The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  He shipped the oars and abandoned the boat and splashed through the shallows onto the north shore. Here the beach was shingle rather than sand, the pebbles click-clattering underfoot, his wet sneakers squishing as he hurried east along that pale width, the lapping water to his right, a rampart of trees to his left.

  Although the south shore and the lake itself lay clear, a thin mist shawled the trees here and seemed to smoke up from the stones. The wet air curdled thick with the scent of forest mast.

  He arrived at an inclined meadow and turned north and climbed through wild grass and the faint sweet-rot smell of last autumn’s Mayapple that had decomposed into a rich compost.

  When he crested the slope, he came to Lakeview Road. On the farther shoulder of the blacktop two-lane, three vehicles awaited him, including his father’s Range Rover. Five men had come for him, dark figures in the greater darkness, faces shadowed but paler than the rest of them. Lacking a moon or other light, their eyes were devoid of reflections, burnt holes in featureless sackcloth visages.

  The county route intersected with this road three miles to the west. With such a posse formed against him, Harley had no hope of getting a hundred yards, let alone three miles.

  He would have been depressed if he had not been more than half expecting such an encounter. Although he hoped for escape, he had learned something valuable from this exercise, and the next time he made a run for it, he would surely elude them.

  For a moment, the men stood still and silent, the thin gauze of mist weaving among them in slow gray currents, as if they were not men at all, but instead rough spirits shaped by angry Nature from the mold and mire of the forest, sent forth to war with humankind.

  Then the imposter who called himself Boyd Higgins crossed the road and put a hand on Harley’s shoulder. “Come along now, son. You need yourself a good night’s rest.”

  Harley pulled loose of him. “Don’t call me son. I’m not your son.”

  “There’s birthday cake and ice cream left. You can have some before you go back to bed.”

  Nothing could be done but cross the blacktop to the Range Rover and get in the front passenger seat and buckle up and slump in the shoulder harness.

  The Rover was preceded by the Chevy Silverado, followed by the Honda Accord, as if these five men were escorting a dangerous mass murderer after a failed break for freedom.

  “I hate you,” the boy said.

  “I’m not the least way hurt when you say that,” the fake Boyd Higgins assured him, “ ’cause I know you don’t ever mean it.”

  “I mean every damn word.”

  “Don’t cuss, son. It taints your soul. Your mother and I love you. We understand your condition, and we’ll always love you and be there for you.”

  “I don’t have a condition.”

  “It’s what they call a personality disorder, Harley.”

  “Here we go again with this horseshit.”

  “Thank the Lord, it’s a disorder you’ll outgrow. We know you’re struggling right now, and we wish there was more we could do to ease you through this.”

  “So I’ve got some stupid personality disorder, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then why don’t you take me to a psychiatrist, some head doctor somewhere?”

  “The school is the best place for your treatment, Harley. You need to see your way clear about that.”

  “It’s not a damn school. No teachers, no classes, no lessons.”

  The fake father smiled and nodded. “It’s not your usual kind of school. Like I told you before, it’s a waiting school.”

  “What sense does that make?”

  Still smiling, the imposter took one hand off the wheel and patted Harley’s shoulder as if to gentle him out of his anger.

  Exasperated by that condescension, Harley said, “You’re not fooling us. Not for a minute. All the kids know none of you is who you look like.”

  “As you’ve said so often before. But that’s just part of this here particular darn personality disorder, Harley—the sad idea that we’re some kind of robots or pod people or something. You kids will outgrow it with treatment. Don’t you worry yourself about that.”

  “With treatment, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “We aren’t getting any damn treatment.”

  “Don’t cuss, son. It’s unbecoming.”

  “What stupid treatment are we getting?”

  “More than you realize. You’ll understand in time.”

  They rounded the northeast corner of the lake. The town lay a few miles ahead.

  “You don’t scare me,” Harley said.

  “That’s good, son. There’s no reason for you to be scared. No one has raised a hand against you, and no one will.”

