The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  “He’s got some bite in him,” Jane disagreed. “But it’s not him. It’s the world out there.”

  “I heard some about you and the world. None true, I’m sure.” She smiled and looked out at the cars and said, “I would’ve brung along tea and coffee. And cookies for the children. But seems it’s not that kind of moment.”

  “We’re fine,” Jane said. “I’ll just wait out at the car.”

  “You take care of yourself,” Margot said.

  “You, too. Nice to see you again.”

  “It was. It truly was.”

  The lakes of mist that pooled here and there across the long hollow were surrendering their substance to the day, greater swaths of green meadow appearing by the minute, the family-built cedar houses more silver than gray in the brighter sun. Widely separated tulip trees reigned over the open ground, the many species of the forest trees like ramparts all around.

  It resembled some Amish farm cooperative. No farming was done here, however, not even of cannabis. Bulk chemicals came in, were combined, were refined into an illegal-drug smorgasbord. From here the merchandise went out into a world gone awry, to deeply troubled people who bought what they needed to get through the night, face the day, and escape them both.

  Luther had gotten out of his car when he’d heard the rifle shot, and he’d been standing by the open door ever since. When Jane joined him, he said, “Are you all right?”

  “Why’s everybody asking me that? We’ll have the vehicle we need in half an hour.”

  Surveying the hollow, he said. “Glad to hear it. This is a bad place.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But the funny thing is, I feel safer here than anywhere since Nick died.”

  4

  * * *

  Otis Faucheur supplied a cranberry-red 1988 Chrysler Voyager, a minivan, with weather-eaten paint, rust-streaked rocker panels, one of six grille segments broken out, and a general air of senescence. But jammed in the resized engine compartment was a GM Performance Parts 383ci stoked small-block V-8 with a steel crank, hydraulic roller cam, 9.7:1 slugs, and a set of Fast Burn aluminum heads. In fact, the entire chassis was new; only the body survived from ’88. The sole giveaway to the casual observer might have been the tires, which could take whatever punishment the outrunner demanded of them.

  Luther had no difficulty keeping pace with Jane’s Mexico-souped Ford Escape.

  In a shopping-center parking lot in Fort Smith, Arkansas, she measured the children’s feet and did some estimating. Luther took her notes into a store and purchased twelve pairs of sneakers. From that assortment they shoed the eight properly without drawing undue attention. He also bought underwear and socks in various sizes.

  Famished, they ate a late breakfast in a restaurant where the food was delicious and the portions generous, and where Jane felt safe from recognition. No one was searching for Luther Tillman, and no authorities were looking for the kids, not officially, not so that their precious faces would be on TV. Jane had her long auburn hair and green eyes and unnecessary glasses, but the best disguise was her black companion and the covey of rumpled but content young ones. Few would imagine America’s most-wanted fugitive might travel with so many children—adopted, they told the waitress—or that a woman known to be a traitor and murderer and thief would be this same loving mother, or that such well-behaved boys and girls would regard the monstrous Jane Hawk with such trust and quiet affection.

  From Fort Smith, they crossed into Oklahoma. The heavens were china blue with a few long stratus-cloud formations like series of low snow-covered hills risen from the earth and gliding eastward.

  At 2:40 P.M. Wednesday, in Oklahoma City, they transitioned to I-35 south. They intended to be in Ardmore by five o’clock and stay the night. Most of the way, one or another of Jane’s namesake birds was making lazy circles in the sky either to the east or west of the highway.

  5

  * * *

  Huey Darnell, thrice divorced by harridans and now betrayed by his fourth wife, bourbon whiskey, sits alone and dismayingly sober in the back of a paneled van, just behind the front seats, watching the Tillman residence through a pair of binoculars.

  Hassan Zaghari had been on duty this morning when the daughter, Jolie, drove her mother to the home of a deputy, Rob Stassen, to borrow an ancient Buick station wagon. Having followed them to and from the deputy’s place, when at home once more they began to load suitcases in the Buick, Zaghari had called Huey for instructions.

