The House of Thunder (23 page)
She knew she couldn’t live that way. Death would be far preferable to such a tortured existence.
She snapped off the bathroom light and fancied that she could feel the weight of the darkness on her back.
She followed the wall to her bed, wincing at the pain in the backs of her legs.
When she reached the bed, she used the power controls to lower it, and she put down the safety railing as she had done on the other side when she’d gotten out, and she started to sit down on the mattress, but then she hesitated. She raised up again and stood for a long while, staring at the curtain. Eventually, she accepted the fact that she could not simply go to sleep now; not yet. She had to find the courage to do what she had been unable to do earlier. She had to go over there, pull back the curtain, and prove to herself that her roommate was only an old, sick woman. Because if she did not do it now, the hallucinations might start again the moment that she turned out the light and put her head down on her pillow. Because if she didn’t fight this sickness every step of the way, it would probably overwhelm her much sooner than if she resisted. Because she was Susan Kathleen Thorton, and Susan Kathleen Thorton never ran away from trouble.
She was standing beside her slippers. She put her cold feet in them.
She moved creakily around the bottom of her bed, holding on to it as she went. She shuffled across the space between the two beds and, standing in the open with nothing to hold on to, she raised one hand and touched the curtain.
The room seemed extraordinarily quiet—as if she were not the only one holding her breath.
The air was as still as the air in a crypt.
She closed her hand, clenching a wad of drapery material in her fist.
Open it, for heaven’s sake! she told herself when she realized that she had been hesitating for almost a minute. There’s nothing threatening behind here, nothing but one old lady who’s sleeping through the last few days of her life.
Susan pulled the curtain aside. Overhead, the dozens of small metal hooks rattle-clattered along the stainless-steel track in the ceiling.
As she swept the curtain out of the way, Susan stepped closer to the bed, right up to the safety railing, and she looked down. In that gut-wrenching moment, she knew that there was a Hell and that she was trapped in it.
Mrs. Seiffert wasn’t in the bed, as she should have been. Something else. Something hideous. A corpse. Jerry Stein’s corpse.
No. It was just imagination.
Confused perceptions.
Brain dysfunction.
A minuscule hemorrhage in a tiny capillary.
And ... oh yes ... the well-known, oft-discussed, mischievous, sand-grain blood clot.
Susan went through the entire litany of medical explanations, but the corpse did not vanish or magically metamorphose into Mrs. Seiffert.
Nevertheless, Susan did not scream. She did not run. She was determined to sweat this one out; she would force herself back to reality. She clung to the safety railing to keep from collapsing.
She closed her eyes.
Counted to ten.
It isn’t real.
She opened her eyes.
The corpse was still there.
The dead man was lying on his back, the covers drawn up to the middle of his chest, as if merely sleeping. One side of his skull had a crumpled look; it was indented, matted with dark, dry blood, where Ernest Harch had kicked him three times. The body’s bare arms were atop the covers, stretched straight out at its sides; the hands were turned palms-up, and the fingers were bent into rigid curves, as if the dead man had made one last, futile grasp at life.
The corpse didn’t look exactly like Jerry Stein, but that was only because it wasn’t in very good condition; death had corrupted it somewhat. The skin was gray with greenish-black patches around the sunken eyes and at the corners of the purple, swollen, suppurating lips. The eyelids were mottled and crusty. Dark, peeling, oozing blisters extended out of the nostrils and across the upper lip. On both sides of the bloated, misshapen nose, other blisters glistened with some foul, brown fluid. In spite of the swelling and the discoloration and the disgusting disfigurement, the dead man was clearly Jerry Stein.
But Jerry had been dead for thirteen years. In that time, death would have visited upon him considerably more corruption than this. His flesh should have completely decomposed years ago. By now he should have been little more than a skeleton with a few strands of brittle hair clinging to its fleshless skull, the bleached bones bound together loosely by scraps of mummified skin and leathery ligaments. Yet he appeared to have been dead for only about ten days or a week, perhaps less.
Which is proof that this is a hallucination, Susan told herself, squeezing the bed’s safety railing so hard that she wondered why it didn’t bend in her hands. Only a hallucination. It doesn’t conform to reality, to the laws of nature, or to logic; not in any detail. So it’s only a vision, a horror that exists nowhere else but in my mind.
More proof of the corpse’s nonexistence was the fact that Susan couldn’t detect even the mildest odor of decay. If the dead man actually were here, even in this inexplicably early stage of decomposition, the stench would be overpowering. But the air, while not exactly sweet, was hospital clean, tainted only by Lysol.
Touch it, she told herself. That would dispel it. No one can touch and feel a mirage. Embracing a mirage is like embracing empty air: your arms come together around yourself. Go ahead. Touch it and prove it isn’t really there.
She couldn’t do it. She tried hard to pry her hand off the railing in order to reach out to the dead man’s cold gray arm, but she didn’t have the courage.
Instead, she said aloud, as if chanting magical words that would banish the vision: “It’s not here. It’s not real. It’s all in my mind.”
The crusted eyelids of the corpse fluttered.
No!
They opened.
No, she thought desperately. No, no, no, this is not happening to me.
Even open, these were not the eyes of a living man: they were rolled far back in the head, so that only the whites were visible; however, the whites were not white at all, but yellow and smeared with streaks of red-brown blood. Then those terrible eyes moved, rolled, bulged, and the brown irises were visible, though coated by milky cataracts. The eyes jittered for a moment, seeing nothing, and then they focused on Susan.
She screamed but didn’t make a sound. The noise of the scream fell back inside of her, like a rubber ball bouncing down a long, long set of dark cellar stairs, until it came to the bottom and was still. She shook her head violently, and she gagged with revulsion, choked on her own sour saliva.
