The House of Thunder (22 page)

McGee kept one eye on the manometer as he extracted the fluid, and he said, “Normal pressure.”

A couple of minutes later, when the final sample had been taken, Susan whimpered with relief and wiped at the stinging tears that had beaded on her eyelashes.

McGee held up one glass tube full of spinal fluid and stared at it against the light. “Well, at least it’s clear,” he said.

“How long until we get the results?” Susan asked.

“It’ll take a little while,” McGee said. “In the meantime, we’ve still got a few minor tests to run. Feel up to giving some blood?”

“Anything for the cause.”

 
 
Shortly before ten o’clock, while McGee went to the lab to see how the spinal workup was coming along, Murf and Phil arrived in diagnostic to escort Susan back to room 258. Although she knew that yesterday’s terror in the elevator had not been real, although she knew that the orderlies were innocent of the malicious behavior that she had attributed to them in her hallucinations, she felt somewhat ill at ease with them.

“Everyone’s missed you up on the second floor,” Phil told Susan as they wheeled her stretcher into the hall.

“Lots of glum faces up there,” Murf said.

“Oh, I’ll bet,” she said.

“It’s true,” Phil said.

“The place seems so grim without you,” Murf said.

“Like a dungeon,” Phil said.

“Like a cemetery,” said Murf.

“Like a hospital,” said Phil.

“It is a hospital,” she said, playing along with them in an effort to keep her spirits up as they approached the elevators.

“You’re absolutely right,” Murf told her.

“It is a hospital, of course,” Phil said.

“But with you around, fair lady—”

“—it seems warmer, brighter—”

“—like a resort hotel—”

“—in some country where it’s always sunny—”

“—someplace exciting, exotic—”

“—like Mesopotamia.”

They reached the elevators, and Susan held her breath.

“Phil, I told you yesterday—there isn’t a Mesopotamia any more.”

One of them pushed the elevator call button.

“Then where have I been going every winter, Murf? My travel agent always told me it was Mesopotamia.”

“I’m afraid you’ve got a crooked travel agent, Phil. You’ve probably been going to New Jersey.”

The elevator doors opened, and Susan stiffened, but there were no dead men waiting.

“No, I’m sure I’ve never been to New Jersey, Murf.”

“Lucky for New Jersey, Phil.”

Dammit, I can’t live like this! Susan thought grimly as they rolled her out of the elevator and into the second-floor corridor. I just can’t go through life being suspicious and frightened of everyone I meet. I can’t cope with this constant expectation that one horror or another will pop out at me from behind every door and from around every corner.

How could
anyone
possibly get through an entire life that was like a continuous, exhausting ride through an especially nasty, gruesome, carnival funhouse?

Why would anyone
want
to get through such a life?

 
 
Jessica Seiffert was gone.

The curtain was open.

An orderly was stripping off the last of the soiled sheets and dropping them into a laundry cart. In answer to Susan’s question, he said, “Mrs. Seiffert took a turn for the worse. They had to rush her down to intensive care.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, everyone expected it,” the orderly said. “But it’s still a shame. She’s such a nice lady.”

Susan
was
sorry for Jessica Seiffert, but she was also relieved that her roommate was gone.

It was nice to be able to see the window, even though the day was gray and misty and teetering on the edge of another storm.

 
 
 
Ten minutes after Susan had been delivered to her room by Phil and Murf, as she was sitting in bed, adjusting the covers around her, Mrs. Baker came in with a tray of food.

“You missed breakfast this morning. And honey, you just can’t afford to skip a single meal. You’re not well padded like I am. I could afford to skip a whole week of meals!”

“I’m starved.”

“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” the nurse said, putting the tray down on the bed table. “How do you feel, kid?”

“Like a pincushion,” Susan said, aware of a dull pain in her back, a souvenir of the spinal tap.

“Did Dr. McGee handle most things himself?”

“Yes.”

“Then it could have been worse,” Mrs. Baker said, removing the lid from the tray. “There are some around here who’re not as gentle as McGee.”

