It was not sufficient to be sensible, and the clarity of it did not increase as he went from room to room. He thought that it was a woman's voice, though it was more neuter than anything else.
In fifteen minutes, he had cautiously inspected the house, and he had not discovered any intruders.
Still: whispers.
He stood in his den, by the large walnut desk there, holding the dumbell as if it were a talisman. Slowly, it occurred to him that he was not listening to a voice; he was not hearing these words with his ears, but in some altogether strange fashion that sent a chill along his spine.
"If he thinks he can . . . never . . . even if she . . . there shouldn't be ... could kill him if ... damn, damn, damn . . ." The voice became softer until it was not a voice at all, but the distant, lonely weeping of a woman. Definitely a woman.
But who?
He stood there in the dark, "hearing" the sobs of the woman, unable to decide what to do.
In time, he put the dumbell down and sat in the black leather swivel chair behind the desk.
The running commentary began again, though it was now as distant as the crying, too far away for him ever to catch a single word of it.
His head lowered so that his chin rested on his chest, he tried to close out all stimuli except that ghostly voice. He closed his eyes now that he felt secure in his own home, and he placed his hands over his ears—an act which did nothing to dull the murmur of the eerie voice.
The voice grew distinct again; it was most definitely a woman's voice, soft and musical. She sounded as if she might be in her early or middle thirties. Indeed, he was struck with the notion that the voice was familiar, though he did not know where he might have heard it before.
". . . money . . . he'll pay . . . then see . . . who . . ."
The voice seemed to emanate from his left, though there was nothing in that direction but a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Nonetheless, he swung his chair in that direction, keeping his eyes closed and his hands pressed flat to his ears. When he faced the bookcase, he found that her voice was clearer than it had been. He was catching whole phrases and some short sentences instead of random words.
"Hank, you sonofabitch!" she moaned, voicelessly.
That was followed by the soft, barely audible sobbing sounds.
But that line had been delivered with such ferocity, such depths of emotion, that he knew immediately who he was listening to. Next door, in an eight room Tudor house, Henry and Annie Faydor lived with one child, seven-year-old Robbie. Annie was a vivacious blonde, thirty-one or two. It was Annie he had heard.
He listened, his throat dry.
In time, the chaotic sobbing noises died and words trickled back to him again. He listened, tuning more closely to what she said. It was a long, sad tale about Henry—Hank—and his unfaithfulness. She alternately considered killing him, merely divorcing him, or even taking him back and forgiving him. She rambled over the horrid details, fascinated by his faithlessness, but mostly giving way to the dominant train of thoughts that took most of her attention: "I'm going to take him to the cleaners, get him for every dime, the house and the car, fifty percent of what he earns from now on, until no woman would have him and he'll be fighting like hell to make ends meet!"
He let her whispers fade into the background until he could only hear bits and pieces again. He was disgusted with himself for eavesdropping as long as he had.
He sat in darkness, Annie Faydor's whispers like muzak for lonely people. It took him ten minutes to come to the decision he knew he had to make. He picked up the telephone on the desk, pulled out the 50-number personal directory in the base, and dialed the house next door.
The phone rang eighteen times.
Finally, she answered it. She was surly, for she evidently thought it was Henry. He let her say hello three times, until he was certain she was Annie and that she was home. Then he hung up. Until she had answered the phone, he could pretend that there were many explanations to the eerie, whispering voice. But once he knew she was home, and once he was able to compare her voice to the whisper that constantly accompanied him now, he could not excuse the phenomenon. He had been reading her mind.
Annie Faydor's whining complaint against her perfidious husband and against the world in general was getting to be a distinct drag. He attempted to snuff the entire thing out of his mind and be done with it, but he could find no way to stop the input.
Then there was a second voice, speaking to him in a whisper as the first had. It was vague and unimaginably distant, but it swelled in volume as the seconds passed. He forgot Annie and focused on this upstart.
Though it grew as clear and as loud as the Faydor woman's whisper, it made no sense. It was a jumble of words and feelings, polysyllabic tonal chains that sometimes were recognizeable as English and sometimes were nothing more than murmurs, groans and sighs of happiness.
It took him more than five minutes to identify the sleep-laden thoughts of his own wife. She wasn't dreaming, but she was thinking in a random, restful manner that indicated the human brain didn't relax completely, even when its body was slumbering soundly.
He smiled at the rounded comfortableness of her thoughts and made to shut off their contact.
He couldn't do it.
The sweet, gentle tide of Della's memories undulated over him, through him, saturating him as they grew in volume and intensity. He was beginning to find the thought of sleep irresistible. His eyes fluttered, and he yawned and stretched.
Then, as the whispers swayed and crashed together, he was fully awake, listening to Annie Faydor bitch about Henry—while Della's unconscious ramblings coursed as a backdrop to the carefully constructed catalogue of infidelity.
And there were others.
He opened his eyes.
The den was deserted.
He closed his eyes and listened and felt the others surging toward him. In minutes, they were on him, overwhelming him, pouring forth a mixture of bitterness and happiness, fear and trust, hatred and love. He recognized some of them as neighbors. Others were utter strangers to him, invading the sanctity of his mind.
