Dean Koontz: Whispers

Light.

Gray afternoon light, slanting down the Mayacamas Mountains from the west, rained through the open door and illuminated the kitchen.

Light.

For a while, he stood in the doorway, letting the wonderful light wash over him. He was sheathed in perspiration. His breath came hard and ragged.

When he finally calmed down, he returned to the pantry. The sickening stench came from old cans and jars of food that had swelled and exploded, spraying spoiled goods and giving rise to green-black-yellow molds and fungi. Trying to avoid the mess as best he could, he located the candles and the can of matches.

The matches were still dry and useful. He struck one to be sure. The spurting flame was a sight that lifted his heart.

***

To the west of the northward-streaking Cessna, a couple of thousand feet below the aircraft, at the seven- or eight-thousand-foot level, storm clouds steadily approached from the Pacific.

"How?" Joshua asked again. "How did Katherine make the twins think and act and be one person?"

"As I said," Hilary told him, "we'll probably never know for certain. But for one thing, it seems to me that she must have shared her delusions with the twins almost from the day she brought them home, long before they were old enough even to understand what she was saying. Hundreds and hundreds of times, perhaps thousands upon thousands of times over the years, she told them that they were the sons of a demon. She told them they'd been born with cauls, and she explained what that meant. She told them their sex organs weren't like those of other boys. She probably told them that they would be killed if other people found out what they were. By the time they were old enough to question all those things, they would have been so thoroughly brainwashed that they wouldn't have been able to doubt her. They'd have shared her psychosis and her delusions. They'd have been two extremely tense little boys, afraid of being found out, afraid of being killed. Fear is stress. And a lot of stress would make their psyches highly malleable. It seems to me that tremendous, unrelenting, extraordinary stress over a long period of time would provide exactly the right atmosphere for the melting together of personalities in the way that Tony has suggested. Massive, prolonged stress wouldn't, by itself, cause that melting together, but it would sort of set the stage for it."

Tony said, "From the tapes we heard in Dr. Rudge's office this morning, we know Bruno was aware that he and his brother were born with cauls. We know that he was familiar with the superstition connected with that rare phenomenon. From the way he sounded on the tape, I think we can safely assume he believed, as his mother did, that he was marked by a demon. And there's other evidence that points to the same conclusion. The letter in the safe-deposit box, for instance. Bruno wrote that he couldn't ask for police protection against his mother because the police would discover what he was and what he'd been hiding all these years. In the letter, he said that if people found out what he was, they would stone him to death. He thought he was the son of a demon. I'm sure of it. He had absorbed Katherine's psychotic delusions."

"All right," Joshua said. "Maybe both twins believed the demon bunk because they'd never had a chance not to believe it. But that still doesn't explain how or why Katherine shaped the two of them into one person, how she got them to ... melt together psychologically, as you put it."

"The why part of your question is the easiest to answer," Hilary said. "As long as the twins thought of themselves as individuals, there would be differences between them, even if only very minor differences. And the more differences, the more likely it was that one of them would unintentionally blow the entire masquerade someday. The more she could force them to act and think and talk and move and respond alike, the safer she was."

"As for the how of it," Tony said, "you shouldn't forget that Katherine knew the ways and means to break and shape a mind. After all, she had been broken and shaped by a master. Leo. He had used every trick in the book to make her what he wanted her to be, and she couldn't have helped but learn something from all of that. Techniques of physical and psychological torture. She could probably have written a textbook on the subject."

"And to make the twins think like one person," Hilary said, "she'd have to treat them like one person. She'd have to set the tone, in other words. She'd have to offer them the exact same degrees of love, if any. She'd have to punish both for the actions of one, reward both for the actions of one, treat the two bodies as if they were in possession of the same mind. She had to talk to them as if they were only one person, not two."

"And every time she caught a glimpse of individuality, she'd either have to make them both do it, or she'd have to eradicate the mannerism in the one who displayed it. And pronoun usage would be very important," Tony said.

"Pronoun usage?" Joshua asked, perplexed.

"Yes," Tony said. "This is going to sound pretty damned far-out. Maybe even meaningless. But more than anything else, our understanding and use of language shapes us. Language is the way we express every idea, every thought. Sloppy thinking leads to a sloppy use of language. But the opposite is also true: Imprecise language causes imprecise thinking. That's a basic tenet of semantics. So it seems logical to theorize that the selectively-twisted usage of pronouns would aid in the establishment of the kind of selectively-twisted self-image that Katherine wanted to see the twins adopt. For example, when the twins spoke to each other, they could never be allowed to use the pronoun 'you.' Because 'you' embodies the concept of another person other than one's self. If the twins were forced to think of themselves as one creature, then the pronoun 'you' would have no place between them. One Bruno could never say to the other, 'Why don't you and I play a game of Monopoly?' He'd have to say, instead, something like this: 'Why don't me and I play a game of Monopoly?' He couldn't use the pronouns 'we' and 'us' when talking about himself and his brother, for those pronouns indicate at least two people. Instead, he'd have to say 'me and myself' when he meant 'we.' Furthermore, when one of the twins was talking to Katherine about his brother, he couldn't be permitted to use the pronouns 'he' and 'him.' Again, they embody the concept of another individual in addition to the speaker. Complicated?"

"Insane," Joshua said.

"That's the point," Tony said.

"But it's too much. It's too crazy."

"Of course, it's crazy," Tony said. "It was Katherine's scheme, and Katherine was out of her mind."

"But how could she possibly enforce all of those bizarre rules about habits and mannerisms and attitudes and pronouns and whatever the hell else?"

"The same way you'd enforce an ordinary set of rules with ordinary children," Hilary said. "If they do the right thing, you reward them. If they do the wrong thing, however, you punish them."

"But to make children behave as unnaturally as Katherine wanted the twins to behave, to make them totally surrender their individuality, the punishment would have to be something truly monstrous," Joshua said.

"And we know it was something monstrous," Tony said. "We all heard Dr. Rudge's tape of that last session with Bruno, when hypnosis was used. If you remember, Bruno said that she put him into some dark hole in the ground as punishment--and I quote--'for not thinking and acting like one.' I believe he meant she put both him and his brother in that dark place when they refused to think and act like a single person. She locked them in a dark place for long periods of time, and there was something alive in there, something that crawled all over them. Whatever happened to them in that room or hole ... it was so terrible that they had bad dreams about it every night for decades. If it could leave that strong an impression so many years afterwards, I'd say it was enough of a punishment to be a good brainwashing tool. I'd say Katherine did exactly what she set out to do with the twins: melted them into one."