“Yes, but I’m afraid he’s going to be late to his office.”

“He doesn’t have office hours Wednesday mornings,” the nurse said. “Just five hours in the afternoon.”

“Oh, and by the way,” Susan said, “I saw so little of you yesterday that I forgot to ask you how everything went on Monday night.”

Mrs. Baker blinked, and her forehead creased in perplexity. “Monday night?”

“How was your date? You know—the bowling and the hamburger dinner?”

For a couple of seconds, the nurse appeared to have no idea what Susan was talking about. Then her eyes suddenly brightened. “Oh! The date. Of course. My jolly big lumberman.”

“The one with the shoulders to measure a doorway,” Susan said, quoting what Mrs. Baker herself had said on Monday when describing her beau.

“And those big, hard,
gentle
hands,” the nurse said rather wistfully.

Susan grinned. “That’s better. I didn’t think you could’ve forgotten
him.”

“It was a night to remember.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

A mischievous expression came over Mrs. Baker’s face. She said, “We knocked down all the pins. And I don’t just mean at the bowling alley, either.”

Susan laughed. “Why, Mrs. Baker, you’ve got a randy streak in you wider than I’d have thought.”

The nurse’s merry eyes gleamed behind her white-framed glasses. “Life’s not very tasty if you don’t add just a dash of spice now and then.”

Unfolding her paper napkin and tucking it into the collar of her pajamas—she had changed into her recently laundered blue pair after returning from downstairs—Susan said, “I suspect you flavor it with more than just a
dash
of spice.”

“Whole tablespoons sometimes.”

“I knew it. Mrs. Baker, you’re a regular Sybarite.”

“No. I’m a Methodist, but Methodists know how to have fun, too. Now, you eat everything on that tray, honey. It’s really good to see you starting to fill out in the face a little. We don’t want any backsliding.”

For the next half hour, Susan ate her late breakfast and watched the turbulent sky that roiled beyond the window. Masses of clouds, painted a dozen shades of gray, raced from horizon to horizon.

A few minutes after eleven o’clock, Jeff McGee came by. “Sorry I’ve been so long. We had the lab results some time ago, but I’ve been up in the intensive-care ward with Jessie Seiffert.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Fading fast.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Yeah. It’s a shame she has to die. But since there wasn’t anything we could do for her, I’m glad she’s finally going downhill in a hurry. She was always an active woman, and it was hard on her to be bedridden, harder than it might have been on a lot of other people. I hated to see her lingering and suffering these past few weeks.” He shook his head sadly, then snapped his fingers as a thought struck him. “Say, something occurred to me when I was with Jessie, upstairs in intensive care. You know why you might have hallucinated Jerry Stein’s corpse when you were actually looking at Jessie? I think there was a trigger that did it for you, that set you off.”

“Trigger?”

“Yes. Initials.”

“Initials,” Susan echoed, not sure what he was talking about.

“That’s right. Don’t you see? Jerry Stein and Jessica Seiffert—both JS.”

“Oh. I hadn’t noticed that.”

“Maybe you didn’t notice it on a
conscious
level. But nothing escapes the subconscious; it’s too damned observant. I’ll bet you were aware of it subconsciously. It might have been the coincidence of their initials that fixated you on the curtain and made you so afraid of it. If that’s the case, then perhaps none of your attacks is merely a random, spontaneous event. Maybe all of them were triggered by one thing or another, unimportant little events and observations that harkened back to some memory connected with the House of Thunder. And once that connection was made on an unconscious level, maybe the hallucinatory episode followed like clockwork.”

He was visibly excited by the theory, and Susan said, “If what you say is true, what difference does it make?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I haven’t had much time to think about all the ramifications. But I suspect it could be important in helping me decide whether or not the official diagnosis should come down on the side of a physical cause.”

She didn’t like what she was hearing.

Frowning, she said, “If my hallucinations aren’t merely random, spontaneous sparks thrown off by an injured brain, then perhaps the root cause of them isn’t physical at all. Is that what you’re saying? If the visions are triggered by some subtle psychological mechanism, then possibly the entire problem is best left to a psychiatrist.”