"Go away!" he heard himself croaking at the empty room.
They remained, as he had known they would. They chattered and laughed, hissed and cried. Here, a mother agnonized over the pregnancy of an unwed daughter. Here, a businessman worked over his balance sheets. Here, a teenage boy popped two bennies and leaned back in his chair, waiting for the surge of excitement he knew would claim him. Here, bare legs tangled in love.
He stood and pushed the swivel chair away from him. It fell over, backwards, but made little noise on the thick blue carpeting.
More whispers arose in the distance and rushed towards him. He had opened up a floodgate of thought-projectionists, and the deluge was about to take him.
Here, a man named Harry had drunk too much and was leaning into the bathroom sink, wondering if he should or could be sick. Here, a woman lay in a dark bedroom, alone, watching the patterns of automobile lights on her roughly plastered ceiling. Here a bitter argument over money. Here, a baby is crying in the night and a woman is padding along the corridor to its room, her slippers making soft animal sounds on the hardwood floor.
He took three quick, wobbling steps away from the desk, into the center of the room. Each step became a challenge of heroic proportions. He now had to consciously will each set of muscles to do their part. By the time he was three steps from the desk, he stopped, for he had begun to wonder where he was going.
His moment of doubt allowed the tide of strange thoughts to overwhelm him once again. It was almost a physical battering now; every joint in his body ached.
"Let me alone," he said.
But they didn't.
"Help."
But there was none.
His mind was filled with a thousand consciousnesses now, though none of them were aware of him. As one or another of the consciousnesses became momentarily dominant, boiling to the surface of that mental cauldron,
he was swept away into another body, behind another pair of eyes. He knew that he was only reading the very vivid conscious thoughts of those people in the nearby blocks of town, but he felt as if he were actually teleporting into other bodies.
He was a man named Bill Harvey, sitting at his white formica kitchen table, reading one of his son's comic books and sipping warm milk in hopes of shrugging off insomnia as he—
—became a man at a window, looking through the slats of a Venetian blind that the woman beyond had carelessly left open. His name was Dunsy Harriman, twenty-seven years old, employed as an apprentice baker, unmarried, guilt-ridden. He pressed his face against the cool glass to see her and—
—was abruptly Peter Mullion, clutching at the door of his den, desperate for the corridor beyond.
It had occurred to him that, if he could somehow reach the garage and the car, and if he could drive without killing himself, the thoughts might dwindle in volume as he put space between himself and the minds that produced them.
In the corridor, he fell.
—and was, abruptly, a man named Leonard, lying on the yellow tile of the bathroom floor, listening to his heart explode, feeling himself die, thinking that sixty-seven was much too young, much too young, much too, much too—
—and Pete pushed the floor away, stood there in the hall and tried to think.
On the horizon of his mind, he began receiving the output of at least ten thousand more minds. If the others had descended on him like bees, these came like locust. They blackened the sky, swarmed down, filmed over him, and carried him away in the static-laden cacophony of all their hopes and dreams, miseries' and jubilations.
There was quiet, then.
He had been lying on the hall floor for more than half an hour; the last ten minutes, he had been conscious. All the whispers were gone, except for the closest one, Della's. He had not tried to rise; his legs were still weak and trembling. Instead, he listened to Della's innermost ramblings, and he taught himself how to delve into the hidden corners of her mind, down into the subconscious where the most interesting fragments were to be found. He began to know her better than ever before, and he felt his chest grow tight with the emotion generated by this new intimacy.
In time, afraid that he could not take any more of this psychologically shattering experience in his first session, he eased her sleep-threaded thoughts out of his conscious mind. It was easy to control the input now; it was as if he had always known what methods to use. Della's murmurs faded into silence. While he slept, his mind had evidently learned how to channel the inpouring mental images. In the blessed silence, he struggled to his feet and went quietly upstairs, where he changed into jeans and a work shirt.
In the kitchen, he wrote a message on the blackboard lest she wake up, find him missing, and be frightened that amnesia had again taken him. He opened the back door, stepped into the garage, went from there to the rear lawn, then walked out to the street.
He was anxious to test his new powers. The longer he could keep himself occupied with them, the longer he could put off wondering where they had come from.
VII
For an hour, he wandered the streets of the town, hesitating before certain houses and calling forth the thoughts of their inhabitants. The longer he explored the minds of others, the easier it became, until he was soon able to contain another person's thoughts without yielding his own grasp of reality and without being forced into a small corner of his own mind. This gave him the opportunity to think about the telepathic talent that he had acquired. He was naturally lead to a series of questions, all of them unanswerable, which kept running through his mind like a tape loop, over and over again. How had he acquired this ability? How was it connected to his periods of amnesia? Did the stranger who had been catching him have anything to do with it? Was it connected to the eerie sense of time-space distortion which he had undergone a few days ago in the stairwell of the Porter-Mullion building? Would this strange new ability lead to another bout with amnesia, as that distorted time-space sense had?
