Whispers (59 page)

A tape recorder stood on the circular coffee table, and two piles of cassettes lay beside it, fourteen in one pile, four in the other. Rudge leaned forward in his chair and picked up one of the four.

“All of my consultations are recorded and stored in a safe,” the doctor said. “These are tapes of Mr. Frye’s sessions. Last night, after I spoke with Mr. Rhinehart on the phone, I listened to portions of these recordings to see if I could find a few representative selections. I had a hunch you might convince me to open the file, and I thought it might be better if you could hear Bruno Frye’s complaints in his own voice.”

“Excellent,” Joshua said.

“This first one is from the very first session,” Dr. Rudge said. “For the first forty minutes, Frye would say almost nothing at all. It was very strange. He seemed outwardly calm and self-possessed, but I saw that he was frightened and trying to conceal his true feelings. He was afraid to talk to me. He almost got up and left. But I kept working at him gently, very gently. In the last ten minutes, he told me what he’d come to see me about, but even then it was like pulling teeth to get it out of him. Here’s part of it.”

Rudge pushed the cassette into the recorder and snapped on the machine.

When Hilary heard the familiar, deep, gravelly voice, she felt a chill race down her spine.

Frye spoke first:

 
In Nicholas Rudge’s office, everyone was watching the tape recorder.

Frye’s voice was still gravelly, but there was raw terror in it now.

Hilary almost could see the big man’s fear-twisted face—the shock-wide eyes, the pale skin, the cold sweat along his hairline.

The tape continued:

 
Dr. Rudge popped the cassette out of the tape recorder and said, “A recurring nightmare. That’s not particularly unusual. But a nightmare followed by tactile and audial hallucinations—that’s not a common complaint.”

“And in spite of that,” Joshua said, “he didn’t strike you as dangerous?”

“Oh, heavens, no,” Rudge said. “He was just frightened of a dream, and understandably so. And the fact that some dream sensations lingered even after he was awake meant that the nightmare probably represented some especially horrible, repressed experience buried way down in his subconscious. But nightmares are generally a healthy way to let off psychological steam. He exhibited no signs of psychosis. He didn’t seem to confuse components of his dream with reality. He drew a clear line when he talked about it. In his mind, there appeared to be a sharp distinction between the nightmare and the real world.”

Tony slid forward on his chair. “Could he have been less sure of reality than he let you know?”

“You mean . . . could he have fooled me?”

“Could he?”

Rudge nodded. “Psychology isn’t an exact science. And by comparison, psychiatry is even less exact. Yes, he could have fooled me, especially since I only saw him once a month and didn’t have a chance to observe the mood swings and personality changes that would have been more evident if we’d had weekly contact.”

“In light of what Joshua told you a while ago,” Hilary said, “do you feel you
were
fooled?”

Rudge smiled ruefully. “It looks as if I was, doesn’t it?”

He picked up a second cassette that had been wound to a pre-selected point in another conversation between him and Frye, and he slipped it into the recorder.

 
For almost a minute, there was silence. The tape wound from spool to spool, producing only a hissing sound.

“I’m just waiting him out,” Rudge said, interpreting the silence for them. “He’ll speak in a moment.”

 
“Jesus!” Tony said. “That’s where he got the notion that Katherine had come back. The woman planted the idea in him before she died!”

To Rudge, Joshua said, “What in the name of God was the woman trying to do? What sort of relationship did those two have?”

“That was the root of his problem,” Rudge said. “But we never got around to exposing it. I kept hoping I could get him to come in every week, but he kept resisting—and then he was dead.”

“Did you pursue the subject of ghosts with him in later sessions?” Hilary asked.

“Yes,” the doctor said. “The very next time he came in, he started off on it again. He said that the dead stayed dead and that only children and fools believed differently. He said there weren’t such things as ghosts and zombies. He wanted me to know that he had never believed Katherine when she’d told him that she would come back.”

“But he was lying,” Hilary said. “he did believe her.”

“Apparently, he did,” Rudge said. He put the third tape in the machine.