“No, no, no,” McGee said quickly, making a placating gesture with his hands. “We don’t have enough data to leap to conclusions like that. We still have to pursue a physical explanation because that seems by far the most likely possibility, considering that you
did
suffer a head injury and were in a coma for more than three weeks.”

Susan wanted very much to believe that her problem was entirely physical, nothing more than the expected consequences of vital tissue damage. If it was a tiny blood clot in the brain, a lesion, or some other malady of the flesh, medical science would take care of it posthaste. She trusted medical science precisely because it
was
a science. She distrusted psychiatry because, to her way of thinking, which had been shaped by her education as a physicist, psychiatry was not really a science at all; she thought of it as little more than voodoo.

She shook her head adamantly. “You’re wrong about the trigger effect of the initials. JS. It wasn’t that. This isn’t a psychological condition.”

“I tend to agree with you,” he said. “But we can’t rule out any possibilities at this stage.”

“
I
can. I’ve ruled it out.”

“But I
can’t.
I’m a doctor. And a doctor’s got to remain objective.”

For the first time since entering the room, he took her hand, and his touch was wonderfully soothing.

Squeezing his hand, she said, “What were the results of the spinal?”

With his free hand, McGee pulled thoughtfully on his ear. “The protein analysis showed no abnormalities. Then we did a blood count. If there had been too many red cells, that would’ve told us that there was bleeding either inside the skull, at the base of the brain, or somewhere along the spine.”

“But the red count was normal,” Susan said, anticipating him.

“Yes. Now, if there was an abundance of white cells, we’d know there was a cerebral or spinal infection.”

“But the white count was normal, too.”

“Yes.”

Susan felt as if she were being backed into a corner by an advancing army of cold, hard facts.
You’re as healthy as a teenager, the facts seemed to be shouting at her. Your body hasn’t betrayed you. Your brain hasn’t betrayed you, either. It’s your mind that has gone rotten. You’re not physically ill, Susan. There’s no organic problem. You’re just plain crazy; that’s all. Nuts. You’re as nutty as a jumbo-size can of Planter’s Party Mix.

She tried very hard not to listen to those invidious inner voices, tried to tune out the increasingly loud chorus of self-doubt, self-loathing, and confusion.

Plaintively, she said, “Didn’t the spinal show
anything
out of the ordinary?”

“Not a thing. We even analyzed the sugar content of your spinal fluid. There are some diseases in which bacteria eat that particular sugar, so a low count would have set off alarms. But your spinal sugar is two-thirds the level of your blood sugar, and that’s also normal.”

“Sounds as if I’m a textbook example of a thirty-two-year-old woman in perfect health,” she said with heavy irony.

McGee was clearly troubled by the difficulty he was having in pinpointing her illness. “No.
Something
is wrong somewhere.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s not terribly reassuring.”

“We’ll just keep looking.”

“I have a feeling I’m going to be here a long time.”

“No. We’ll find it soon. We have to.”

“But how?”

“Well, first of all, I’m taking the EEG printouts, the X rays, and all the lab data home with me. I’m going to go over everything one more time, with a magnifying glass if I have to. Maybe we didn’t look carefully this morning. Maybe the answer was there and we just failed to spot it. Some little thing that was easily overlooked ... some subtle anomaly ...

“And what if you still don’t find anything?”

He hesitated, and he looked worried as he finally said, “Well, then ... there’s another test we can run.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“It’s not a simple procedure.”

“I could figure that much just by taking a look at your face,” she said.

“A cerebral angiogram. It’s a diagnostic technique that we usually reserve for functionally impaired stroke victims who’ve got to undergo brain surgery for clot removal or for the repair of a hemorrhaged blood vessel.”

“What’s it entail?”

“We’d inject a radiopaque substance into your bloodstream, into an artery between the heart and the brain, which means in the neck, and that isn’t pleasant.”