Whispers

"She pushes me."

"Go on."

"Pushes me... through the door."

"Go on, Bruno."

"She slams it ... locks it."

"She locks you inside?"

"Yeah."

"What's it like in there?"

"Dark."

"What else?"

"Just dark. Black."

"You must be able to see something."

"No. Nothing."

"What happens next?"

"I try to get out."

"And?"

"The door's too heavy, too strong."

"Bruno, is this really just a dream?"

"..."

"Is it really just a dream, Bruno?"

"It's what I dream."

"But is it also a memory?"

"..."

"Did your mother actually lock you in a dark room when you were a child?"

"Y-Yes."

"In the cellar?"

"In the ground. In that room in the ground."

"How often did she do that?"

"All the time."

"Once a week?"

"More often."

"Was it a punishment?"

"Yeah."

"For what?"

"For ... for not acting ... and thinking ... like one."

"What do you mean?"

"It was punishment for not being one."

"One what?"

"One. One. Just one. That's all. Just one."

"All right. We'll come back to that later. Now we're going to go on and find out what happens next. You're locked in that room. You can't get out the door. What happens next, Bruno?"

"I'm s-s-scared."

"No. You're not scared. You feel very calm, relaxed, not scared at all. Isn't that right? Don't you feel calm?"

"I ... guess so."

"Okay. What happens after you try to open the door?"

"I can't get it open. So I just stand on the top step and look down into the dark."

"There are steps?"

"Yes."

"Where do they lead?"

"Hell."

"Do you go down?"

"No! I just ... stand there. And ... listen."

"What do you hear?"

"Voices."

"What are they saying?"

"They're just ... whispers. I can't make them out. But they're ... coming ... getting louder. They're coming closer. They're coming up the steps. They're so loud now!"

"What are they saying?"

"Whispers. All around me."

"What are they saying?"

"Nothing. It means nothing."

"Listen closely."

"They don't speak in words."

"Who are they? Who's whispering?"

"Oh, Jesus. Listen. Jesus."

"Who are they?"

"Not people. No. No! Not people!"

"It isn't people whispering?"

"Get them off! Get them off me!"

"Why are you brushing at yourself?"

"They're all over me!"

"There's nothing on you."

"All over me!"

"Don't get up, Bruno. Wait--"

"Oh, my God!"

"Bruno, lie down on the couch."

"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

"I'm ordering you to lie down on the couch."

"Jesus, help me! Help me!"

"Listen to me, Bruno. You--"

"Gotta get 'em off, gotta get 'em off!"

"Bruno, it's all right. Relax. They're going away."

"No! There's even more of them! Ah! Ah! No!"

"They're going away. The whispers are getting softer, fainter. They're--"

"Louder! Getting louder! A roar of whispers!"

"Be calm. Lie down and be--"

"They're getting in my nose! Oh, Jesus! My mouth!"

"Bruno!"

On the tape, there was a strange, strangled sound. It went on and on.

Hilary hugged herself. The room suddenly seemed frigid.

Rudge said, "He jumped up from the couch and ran into the corner, over there. He crouched down in the corner and put his hands over his face."

The eerie, wheezing, gagging sound continued to come from the tape.

"But you snapped him out of the trance," Tony said.

Rudge was pale, remembering. "At first, I thought he was going to stay there, in the dream. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. I'm very good at hypnotic therapy. Very good. But I thought I'd lost him. It took a while, but finally he began to respond to me."

On the tape: rasping, gagging, wheezing.

"What you hear," Rudge said, "is Frye screaming. He's so frightened that his throat has seized up on him, so terrified that he's lost his voice. He's trying to scream, but he can't get much sound out."

Joshua stood up, bent over, switched off the recorder. His hand was shaking. "You think his mother really locked him in a dark room."

"Yes," Rudge said.

"And there was something else in there with him."

"Yes."

Joshua pushed one hand through his thick white hair. "But for God's sake, what could it have been? What was in that room?"

"I don't know," Rudge said. "I expected to find out in a later session. But that was the last time I saw him."

***

In Joshua's Cessna Skylane, as they flew south and slightly east toward Hollister, Tony said, "My view of this thing is going through changes."

"How?" Joshua asked.

"Well, at first, I looked at it in simple black and white. Hilary was the victim. Frye was the bad guy. But now ... in a way ... maybe Frye's a victim, too."

"I know what you mean," Hilary said. "Listening to those tapes ... I felt so sorry for him."

"It's all right to feel sorry for him," Joshua said, "so long as you don't forget that he's damned dangerous."

"Isn't he dead?"

"Is he?"

***

Hilary had written a screenplay that contained two scenes set in Hollister, so she knew something about the place.

On the surface, Hollister resembled a hundred other small towns in California. There were some pretty streets and some ugly streets. New houses and old houses. Palm trees and oaks. Oleander bushes. Because this was one of the drier parts of the state, there was more dust than elsewhere, but that was not particularly noticeable until the wind blew really hard.

The thing that made Hollister different from other towns was what lay under it. Fault lines. Most communities in California were built on or near geological faults that now and then slipped, causing earthquakes. But Hollister was not built on just one fault; it rested on a rare confluence of faults, a dozen or more, both major and minor, including the San Andreas Fault.

Hollister was a town on the move; at least one earthquake struck it every day of the year. Most of those shocks were in the middle or lower range of the Richter Scale, of course. The town had never been leveled. But the sidewalks were cracked and canted. A walk could be level on Monday, a bit hoved up on Tuesday, and almost level again on Wednesday. Some days there were chains of tremors that rattled the town gently, with only brief pauses, for an hour or two at a time; but people who lived there were seldom aware of these very minor tremors, just as those who lived in the High Sierra ski country paid scant attention to any storm that put down only an inch of snow. Over the decades, the courses of some streets in Hollister were altered by the evermoving earth; avenues that had once been straight were now a bit curved or occasionally doglegged. The grocery stores had shelves that were slanted toward the back or covered with wire screens to prevent bottles and cans from crashing to the floor every time the ground shook. Some people lived in houses that were gradually slipping down into unstable land, but the sinkage was so slow that there was no alarm, no urgency about finding another place to live; they just repaired the cracks in the walls and planed the bottoms off doors and made adjustments as they could. Once in a while, a man in Hollister would add a room to his house without realizing that the addition was on one side of a fault line and the house on the other side; and as a result, over a period of years, the new room would move with stately, turtlelike determination--north or south or east or west, depending on the fault--while the rest of the house stood still or inched in the opposite direction, a subtle but powerful process that eventually tore the addition from the main structure. The basements of a few buildings contained sinkholes, bottomless pits; these pits were spreading unstoppably under the buildings and would one day swallow them, but in the meantime, the citizens of Hollister lived and worked above. A lot of people would be terrified to live in a town where (as some residents put it) you could "go to sleep at night listening to the earth whisper to itself." But for generations the good people of Hollister had gone about their business with a positive attitude that was wondrous to behold.

Here was the ultimate California optimism.

Rita Yancy lived in a corner house on a quiet street. It was a small home with a big front porch. There were autumn-blooming white and yellow flowers in a border along the walkway.

Joshua rang the bell. Hilary and Tony stood behind him.

An elderly woman came to the door. Her gray hair was done up in a bun. Her face was wrinkled, and her blue eyes were quick, bright. She had a friendly smile. She was wearing a blue housedress and a white apron and sensible old-lady shoes. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, she said, "Yes?"

"Mrs. Yancy?" Joshua asked.

"That's me."

"My name's Joshua Rhinehart."

She nodded. "I figured you'd show up."

"I'm determined to talk to you," he said.

"You strike me as a man who either doesn't give up easily or never gives up at all."

"I'll camp out right here on your porch until I get what I've come for."

She sighed. "That won't be necessary. I've given the situation a great deal of thought since you called yesterday. What I decided was--you can't do anything to me. Not a thing. I'm seventy-five years old, and they don't just throw women my age into jail. So I might as well tell you what it was all about, because, if I don't, you'll just keep pestering me."

She stepped back, opened the door wide, and they went inside.

***

In the attic of the clifftop house, in the king-size bed, Bruno woke, screaming.

The room was dark. The flashlight batteries had gone dead while he'd slept.

Whispers.

All around him.

Soft, sibilant, evil whispers.

Slapping at his face and neck and chest and arms, trying to brush away the hideous things that crawled on him, Bruno fell off the bed. There seemed to be even a greater number of bustling, skittering things on the floor than there had been on the bed, thousands of them, all whispering, whispering. He wailed and gibbered, then clamped a hand over his nose and mouth to prevent the things from slithering inside of him.

Light.

Threads of light.

Thin lines of light like loose, luminescent threads hanging from the otherwise tenebrous fabric of the room. Not many threads, not much light, but some. It was a whole lot better than nothing.

He scrambled as fast as he could toward those faint filaments of light, flinging the things from him, and what he found was a window. The far side of it was covered by shutters. Light was seeping through the narrow chinks in the shutters.

Bruno stood, swaying, fumbling in the dark for the window latch. When he found the lock, it would not turn; it was badly corroded.

Screaming, brushing frantically at himself, he stumbled back toward the bed, found it in the seamless blackness, got hold of the lamp that stood on the nightstand, carried the lamp back to the window, used it as a club, and glass shattered. He threw the lamp aside, felt for the bolt on the inside of the shutters, put his hand on it, jerked on it, skinned a knuckle as he forced the bolt out of its catch, threw open the shutters, and wept with relief as light flooded into the attic.

The whispers faded.

***

Rita Yancy's parlor--that was what she called it, a parlor, rather than using a more modern and less colorful word--almost was a parody of the stereotypical parlor in which sweet little old ladies like her were supposed to spend their twilight years. Chintz drapes. Handmade, embroidered wall hangings--most of them inspirational sayings framed by penny-sized flowers and cute birds--were everywhere, a relentless display of good will and good humor and bad taste. Tasseled upholstery. Wingback chairs. Copies of Reader's Digest on a dainty occasional table. A basket filled with balls of yarn and knitting needles. A flowered carpet that was protected by matching flowered runners. Handmade afghans were draped across the seat and the back of the sofa. A mantel clock ticked hollowly.

Hilary and Tony sat on the sofa, on the edge of it, as if afraid to lean back and risk rumpling the covering. Hilary noticed that each of the many knickknacks and curios was dustfree and highly polished. She had the feeling that Rita Yancy would jump up and run for a dust cloth the instant anyone tried to touch and admire those prized possessions.

Joshua sat in an armchair. The back of his head and his arms rested on antimacassars.

Mrs. Yancy settled into what was obviously her favorite chair; she seemed to have acquired part of her character from it, and it from her. It was possible, Hilary thought, to picture Mrs. Yancy and the chair growing together into a single organic-inorganic creature with six legs and brushed velvet skin.

The old woman picked up a blue and green afghan that was folded on her footstool. She opened the blanket and covered her lap with it.

There was a moment of absolute silence, where even the mantel clock seemed to pause, as if time had stopped, as if they had been quick-frozen and magically transported, along with the room, to a distant planet to be put on exhibition in an extraterrestrial museum's Department of Earth Anthropology.

Then Rita Yancy spoke, and what she said totally shattered Hilary's homey image of her. "Well, there's sure as hell no point in beating around the bush. I don't want to waste my whole day on this damn silly thing. Let's get straight to it. You want to know why Bruno Frye was paying me five hundred bucks a month. It was hush money. He was paying me to keep my mouth shut. His mother paid me the same amount every month for almost thirty-five years, and when she died, Bruno started sending checks. I must admit that surprised the hell out of me. These days it's an unusual son who would pay that kind of money to protect his mother's reputation--and especially after she's already kicked the bucket. But he paid."

"Are you saying you were blackmailing Mr. Frye and his mother before him?" Tony asked, astonished.

"Call it whatever you want. Hush money or blackmail or anything you want."

"From what you've told us so far," Tony said, "I believe the law would call it blackmail and nothing else."

Rita Yancy smiled at him. "Do you think the word bothers me? Do you think I'm afraid of it? All quivery inside? Sonny, let me tell you, I've been accused of worse than that in my time. Is blackmail the word you want to use? Well, it's all right by me. Blackmail. That's what it is. We won't put a prettier face on it. But of course, if you're stupid enough to drag an old lady into court, I won't use the same word then. I'll just say that I did a great favor for Katherine Frye a long time ago, and that she insisted on repaying me with a monthly check. You don't really have any proof otherwise, do you? That's one reason I set it up on a monthly basis in the first place. I mean, blackmailers are supposed to strike and run, take it in one big bite, which is easy for the prosecutor to trace. But who's going to believe that a blackmailer would agree to a modest monthly payment on account?"

"We don't have any intention of bringing criminal charges against you," Joshua assured her. "And we haven't the slightest interest in attempting to recover the money that was paid to you. We realize that would be futile."

"Good," Mrs. Yancy said. "Because I'd make a bloody battle of it if you tried."

She straightened her afghan.

I've got to remember this one, everything about her, Hilary thought. She'd make a great little character role in a movie some day: Grandma with spice and acid and a touch of rot.

