The House of Thunder (27 page)

Even if she had been predisposed to supernatural explanations, there was one thing that would nevertheless have made it hard for her to accept the ghost theory. That one hitch was the mezuzah. If the dead men were malevolent spirits who were capable of vanishing in the blink of an eye—as Harch had seemed to vanish from the bathroom yesterday afternoon, taking Jerry Stein’s severed head with him—then the mezuzah should have vanished, too. After all, if it was a part of the apparition, it couldn’t also be a part of the real world. Yet here it was, in her hand.

Last night when her mind had been clouded by a sedative, it had seemed to her that the mezuzah was proof that there were such things as ghosts. However, now she realized that the pendant’s existence proved only that the dead men were not merely hallucinations. In fact it didn’t even prove that much; it only
indicated
that such was the case.

Ghosts? That seemed unlikely.

And with the mezuzah in her hand, blaming everything on brain dysfunction seemed too simplistic.

She couldn’t completely forget about either of those theories, of course. But for the time being, she could relegate them to a back room in her mind.

So what explanations were left?

She stared at the mezuzah, frowning.

She seemed to have come full circle, back to the look-alike theory. But that was no good to her, either, because she had never been able to explain why four perfect look-alikes for the four fraternity brothers would show up in Willawauk County Hospital—of all places—intent upon tormenting and perhaps killing her. If a theory made absolutely no sense, then it was a worthless theory.

Besides, even the conspiracy theory didn’t explain how Harch had disappeared from the windowless bathroom yesterday. It didn’t explain how he could have recovered so completely and so quickly from the back surgery that he’d undergone on Monday. Or how Jerry Stein’s corpse could have turned up in Jessica Seiffert’s sickbed. Or why the corpse was not completely decomposed, reduced by now to a mere collection of bones.

Ghosts?

Brain dysfunction?

Bizarre conspiracies?

None of the available theories answered all of the questions—or even most of them. Every avenue of inquiry seemed to lead only to further confusion.

Susan felt light-headed.

She clenched her hand tightly around the mezuzah, as if she could squeeze the truth from it.

A nurse entered the room from the hall. It was Millie, the thin, fox-faced blonde. On Tuesday morning, when Susan had become hysterical at the appearance of the Jellicoe and Parker duplicates—the orderlies named Bradley and O’Hara—it had been Millie who had attempted to give Susan an injection against her will, while Carl Jellicoe held her down on the bed.

“The breakfast cart’s just right down the hall,” Millie said as she passed the bed, heading toward the bathroom. “Ought to be here in a minute,” she added, slipping into the bathroom before Susan had an opportunity to respond.

Through the half-open door, Susan saw the nurse crouch down and peer behind the commode; first, around one side of it; then, around the other side. She squinted at the shadowy spots back there, where the overhead fluorescent lights didn’t reach.

After the nurse had carefully inspected all around the toilet, she turned her back to it, still hunkering down. She swung her head left, right, keeping her eyes down toward the baseboard. She peeked behind the door. Under the sink.

Susan’s eyes turned inexorably down to her own hand. The mezuzah, now hidden in her fist, seemed to grow icy, leeching the warmth from the flesh that encircled it.

The gold chain trailed from between her clenched fingers. Without fully understanding why she did it, operating solely on a hunch, Susan opened her fingers just long enough to quickly, surreptitiously push the chain in to keep company with the pendant. She made a fist again. Put the fist in her lap. Covered it with her other, open hand. Tried to look relaxed. Just sitting there in bed, yawning, blinking at the morning light, hands folded oh-so-casually in her lap.

Millie came out of the bathroom and over to the side of the bed. She hesitated for only a second or two, then said, “Say, did you find any jewelry in there yesterday?”

“Jewelry?”

“Yeah.”

“In where?” Susan asked, feigning surprise, yawning. “You mean in the bathroom?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean like pearl necklaces and diamond brooches?” Susan asked lightly, as if she thought the nurse was leading up to a joke.

“No. Nothing like that. It’s mine. I lost it somewhere yesterday, and I can’t find it.”

