Dean Koontz: Whispers

***

The pathology laboratory had a vague, unpleasant chemical odor. So did the coroner, Dr. Amos Garnet, who sucked vigorously on a breath mint.

There were five people in the room. Laurenski, Larsson, Garnet, Tannerton, and Olmstead. No one, with the possible exception of the perennially good-natured Tannerton, seemed happy to be there.

"Open it," Laurenski said. "I've got an appointment to keep with Joshua Rhinehart."

Tannerton and Olmstead threw back the latches on the bronze casket. A few remaining chunks of dirt fell to the floor, onto the plastic dropcloth that Garnet had put down. They pushed the lid up and back.

The body was gone.

The velvet- and silk-lined box held nothing but the three fifty-pound bags of dry mortar mix that had been stolen from Avril Tannerton's basement last weekend.

***

Hilary and Tony sat on one side of the cable car, and Joshua sat on the other. The attorney's knees brushed Tony's. Hilary held Tony's hand as the red gondola moved slowly, slowly up the line toward the top of the cliff. She wasn't afraid of heights, but the tramway seemed so fragile that she could not help gritting her teeth.

Joshua saw the tension on her face and smiled. "Don't worry. The car seems small, but it's sturdy. And Gilbert does a fine job with maintenance."

As it ground gradually upward, the car swung slightly in the stiff morning wind.

The view of the valley became increasingly spectacular. Hilary tried to concentrate on that and not on the creaking and clattering of the machinery.

The gondola finally reached the top of the cable. It locked in place, and Joshua opened the door.

When they walked out of the upper station of the tramway system, a fiercely-white arc of lightning and a violent peal of thunder broke open the lowering sky. Rain began to fall. It was a thin, cold, slanting rain.

Joshua, Hilary, and Tony ran for shelter. They stomped up the front steps and across the porch to the door.

"And you say there's no heat up here?" Hilary asked.

"The furnace has been shut down for five years," Joshua said. "That's why I told both of you to wear sweaters under your coats. It's not a cold day, really. But once you've been up here awhile in this damp, the air will cut through to your bones."

Joshua unlocked the door, and they went inside, switching on the three flashlights they'd brought with them.

"It stinks in here," Hilary said.

"Mildew," Joshua said. "That's what I was afraid of."

They walked from the foyer into the hall, then into the big drawing room. The beams of their flashlights fell on what looked to be a warehouse full of antique furniture.

"My God," Tony said, "it's worse than Bruno's house. There's hardly room to walk."

"She was obsessed with collecting beautiful things," Joshua said. "Not for investment. Not just because she liked to look at them, either. A lot of things are crammed into closets, hidden away. Paintings stacked on paintings. And as you can see, even in the main rooms, there's just too damned much stuff; it's jammed too close together to please the eye."

"If every room has antiques of this quality," Hilary said, "then there's a fortune here."

"Yeah," Joshua said. "If it hasn't been eaten up by worms and termites and whatnot." He let his flashlight beam travel from one end of the room to the other. "This mania for collecting was something I never understood about her. Until this minute. Now I wonder if.... As I look at all of this, and as I think about what we learned from Mrs. Yancy...."

Hilary said, "You think collecting beautiful things was a reaction to all the ugliness in her life before her father died?"

"Yeah," Joshua said. "Leo broke her. Shattered her soul, smashed her spirit flat and left her with a rotten self-image. She must have hated herself for all the years she let him use her--even though she'd had no choice but to let him. So maybe ... feeling low and worthless, she thought she could make her soul beautiful by living among lots of beautiful things."

They stood in silence for a moment, looking at the overfurnished drawing room.

"It's so sad," Tony said.

Joshua shook himself from his reverie. "Let's get these shutters open and let in some light."

"I can't stand this smell," Hilary said, cupping one hand over her nose. "But if we raise the windows, the rain will get in and ruin things."

"Not much if we raise them only five or six inches," Joshua said. "And a few drops of water aren't going to hurt anything in this mold colony."

"It's a wonder there aren't mushrooms growing out of the carpet," Tony said.

They moved through the downstairs, raising windows, unbolting the inward-facing latches on the shutters, letting in the gray storm light and the fresh rain-scented air.

When most of the downstairs rooms had been opened, Joshua said, "Hilary, all that's left down here is the dining room and the kitchen. Why don't you take care of those windows while Tony and I tend to the upstairs."

"Okay," she said. "I'll be up in a minute to help out."

She followed her flashlight beam into the pitch-black dining room as the men went down the hall toward the stairs.

When he and Joshua came into the upstairs hallway. Tony said, "Phew! It stinks even worse up here."

A blast of thunder shook the old house. Windows rattled icily. Doors stuttered in their frames.

"You take the rooms on the right," Joshua said. "I'll take the ones on the left."

Tony went through the first door on his side and found a sewing room. An ancient treadle-powered sewing machine stood in one corner, and a more modern electric model rested on a table in another corner; both were bearded with cobwebs. There was a work table and two dressmaker's forms and one window.

He went to the window, put his flashlight on the floor, and tried to twist open the lock lever. It was rusted shut. He struggled with it as rain drummed noisily on the shutters beyond the glass.

Joshua shone his flashlight into the first room on the left and saw a bed, a dresser, a highboy. There were two windows in the far wall.

He crossed the threshold, took two more steps, sensed movement behind him, and he started to turn, felt a sudden cold thrill go through his back, and then it became a very hot thrill, a burning lance, a line of pain drawn through his flesh, and he knew he had been stabbed. He felt the knife being jerked out of him. He turned. His flashlight revealed Bruno Frye. The madman's face was wild, demoniacal. The knife came up, came down, and the cold thrill shivered through Joshua again, and this time the blade tore his right shoulder, from front to back, all the way through, and Bruno had to twist and jerk the weapon savagely, several times, to get it out. Joshua raised his left arm to protect himself. The blade punctured his forearm. His legs buckled. He went down. He fell against the bed, slid to the floor, slick with his own blood, and Bruno turned away from him and went out to the second-floor hall, out of the flashlight's glow, into the darkness. Joshua realized he hadn't even screamed, had not warned Tony, and he tried to shout, really tried, but the first wound seemed to be very serious, for when he attempted to make any sound at all, pain blossomed in his chest, and he could do no better than hiss like a goddamned goose.

Grunting, Tony put all of his strength against the stubborn window latch, and abruptly the rusted metal gave--sweeek--and popped open. He raised the windows, and the sound of the rain swelled. A fine spray of water misted through a few narrow chinks in the shutters and dampened his face.

The inward-facing bolt on the shutters also was corroded, but Tony finally freed it, pushed the shutters open, leaned out in the rain, and fixed them in their braces so they wouldn't bang about in the wind.