  Fortunately, the women delayed until the bank opened and went in there together, which gave Huey time and an opportunity to fix a transponder to their borrowed vehicle.

  Now Hassan Zaghari and Kernan Beedle, the only other agent on Huey’s reduced team, are following Rebecca and Jolie Tillman to God knows where, and Huey is left alone to keep track of the sheriff, who is on vacation and who is—who surely must be, who damn well better be—in the house, lounging in pajamas or sweats, eating Cheez Doodles and drinking beer and watching sports.

  No one has glimpsed the sheriff since this surveillance began the previous day, Tuesday.

  Huey Darnell is long past due to report this situation to his boss, Booth Hendrickson. He is hoping that if he makes the sacrifice of remaining stone-cold sober long enough, the gods will reward him and all of this will turn out to be of no importance, so that he never needs to tell anyone that he has screwed up. He doesn’t believe in gods or God, or Fate, or that the arc of history inevitably bends toward justice. However, maybe he is wrong about all those things. And if for the moment he is unable to believe in bourbon…well, a man has to believe in something.

  6

  * * *

  By Wednesday afternoon, the basic facts of the crisis are known, though the dimensions of the threat are not yet understood.

  Booth Hendrickson, of the Department of Justice and esteemed associate of David James Michael, airborne from D.C. to Louisville in a Bureau Gulfstream V jet, is then lifted from Louisville alone in an eight-seat executive helicopter. When the pilot settles the chopper in a meadow on the outskirts of Iron Furnace at 2:20 P.M. Wednesday, Hendrickson is met by one of the adjusted people of that town, Stacia O’Dell, the concierge at the Iron Furnace Lake Resort. Stacia serves as his chauffeur in a Mercedes S600 bearing the license plate IFLR 1.

  Earlier, by telephone, Hendrickson accessed the woman’s nanomachine implant by inviting her to play Manchurian with him. He programmed her to believe that his name is John Congrieve and that he’s the CEO of Terra Firma Enterprises, which owns the resort. She is to escort him wherever he might wish to go, while having no curiosity as to his purpose, for this is said to be sensitive corporate business.

  The first place he wishes to go is to the private school for problem children.

  As they enter town on Lakeview Road, Stacia says, “It’s a sad thing when little children are afflicted like that.”

  “Yes,” he agrees, “very sad.” Curious as to what she might say, he asks, “What is their problem as you understand it?”

  “Personality disorders. There’s more and more of that lately.”

  “Absolutely. But I wonder why that is. Violent video games? Filth all over the Internet? All the wrong lessons in the movies they’re making these days? The schools failing them?”

  “Oh,” she says, “maybe a little of it’s about that. But mostly it’s because there’s not enough caring these days.”

  “Caring?”

  “For one another. Parents caring about their kids. Neighbors caring about neighbors. All for one and one for all, you see.”

  “I do see, yes.”

  “Everyone for himself is such a terrible dead-end. I mean, when everything is me-me-me-me, you’re bound to have some children become confused, disordered. It’s very sad.”

  “Would you say that Iron Furnace is a caring town?”

  Her expression of concern melts into a smile. “Oh, yes, we’re a closely knit community. There’s caring, unity, a sense of belonging. Just look around
, you can see it, the way everything is. Yesterday this event planner from Atlanta, Mr. Moses, the nicest black man, he said our little town is like a bejeweled Fabergé egg.”

  She glances away from the road to gauge whether he’s taken well what she has said, her apple-green eyes conveying earnestness that might move someone unaware that she is an adjusted person.

  “You’ve really got that right, Ms. O’Dell. You surely do.”

  At the estate where the children are held, he asks her to remain in the car, under the portico roof. Of course she will wait dutifully, patiently, perhaps even until she dies of thirst.

  A woman named Noreen Klostner answers the door, and Hendrickson asks her to play Manchurian with him and then to use the whispering room to summon the other seven staff members.

