The House of Thunder (8 page)

“So the wink was just a wink, and the threat was all in my head?”

“Don’t you figure that’s probably the case?” he asked diplomatically.

She sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do. And I suppose I should apologize for causing so much trouble about this.”

“It wasn’t any trouble,” he said graciously.

“I’m awfully tired, weak, and my perceptions aren’t as sharp as they should be. Last night, I dreamed about Harch, and when I saw that man step out of the elevator, looking so much like Harch, I just ... lost my head. I panicked.”

That was a difficult admission for her to make. Other people might act like Chicken Little at the slightest provocation, but Susan Kathleen Thorton expected herself to remain—and previously always had remained—calm and collected through any crisis that fate threw at her. She had been that way since she was just a little girl, for the circumstances of her lonely childhood had required her to be totally self-reliant. She hadn’t even panicked in the House of Thunder, when Ernest Harch had kicked in Jerry’s skull; she had run, had hidden, had survived—all because she had kept her wits about her at a time when most people, if thrust into the same situation, would surely have lost theirs. But now she had panicked; worse, she had let others see her lose control. She felt embarrassed and humbled by her behavior.

“I’ll be a model patient from now on,” she told Dr. McGee. “I’ll take my medicine without argument. I’ll eat real well, so I’ll regain my strength just as quickly as possible. I’ll exercise when I’m told to and only as much as I’m told to. By the time I’m ready to be discharged, you’ll have forgotten all about the scene I caused today. In fact you’ll wish that all of your patients were like me. That’s a promise.”

“I already wish all of my patients were exactly like you,” he said. “Believe me, it’s much more pleasant treating a pretty young woman than it is treating cranky old men with heart conditions.”

After McGee had gone for the day, Susan arranged with one of the orderlies to have a rental television installed in her room. As afternoon faded into evening, she watched the last half of an old episode of “The Rockford Files,” then the umpteenth rerun of an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” In spite of frequent bursts of storm-caused static, she watched the five o’clock news on a Seattle station, and she was dismayed to discover that the current international crises were pretty much the same as the international crises that had been at the top of the news reports more than three weeks ago, before she had fallen into a coma.

Later, she ate all the food on her dinner tray. Later still, she rang for one of the second-shift nurses and asked for a snack. A pert blonde named Marcia Edmonds brought her a dish of sherbet with sliced peaches. Susan ate all of that, too.

She tried not to think about Bill Richmond, the Harch look-alike. She tried not to think about the House of Thunder, or about the precious days she had lost in a coma, or about the remaining gaps in her memory, or about her current state of helplessness, or about anything else that might upset her. She concentrated on being a good patient and developing a positive attitude, for she was eager to get well again.

Nevertheless, an unspecific but chilling presentiment of danger disturbed her thoughts from time to time. A shapeless portent of evil.

Each time that her thoughts turned into that dark pathway, she forced herself to think only of pleasing things. Mostly, she thought about Dr. Jeffrey McGee: the grace with which he moved; the ear-pleasing timbre of his voice; the sensitivity and the intriguing scintillation of his exceptionally blue eyes; his strong, well-formed, long-fingered hands.

Near bedtime, after she had taken the sedative that McGee had prescribed for her, but before she had begun to get drowsy, the rain stopped falling. The wind, however, did not die down. It continued to press insistently against the window. It murmured, growled, hissed. It sniffed all around the window frame and thumped its paws of air against the glass, as if it were a big dog searching diligently for a way to get inside.

