The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  He had so long been accustomed to wielding power that only now did he appear suddenly to understand that he could not rely on the decorum common to a courtroom, nor could he shape the narrative with deceptively worded questions. She was asking the questions. He was the witness this time, she the litigator, and not just litigator but also prosecutor.

  “What did the freakin’ tie cost, Randy?”

  He shrugged and pretended contemptuous indifference to her obsession with his wardrobe. “Maybe a couple hundred.”

  “Tell me about the shirt. You better know about the shirt.”

  A double stutter on the P belied his composure. “P-P-Paul Smith. Paul Smith—London.”

  “What’s the story with the shoes?”

  “Armando Cabral.”

  “You’re quite a dandy, aren’t you?”

  “I dress well, that’s all.”

  “Would you call that a power suit?”

  “I wouldn’t, no.”

  She said, “Given your current circumstances, neither would I.”

  She returned to her patio chair. She sat watching him.

  He remained expressionless, but his eyes were windows on a cauldron of rage. In the chalky gaslight, Larkin’s face lacked the ruddiness of raw anger, as pale now as salt flats in moonlight, the faintest dusting of gray under the lower eyelids, lips an anemic pink. He was furious, but he was also at last profoundly afraid.

  “Your current wife’s name is Diamanta.”

  “Leave her out of this.”

  Jane raised her eyebrows. “Whyever should I? You didn’t leave my husband out of this.”

  “She doesn’t know anything.”

  “Oh, well, that’s probably a lie.” She cocked her head and regarded him quizzically, letting a half smile come and go, as if she found him almost as amusing as he was repellent. “Your wife, Diamanta,” she said in a tone that might have been taken by the neighborhood gossip seeking a juicy morsel. “Does Diamanta know about Aspasia?”

  A moment of stunned silence revealed his shock before he said, “Is that a drug or something? I don’t do drugs.”

  He and the others in this conspiracy were aware that she had learned about the brain implants and the Hamlet list, that on the day of Bertold Shenneck’s death, she had taken possession of flash drives containing the scientist’s research and also obtained ampules of the nanomachine control mechanisms suspended in a neutral medium and ready for injection. But they had no way of knowing that she had discovered the perverse and cruel other use to which they had put this fearsome technology: Aspasia.

  “Randy, Randy, Randy. You know me a little better now. You know that I come well prepared to a conference like this.”

  He said nothing.

  “How often do you go to Aspasia, Randy? Once a month? Once a week? How extreme is your most extreme desire?”

  She could read him. His pallid skin, eyes fever-wet and sliding out of focus because some inner vision born of memory distracted him, nostrils flared as if he had just caught the true scent of his corrupted soul, hands no longer relaxed on the arms of the chair but gripping the extruded aluminum as though he were aboard a roller coaster climbing to the brink of a perilous drop: By all those tells, he wrote his anxiety and his guilt as clearly as if he had composed his confession on a blackboard with a stick of chalk.

  8

  * * *

  Before moving on to the time-consuming step of reviewing the archived video from streets flanking the alleyway, Jason Drucklow asks his girlfriend and assistant, Cammy Newton, to hurry to the site to find the phone signaling Randy Larkin’s presence.

  “Great! On it!” Cammy declares.

  In these circles, the Drucklow-Newton relationship is unusual. She is only two years younger than he, and she holds him in the highest regard. Likewise, he is so smitten with her that sometimes he feels as if he is thirteen again, full of adolescent yearning and romantic schmaltz that he once mocked in others.

  When they hooked up three years earlier, she was working as a foot technician at a nail salon, trimming and painting toenails and dealing with such issues as calluses and unpretty fungi. She feels like Cinderella if Cinderella had been swept off her feet not by a prince, but instead by James Bond.

  “Gonna miss you!” she calls to him as she heads out the door, though she won’t be gone an hour.

  9

  * * *

  Hazel Syvertsen lived on the edge of town, in a white Victorian with gingerbread moldings, carved pediments, and two big Italianate bay windows. The house was as frivolous as its owner was practical.

