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.