  When everyone is seated in the dining room, he accesses them and tries to ascertain how they could have been so delinquent as to allow the children to escape unnoticed. Yes, the locaters in the shoes. But once the kids crept through the house in their stocking feet—where did they go? Nobody knows. Where are they now? Nobody knows. They can’t be hiding anywhere in Iron Furnace, because groups of citizens have searched everywhere for them. The oldest boy might have been able to drive. But no vehicle is missing from the garage. And what has happened to the security video? Nobody knows. Where are the discs that were removed from the recorder? Nobody knows. The eight sit at the table, blank-faced. For an hour, Hendrickson pulls their strings, uses every tool provided by their control program to extract from their memory the events of the previous night, with no success. They share a period of amnesia beginning at dinner and continuing until they had gone to bed, as though something went wrong in their programs all at the same time.

  Because these adjusted people are incapable of lying to him or of concealing vital information by any manner of deceit, the usual techniques of a tough interrogation are of no use to him. Yet out of habit, he finds himself using intimidation and inducing fear, even brutally, repeatedly slapping two women until one is bleeding from the lips, the other from her nose. He is chagrinned to have resorted to such primitive measures, not because they are so primitive but because there is no chance they will work with creatures like these.

  Just as Hendrickson is about to terminate the session in disgust, a fearful man named George Woolsey, sitting at the head of the table, declares, “I’m not here to hurt you. Do you believe me?”

  Hendrickson goes to him, stares down at him. “Hurt me? What the hell are you talking about? Of course you can’t hurt me. You belong to me.”

  George Woolsey’s face is sickly pale, and his eyes regard his interrogator much as the eyes of a helpless, tethered horse might track with terror the encroaching flames of a stable fire. He says, “Don’t be afraid, George. Not of me.”

  “You’re George, you dumbass,” Hendrickson says. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Woolsey’s voice is thick with misery. “What’s happened to me?” Before Hendrickson can respond, Woolsey says, “Don’t you know, George?” And then: “Something’s happened. What was isn’t.” And finally: “Come back into the dining room, George. Sit down with the others.”

  Hendrickson studies Woolsey. Something has just escaped the black hole that swallowed his memories of the previous evening. “You’re repeating a conversation, aren’t you? From last night.”

  Woolsey says nothing.

  “Answer me, George. Who told you they weren’t here to hurt you?”

  Woolsey rolls his eyes, his breathing quick and shallow.

  “Dredge it up, damn you. Remember. Last night, who said they weren’t here to hurt you?”

  “She did.” Woolsey wasn’t looking at anyone at the table.

  “She? Who was she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She was…”

  “She was what, George? Tell me.”

  “She was kind to me.”

  “What else?”

  Woolsey works his mouth, as if seeking an answer, but he isn’t able to find one.

  “Tell me something else about her, George. Something, damn you, anything.”

  “I don’t. I can’t. I don’t know.”

  Someone had been here the previous evening; and the children are now with her. Someone who knows how to access these people and control them and make them forget. There are factions among the Arcadians, as there are factions in any organization, but Booth Hendrickson is stunned by the possibility that one of them might turn traitor on the others.

  He presses Woolsey for a few minutes, to no avail. “All of you, be calm, go to your rooms. Wait till we come to deal with you.”

  Because he doesn’t free them with the phrase auf Wiedersehen, they rise from the chairs as if they are a convocation of the living dead, solemn and silent, their eyes forward but seeming to gaze inward toward some devastation. Two women drip blood from their battered faces, the red droplets shimmering on the carpet and on the limestone floor, as though having come unstrung from some beadroll and here portending Hendrickson’s fate.

  He can’t look up from those scattered scarlet beads as he makes a phone call to summon specialists from certain laboratories in Virginia. They will need to conduct forensic exams of the keepers of the children, as if those eight adjusted people are hard drives that have crashed.

  When he returns to the car, Stacia O’Dell smiles and says, “Everything hunky dory?”

