The House of Thunder (33 page)

On the big screen, Arthur had just awakened in bed after a night of debauchery. It was John Gielgud’s first scene. Susan had seen the film when it had first been released, early last summer. In fact she had liked it so much that she had gone to see it twice. She knew that the scene now playing was fairly early in the movie. There must be at least an hour to go before the end credits, an hour of dry, warm time during which she could attempt to make some sense of what had happened to her tonight.

Susan’s eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the pitch-black theater. She couldn’t see if there was a crowd or only a few patrons. Then she remembered that there were only two cars in the parking lot. Mustn’t be a crowd; not many people would
walk
to the theater on a night like this.

She was standing beside the left-hand aisle seat in the last row, which was the only seat she could see clearly, and it was empty. She took it, rather than search for something more private and risk drawing attention to herself. Her wet clothes squished as she sat down, and they clung to her, cold and sticky.

She tuned the movie out.

She thought about ghosts.

Demons.

Walking dead men.

Again, she decided that she couldn’t accept a supernatural explanation. At least not for the time being. For one thing, there wasn’t anything to be gained by dwelling on the occult possibilities, for if that
was
the explanation, there was absolutely nothing she could do to save herself. If all the forces of Hell were aligned against her, then she was lost for sure, so she might just as well rule out the very possibility of it.

She ruled out madness, too. She might actually
be
mad, but there was nothing whatsoever she could do to change that if it were the case, so it was better not even to think about it.

Which left her with the conspiracy theory.

That wasn’t much of a theory, either. She didn’t have the slightest idea who, how, or why.

As she puzzled over those three essential questions, her thoughts were briefly disturbed by a wave of laughter that swept the theater. Although it came in reaction to a very funny scene in
Arthur
and wasn’t at all out of place, there was something about the laughter which seemed distinctly odd to Susan.

Of course, the volume of laughter indicated that there were quite a few people in the theater, at least a hundred, maybe more, and that was certainly a surprise, considering the fact that there were only two cars in the parking lot. But that wasn’t what was odd about it.

Something else.

Something about the sound of it.

The laughter subsided, and Susan’s thoughts returned to her escape plans.

When had it begun to go wrong?

As soon as she had left the hospital—or, rather, as soon as she’d left Milestone
—that
was when it had begun to go wrong. The keys in the Pontiac. Too easy. Which meant they had known she would try to escape, and they had actually
wanted
her to try. The Pontiac had been left there expressly for her use.

But how had they known that she would think to look in the car for the keys? And how could they have been so certain that she would stop at the sheriff’s station?

How could they have known she would go to the Shipstat house for help? Willawauk contained hundreds of other houses, other people to whom she might have turned. Why had the Harch look-alike been waiting with such perfect confidence at the Shipstat place?

She knew the most likely answer to her own question, but she didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t even want to consider it. Maybe they always knew where she was going to go next because they had
programmed
her to go there. Maybe they had planted a few crucial directives in her subconscious while she’d been in the coma. That would explain why they never seriously pursued her when she ran from them; they knew she would walk into their arms later, at a prearranged place.

Maybe she had no free will whatsoever. That possibility made her feel sick to her stomach—and in her soul, as well.

Who
were
these shadowy manipulators with godlike power over her?

Her train of thought was derailed by another wave of loud laughter that rolled through the theater, and this time she realized what was odd about the sound. It was the laughter of young people: higher pitched than that of a general audience, quicker and more eager and more shrill than the laughter of adults.

Her eyes had adapted somewhat to the darkness in the theater, and she raised her head, looked around. At least two hundred people were present. No, it was more like three hundred. Of those nearest to Susan, of those she could see, all appeared to be kids. Not young children. Teenagers. Thirteen to eighteen, or thereabouts. High school and junior high kids. As far as she could tell, she was the only adult in the crowd.

Why had three hundred kids walked through a fierce storm to see a movie that was almost six months old? And what kind of uncaring parents would have permitted them to risk pneumonia and possibly even electrocution by lightning just to come to a movie?

She thought of the dozen children at the Shipstat house, their faces glazed by the bluish light from the TV.

Willawauk seemed to have more than its share of children.

And what the devil did all these children have to do with her own situation?

Something. There was some connection, but she couldn’t figure it out.

While Susan was puzzling over the oddity of Willawauk’s youthful population, she saw a door open at the front of the theater, to the left of the screen. A pale blue light shone in a room beyond the door. A tall man came out into the auditorium and closed the door behind him. He switched on a flashlight, one with a very narrow beam, and pointed it at the floor immediately in front of him.

An usher?

He started up the aisle.

Toward Susan.

The theater was fairly large, three times longer than it was wide. The usher took at least half a dozen steps up the sloping aisle before Susan became aware, through some sixth sense, that he was a threat to her.

She stood up. Her wet clothes stuck to her. She had been in the theater only fifteen minutes, not nearly long enough to dry out, and she was reluctant to leave.

The usher kept coming.

The narrow flashlight beam bobbled up and down a bit with each step the man took.

Susan edged away from her seat, into the aisle. She squinted into the gloom ahead, trying to perceive the usher’s face.

He was forty feet away, coming slowly toward her, invisible behind his flashlight, suddenly silhouetted but unrevealed by a bright scene on the movie screen.

Dudley Moore said something funny.

The audience laughed.

Susan began to shake.

John Gielgud said something funny, and Liza Minnelli said something funny right back at him, and the audience laughed again.

If I was programmed to steal the Pontiac, Susan thought, and if I was programmed to go to the sheriff’s station and to the Shipstat house, then perhaps I was also programmed to come here instead of going up the street to the Plenty Good Coffee Shop or somewhere else.

