“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.