Dean Koontz: Whispers

The whispering was the sound of their ceaseless movement, long legs and trembling antennae brushing other long legs and antennae, constantly crawling and creeping and scurrying this way and that.

Hilary screamed. She wanted to climb the steps and get out of there, but Frye was above, waiting.

The roaches shied away from her flashlight. They were evidently subterranean insects that survived only in the dark, and she prayed that her flashlight batteries would not go dead.

The whispering grew louder.

More roaches were pouring into the room. They were coming out of a crack in the floor. Coming out by tens. By scores. By hundreds. There were a couple of thousand of the disgusting things in the room already, and the chamber was no more than twenty feet on a side. They piled up two and three deep in the other half of the room, avoiding the light, but getting bolder by the moment.

She knew that an entomologist would probably not call them roaches. They were beetles, subterranean beetles that lived in the bowels of the earth. A scientist would have a crisp, clean, Latin name for them. But to her they were roaches.

Hilary looked up at Bruno.

"Bitch," he said.

Leo Frye had built a cold storage cellar, a common enough convenience in 1918. But he had mistakenly built it on a flaw in the earth. She could see that he had tried many times to patch the floor, but it kept opening each time that the earth trembled. In quake country, the earth trembled often.

And the roaches came up from hell.

They were still gushing from the hole, a wriggling, kicking, squirming mass.

They mounted up on one another, five- and six- and seven-deep, covering the walls and the ceiling, moving, endlessly moving, swarming restlessly. The cold whisper of their movement was now a soft roar.

For punishment, Katherine had put Bruno in this place. In the dark. For hours at a time.

Suddenly, the roaches moved toward Hilary. The pressure of them building up in layers finally caused them to spill at her like a breaking wave, in a roiling green-brown mass. In spite of the flashlight, they surged forward, hissing.

She screamed and started up the steps, preferring Bruno's knife to the hideous insect horde behind her.

Grinning, Frye said, "See how you like it, bitch." And he slammed the door.

The rear lawn was no more than twenty yards long, but to Tony it appeared to be at least a mile from the porch to the place where Frye was standing. He slipped and fell in the wet grass, taking some of the fall on his wounded shoulder. A brilliant light played behind his eyes for a moment, and then an iridescent darkness, but he resisted the urge to just lay there. He got up.

He saw Frye close the doors and lock them. Hilary had to be on the other side, shut in.

Tony covered the last ten feet of the lawn with the awful certainty that Frye 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.

-------------

NEW 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.