The House of Thunder (26 page)

“Isn’t that better?” Mrs. Baker asked.

“Isn’t it?”

“Susan?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m worried about you, honey.”

“Don’t worry. I just want to rest. I just want to go away for a while.”

“Go away?”

“Just for a little while. Away.”

“Susan?”

 
She opened her eyes and saw Jeff McGee looking down at her, his brow lined with concern.

She smiled and said, “Hi.”

He smiled, too.

It was funny. The slow reshaping of his face from a frown into a smile seemed to take an incredibly long time. She watched the lines in his flesh rearrange themselves as if she were viewing a slow-motion film.

“How are you feeling?”

His voice was funny, too. It sounded distant, heavy, deeper than it had been before. Each word was drawn out as if she were listening to a phonograph record played at the wrong speed; too slow.

“I’m not feeling too bad,” she said.

“I hear you had another episode.”

“Yeah.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“No. Boring.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t be bored.”

“Maybe not. But I would.”

“It’ll help to talk about it.”

“Sleep is what helps.”

“You’ve been sleeping?”

“A little... on and off.”

Jeff turned to someone on the other side of the bed and said, “Has she been sleeping ever since?”

It was a nurse. Mrs. Baker. She said, “Dozing. And kind of disassociated like you see.”

“Just tired,” Susan assured them.

Jeff McGee looked down at her again, frowning again.

She smiled at him and closed her eyes.

“Susan,” he said.

“Hmmm?”

“I don’t want you to sleep right now.”

“Just for a while.”

She felt as if she were adrift on a warm sea. It was so nice to be relaxed again; lazy.

“No,” Jeff said. “I want you to talk to me. Don’t sleep. Talk to me.”

He touched her shoulder, shook her gently.

She opened her eyes, smiled.

“This isn’t good,” he said. “You mustn’t try to escape like this. You know it isn’t good.”

She was perplexed. “Sleep isn’t good?”

“Not right now.”

“‘Sleep ravels up the knitted sleeve of care,’” she misquoted in a thick voice.

And closed her eyes.

“Susan?”

“In a while,” she murmured. “In a while...”

“Susan?”

“Hmmm?”

“I’m going to give you an injection.”

“Okay.”

Something clinked softly.

“To make you feel better.”

“I feel okay,” she said drowsily.

“To make you more alert.”

“Okay.”

Coolness on her arm. The odor of alcohol.

“It’ll sting but only for a second.”

“Okay,” she said.

The needle pierced her skin. She flinched.

“There you go, all finished.”

“Okay,” she said.

“You’ll feel better soon.”

“Okay.”

 
 
Susan was sitting up in bed.

Her eyes were grainy, hot, and itchy. She rubbed at them with the back of one hand. Jeff McGee rang for a nurse and ordered some Murine, which he applied to Susan’s eyes himself. The drops were cool and soothing.

She had a sour, metallic taste in her mouth. Jeff poured a glass of water for her. She drank all of it, but that didn’t do much good.

Drowsiness still clung to her, but she was shaking it off minute by minute. She felt a bit cross at Jeff for spoiling her nice sleep.

“What did you give me?” she asked, rubbing one finger over the spot where he had administered the injection into her arm.

“Methylphenidate,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“A stimulant. It’s good for bringing someone out of a severe depression.”

She scowled. “I wasn’t depressed. Just sleepy.”

“Susan, you were heading toward total withdrawal.”

“Just sleepy,” she said querulously.

“Extreme, narcoleptic-phase depression,” he insisted. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Now, I want you to tell me what happened to you in the bathroom.”

She sighed. “Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

She was almost completely awake. If she had been suffering from a form of depression that caused her to seek escape in sleep, she certainly wasn’t suffering from it any longer. If anything, she felt unnaturally energetic, even a bit edgy.

She thought about Ernest Harch in the bathroom. The severed head on the commode.

She shivered. She looked at Jeff and was warmed by his encouraging smile.