The usher was no more than thirty feet away now.

Susan took three sliding steps backwards to the padded doors that opened onto the lobby. She reached behind her and put one hand against the door.

The usher raised the flashlight, no longer directing it toward the sloping floor in front of him, and shone it straight into Susan’s face.

The beam wasn’t terribly bright, but it blinded her because her eyes had adjusted to the darkness.

He’s one of
them
, she thought. One of the dead men. Probably Quince because Quince hasn’t yet put in an appearance tonight.

Or maybe it was Jerry Stein, his face rotting away from his bones, pus oozing from his swollen, purple lips. Jerry Stein, all dressed up in a neat usher’s uniform, coming to say hello, coming to get a kiss.

There’s nothing supernatural about this, she told herself in a desperate attempt to stave off panic.

But maybe it was Jerry, his face gray, a little green around the eyes, with brown-black blisters of corruption extending from his nostrils. Maybe it was Jerry, coming to give her a hug, coming to take her in his arms. Maybe he would lower his face to hers and put his lips to hers and thrust his cold, slimy tongue into her mouth in a grotesque kiss of graveyard passion.

Susan flung open the door and raced out of the theater, into the lobby, across the plush carpeting, through the outer doors, not daring to look back. She turned right at the corner of the building, into the parking lot, and headed toward the dark alley. She sucked the humid air deep into her heaving lungs, and she felt as if she were breathing wet cotton.

In seconds, her clothes were as thoroughly soaked as they had been when she’d gone into the theater.

Hot flashes of pain shot through her legs, but she tried to ignore them. She told herself she could run all night if that was necessary.

But she knew she was lying to herself. She was quickly using up what little strength she had managed to store away during the past five days. Not much was left. Dregs.

 
 
The Arco service station was closed for the night. Rain lashed the gasoline pumps and rattled against the big windows and drummed on the metal garage doors.

Beside the station, a public telephone booth stood in shadows. Susan stepped into it but didn’t close the door because closing it would turn on the booth light.

She had gotten change for a dollar from a change machine in a coin-operated laundromat. She dropped a dime in the phone and dialed the operator.

She was shivering uncontrollably now, miserably cold and exhausted.

“Operator.”

“Operator, I’d like to place a long-distance call and charge it to my home number.”

“And what is the number you’re calling, please?”

Susan gave her Sam Walker’s number in Newport Beach. She had dated Sam for over a year, and he had been more serious about their relationship than she had been. They had broken off last spring, not without pain, but they were still friends; they talked once in a while on the phone, and they occasionally encountered each other by accident at restaurants they both favored, in which case they weren’t so estranged that they couldn’t have dinner together.

It was perhaps a condemnation of her excessively solitary, self-reliant, go-it-alone nature that she had no really close girl friends from whom she could seek help. She had no one closer than Sam, and she had last seen him nearly five weeks before she had left on her vacation to Oregon.

“What is the number to which you wish to bill the call?” the operator asked.

Susan recited her home number in Newport Beach.

After fleeing from the Main Street Cinema, she had decided that she couldn’t be sure of escaping from Willawauk unless she had help from someone outside of town. She didn’t know if she could convince Sam that she was in danger and that the Willawauk police couldn’t be trusted. Even though he knew she didn’t take drugs or drink to excess, he’d have to wonder if she was stoned. She could not possibly tell him the whole story or even most of it; for sure, he’d think she had slipped a mental gear. The trick was to tell him only enough to make him come running or to convince him to call the FBI for her.

The FBI, for God’s sake! It all sounded so ludicrous. But who else did you call when you couldn’t trust the local police? Who else did you turn to? Besides, there was kidnapping involved here, and that was a federal offense, within the FBI’s jurisdiction.

She would have called the Bureau’s Oregon office herself, except she didn’t think she’d be able to convince a total stranger that she was really in trouble. She wasn’t even certain that she could convince Sam, who knew her very well.

Down in Newport Beach, Sam’s phone began to ring.

Please be there, please,
she thought.

A gust of icy wind rammed through the open door of the phone booth. It pummeled her back with hard-driven rain.

Sam’s phone rang three times.

Four times.

A fifth time.

Then someone picked it up. “Hello?”

“Sam?”

“Hello?”

There was a lot of static on the line.

“Sam?”

“Yeah. Who’s this?”

His voice was faint.

“Sam, it’s me, Susan.”

A hesitation. Then: “Suzie?”

“Yes.”

“Suzie Thorton?”

“Yes,” she said, relieved that at last she had touched someone beyond Willawauk.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Willawauk, Oregon.”

“Will
who
walk to Oregon?”

“No, no. Willawauk.” She spelled it.

“Sounds like you’re calling from Tahiti or something,” he said as the static temporarily abated.

Listening to him, Susan felt a terrible suspicion uncoiling like a snake in her mind. A new chill slithered through her, tongue of ice flickering on her spine.

She said, “I can hardly hear you.”

“I said, it sounds like you’re calling from Tahiti or something.”

Susan pressed the receiver tightly to her ear, put her hand over her other ear, and said, “Sam, you don’t...”

“What? Suzie, are you there?”

“Sam... you don’t... sound like yourself.”

“Suzie, what’s this all about?”

She opened her mouth, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak the dreadful truth.

“Suzie?”

Even the goddamned
telephone company
couldn’t be trusted in Willawauk.

“Suzie, are you there?”

Her voice cracked with fury and anger, but she spat out the unthinkable thought: “You aren’t Sam Walker.”