The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  The people he’d met were so normal—in a ’50s-TV kind of way, like the cast of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver—that their normalness was an abnormality in this era. Neatly groomed, nicely but never flamboyantly dressed. Polite and well-mannered.

  No matter how effective an employer’s training, you were sure to encounter an occasional salesgirl distracted by personal business or impatient for whatever reason, a gallery manager who was a bit of a snob, a scowling clerk, a waiter with attitude—but not in Iron Furnace. Everyone was efficient, attentive, informed about what they were selling, and none appeared to be dissatisfied with his job.

  A pleasant demeanor was so universal and unfaltering in Iron Furnace that Luther’s cop intuition said not just that someone must be hiding something, but that all of them must be hiding something.

  Which was absurd. Paranoid.

  Six hundred residents? Six hundred people keeping a secret? Not possible. Anyway, what would the secret be—that every last one of them was flying high on some happiness drug?

  Another strange thing. As pleasant as everyone had been, he hadn’t seen much of anything that could be called gaiety, no bright-eyed delight, no merriment. Rather than happiness, these people, to a one, seemed to exist in a state of bland contentment. In these troubled times, maybe contentment was enough, but the universality of it nonetheless struck him as peculiar.

  He’d explored side streets, where houses were as assiduously maintained as the businesses on Lakeview Road. The entire town might be a movie set. If he were to open a door to one of the houses, would he find only a shell, no rooms within its walls, no furniture?

  “You’re going off the deep end,” he warned himself.

  But…one more strangeness. He’d seen tourists on their smartphones, text-messaging and playing games—but not any employees or shop owners, either on or off duty, not anyone who appeared to be a resident of Iron Furnace. In a tech-obsessed society that wanted continuous social-media contact, if anything confirmed an alien aspect to these people, their smartphone restraint was it.

  Luther hadn’t expected to need a handgun. He still didn’t think he would require one.

  However, counting on the traditional consideration given to high police officials when they carried concealed weapons into a jurisdiction other than their own, he had stowed in his suitcase a Springfield Armory Super Tuned .45 Champion. And a shoulder rig. Plus two loaded magazines.

  Now he unpacked the pistol that he didn’t expect to need, and he inserted a magazine.

  Again he sat in the armchair, this time with the journal of Cora’s fiction. He turned to the two-page fragment of repetitive sentences and fragments that he had discovered near the end of his flight from Minneapolis.

  As he studied her words, he glanced occasionally at the pistol on the table beside the chair. He was glad that he had brought it.

  2

  * * *

  Harley Higgins hadn’t gone to bed until 5:20 Monday morning. Even then he lay in the grip of such anguish and dread, exhaustion could not bear him into sleep. Although his parents weren’t dead, they were in some nameless condition that consigned them to lives conducted according to the direction of someone or something else. If there was no way to undo whatever had been done to them, they were lost to him forever, and he might as well be an orphan.

  In two years, when he was made like them, he might be returned to their house to live, but he would not be truly Harley, and they would lead shadows of the lives they might have lived. They wouldn’t be the walking dead, because they wouldn’t be rotting and falling apart and all that, but they wouldn’t really be living, either. And judging by the available evidence, they wouldn’t know that they were changed, which was the most terrible thing of all.

  His captors must have realized he was unable to sleep, because Noreen came at 6:30 with “a little special breakfast” that consisted of a bear claw, a cinnamon-pecan roll, and a glass of ice-cold milk. She insisted that the milk would help him sleep. There was probably a sedative in it. Harley didn’t care. He had no interest in the pastries, but he drank the milk.

  He dreamed of a city where no one appeared to live: abandoned office towers and apartment buildings without tenants, broad avenues deserted, stalled cars unoccupied in the streets, the silence of death blanketing all. But the people who didn’t seem to be there anymore could still be seen reflected in store windows as they passed, in the polished-steel façade of a trendy shop, in the surface of a pool in the park. Their presence was attested to by mirrors, but the people who cast those images could not be seen. Harley gazed out from a hotel-lobby mirror, but he was invisible to himself when, standing before that reflection, he looked down at his body. When he understood that he lived only within the mirror, that he could no longer touch the world or be touched by it, his habitation limited to the thin plane between the glass and its silvery backing, he cried out in despair, but his cry produced no sound, as meaningless as the hopes of the dead and the desires of the never-born.

  Ten hours after drinking the milk, at 4:30 Monday afternoon, Harley woke and sat up and threw aside the covers and got out of bed and knew that he must try again to escape, keep on trying no matter how often he failed, until he died trying or they locked him away.

  3

  * * *

  Jane Hawk arrived in Bowling Green, Kentucky, at 4:54 P.M. Monday afternoon, too tired to care that she ached in more places than not.

  She found a deli and bought two Reuben sandwiches and pickles and a container of potato salad.

  The motel was expensive, four stars and worth every one, offering a full array of cable channels, a universe of sense and nonsense. Sitting in front of the TV to eat, she wanted to watch only the Game Show Network: Family Feud with Steve Harvey, three reruns in a row. As long as the host mugged and joked, as long as the families feuded, it seemed something remained of the lighthearted, self-mocking, apolitical aspect of America that spoke so well of the nation’s heart, as it once had been in full, even if it might be fast withering now.

