Whispers

by Dean Koontz

  would turn and see him. But the big man continued to face the doors. He was listening to Hilary, and she was screaming. Tony slipped up on him and put the knife between his shoulder blades.

  Frye cried out in pain and turned.

  Tony stumbled backwards, praying that he had inflicted a mortal wound. He knew he could not win in hand-to-hand combat with Frye—especially not when he had the use of only one arm.

  Frye reached frantically behind, trying to grab the knife that Tony had rammed into him. He wanted to pull it out of himself, but he could not reach it.

  A thread of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

  Tony backed up another step. Then another.

  Frye staggered toward him.

  Hilary stood on the top step, pounding on the locked doors. She screamed for help.

  Behind her, the whispering in the dark cellar grew louder with each shattering thump of her heart.

  She risked a glance backward, shining the light down the steps. Just the sight of the humming mass of insects made her gag with revulsion. The room below appeared to be waist-deep in roaches. A huge pool of them shifted and swayed and hissed in such a way that it seemed almost as if there was only one organism down there, one monstrous creature with countless legs and antennae and hungry mouths.

  She realized that she was still screaming. Over and over again. Her voice was getting hoarse. She couldn’t stop.

  Some of the insects were venturing up the steps in spite of her light. Two of them reached her feet, and she stamped on them. Others followed.

  She turned to the doors again, screaming. She pounded on the timbers with all her strength.

  Then the flashlight went out. She had thoughtlessly hammered it against the door in her hysterical effort to get help. The glass cracked. The light died.

  For a moment, the whispering seemed to subside—but then it rose rapidly to a greater volume than ever before.

  Hilary put her back to the door.

  She thought of the tape recording she had heard in Dr. Nicholas Rudge’s office yesterday morning. She thought of the twins, as children, locked in here, hands clamped over their noses and mouths, trying to keep the roaches from crawling into them. All of that screaming had given both of them coarse, gravelly voices; hours and hours, days and days of screaming.

  Horrified, she stared down into the darkness, waiting for the ocean of beetles to close over her.

  She felt a few on her ankles, and she quickly bent down, brushed them away.

  One of them ran up her left arm. She clapped a hand on it, squashed it.

  The terrifying susurration of the moving insects was almost deafening now.

  She put her hands to her ears.

  A roach dropped from the ceiling, onto her head. Screaming, she plucked it out of her hair, threw it away.

  Suddenly, the doors opened behind her, and light burst into the cellar.

  She saw a surging tide of roaches only one step below her, and then the wave fell back from the sun, and Tony pulled her out into the rain and the beautiful dirty gray light.

  A few roaches clung to her clothes, and Tony knocked them from her.

  “My God,” he said. “My God, my God.”

  Hilary leaned against him.

  There were no more roaches on her, but she imagined she could still feel them. Crawling. Creeping.

  She shook violently, uncontrollably, and Tony put his good arm around her. He talked to her softly, calmly, bringing her down.

  At last she was able to stop screaming.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “I’ll live. And paint.”

  She saw Frye. He was sprawled on the grass, face down, obviously dead. A knife protruded from his back, and his shirt was soaked with blood.

  “I had no choice,” Tony said. “I really didn’t want to kill him. I felt sorry for him . . . knowing what Katherine put him through. But I had no choice.”

  They walked away from the corpse, across the lawn.

  Hilary’s legs were weak.

  “She put the twins in that place when she wanted to punish them,” Hilary said. “How many times? A hundred? Two hundred? A thousand times?”

  “Don’t think about it,” Tony said. “Just think about being alive, being together. Think about whether you’d like being married to a slightly battered ex-cop who’s struggling to make a living as a painter.”

  “I think I’d like that very much.”

  Forty feet away, Sheriff Peter Laurenski rushed out of the kitchen, onto the back porch. “What’s happened?” he called to them. “Are you all right?”

  Tony didn’t bother to answer him. “We’ve got years and years together,” he told Hilary. “And from here on, it’s all going to be good. For the first time in our lives, we both know who we are, what we want, and where we’re going. We’ve overcome the past. The future will be easy.”

  As they walked toward Laurenski, the autumn rain hammered softly on them and whispered in the grass.

  AFTERWORD BY DEAN KOONTZ

  afterword

  In 1979, when I wrote Whispers, I was less well known than the young Harrison Ford before he appeared in American Graffiti—and a lot less handsome. I was slightly better looking than J. Fred Muggs, a performing chimpanzee on TV at that time, but also less well known than he was. Although I had been a full-time writer for several years, and though I had a file drawer full of good reviews, I had never enjoyed a bestseller and, in fact, had never known enough financial security to guarantee that I would always be able to earn a living at my chosen art and craft. Writing novels was the only work for which I’d ever had a passion. Although I put in sixty- and seventy-hour weeks at the typewriter, I worried that I might eventually have to find new work. Because I had no other talent, skill, or ability, I would no doubt have turned to a life of crime. Robbing banks, hijacking airliners to hold the passengers for ransom, and knocking over armored cars is undeniably more exciting than sitting at a typewriter all day; however, with associates named Slash and Scarface and Icepick, the office Christmas party each year tends to be deadly.