  The father thing looked identical to Boyd Higgins. He sounded like Boyd Higgins. But the real Boyd Higgins never lied to Harley or patronized him, and this guy was nothing but a patronizing, lying sack of shit.

  “You’re a lying sack of shit.”

  The imposter smiled and shook his head. “You think so ’cause of your condition, but that’s sure to pass when you heal.”

  “If you were really my dad, you’d punish me for saying a thing like that.”

  “Well, now, if you’d lost your legs, son, I wouldn’t punish you just ’cause you couldn’t walk. And I surely won’t punish you just ’cause of your condition.”

  Chevy Silverado, Range Rover, and Honda Accord passed through town in solemn procession.

  For a burg so small, Iron Furnace had a large number of gift shops and galleries and restaurants, all quaint, arrayed along a wide main street with brick sidewalks and antique streetlamps. It flourished not just because of the two hundred or more rich guests who stayed at the always-full five-star resort, but also because it was a popular day-trip destination for people from as far away as Nashville and Louisville and Lexington.

  Big Pembury Blue conifers with pendulous sprays of blue-green foliage lined both sides of the street. They were decorated year-round with thousands of tiny lights, which inclined the Chamber of Commerce to call this the Town Where It’s Always Christmas.

  This had been a great place to grow up, especially when your mom and dad owned Higgins’s Haven, a combination sandwich shop and ice-cream parlor. But it wasn’t Harley’s town anymore. He wasn’t permitted to walk its streets. The old buildings and the businesses and the trees, not lighted at this hour, looked the same as they had always looked, but what had been welcoming and even magical to him in the past now appeared sinister.

  Outside of town, Lakeview Road turned west. Two miles ahead lay the resort in all its splendor.

  Harley said, “So tell me again why it is you call the place a ‘waiting school.’ ”

  “Well, now, though I’ve told you a hundred times, I don’t mind telling you again, if it helps you settle yourself. We call it the waiting school because this here condition you have—it mostly has to be cured by time. There’s nothing to be done but wait the darn thing out.”

  “Until I’m sixteen.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Meanwhile, I’m in prison.”

  “Now, Harley boy, don’t torture my heart with such talk. You know it’s not a prison. There’s nothing you want you don’t get, plus good food and fresh air and the finest care.”

  Harley wanted to scream. Just scream, scream, scream until he exhausted himself. He knew he wasn’t crazy. But truly insane people screamed like that in asylums, didn’t they?

  Instead of screaming, he said, “I’ve been reading a book about personality disorders.”

  “Good for you. Know thyself, as they say.”

  “I might want another book about them.”

  “Then you’ll have it, son. We’ve gotten you all kinds of books you asked about. You know, we encourage you to read anything you want. Your mom and me, we don’t care, whatever it is, even if it’s spicy, anything that keeps you interested and passes the time. You just hav
e to stay in the school and pass the time.”

  “What kind of personality disorder cures itself when you turn sixteen?”

  “Why, the kind you have, son.”

  “What’s the name of it?”

  The imposter laughed just like Boyd Higgins. “Lord bless me, boy, I’ve spent my life making sandwiches and ice-cream treats. My mind hasn’t been shaped to remember thirty-letter medical terms.”

  “Why sixteen, exactly?”

  “Well, now, as I understand it, the brain is still in some ways growing past sixteen, but that’s the golden age when it’s mostly matured. So when it’s mostly matured, then you’re ready.”

  “Ready.”

  “Ready as you’ll ever be,” the imposter confirmed.

  “Ready for what?”

  “Well, ready to be done with this condition you’ve got.”

  “Overnight, you mean?”

  “If my own poor brain understands it, that’s right.”

  As they cruised past the entrance to the resort and kept going, Harley said, “Two years from today.”

  “From yesterday, your true birthday. It’ll be such a relief to us when you’re cured, son. To have our Harley back like you used to be.”

  After a hesitation, Harley said, “Will I be like I used to be?”