“What kind of jewelry?”

Millie hesitated only an instant, then said, “A mezuzah. It was on a gold chain.”

Susan could see the tension, the lies, the deception in the nurse’s foxlike face and in her hard, watchful eyes.

It isn’t yours, Susan thought. You didn’t leave it here. You’re a damned liar.

The mezuzah had been left behind by mistake. Obviously, it had dropped unnoticed from the severed head. And now they were trying to cover up and keep the charade going.

“Sorry,” Susan said. “I didn’t find anything.”

The nurse stared at her.

Susan could see what they wanted her to believe. They wanted her to think that she had seen Millie’s mezuzah on the bathroom floor and had linked it subconsciously to Jerry Stein’s mezuzah, and thereby triggered another attack of nasty hallucinations.

But Millie’s behavior had made Susan suspicious. And now she was sure that her problem was not merely psychological. They were running her through some kind of... test or program... a charade, the purpose of which she could not begin to understand. She was sure of that now.

But who were
they?

“I hope you find it,” she said to Millie, smiling sweetly.

“The chain must have broke,” Millie said. “It could have fallen off anywhere, 1 guess.”

The nurse wasn’t a good liar. Neither her eyes nor her voice contained any conviction.

An orderly entered, pushing a cafeteria cart. Millie put Susan’s breakfast tray on the bed table. Then both she and the orderly left.

Alone again, Susan opened her hand. The mezuzah was damp with perspiration.

 
 
Susan went into the bathroom, snapped on the fluorescent lights, and closed the door, leaving her untouched breakfast to get cold on the tray.

She began to examine the walls, starting behind the commode. It was drywall construction, not plaster; it was a pebbly surface, white, freshly painted, without a visible crack. At the corner, she examined the drywall joint with special care, but she didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The second wall bore no cracks, either, and the second corner was as smooth and seamless as the first one had been. The sink stood in the middle of the third wall; above the sink, the mirror filled in from the backsplash to the ceiling. On both sides of the sink and the mirror, the wall was perfectly even in texture, unmarked, normal.

Three-quarters of the way around the small room, in the third corner, behind the door, she found what she was looking for. The drywall joint was marred by an unnaturally straight hairline crack that extended all the way from the mitered junction of the three-inch-high base molding to the ceiling.

She raised her hands to her face, rubbed her eyes gently with her fingertips, blinked, looked at the corner again. The crack was still there, a knife-edge line that clearly had not been caused by the settling of the building over the years. It was a deliberate feature of the wall.

She went to the sink again, stared at the mirror, looking at the surface of it, not at her own reflection. It was a single sheet of glass; there was no division down the middle of it, nothing as obvious as that. Apparently, it served as an unconnected flange; it was probably fixed to the wall only on the left side, neatly concealing the pivot point behind it.

She knelt on the cold tile floor and peered beneath the sink. All of the plumbing, both the drain and the two water lines, came up out of the floor; nothing came out of the wall. She squirmed under the sink as far as she could and peered at the shadowed drywall back there. It was scarred by another crack that evidently came down from the ceiling, for the most part hidden by the mirror and the sink, appearing here and running all the way to the baseboard; this crack was as straight as a plumb line, just as the one in the corner was. The base molding had been cut through; the cut aligned with the crack in the wall. Susan was able to insert a fingernail into the crevice where the two sections of molding met; it had never been filled with putty.

She could feel a faint, cold draft puffing through that narrow gap, a vague but icy breath against her fingertips.

She retreated from beneath the sink and stood up, brushing her dusty hands together.

She stared thoughtfully at the six-foot-wide expanse of drywall between the corner by the door and the middle of the sink. Apparently, that entire section of the wall swung inward, away from the bathroom.

This was how Ernest Harch had exited, the severed head tucked under his arm, unaware that the mezuzah had fallen to the floor behind him.

What lay on the other side?

 
 
 
Behind the second bed, the one in which Jessica Seiffert had lain until yesterday afternoon, Susan inspected the wall. It was marked by another hairline, ruler-straight crack that extended from the floor to the ceiling. From a distance of more than six or eight feet, the line was invisible. A similar seam was hidden in the corner.