The corpse raised one stiff, gray hand. The rigormortised fingers gradually uncurled. It reached toward her.
She tore her hands off the bed’s safety railing as if the metal had suddenly become red hot.
The corpse opened its filthy, oozing mouth. With rotting tongue and lips, it formed her name:
“Sssuuuuusssaaaaannn...”
“Sssuuuuusssaaaaannn...”
She stumbled backwards one step.
It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t, isn’t...
Jerkily, as if animated by a sputtering electrical current, the dead man sat up in bed.
It’s all in my mind, she told herself, trying very hard to talk herself down, as McGee had advised.
The dead man called her name again and smiled.
Susan swung away from the apparition and bolted for the door to the hall, her slippered feet slapping flatly against the tile floor, and she
(I’m
out of control) reached the door after what seemed like hours, grabbed the big handle, tugged on it, but the door (I’ve got to stop, get calm) seemed to weigh a thousand tons, and she cursed her weakness, which was costing her precious seconds, and she heard a wet gurgling noise behind her (Imagination!), and she grunted and put her back into the should-have-been-simple task of opening the damned door, and finally she did drag it open, and she (I’m running from a mirage) plunged into the corridor, not daring to glance behind her to see if the corpse was in pursuit (Just a mirage), then she staggered, nearly fell, turned left, weaved down the hall, unable to progress in a straight line, her leg muscles afire, her knees and ankles melting more rapidly with each step she took, and she careened into the wall, put her hand against it, gasping, and shuffled forward, didn’t think she could go on, then felt (Imagined!) the dead man’s bitterly cold breath against the bare nape of her neck, and somehow she did go on, and she reached the main corridor, saw the nurses’ station down by the elevators, tried to cry out, still couldn’t produce a sound, and pushed away from the wall, hurrying as best she could along the dark green floor, beneath the pale yellow ceiling, hurrying toward the nurses’ station. Toward help. Safety.
(I’m
out of control) reached the door after what seemed like hours, grabbed the big handle, tugged on it, but the door (I’ve got to stop, get calm) seemed to weigh a thousand tons, and she cursed her weakness, which was costing her precious seconds, and she heard a wet gurgling noise behind her (Imagination!), and she grunted and put her back into the should-have-been-simple task of opening the damned door, and finally she did drag it open, and she (I’m running from a mirage) plunged into the corridor, not daring to glance behind her to see if the corpse was in pursuit (Just a mirage), then she staggered, nearly fell, turned left, weaved down the hall, unable to progress in a straight line, her leg muscles afire, her knees and ankles melting more rapidly with each step she took, and she careened into the wall, put her hand against it, gasping, and shuffled forward, didn’t think she could go on, then felt (Imagined!) the dead man’s bitterly cold breath against the bare nape of her neck, and somehow she did go on, and she reached the main corridor, saw the nurses’ station down by the elevators, tried to cry out, still couldn’t produce a sound, and pushed away from the wall, hurrying as best she could along the dark green floor, beneath the pale yellow ceiling, hurrying toward the nurses’ station. Toward help. Safety.
Nurse Scolari and a chunky, red-faced nurse named Beth Howe both did for Susan what she had been unable to do for herself: They talked her down, just as Jeff McGee had talked down the raving, hallucinating acid freaks in that Seattle hospital where he had served his residency. They brought her around behind the counter at the nurses’ station and settled her into a spring-backed office chair. They gave her a glass of water. They reasoned with her, soothed her, listened to her, cajoled her, calmed her.
But they couldn’t entirely convince her that it was safe to go back to room 258. She wanted another bed for the night, a different room.
“That’s not possible, I’m afraid,” Tina Scolari said. “You see, there’s been an upturn in admissions the last day or so. The hospital’s nearly full tonight. Besides, there’s really nothing wrong with two fifty-eight. It’s just a room like any other room. You know that’s true, don’t you, Susan? You know that what happened to you was just another of your attacks. It was just another dysfunctional episode.”
Susan nodded, although she wasn’t sure what she believed any more. “I still ... I ... don’t want ... to go back there,” she said, her teeth chattering.
While Tina Scolari continued to talk to Susan, Beth Howe went to have a look in 258. She was gone only a couple of minutes, and upon her return, she reported that all was well.
“Mrs. Seiffert?” Susan asked.
“She’s in bed where she belongs,” Beth said.
“You’re sure it’s her?”
“Positive. Sleeping like a rock.”
“And you didn’t find ... ?”
“Nothing else,” Beth assured her.
“You looked where it might have hidden?”
“Not many places to hide in that room.”
“But you did look?”
“Yes. Nothing was there.”
They coaxed Susan into a wheelchair, and both of them took her back to 258. The closer they got to the room, the more violently Susan shivered.
The curtain was drawn tightly shut around the second bed.
They pushed her wheelchair past the first bed and kept going.
“Wait!” Susan said, sensing their intention.
“I want you to have a look for yourself,” said Beth Howe.
“No, I shouldn’t.”
“Of course you should,” Beth said.
“You must,” Tina Scolari said.
“But... I don’t think ... I can.”
“I’m sure you can,” Tina Scolari said encouragingly.
They wheeled her right up to Jessica Seiffert’s bed.
Beth Howe pulled the curtain aside.
Susan snapped her eyes shut.
Clutched the arms of the wheelchair.
“Susan, look,” Tina said.
“Look,” Beth said. “It’s only Jessie.”
“You see?”
“Only Jessie.”
With her eyes closed, Susan could see the dead man—a man she had perhaps loved a long time ago, a man she now feared because the quick were meant to fear the dead—could see him on the inside of her eyelids as he sat up in the bed and smiled at her with soft lips that were like bursting pieces of spoiled fruit. The horror show behind her eyes was worse than what might lie in front of them, so she blinked; she looked.
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