  Sheriff Luther Tillman climbed the steps to a highly decorated portico, unzipped his snow boots, slipped his shoed feet out of them, and rang the bell.

  He had to ring again before Hazel appeared in woodsman’s boots, gray rock-climber’s pants, and a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. In spite of her outfit, she was as feminine as any object of a man’s devotion in a novel of the same period as her house.

  “You took your boots off,” she said, “so you’re here to grill me at length. You’ll have to do it without coffee, in my workroom. I’m in the thrall of glass and damn well not taking a break.”

  “I accept your terms, ma’am.”

  “Don’t ma’am me. It makes me feel even older than I am.”

  Now sixty-six, Hazel had retired a year earlier. After college, she served twenty years in the Army, exited as a sergeant, came home, and held the job of elementary-school principal for twenty-four years. She’d been married three times, twice to Army men; the first died in combat, the second in a helicopter crash. Her third was a scoundrel, by her determination; she divorced him after chasing him out of the house with a twelve-gauge shotgun that he thought was loaded, and she reverted to her maiden name.

  Her workroom was an add-on at the back of the house. A six-foot-by-three-foot panel frame for a stained-glass window was fixed to the central worktable. She had been making windows on commission ever since she’d come home from the Army; and they could be found in homes, businesses, and churches all over the county.

  A full-size cartoon of the work hung on the wall, and a third of the window lay finished: a vibrant swash of reds and blues and yellows and purples.

  “It’s abstract. It’s beautiful, but you hate abstracts.”

  “Started it yesterday. Up most of the night. It’s yesterday-inspired. Yesterday I decided the world is losing form, coherence, it’s becoming crazy abstract. This is the new reality.”

  “So it’s about Cora.”

  “Hell, yes, it’s about Cora. It’s going to be beautiful, full of life. I’m titling it Cora, and if any sonofabitch objects to me hanging it in the elementary school, to hell with him.”

  As Hazel began selecting precut shapes of glass to fit into the lead came, Luther said, “I’m not here in an official capacity.”

  “I noticed—no uniform.”

  “The Feds have frozen my department out of this. So I’m only here as a friend. You knew Cora as well as anyone. Did she ever talk to you about a place called Iron Furnace?”

  Hazel looked up from her work, her expression of disgust quite like it might have been had Luther asked if Cora ever talked about Auschwitz. “That place. Something happened to her at that place.”

  10

  * * *

  On the cool air of the empty factory, a vague odor of slime mold here and gone, also a more pungent scent of urine likewise inconstant. Out there in the dark beyond the lanternfall, a rustling as if a draft stirred the littered floor, yet the air dead-still.

  Bound to his chair, Randall Larkin turned his head toward the sound, and though he clearly wondered about it, he didn’t ask.

  Jane knew that among the great heaps of abandoned paperwork and dead files and mildewed brochures, the unwanted history of a failed enterprise had become a home to rats that clawed it and chewed it and disgorged it and shaped it into warrens. She was not yet ready to share that information with Larkin.

&
nbsp; “What do you want from me?” he asked. “What do you think you can get that you don’t already have?”

  Ignoring his question, she leaned forward in her chair. “You ever explore the Dark Web, Randy? I don’t mean the Deep Web. There’s basically nothing creepy there. The Dark Web. You ever visit that?”

  “I don’t know about deep webs and dark webs.”

  She smiled at the transparency of his lie. “You can’t get into the Dark Web with a standard search engine. Website addresses there are long chains of nonsense, letters and numbers and symbols that no one could type by accident. You can’t even remember them, they’re so complex. There’s one particular address forty-four characters long. To get it, you have to be a member of a very exclusive club—or be given an invitation. If you type those forty-four characters, Randy, you get a black-screen homepage with one word in white letters. The word is Aspasia.”

