The House of Thunder (12 page)

The night lamp provided little light, but the room was not entirely dark. As far as she could see, no one was there.

She waited to hear her name again.

The night remained silent.

“Who’s there?” she asked at last, squinting into the purple-black shadows in the corners of the room.

No one answered.

Shaking off the last clinging threads of sleep, she realized that the voice had come from her left, from the curtained bed. And it had been a man’s voice.

The curtain still encircled the bed. In spite of the gloom, she could see it. The white material reflected and seemed even to amplify the meager glow of the night light. The curtain appeared to shimmer like a cloud of phosphorus.

“Is someone there?” she asked.

Silence.

“Mrs. Seiffert?”

The curtain didn’t move.

Nothing moved.

According to the radiant face of the nightstand clock, it was 3:42 in the morning.

Susan hesitated, then snapped on the bedside lamp. The bright light stung her eyes, and she left it on only long enough to be sure there was no one lurking where the shadows had been. Jessica Seiffert’s shrouded bed looked far less threatening in full light than it had in darkness.

She clicked off the lamp.

The shadows scurried back to their nests, and their nests were everywhere.

Maybe I was dreaming, she thought. Maybe it was only a voice calling to me in a dream.

But she was pretty sure that tonight had provided the first dreamless sleep she’d had since coming out of her coma.

She fumbled for the bed controls and raised herself halfway up into a sitting position. For a while she listened to the darkness, waited.

She didn’t think she would be able to get back to sleep. The strange voice had reminded her of the Harch and Quince look-alikes, and that seemed like a perfect prescription for insomnia. But the sedative she had been given was evidently still doing its work, for in time she dozed.

All day yesterday a storm had been pending. The sky had looked beaten, bruised, and swollen.

Now, Tuesday morning, the storm broke with no warning other than a single clap of thunder so loud that it seemed to shake the entire hospital. Rain fell suddenly and heavily like a giant tent collapsing with a whoosh and a roar.

Susan couldn’t see the storm because the curtain around the other bed blocked her view of the window. But she could hear the thunder and see the brilliant flashes of lightning. The fat raindrops pounded on the unseen windowpane with the force of drumbeats.

She ate a filling breakfast of hot cereal, toast, juice, and a sweet roll, shuffled to and from the bathroom with more assurance and with less pain than she’d had last evening, then settled down in bed with another mystery novel.

She had read only a few pages when two orderlies arrived with a wheeled stretcher. The first one through the door said, “We’re here to take you down to the physical therapy department, Miss Thorton.”

She put her book aside, looked up—and felt as if February had just breathed down the back of her neck.

They were dressed in hospital whites, and the blue stitched lettering on their shirt pockets said Willawauk County Hos
pital,
but they weren’t merely two orderlies. They weren’t anything as simple as that, nothing as ordinary as that.

The first man, the one who had spoken, was about five feet seven, pudgy, with dirty blond hair, a round face, dimpled chin, pug nose, and the small quick eyes of a pig. The other was taller, perhaps six feet, with red hair, hazel eyes, and a fair complexion spattered with freckles under the eyes and across the bridge of the nose; he was not handsome, but certainly good looking, and his open face, his soft-edged features, were distinctly Irish.

The pudgy one was Carl Jellicoe.

The redhead was Herbert Parker.

They were the last of the four fraternity brothers from the House of Thunder, friends of Harch and Quince.

Impossible. Nightmare creatures. They were meant to inhabit only the land of sleep.

But she was awake. And they were here. Real.

“Some storm, isn’t it?” Jellicoe asked conversationally as a cannonade of thunder shot through the sky.

Parker pushed the wheeled stretcher all the way into the room and parked it parallel to Susan’s bed.

Both men were smiling.

She realized that they were young, twenty or twenty-one. Like the others, they had been utterly untouched by the passing of thirteen years.

Two more look-alikes? Showing up here at the same time? Both of them employed as orderlies by the Willawauk County Hospital? No. Ridiculous. Preposterous. The odds against such an incredible coincidence were astronomical.

