The House of Thunder (15 page)

“I’d like to hear it.”

“Well, when I was completing my residency at a hospital in Seattle—more years ago than I like to remember—we had a lot of cases of drug overdose. People were always coming into the emergency ward—or being brought in by police—suffering from bad drug trips, uncontrollable hallucinations that had them either climbing walls or shooting at phantoms with a real shotgun. No matter whether it was LSD, PCP, or some other substance, we didn’t treat the patient with just counteractive drugs. We also talked him down. Encouraged him to loosen up. We held his hand and soothed him. Told him the big bad boogeymen he was seeing weren’t real. And you know something? Usually, the talk did the trick, had a tremendous calming effect. I mean, frequently the talking down seemed more effective than the counteractive drugs that we administered.”

“And that’s what you want me to do when I see Harch or one of the others. You want me to talk myself down.”

“Yes.”

“Just tell myself they aren’t real?”

“Yes. Tell yourself they’re not real and they can’t hurt you.”

“Like saying a prayer to ward off vampires.”

“In fact if you feel that praying would ward them off, don’t hesitate. Don’t be embarrassed to pray.”

“I’ve never been a particularly religious person.”

“Doesn’t matter. If you want to pray, do it. Do whatever works for you. Do whatever you need to do to keep yourself calm until I’ve had a chance to come up with a permanent, medical solution for your condition.”

“All right. Whatever you say.”

“Ah, I’m pleased to see that you’ve finally got the proper subservient attitude toward your doctor.”

She smiled.

He glanced at his wristwatch.

Susan said, “I’ve made you late to the office.”

“Only a few minutes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. The only patients who had appointments this morning were all just hypochondriacs anyway.”

She laughed, surprised that she still could laugh.

He kissed her cheek. It was just a peck, a quick buss, and it was over before she realized it was happening. Yesterday, she had thought that he was going to kiss her on the cheek, but he had backed off at the last second. Now he had done it—and she still didn’t know what it meant. Was it merely an expression of sympathy, pity? Was it just affection? Just friendship? Or was it something more than that?

As soon as he had kissed her, he stood up, straightened his rumpled lab coat. “Spend the rest of the morning relaxing as best you can. Read, watch TV, anything to keep your mind off the House of Thunder.”

“I’ll call in the four look-alikes and get a poker game going,” she said.

McGee blinked, then shook his head and grinned. “You sure spring back fast.”

“Just obeying doctor’s orders. He wants me to keep a positive attitude, no matter what.”

“Mrs. Baker’s right.”

“About what?”

“About you. She says you’ve got plenty of moxie.”

“She’s too easily impressed.”

“Mrs. Baker? She wouldn’t be impressed if the Pope and the President walked through that door arm-in-arm.”

Self-conscious, feeling that she didn’t really deserve this praise after having broken down and wept, Susan straightened the blanket and the sheets around her and avoided responding to his compliment.

“Eat everything they give you for lunch,” McGee said. “Then this afternoon, I want you to take the physical therapy you were scheduled for this morning.”

Susan stiffened.

McGee must have seen the sudden change in her, for he said, “It’s important, Susan. You need to have physical therapy. It’ll get you back on your feet considerably faster. And if we discover some physical cause for your perceptual problems, something that necessitates major surgery, you’ll withstand the stress and strain of the operation a great deal better if you’re in good physical condition.”

Resigned, she said, “All right.”

“Excellent.”

“But please ...”

“What is it?”

“Don’t send Jelli—” She cleared her throat. “Don’t send Bradley and O’Hara to take me downstairs.”

“No problem. We’ve got plenty of other orderlies.”

“Thank you.”

“And remember—chin up.”

Susan put one fist under her chin, as if propping up her head, and she assumed a theatrical expression of heroic, iron-hard determination.

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Think of yourself as Sylvester Stallone in Rocky.”

“You think I look like Sylvester Stallone?”

“Well ... more than you look like Marlon Brando.”

“Gee, you sure know how to flatter a girl, Dr. McGee.”