"All we want is some information," Joshua said. "There's a problem with the estate, and it's holding up the disbursement of funds. I need to get answers to some questions in order to expedite the final settlement. You say you don't want to waste your whole day on this 'damn silly thing.' Well, I don't want to waste months on the Frye estate either. My only motivation in coming here is to get the information I need to wrap up this damn silly thing of mine."

Mrs. Yancy stared hard at him, then at Hilary and Tony. Her eyes were shrewd, appraising. Finally, she nodded with evident satisfaction, as if she had read their minds and had approved of what she'd seen in them. "I think I believe you. All right. Ask your questions."

"Obviously," Joshua said, "the first thing we want to know is what you had on Katherine Frye that made her and her son pay you nearly a quarter of a million dollars over the past forty years."

"To understand about that," Mrs. Yancy said, "you'll need a bit of background on me. You see, when I was a young woman, at the height of the Great Depression, I looked around at all the kinds of work I could do to make ends meet, and I decided that none of them offered more than mere survival and a life of drudgery. All but one. I realized that the only profession that offered me a chance at real money was the oldest profession of them all. When I was eighteen, I became a working girl. In those days, in mixed company like this, a woman like me was referred to as a 'lady of easy virtue.' Today, you don't have to tiptoe around it. You can use any damn word you want these days." A strand of gray hair had slipped out of her bun. She pushed it away from her face, tucked it behind her ear. "When it comes to sex--the old slap-and-tickle, as it was sometimes called in my day--I'm amazed at how times have changed."

"You mean you were a ... prostitute?" Tony asked, expressing the surprise that Hilary felt.

"I was an exceptionally good-looking girl," Mrs. Yancy said proudly. "I never worked the streets or bars or hotels or anything like that. I was on the staff of one of the finest, most elegant houses in San Francisco. We catered exclusively to the carriage trade. Only the very best sort of men. There were never fewer than ten girls and often as many as fifteen, but every one of us was striking and refined. I made good money, as I had expected I would. But by the time I was twenty-four, I realized that there was a great deal more money to be made operating my own house than there was in working in someone else's establishment. So I found a house with a lot of charm and spent nearly all of my savings redecorating it. Then I lined up a stable of lovely and polished young ladies. For the next thirty-six years, I worked as a madam, and I ran a damned classy place. I retired fifteen years ago, when I was sixty, because I wanted to come here to Hollister where my daughter and her husband lived; I wanted to be close to my grandchildren, you know. Grandchildren make old age a lot more rewarding than I'd ever thought it would be."

Hilary leaned back on the couch, no longer worried about rumpling the afghans that were draped across it.

Joshua said, "This is all quite fascinating, but what does it have to do with Katherine Frye?"

"Her father regularly visited my place in San Francisco," Rita Yancy said.

"Leo Frye?"

"Yes. A very strange man. I was never with him myself. I never serviced him. After I became a madam, I did very little bedwork; I was busy with the management details. But I heard all the stories that my girls told about him. He sounded like a first-class bastard. He liked his women docile, subservient. He liked to insult them and call them dirty names while he was using them. He was a strong disciplinarian, if you know what I mean. He had some nasty things he liked to do, and he paid a high price for the right to do them with my girls. Anyway, in April of 1940, Leo's daughter, Katherine, showed up on my doorstep. I'd never met her, I didn't even know he had a child. But he'd told her about me. He'd sent her to me so that she could have her baby in total secrecy."

Joshua blinked, "Her baby?"

"She was pregnant."

"Bruno was her baby?"

"What about Mary Gunther?" Hilary asked.

"There never was such a person as Mary Gunther," the old woman said. "That was just a cover story that Katherine and Leo made up."

"I knew it!" Tony said. "Too smooth. It was just too damn smooth."

"Nobody in St. Helena knew she was pregnant," Rita Yancy said. "She was wearing several girdles. You wouldn't believe how that poor girl had bound herself up. It was horrible. From the time she missed her first period, long before she ever began to swell up, she started wearing tighter and tighter and tighter girdles, then one girdle on top of another. And she starved herself, trying to keep off all the weight she could. It's a miracle she didn't either have a miscarriage or kill herself."

"And you took her in?" Tony asked.

"I'm not going to claim I did it out of the goodness of my heart," Mrs. Yancy said. "I can't stand old women when they're smug and self-righteous, like a lot of the ones I see when I go to the bridge games at the church. Katherine didn't touch my heart or anything like that. And I didn't take her in because I felt I had an obligation to her father. I didn't owe him a thing. Because of what I'd heard about him from my girls, I didn't even like him. And he'd been dead six weeks when Katherine showed up. I took her in for one reason, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. She had three thousand bucks with her to cover room and board and the doctor's fee. That was a good deal more money then than it is today."

Joshua shook his head. "I can't understand it. She had a reputation as a cold fish. She didn't care for men. She didn't have a lover that anyone knew about. Who was the father?"

"Leo," Mrs. Yancy said.

"Oh, my God," Hilary said softly.

"Are you sure?" Joshua asked Rita Yancy.

"Positive," the old woman said. "He'd been fooling around with his own daughter since she was four years old. He forced her to perform oral sex when she was a small child. Later, as she grew up, he did everything to her. Everything."

***

Bruno had hoped that a good night's sleep would clear his befuddled mind, wash away the confusion and the disorientation that had plagued him last night and early this morning. But now, as he stood in front of the broken attic window, basking in the gray October light, he was no more in command of himself than he had been six hours ago. His mind was writhing with chaotic thoughts and doubts and questions and fears; pleasant and ugly memories tangled like worms; mental images shifted and changed like puddles of quicksilver.

He knew what was wrong with him. He was alone. All alone. He was only half a man. Torn in half. That's what was wrong with him. Ever since the other half of him had been killed, he'd been increasingly nervous, increasingly unsure of himself. He no longer had the resources that he'd had when both halves of him had been alive. And now, trying to stumble along as only half a person, he was unable to cope; even the smallest problems were beginning to seem insoluble.

He turned away from the window and staggered heavily to the bed. He knelt on the floor beside the bed and put his head on the corpse, on its chest.

"Say something. Say something to me. Help me figure out what to do. Please. Please, help me."

But the dead Bruno had nothing to say to the one who was still alive.

***

Mrs. Yancy's parlor.

The ticking clock.

A white cat strolled in from the dining room and jumped up on the old woman's lap.

"How do you know that Leo molested Katherine?" Joshua asked. "Surely he didn't tell you about it."

"He didn't," Mrs. Yancy said. "But Katherine did. She was in a terrible state. Half out of her mind. She'd expected her father to bring her to me when her time drew near, but then he died. She was alone and terrified. Because of what she'd done to herself--the girdles and the dieting--her labor was damned difficult. I called in the doctor who gave my girls their weekly health examinations because I knew he would be discreet and willing to handle the case. He was sure the baby would be born dead. He thought there was a pretty good chance Katherine would die, too. She was in hard, agonizing labor for fourteen hours. I've never seen anyone endure the kind of pain that she went through. She was delirious a lot of the time, and when she had her wits about her, she was desperate to tell me what her father had done to her. I think she was trying to patch up her soul. She seemed to be afraid to die with the secret, and so she sort of treated me as if I was a priest listening to her confession. Her father forced her to provide oral sex shortly after her mother died. When they moved into the cliff house, which I gather is fairly isolated, he virtually set about training her to be a sex slave to him. When she was old enough for intercourse, he took precautions, but eventually, after years and years of it, they made a mistake; she got pregnant."

Hilary had the urge to lift the afghan that was draped on the couch and curl up in it to ward off the chills that swept over her. In spite of the frequent beatings, the emotional intimidation, the physical and mental torture that she suffered while living with Earl and Emma, she knew she was lucky to have escaped sexual abuse. She believed Earl had been impotent; only his inability to perform had saved her from that ultimate degradation. At least she had been spared that nightmare. But Katherine Frye had been plunged into it, and Hilary unexpectedly felt a kinship with the woman.

Tony seemed to sense what was going through her mind. He took her hand, squeezed it gently, reassuringly.

Mrs. Yancy stroked the white cat, and it made a low, rough, purring sound.

"There's something I don't understand," Joshua said. "Why didn't Leo send Katherine to you as soon as he knew she was going to have a baby? Why didn't he ask you to set up an abortion for her? Surely you had the contacts for that."

"Oh, yes," Mrs. Yancy said. "In my line of work, you had to know doctors who would handle that sort of thing. Leo could have arranged it through me. I don't know for sure why he didn't. But I suspect it was because he hoped Katherine would have a pretty baby girl."

"I'm not sure I follow," Joshua said.

"Isn't it obvious?" Mrs. Yancy asked, scratching the white cat under its fat chin. "If he had a granddaughter, then in a few years, he'd be able to start breaking her in, just like he did Katherine. Then he'd have two of them. A little harem of his own."

***

Unable to get a response out of his other self, Bruno got up and walked aimlessly around the huge room, stirring the dust on the floor; hundreds of whirling motes spun in the milky shaft of light from the window.

Eventually, he noticed a pair of dumbbells, each weighing about fifty pounds. They were part of the elaborate set of weights he had used six days a week, every week, between the ages of twelve and thirty-five. Most of his equipment--the barbells, heavier weights, the press bench--was down in the basement. But he had always kept a spare set of dumbbells in his room for use in those idle moments when a few extra sets of bicep curls or wrist flexes was just the thing to drive away boredom.

Now he picked up the weights and started working out with them. His enormous shoulders and powerful arms quickly got into the familiar rhythm, and he began to work up a sweat.

Twenty-eight years ago, when he'd first expressed a desire to lift weights and become a body builder, his mother had thought it was an excellent idea. Long, brutal workouts with weights helped burn up the sexual energy that he was just then beginning to generate, caught as he was in the throes of puberty. Because he didn't dare expose his demonic penis to a girl, vigorous weight training preoccupied him, seized his imagination and his emotions as sex might otherwise have done. Katherine had approved.

Later, as he packed on muscle tissue and became a formidable specimen, she had second thoughts about the wisdom of letting him grow so strong. Afraid that he might develop his body only so he could successfully turn on her, she had tried to take his weights away from him. But when he broke into tears and begged her to reconsider, she realized that she would never have anything to fear from him.

How could she ever have thought differently? Bruno wondered as he curled the dumbbells to his shoulders and then slowly let them down again. Hadn't she realized that she would always be stronger than he was? After all, she had the key to the door in the ground. She had the power to unlock that door and make him go into that dark hole. No matter how big his biceps and triceps became, as long as she possessed that key, she would always be stronger than he was.

It was around that time, when his body began to develop, that she first told him that she knew how to come back from the dead. She'd wanted him to know that, after she died, she'd watch over him from the other side; and she'd sworn that she would come back to punish him if she saw him misbehaving or if he started getting careless about hiding his demonic heritage from other people. She had warned him a thousand times or more that, if he was bad and forced her to come back from the grave, she would throw him into the hole in the ground, lock the door, and leave him there forever.

But now, as he worked out in the dusty attic, Bruno suddenly wondered if Katherine's threat had been empty. Had she really possessed supernatural powers? Could she really come back from the dead? Or was she lying to him? Was she lying because she was afraid of him? Was she afraid he would get big and strong--and then break her neck? Was her story about coming back from the grave nothing more than feeble insurance against his getting the idea that he could kill her and then be free of her forever?

Those questions came to him, but he was not capable of holding on to them long enough to explore each one and answer it. Disconnected thoughts surged like bursts of electric current through his short-circuiting brain. Each doubt was forgotten an instant after it occurred to him.

Contrarily, each fear that rose up did not fade away but remained, sparking and sputtering, in the dark corners of his mind. He thought of Hilary-Katherine, the latest resurrection, and he remembered that he had to find her.

Before she found him.

He began to shake.

He dropped one dumbbell with a crash. Then the other one. The floorboards rattled.

"The bitch," he said fearfully, angrily.

***

The white cat licked Mrs. Yancy's hand as she said, "Leo and Katherine worked up a complex story to explain the baby. They didn't want to admit it was hers. If they did that, they had to point a finger at the man responsible, at some young suitor. But she didn't have any suitors. The old man didn't want anyone else touching her. Just him. Gives me the creeps. What kind of man would force himself on his own little girl? And the bastard started on her when she was only four! She wasn't even old enough to understand what was happening." Mrs. Yancy shook her gray head in shock and sorrow, "How could a grown man be aroused by a baby like that? If I made the laws, any man who did that sort of thing would be castrated--or worse. Worse, I think, I tell you, it disgusts me."

Joshua said, "Why didn't they just claim Katherine was raped by a migrant farm worker or some stranger passing through? She wouldn't have had to send an innocent man to jail to support a story like that. She could have given the police a totally phony description. And even if, by some wild chance, they'd found a guy who fit that description, some poor son of a bitch who didn't have an alibi ... well, then she could have said he wasn't the right man. She wouldn't have been forced to railroad anyone."

"That's right," Tony said. "Most rape cases of that sort are never solved. The police would probably have been surprised if Katherine had made a positive identification of anybody they rounded up."

"I can understand why she wouldn't have been eager to cry rape," Hilary said. "She would have had to endure endless humiliation and embarrassment. A lot of people think every woman who's raped was just asking for it."