They had to be the real thing, Jellicoe and Parker themselves, not dead ringers.

But then, with stomach-wrenching suddenness, she remembered that Jellicoe and Parker were dead.

Dammit, they were dead.

Yet they were here, too, smiling at her.

Madness.

“No,” Susan said, shrinking back from them, moving to the opposite edge of the bed, tight up against the tubular metal railing, which burned coldly through her thin pajamas. “No, I’m not going downstairs with you. Not me.”

Jellicoe feigned puzzlement. Pretending not to see that she was terrified, pretending not to understand what she really meant, he glanced at Parker and said, “Have we fouled up? I thought we were supposed to bring down Thorton in two fifty-eight.”

Parker fished in his shirt pocket, pulled out a folded slip of paper, opened it, read it. “Says right here. Thorton in two-five-eight.”

Susan wouldn’t have thought she’d known Jellicoe and Parker well enough to recognize their voices after thirteen years. She had met both of them for the first time on the night that they and the two others had beaten and murdered Jerry Stein. At the trial, Jellicoe had not spoken a word on the witness stand, had never even taken the stand, for he had exercised his rights under the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating himself; Parker had testified but not at length. Indeed, she didn’t recognize Carl Jellicoe’s voice. But when Herbert Parker spoke, reading from the slip of paper he had taken from his shirt pocket, Susan jerked in surprise, for he spoke with a Boston accent, which was something she had nearly forgotten.

He looked like Parker. He spoke like Parker. He had to be Parker.

But Herbert Parker was dead, buried, and rotting away in a grave
somewhere!

They were both looking at her strangely.

She wanted to look at the nightstand, behind her, to see if there was anything she could conceivably use as a weapon, but she didn’t dare take her eyes off them.

Jellicoe said, “Didn’t your doctor tell you we’d be taking you downstairs for therapy this morning?”

“Get out of here,” she said, her voice strained, tremulous. “Go away.”

The two men glanced at each other.

A series of preternaturally brilliant lightning bolts pierced the cloud-dark day, shimmered on the rain-washed windowpane, and cast stroboscopic patterns of light and shadow on the wall opposite the foot of Susan’s bed. The eerie light briefly transformed Carl Jellicoe’s face, distorted it, so that for an instant his eyes were sunken caverns with a bead of hot white light far down at the bottom of each.

To Susan, Parker said, “Hey, listen, there’s really nothing to worry about. It’s only therapy, you know. It’s not painful or anything like that.”

“Yeah,” Jellicoe said, now that the incredible barrage of lightning was over. He wrinkled his piggish face in an unnaturally broad smile. “You’ll really like it down in the PT department, Miss Thorton.” He stepped up to the bed and started to put down the railing on that side. “You’ll
love
the whirlpool.”

“I said, get out!” Susan screamed. “Get out! Get the hell out of here!”

Jellicoe flinched, stepped back.

Susan shook violently. Each beat of her heart was like the concrete-busting impact of a triphammer.

If she got on the stretcher and let them take her downstairs, she would never be brought back again. That would be the end of her. She knew it. She knew it.

“I’ll claw your eyes out if you try to take me from this room,” she said, struggling to keep the tremor out of her voice. “I mean it.”

Jellicoe looked at Parker. “Better get a nurse.”

Parker hurried out of the room.

The hospital’s lights dimmed, went off, and for a moment there was only the funereal light of the storm-gray day, and then the power came on again.

Jellicoe turned his small, close-set eyes on Susan and favored her with an utterly empty smile that made her chilled blood even colder. “Just take it easy, huh? Look, lady, just relax. Will you do that for me?”

“Stay away.”

“Nobody’s going to come near you. So just stay calm,” he said in a soft, singsong voice, making a placating gesture with his hands. “Nobody wants to hurt you. We’re all your friends here.”

“Dammit, don’t pretend that you think I’m crazy,” she said. She was both terrified and furious. “You know damned well I’m not nuts. You know what’s going on here. I don’t know, but you sure as hell do.”

