Whispers

by Dean Koontz

  The woman was crying, tossing her head from side to side. “No, no, no! Oh, God!” But then she got control of herself, locked eyes with him, gazed intently at him (and he could see Katherine in there, beyond the brown eyes, glaring out at him), and she said, “Listen to me. Please, listen to me! You’re sick. You’re a very sick man. You’re all mixed up. You need help.”

  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  He slapped her again, harder than he had done before, swinging his big hand in a long swift arc, into the side of her face.

  Each act of violence excited him. He was aroused by the sharp sound of each blow, by her gasps of pain and her birdlike cries, by the way her tender flesh reddened and swelled. The sight of her pain-contorted face and her scared-rabbit eyes stoked his lust to an unbearable white-hot flame.

  He was shaking with need, trembling, quivering, quaking. He was breathing like a bull. His eyes were wide. His mouth was watering so excessively that he had to swallow every couple of seconds to avoid drooling on her.

  He mauled her lovely breasts, squeezed and stroked them, roughed them up.

  She had retreated from the terror, had slipped back into that semi-trance, motionless and rigid.

  On the one hand, Bruno hated her and did not care how badly he hurt her. He wanted to cause her pain. He wanted her to suffer for all the things she had done to him—for even bringing him into the world in the first place.

  But on the other hand, he was ashamed of touching his mother’s breasts and ashamed of wanting to stick his penis into her. Therefore, as he pawed at her, he tried to explain himself and justify his actions: “You told me that if I ever tried to make love to a woman, she’d know right away that I’m not human. You said she’d see the difference, and she’d know. She’d call the police, and they’d take me away, and they’d burn me at the stake because they’d know who my father was. But you already know. It’s no surprise to you, Mother. So I can use my prick on you. I can stick it right up in you, Mother, and no one will burn me alive.”

  He had never thought of putting it into her while she was alive. He’d been hopelessly cowed by her. But by the time she had come back from the dead in her first new body, Bruno had tasted freedom, and he had been full of daring and new ideas. He realized at once that he must kill her to prevent her from taking over his life again—or dragging him back to the grave with her. But he also realized that he could screw her and be safe, since she already knew his secret. She was the one who had told him the truth about himself; she’d told him ten thousand times. She knew that his father was a demon, a foul and hideous thing, for she had been raped by that inhuman creature, impregnated by it against her will. During her pregnancy, she had worn overlapping girdles to conceal her condition. When her time drew near, she went away to give birth under the care of a close-mouthed midwife in San Francisco. Later, she told people in St. Helena that Bruno was the illegitimate son of an old college friend who had gotten in trouble, that his real mother died shortly after his birth, and that her last wish was for Katherine to raise the boy. She brought the baby home and pretended he had been legally placed in her care and custody. She lived in constant, numbing fear that someone would discover Bruno was hers, and that his father was not human. One of the things that marked him as the progeny of a demon was his penis. He had the penis of a demon, different from that of a man. He must always hide it, she said, or he would be uncovered and burned at the stake. She had told him all about those things, had been telling him about them since he was too young to know what a penis was for. So, in a peculiar way, she had become both his blessing and his curse. She was a curse because she kept returning from the grave to regain control of him or to kill him. But she was also a blessing because, if she didn’t keep coming back again and again and again, he wouldn’t have anyone into whom he could empty the great, hot quantities of semen that built up like boiling lava in him. Without her, he was doomed to a life of celibacy. Therefore, while he regarded her resurrections with horror and outrage, a part of him also eagerly looked forward to each new encounter with each new body that she inhabited.

  Now, as he knelt on the bed beside her, looking down at her breasts and at the dark pubic bush that was visible through her pale yellow panties, his erection grew so hard that it hurt. He was aware of the demon-half of his personality asserting itself; he felt the beast surging toward the surface of his mind.

  He clawed at Sally’s (Katherine’s) pantyhose, shredding the nylon as he pulled it down her slim legs. He gripped her thighs in his large hands and forced them apart, and he moved around clumsily on the mattress until he was kneeling between her legs.

  She snapped out of her trance again. Suddenly bucking, thrashing, kicking, she tried to rise, but he shoved her back with ease. She pummeled him with her fists, but her punches were without force. Seeing that he was unaffected by her blows, she opened her hands, made claws of them, struck at his face, raked his left cheek with her nails, then went for his eyes.

  He jerked back, raised one arm to protect himself, winced as she gouged the back of his hand. Then he fell full-length upon her, crushing her with his big, strong body. He got one arm across her throat and pressed down, choking her.

