"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?"

"h.e.l.l."

"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 G.o.d!"

"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 G.o.d'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 d.a.m.ned 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 bas.e.m.e.nts 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 att.i.tude 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 ap.r.o.n 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.