She forced a thin smile of her own. Trying hard to make light of what she’d been through, she said, “Gather ‘round the old campfire, children, and I’ll tell you a scary story.”

 
 
She had dinner an hour later than usual. She didn’t want anything; she wasn’t hungry. However, Jeff insisted that she eat, and he sat with her, making sure that she finished most of the food on her tray.

They talked for more than an hour. His presence calmed her.

She didn’t want him to leave, but he couldn’t stay all night, of course. For one thing, he intended to go home and spend a couple of hours with her EEG printouts, her cranial X rays, and the lab reports on the spinal workup.

At last the time came for him to go. He said, “You’ll be all right.”

Wanting to be brave for him, braver than she felt, Susan said, “I know. Don’t worry about me. Hey, I’ve got a lot of moxie, remember?”

He smiled. “The methylphenidate will start wearing off just about by bedtime. Then you’ll get a sedative, a stronger one than you’ve been getting.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to sleep.”

“That was different. That was unnatural sleep, psychological withdrawal. Tonight, I want you to sleep soundly.”

Because when I’m sleeping soundly, Susan thought, I can’t have one of my hallucinations, one of my little expeditions into the jungle of insanity. And if I have one more of them ... one more safari into madness... I very likely won’t come back. Just be swallowed up by the lions and tigers. One gulp. Gone.

“The nurses will stop in and out all evening,” Jeff said. “About every fifteen minutes or so. Just to say hello and to let you know you aren’t alone.”

“All right.”

“Don’t just sit here in silence.”

“I won’t.”

“Turn on your TV. Keep your mind active.”

“I will,” she promised.

He kissed her. It was a very nice kiss, tender and sweet. That helped, too.

Then he left, glancing back as he went out the door.

And she was alone.

She was tense for the rest of the evening, but the time passed without incident. She watched television. She even ate two pieces of candy from the box of chocolates that Jeff had brought her a couple of days ago. Two nightshift nurses—Tina Scolari and Beth Howe—took turns checking in on her, and Susan found that she was even able to joke with them a little.

Later, just after she took the sedative that Jeff had prescribed for her, she felt the need to go to the bathroom. She looked at the closed door with trepidation and considered ringing the nurse to ask for a bedpan. She hesitated for a few minutes, but she grew increasingly ashamed of her timidity. What had happened to the stiff backbone on which she had always prided herself? Where was the famous Thorton pluck? She reached for the call button. Stopped herself. Finally, reluctantly, driven more by her protesting bladder than by her humiliation, she threw back the covers, got out of bed, and went to the bathroom.

Opened the door.

Turned on the light.

No dead men. No severed heads.

“Thank God,” she said, her breath whooshing out of her in relief.

She went inside, closed the door, and went about her business. By the time she had finished and was washing her hands, her heart had slowed to a normal beat.

Nothing was going to happen.

She pulled a paper towel from the wall dispenser and started to dry her hands.

Her eye was suddenly caught by something gleaming on the bathroom floor. It was in the corner, against the wall. Something small and shiny.

She dropped the paper towel in the waste can.

She stepped away from the sink. Bent down. Picked up the glittering object.

She stared at it in disbelief.

Earlier, she had wished that ghosts were real. And now it appeared as if she’d been granted her wish.

She held the proof in her hand. The thing she had picked up from the floor. A thin gold chain and a gold-plated pendant. Jerry Stein’s mezuzah. The same one that she had seen tangled around the ruined throat of his severed head.

Going Into Town...

Susan went to bed that night without showing the gold mezuzah to anyone.

When she had found it on the bathroom floor, her first impulse had been to run with it straight to the nurses’ station. She wanted to show it to as many people as she could find, for initially it seemed to be proof that she wasn’t merely a victim of brain injury, and that the dead men’s visitations were something considerably stranger than hallucinations.