  Joshua Rhinehart washed the three whiskey glasses in the sink at the wet bar. To Tony and Hilary, he said, “The two of you have more at stake in this thing than I do, so why don’t you come with me tomorrow when I fly down to see Rita Yancy in Hollister?”

  “I was hoping you’d ask us,” Hilary said.

  “There’s nothing we can do here right now,” Tony said.

  Joshua dried his hands on a dishtowel. “Good. That’s settled. Now have you gotten a hotel room for the night?”

  “Not yet,” Tony said.

  “You’re welcome to stay at my place,” Joshua said.

  Hilary smiled prettily. “That’s very kind. But we don’t want to impose on you.”

  “You wouldn’t be imposing.”

  “But you weren’t expecting us, and we—”

  “Young lady,” Joshua said impatiently, “do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had house guests? More than three years. And do you know why I haven’t had any house guests in three years? Because I didn’t invite anyone to stay with me, that’s why. I am not a particularly gregarious man. I don’t issue invitations lightly. If I felt that you and Tony would be a burden—or, worst of all, boring—I wouldn’t have invited you, either. Now let’s not waste a lot of time being overly polite. You need a room. I have a room. Are you going to stay at my place or not?”

  Tony laughed, and Hilary grinned at Joshua. She said, “Thank you for asking us. We’d be delighted.”

  “Good,” Joshua said.

  “I like your style,” she told him.

  “Most people think I’m a grump.”

  “But a nice grump.”

  Joshua found a smile of his own. “Thank you. I think I’ll have that engraved on my tombstone. ‘Here lies Joshua Rhinehart, a nice grump.’”

  As they were leaving the office, the telephone rang, and Joshua went back to his desk. Dr. Nicholas Rudge was calling from San Francisco.

  Bruno Frye was still on top of the woman, pinning her to the mattress, one muscular arm across her throat.

  She gagged and fought for breath. Her face was red, dark, twisted in agony.

  She excited him.

  “Don’t fight me, Mother. Don’t fight me like this. You know it’s useless. You know I’ll win in the end.”

  She writhed under his superior weight and strength. She tried to arch her back and roll to one side, and when she failed to throw him off, she was shaken by violent involuntary muscle spasms as her body reacted to the growing interruption in her air supply and in the supply of blood to her brain. At last, she seemed to realize she would never be able to get free of him, that she had absolutely no hope of escape, and so she went limp in defeat.

  Convinced that the woman had surrendered spiritually as well as physically, Frye lifted his arm fro
m her bruised throat. He raised up on his knees, taking his weight off her.

  She put her hands to her neck. She gagged and coughed uncontrollably.

  In a frenzy now, his heart pounding, blood roaring in his ears, aching with need, Frye got up, stood beside the bed, stripped off his clothes, threw them on top of the dresser, out of the way.

  He looked down at his erection. The sight of it thrilled him. The steeliness of it. The size of it. The angry color.

  He climbed onto the bed again.

  She was docile now. Her eyes had a vacant look.

  He ripped off her pale yellow panties and positioned himself between her slim legs. Saliva drooled out of his mouth. Dripped on her breasts.

  He thrust into her. He thrust his demon staff all the way into her. Growling like an animal. Stabbed her with his demonic penis. He stabbed and stabbed her, until his semen flowered within her.

  He pictured the milky fluid. Pictured it flowering from him, deep inside of her.

  He thought of blood blossoming from a wound. Red petals spreading from a deep knife wound.

  Both thoughts wildly excited him: semen and blood.

  He didn’t go soft.

  Sweating, grunting, slobbering, he made thrust after thrust after thrust. Into her. Into. In.

  Later, he would use the knife.

  Joshua Rhinehart flipped a switch on his desk phone, putting the call from Dr. Nicholas Rudge on the conference speaker, so that Tony and Hilary could hear the conversation.

  “I tried your home number first,” Rudge said. “I didn’t expect you to be at the office at this hour.”

  “I’m a workaholic, doctor.”

  “You should try to do something about it,” Rudge said with what sounded like genuine concern. “That’s no way to live. I’ve treated more than a few overly-ambitious men for whom work had become the only interest in their lives. An obsessive attitude toward work can destroy you.”

  “Dr. Rudge, what is your medical specialty?”

  “Psychiatry.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  “You’re the executor?”

  “That’s right. I presume you heard all about his death.”

  “Just what the newspaper had to say.”

