Whispers

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.