The House of Thunder (34 page)

Static.

Silence.

More static.

At last he giggled and said, “Of course I’m not Walker, you stupid bitch.”

It was Carl Jellicoe’s giggle.

Susan felt a thousand years old, older than that, ancient, wasted, shriveled, hollow.

The wind changed direction, slammed against the side of the phone booth, rattled the glass.

Jellicoe said, “Why do you insist on thinking it’s going to be easy to get away from us?”

Susan said nothing.

“There’s no place to hide. Nowhere to run.”

“Bastard,” she said.

“You’re finished. You’re through,” Jellicoe said. “Welcome to Hell, you dumb slut.”

She slammed the phone down.

Susan stepped out of the booth and looked around at the rain-drenched service station and at the street beyond. Nothing moved. There was no one in sight. No one was coming after her. Yet.

She was still free.

No, not free. She was still on a very long leash, but she was not free. On a leash—and she had the strong feeling that they were about to begin reeling it in.

For a little while, she walked, hardly aware of the rain and the cold wind any more, stubbornly disregarding the pain in her legs, unable to formulate any new escape plans. She was merely passing time now, waiting for them to come for her.

She paused in front of St. John’s Lutheran Church.

There was a light inside. It filtered out through the large, arched, stained-glass windows; it colored the rain red, blue, green, and yellow for a distance of three or four feet, and it imparted a rainbow glow to the thin veil of wind-whirled fog.

A parsonage was attached to the church, a Victorian-style structure: two full stories plus a gabled attic, bay windows on the second floor. The neatly tended lawn was illuminated by an ornate iron lamppost at the outer end of the walk, and two smaller, matching iron lamps on the porch posts, one on each side of the steps. A sign on the gate read, REV. POTTER B. KINFIELD.

Susan stood in front of Reverend Kinfield’s house for a couple of minutes, one hand on the gate, leaning against it. She was too weary to go on, but she was too proud to lie down in the street and just give up as if she were a whipped dog.

Without hope, but also without anything else to do and without anywhere else to go, she finally went up the walk and climbed the steps to the parsonage porch. You were supposed to be able to count on clergymen. You were supposed to be able to go to them with any kind of problem and get help. Would that be true of clergymen in Willawauk? Probably not.

She rang the bell.

Although the outside lights were burning brightly, the house itself was dark. That didn’t necessarily mean the preacher wasn’t home. He might have gone to bed. It was late, after all. She didn’t know exactly how late it was; she had lost track of time. But it must be somewhere between eleven o’clock and midnight.

She rang the bell again.

And again.

No lights came on inside. No one answered.

In anticipation of the minister’s response to the bell, Susan had summoned up images of warmth and comfort: a toasty parlor; a big, soft easy chair; pajamas, a heavy robe, and slippers borrowed from the preacher’s wife; maybe some nice buttered toast and hot chocolate; sympathy; outrage at what had been done to her; promises of protection and assistance; a bed with a firm mattress; crisp, clean sheets and heavy woolen blankets; two pillows; and a lovely, lovely feeling of being safe.

Now, when no one answered the door, Susan couldn’t get those images out of her mind. She simply could not forget them and just walk away. The loss hurt too much, even though it was the loss of something she’d never really possessed in the first place. She stood on the porch, quivering on the verge of tears, desperately wanting those damned dry pajamas and that hot chocolate, wanting them with such fierce intensity that the wanting drove out all other emotions, including all fear of Ernest Harch and the walking dead men and the people behind Milestone.

She tried the door. It was locked.

She moved along the porch, trying the dash-hung windows. The three to the left of the door were all locked. The first one to the right was also locked, but the second one was not. It was swollen by the damp air, and it didn’t move easily, but finally she raised it far enough to squeeze through, into the parsonage.

She had just committed an illegal act. But she was a desperate woman, and the Reverend Kinfield would surely understand once he heard all the facts. Besides, this was Willawauk, Oregon, where the normal rules of society didn’t apply.

The interior of the house was utterly black. She couldn’t see more than two or three inches in front of her face.

Curiously, the house wasn’t warm, either. It seemed almost as cold as the night outside.

Susan felt her way along the wall, moving left, past the first window on that side of the door, then to the door itself. She located the switch on the wall, flicked it.

She blinked at the sudden flood of light—then blinked in surprise when she saw that the Lutheran parsonage was not what it appeared to be from the outside. It wasn’t a gracious old Victorian house. It was a warehouse: one room as large as a barn, more than two stories high, with no partitions, and a bare concrete floor. Life-size papier-mâché figures for a nativity scene, plus a large red sleigh complete with reindeer were suspended from the ceiling on wires, stored away until the holidays. The room itself was filled with cardboard cartons, hundreds upon hundreds of them stacked four and five high; there were also trunks, chests, enormous wooden crates, and a couple of dozen metal cabinets each about seven feet high, four feet deep and eight feet long. Everything was arranged in neat rows that extended the length of the building, with access aisles in between.

Baffled, Susan ventured away from the wall and went exploring through the stacks. In the first couple of cabinets, she found black choir robes hanging from metal bars, each robe sealed tightly in a clear plastic bag. In the third cabinet, she uncovered several Santa Claus outfits, two Easter Bunny costumes, and four sets of Pilgrims’ clothes that apparently were used in Thanksgiving celebrations. The first of the cardboard cartons—according to the labels on them—contained religious pamphlets, Bibles, and church songbooks.

All of those things, including the Christmas figures that were suspended from the ceiling, were objects that any church might wish to store. Not, of course, in a fake parsonage; that part of it didn’t make any sense at all. But those goods were perfectly legitimate.