  “While handling some estate matters, I discovered that Mr. Frye had been seeing you regularly during the year and a half prior to his death.”

  “He came in once a month,” Rudge said.

  “Were you aware that he was homicidal?”

  “Of course not,” Rudge said.

  “You treated him all that time and weren’t aware that he was capable of violence?”

  “I knew he was deeply disturbed,” Rudge said. “But I didn’t think he was a danger to anyone. However, you must understand that he didn’t really give me a chance to spot the violent side of him. I mean, as I said, he only came in once a month. I wanted to see him at least once every week, and preferably twice, but he refused. On the one hand, he wanted me to help him. But at the same time, he was afraid of what he might learn about himself. After a while, I decided not to press him too hard about making weekly visits because I was afraid that he might back off altogether and even cancel his monthly appointment. I figured a little therapy was better than none, you see.”

  “What brought him to you?”

  “Are you asking what was wrong with him, what he was complaining of?”

  “That’s what I’m asking, all right.”

  “As an attorney, Mr. Rhinehart, you ought to be aware that I can’t give out that sort of information indiscriminately. I have a doctor-patient privilege to protect.”

  “The patient is dead, Dr. Rudge.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference.”

  “It sure as hell makes a difference to the patient.”

  “He placed his trust in me.”

  “When the patient is dead, the concept of doctor-patient privilege has little or no legal validity.”

  “Perhaps it has no legal validity,” Rudge said. “But the moral validity remains. I still have certain responsibilities. I wouldn’t do anything to damage the reputation of a patient, regardless of whether he’s dead or alive.”

  “Commendable,” Joshua said. “But in this case, nothing you could tell me would damage his reputation one whit more than he damaged it himself.”

  “That, too, makes no difference.”

  “Doctor, this is an extraordinary situation. This very day, I have come into possession of information which indicates that Bruno Frye murdered a number of women over the past five years, a large number of women, and got away with it.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I don’t know what sort of thing strikes you as funny, Dr. Rudge. But I don’t make jokes about mass murder.”

  Rudge was silent.

  Joshua said, “Furthermore, I have reason to believe that Frye didn’t act alone. He may have had a partner in homicide. And that partner may still be walking around, alive and free.”

  “This is extraordinary.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Have you given this information of yours to the police?”

  “No,” Joshua said. “For one thing, it’s probably not enough to get their attention. What I’ve discovered convinces me—and two other people who are involved in this. But the police will probably say it’s only circumstantial evidence. And for another thing—I’m not sure which police agency has primary jurisdiction in the case. The murders might have been committed in several counties, in a number of cities. Now it seems to me that Frye might have told you something that doesn’t appear all that important by itself, but which fits in with the facts that I’ve uncovered. If, during those eighteen months of therapy, you acquired a bit of knowledge that complements my information, then perhaps I’ll have enough to decide which police agency to approach—and enough to convince them of the seriousness of the situation.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Dr. Rudge, if you persist in protecting this particular patient, yet more murders may occur. Other women. Do you want their deaths on your conscience?”

  “All right,” Rudge said. “But this can’t be done on the telephone.”

  “I’ll come to San Francisco tomorrow, at your earliest convenience.”

  “My morning is free,” Rudge said.

  “Shall my associates and I meet you at your offices at ten o’clock?”

  “That’ll be fine,” Rudge said. “But I warn you—before I discuss Mr. Frye’s therapy, I’ll want to hear this evidence of yours in more detail.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And if I’m not convinced that there’s a clear and present danger, I’ll keep his file sealed.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt that we can convince you,” Joshua said. “I’m quite sure we can make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. We’ll see you in the morning, doctor.”

  Joshua hung up. He looked at Tony and Hilary. “Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day. First San Francisco and Dr. Rudge, then Hollister and the mysterious Rita Yancy.”

  Hilary got up from the couch where she had sat through the call. “I don’t care if we have to fly halfway around the world. At least things seem to be breaking. For the first time, I feel that we’re actually going to find out what’s behind all of this.”

  “I feel the same way,” Tony said. He smiled at Joshua. “You know . . . the way you handled Rudge . . . you’ve got a real talent for interrogation. You’d make a good detective.”

  “I’ll add that to my tombstone,” Joshua said.“‘Here lies Joshua Rhinehart, a nice grump who would have made a good detective.’” He stood up. “I’m starved. At home I’ve got steaks in the freezer and a lot of bottles of Robert Mondavi’s Cabernet Sauvignon. What are we waiting for?”