  Whispers was the last book I wrote in total obscurity and the last book I wrote on a typewriter. In those days, personal computers were not universally in use, though a few writers had them. (To help you understand this ancient era: Most of the dinosaurs had died off by that time; we had indoor plumbing, electricity, and the internal-combustion engine; abductions by extraterrestrials were not yet an everyday occurrence back then; but most people were naive enough to believe that Elvis Presley was dead—when, as we now know, he had moved to a fabulous mansion on a moon of Jupiter.) My wife, Gerda, had been urging me to trade my typewriter for a computer. When I finished Whispers, she informed me that she had tracked our office supplies, and that for every page in the final manuscript, I had used thirty-two pages of typing paper, which meant that I had done thirty-one discarded drafts of every page, typing eight hundred pages of text again and again to polish it. Although I was aware of my obsessive-compulsive rewriting, I hadn’t realized quite how many revisions I usually undertook. With a computer, revision didn’t require re-typing an entire page to make half a dozen changes. I bought an IBM Displaywriter (now as extinct as the T-Rex) and never looked back.

  During the last few months that I sat at the typewriter, working on this novel, I lost twenty pounds. I was not overweight when I started the project, and I didn’t diet while writing. When I finished the script—which took nearly a year of long hours—I was not only thinner but both physically and emotionally exhausted. For years, I didn’t realize why this project drained me. A decade later, I could look back on the book and understand that I was writing out of painful personal experience, which I couldn’t acknowledge at the time. Virtually all the characters in Whispers suffer terrible, violent childhoods. Some overcome those traumas, and some do not; indeed, one of them becomes a serial killer. I, too, had lived through a childhood marked by physical and psychological violence. Although my experie
nce was not like that of Hilary in Whispers, and certainly not like that of Bruno, I was nevertheless drawing upon my own life for the emotional content of the novel, while only half realizing what I was doing, which is why the writing of it left me so depleted.

  When the book was delivered to the publisher, I was asked to slash the manuscript in half. I was told that the story was too long and that I was “a mid-list suspense writer” who had overreached. The publisher was smart, successful, and perceptive, but I felt that this particular judgment was wrong. Although I desperately needed to be paid for the acceptance of the manuscript, I found only five pages to cut out of eight hundred pages of manuscript, less than one percent, and I declined to delete any more.

  For the next four months, as the debate continued and my career seemed doomed, I studied the help-wanted ads with growing panic. I had taught high-school English for a year and a half before becoming a full-time writer; perhaps I could return to the classroom. Perusing the employment opportunities, I saw that exotic dancers earned more than teachers, but to achieve the highest earnings as a stripper, I would need to have a sex-change operation as well as a great deal of body contouring.

  At last, the publisher reluctantly accepted the book and issued it without enthusiasm in a small printing of seven thousand hardcovers, which wasn’t enough to put even one copy in every bookstore. Fortunately, I was kept afloat by a motion-picture rights sale, a bookclub sale, and the enthusiasm of a paperback publisher who believed Whispers could be a major success. Eventually, when issued in paperback, it rose into the top five of the New York Times’s paperback bestsellers list. As I write this afterword, Whispers has been published in thirty-three languages and has been continuously in print for nearly two decades.

  The lesson for me was one I had already learned well as a child under the thumb of an alcoholic father: In the face of adversity, it’s important to persevere, to be optimistic, and to be true to your personal vision. This insight is, in fact, expressed by the actions of the lead characters—Hilary and Tony—in Whispers, and is one of the themes of the novel.

  Primarily, however, Whispers explores the forces that affect our lives but that we often do not—or refuse to—contemplate. Geography and climate (in this novel, California) deeply influence us in more ways than we generally recognize on a conscious level. The subculture in which we choose to involve ourselves can either inspire us to be great or diminish us. And family history, for better or worse, shapes us more profoundly than anything else.

  I still like this novel and feel that it was a milestone for me. I regret only the rigid Freudian nature of the psychology underlying the history. In the years since, I’ve come to believe that Freudianism is pure bunkum and to deplore the culture of victimization that it has generated. John D. MacDonald—the brilliant novelist whose work most influenced mine when I was young—might say, “Kid, don’t worry about it. Freud or no Freud, the yarn is still good.” That is, of course, the right attitude, and I hope that the yarn in Whispers is, indeed, still good.

  Anyway, this is the book that saved me from a life of crime. No banks robbed. No airliners hijacked. No armored cars hit. I’ve had a couple speeding tickets over the past two decades, but in neither case did the authorities consider the offense serious enough to throw me in the slammer. Furthermore, I’ve gained back the twenty pounds—plus a few.