by Dean Koontz
shut and make a fortress of his house, but before he could set himself to the task, he had been suddenly overwhelmed by fear and had fled to the garage, where he had hidden behind the furnace.
He dropped the hammer, stood, looked out the window. Beyond lay only bloom-laden rose bushes, a small strip of lawn, and an ivy-covered slope that led up to another house. A lovely landscape. Peaceful. He could not believe that it had been any different last night, that something more threatening had been crouching out there in the darkness.
And yet...
For a while Dom Corvaisis watched the day grow brighter, watched the bees visit the roses, then began to pick up the nails.
It was November 24.
5. Boston, Massachusetts
After the incident of the black gloves, two weeks passed without another attack.
For a few days following the embarrassing scene at Bernstein’s Delicatessen, Ginger Weiss remained on edge, expecting another seizure. She was unusually self-aware, acutely conscious of her physiological and psychological conditions, searching for subtle symptoms of serious disorder, alert for the slightest sign of another impending fugue, but she noticed nothing worrisome. She had no headaches, no attacks of nausea, no joint or muscle pain. Gradually, her confidence rose to its usual high level. She became convinced that her wild flight had been entirely stress-related, a never-to-be-repeated aberration.
Her days at Memorial were busier than ever. George Hannaby, chief of surgery—a tall burly bear of a man who talked slow, walked slow, and looked deceptively lazy—maintained a heavy schedule, and though Ginger was not the only resident working under him, she was the only one who currently worked exclusively with him. She assisted in many—perhaps in a majority—of his procedures: aortal grafts, amputations, popliteal bypasses, embolectomies, portocaval shunts, thoracotomies, arteriograms, the installation of temporary and permanent pacemakers, and more.
George observed her every move, was quick to note the slightest flaw in her skill and techniques. Although he looked like a friendly bear, he was a tough taskmaster and had no patience for laziness, ineptitude, or carelessness. He could be scathing in his critiques, and he made all the young doctors sweat. His scorn was not merely withering; it was dehydrating, searing, a nuclear heat.
Some residents considered George tyrannical, but Ginger enjoyed assisting him precisely because his standards were so high. She knew that his criticisms, though sometimes blisteringly delivered, were motivated solely by his concern for the patient, and she never took them personally. When she finally earned Hannaby’s unqualified blessing... well, that would be almost as good as God’s own seal of approval.
On the last Monday in November, thirteen days after her strange seizure, Ginger assisted in a triple-bypass heart operation on Johnny O’Day, a fifty-three-year-old Boston police officer who had been forced into early retirement by cardiovascular disease. Johnny was stocky, rubber-faced, tousle-haired, with merry blue eyes, unassuming, quick to laugh in spite of his troubles. Ginger was especially drawn to him because, although he looked nothing whatsoever like the late Jacob Weiss, he nevertheless reminded her of her father.
She was afraid Johnny O’Day was going to die—and that it was going to be, in part, her fault.
She had no reason to believe that he was more vulnerable than other cardiac patients. In fact, Johnny was in comparatively little danger. He was ten years younger than the average recipient of bypass surgery, with greater resources for recuperation. His cardiac ailment was not complicated by any other debilitating condition, such as phlebitis or excessively high blood pressure. His prospects were encouraging.
But Ginger could not twist free of the dread in which she found herself increasingly tangled. On Monday afternoon, as the hour of surgery drew near, she grew tense, and her stomach turned sour. For the first time since she had sat a lonely vigil beside her father’s hospital bed and had helplessly watched him die, Ginger was filled with doubt.
Perhaps her apprehension grew from the unjustified but inescapable notion that if she somehow failed this patient she would in a sense be failing Jacob yet again. Or perhaps her fear was utterly unwarranted and would seem foolish and laughable in hindsight. Perhaps.
Nevertheless, entering the operating theater at George’s side, she wondered if her hands would shake. A surgeon’s hands must never shake.
The operating room was all white and aqua tile, filled with gleaming chrome-plated and stainless-steel equipment. Nurses and an anesthesiologist were preparing the patient.
Johnny O’Day lay on the cruciform operating table, arms extended, palms up and wrists exposed for the intravenous spikes.
Agatha Tandy, a private surgical technician who was employed by George rather than by the hospital, stretched thin latex gloves over her boss’s freshly scrubbed hands, then over Ginger’s hands as well.
The patient had .been anesthetized. He was orange with iodine from the neck to the wrist, swathed in neatly tucked and folded layers of green cloth from the hips down. His eyes were taped shut to keep them from drying out. His breathing was slow but regular.
A portable tape deck with stereo speakers was on a stool in one corner. George preferred to cut to the accompaniment of Bach, and that calming music now filled the room.
It may have calmed the others, but today it did not calm Ginger. A secret scurrying something spun a web of ice in her stomach.
Hannaby positioned himself at the table. Agatha stood at his right side with an elaborately ordered tray of instruments. The circulating nurse waited to fetch whatever might be required from the cabinets along one wall. An assisting nurse with large gray eyes noticed an errant flap of green sheeting and quickly tucked it into place around the patient’s body. The anesthesiologist and his nurse were at the head of the table, monitoring the IV and the EKG. Ginger moved into position. The team was ready.
Ginger looked at her hands. They were not shaking.
Inside, though, she was all aquiver.