  Frye turned away from the blood-drenched bed and from the blood-splashed wall behind the bed.

  He put the bloody knife on the dresser and walked out of the room.

  The house was filled with an unearthl
y quiet.

  His demonic energy was gone. He was heavy-lidded, heavy-limbed, lethargic, sated.

  In the bathroom, he adjusted the water in the shower until it was as hot as he could stand it. He stepped into the stall and soaped himself, washed the blood out of his hair, washed it off his face and body. He rinsed, then lathered up again, rinsed a second time.

  His mind was a blank. He thought of nothing except the details of cleaning up. The sight of the blood swirling down the drain did not make him think of the dead woman in the next room; it was only dirt being sluiced away.

  All he wanted to do was make himself presentable and then go sleep in the van for several hours. He was exhausted. His arms felt as if they were made of lead; his legs were rubber.

  He got out of the shower and dried himself on a big towel. The cloth smelled like the woman, but it had neither pleasant nor unpleasant associations for him.

  He spent a lot of time at the sink, working on his hands with a brush that he found beside the soap dish, getting every trace of blood out of his knuckle creases, taking special care with his caked fingernails.

  On his way out of the bathroom, intending to fetch his clothes from the bedroom, he noticed a full-length mirror on the door, which he hadn’t seen on his way to the shower. He stopped to examine himself, looking for smears of blood that he might have missed. He was as spotless and fresh and pink as a well-scrubbed baby.

  He stared at the reflection of his flaccid penis and the drooping testicles beneath it, and he tried very hard to see the mark of the demon. He knew that he was not like other men; he had no doubt whatsoever about that. His mother had been terrified that someone would find out about him and that the world would learn that he was half-demon, the child of an ordinary woman and a scaly, fanged, sulphurous beast. Her fear of exposure was transmitted to Bruno at an early age, and he still dreaded being found out and subsequently burned alive. He had never been naked in front of another person. In school, he had not gone out for sports, and he had been excused from gymnasium for supposed religious objections to taking showers in the nude with other boys. He had never even completely stripped for a physician. His mother had been positive that anyone who saw his sex organs would know at once that his manhood was the genetic legacy of a demon father; and he had been impressed and deeply affected by her fearful, unwavering certainty.

  But as he looked at himself in the mirror, he couldn’t see anything that made his sex organs different from those of other men. Shortly after his mother’s fatal heart attack, he had gone to a pornographic movie in San Francisco, eager to learn how a normal man’s penis looked. He’d been surprised and baffled to discover that the men in the film were all very much like him. He’d gone to other pictures of the same sort, but he hadn’t seen even one man who was strikingly different from him. Some of them had bigger penises than his; some of them had smaller organs; some were thicker, some thinner; some were curved slightly; some of them were circumcised, and some were not. But those were all just minor variations, not the awful, shocking, fundamental differences which he had expected.

  Puzzled, worried, he had gone back to St. Helena to sit with himself and discuss his discovery. His first thought was that his mother had lied to him. But that was very nearly inconceivable. She had recounted the story of his conception several times every week, for years and years, and each time that she had described the hateful demon and the violent rape, she had shuddered and wailed and wept. The experience had been real for her, not some imaginary tale that she had created to mislead him. And yet. . . . Sitting with himself that afternoon five years ago, discussing it with himself, he had been unable to think of any explanation other than that his mother was a liar; and himself agreed with him.

  The following day, he had returned to San Francisco, wildly excited, fevered, having decided to risk sex with a woman for the first time in his thirty-five years. He had gone to a massage parlor, a thinly disguised brothel, where he had chosen a slim, attractive blonde as his masseuse. She called herself Tammy, and except for slightly protruding upper teeth and a neck that was just a bit too long, she was as beautiful as any woman he had ever seen; or at least that’s how she seemed to him as he struggled to keep from ejaculating in his trousers. In one of the cubicles that smelled of pine disinfectant and stale semen, he agreed to Tammy’s price, paid her, and watched as she took off her sweater and slacks. Her body was smooth and sleek and so desirable that he stood like a post, unable to move, awe-stricken as he considered all of the things he could do with her. She sat on the edge of the narrow bed and smiled at him and suggested he undress. He stripped down to his underpants, but when the time came for him to show her his rigid penis, he was unable to take the risk, for he could see himself in a pillar of flame, put to death because of his demonic blood. He froze. He stared at Tammy’s slender legs and at her wiry pubic hair and at her round breasts, wanting her, needing her, but afraid to take her. Sensing his reluctance to