The House of Thunder (18 page)

Yet she knew it had happened to her. Just like in the movies.

All right, she thought, if it is love, then why is it? Have I fallen in love with him only because I’m sick and weak and helpless, only because I’m grateful to have a strong, reliable man on my side? If that’s it, then it could hardly be called love; it’s merely gratitude and a shameless, headlong flight from responsibility for my own life.

However, the more she thought about it, the more she came to feel that the love had been there first. Or at the very least, the love and the desperate need for McGee’s strength had come to her simultaneously.

Which came first, she thought, the chicken or the egg? And does it matter anyway? What matters is how I feel about him—and I really want him.

Since, for the time being, romance had to take second place to recuperation, she tried to put the subject out of her mind. After dinner, she read several chapters of a good mystery novel and ate three or four chocolates. The night nurse, a perky brunette named Tina Scolari, brought Susan some ginger ale. She read more of the mystery, and it got even better. Outside, the rain stopped falling, and the irritatingly monotonous drumming of water on the windowpane ceased at last. She asked for and was given a second glass of ginger ale. The evening was relatively pleasant. For a while.

10

Nurse Scolari came in at 9:15. “You’ve got an early day tomorrow. Lots of tests.” She gave Susan a small pill cup that contained a single pink tablet, the mild sedative that McGee had prescribed for her. While Susan washed the pill down with the last of her second glass of ginger ale, Nurse Scolari checked on Jessica Seiffert in the next bed, drawing back the curtain just far enough to ease behind it. When she reappeared, she said to Susan, “Lights out as soon as you feel drowsy.”

“Sooner than that, even. I just want to finish this chapter,” Susan said, indicating the book she had been reading. “Just two more paragraphs.”

“Want me to help you to the bathroom then?”

“Oh, no. I can make it on my own.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, positive.”

The nurse stopped by the door and flipped up the switch that turned on the small night light at the far end of the room, so that Susan wouldn’t have to cross the room to do it later. The swinging door had been propped open all day; on her way out, Nurse Scolari pushed up the rubber-tipped prop that was fixed to the base of the door, and she pulled the door shut behind her.

After Susan had read two more paragraphs, she got out of bed and went into the bathroom, trailing one hand lightly along the wall, so she could lean on it for support if that were suddenly necessary. After she brushed her teeth, she returned to bed. Her legs were weak and sore, especially the calves and the backs of her thighs, but she was no longer dangerously shaky. She walked without fear of falling, even though she was not yet entirely sure-footed, and even though she knew she still couldn’t travel any great distance under her own steam.

In bed, she fluffed her pillows and used the power controls to lower the upper end of the mattress. She switched off the lamp that stood on her nightstand.

The moon-soft beams of the night light fell upon the curtain that enclosed Jessica Seiffert’s bed and, as it had done last night, the white fabric seemed to absorb the light, magnify it, and cast back a phosphoric glow all of its own, making it by far the most prominent object in the shadowy room. Susan stared at it for a minute or two and felt a renewal of the curiosity and uneasiness that had plagued her ever since the unseen Seiffert woman had been brought into the room.

She nearly exploded off the bed in surprise, sat straight up, quivering, the covers thrown back, her breath quick-frozen in her lungs, her heart briefly stilled.

The voice was thin, dry, brittle, a voice of dust and ashes and time-ravaged vocal cords. It possessed a disturbing, bone-chilling quality that seemed, to Susan, to be inexplicably yet undeniably sinister.

Even as low as it was, even as raspy and tortured as it was, that ruined voice was nevertheless clearly, indisputably masculine. And it was coming from behind the luminous curtain, from Jessica Seiffert’s shrouded bed.

Susan finally managed to draw a breath, with a shudder and a gasp. Her heart started again with a thud.

Last night, waking in the dead and lonely hours of the morning, she had thought she’d heard a voice calling to her from behind the curtain, but she had convinced herself that it had been only part of a dream, and she had gone back to sleep. Her senses had been dulled by sedatives, and she had not been sufficiently clear-headed to recognize that the voice was, indeed, real. Tonight, however, she was not asleep nor even sleepy yet; the sedative hadn’t begun to take effect. Wide-eyed, not the least bit drowsy, she had no doubt whatsoever that the voice was real.

It was the pleading cry of some grim and grisly siren, and it exerted an emotional, visceral pull that was almost physical in its intensity. Although she was afraid of the bizarre voice and was afraid, too, of whatever man—whatever create—owned that voice, she had the urge to get up and go to Mrs. Seiffert’s bed; she felt strangely compelled to draw back the white curtain and confront the being who was summoning her. She gripped a wad of sheets in one hand, seized the cold bed rail with the other hand, and resisted that crazy urge with all her might.

She fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp, found it after too many seconds had ticked by in darkness, clicked it. Light drove back the shadows, which seemed to retreat only with the greatest reluctance, as if they were hungry wolves that were slinking grudgingly away from prey that had at first appeared to be easy pickings.

Susan stared at the curtained bed. Waited.

There wasn’t a sound.

Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Half a minute.

Nothing. Silence.

At last she said, “Who’s there?”

No response.

More than twenty-four hours had passed since Susan had returned from her wheelchair constitutional to discover that a roommate had been installed in the other bed. Mrs. Baker had told her that it was Jessica Seiffert; otherwise, she wouldn’t have known with whom she was sharing her room. More than twenty-four hours, and still she hadn’t gotten a glimpse of Mrs. Seiffert. Nor had she heard the old woman speak a single word: she’d heard only that vague, wordless murmur that had answered Jeff McGee’s questions, that soft mumbled response to the various nurses who had gone behind the curtain. People had come and gone and come again, attending to Mrs. Seiffert with commendable concern and diligence—emptying the old woman’s bedpan, taking her temperature and her blood pressure, timing her pulse, feeding her meals, giving her medicine, changing her bed linens, offering her encouragement—but in spite of all that activity, Susan had not gotten even one brief peek at the mysterious occupant of the other bed.