On second thought, however, she decided to be cautious. If she clutched the mezuzah and ran breathlessly to show it to someone else, was it possible that she would open her hand in revelation—onty to discover that she wasn’t really clutching a mezuzah? She couldn’t be sure that her brain was properly interpreting the images that her senses were transmitting to it. She might be having another attack right now, a miniepisode of brain dysfunction; when the fit passed, she might find that the gold mezuzah was only a small ball of scrap paper or a bent nail or a screw that had popped loose from the wall-mounted towel dispenser—or any of a hundred other mundane items. Better to wait, put the mezuzah aside, give herself time to recover from this attack—if it
was
another attack—and look at the object again, later, to see if it then appeared to be what it now appeared to be.

Furthermore, she suddenly wasn’t very eager to consider the existence of walking dead men and the possibility of vengeance being taken from beyond the grave. When she’d been talking with Jeff McGee, she had jokingly wished that there really were such things as ghosts, so that her problems could be blamed on an external cause, rather than on her own loss of mental control. But she had not given any thought to what it would mean to her if her wish were granted. What it meant, she now saw with chilling clarity, was an even deeper descent into the cellars of insanity. She simply wasn’t prepared to believe that dead men could come back from their tombs. She was a scientist, a woman of logic and reason. Whenever she saw gross superstition at work in other people, she was either amused or appalled by it. There wasn’t room for the supernatural in her philosophy or, more importantly, in her self-image. This far, she had retained possession of her sanity primarily because a small part of her had clung tenaciously to the knowledge that her tormentors were only figments of her sick mind, nothing but imaginary creatures, phantoms. But if they were real...

What then?

What next?

She looked at her face in the mirror and could see the stark, haunted look in her own gray-green eyes.

Now there were new insanities, new terrors, new horrors to contemplate.

She didn’t want to think about that. Indeed, there was no point in thinking about it until she knew whether the mezuzah was real or not.

Besides, the strong sedative she’d been given was beginning to take effect. Her eyes were rapidly becoming heavy, and her thoughts were getting fuzzy at the edges.

She carefully wrapped the gold pendant in a strip of toilet paper. She made a small, square, tidy bundle of it.

She left the bathroom, turning off the overhead fluorescents as she went. She got into bed and put the wad of toilet tissue in the top drawer of the nightstand, beside her wallet; closed the drawer; her little secret.

The sedative was like a great wave in the sea, rolling inexorably over her, pulling her down, down.

She reached out to snap off the bedside lamp, but she noticed that no one had turned on the night light. If she switched off her lamp, she would be in total darkness, except for what little indirect illumination the hall lights provided. She didn’t like the prospect of lying alone in darkness, not even for the few minutes she would need to fall soundly asleep. She pulled her hand back from the lamp.

Staring at the ceiling, trying not to think, she lay in light—until, a minute later, she herself went out with the suddenness of a clicking switch.

 
 
Thursday morning. Clouds again. Also some torn strips of blue sky, like bright banners in the gloom.

Susan lay motionless for a minute or two, blinking at the window, before she remembered the treasure that she had secreted in the nightstand.

She raised the bed, sat up, quickly combed her shaggy hair with her fingers, then opened the night stand drawer. The toilet tissue was there, where she remembered having put it. At least that much was real. She took it out and held it in the palm of her hand for a while, just staring at it. Finally, she opened it with as much care as she had employed in the wrapping of it.

The religious pendant lay in the center of the tissue. Its gold chain was tangled; it gleamed.

Susan picked it up, fingered it wonderingly. The mezuzah was real; there was no doubt about that.

As impossible as it seemed, it must follow that the dead men were real, too.

Ghosts ?

She turned the pendant over and over in her fingers, the chain trailing out of her hand and along her arm, while she tried to make up her mind whether or not she wanted to believe in ghosts. And even if she wanted to believe in them,
could
she? Her ingrained level-headedness, her lifelong skepticism in such matters, and her preference for neatly packaged scientific answers made it difficult for her to turn abruptly away from logic and just blithely embrace superstition.