  After taking a shower, she carefully shampooed and conditioned and rinsed clean the wig in the sink. She put it on and shaped it to her head with blow dryer and brush. Then she took it off and put it aside and finished drying her own short, inexpertly self-cut hair.

  She took out the contact lenses that greened her eyes, rinsed them with solution, and stored them in a case. She stretched out in bed with the Colt .45 under the pillow where Nick would have rested his head if this had been a better world in which he still lived.

  She lay watching a ceiling she couldn’t see, the dark pouring into her blue-eyed stare, and she asked only that when the darkness filled her for the night, it would lack the drama of dreams.

  4

  * * *

  Harley received dinner in his quarters at six o’clock. This version of San Quentin provided room service. Each kid had a bedroom with king-size bed, a sitting area, and a full bath. But any place could be a prison if those who lived there were not free.

  For ten months, he’d been stuck in this crazy place with these jailers who called themselves therapists. The weirdness, loneliness, and fear at times scraped his nerves raw. If he had instead been trapped in a nightmare, at least he would have awakened from it.

  He didn’t know how much longer he could hold himself together. Something was coming apart inside him. Unraveling. Unplugging. His mind had always been a bright and busy place. But lately, some of the lights at the center seemed to be going out, so that sometimes he couldn’t think clearly, couldn’t see around that core blackness. When that happened, the sounds of this world became meaningless noise—people’s voices, music, bird songs—like the racket of roller-coaster wheels rocketing over buckled tracks. Then he needed to lie down, close his eyes, settle himself, and wait for the panic to pass. It always passed, but that didn’t mean it always would.

  Some kids were in worse shape. The youngest two—Sally Ingram, seven, and Nora Rhinehart, eight—shared a ro
om because they feared being alone at night and often in daylight. Jimmy Cole, ten, had been a fragile kid when this started, and last Christmas he had begun to withdraw; now he went days without speaking.

  Harley ate dinner by a window, overlooking the moonlit lake in the distance and the estate grounds, to which the landscape lighting added a sinister magic. No barred windows. No locked doors. Inmates were allowed to roam the five-acre property. A nine-foot stone wall surrounded the place, but it could be scaled where decades-old vines wove a lattice of handholds. Some trees stood close to the wall, sturdy branches overhanging it, providing routes of escape. At the north end of the estate, a wrought-iron gate served a private pier, and the ironwork was easier to climb than the wall.

  The setup enticed Harley with the promise of deliverance from imprisonment, but the promise proved false. He was not the only one who had broken out but failed to stay out. Their jailers must have some psychological purpose in tempting them.

  He wanted to believe that everyone on the staff was a rotten, vicious, egg-sucking snake. But they weren’t. They seemed to be like his father and mother, ordinary people somehow changed, so they were and weren’t who they once had been. They went on with their lives as before, except when told to do something—even something freaky like giving up their children—and then they obeyed without objection. Worse, they believed they were doing the right thing. None of the staff physically or verbally abused those in their custody, and in a weird way, they were always pleasant, almost kind.

  He wished they were complete zombies. Then he could have killed them. Sometimes he wanted to kill them anyway, but he knew that when it came to shoving the knife in, he couldn’t do it.

  The jailers here weren’t the rotten, vicious snakes. The snakes were whoever changed these people. Harley had theories, but they seemed stupid. He’d seen countless movies and TV shows about body-snatching ETs, mind-controlling ETs, evil artificial intelligences, murderous robots from the future, demonic possession. This could be any of those things. But if the real future was like a sci-fi movie, that would be insufferably dumb. Life was more complex than movies, needed to be more complex if it was going to be any fun at all.

  Besides, if the future took the shape of a sci-fi plot, there would be one scary difference between the movie and real life. In real life, no superstar hero could save the world from evil ETs. Armies couldn’t defeat such enemies. If the vicious snakes in this case weren’t people, humanity was screwed. And Harley would become one of them on his sixteenth birthday.

  He had to make another escape attempt. Soon.

  He figured there must be cameras, maybe hundreds, some obvious, others concealed. He supposed that the continuous streams of images from the cameras were analyzed in real time by software that could tell the difference between purposeful motion and the effects of the wind, that could also identify human heat signatures. When someone went over the wall, the system alerted the staff.

  Getting out of the estate didn’t count as an escape, because the staff would be close behind you, but also because the entire population of Iron Furnace, sixteen and older, had been replaced by imposters or had been converted into mind-numbed worker bees. The first two times Harley skipped, he approached people he knew, thinking they would help him. Instead they detained him until the so-called school could collect him and take him back to his room.

  The third time he escaped, he approached tourists for help. They thought he must be hoaxing them. Then they thought he must be mentally ill—which the staff from the so-called school confirmed when they showed up to get their disturbed young patient.

  He had to get all the way out of town, and he needed to tell his story in a more convincing way than he had managed with the tourists.