“Yeah. I’m a regular lady-killer.” He winked at her, and it was the right kind of wink, very different from that which Bill Richmond had given her in the hall yesterday. “I’ll see you later, when I make my evening rounds.”

And then he was gone.

She was alone. Except for Jessica Seiffert. Which was the same as being alone.

She still hadn’t seen the woman.

Susan looked at the curtained bed. There was not even the slightest movement or noise from behind it.

At the moment, she did not want to be alone, so she said, “Mrs. Seiffert?”

There was no response.

She considered getting out of bed, going over there, and seeing if Mrs. Seiffert was all right. For reasons she could not explain, however, she was afraid to open that curtain.

Susan tried to follow doctor’s orders. She picked up a book and read for a few minutes, but she couldn’t get interested in the story. She switched on the TV, but she couldn’t find a program that held her attention. The only thing that engaged her interest was the mystery of the four look-alikes, the puzzle of their purpose. What did they intend to do to her? In spite of McGee’s advice, she spent a large part of the morning thinking about Harch and the other three, worrying.

Clear evidence of an unnatural fixation, obsession, psychological illness or brain dysfunction, she thought. I say I don’t believe in elaborate fantasies. I say I don’t believe in the occult. And yet I believe these four are real, including the two who are dead. It makes no sense.

But she worried anyway, and she looked forward with unalloyed dread to the prospect of being taken from her room for therapy. Not that she felt safe in her room. She didn’t. But at least her room was known territory. She didn’t want to go downstairs. She recalled the way Jellicoe ... the way Dennis Bradley had said it: “We’re here to take
you
downstairs.” It had an ominous sound.

Downstairs.

Feeling guilty about ignoring much of McGee’s advice, Susan made a point of eating everything she was served for lunch, which was what he had told her to do.

The condemned woman ate a hearty last meal, she thought with gallows humor. Then, angry with herself, she thought: Dammit, stop this! Get your act together, Thorton.

Just as she finished eating, the phone rang. It was a call from a couple of her fellow workers at Milestone. She didn’t remember them, but she tried to be pleasant, tried to think of them as friends. It was nevertheless an awkward and disturbing conversation, and she was relieved when they finally hung up.

An hour after lunch, two orderlies came with a wheeled stretcher. Neither of them even faintly resembled any of the four fraternity men.

The first was a burly, fiftyish man with a beer gut. He had thick graying hair and a gray mustache. “Hi ya, gorgeous. You ordered a taxi?”

The second man was about thirty-five. He was bald and had a smooth, open, almost childlike face. He said, “We’re here to take you away from all this.”

“I was expecting a limousine,” she said.

“Hey, sweetheart, what d’ya think this is?” the older one asked. He swept his open hand across the wheeled stretcher as if he were presenting an elegant motor coach. “Look at those classic lines!” He slapped the stretcher’s three-inch foam mattress. “Look at that upholstery. Nothing but the best, the finest.”

The bald one said, “Is there any other mode of transportation, other than a limousine, in which you could ride lying down?”

“With a chauffeur,” said the older one, putting down the rail on her bed.

“With two chauffeurs,” the bald one said, pushing the stretcher against the side of her bed. “I’m Phil. The other gent is Elmer Murphy.”

“They call me Murf.”

“They call him worse than that.”

Although she was still afraid of being taken downstairs, into unknown territory, Susan was amused by their patter. Their friendliness, their efforts to make her feel at ease, and her determination not to disappoint McGee gave her sufficient courage to slide off the bed and onto the stretcher. Looking up at them, she said, “Are you two always like this?”

“Like what?” Murf asked.

“She means charming,” Phil said, slipping a small, somewhat hard pillow under her head.

“Oh, yeah,” Murf said. “We’re always charming.”

“Cary Grant has nothing on us.”

“It’s just something we were born with.”

Phil said, “If you look under ‘charm’ in the dictionary—”

“—you’ll see our faces,” Murf finished for him.

They put a thin blanket over her, put one strap across her to keep the blanket in place, and wheeled her into the hall.