"I'm aware of that," Joshua said. "I'm the one who keeps saying that most of my fellow human beings are idiots, asses and buffoons. Remember? But St. Helena has always been a relatively openminded town. The people there wouldn't have blamed Katherine for being raped. At least most of them wouldn't have. She would have had to deal with a few crude characters and a measure of embarrassment, naturally, but in the long run she would have had everyone's sympathy. And it seems to me that it would have been a lot easier taking that route than trying to make everyone believe an elaborate lie about Mary Gunther--and then having to worry about maintaining that lie for the rest of her life."

The cat turned over on Mrs. Yancy's lap. She rubbed its belly.

"Leo didn't want to blame the pregnancy on a rapist because that would have brought in the cops," Mrs. Yancy said. "Leo had great respect for the cops. He was an authoritarian type. He believed the cops were better at their jobs than they really were, and he was afraid they would smell something fishy about any rape story that he and Katherine could concoct. He didn't want to draw attention to himself, not attention like that. He was scared to death the cops would sniff out the truth. He wasn't about to risk going to jail for child molestation and incest."

"Katherine told you that?" Hilary asked.

"That's right. As I said before, she'd been living with the shame of Leo's abuse all her life, and when she thought maybe she was going to die in childbirth, she wanted to tell someone, anyone, what she'd been through. Anyway, Leo was sure he'd be safe if Katherine could conceal her pregnancy, hide it completely, and fool everyone in St. Helena. Then it would be possible to pass the child off as the illegitimate baby of an unfortunate friend from Katherine's college days."

"So her father forced her to wear the girdles," Hilary said, feeling sorrier for Katherine Frye than she would have thought possible when she first walked into Mrs. Yancy's parlor. "He put her through that agony to protect himself. It was his idea."

"Yes," Mrs. Yancy said. "She'd never been able to stand up to him. She'd always done what he'd told her to do. It wasn't any different this time. She did this thing with the girdles and the dieting, even though it caused her a hell of a lot of pain. She did it because she was afraid to disobey him. Which isn't surprising when you consider that he'd spent twenty-some years breaking her spirit."

"She went away to college," Tony said. "Wasn't that an attempt to gain independence?"

"No," Mrs. Yancy said. "College was Leo's idea. In 1937, he went to Europe for seven or eight months to sell off the last of his holdings in the old country. He saw World War Two coming, and he didn't want to have any assets frozen over there. He didn't want to take Katherine on the trip with him. I suspect he intended to combine business with pleasure. He was a highly-sexed man. And I hear tell some of those European brothels offer all kinds of kinky thrills, just the sort of things to appeal to him. The dirty old goat. Katherine would have been in his way. He decided she should go to college while he was out of the country, and he arranged for her to stay with a family he knew in San Francisco. They owned a company that distributed wine, beer, and liquor in the Bay Area, and one of the things they handled was Shade Tree products."

Joshua said, "He was taking quite a chance, letting her out from under his thumb for so long."

"Apparently, he didn't think so," Mrs. Yancy said. "And he was proved right. In all those months without him around, she never began to come out of his thrall. She never told anyone about the things he'd been doing to her. She never even considered telling anyone. She was a broken spirit, I tell you. Enslaved. That's really the word for it. She was enslaved, not like a plantation worker or anything like that. Mentally and emotionally enslaved. And when he came back from Europe, he made her drop out of college. He took her back to St. Helena with him, and she didn't resist. She couldn't resist. She didn't know how."

The mantel clock chimed the hour. Two measured tones. The notes echoed softly from the parlor ceiling.

Joshua had been sitting on the edge of his chair. Now he slid back until his head touched the antimacassar again. He was pale, and dark rings circled his eyes. His white hair was no longer fluffy; it was lank, lifeless. In the short time that Hilary had known him, he appeared to her to have aged. He looked wrung-out.

She knew how he felt. The Frye family history was an unrelievedly grim tale of man's inhumanity to man. The more they poked around in that mess, the more depressed they became. The heart could not help but respond, and the spirit sagged as one awful discovery followed another.

As if talking to himself, getting it straight in his own mind, Joshua said, "So they went back to St. Helena, and they picked up their sick relationship where they'd left off, and eventually they made a mistake, and she got pregnant--and no one up there in St. Helena ever suspected a thing."

Tony said. "Incredible. Usually a simple lie is the best because it's the only kind that won't trip you up. The story about Mary Gunther was so damned involved! It was a juggling act. They had to keep a dozen balls in the air at once. Yet they brought it off without a hitch."

"Oh, hardly without a hitch," Mrs. Yancy said. "There was certainly a hitch or two."

"Such as?"

"Such as--the day she left St. Helena to come to my place to have her baby, she told people up there that this imaginary Mary Gunther had sent word that the baby had arrived. Now that was stupid. It really was. Katherine said she was going to San Francisco to pick up the child. She told them Mary's message mentioned a lovely baby, but neglected to say whether it was a boy or a girl. That was Katherine's pathetic way of covering for herself, since she couldn't know what her baby's sex was until it was born. Dumb. She should have known better. That was her only mistake--saying that the child was born before she left St. Helena. Ah, I know she was a complete nervous wreck. I know she wasn't thinking straight. She couldn't have been a very well-balanced woman after all that Leo had done to her over the years. And being pregnant, having to hide it under all those girdles, then Leo's death coming at a time when she needed him most--that was bound to drive her even further over the edge. She was out of her head, and she didn't think it out well enough."

"I don't understand," Joshua said. "Why was it a mistake for her to say Mary's baby had already been born? Where's the hitch?"

Stroking the cat, Mrs. Yancy said, "What she should have told the people in St. Helena was that the Gunther baby was about to arrive, that it hadn't been born yet, but that she was going to San Francisco to be with Mary. That way she wouldn't have been committed to the story that there was one baby. But she didn't think of that. She didn't realize what might happen. She told everyone that it was just one baby, already in hand. Then she came to my place and gave birth to twins."

Hilary said, "Twins?"

"Damn," Tony said.

The surprise brought Joshua to his feet.

The white cat sensed the tension. It lifted its head out of Rita Yancy's lap and peered curiously at each person in the parlor, one after the other. Its yellow eyes appeared to shine with inner light.

***

The attic bedroom was large, but not nearly large enough to keep Bruno from feeling that it was gradually closing in on him. He looked for things to do because idleness made his claustrophobia worse.

He got bored with the dumbbells even before his massive arms began to ache from the exercise.

He took a book from one of the shelves and tried to read, but he wasn't able to concentrate.

His mind still hadn't settled down; it flitted from one thought to another, like a quietly desperate jeweler looking for a misplaced bag of diamonds.

He talked to his dead self.

He searched the dusty corners for spiders and squashed them.

He sang to himself.

He laughed at times without really knowing what had struck him funny.

He wept, too.

He cursed Katherine.

He made plans.

He paced, paced, paced.

He was eager to leave the house and begin searching for Hilary-Katherine, but he knew he would be a fool if he went out in daylight. He was certain that Katherine's conspirators were everywhere in St. Helena. Her friends from the grave. Other walking dead, men and women from the Other Side, hiding in new bodies. All of them would be on the lookout for him. Yes. Yes. Maybe dozens of them. He would be too conspicuous during the day. He would have to wait until sunset before he went looking for the bitch. Although night was the favorite time of the day for the undead, the time when they prowled in especially large numbers, and although he would be in terrible danger while he stalked Hilary-Katherine in the night, he would also benefit from the darkness. A night-shadow would hide him from the walking dead every bit as well as it would conceal them from him. With the scales thus balanced, the success of the hunt would depend only on who was smarter--he or Katherine--and if that was the only criterion, he might have a better than even chance of winning; for Katherine was clever and infinitely wicked and cunning, but she was not as smart as he was.

He believed that he would be safe if he stayed in the house during the day, and that was ironic, really, because he hadn't felt safe for one minute during the thirty-five years he'd lived there with Katherine. Now the house was a reliable haven because it was the last place Katherine or her conspirators would look for him. She wanted to catch him and bring him to this very place. He knew that. He knew it! She had come back from the grave for only one reason: to bring him to the top of the cliff, around the house, to the doors in the ground at the end of the rear lawn. She wanted to put him in that hole in the ground, lock him in there forever. That's what she had told him she would do if she ever had to come back to punish him. He had not forgotten. And now she would expect him to avoid the top of the cliff and the old house at all costs. She would never think to look for him in his long-abandoned attic bedroom, not in a million years.

He was so pleased with his excellent strategy that he laughed aloud.

But then he had a horrible thought. If she did think to look for him here, and if she came with a few of her friends, others of the living dead, enough of them to overpower him, then they wouldn't have far to drag him. The doors in the ground were right behind the house. If Katherine and her hellish friends caught him here, they would be able to carry him to those doors and throw him into that dark room, into the whispers, in little more than a minute.

Frightened, he ran back to the bed and sat down beside himself and tried to get himself to reassure him that everything would be all right.

***

Joshua couldn't sit still. He walked back and forth on one of the flowered runners in Mrs. Yancy's parlor.

The old woman said, "When Katherine gave birth to twins, she realized that the elaborate lie about Mary Gunther would no longer hold up. The people in St. Helena had been prepared for one child. No matter how she explained the second baby, she'd plant suspicion. The idea that everyone she knew would find out what she'd been doing with her own father.... Well, I guess it was too much for her on top of everything else that had happened in her life. She just snapped. For three days, she carried on like someone in a fever delirium, gabbling like a madwoman. The doctor gave her sedatives, but they didn't always work. She ranted and raved and babbled. I thought I'd have to call the cops and let them put her away in a little padded room. But I didn't want to do that. I sure as hell didn't."

"But she needed psychiatric help," Hilary said. "Just letting her scream and carry on for three days--that wasn't good. That wasn't good at all."

"Maybe not," Mrs. Yancy said. "But I couldn't do anything else. I mean, when you're running a fancy bordello, you don't want to see the cops except when you pass out their payoff money. They usually don't bother a classy operation like the one I had going. After all, some of my clients were influential politicians and wealthy businessmen, and the cops didn't want to embarrass any big shots in a raid. But if I sent Katherine off to a hospital, I knew damned well the newspapers would pick up on the story, and then the cops would have to shut me down. They couldn't just let me go on doing business after I'd gotten all that publicity. No way. Absolutely impossible. I'd have lost everything. And my doctor was worried that his career would be ruined if his regular patients found out he was secretly treating prostitutes. These days it wouldn't damage a doctor's practice even if everyone knew he gave vasectomies to alligators with the same instruments he used in his office. But in 1940, people were more ... squeamish. So you see, I had to think about myself, and I had to protect my doctor, my girls..."

Joshua walked up to the old woman's chair. He looked down at her, taking in the plain dress and the apron and the dark brown support stockings and the stodgy black shoes and the silky white cat, trying to see through the grandmotherly image to the real woman underneath. "When you accepted Katherine's three thousand dollars, didn't you also take on certain responsibilities for her?"

"I didn't ask her to come to my place to have her baby," Mrs. Yancy said. "My business was worth a whole lot more than three thousand dollars. I wasn't going to throw it all away just for principle. Is that what you think I should have done?" She shook her gray head in disbelief. "If that's what you really think I should have done, then you're living in a dream world, my dear sir."

Joshua stared down at the woman, unable to speak for fear he would scream at her. He didn't want to be thrown out of her house until he was certain she had told him absolutely everything she knew about Katherine Anne Frye's pregnancy and about the twins. Twins!

Tony said, "Look, Mrs. Yancy, shortly after you took Katherine in, when you discovered that she had wrapped herself up in girdles, you knew she was likely to lose the baby. You admit the doctor told you that might happen."

"Yes."

"He told you Katherine might die, too."

"So?"

"A child's death or the death of a pregnant woman in labor--something like that would have closed up your place every bit as fast as having to call in the cops to deal with a woman who was suffering a nervous breakdown. Yet you didn't turn Katherine away when there was still time to do that. Even after you knew it was a risky proposition, you kept her three thousand dollars, and you allowed her to stay. Now surely you realized that if someone died, you'd have to report it to the police and risk getting shut down."

"No problem," Mrs. Yancy said. "If the babies had died, we'd have taken them away in a suitcase. We'd have buried them quietly in the hills up in Marin County. Or maybe we'd have weighted the suitcase and dropped it off the Golden Gate Bridge."

Joshua had an almost irresistible urge to grab the old woman by her bun of gray hair and yank her out of her chair, jerk her out of her smug complacency. Instead, he turned away and took a deep breath and began to pace along the flower-patterned runner once more, glowering at the floor.

"And what about Katherine?" Hilary asked Rita Yancy. "What would you have done if she had died?"

"The same as I'd done if the twins had been born dead," Mrs. Yancy said blithely. "Except, of course, we wouldn't have been able to fit Katherine into a suitcase."

Joshua stopped at the far end of the runner and looked back at the woman, aghast. She wasn't trying to be funny. She was utterly unaware of the gruesome humor in that gross remark; she was merely stating a fact.