He stared at her, saying nothing. But there was mockery in his eyes and in the smug half-smile that turned up only one corner of his mouth.

“Get back,” Susan said. “Get away from the bed.
Now!”

Jellicoe retreated to the open door, but he didn’t leave the room.

The sound of Susan’s own heartbeat was so loud in her ears that it challenged the rain-wind-thunder-lightning chorus of the autumn storm.

Each breath caught in her dry, jagged throat and had to be torn loose with conscious effort.

Jellicoe watched her.

This can’t be happening, she told herself frantically. I’m a rational woman. I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in miraculous coincidences, and as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, I don’t believe in the supernatural. There aren’t such things as ghosts. Dead men don’t come back. They don’t!

Jellicoe watched her.

Susan cursed her weak, emaciated body. Even if she had a chance to run, she wouldn’t get more than a few steps. And if they forced her to fight for her life, she wouldn’t last very long.

Finally, Herbert Parker returned with a nurse, a severe looking blonde who was a stranger to Susan.

“What’s wrong here?” the nurse asked. “Miss Thorton, why are you upset?”

“These men,” she said.

“What about them?” the nurse asked, coming to the bed.

“They want to hurt me,” Susan said.

“No, they only want to take you down to the physical therapy department on the first floor,” the nurse said. She was at the bed now, at the side where Carl Jellicoe had lowered the safety railing.

“You don’t understand,” Susan said, wondering how in the name of God she could explain the situation to this woman without sounding like a raving lunatic.

Parker was standing at the open door. He said, “She threatened to claw our eyes out.”

Jellicoe had drifted closer and was near the foot of the bed; too near.

“Back off, you bastard,” Susan said, virtually spitting the words at him.

He ignored her.

To the nurse, Susan said, “Tell him to back off. You don’t understand. I’ve got good reason to be afraid of him. Tell him!”

“Now, there’s no reason on earth for you to be upset,” the nurse said.

“We’re all your friends here,” Jellicoe said.

“Susan, do you know where you are?” the nurse asked in a tone of voice usually reserved for very young children, very old people, and the mentally disturbed.

Frustrated, angry, Susan shouted at her. “Hell, yes, I know where I am. I’m in the Willawauk County Hospital. I suffered a head injury, and I was in a coma for three weeks, but I’m not suffering any kind of relapse. I’m not having hallucinations or delusions. I’m not hysterical. These men are—”

“Susan, would you do something for me?” the nurse asked, still using that excessively reasonable, syrupy, patronizing tone of voice. “Would you not shout? Would you please lower your voice? If you would just lower your voice and take a minute to catch your breath, I’m sure you’ll feel calmer. Just take a few deep breaths and try to relax. Nothing can be accomplished until we’re all relaxed and at ease with one another, until we’re all polite to one another.”

“Christ!” Susan said, burning with frustration.

“Susan, I want to give you this,” the nurse said. She raised one hand; she was holding a damp cotton pad and a hypodermic syringe that she had already filled with an amber fluid.

“No,” Susan said, shaking her head.

“It’ll help you relax.”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to relax?”

“I want to keep my guard up.”

“It won’t hurt, Susan.”

“Get away from me.”

The nurse leaned across the bed toward her.

Susan snatched up the paperback book that she’d been reading and threw it in the woman’s face.

The nurse took a step backwards, but she was unhurt. She looked at Jellicoe. “Can you help me?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Stay away,” Susan warned him.

Jellicoe started around the side of the bed.

She twisted to her left, scooped a drinking glass off the nightstand, and pitched it at Jellicoe’s head.

He ducked, and the glass missed, shattered explosively against the wall beyond him.

Susan looked for something else to throw.

He moved in fast, and she tried to claw his face, and he seized her wrists in his viselike hands. He was stronger than he looked. She couldn’t have wrenched free of him even if she’d been in better condition.

“Don’t struggle,” the nurse said.

“We’re all your friends here,” Carl Jellicoe said for the third time.