  He closed his eyes and lowered his head as if he found her tiresome, though perhaps he was afraid to look at her just now.

  “Then the next words are ‘Beautiful girls. Totally submissive. No desire too extreme.’ Remember?”

  He embraced the defense of silence.

  “Then new words appear,” she continued. “ ‘Girls incapable of disobedience. Permanent silence assured.’ Like, cool, huh? Costs three hundred thousand to join, Randy, but that’s not expensive if your desires are extreme and your suits cost four thousand and up. Only way you can join is to be invited by an existing member. As close as you seem to be to David James Michael, I assume you were one of the founding members.”

  His strategy of noncooperation would soon prove inadequate.

  Jane said, “There are Aspasias in L.A., San Francisco, New York, and Washington. I’ve been to the one here in L.A.”

  He opened his eyes. “That’s not…”

  “Not possible?” she asked. “I won’t take the time to explain how I got in. It’s a three-acre walled estate, isn’t it? Yes, that’s right. Gosh, Randy, it’s a real palace. Tens of millions must’ve been spent on that place. So tasteful, too. You know? Not a whiff of whorehouse about the place. Lots of super antiques, way-cool Persian carpets, acres and acres of marble everywhere. Like, see, a boy could go there all horny and extreme in his desires, you know, and feel sophisticated and elite and totally okay with himself.”

  Jane got to her feet. As she walked around behind Larkin’s chair, she said, “And the girls, Randy! The girls are so stunning. I mean, they make a Victoria’s Secret catalog look like a collection of has-beens and never-wases.”

  He turned his head as best he could to look back at her.

  Seizing a fistful of his hair, twisting it hard, she pushed his face toward his chest. “Look at my empty chair. Don’t you look anywhere but at my empty chair.”

  He found a measure of bravado if not real courage. “You’re as good as dead.”

  “Well, that’s true of everyone, isn’t it? None of us gets out of this world alive. Though some get out sooner than others.”

  She let go of his hair and patted his head with her gloved hand, as if with affection.

  “These totally hot girls are über-submissive, incapable of disobedience because they’ve been injected with a nanomachine, a brain-tropic control mechanism. Isn’t that, like, amazing sci-fi shit, Randy?”

  “Enough of this,” he said. “You don’t—”

  She twisted his left ear until a thin scream escaped him.

  “Best be submissive,” she said, “be incapable of disobedience.”

  She gave him a moment to collect himself. Then she said, “Yeah, really amazing sci-fi shit. And here’s the coolest thing. These girls are charming and happy-acting and want to please, and they never leave Aspasia, they live there all the time, because these are different implants from the ones that make people kill themselves. These implants don’t just brainwash the girls. They scrub away the fabric of the mind until it’s threadbare, wash out the memories, bleach out the personality and install a new one. There’s no hope of bringing back who they were. It’s a one-way process. Like, you know, anyone’s daughter can be turned into everyone’s toy, which is the coolest thing ever, don’t you think?”

  She thought he was trembling. Hard to tell with his hands gripping the chair so tightly.

  She drew one finger down the nape of his neck, and he cried out in alarm, as if he thought it must be the blade of a knife.

  Lowering her mouth close to the ear that she hadn’t twisted, she whispered, “It’s not even about sex so much as it is about power. Isn’t that right, Randy. Total power over these girls.”

  “I don’t know,” he said miserably.

  “You don’t know? Not really thought too deeply about it, huh?” She put her hands on his shoulders and began to massage them as if to relieve his stress. “Do you hurt the girls, Randy? Does hurting them get you off?”

  “No. Hell, no. It’s not like that.”

  “You enjoy doing things to them that would humiliate any girl not programmed like they are? You ever go a little too far and kill one of them, Randy?”

  “That’s crazy. Insane. There’s something wrong with you.”

  She worked his shoulder muscles. “Because the night I was there, I found a girl one of the guests had strangled to death. Totally submissive, see. He probably did it as he climaxed. I know it wasn’t you that night, but isn’t that how you’d want to time it?”