To keep from thinking about where she was going, Susan said, “Why this contraption? Why not a wheelchair?”

“We can’t deal with patients in wheelchairs,” Phil said.

“They’re too mobile,” Murf said.

“Americans love mobility.”

“They hate to sit still.”

Phil said, “If we leave a patient alone in a wheelchair for just ten seconds—”

“—he’s halfway to Mesopotamia by the time we get back,” Murf finished.

They were at the elevators. Murf pushed the white button labeled Down.

“Lovely place,” Phil said as the doors opened wide.

“What?” Murf said. “This elevator? Lovely?”

“No,” Phil said. “Mesopotamia.”

“You been there, huh?”

“That’s where I spend my winters.”

“Ya know, I don’t think there is a Mesopotamia any more.”

“Better not let the Mesopotamians hear you say that,” Phil warned him.

They kept up their chatter in the elevator and all the way along the first-floor hall into the Physical Therapy Department, which was in one of the building’s short wings. There, they turned her over to Mrs. Florence Atkinson, the specially trained therapist who was in charge of the hospital’s PT program.

Florence Atkinson was a small, dark, birdlike woman, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. She guided Susan through half an hour of exercises, using a variety of machines and modified gym equipment that gave a workout to every muscle group. There was nothing in the least strenuous about it; a healthy person would have found it all laughably easy. “For your first couple of visits,” Mrs. Atkinson said, “we’ll concentrate primarily on passive exercise.” But at the end of the half hour, Susan was exhausted and achy. Following the exercise period, she was given a massage that made her feel as if she were a loose collection of disjointed bones and ligaments that God had neglected to assemble into human form. After the massage, there was a session in the whirlpool. The hot, swirling water leeched the remaining tension out of her, so that she felt not just loose but liquid. Best of all, she was allowed to take a shower in a stall that was equipped with a seat and handrails for invalids. The glorious feeling and scent of soap, hot water, and steam was so wonderful, so exquisite, that merely taking a bath seemed deliciously sinful.

Florence Atkinson dried Susan’s shaggy blond hair with an electric blower while she sat in front of a dressing table mirror. It was the first time she had looked in a mirror in more than a day, and she was delighted to see that the bags under her eyes were entirely gone. The skin around her eyes was still a bit on the bluish side, but not much, and she actually had a touch of rosy color in her cheeks. The thin scar on her forehead was less red and swollen than it had been yesterday morning, when the bandages had come off, and she had no difficulty believing that it really would be all but invisible when it was entirely healed.

In her green pajamas again, she got onto the wheeled stretcher, and Mrs. Atkinson pushed her into the PT Department’s waiting room. “Phil and Murf will be around for you in a few minutes.”

“They can take their time. I feel like I’m floating on a warm, blue ocean. I could lay here forever,” she said, wondering how on earth she could ever have been so afraid of being brought downstairs to PT.

She stared at the acoustic-tile ceiling for a minute or two, finding outlines of objects in the pattern of dots: a giraffe, a sailboat, a palm tree. Drowsy, she closed her eyes and yawned.

“She looks too satisfied, Phil.”

“Yes, she does, Murf”

She opened her eyes and smiled up at them.

“Got to be careful about pampering the patients too much,” Phil said.

“Massages, whirlpools, chauffeurs ...”

“Pretty soon, she’ll be wanting breakfast in bed.”

“What is this, Phil, a hospital or a country club?”

“Sometimes I wonder, Murf.”

“Well, if it isn’t the Laurel and Hardy of Willawauk Hospital,” Susan said.

They wheeled her out of the PT waiting room.

Murf said, “Laurel and Hardy? No, we think of ourselves more as the Bob and Ray of Willawauk.”

They turned the corner into the long main hall. The hard pillow raised Susan’s head just enough so she could see that the corridor was deserted. It was the first time she’d seen an empty hallway in the bustling hospital.

“Bob and Ray?” Phil said to Murf. “Speak for yourself. Me, I think I’m the Robert Redford of Willawauk.”