  “Whyever wouldn’t you be? It’s a passing condition.”

  They rode in silence, into the darkness past the resort and farther west along the lake.

  Then Harley said, “Dad, doesn’t it sound crazy—or at least weird—that every kid in town under sixteen has the same condition, and they’ll all be cured overnight when they turn sixteen, and until then they have to be kept locked up and away from people? Meanwhile nobody’s teaching them any schoolwork? They’re just supposed to entertain themselves? When you think about it, Dad, doesn’t it seem not just wacko but plain wrong?”

  Boyd Higgins—if he was Boyd Higgins—frowned and stared at the road where the headlight beams intersected in the distance, and he remained silent for half a mile. Then he shook his head and smiled. “You don’t need teaching, Harley, ’cause you’ll know it all when you’re sixteen.”

  “Know it all? All what?”

  “Everything you need to know and nothing you don’t need. You wait and see. You’ll be all set when you turn sixteen.”

  Four miles past the resort, the Chevy Silverado slowed and hung a U-turn and headed back toward town. The Honda Accord followed it.

  The imposter slowed and turned right into a driveway that came to a tall gate flanked by stone walls receding into the night. He put down the driver’s window and pressed a button on a call box and identified himself. The gate rolled aside.

  “Please don’t do this,” Harley pleaded.

  “You’ll be okay, son. They care about you here.”

  “It’s like I’m going crazy.”

  “But you’re not, dear boy.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “You’re not. And you won’t.”

  They passed through the gate and along the driveway toward the place that wasn’t a school and never had been.

  Harley had told this man that he wasn’t afraid of him, which was true. There were, however, things he feared.

  He feared spending two more years in this place.

  He feared his sixteenth birthday and what would happen then.

  He feared also that this Boyd Higgins was no imposter, that this might be his father strangely changed, never to be as he had once been.

  The driveway led to the mansion. Under the pillared portico. two attendants—the woman who called herself Noreen and the man who called himself Harvey—waited there in a fall of amber light from the coffered ceiling.

  Man and boy got out of the Range Rover at the same time. The man came around the front of the vehicle and embraced Harley, because Boyd Higgins had always been a hugger. He kissed Harley on the forehead, then on the cheek, because Boyd Higgins had always been a kisser. He said, “I love you with all my heart, son,” because Boyd Higgins had always been generous in the expression of his love for his wife and child.

  Harley met the man’s stare and saw the warm blue-green eyes that cherished him throughout his life. If he perceived sincerity in those eyes, sincerity and love, Harley recognized something else as well: a wimpling shadow in the depths, like he sometimes glimpsed on a sunny day when he was boating on the lake and he peered into the water and saw, at the farthest reach of light, a torsional finned form that seemed as mysterious as anything in this world of mysteries, yet could be known for what it was. However, the shadow in the deeper water of these eyes wasn’t as clean and right as a fish in the lower currents of the lake, was instead a twist of torment, as if the man before him, in the saying of good-bye, felt tortured and knew if only briefly that something was gravely wrong. But then the eyes shallowed away from those depths, and as if in the grip of some power demonic and unknowable, the man became insensate to the boy’s misery. He smiled and got in the Rover and drove off, leaving Harley with the devastating and terrifying certainty that he had been driven here by neither a robot nor a pod person, but only by what remained of a good man named Boyd Higgins.

  1

  * * *

  Monday, on the flight from Minneapolis, Luther Tillman occupied himself with one of the thick spiral-bound journals containing Cora Gundersun’s handwritten fiction. He believed it offered her most recent compositions, because unlike the others of its kind, it was not filled to the end; about a hundred lined pages hadn’t been used.

  As before, he was captivated by her prose. In the middle of the volume, however, he found two pages reminiscent of the contents of the journal that he and Rob Stassen found on the woman’s kitchen table, the obsessive repetition of phrases that slowly accumulated into a sentence about a spider laying eggs inside her skull.

  This repetition was of a different character. The lines of precise cursive warranted interpretation. But because the plane was making its approach to Louisville, he left that analysis for later.