"If anything had gone wrong, we'd have dumped the body," Mrs. Yancy said, still answering Hilary's question. "And we'd have handled it so that no one would have known that Katherine had ever come to my place. Now don't you look so shocked and disapproving, young lady. I'm no killer. We're talking about what I'd have done--what any sensible person in my position would have done--if she or the baby had died a natural death. Natural death. For heaven's sake, if I were a killer, I'd have done away with poor Katherine when she was out of her head, when I didn't know if she'd ever recover. She was a threat to me then. I didn't know whether or not she was going to cost me my house, my business, everything. But I didn't strangle her, you know. My goodness, such a thought never crossed my mind! I nursed the poor girl through her fits. I nursed her out of her hysteria, and then everything was all right."

Tony said, "You told us Katherine ranted and raved and babbled. That sounds as if--"

"Only for three days," Mrs. Yancy said. "We even had to tie her down to the bed to keep her from hurting herself. But she was only sick for three days. So maybe it wasn't a nervous breakdown. Just a sort of temporary collapse. Because after three days she was as good as new."

"The twins," Joshua said. "Let's get back to the twins. That's what we really want to know about."

"I think I've told you just about everything," Mrs. Yancy said.

"Were they identical twins?" Joshua asked.

"How can you tell when they're just born? They're all wrinkled and red. There's no way to tell that early if they're fraternal or identical."

"Couldn't the doctor have run a test--"

"We were in a first-class bordello, Mr. Rhinehart, not a hospital." She chucked the white cat under the chin, and it playfully waved a paw at her. "The doctor didn't have the time or the facilities for what you're suggesting. Besides, why should we have cared whether the boys were identical or not?"

Hilary said, "Katherine named one of them Bruno."

"Yes," Mrs. Yancy said. "I found that out when he started sending me checks after Katherine's death."

"What did she call the other boy?"

"I haven't the foggiest. By the time she left my place, she hadn't given names to either of them yet."

"But weren't their names on their birth certificates?" Tony asked.

"There weren't any certificates," Mrs. Yancy said.

"How could that be?"

"The births weren't recorded."

"But the law--"

"Katherine insisted that the births not be recorded. She was paying good money for what she wanted, and we made sure she got it."

"And the doctor went along with this?" Tony asked.

"He got a thousand bucks for delivering the twins and for keeping his mouth shut," the old woman said. "A thousand was worth several times more in those days than it is now. He was well paid for bending a few rules."

"Were both of the babies healthy?" Joshua asked.

"They were thin," Mrs. Yancy said. "Scrawny as hell. Two pathetic little things. Probably because Katherine had been on a diet for months. And because of the girdles. But they could cry just as good and loud as any other babies. And there wasn't a thing wrong with their appetites. They seemed healthy enough, just small."

"How long did Katherine stay at your place?" Hilary asked.

"Almost two weeks. She needed that long to get her strength back after such a hard delivery. And the babies needed time to put a little flesh on their bones."

"When she left, did she take both children with her?"

"Of course. I wasn't running a nursery. I was glad to see her leave."

"Did you know that she was going to take only one of the twins to St. Helena?" Hilary asked.

"I understood that to be her intention. Yes."

"Did she say what she was going to do with the other boy?" Joshua asked, taking over the questioning from Hilary.

"I believe she intended to put it up for adoption," Mrs. Yancy said.

"You believe?" Joshua asked exasperatedly. "Weren't you even the least bit concerned about what might happen to those two helpless babies in the hands of a woman who was obviously mentally unbalanced?"

"She had recovered."

"Baloney."

"I tell you, if you'd met her on the street, you wouldn't have thought she had any problems."

"But for God's sake, underneath that facade--"

"She was their mother," Mrs. Yancy said primly. "She wouldn't have done them any harm."

"You couldn't have been sure of that," Joshua said.

"I certainly was sure of it," Mrs. Yancy declared. "I've always had the highest respect for motherhood and a mother's love. A mother's love can work wonders."

Again, Joshua had to restrain himself from reaching for the bun of hair on top of her head.

Tony said, "Katherine couldn't have put the baby up for adoption. Not without a birth certificate to prove that it was hers."

"Which leaves us with a number of unpleasant possibilities to consider," Joshua said.

"Honestly, you people amaze me," Mrs. Yancy said, shaking her head and scratching her cat. "You always want to believe the worst. I've never seen three bigger pessimists. Did you ever stop to think she might have left the little boy on a doorstep? She probably abandoned him at an orphanage or maybe a church, some place where he would be found right away and given proper care. I imagine he was adopted by an upstanding young couple, raised in an excellent home, given lots of love, a good education, all sorts of advantages."

***

In the attic, waiting for nightfall, bored, nervous, lonely, apprehensive, sometimes stuporous, more often frenetic, Bruno Frye spent much of Thursday afternoon talking to his dead self. He hoped to soothe his roiling mind and regain a sense of purpose, but he made little or no progress along those lines. He decided that he would be calmer, happier, and less lonely if he could at least look into his other self's eyes, like in the old days, when they had often sat and stared longingly into each other for an hour or more at a time, communicating so much without benefit of words, sharing, being one, just one together. He recalled that moment in Sally's bathroom, only yesterday, when he had stopped in front of a mirror and had mistaken his reflection for his other self. Looking into eyes that he had thought were the eyes of his other self, he had felt wonderful, blissful, at peace. Now he desperately wanted to recapture that state of mind. And how much better to look into the real eyes of his other self, even if they were flat and sightless now. But himself lay on the bed, eyes firmly closed. Bruno touched the eyes of the other Bruno, the dead one, and they were cold orbs; the lids would not lift under his gently prodding fingertips. He explored the curves of those shuttered eyes, and he felt hidden sutures at the corners, tiny knots of thread holding the lids down. Excited by the prospect of seeing the other's eyes again, Bruno got up and hurried downstairs, looking for razor blades and delicate cuticle scissors and needles and a crocheting hook and other makeshift surgical instruments that might be of use in the reopening of the other Bruno's eyes.

***

If Rita Yancy had any more information about the Frye twins, neither Hilary nor Joshua would get it out of her. Tony could see that much even if Hilary and Joshua could not. Any second now, one of them was going to say something so sharp, so angry, so biting and bitter, that the old woman would take offense and order all of them out of the house.

Tony was aware that Hilary was deeply shaken by the similarities between her own childhood ordeal and Katherine's agony. She was bristling at all three of Rita Yancy's attitudes--the bursts of phony moralizing, the brief moments of equally unfelt and syrupy sentimentality, and the far more genuine and constant and stunning callousness.

Joshua was suffering from a loss of self-esteem because he had worked for Katherine for twenty-five years without spotting the quiet madness that surely must have been bubbling just below her carefully-controlled surface placidity. He was disgusted with himself; therefore, he was even more irritable than usual. And because Mrs. Yancy was, even in ordinary circumstances, the kind of person Joshua despised, the attorney's patience with her could fit into a thimble with room left over for one of Charo's stage costumes plus the collected wisdom of the last four U.S. Presidents.

Tony got up from the sofa and went to the footstool that was in front of Rita Yancy's chair. He sat down, explaining his move by pretending that he just wanted to pet the cat; but in switching seats, he was placing himself between the old woman and Hilary, and he was effectively blocking Joshua, who looked as if he might seize Mrs. Yancy and shake her. The footstool was a good position from which to continue the interrogation in a casual fashion. As Tony stroked the white cat, he kept up a constant stream of chatter with the woman, ingratiating himself with her, charming her, using the old Clemenza soft-sell which always had done well for him in his police work.

Eventually, he asked her it there had been anything unusual about the birth of the twins.

"Unusual?" Mrs. Yancy asked, perplexed. "Don't you think the whole damned thing was unusual?"

"You're right," he said. "I didn't put my question very well. What I meant to ask was whether there was anything peculiar about the birth itself, anything odd about her labor pains or her contractions, anything remarkable about the initial state of the babies when they came out of her, any abnormality, any strangeness."

He saw the surprise enter her eyes as his question tripped a switch in her memory.

"In fact," she said, "there was something unusual."

"Let me guess," he said. "Both of the babies were born with cauls."

"That's right! How did you know?"

"Just a lucky guess."

"The hell it was." She wagged a finger at him. "You're smarter than you pretend to be."

He forced himself to smile at her. He had to force it, for there was nothing about Rita Yancy that could elicit a genuine smile from him.

"Both of them were born with cauls," she said. "Their little heads were almost entirely covered. The doctor had seen and dealt with that sort of thing before, of course. But he thought the chances of both twins having cauls was something like a million to one."

"Was Katherine aware of this?"

"Aware of the cauls? Not at the time. She was delirious with pain. And then for three days she was completely out of her mind."

"But later?"

"I'm sure she was told about it," Mrs. Yancy said. "It's not the sort of thing you forget to tell a mother. In fact ... I remember telling her myself. Yes. Yes, I do. I recall it very clearly now. She was fascinated. You know, some people think that a child born with a caul has the gift of second sight."

"Is that what Katherine believed?"

Rita Yancy frowned. "No. She said it was a bad sign, not a good one. Leo had been interested in the supernatural, and Katherine had read a few books in his occult collection. In one of those books, it said that when twins were born with cauls, that was ... I can't recall exactly what she said it meant, but it wasn't good. An evil omen or something."

"The mark of the demon?" Tony asked.

"Yes! That's it!"

"So she believed that her babies were marked by a demon, their souls already damned?"

"I'd almost forgotten about that," Mrs. Yancy said.

She stared beyond Tony, not seeing anything in the parlor, looking into the past, striving to remember....

Hilary and Joshua stayed back, out of the way, silent; and Tony was relieved that they recognized his authority.

Eventually, Mrs. Yancy said, "After Katherine told me about it being the mark of a demon, she just clammed up. She didn't want to talk any more. For a couple of days, she was as quiet as a mouse. She stayed in bed, staring at the ceiling, hardly moving at all. She looked like she was thinking real hard about something. Then suddenly, she started acting so damned weird that I had to start wondering if I still might have to send her away to the booby hatch."

"Was she ranting and raving and violent like before?" Tony asked.

"No, no. It was all talk this time. Very wild, intense, crazy talk. She told me that the twins were the children of a demon. She said she'd been raped by a thing from hell, a green and scaly thing with huge eyes and a forked tongue and long claws. She said it had come from hell to force her to carry its children. Crazy, huh? She swore up and down that it was true. She even described this demon. A damned good description, too. Full of detail, very well done. And when she told me about how it raped her, she managed to give me the chills, even though I knew it was all a bunch of crap. The story was colorful, very imaginative. At first, I thought it was a joke, something she was doing just for laughs, except she wasn't laughing, and I couldn't see anything funny in it. I reminded her that she'd told me all about Leo, and she screamed at me. Did she scream! I thought the windows would break. She denied ever having said such things. She pretended to be insulted. She was so angry with me for suggesting incest, so self-righteous, a regular little prig, so determined to make me apologize--well, I couldn't help laughing at her. And that made her even angrier. She kept saying it hadn't been Leo, though we both knew damned well it had. She did everything she could to make me believe it was a demon that had fathered the twins. And I tell you, her act was good! I didn't believe it for a minute, of course. All that silly stuff about a creature from hell sticking his thing in her. What a bunch of hogwash. But I started to wonder if maybe she had convinced herself. She sure looked convinced. She was so fanatical about it. She said she was afraid that she and her babies would be burned alive if any religious people found out that she'd consorted with a demon. She begged me to help her keep the secret. She didn't want me to tell anyone about the two cauls. Then she said she knew that both twins carried the mark of the demon between their legs. She pleaded with me to keep that a secret, too."

"Between their legs?" Tony asked.

"Oh, she was carrying on like a full-fledged looney," Rita Yancy said. "She insisted that both of her babies had their father's sex organs. She said they weren't human between the legs, and she said she knew I'd noticed that, and she begged me not to tell anyone about it. Well, that was purely ridiculous. Both those little boys had perfectly ordinary pee-pees. But Katherine jabbered on and on about demons for almost two days. Sometimes she seemed truly hysterical. She wanted to know how much money I'd take to keep the secret about the demon. I told her I wouldn't take a penny for that, but I said I'd settle for five hundred a month to keep mum about Leo and all the rest of it, the rest of the real story. That calmed her down a little, but she still had this demon thing stuck in her head. I was just about decided that she really believed what she was saying, and I was going to call my doctor and have him examine her--and then she shut up about it. She seemed to regain her senses. Or she got tired of her joke, I guess. Anyway, she didn't say one more word about demons. She behaved herself from then on until she took her babies and left a week or so later."

Tony thought about what Mrs. Yancy had told him.

Like a witch cuddling a feline familiar, the old woman petted the white cat.

"What if," Tony said. "What if, what if, what if?"

"What if what?" Hilary asked.

"I don't know," he said. "Pieces seem to be falling into place ... but it looks ... so wild. Maybe I'm putting the puzzle together all wrong. I've got to think about it. I'm just not sure yet."

"Well, do you have any more questions for me?" Mrs. Yancy asked.

"No," Tony said, getting up from the footstool. "I can't think of anything else."

"I believe we've gotten what we came for," Joshua agreed.

"More than we bargained for," Hilary said.