Perhaps because of the sound of the wind, Susan dreamed of dogs that night. Dogs and then jackals. Jackals and then wolves. Werewolves. They changed fluidly from lupine to human form, then into wolves again, then back into men, always pursuing her or leaping at her or waiting in the darkness ahead to pounce on her. When they took the form of men, she recognized them: Jellicoe, Parker, Quince, and Harch. Once, as she was fleeing through a dark forest, she came upon a moonlit clearing in which the four beasts, in wolf form, were crouched over the corpse of Jerry Stein, tearing the flesh from its bones. They looked up at her and grinned malevolently. Blood and ragged pieces of raw flesh drooled from their white teeth and vicious jowls. Sometimes she dreamed they were chasing her through the caverns, between thrusting limestone stalagmites and stalactites, along narrow corridors of rock and earth. Sometimes they chased her across a vast field of delicate black flowers; sometimes they prowled deserted city streets, following her scent, forcing her to flee from a series of hiding places, snapping relentlessly at her heels. Once, she even dreamed that one of the creatures had slunk into her hospital room; it was a crouching wolf-thing, swathed in shadows, visible only in murky silhouette, watching her from the foot of the bed, one wild eye gleaming. Then it moved into the weak amber glow of the night light, and she saw that it had undergone another metamorphosis, changing from wolf to man this time. It was Ernest Harch. He was wearing pajamas and a bathrobe—

(This isn’t part of the dream! she thought as icy shards of fear thrilled through her.)

—and he came around to the side of the bed. He bent down to look more closely at her. She tried to cry out; couldn’t. She could not move, either. His face began to blur in front of her, and she struggled to keep it in focus, but she sensed that she was slipping back to the field of black flowers—

—and Harch’s features ran together in one gray smear. The hospital room dissolved completely, and again she was plunging across a field of strange black flowers, with a pack of wolves baying behind her. The moon was full; oddly, however, it provided little light. She couldn’t see where she was going, and she tripped over something, fell into the flowers, and discovered that she had stumbled over Jerry Stein’s mutilated, half-eaten cadaver. The wolf appeared, loomed over her, snarling, leering, pushing its slavering muzzle down at her, down and down, until its cold nose touched her cheek. The beast’s hateful face blurred and reformed into an even more hateful countenance: that of Ernest Harch. It wasn’t a wolf’s nose touching her cheek any longer; it was now Harch’s blunt finger. She flinched, and her heart began pounding so forcefully that she wondered why it didn’t tear loose of her. Harch pulled his hand away from her and smiled. The field of black flowers was gone. She was dreaming that she was in her hospital room again—

—and she tried to sit up in bed but was unable to move. She reached for the call button that would summon a nurse or an orderly, and although the button was only a few inches away, it suddenly seemed light-years beyond her reach. She strained toward it, and her arm appeared to stretch and stretch magically, until it was bizarrely elongated; her flesh and bones seemed to be possessed of an impossible elasticity. Still, her questing finger fell short of the button. She felt as if she were Alice, as if she had just stepped through the looking glass. She was now in that part of Wonderland in which the usual laws of perspective did not apply. Here, little was big, and big was little; near was far; far was near; there was no difference whatsoever between up and down, in and out, over and under. This sleep-induced, drug-induced confusion made her nauseous; she tasted bile in the back of her throat. Could she taste something like that if she were dreaming? She wasn’t sure. She wished fervently that she could at least be certain whether she was awake or still fast asleep. “Long time no see,” Harch said. Susan blinked at him, trying to keep him in focus, but he kept fading in and out. Sometimes, for just a second or two, he had the shining eyes of a wolf. “Did you think you could hide from me forever?” he asked, speaking in a whisper, leaning even closer, until his face was nearly touching hers. His breath was foul, and she wondered if her ability to smell was an indication that she was awake, that Harch was real. “Did you think you could hide from me forever?” Harch demanded again. She could not respond to him; her voice was frozen in her throat, a cold lump that she could neither spit out nor swallow. “You rotten bitch,” Harch said, and his smile became a broad grin. “You stinking, rotten, smug little bitch. How do you feel now? Huh? Are you sorry you testified against me? Hmmm? Yeah. I’ll bet you’re real sorry now.” He laughed softly, and for a moment the laughter became the low growling of a wolf, but then it turned into laughter again. “You know what I’m going to do to you?” he asked. His face began to blur. “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” She was in a cavern. There were black flowers growing out of the stone floor. She was running from baying wolves. She turned a corner, and the cavern opened onto a shadowy city street. A wolf stood on the sidewalk, under a lamppost, and it said, “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” Susan ran and kept on running through a long, frightening, amorphous night.