  He doesn’t reply but sits thinking for a moment. Iron Furnace is a valuable asset to the cause, a place that allows them access to many influential people who can be programmed either to serve the shaping of the better world to come or to commit suicide at some moment in the future that is specified by the computer model as an ideal expiration date. But the usefulness of the town is jeopardized by the eight children on the loose. He senses that the answer to the mystery of their escape is within his reach, that he has overlooked something that still eludes him.

  “Let’s go, Ms. O’Dell.”

  “Where to?”

  He hesitates, then says, “Back into town. I’d like to have a look around.”

  It is another fifteen minutes before Stacia O’Dell once more mentions the black event planner from Atlanta, Martin Moses, who has compared Iron Furnace to a jewel-encrusted Fabergé egg.

  7

  * * *

  Late afternoon, Ancel Hawk was in the stables, observing the vet conduct a follow-up exam with his favorite horse, Donner. The stallion had come down with coffin-joint synovitis. Fortunately, the inflammation had been treated before any degeneration in the foot.

  Ancel’s iPhone rang. When he saw who was calling, he excused himself and took the call as he moved to the farther end of the stable. “Is this really Chase Longrin or is my phone funnin’ me?”

  “How’re you, Mr. Hawk?”

  “I’ve been better, been worse, and been here before. No complaints. Your own self?”

  “I’m in the same corral you just described, sir. As long as the food’s good and the bed’s warm, I’d be a fool to repine.”

  Chase had been Nick’s best friend in high school. In their senior year, they were both smitten with the same girl, Alexis Aimes, and contested for her attention. When she fell in love with the other, Nick handled his disappointment with grace, remaining best friends with Chase and treating Alexis like a sister. It was as if Nick had always known Jane would be there for him in a few years.

  “What can I do for you, son?”

  “Remember last year you hounded me for that Tennessee Walker?”

  “The chestnut mare with the golden mane and tail. I regret if you felt hounded. I’m just a truly persistent horse trader.”

  “Her name’s Melosa. You still like to buy her for Mrs. Hawk?”

  “If ever a horse and woman were born to further glorify each other, it’s them.”

  “After that kind of talk, you won’t whittle my price down.”

  “Well, Melosa is a year older, than
ks to your intransigence.”

  “You’re amusing to dicker with, sir. Anytime you want to come see Melosa, make sure her teeth haven’t fallen out, you’re welcome.”

  “Why not now?”

  “I could live with now.”

  “I’ll set out shortly,” Ancel said.

  Leaving the vet to report on Donner’s condition to Juan Saba, the ranch manager, Ancel went to his Ford 550 truck in front of the house and fired it up. His heart was lighter than it had been in a while, though not because of any Tennessee walking horse.

  There was a Melosa in Chase Longrin’s stables, and Ancel would not mind buying her for Clare; but the purpose of the call had not been to sell a horse. As had been arranged when Jane went off the grid two and a half months earlier, such a call meant that she had contacted Chase and that he had a message to relay to her in-laws. This was the first time she had rung him up.

  The long private lane between the house and the county road was flanked by ranch fencing overhung in places by ancient oak trees. In this season, the world beyond appeared to offer only rich green grasslands, sheep grazing to the left and cattle on the right.

  Tens of millions of years earlier, most of Texas had been covered by shallow seas. The skeletons and shells of tiny creatures abiding therein formed the sediment that compacted into the deep limestone bedrock supporting all of what accrued in this territory thereafter. The land was the foundation on which a man and woman could build a life with hard work and love, with faith that it meant something. As long as Ancel could remember, he loved the land but also the vastness of the sky, which was bigger here than in most places, the horizon as far away as aboard a ship in mid-ocean. He felt anchored by the earth and buoyed by the majesty of the big sky, so that life had a sweet tension.

  With Nick’s death, the land seemed to fracture under Ancel, its millions of years of stability called into question. Some days the sky paled, as if it might fade to a white arc too empty and terrible for the eye to tolerate. Far horizons that once inspired by their distance now suggested that there were no longer limits in the world, that some never-imagined threat would come from beyond the curve of the earth and fall on them as they lay defenseless.