Mrs. Yancy lifted the cat off her lap, put it on the floor, and rose from her chair. "I've wasted too much time on this silly damned thing. I should be in the kitchen. I've got work to do. I made four pie shells this morning. Now I've got to mix up the fillings and get everything in the oven. I've got grandchildren coming for dinner, and each one of them has a different kind of favorite pie. Sometimes the little dears can be a tribulation. But on the other hand, I'd sure be lost without them."

The cat leapt abruptly over the footstool, darted along the flowered runner, past Joshua, and under a corner table. Precisely when the animal stopped moving, the house shook. Two miniature glass swans toppled off a shelf, bounced without breaking on the thick carpet. Two embroidered wall hangings fell down. Windows rattled.

"Quake," Mrs. Yancy said.

The floor rolled like the deck of a ship in mild seas.

"Nothing to worry about," Mrs. Yancy said.

The movement decreased.

The rumbling, discontented earth grew quiet.

The house was still again.

"See?" Mrs. Yancy said. "It's over now."

But Tony sensed other oncoming shockwaves--although none of them had anything to do with earthquakes.

***

Bruno finally opened the dead eyes of his other self, and at first he was upset by what he found. They weren't the clear, electrifying, blue-gray eyes that he had known and loved. These were the eyes of a monster. They appeared to be swollen, rotten-soft and protuberant. The whites were stained brownred by half-dried, scummy blood from burst vessels. The irises were cloudy, muddy, less blue than they had been in life, now more the color of an ugly bruise, dark and wounded.

However, the longer Bruno stared into them the less hideous those damaged eyes became. They were, after all, still the eyes of his other self, still part of himself, still eyes that he knew better than any other eyes, still eyes that he loved and trusted, eyes that loved and trusted him. He tried not to look at them but into them, deep down beyond the surface ruin, way down in, where (many times in the past) he had made the blazing, thrilling connection with the other half of his soul. He felt none of the old magic now, for the other Bruno's eyes were not looking back at him. Nevertheless, the very act of peering deeply into the other's dead eyes somehow revitalized his memories of what total unity with his other self had been like; he remembered the pure, sweet pleasure and fulfillment of being with himself, just he and himself against the world, with no fear of being alone.

He clung to that memory, for memory was now all that he had left.

He sat on the bed for a long time, staring down into the eyes of the corpse.

***

Joshua Rhinehart's Cessna Turbo Skylane RG roared north, slicing across the eastward-flowing air front, heading for Napa. Hilary looked down at the scattered clouds below and at the sere autumn hills that lay a few thousand feet below the clouds. Overhead, there was nothing but crystal-blue sky and the distant, stratospheric vapor trail of a military jet.

Far off in the west, a dense bank of blue-gray-black clouds stretched out of sight to the north and the south. The massive thunderheads were rolling in like giant ships from the sea. By nightfall, Napa Valley--in fact, the entire northern third of the state from the Monterey Peninsula to the Oregon border--would lay under threatening skies again.

During the first ten minutes after takeoff, Hilary and Tony and Joshua were silent. Each was preoccupied with his own bleak thoughts--and fears.

Then Joshua said, "The twin has to be the dead ringer we're looking for."

"Obviously," Tony said.

"So Katherine didn't try to solve her problem by killing off the extra baby," Joshua said.

"Evidently not," Tony said.

"But which one did I kill?" Hilary asked. "Bruno or his brother?"

"We'll have the body exhumed and see what we can learn from it," Joshua said.

The plane hit an air pocket. It dropped more than two hundred feet in a roller coaster swoop, then soared up to its proper altitude.

When her stomach crawled back into its familiar niche, Hilary said, "All right, let's talk this thing out and see if we can come up with any answers. We're all sitting here chewing on the same question anyway. If Katherine didn't kill Bruno's twin brother in order to keep the Mary Gunther lie afloat, then what did she do with him? Where the devil has he been all these years?"

"Well, there's always Mrs. Rita Yancy's pet theory," Joshua said, managing to pronounce her name in such a way as to make it clear that even the need to refer to her in passing distressed him and left a bad taste in his mouth. "Perhaps Katherine did leave one of the twins bundled up on the doorstep of a church or an orphanage."

"I don't know...." Hilary said doubtfully. "I don't like it, but I don't exactly know why. It's just too ... clichéd ... too trite ... too romantic. Damn. None of those is the word I want. I can't think how to say it. I just sense that Katherine would not have handled it like that. It's too ..."

"Too smooth," Tony said. "Just like the story about Mary Gunther was too smooth to please me. Abandoning one of the twins like that would have been the quickest, easiest, simplest, safest--although not the most moral--way for her to solve her problem. But people almost never do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way. Especially not when they're under the kind of stress that Katherine was under when she left Rita Yancy's whorehouse."

"Still," Joshua said. "we can't rule it out altogether."

"I think we can," Tony said. "Because if you accept that the brother was abandoned and then adopted by strangers, you've got to explain how he and Bruno got back together again. Since the brother was an unregistered birth, there'd be no way he could trace his blood parentage. The only way he could hook up with Bruno would be by coincidence. Even if you're willing to accept that coincidence, you've still got to explain how the brother could have been raised in another home, in an altogether different environment from Bruno's, without ever knowing Katherine--and yet have such a fierce hatred for the woman, such an overwhelming fear of her."

"That's not easy," Joshua admitted.

"You've got to explain why and how the brother developed a psychopathic personality and paranoid delusions that perfectly match Bruno's in every detail," Tony said.

The Cessna droned northward.

Wind buffeted the small craft.

For a minute, the three of them sat in silence, within the expensive, single-engine, overhead-wing, two-hundred-mile-per-hour, sixteen-mile-per-gallon, white and red and mustard-yellow, airborne cocoon.

Then Joshua said, "You win. I can't explain it. I can't see how the brother could have been raised entirely apart from Bruno yet wind up with the same psychosis. Genetics don't explain it, that's for sure."

"So what are you saying?" Hilary asked Tony. "That Bruno and his brother weren't separated after all?"

"She took them both home to St. Helena," Tony said.

"But where was the other twin all those years?" Joshua asked. "Locked away in a closet or something?"

"No," Tony said. "You probably met him many times."

"What? Me? No. Never. Just Bruno."

"What if.... What if both of them were living as Bruno? What if they ... took turns?"

Joshua looked away from the open sky ahead, stared at Tony, blinked. "Are you trying to tell me they played some sort of childish game for forty years?" he asked skeptically.

"Not a game," Tony said. "At least it wouldn't have been a game to them. They would have thought of it as a desperate, dangerous necessity."

"You've lost me," Joshua said.

To Tony, Hilary said, "I knew you were working on an idea when you started asking Mrs. Yancy about the babies having cauls and about how Katherine reacted to that."

"Yes," Tony said. "Katherine carrying on about a demon--that bit of news gave me a big piece of the puzzle."

"For God's sake," Joshua said impatiently, gruffly, "stop being so damned mysterious. Put it together for Hilary and me in a way we can understand."

"Sorry. I was more or less still thinking aloud." Tony shifted in his seat. "Okay, look. This will take a while. I'll have to go back to the beginning.... To understand what I'm going to say about Bruno, you have to understand Katherine, or at least understand the way I see her. What I'm theorizing is ... a family in which madness has been ... sort of handed down like a legacy for at least three generations. The insanity steadily grows bigger and bigger, like a trust fund earning interest." Tony shifted in his seat again. "Let's start with Leo. An extreme authoritarian type. To be happy he needed to totally control other people. That was one of the reasons he did so well in business, but it was also the reason he didn't have many friends. He knew how to get his way every time, and he never gave an inch. A lot of aggressive men like Leo have a different approach to sex from the one they have toward everything else; they like to be relieved of all responsibility when they're in bed; they like to be ordered around and dominated for a change--but only in bed. Not Leo. Not even in bed. He insisted on being the dominant one even in his sex life. He enjoyed hurting and humiliating women, calling them names, forcing them to do unpleasant things, being a little rough, a little sadistic. We know that from Mrs. Yancy."

"It's a hell of a big step from paying prostitutes so they'll satisfy some perverse desire--to molesting your own child," Joshua said.

"But we know he did molest Katherine repeatedly, over many years," Tony said. "So it mustn't have been a big step in Leo's eyes. He probably would have said that his abuse of Mrs. Yancy's girls was all right because he was paying them and therefore owned them, at least for a while. He would have been a man with a strong sense of property rights--and with an extremely liberal definition of the word 'property.' He'd have used that argument, that same point of view, to justify what he did to Katherine. A man like that thinks of a child as just another of his possessions--'my child' instead of 'my child.' To him, Katherine was a thing, an object, wasted if not used."

"I'm glad I never met the son of a bitch," Joshua said. "If I'd ever shaken hands with him, I think I'd still feel dirty."

"My point," Tony said, "is that Katherine, as a child, was trapped in a house, in a brutalizing relationship, with a man who was capable of anything, and there was virtually no chance that she could maintain a firm grip on her sanity under those awful conditions. Leo was a very cold fish, a loner's loner, more than a little bit selfish, with a very strong and very twisted sex drive. It's possible, even likely, that he wasn't just emotionally disturbed. He might have been all the way gone, over the edge, psychotic, detached from reality but able to conceal his detachment. There's a kind of psychopath who has iron control over his delusions, the ability to channel a lot of his lunatic energy into socially-acceptable pursuits, the ability to pass for normal. That kind of psycho vents his madness in one narrow, generally private, area. In Leo's case, he let off a little steam with prostitutes--and a lot of it with Katherine. We've got to figure that he didn't merely abuse her physically. His desire went beyond sex. He lusted after absolute control. Once he'd broken her physically, he wouldn't have been satisfied until he'd broken her emotionally, spiritually, and then mentally. By the time Katherine arrived at Mrs. Yancy's place to have her father's baby, she was every bit as mad as Leo had been. But she apparently also had acquired his control, his ability to pass among normal people. She lost that control for three days when the twins arrived, but then she pulled herself together again."

"She lost control a second time," Hilary said as the plane bobbled through a patch of turbulent air.

"Yeah," Joshua said. "When she told Mrs. Yancy that she'd been raped by a demon."

"If my theory's correct," Tony said, "Katherine was going through incredible changes after the birth of the twins. She was moving from one severe psychotic state to an even more severe psychotic state. A new set of delusions was pushing out the old set. She had been able to maintain a surface calm in spite of her father's sexual abuse, in spite of the emotional and physical torture he put her through, in spite of becoming pregnant with his child, and even in spite of the agony of being girdled in day and night during all those months when nature was insisting that she grow. Somehow she maintained an air of normalcy through all of that. But when the twins were born, when she realized her story about Mary Gunther's baby had come crashing down around her, that was too much to bear. She flipped out--until she conceived the notion that she'd been raped by a demon. We know from Mrs. Yancy that Leo was interested in the occult. Katherine had read some of Leo's books. Somewhere she had picked up the fact that some people believe twins born with cauls are marked by a demon. Because her twins were born with cauls ... well, she began to fantasize. And the idea that she had been the innocent victim of a demonic creature that had forced itself on her--well, that was very appealing. It exonerated her of the shame and guilt of bearing her own father's babies. It was still something she had to hide from the world, but it wasn't something she had to hide from herself. It wasn't something shameful for which she had to make constant excuses to herself. No one could expect an ordinary woman to resist a demon that had supernatural strength. If she could make herself believe that she'd really been raped by a monster, then she could start thinking of herself as nothing worse than an unfortunate, innocent victim."

"But that's what she was anyway," Hilary said. "She was her father's victim. He forced himself on her, not the other way around."

True," Tony said "But he had probably spent a lot of time and energy brainwashing her, trying to make her think she was the one at fault, the one responsible for their twisted relationship. Transferring the guilt to the daughter--that's a fairly common way for a sick man to escape his own sense of guilt. And that sort of behavior would fit Leo's authoritarian personality."

"All right," Joshua said as they fled northward into the yielding sky. "I'll go along with what you've said so far. It may not be right, but it makes sense, and that's a welcome change in the situation. So Katherine gave birth to twins, lost herself for three days, and then got control again by resorting to a new fantasy, a new delusion. By believing that a demon had raped her, she was able to forget that her father was the one who had actually done it. She was able to forget about the incest and regain some of her self-respect. In fact, she probably hadn't ever felt better about herself in her whole life."

"Exactly," Tony said

Hilary said, "Mrs. Yancy was the only person she'd ever told about the incest, so when she settled into the new fantasy about a demon, she was eager to let Mrs. Yancy know the 'truth.' She was worried that Mrs. Yancy thought of her as a terrible person, a wicked sinner, and she wanted Mrs. Yancy to know that she was only the victim of some irresistible supernatural thing. That's why she babbled on about it for so long."

"But when Mrs. Yancy didn't believe her," Tony said, "she decided to keep it to herself. She figured no one else would believe her, either. But that didn't matter to her because she was positive, in her own mind, that she knew the truth, and that truth was the demon. That was a much easier secret to keep than the other one, the one about Leo."

"And Leo had died a few weeks earlier," Hilary said, "so he wasn't around to remind her of what she had forgotten."

Joshua took his hands off the airplane controls for a moment, wiped them on his shirt. "I thought I was too damned old and too cynical to respond to a horror story any more. But this one makes my palms sweat. There's a terrible correlation to what Hilary just said. Leo wasn't around to remind her--but she needed to keep both of the twins around to reinforce the new delusion. They were the living proof of it, and she couldn't put either of them up for adoption."