Monday, shortly after dawn, she woke, groggy and damp with sweat. She remembered dreaming about wolves and about Ernest Harch. In the flat, hard, gray light of the cloudy morning, it seemed ridiculous for her to entertain the thought that Harch actually had been in her room last night. She was still alive, uninjured, utterly unmarked. It had all been a nightmare. All of it. Just a terrible nightmare.

Not long after Susan woke, she took a sponge bath with the help of a nurse. Refreshed, she changed into her spare pajamas, a green pair with yellow piping. A nurse’s aide took the soiled blue silk pajamas into the bathroom, rinsed them in the sink, and hung them to dry on a hook behind the door.

Breakfast was larger this morning than it had been yesterday. Susan ate every bite of it and was still hungry.

A few minutes after Mrs. Baker came on duty with the morning shift, she came to Susan’s room with Dr. McGee, who was making his morning rounds before attending to his private practice at his offices in Willawauk. Together, McGee and Mrs. Baker removed the bandages from Susan’s forehead. There was no pain, just a prickle or two when the sutures were snipped and tugged loose.

McGee cupped her chin in his hand and turned her head from side to side, studying the healed wound. “It’s a neat bit of tailoring, even if I do say so myself.”

Mrs. Baker got the long-handled mirror from the nightstand and gave it to Susan.

She was pleasantly surprised to find that the scar was not nearly as bad as she had feared it would be. It was four inches long, an unexpectedly narrow line of pink, shiny, somewhat swollen skin, bracketed by small red spots where the stitches had been.

“The suture marks will fade away completely in ten days or so,” McGee assured her.

“I thought it was a huge, bloody gash,” Susan said, raising one hand to touch the new, smooth skin.

“Not huge,” McGee said. “But it bled like a faucet gushing water when you were first brought in here. And it resisted healing for a while, probably because you frowned a lot while you were comatose, and the frowning wrinkled your forehead. There wasn’t much we could do about that. Blue Cross wouldn’t pay for an around-the-clock comedian in your room.” He smiled. “Anyway, after the suture marks have faded, the scar itself will just about vanish, too. It won’t look as wide as it looks now, and, of course, it won’t be discolored. When it’s fully healed, if you think it’s still too prominent, a good plastic surgeon can use dermabrasion techniques to scour away some of the scar tissue.”

“Oh, I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” Susan said. “I’m sure it’ll be almost invisible. I’m just relieved that I don’t look like Frankenstein’s monster.”

Mrs. Baker laughed. “As if that were ever a possibility, what with your good looks. Goodness gracious, kid, it’s a crime the way you underrate yourself!”

Susan blushed.

McGee was amused.

Shaking her head, Mrs. Baker picked up the scissors and the used bandages, and she left the room.

“Now,” McGee said, “ready to talk to your boss at Milestone?”

“Phil Gomez,” she said, repeating the name McGee had given her yesterday. “I still can’t remember a thing about him.”

“You will.” McGee looked at his wristwatch. “It’s a bit early, but not much. He might be in his office now.”

He used the phone on the nightstand and asked the hospital operator to dial the Milestone number in Newport Beach, California. Gomez was already at work, and he took the call.

For a couple of minutes, Susan listened to one side of the conversation. McGee told Phil Gomez that she was out of her coma, and he explained about the temporary spottiness of her memory, always stressing the word “temporary.” Finally, he passed the receiver to her.

Susan took it as if she were being handed a snake. She wasn’t sure how she felt about making contact with Milestone. On one hand, she didn’t want to go through the rest of her life with a gaping hole in her memory. On the other hand, however, she remembered how she had felt yesterday when the subject of Milestone had come up during her talk with McGee: She’d had the disquieting feeling that she might be better off if she never found out what her job had been. A worm of fear had coiled up inside of her yesterday. Now, again, she felt that same inexplicable fear, squirming.

“Hello?”

“Susan? Is that really you?”

“Yes. It’s me.”

Gomez had a high, quick, puppy-friendly voice. His words bumped into one another. “Susan, thank God, how good to hear from you, how very good indeed, really, I mean it, but of course you know I mean it. We’ve all been so concerned about you, worried half to death. Even Breckenridge was worried sick about you, and who would ever have thought he had any human compassion? So how are you? How are you feeling?”