Susan put one hand flat against the wall and pressed hard at several points on both sides of both cracks, hoping that the hidden doorway was operated by a pressure latch of some kind. But the wall remained in place in spite of her careful prodding.

She knelt down and squinted at the baseboard. Felt along it with one hand.

Again, there was a draft coming out of the gaps; faint but detectable, and cold.

Near the left-hand crack, she found a trace of grease. Lubricant for the swinging partition’s secret hinges?

She pressed every couple of inches along the molding, but she could find no pressure latch there, either.

Secret doors? It seemed too bizarre to be true.

Shadowy conspirators moving clandestinely through the walls? That was a classic paranoid fantasy.

But what about the seams in the drywall?

And the drafts seeping through from hidden rooms?

And the grease?

“Like hell it is,” she muttered.

 
 
 
Her oatmeal had gotten cold and gummy. She ate it anyway ; more than ever, she needed to keep up her strength.

While she ate, she tried to figure out what the hell was going on. She seemed stuck with the conspiracy theory, though it made no sense at all.

Who could possibly have the resources and the determination to organize such an elaborate plot, such an incredible masquerade, involving four dead ringers that must have been located with only the most titanic effort? And for what purpose? Why all this expenditure of time and money and energy? What could be gained? Was some relative of one of the dead fraternity men—a father, mother, sister, brother—seeking revenge on Susan for her testimony at the trial, even though she had told only the truth? Seeking revenge—after thirteen years? By trying to drive her out of her mind? No. Good heavens, that was absurd! That was a scenario straight out of a comic book. People didn’t seek revenge by means of such complicated—and
expensive-
conspiracies
.
If you were dead set on getting revenge for something like this, then you did it with a knife or a gun or poison. And you didn’t wait thirteen years, either. Surely, a raging hatred—a hatred sufficiently powerful to inspire a vengeance killing—could not be sustained for thirteen years.

But what kind of hospital had hidden rooms and secret doors in its walls?

In a madhouse clinic, in a sanitarium for the hopelessly insane, there might be such secret doors—but only in the fevered minds of the most severely disturbed patients. Yet these doors were not merely figments of her demented imagination; she wasn’t just a disassociated schizophrenic sitting in a padded cell, fantasizing that she was in some ordinary hospital in a town called Willawauk. She was
here,
damn it all. This was really happening. The secret doors did exist.

As she thought back over the past four days, she remembered a few strange incidents that hadn’t seemed important at the time but which seemed vitally important now. They were incidents that should have alerted her to the fact that this place and the people in it were not what they pretended to be.

Viteski. The first indication that something was amiss had come from him.

Saturday night, when Susan had awakened from her coma, Dr. Viteski had been stiff, ill at ease, noticeably uncomfortable with her. When he had told her about her accident and about Willawauk County Hospital, his voice had been so stilted, so wooden, that each word had seemed like a cast-off splinter. At times he had sounded as if he were reciting lines from a well-memorized script. Perhaps that was precisely what he
had
been doing.

Mrs. Baker had made a mistake, too. On Monday, as the nurse was finishing up her shift and preparing to go home for the day, she had spoken of having a hot date that night with a man whose shoulders were big enough “to measure a doorway.” Two days later, when Susan had asked belatedly whether the date was a success or not, Mrs. Baker had been lost for a moment, utterly baffled. For a
long
moment. Too long. Now, it seemed perfectly clear to Susan that the story about the lumberman and the bowling date and the hamburger dinner had been nothing but a spur-of-the-moment ad-lib, the kind of sharp and colorful detail that a good actor frequently invents in order to contribute to the verisimilitude of a role. In actuality, there had been no aging, virile lumberman. No bowling date. Poor pudgy, graying Thelma Baker had not enjoyed a wild night of unrestrained passion, after all. The nurse merely improvised that romantic tale to flesh out her characterization, then later forgot what she had improvised—untit Susan reminded her.