Dean Koontz: Whispers

"So relax," she said aloud.

No one had tried to get in the kitchen door. That was just her imagination.

She finished the sandwich and beer, then went downstairs and turned out the lights.

She slept soundly.

***

The next day was one of the best days of her life. It was also one of the worst.

Wednesday began well. The sky was cloudless. The air was sweet and clear. The morning light had that peculiar quality found only in Southern California and only on certain days. It was crystalline light, hard yet warm, like the sunbeams in a cubist painting, and it gave you the feeling that at any moment the air would part like a stage curtain to reveal a world beyond the one in which we live.

Hilary Thomas spent the morning in her garden. The walled half-acre behind the two-story neo-Spanish house was adorned with two dozen species of roses--beds and trellises and hedges of roses. There were the Frau Karl Druschki Rose, the Madame Pierre Oger Rose, the rosa muscosa, the Souvenir de la Malmaison Rose, and a wide variety of modern hybrids. The garden blazed with white roses and red roses, orange and yellow and pink and purple and even green roses. Some blooms were the size of saucers, and others were small enough to pass through a wedding ring. The velvety green lawn was speckled with windblown petals of every hue.

Most mornings, Hilary worked with the plants for two or three hours. No matter how agitated she was upon entering the garden, she was always completely relaxed and at peace when she left.

She easily could have afforded a gardener. She still received quarterly payments from her first hit film, Arizona Shifty Pete, which had been released more than two years ago and which had been an enormous success. The new movie, Cold Heart, in the theaters less than two months, was doing even better than Pete. Her twelve-room house in Westwood, on the fringes of Bel Air and Beverly Hills, had cost a great deal, yet six months ago she had paid cash for the place. In show business circles, she was called a "hot property." That was exactly how she felt, too. Hot. Burning. Ablaze with plans and possibilities. It was a glorious feeling. She was a damned successful screenwriter, a hot property indeed, and she could hire a platoon of gardeners if she wanted them.

She tended to the flowers and the trees herself because the garden was a special place for her, almost sacred. It was the symbol of her escape.

She had been raised in a decaying apartment building in one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods. Even now, even here, even in the middle of her fragrant rose garden, she could close her eyes and see every detail of that long-ago place. In the foyer, the mailboxes had been smashed open by thieves looking for welfare checks. The hallways were narrow and poorly lit. The rooms were tiny, dreary, the furniture tattered and worn. In the small kitchen, the ancient gas range had seemed about to spring a leak and explode; Hilary had lived for years in fear of the stove's irregular, spurting blue flames. The refrigerator was yellow with age; it wheezed and rattled, and its warm motor attracted what her father called "the local wildlife." As she stood now in her lovely garden, Hilary clearly remembered the wildlife with which she'd spent her childhood, and she shuddered. Although she and her mother had kept the four rooms spotlessly clean, and although they had used great quantities of insecticide, they had never been able to get rid of the cockroaches because the damned things came through the thin walls from the other apartments where people were not so clean.

Her most vivid childhood memory was of the view from the single window in her cramped bedroom. She had spent many lonely hours there, hiding while her father and mother argued. The bedroom had been a haven from those terrible bouts of cursing and screaming, and from the sullen silences when her parents weren't speaking to each other. The view from the window wasn't inspiring: nothing more than the soot-streaked brick wall on the far side of the four-foot-wide serviceway that led between the tenements. The window would not open; it was painted shut. She'd been able to see a thin sliver of sky, but only when she'd pressed her face against the glass and peered straight up the narrow shaft.

Desperate to escape from the shabby world in which she lived, young Hilary learned to use her imagination to see through the brick wall. She would set her mind adrift, and suddenly she would be looking out upon rolling hills, or sometimes the vast Pacific Ocean, or great mountain ranges. Most of the time, it was a garden that she conjured up, an enchanted place, serene, with neatly trimmed shrubs and high trellises twined about with thorny rose vines. In this fantasy there was a great deal of pretty wrought-iron lawn furniture that had been painted white. Gaily striped umbrellas cast pools of cool shadow in the coppery sunlight. Women in lovely long dresses and men in summer suits sipped iced drinks and chatted amiably.

And now I'm living in that dream, she thought. That make-believe place is real, and I own it.

Maintaining the roses and the other plants--palms and ferns and jade shrubs and a dozen other things--was not a chore. It was a joy. Every minute she worked among the flowers, she was aware of how far she had come.

At noon, she put away her gardening tools and showered. She stood for a long while in the steaming water, as if it were sluicing away more than dirt and sweat, as if it were washing off ugly memories as well. In that depressing Chicago apartment, in the minuscule bathroom, where all the faucets had dripped and where all the drains had backed up at least once a month, there never had been enough hot water.

She ate a light lunch on the glassed-in patio that overlooked the roses. While she nibbled at cheese and slices of an apple, she read the trade papers of the entertainment industry--Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety--which had come in the morning mail. Her name appeared in Hank Grant's column in the Reporter, in a list of movie and television people whose birthday it was. For a woman just turned twenty-nine, she had come a long, long way indeed.

Today, the chief executives at Warner Brothers were discussing The Hour of the Wolf, her latest screenplay. They would decide either to buy or reject by the close of the business day. She was tense, anxious for the telephone to ring, yet dreading it because it might bring disappointing news. This project was more important to her than anything else she'd ever done.

She had written the script without the security of a signed contract, strictly on speculation, and she had made up her mind to sell it only if she was signed to direct and was guaranteed final cut. Already, Warners had hinted at a record offer for the screenplay if she would reconsider her conditions of sale. She knew she was demanding a lot; however, because of her success as a screenwriter, her demands were not entirely unreasonable. Warners reluctantly would agree to let her direct the picture; she would bet anything on that. But the sticking point would be the final cut. That honor, the power to decide exactly what would appear on the screen, the ultimate authority over every shot and every frame and every nuance of the film, usually was bestowed upon directors who had proven themselves on a number of money-making movies; it was seldom granted to a fledgling director, especially not to a fledgling female director. Her insistence on total creative control might queer the deal.

Hoping to take her mind off the pending decision from Warner Brothers, Hilary spent Wednesday afternoon working in her studio, which overlooked the pool. Her desk was large, heavy, custom-made oak, with a dozen drawers and two dozen cubbyholes. Several pieces of Lallique crystal stood on the desk, refracting the soft glow from the two brass piano lamps. She struggled through the second draft of an article she was writing for Film Comment, but her thoughts constantly wandered to The Hour of the Wolf.