And now she was troubled by the unsettling notion that Jessie Seiffert had never been in that bed to begin with. It was someone else. Ernest Harch? One of the other three fraternity men? Or something even worse than that?

This is insane.

It had to be Jessica Seiffert in that bed, for if it was not her, then everyone in the hospital was involved in some grotesque conspiracy. Which was impossible. Thoughts like those—paranoid fantasies of complicated conspiracies—were only additional proof of her brain dysfunction. Mrs. Baker hadn’t lied to her. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name. Yet she couldn’t stop considering the possibility that Jessica Seiffert didn’t exist, that the unseen roommate was someone far less innocent and far less harmless than an old woman dying of cancer.

“Who’s there?” she demanded again.

Again, there was no reply.

“Dammit,” she said, “I know I didn’t just imagine you!”

Or did I?

“I heard you call me,” she said.

Or did I only think I heard it?

“Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”

She jerked as if she had been slapped, for the voice was even eerier in bright light than it had been in darkness. It belonged to darkness; it seemed impossible, twice as monstrous, when heard in the light.

Stay calm, she told herself. Stay cool. Stay collected. If I’ve got a brain injury that causes me to see things that are not really there, then it’s entirely logical that it also causes me to hear sounds that were never made. Auditory hallucinations. There are such things.

She had to regain control of herself before this episode progressed any further; she had to quickly squelch this incipient hysteria. She had to prove to herself that there was no voice coming from behind the curtain, that it was only an imagined voice. The best way to prove it was to go straight over there and draw back the curtain. The only thing she would find in Jessica Seiffert’s bed was an old woman who was dying of cancer.

“Shut up,” she said.

Her hands were cold and damp. She wiped the icy sweat on the sheets. She took a deep breath, as if she thought that courage was merely a vapor that could be siphoned out of the air.

“Susau... Susan
...”

Stop procrastinating, she told herself. Get up, get moving, get it over with.

She put down the safety rail and pushed back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, legs dangling. She stood up, holding on to the mattress. She had gotten out of the bed on the side nearest Jessica Seiffert. Her slippers were on the other side, out of reach, and the green tile floor was cold against her bare feet. The distance between the two beds was only nine or ten feet. She could cover it in three shuffling steps, four at most. She took the first one.

“S.ssuuuuusssaaaaannn
...”

The thing in the bed—and in spite of her brave and oh-so-rational thoughts about auditory hallucinations, she could only think of it now as a
thing
—seemed to sense both her approach and her timidity. Its voice became even more hoarse, even more insistent and sinister than it had been; it did not speak her name so much as moan it.

She considered returning to the bed and pushing the call button that would summon a nurse. But what if the nurse came and heard nothing? What if the nurse pulled back the curtain and found only an old, pathetic, dying woman who was murmuring senselessly in a drug-induced stupor? Which was almost certainly what she would find, of course. What then?

She took a second step toward the other bed, and the cold floor seemed to be getting colder.

The curtain fluttered as if something had brushed against the other side of it.

Susan’s ice-water blood grew colder and moved sluggishly through her veins in spite of the rapid beating of her heart.

She retreated one step.

The curtain fluttered again, and she saw a dark shape behind it.

The voice called her again, and this time there was definitely a threatening tone to it.

The curtain rustled, then flapped violently. It rattled the hooks by which it was suspended from the ceiling track. A dark form, shapeless but surely much too large to be a cancer-withered woman, groped clumsily against the far side of the white fabric, as if searching for a place to part it.

Susan was stricken by a premonition of death. Perhaps that was a sure sign of her mental imbalance; perhaps it was irrefutable proof that she was irrational and was imagining everything, yet the premonition was too powerful to be ignored. Death. Death was very near. Suddenly, the last thing on earth she wanted was to see what lay beyond the curtain.

She turned and fled. She stumbled around the foot of her own bed, then glanced back.

The curtain appeared to be caught in a turbulent whirlpool of crossdrafts—though she could feel no air moving in the room. It trembled and fluttered and rustled and billowed. And it was beginning to slide open.

She shuffled quickly into the bathroom—the door to the hall seemed too far away-and her legs protested at the speed that she demanded from them. In the bathroom, she closed the door and leaned against it, breathless.

It
isn’t
real. It can’t hurt me.

The bathroom was dark, and she could not tolerate being alone in the dark now. She felt for the switch and finally located it; the white walls, the white sink and commode, and the white ceramic-tile floor all gleamed brightly.

It can’t hurt me.

She was still holding the doorknob. It moved in her hand. Someone was turning it from the other side.

She twisted the latch. It was loose, broken.

“No,” she said. “No.”

She held the knob as tightly as she could, and she put her shoulder to the door, digging her heels into the tile floor of the bathroom. For interminably long seconds, seconds that seemed like minutes, the person on the other side continued to try the knob, working it back and forth; it strained against Susan’s hand, but she gritted her teeth and tensed her wasted muscles and refused to let herself be budged. After a while the knob stopped moving. She thought the surrender might be only a trick, so she maintained a firm grip.

Something scratched on the other side of the door. The sound, so near her face, startled her. It was a stealthy noise at first, but it quickly grew louder. Fingernails. Clawing at the wood.

“Who’s there?”

She received no answer.

The nails scratched furiously for perhaps half a minute. Then paused. Then scratched again, but languidly this time. Now—steadily and relentlessly. Now—desultorily.

“What do you want?”