Then she found other things that seemed out of place and more than a little strange.

Three entire, sixty-foot-long walls of boxes and crates—as many as two or three thousand containers—were filled with clothes. The labels told a curious story. The first hundred or so were all marked the same:

 
A smaller number of containers were labeled:

 
There were a lot of women’s clothes, some men’s clothes, and a few boxes of children’s clothes from every subsequent fashion era through the late Seventies. There were even clusters of boxes in which the clothing of various subcultures was stored.

 
All of this was not simply evidence of an ambitious clothing drive to benefit the church’s overseas missions. It was clearly a long-term storage program.

Susan was also convinced that it wasn’t merely some ambitious historical preservation project. These weren’t museum samples of American clothing styles; these were entire wardrobes, sufficient to clothe hundreds upon hundreds of people in virtually any fashion period from the past twenty years.

It appeared as if the people of Willawauk were so extraordinarily thrifty—every man, woman and child of them—that they had joined en masse to preserve their out-of-date clothing, just in case old styles came back into fashion some day and could be used again. It was wise and admirable to attempt to circumvent the expensive tyranny of fashion designers. But in a throwaway culture like America’s, where virtually everything was designed to be disposable, what kind of people, what kind of community, could organize and so perfectly execute an enormous storage program like this one?

A community of robots, perhaps.

A community of ants.

Susan continued to prowl through the stacks, her confusion increasing. She found scores of boxes labeled INFORMAL HOLIDAYS: HALLOWEEN. She peeled the tape off one of those boxes and opened it. It was crammed full of masks: goblins, witches, gnomes, vampires, the Frankenstein monster, werewolves, alien creatures, and assorted ghouls. She opened another box and found Halloween party decorations: orange and black paper streamers, plastic jack-o’-lanterns, bundles of real Indian corn, black paper cutouts of cats and ghosts. This huge collection of Halloween gear was not just for parties at St. John’s Church; there was enough stuff here to decorate the entire town and to costume all of its children.

She moved along the aisles, reading labels on some of the hundreds of other containers:

 
Susan finally stopped examining the boxes and the cabinets because she realized there were no answers to be found among them. They only raised new questions about Willawauk. In fact, the more she probed through this place, the more confused and disoriented and depressed she became. She felt as if she had chased a white rabbit and had fallen down a hole into a bizarre and considerably less than friendly Wonderland. Why were bar mitzvah decorations stored in St. John’s Lutheran Church? And wasn’t it strange for a church to store supplies for a stag party? Dirty movies, posters of naked women, party napkins bearing obscene cartoons—that sort of stuff kept in a
church?
Why wasn’t the parsonage really a parsonage? Was there a Reverend Potter B. Kinfield, or was he only a fictitious character, a name on a gate plaque? If he existed, where did he live, if not in the parsonage? Was Willawauk inhabited by four thousand or more pack rats who never threw
anything
away? What was going on in this town? At a glance, everything appeared to be normal. But on closer inspection, there hadn’t been a single thing about Willawauk that hadn’t turned out to be strange.

How many other buildings in town were not what they appeared to be?

She walked wearily out of the storage aisles and returned to the front door. She was growing increasingly shaky. She wondered if there was any chance at all that she would eventually be able to climb out of the rabbit hole, back into the real world.

Probably not.

Outside again, she could barely stay on her feet. Her rain-sodden clothes felt as if they weighed a couple of thousand pounds. The impact of the raindrops was incredible, and the wind struck with sledgehammer blows that threatened to drive her to her knees.

She knew that Harch and the others would come for her, sooner or later, and until they did, she just wanted to sit where it was warm. All hope of escape had left her.

The church might be warm. At least it would be dry, and she would be out of the cold wind. That is—if the church was real. If it wasn’t just a facade, like a false-front set on a Hollywood backlot.

There was light in the church, anyway. Maybe that was a good sign; maybe there would be heat, too.

She climbed the dozen brick steps toward the heavy, hand-carved oak doors, hoping they were unlocked.

The doors of a church were supposed to remain unlocked at all times, twenty-four hours a day, every day, so that you could go inside to pray or to be comforted whenever you needed to escape from the pain of life. That’s the way it was
supposed
to be, but you could never be sure of anything in good old Willawauk, Oregon.

She reached the doors. There were four doors, two sets of two. She tried the one on the extreme right. It was unlocked.

At least
something
in Willawauk was as it should be.

Pulling open the door, about to step into the building, she heard an engine in the street behind her. The hiss of tires on the wet pavement. The squeal of brakes.

She turned and looked down the steps.

An ambulance had drawn up to the curb in front of the church. Three words were painted on the side of it: WILLAWAUK COUNTY HOSPITAL.

“There is no such goddamned thing,” Susan said, surprised to find a drop of anger remaining in her vast pool of resignation and depression.

Jellicoe and Parker got out of the ambulance and looked up at her. They were no longer dressed as sheriff’s deputies. They were wearing white raincoats and white rain hats, black boots. They were playing hospital orderlies again.

Susan didn’t intend to run from them. She couldn’t. Her strength and her will power were gone, used up.

On the other hand, she wasn’t going to walk down the steps and into their arms, either. They would have to come and get her and carry her back to the ambulance.

Meanwhile, she would go inside where it was warm, go as far toward the front of the church as her legs would take her, so that Jellicoe and Parker would have to carry her that much farther when they took her out to the ambulance. It was a small, perhaps meaningless protest. Pathetic, really. But passive resistance was the only kind of which she was still capable.