"That's right," Tony said. "Having them with her helped her maintain the fantasy. When she looked at those two perfectly healthy, unquestionably human babies, she really did see something different about their sex organs, like she told Mrs. Yancy. She saw it in her mind, imagined it, saw something that was proof, to her, that they were the children of a demon. The twins were part of her comfortable new delusion--and I say 'comfortable' only in comparison to the nightmares with which she had lived before."

Hilary's mind was racing faster than the airplane engine. She grew excited as she saw where Tony's speculations were leading. She said, "So Katherine took the twins home, to that clifftop house, but she still had to keep the Mary Gunther lie in the air, didn't she? Sure. For one thing, she wanted to protect her reputation. But there was another reason, much more important than just her good name. A psychosis is rooted in the subconscious mind, but, as I understand it, the fantasies a psychotic uses to cope with his inner turmoil are more the product of the conscious mind. So ... while Katherine believed in the demon on a conscious level ... at the same time, deep down, subconsciously, she knew that if she went back to St. Helena with twins and let the Mary Gunther story collapse, her neighbors would eventually realize that Leo was the father. If she had to deal with that disgrace, she wouldn't have been able to support the demon fantasy that her conscious mind had fabricated. Her new, more comfortable delusions would be replaced by the old, hard, sharp-edged ones. So to maintain the demon fantasy in her own mind, she had to present only one child to the public. So she gave the two boys just one name. She allowed only one of them to go out in public at any one time. She forced them to live one life."

"And eventually," Tony said, "the two boys actually came to think of themselves as one and the same person."

"Hold it, hold it," Joshua said. "Maybe they were able to double for each other and live under only one name, one identity, in public. Even that's asking me to believe a lot, but I'll try. But for sure, in private they still would have been two distinct individuals."

"Maybe not," Tony said. "We've come across proof that they thought of themselves as ... sort of one person in two bodies."

"Proof? What proof?" Joshua demanded.

"The letter you found in the safe-deposit box in that San Francisco bank. In it, Bruno wrote that he had been killed in Los Angeles. He didn't say his brother had been killed. He said he, himself, was dead."

"You can't prove anything by that letter," Joshua said. "It was all mumbo-jumbo. It didn't make any sense."

"In a way it does make sense," Tony said. "It makes sense from Bruno's point of view--if he didn't think of his brother as another human being. If he thought of his twin as part of himself, as just an extension of himself, and not as a separate person at all, then the letter makes a lot of sense."

Joshua shook his head. "But I still don't see how two people could possibly ever be made to believe they were only one person."

"You're accustomed to hearing about split personalities," Tony said. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The woman whose true story was told in The Three Faces of Eve. And there was a book about another woman like that. It was a best-seller several years ago. Sybil. Sybil had sixteen distinct, separate personalities. Well, if I'm right about what became of the Frye twins, then they developed a psychosis that's just the reverse of split personality. These two people didn't split into four or six or eight or eighty; instead, under tremendous pressure from their mother, they ... melted together psychologically, melted into one. Two individuals with one personality, one self-awareness, one self-image, all shared. It's probably never happened before and might never happen again, but that doesn't mean it can't have happened here."

"The two would have found it virtually essential to develop identical personalities in order to take turns living in the world beyond their mother's house," Hilary said. "Even small differences between them would ruin the charade."

"But how?" Joshua demanded. "What did Katherine do to them? How did she make it happen to them?"

"We'll probably never know for certain," Hilary said. "But I've got a few ideas about what she might have done."

"So do I," Tony said. "But you go first."

***

By mid-afternoon, the amount of light coming through the east-facing attic windows grew steadily less. The quality of the light began to decrease as well; it no longer radiated out from the shaft form that the shape of the window imparted to it. Darkness slowly claimed the corners of the room.

As shadows crept across the floor, Bruno began to worry about being caught in the dark. He couldn't simply snap on a lamp because the lamps weren't in working order. There hadn't been any electric service to the house for five years, since his mother's first death. His flashlight was useless; the batteries were drained.

For a while, as he watched the room sink into purple-gray gloom, Bruno fought panic. He didn't mind being outdoors in the dark, for there was almost always some light spilling from houses, streetlamps, light from passing cars, the stars, the moon. But in a totally lightless room, the whispers and the crawling things returned, and that was a double plague he must prevent somehow.

Candles.

His mother had always kept a couple of boxes of tall candles in the pantry, off the kitchen. They were for use in the event of a power failure. He was pretty sure there would also be matches in the pantry, a hundred or more of them in a round tin with a tight-fitting lid. He hadn't touched any of those things when he had moved out; he had taken nothing but a few personal possessions and some of the collections of artwork that he had acquired himself.

He leaned over to peer into the face of the other Bruno, and he said, "I'm going downstairs for a minute."

The cloudy, blood-muddied eyes stared up at him.

"I won't be gone long," Bruno said.

Himself said nothing.

"I'm going to get some candles so I won't be caught in the dark," Bruno said. "Will I be all right alone here for a few minutes while I'm gone?"

His other self was silent.

Bruno went to the set of steps in one corner of the room. They led down into a second-floor bedroom. The stairwell was not totally dark, for some light from the attic window fell into it. But when Bruno pushed open the door at the bottom, he was shocked to find that the bedroom below was black.

The shutters.

He had opened the shutters in the attic when he'd awakened in the dark this morning, but the windows were still sealed elsewhere in the house. He hadn't dared open them. It wasn't likely that Hilary-Katherine's spies would look up and notice just one pair of opened attic shutters; but if he were to let light into the entire house, they would certainly spot the change and come running. Now the place was like a sepulcher, shrouded in eternal night.

He stood in the stairwell and peered into the lightless bedroom, afraid to advance, listening for whispers.

Not a sound.

No movement either.

He thought of going back to the attic. But that was no solution to his problem. In a few hours, night would have come, and he would be without a protective light. He must forge on to the pantry and find those candles.

Reluctantly, he moved into the second-floor bedroom, holding open the stairwell door to take advantage of the meager, smoky light that lay behind and above him. Two steps. Then he stopped.

Waited.

Listened.

No whispers.

He let go of the door and hurriedly crossed the bedroom, feeling his way between pieces of furniture.

No whispers.

He reached another door and then stepped into the second-floor hallway.

No whispers.

For a moment, enveloped in seamless velvety blackness, he could not remember whether to turn left or right to reach the stairs that led to the ground floor. Then he regained his bearings, and he went to the right, arms extended in front of him and hands opened with fingers spread in blindman fashion.

No whispers.

He almost fell down the stairs when he came to them. The floor suddenly opened under him, and he saved himself by reeling to the left and clutching the unseen bannister.

Whispers.

Clinging to the bannister, unable to see anything at all, he held his breath, cocked his head.

Whispers.

Coming after him.

He cried out and lumbered drunkenly down the steps, lost touch with the railing, then with his balance, windmilled his arms, tripped, sprawled on the landing, face down in the musty carpet, pain shooting through his left leg, just a flash of pain and then the dull echo of it in his flesh, and he lifted his head, and he heard the whispers getting closer, closer, and he got up, whimpering in fear, limped rapidly down the next flight, stumbled when he abruptly reached the ground floor, and looked back, stared up into darkness, heard the whispers rushing toward him, building to a roaring hiss, and he shouted--"No! No!"--and started toward the rear of the house, along the first-floor corridor, toward the kitchen, and then the whispers were all around him, rolling over him, coming from above and below and every side, and the things were there, too, the horrible crawling things--or thing; one or many; he didn't know which--and as he careened toward the kitchen, bouncing from wall to wall in his terror, he brushed and slapped at himself, desperately trying to keep the crawling things off him, and then he crashed into the kitchen door, which was a swinging door, which swung open to admit him, and he felt along the perimeter of the room, felt over the stove and the refrigerator and the cupboards and the sink until he came to the pantry door, and the things slithered over him all this time, and the whispers continued, and he screamed and screamed at the top of his raspy voice, and he pulled open the pantry door, was assaulted by a nauseating stench, stepped into the pantryn in spite of the overpowering odor that wafted from it, then realized he couldn't see and wouldn't be able to find the candles or the matches by touch among all the other jars and cans, whirled around, into the kitchen again, screaming, flailing at himself, wiping the wriggling things off his face as they tried to scurry into his mouth and nose, found the outside door that connected the kitchen to the back porch, fumbled with the stiff latches, finally freed them, and threw the door open.

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."

Joshua stared at the sky ahead.

At last, he said, "When she came back from Mrs. Yancy's whorehouse, her problem was to pass off the twins as the one child she'd talked about, thereby salvaging the Mary Gunther lie. But she could have accomplished that by locking up one of the brothers, making him a house son, while the other twin was the only one allowed to go out of the house. That would have been quicker, easier, simpler, safer."

"But we all know Clemenza's Law," Hilary said.

"Right," Joshua said. "Clemenza's Law: Damned few people ever do anything the quickest, easiest, simplest, and safest way."

"Besides," Hilary said, "Maybe Katherine just didn't have the heart to keep one of the boys locked up forever while the other one was permitted to lead at least a little bit of a normal life. After all the suffering she'd been through, maybe there was a limit to the amount of suffering she could force her children to endure."

"It seems to me she made them endure a whole hell of a lot!" Joshua said. "She drove them mad!"

"Inadvertently, yes," Hilary said. "She didn't intend to drive them mad. She thought she was doing what was best for them, but her own state of mind didn't make it possible for her to know what was best."

Joshua sighed wearily. "It's a wild theory you've got."

"Not so wild," Tony said. "It fits the known facts."

Joshua nodded. "And I guess I believe it, too. At least most of it. I just wish all of the villains in this piece were thoroughly vile and despicable. It seems wrong, somehow, to feel so much sympathy for them."

***

After they landed in Napa, under rapidly graying skies, they went straight to the county sheriff's office and told Peter Laurenski everything. At first, he gaped at them as if they had lost their minds, but gradually his disbelief turned into reluctant, astonished acceptance. That was a pattern of reactions, a transformation of emotions that Hilary expected they would all witness a few hundred times in the days ahead.

Laurenski telephoned the Los Angeles Police Department. He discovered that the FBI already had contacted the LAPD in regard to the San Francisco bank fraud case involving a look-alike for Bruno Frye, now believed at large in the LAPD's jurisdiction. Laurenski's news, of course, was that the suspect was not merely a look-alike, but the genuine article--even though another genuine article was dead and buried in the Napa County Memorial Park. He informed the LAPD that he had reason to believe the two Brunos had taken turns killing women and had been involved in a series of murders in the northern half of the state over the past five years, although he could not yet provide hard evidence or name specific homicides. The evidence was thus far circumstantial: a grisly but logical interpretation of the safe-deposit box letter in light of recent discoveries about Leo and Katherine and the twins; the fact that both of the twins had made attempts on Hilary's life; the fact that one of the twins had covered for the other last week when Hilary had first been attacked, which indicated complicity in at least attempted murder; and finally the conviction, shared by Hilary and Tony and Joshua, that Bruno's hatred for his mother was so powerful and maniacal that he would not hesitate to slaughter any woman who he imagined was his mother come back to life in a new body.

While Hilary and Joshua shared the railback bench that served as an office couch, and while they drank coffee provided by Laurenski's secretary, Tony took the phone at Laurenski's request and spoke with two of his own superiors in L.A. His support for Laurenski and the corroboration of facts that he provided were apparently effective, for the call concluded with a promise that L.A. authorities would take immediate action at their end. Operating under the assumption that the psychopath would be keeping a watch on Hilary's home, the LAPD agreed to establish around-the-clock surveillance on the Westwood house.

With the cooperation of the Los Angeles police assured, the sheriff quickly composed a bulletin, outlining the basic facts of the case, for distribution to all law enforcement agencies in Northern California. The bulletin doubled as an official request for information on any unsolved murders of young, attractive, brown-eyed brunettes, in jurisdictions beyond Laurenski's, during the past five years--and especially any murders involving decapitation, mutilation, or evidence of blood fetishism.

As Hilary watched the sheriff issuing orders to clerks and deputies, and as she thought about the events of the past twenty-four hours, she had the feeling that everything was moving too fast, like a whirlwind, and that this wind--filled with surprises and ugly secrets, just as a tornado is filled with swirling clods of uprooted earth and chunks of debris--was carrying her toward a precipice that she could not yet see, but over which she might be flung. She wished she could reach out with both hands and seize control of time itself, hold it back, slow it down, take a few days out to rest and to consider what she had learned, so that she would be able to follow the final few twists and turns of the Frye mystery with a clear head. She felt sure that continued haste was foolish, even deadly. But the wheels of the law, now engaged and rolling, could not be blocked. And time could not be reined in as if it were a runaway stallion.

She hoped there was no precipice ahead.

At 5:30, after Laurenski had gotten the law enforcement machinery moving, he and Joshua used the telephone to track down a judge. They found one, Judge Julian Harwey, who was fascinated by the Frye story. Harwey understood the necessity of retrieving the corpse and putting it through an extensive battery of tests for identification purposes. If the second Bruno Frye was apprehended, and if he somehow managed to pass a psychiatric examination, which was highly unlikely but not altogether impossible, then the prosecutor would need physical proof that there had been identical twins. Harwey was willing to sign an exhumation order, and by 6:30, the sheriff had that paper in hand.