  After renting a Chevrolet, Luther drove two hours to Mourning Dove, Kentucky, nine miles from Iron Furnace. He took a room in the Mourning Dove Inn, which was no more an inn than it was a roller coaster, but only an ordinary mom-and-pop motel.

  Iron Furnace offered better motels. But Luther’s name was more likely to come to the attention of Booth Hendrickson and the U.S. Department of Justice if it appeared on a motel registry in the town where Cora Gundersun had attended a conference of cloudy purpose.

  For his first visit to Iron Furnace, Luther dressed in gray slacks, a gray shirt, and a black sport coat, which he hoped would be acceptable, later, at the resort restaurant

  The smelting of iron ore required a large supply of water; and the town had been flourishing by 1830. The industry there petered out after the turn of the century. The great furnace was long gone. Instead, Luther found a charming village with a four-block colonnade of beautiful conifers, something called Pembury Blues, with graceful aromatic sprays of foliage, unlike any evergreen in Minnesota.

  For an hour and a half, before the shops and galleries began to close, he wandered through them, chatting up the clerks and owners, who were unfailingly pleasant. If anyone asked, he was Martin Moses from Atlanta, a partner in an event-planning firm.

  At 6:00, he drove a few miles to the famous resort, where he was greeted by a valet whose black jacket had gold epaulettes and gold buttons and gold cuffs, and whose cap featured gold braiding on the visor. The rental car was received with no less enthusiasm than if it had been a Rolls-Royce.

  The three-story Wrightian structure seemed immense: long straight lines, gently sloped slate roofs overhanging deep eaves, cantilevered decks, dramatic stacked-stone walls relieved by beige plasterwork. The stained-glass windows were mostly of clear glass, with color in the geometric border patterns.

  In the early dark, the windows glowed with warm—almost mystical—light, as if herein the mortal guests could mingle with the gods and d
emigods of ancient civilizations, who had descended from their pantheons.

  The interior exceeded expectations, from simple but striking decorative details in the silken-finished cherry-gold cedar ceilings to the luminous pale quartz floors with black granite borders.

  The restaurant staff wore modified tuxedoes. Candles in Baccarat crystal cups cast dancing prisms across the silver place setting. Scarlet amaryllis, gathered tightly in a glass bowl-shaped vase, seemed to tremble sensuously in the pulsating candle glow.

  The food was delicious and without the slightest fault, the service impeccable, the waiter friendly. When Luther expressed a desire to pay cash, he was given no slightest reason to suppose that he might be thought gauche in this age of gold and platinum plastic.

  Because the valet was not busy, he chatted with Luther for a few minutes before bringing the rental car. He was well spoken and thoroughly versed in the history of the town.

  Nine miles later, once more in the glamourless Mourning Dove Inn, Luther hung his sport coat in the closet and used the bathroom. At the sink, washing his hands, he regarded himself in the mirror and said, “What the hell was all that?”

  He sat in an armchair, staring at a TV that he didn’t bother to turn on, considering the town and resort that shared a name. He had experienced them not as a tourist but as a cop at a crime scene.

  There had been no power lines, no telephone poles. Utilities were underground, an unusual condition for a village in a rural area. Of course, desiring a picturesque setting for tourists, the locals might have accepted the expense of prettifying the place.

  The streets were immaculate. If a tourist dropped a gum wrapper, someone must have been steps behind, picking up the litter. The sidewalks were so clean, they might have been vacuumed. Gutters contained only needles from the evergreens and not many of those.

  The owners of the quaint buildings appeared to have contracted their maintenance to industrious elves. Woodwork looked as if it had been painted yesterday. Everywhere else, time and weather leached mortar from between bricks and stones, but not in Iron Furnace. Zero graffiti. Not one dirty window or pane of cracked glass. The shops and galleries displayed merchandise with such an appreciation for orderliness that every business owner and employee might have been diagnosed with an obsessive-compulsive disorder.