Whispers

Page 66

 
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."