  He kept failing, but also learning. The previous night, having crossed the lake, when he came to Lakeview Road and saw the posse, he learned the most important thing yet: They might have hundreds of cameras and motion detectors; but they definitely had planted on him a GPS locater by which they could find him anywhere on earth.

  After the father thing returned him here, Harley had stepped into the three-mirror nook in his walk-in closet, stripped naked, and examined himself, searching for a tiny scar that would betray a GPS implant. Maybe cameras watched from behind the mirrors. Maybe the snakes controlling everyone were pervs who enjoyed watching him. He didn’t care. He needed to know if he had a surgically implanted transponder that betrayed his whereabouts. He couldn’t find a scar.

  Finally he had fallen into bed, exhausted.

  Now, as he finished dinner, he thought about his shoes. When he first realized something was wrong with his mom and dad, he had been transferred to this place while in a drugged sleep. When he woke, he found his clothes had been brought here from home, though not his shoes. No footwear was provided except for a new pair of sneakers.

  The previous night, after he’d grounded the rowboat and sloshed through ankle-deep water to the shore, after he had then climbed the meadow through the decomposed fruit of last autumn’s Mayapple, his sneakers hadn’t been ruined, though they had needed to be cleaned. Instead, a new pair had been put in his closet.

  New. Maybe because the locater in the old pair was damaged.

  He was wearing the new sneakers now.

  His bathroom included a separate enclosure for the toilet, which he’d never seen anywhere else. They called it a water closet. If they thought the toilet should be hidden away and given a nicer name, they probably wouldn’t put a camera there. At least he hadn’t been able to find one in that small space.

  He went in there now and closed the door and lowered the lid on the toilet seat and sat down and took off his sneakers. He inspected the left one from end to end, but he found nothing.

  In the rounded back of the heel on the right shoe, however, he discovered a circular indentation about half an inch in diameter. As if a core had been extracted from the rubber. And something inserted in the hole. And then a cap of rubber glued over it.

  His dinner had come with a steak knife, which was pointed enough to dig out the cap and open the hole and reveal the locater.

  One problem. Maybe the thing couldn’t be removed without damaging it. Then they would know that he had found it.

  As long as they remained unaware that he had discovered he was GPSed, he had an advantage.

  Because he had slept most of the day, he didn’t fall asleep until 2:00 A.M., which gave him plenty of time to work out an escape plan for Tuesday night.

  5

  * * *

  Fading winter remained reluctant to make its peace with the coming spring. The weather was in flux from day to day, and Tuesday arrived cooler than Monday, corsair clouds having pirated the sun.

  Wearing long auburn hair and green eyes and horn-rimmed glasses with clear lenses, not wearing her wedding ring with its loving and incriminating words memorializing Nick’s commitment to her, Jane drove through Iron Furnace shortly after eleven o’clock Tuesday morning. The town was enchanting, with marshaled evergreens towering over prime examples of American Victorian architecture.

  At the end of town, she turned west toward the resort. The lake was a smooth pool of pewter in the gray light of a sullen sky. Only two blue-canopied electric boats plied those waters, leaving wakes that melted away almost as they formed.

  She passed the resort. Two miles farther stood the estate owned by the limited-liability company Apiculus, its massive gate as forbidding as a castle portcullis. She cruised past without slowing.

  A mile later, she came to a currently deserted scenic overlook with parking for several cars. She locked the Ford Escape, which contained her suitcases, handbag, and tote.

  Carrying binoculars, she crossed the road and entered a pine woods undergrown at first with ribbon grass and snowy wood rush not yet in flower, and then by ferns and spleenwort. The land climbed to an east-west ridge. She followed the crest eastward until pines gave way to witchgrass, whereupon she walked the southern slope, staying below t
he ridge line to avoid being seen from Lakeview Road.

  Opposite the great house, she returned to the ridge crest and lay prone in the grass, from which tiny whiteflies riffled up and away to less contested vegetation. She adjusted the binoculars and glassed the property below, north of the road.

  Regarding the secret retreat of a man worth tens of billions, Jane expected not just the walled grounds and the formidable front gate, as existed, but also a gatehouse manned around the clock by at least one armed guard. There was no gatehouse. And the cap of the estate wall lacked the spearpoint staves that would have been both decorative and, if sharp enough, a further impediment to entry.

  For a five-acre property, the driveway should have been longer than this, though not for aesthetic reasons. A lengthy driveway gave guards more opportunities to stop an aggressive intruder who either blew down the gate with a package of explosives or rammed it with a fortified truck.

  Perhaps D. J. Michael had nixed a gatehouse, a spearpoint wall cap, and other obvious defenses in order not to call undue attention to the property. He could have compensated for those omissions with greater electronic surveillance, armored doors, bullet-resistant glass, more than one panic room, and other security measures.

  At the moment, a man was sweeping dead leaves off the driveway where it curved under the receiving portico. He was dressed neither as a gardener nor in the black-and-white livery most common to the staff of a great house. Shirt to shoes, he wore only white, as if he were a dental hygienist or a hospital orderly.