"The workmen at the cemetery won't be able to open the grave in the dark," Laurenski said. "But I'll have them out there digging at the crack of dawn." He made a few more phone calls, one to the director of the Napa County Memorial Park where Frye was buried, another to the county coroner who could conduct the exhumation of the body as soon as it was delivered to him, and one to Avril Tannerton, the mortician, to arrange for him to transport the corpse to and from the coroner's pathology lab.

When Laurenski finally got off the telephone, Joshua said, "I imagine you'll want to search the Frye house."

"Absolutely," Laurenski said. "We want to find proof that more than one man was living there, if we can. And if Frye really had murdered other women, maybe we'll turn up some evidence. I think it would be a good idea to go through the house on the cliff, too."

"We can search the new house as soon as you like," Joshua said. "But there's no electricity in the old place. That one will have to wait until daylight."

"Okay," Laurenski said. "But I'd like to have a look at the vineyard house tonight."

"Now?" Joshua asked, getting up from the railback bench.

"None of us has had dinner," Laurenski said. Earlier. before they had told him even half of what they'd learned from Dr. Rudge and Rita Yancy, the sheriff had called his wife to tell her he wouldn't be home until very late. "Let's get a bite to eat at the coffee shop around the corner. Then we can head on out to Frye's place."

Before they left for the restaurant, Laurenski told the night receptionist where he would be and asked her to let him know immediately if word came in that the Los Angeles police had arrested the second Bruno Frye.

"It's not going to be that easy," Hilary said.

"I suspect she's right," Tony said. "Bruno has concealed an incredible secret for forty years. He may be crazy, but he's also clever. The LAPD isn't going to lay hands on him that fast. They'll have to play a lot of cat-and-mouse before they finally nail him."

***

When night had begun to fall, Bruno had closed the attic shutters again.

Now there were candles on each nightstand. There were two candles on the dresser. The flickering yellow flames made shadows dance on the walls and ceiling.

Bruno knew that he should already be out looking for Hilary-Katherine, but he could not find the energy to get up and go. He kept putting it off.

He was hungry. He suddenly realized that he hadn't eaten since yesterday. His stomach was growling.

For a while, he sat on the bed, beside the staring corpse, and he tried to decide where he should go to get some food. A few of the cans in the pantry hadn't swelled up, hadn't burst, but he was sure that everything on those shelves was spoiled and poisonous. For almost an hour, he struggled with the problem, trying to think of where he could go to get something to eat and still be safe from Katherine's spies. They were everywhere. The bitch and her spies. Everywhere. His state of mind was still best described as confused, and even though he was hungry, he had difficulty keeping his thoughts focused on food. But at last, he remembered there was food in the vineyard house. The milk would have spoiled during the past week, and the bread would have gotten hard. But his own pantry was full of canned goods, and the refrigerator was stocked with cheese and fruit, and there was ice cream in the freezer. The thought of ice cream made him smile like a small boy.

Driven by the vision of ice cream, hoping that a good supper would give him the energy he needed to begin looking for Hilary-Katherine, he left the attic and made his way down through the house with the aid of a candle. Outside, he snuffed out the flame and tucked the candle into a jacket pocket. He descended the crumbling switchback stairs on the face of the cliff and strode off through the dark vineyards.

Ten minutes later, in his own house, he struck a match and relit the candle because he was afraid that he would attract unwanted attention if he switched on the lights. He got a spoon from a drawer by the kitchen sink, took a one-gallon, cardboard tub of chocolate ripple from the freezer, and sat at the table for more than a quarter of an hour, smiling, eating big spoonfuls of ice cream right out of the carton, until at last he was too full to swallow even one more bite.

He dropped the spoon in the half-emptied carton, put the ice cream back in the freezer, and realized that he ought to pack up canned goods to take back to the clifftop house. He might not be able to find and kill Hilary-Katherine for days, and during that time he didn't want to have to sneak back here for every meal. Sooner or later, the bitch would think to have some of her spies put a watch on this place, and then he would be caught. But she'd never look for him in the cliff house, not in a million years, so that was where he ought to have his food supply.

He went into the master bedroom and got a large suitcase from the closet, took that into the kitchen, and filled it with cans of peaches, pears, mandarin orange slices, jars of peanut butter and jars of olives, and two kinds of jelly--each jar wrapped in paper towels to cushion it and keep it from breaking--and tins of little Vienna sausages. When he finished packing, the big suitcase was extremely heavy, but he had the muscles to handle it.

He had not showered since last night, at Sally's house in Culver City, and he felt grimy. He hated being dirty, for being dirty somehow always made him think of the whispers and the awful crawling things and the dark place in the ground. He decided he could risk taking a quick shower before he carried the food back to the clifftop house, even if that meant being naked and defenseless for a few minutes. But as he walked through the living room on his way to the bedroom and master bath, he heard cars approaching along the vineyard road. The engines sounded unnaturally loud in the perfect stillness of the fields.

Bruno ran to a front window and parted the drapes just an inch and looked out.

Two cars. Four headlights. Coming up the slope toward the clearing.

Katherine.

The bitch!

The bitch and her friends. Her dead friends.

Terrified, he ran to the kitchen, grabbed the suitcase, put out the candle that he was carrying, and pocketed it. He let himself out by the back door and dashed across the rear lawn, into the sheltering vineyards, as the cars stopped out front.

Crouching, lugging the suitcase, anxiously aware of every small sound he made, Bruno moved through the vines. He circled the house until he could see the cars. He put down the suitcase and sprawled beside it, hugging the moist earth and the darkest of the night shadows. He watched the people getting out of the cars, and his heart hammered faster each time that he recognized a face.

Sheriff Laurenski and a deputy. So the police were among the living dead! He had never suspected them.

Joshua Rhinehart. The old attorney was a conspirator, too! He was one of Katherine's hellish friends.

And there she was! The bitch. The bitch in her sleek new body. And that man from Los Angeles.

They all went into the house.

Lights came on in one room after another.

Bruno tried to remember if he'd left any signs of his visit. Maybe some drippings from the candle. But the droplets of wax would be cold and hard already. They would have no way of knowing if the drippings were fresh or weeks old. He'd left the spoon in the ice cream carton, but that might have been done a long time ago, too. Thank God, he hadn't taken a shower! The water on the floor of the stall and the damp towel would have given him away; finding a recently used towel, they would have known instantly that he was back in St. Helena, and they would have intensified their search for him.

He got to his feet, hefted the suitcase, and hurried as fast as he could through the vineyards. He went north toward the winery, then west toward the cliff.

They would never come to the cliff house looking for him. Not in a million years. He would be safe in the cliff house because they would think he was too afraid to go there.

If he hid in the attic, he would have time to think and plan and organize. He didn't dare rush into this. He hadn't been thinking too clearly lately, not since the other half of him had died, and he didn't dare move against the bitch until he had planned for every possible contingency.

He knew how to find her now. Through Joshua Rhinehart.

He could get his hands on her whenever he wanted.

But first he needed time to formulate a foolproof plan. He could hardly wait to get back to the attic to talk it over with himself.

***

Laurenski, Deputy Tim Larsson, Joshua, Tony, and Hilary spread out through the house. They searched drawers and closets and cupboards and cabinets.

At first, they couldn't find anything that proved two men had been living in the house instead of one. There seemed to be quite a few more clothes than one man would need. And the house was stocked with more food than one man usually kept on hand. But that wasn't proof of anything.

Then, as Hilary was going through desk drawers in the study, she came across a stack of recently received bills that hadn't been paid yet. Two of them were from dentists--one in nearby Napa, the other in San Francisco.

"Of course!" Tony said as everyone gathered around to have a look at the bills. "The twins would have had to go to different doctors and, especially, different dentists. Bruno Number Two couldn't walk into a dentist's office to have a tooth filled when that same dentist had filled the same tooth in Bruno Number One just the week before."

"This helps," Laurenski said. "Even identical twins don't get the same cavities in the same places on the same teeth. Two sets of dental records will prove there were two Bruno Fryes."

A while later, while searching a bedroom closet, Deputy Larsson made an unsettling discovery. One of the shoe boxes did not have shoes in it. Instead, the box contained a dozen wallet-size snapshots of a dozen young women, driver's licenses for six of them, and another eleven licenses belonging to eleven other women. In each snapshot and in each license photo, the woman looking out at the camera had things in common with all the other women in the collection: a pretty face, dark eyes, dark hair, and an indefinable something in the lines and angles of the facial structure.

"Twenty-three women who vaguely resemble Katherine," Joshua said. "My God. Twenty-three."

"A gallery of death," Hilary said, shivering.

"At least they're not all unidentified snapshots," Tony said. "With the licenses, we've got names and addresses."

"We'll get them out on the wire right away," Laurenski said, sending Larsson out to the car to radio the information to HQ. "But I think we all know what we'll find."

"Twenty-three unsolved murders spread over the past five years," Tony said.

"Or twenty-three disappearances," the sheriff said.

They spent two more hours in the house, but they didn't find anything else as important as the photographs and driver's licenses. Hilary's nerves were frayed, and her imagination was stimulated by the disturbing realization that her own driver's license had nearly wound up in that shoe box. Each time she opened a drawer or a cupboard door, she expected to find a shriveled heart with a stake through it or a dead woman's rotting head. She was relieved when the search was finally completed.

Outside, in the chilly night air, Laurenski said, "Will the three of you be coming to the coroner's office in the morning?"

"Count me out," Hilary said.

"No thanks," Tony said.

Joshua said, "There's really nothing we can do there."

"What time should we meet at the cliff house?" Laurenski asked.

Joshua said, "Hilary and Tony and I will go up first thing in the morning and open all the shutters and windows. The place has been closed up for five years. It'll need to be aired out before any of us will want to spend hours poking through it. Why don't you just come on up and join us whenever you're finished at the coroner's?"

"All right," Laurenski said. "See you tomorrow. Maybe the Los Angeles police will get the bastard during the night."

"Maybe," Hilary said hopefully.

Up in the Mayacamas Mountains, soft thunder roared.

***

Bruno Frye spent half the night talking to himself, carefully planning Hilary-Katherine's death.

The other half, he slept while the candles flickered. Thin streams of smoke rose from the burning wicks. The dancing flames cast jiggling, macabre shadows on the walls, and they were reflected in the staring eyes of the corpse.

***

Joshua Rhinehart had trouble sleeping. He tossed and turned, getting increasingly tangled in the sheets. At three o'clock in the morning, he went out to the bar and poured himself a double shot of bourbon, drank it fast. Even that didn't settle him down a whole lot.

He had never missed Cora so much as he did that night.

Hilary woke repeatedly from bad dreams, but the night did not go by slowly. It swept past at rocket speeds. She still had the feeling that she was hurtling toward a precipice, and she could do nothing to stop her forward rush.

***

Near dawn, as Tony lay awake, Hilary turned to him, came against him, and said, "Make love to me."

For half an hour, they lost themselves in each other, and although it was not better than before, it was not one degree worse either. A sweet, silken, hushed togetherness.

Afterwards, she said, "I love you."

"I love you, too."

"No matter what happens," she said, "we've had these few days together."

"Now don't get fatalistic on me."

"Well... you never know."

"We've got years ahead of us. Years and years and years together. Nobody's going to take them away from us."

"You're so positive, so optimistic. I wish I'd found you a long time ago."

"We're through the worst of this thing," he said. "We know the truth now."

"They haven't caught Frye yet."

"They will," Tony said reassuringly. "He thinks you're Katherine, so he's not going to stray too far from Westwood. He'll keep checking back at your house to see if you've shown up, and sooner or later the surveillance team will spot him, and it'll all be over."

"Hold me," she said.

"Sure."

"Mmmm. That's nice."

"Yeah."

"Just being held."

"Yeah."

"I feel better already."

"Everything's going to be fine."

"As long as I have you," she said.

"Forever, then."

***

The sky was dark and low and ominous. The peaks of the Mayacamas were shrouded in mist.

Peter Laurenski stood in the graveyard, hands in his pants pockets, shoulders hunched against the chill morning air. Using a backhoe for most of the way, then tossing out the last eight or ten inches of dirt with shovels, workmen at Napa County Memorial Park gouged into the soft earth, tearing open Bruno Frye's grave. As they labored, they complained to the sheriff that they were not being paid extra for getting up at dawn and missing breakfast and coming in early, but they got very little sympathy from him; he just urged them to work faster.

At 7:45, Avril Tannerton and Gary Olmstead arrived in the Forever View hearse. As they walked across the green hillside toward Laurenski, Olmstead looked properly somber, but Tannerton was smiling, taking in great lungfuls of the nippy air, as if he were merely out for his morning constitutional.

"Morning, Peter."

"Morning, Avril. Gary."

"How long till they have it open?" Tannerton asked.

"They say fifteen minutes."

At 8:05, one of the workmen climbed up from the hole and said, "Ready to yank him out?"

"Let's get on with it," Laurenski said.