Now, he explored the mind of a nine-year-old boy, fascinated by the unbounded realm of fantasy he found there. In such a mind, all things were possible, all dreams recognizable, all goals within grasp. Simultaneously, he considered the tape loop of questions, so occupied between the two endeavours that he was not aware of the first stirrings of the alien mind which had intruded into his. At first, there was only a sudden calming influence, a sense of barrenness. Then the hard, clean mind weighed him down. He felt cold and hollow, drained by the contact. The child's thoughts ebbed. The alien consciousness flowed, filling his horizons until it commanded all his attention.
He looked about the dark streets. Arc lamps glowed at intervals; the branches of elms cast weird shadows on the sidewalks. Still, he could see that no one else was about.
Tentatively, he examined the odd consciousness. It was a mind of sorts, though not like any he had pried open before. It was smooth, completely featureless. It was a dazzling white, though it did not glint with light. It was cold, like a ball of compressed frost.
He insisted on finding a chink in it. He could not.
"Who are you?" he asked.
It did not reply. He was certain that the lack of response was not indicative of a lack of ability. Whoever this was, he did not want to respond, aware that silence would continue to give him the upper hand.
"What do you want?"
If it wanted anything, it did not say.
He enveloped it with mental fingers and found a thin filament of thought trailing away behind it. He tested the strand and found bright images that made little sense in their severe compression. This cold mind was somehow joined to another consciousness. Pete permitted his telepathic probe to float outwards upon this tenuous thread, building speed until, abruptly, he had plunged into a mind that he had not been expecting at all.
He looked out at the world through two amber patches that registered light in the highest and lowest spectrums and sensed heat and cold as well.
His eyes somehow translated sound, for he had no ears.
He worked his toothless and lipless mouth and felt rows of gums wriggle like bloodless snakes.
He raised an eight-fingered hand and touched some control in a board before him.
That was all he could endure. Instantly, he fled backwards to the first, featureless mind that contained no thoughts of its own. From there, he settled completely into his own body and thrust the alien consciousness from his mind. The alabaster sphere dwindled and was gone.
Ahead, on the sidewalk, a tall man appeared. He was dressed in black slacks, a dark shirt and dark topcoat. As the man approached, Pete could see that it was the same stranger who had been watching him the past several days.
"Who are you?" he asked again.
He received the silence that he had expected for his answer.
They were only a hundred feet apart now.
Pete tested the stranger's mind and encountered the white sphere and the cold, the apparent absence of mental processes. There was only the filament, stretching back to the eyeless creature, and he did not want to follow that a second time.
He withdrew his psionic fingers.
Fifty feet of sidewalk separated them.
The stranger's hands hung at his sides. He had no weapon in them. And though his manner was relaxed and not particularly threatening, he seemed to radiate danger.
Five feet away, he stopped, his ghastly white face expressionless. He nodded and said, "Good evening, Mr. Mullion."
He had the voice of a television newscaster. If he had been gravel-throated, rough and mean, he would not have been so frightening. This voice was unsettling.
"Don't be frightened, Mr. Mullion."
"Why shouldn't I be?"
"It isn't going to hurt."
"What isn't?"
"Whatever we decide to do with you, Mr. Mullion." Smooth voice, cool voice, its tones fatherly and reassuring. "We will make it just as painless as possible."
The stranger's face remained expressionless.
Pete felt the white, spherical mind entering his own mental perimeters once again, slowly swelling until it threatened to completely dominate him. The thread behind it had become a string; the string swiftly grew into a cord; the cord became a taut cable. From his distant control perch, the eyeless being had begun to exert more influence with the stranger in dark clothes. In turn, it was using the stranger's mind to influence Peter Mullion as well. Now, relentlessly, images of contentment and peace poured across Pete's consciousness, spilling over all the sharp edges of his fear and coating them.
The stranger did not smile. Neither did he frown. Indeed, at such close range, under such trying circumstances, his face looked far more like a clever rubber mask than like human flesh. Though it was exceedingly well executed, the mask's age lines and laugh lines looked unreal, as though sculpted in minutes rather than years.
The eyeless creature, working from its distant lair, began to radiate a desire for sleep, along with the images of comfort and contentment. Pete felt heavy, as if boulders lay across his shoulders. He was capped with exhaustion, jacketed in weariness. He wanted to drop to the pavement, curl up and sleep, sleep. . . .
But his fascination with the blandness of the stranger's face made him hold on just a moment longer—just long enough to reach out and grab at the man's forehead, along his hairline, in search of the mask's edges. He could not find an edge. But in a second, he felt the flesh give more than flesh ought to. His fingernails slit it, tearing it from hairline to eyebrows.
The emanations of sleep ceased.
The stranger stepped back, reaching up to touch the wound. There was no blood whatsoever. But beneath the plastic flesh, there was the dull sheen of burnished steel, smooth and featureless.
VIII
It did not occur to him that he might have any other option but flight. Turning away from the thing in front of him, taking advantage of the confusion which he had caused, he leaped over a low, well-trimmed hedge, onto the lawn of an enormous, many-gabled Victorian house. The street would have been too open; here, shadows already half concealed him.
Koontz, Dean - Time Thieves Page 4