  “Oh, God,” he said, faint of voice and in distress. “Oh, God.”

  “You think He’d bother listening to you, Randy? I don’t think God listens to you anymore. Anyway, I figure you sophisticates don’t kill the girls routinely. I mean, that would create a major staffing problem. So it only happens now and then, when one of you is really in a master-of-the-universe mood.”

  “I’m no angel, but you’ve got me so wrong. I’m not capable of killing anyone.”

  “No, you hire it done. Sakura Hannafin was allergic to hornet venom. Deathly allergic. While her hubby, Reporter Larry, was conveniently out of state on an assignment, who did you hire to put those hornets in the car with Sakura Hannafin?”

  “You can’t be serious. It’s just a thing happened, a natural thing. Hornets got in the car. Nobody put them there. Not every rotten thing that happens in the world is wired back to me.”

  “She must have thought her anaphylactic kit was in the glove box,” Jane said, “her epinephrine self-injectors and the liquid Benadryl. The glove box was hanging open when mall security found her dead of anaphylactic shock, a hornet sitting on her face, two others in the car. She always took the kit with her. I guess she just forgot that day. We all forget things, don’t we, Randy?”

  11

  * * *

  Not ten minutes after she dashes out of their apartment, Cammy Newton calls Jason Drucklow from behind the law offices. He rolls his chair away from the computer at which he is trying to review archived traffic-cam video and turns his attention to his second workstation. On the screen, in a Google Maps version of the alley, a red dot that is Randall Larkin’s locater is still blinking. Near it now is a second dot, a blue one representing Cammy.

  “I’ve got nothin’, honey! No sign of Larkin or his Mercedes. Don’t see a cellphone anywhere.”

  “You’re almost on top of it, sugar. Move west a few feet. Okay. Now maybe one or two steps to your right. No, too far. Back to your left.” The two blinking signifiers bumped together. “Right there.”

  “I’m standing on some kind of drainage grille, or maybe a vent or something. It’s got the power-company name on it.”

  Jason said, “He dropped the phone through the grille.”

  “Or someone did,” Cammy amended.

  12

  * * *

  Luther Tillman already knew that Iron Furnace was a small town in Kentucky, on Iron Furnace Lake. Six hundred residents. The biggest employer was a hundred-room five-star super-expensive resort. That and more he had learned online. But he didn’t know why Cora Gundersun embedded
those three words, apparently unconsciously, among the obsessive repetitions in her strange journal entries.

  After fingering a circle of red, a crescent of blue, Hazel Syvertsen chose a dewdrop of yellow and fitted it into the leading. “Cora was invited to a conference at Iron Furnace Lake Resort. Four days, five nights, all expenses paid. She was so excited about it.”

  “Conference about what?”

  “The education of special-needs children. Supposed to be part conference and part reward for the attendees, who’d all been at one time or another named Teacher of the Year by their city or state.”

  “When was this?”

  “Last August. Before school began.”

  “Who put on this conference?”

  “A charitable foundation. I think it was something called the Seeding Foundation. No. Seedling. The Seedling Foundation.”

  “She went to this alone?”

  Molding the lead came to the dewdrop curve, Hazel said, “She could have brought a guest, one girlfriend or another. Which would have bollixed things if one of the men at the conference turned out to be her Mr. Right. After all, they had a profession in common with her, an affection for children that most of the world considers lost causes. Maybe you can’t quite imagine this, but Cora was a huge romantic. She believed there’s someone special out there for everyone, she just needed fate to make the connection. Going to Kentucky alone was a way of giving fate a little kick in the ass.”

  Having read several of Cora’s short stories and a portion of a novel, Luther knew she’d been a romantic who wrote about hope and the potential goodness of the human heart without sentimentality, in fact with an undercurrent of affecting melancholy. He didn’t intend, however, to tell Hazel about those notebooks, which someone had meant to incinerate along with everything else in Cora’s house.