Chains were attached to the casket, and it was brought out of the ground by the same device that had lowered it in just last Sunday. The bronze coffin was caked with earth around the handles and in the frill work, but overall it was still shiny.

By 8:40, Tannerton and Olmstead had loaded the big box into the hearse.

"I'll follow you to the coroner's office," the sheriff said.

Tannerton grinned at him. "I assure you, Peter, we aren't going to run off with Mr. Frye's remains."

***

At 8:20, in Joshua Rhinehart's kitchen, while the casket was being exhumed at the cemetery a few miles away, Tony and Hilary stacked the breakfast dishes in the sink.

"I'll wash them later," Joshua said. "Let's get up to the cliff and open that house. It must smell like hell in there after all these years. I just hope the mildew and mold haven't done too much damage to Katherine's collections. I warned Bruno about that a thousand times, but he didn't seem to care if--" Joshua stopped, blinked. "Will you listen to me babble on? Of course he didn't care if the whole lot of it rotted away. Those were Katherine's collections, and he wouldn't have cared a damn about anything she treasured."

They went to Shade Tree Vineyards in Joshua's car. The day was dreary; the light was dirty gray. Joshua parked in the employees' lot.

Gilbert Ulman hadn't come to work yet. He was the mechanic who maintained the aerial tramway in addition to caring for all of Shade Tree Vineyards' trucks and farm equipment.

The key that operated the tramway was hanging on a pegboard in the garage, and the winery's night manager, a portly man named Iannucci, was happy to get it for Joshua.

Key in hand, Joshua led Hilary and Tony up to the second floor of the huge main winery, through an area of administrative offices, through a viniculture lab, and then onto a broad catwalk. Half the building was open from the first floor to the ceiling, and in that huge chamber there were enormous three-story fermentation tanks. Cold, cold air flowed off the tanks, and there was a yeasty odor in the place. At the end of the long catwalk, at the southwest corner of the building, they went through a heavy pine door with black iron hinges, into a small room that was open at the end opposite from where they entered. An overhanging roof extended twelve feet out from the missing wall, to keep rain from slanting into the open chamber. The four-seat cable car--a fire-engine-red number with lots of glass--was nestled under the overhang, at the brink of the room.

***

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.

He was wet and cold. He was anxious to get on with the search of the house, hoping the activity would warm him.

As another volley of thunder cannonaded down from the Mayacamas, into the valley, over the house, Tony walked out of the sewing room and into Bruno Frye's knife.

In the kitchen, Hilary opened the shutters on the window that looked onto the back porch. She fixed them in place and paused for a moment to stare out at the rain-swept grass and the wind-whipped trees. At the end of the lawn, twenty yards away, there were doors in the ground.

She was so surprised to see those doors that, for a moment, she thought she was imagining them. She squinted through the sheeting rain, but the doors didn't dissolve miragelike, as she half expected.

At the end of the lawn, the land rose up in one of its last steps to the vertical ramparts of the mountains. The doors were set into that hillside. They were framed with timbers and mortared stones.

Hilary turned away from the window and hurried across the filthy kitchen, anxious to tell Joshua and Tony about her discovery.

Tony knew how to protect himself against a man with a knife. He was trained in self-defense, and he'd been in situations like this one on two other occasions. But this time he was caught off guard by the suddenness and total unexpectedness of the attack.

Glaring, his broad countenance split by a hideous rictus grin, Frye swung the knife at Tony's face. Tony managed to turn partly out of the blow, but the blade still tore along the side of his head, ripping scalp, drawing blood.

The pain was like an acid burn.

Tony dropped his flashlight; it rolled away, causing the shadows to leap and sway.

Frye was fast, damned fast. He struck again as Tony was just going into a defensive posture. This time the knife scored solidly if peculiarly, coming down point-first on the top of his left shoulder, driving through jacket and sweater, through muscle and gristle, between bones, instantly taking all the strength out of that arm and forcing Tony to his knees. Somehow Tony found the energy to swing his right fist up from the floor, into Frye's testicles. The big man gasped and staggered backwards, pulling the knife out of Tony as he went.

Unaware of what was happening above her, Hilary called up from the foot of the stairs. "Tony! Joshua! Come down here and see what I've found."

Frye whirled at the sound of Hilary's voice. He headed for the steps, apparently forgetting that he was leaving a wounded but living man behind him.

Tony got up, but a napalm explosion of pain set fire to his arm, and he swayed dizzily. His stomach flopped over. He had to lean against the wall.

All he could do was warn her. "Hilary, run! Run! Frye's coming!"

Hilary was about to call up to them again when she heard Tony shouting to her. For an instant, she couldn't believe what he was saying, but then she heard heavy footsteps on the first flight, thumping down. He was still out of sight above the landing, but she knew he couldn't be anyone but Bruno Frye.

Then Frye's gravelly voice boomed: "Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch!"

Stunned, but not frozen with shock, Hilary backed away from the foot of the stairs, and then she ran as she saw Frye reach the landing. Too late, she realized she should have gone toward the front of the house, outside, to the cable car; but she was streaking toward the kitchen instead, and there was no turning back now.

She pushed through the swinging door, into the kitchen, as Frye jumped down the last few steps and into the hallway behind her.

She thought of searching the kitchen drawers for a knife.

Couldn't. No time.

She ran to the outside door, unlocked it, and bolted from the kitchen as Frye entered it through the swinging door.

The only weapon she had was the flashlight she had been carrying, and that was no weapon at all.

She crossed the porch, went down the steps. Rain and wind battered her.

He was not far behind. He was still chanting, "Bitch, bitch, bitch!"

She would never be able to run around the house and all the way to the cable car before he caught her. He was much too close and gaining.

The wet grass was slick.

She was afraid of falling.

Of dying.

Tony?

She ran toward the only place that might offer protection: the doors in the ground.

Lightning flickered, and thunder followed it.

Frye wasn't screaming behind her any more. She heard a deep, animal growl of pleasure.

Very close.

Now she was screaming.

She reached the doors in the hillside and saw that they were latched together at both the top and bottom. She reached and threw back the top bolt, then stooped and disengaged the one on the bottom, expecting a blade to be slammed down between her shoulders. The blow never came. She pulled open the doors, and there was inky blackness beyond.

She turned.

Rain stung her face.

Frye had stopped. He was standing just six feet away.

She waited in the open doors with darkness at her back, and she wondered what was behind her other than a flight of steps.

"Bitch," Frye said.

But now there was more fear than fury in his face.

"Put the knife down," she said, not knowing if he would obey, doubting it, but having nothing to lose. "Obey your mother, Bruno. Put the knife down."

He took a step toward her.

Hilary stood her ground. Her heart was exploding.

Frye moved closer.

Shaking, she backed down the first step that lay beyond the doors.

Just as Tony reached the head of the stairs, supporting himself with one hand against the wall, he heard a noise behind him. He looked back.

Joshua had crawled out of the bedroom. He was splashed with blood, and his face was nearly as white as his hair. His eyes seemed out of focus.

"How bad?" Tony asked.

Joshua licked his pale lips. "I'll live," he said in a strange, hissing, croaking voice. "Hilary. For God's sake ... Hilary!"

Tony pushed away from the wall and careened down the stairs. He weaved back down the hall toward the kitchen, for he could hear Frye shouting out on the rear lawn.

In the kitchen, Tony pulled open one drawer, then another, looking for a weapon.

"Come on, dammit! Shit!"

The third drawer held knives. He chose the largest one. It was spotted with rust but still wickedly sharp.

His left arm was killing him. He wanted to cradle it in his right arm, but he needed that hand to fight Frye.

Gritting his teeth, steeling himself against the pain of his wounds, lurching like a drunkard, he went out to the porch. He saw Frye at once. The man was standing in front of two open doors. Two doors in the ground.

Hilary was nowhere in sight.

Hilary backed off the sixth step. That was the last one. Bruno Frye stood at the head of the stairs, looking down, afraid to come any farther. He was alternately calling her a bitch and whimpering as if he were a child. He was clearly torn between two needs: the need to kill her, and the need to get away from that hated place.

Whispers.

Suddenly she heard the whispers, and her flesh seemed to turn to ice in that instant. It was a wordless hissing, a soft sound, but growing louder by the second.

And then she felt something crawling up her leg.

She cried out and moved up one step, closer to Frye. She reached down, brushed at her leg, and knocked something away.

Shuddering, she switched on the flashlight, turned, and shone the beam into the subterranean room behind her.

Roaches. Hundreds upon hundreds of huge roaches were swarming in the room--on the floor, on the walls, on the low ceiling. They were not just ordinary roaches, but enormous things, over two inches long, an inch wide, with busy legs and especially long feelers that quivered anxiously. Their shiny green-brown carapaces appeared to be sticky and wet, like blobs of dark mucus.

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.

Whispers was the last book I wrote in total obscurity and the last book I wrote on a typewriter. In those days, personal computers were not universally in use, though a few writers had them. (To help you understand this ancient era: Most of the dinosaurs had died off by that time; we had indoor plumbing, electricity, and the internal-combustion engine; abductions by extraterrestrials were not yet an everyday occurrence back then; but most people were naive enough to believe that Elvis Presley was dead--when, as we now know, he had moved to a fabulous mansion on a moon of Jupiter.) My wife, Gerda, had been urging me to trade my typewriter for a computer. When I finished Whispers, she informed me that she had tracked our office supplies, and that for every page in the final manuscript, I had used thirty-two pages of typing paper, which meant that I had done thirty-one discarded drafts of every page, typing eight hundred pages of text again and again to polish it. Although I was aware of my obsessive-compulsive rewriting, I hadn't realized quite how many revisions I usually undertook. With a computer, revision didn't require retyping an entire page to make half a dozen changes. I bought an IBM Displaywriter (now as extinct as the T-Rex) and never looked back.

During the last few months that I sat at the typewriter, working on this novel, I lost twenty pounds. I was not overweight when I started the project, and I didn't diet while writing. When I finished the script--which took nearly a year of long hours--I was not only thinner but both physically and emotionally exhausted. For years, I didn't realize why this project drained me. A decade later, I could look back on the book and understand that I was writing out of painful personal experience, which I couldn't acknowledge at the time. Virtually all the characters in Whispers suffer terrible, violent childhoods. Some overcome those traumas, and some do not; indeed, one of them becomes a serial killer. I, too, had lived through a childhood marked by physical and psychological violence. Although my experience was not like that of Hillary in Whispers, and certainly not like that of Bruno, I was nevertheless drawing upon my own life for the emotional content of the novel, while only half realizing what I was doing, which is why the writing of it left me so depleted.

When the book was delivered to the publisher, I was asked to slash the manuscript in half. I was told that the story was too long and that I was "a mid-list suspense writer" who had overreached. The publisher was smart, successful, and perceptive, but I felt that this particular judgment was wrong. Although I desperately needed to be paid for the acceptance of the manuscript, I found only five pages to cut out of eight hundred pages of manuscript, less than one percent, and I declined to delete any more.

For the next four months, as the debate continued and my career seemed doomed, I studied the help-wanted ads with growing panic. I had taught highschool English for a year and a half before becoming a full-time writer; perhaps I could return to the classroom. Perusing the employment opportunities, I saw that exotic dancers earned more than teachers, but to achieve the highest earnings as a stripper, I would need to have a sex-change operation as well as a great deal of body contouring.

At last, the publisher reluctantly accepted the book and issued it without enthusiasm in a small printing of seven thousand hardcovers, which wasn't enough to put even one copy in every bookstore. Fortunately, I was kept afloat by a motion-picture rights sale, a bookclub sale, and the enthusiasm of a paperback publisher who believed Whispers could be a major success. Eventually, when issued in paperback, it rose into the top five of the New York Times's paperback bestsellers list. As I write this afterword, Whispers has been published in thirty-three languages and has been continuously in print for nearly two decades.

The lesson for me was one I had already learned well as a child under the thumb of an alcoholic father: In the face of adversity, it's important to persevere, to be optimistic, and to be true to your personal vision. This insight is, in fact, expressed by the actions of the lead characters--Hillary and Tony--in Whispers, and is one of the themes of the novel.

Primarily, however, Whispers explores the forces that affect our lives but that we often do not--or refuse to--contemplate. Geography and climate (in this novel, California) deeply influence us in more ways than we generally recognize on a conscious level. The subculture in which we choose to involve ourselves can either inspire us to be great or diminish us. And family history, for better or worse, shapes us more profoundly than anything else.

I still like this novel and feel that it was a milestone for me. I regret only the rigid Freudian nature of the psychology underlying the history. In the years since, I've come to believe that Freudianism is pure bunkum and to deplore the culture of victimization that it has generated. John D. MacDonald--the brilliant novelist whose work most influenced mine when I was young--might say, "Kid, don't worry about it. Freud or no Freud, the yarn is still good." That is, of course, the right attitude, and I hope that the yarn in Whispers is, indeed, still good.

Anyway, this is the book that saved me from a life of crime. No banks robbed. No airliners hijacked. No armored cars hit. I've had a couple speeding tickets over the past two decades, but in neither case did the authorities consider the offense serious enough to throw me in the slammer. Furthermore, I've gained back the twenty pounds--plus a few.