In spite of her sense of impending disaster, the surgery went smoothly. George Hannaby operated with quickness, sureness, dexterity, and skill that were even more impressive than usual. Twice, he stepped aside and requested that Ginger complete a part of the procedure.
Ginger surprised herself by functioning with her customary sureness and speed, her fear and tension revealed only by a tendency to perspire more than usual. However, the nurse was always there to blot her brow.
Afterward, at the scrub sink, George said, “Like clockwork.”
Soaping her hands under the hot water, she said, “You always seem so relaxed, as if ... as if you weren’t a surgeon at all ... as if you were just a tailor altering a suit of clothes.”
“I may seem that way,” he said, “but I’m always tense. That’s why I play Bach.” He finished washing up. “You were very tense today.”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Exceptionally tense. It happens.” Big as he was, he sometimes seemed to have the eyes of a sweet, gentle child. “The important thing is that it didn’t affect your skill. You were as smooth as ever. First rate. That’s the key. You’ve got to use tension to your advantage.”
“I guess I’m learning.”
He grinned. “As usual, you’re being too hard on yourself. I’m proud of you, kid. For a while there, I thought maybe you’d have to give up medicine and earn your living as a meat cutter in a supermarket, but now I know you’ll make it.”
She grinned back at him, but the grin was counterfeit. She had been more than tense. She had been seized by a cold, black fear that might easily have overwhelmed her, and that was much different from a healthy tension. That fear was something she had never felt before, something that she knew George Hannaby had never felt in his life, not in an operating room. If it continued, if the fear became a constant companion during surgery and would not be dispelled... what then?
At ten-thirty that evening, when she was reading in bed, the phone rang. It was George Hannaby. If the call h
ad come earlier, she’d have panicked and assumed that Johnny O’Day had taken a serious turn for the worse, but now she had regained her perspective. “So sorry. Missy Weiss not home. I no speak the English. Call back next April, please.”
“If that’s supposed to be a Spanish accent,” George said, “it’s atrocious. If it’s supposed to be Oriental, it’s merely terrible. Be thankful you chose medicine as a career instead of acting.”
“You, on the other hand, would’ve done well as a drama critic.”
“I do have the refined and sensitive perspective, the cool judgment and unerring insight of a first-rate critic, don’t I? Now shut up and listen: I’ve got good news. I think you’re ready, smart-ass.”
“Ready? For what?”
“The big time. An aortal graft,” he said.
“You mean... I wouldn’t just assist you? Do it entirely myself?”
“Chief surgeon for the entire procedure.”
“Aortal graft?”
“Sure. You didn’t specialize in cardiovascular surgery just to perform appendectomies for the rest of your life.”
She was sitting straight up in bed now. Her heart was beating faster, and she was flushed with excitement. “When?”
“Next week. There’s a patient checking in this Thursday or Friday. Name’s Fletcher. We’ll go over her file together on Wednesday. If things proceed according to schedule, I would think we’d be ready to cut on Monday morning. Of course, you’ll be responsible for scheduling all the final tests and making the decision to go ahead.”
“Oh, God.”
“You’ll do fine.”
“You’ll be with me.”
“I’ll assist you ... if you feel you need me for anything.”
“And you’ll take over if I start to screw up.”
“Don’t be silly. You won’t screw up.”
She thought about it a moment, then said, “No. I won’t screw up.”
“That’s my Ginger. You can do whatever you set your mind to.”
“Even ride a giraffe to the moon.”
“What?”
“Private joke.”
“Listen, I know you came close to panic this afternoon, but don’t worry. All residents experience that. Most have to deal with it early, when they begin to assist in the surgery. They call it The Clutch. But you’ve been cool and collected from the start, and I’d finally decided you’d never clutch up like the rest of them. Today, at last you did. The Clutch just came later for you than for most. And though I imagine you’re still worried about it, I think you should be glad it happened. The Clutch is a seasoning experience. The important thing is that you dealt with it superbly.”
“Thanks, George. Even better than a drama critic, you’d have made a good baseball coach.”
Minutes later, when they concluded their conversation and hung up, she fell back against the pillows again and hugged herself and felt so fine that she actually giggled. After a while she went to the closet and dug around in there until she located the Weiss family photograph album. She brought it back to bed and sat for a time, paging through the pictures of Jacob and Anna, for although she could not share her triumphs with them any more, she needed to feel that they were close.
Later still, in the dark bedroom, as she lay balanced on the thin edge of wakefulness, she finally understood why she had been frightened this afternoon. She had not been seized by The Clutch. Although she had not been able to admit it until now, she had been afraid that, in the midst of surgery, she would black out, plummet into a state of fugue, as she had done that Tuesday, two weeks ago. If an attack came while she held a scalpel, while she was doing delicate cutting, or while stitching in a vascular graft...
That thought brought her eyes wide open. The creeping form of sleep retreated like a thief caught in the middle of a burglary. For a long time she lay there, stiff, staring at the dark and newly ominous shapes of the bedroom furniture and at the window, where incompletely drawn draperies revealed a band of glass silvered by a fall of moonlight and by the rising beams of streetlamps below.
Could she accept the responsibility of chief surgeon on an aortal graft? Her seizure had surely been a one-time occurrence. It would never happen again. Surely not. But did she dare test that theory?
Sleep crept back again and claimed her, though not for hours.
Tuesday, after a successful trip to Bernstein’s Delicatessen, much food, and several lazy hours in an easy chair with a good book, her self-confidence was knit up again, and she began to look forward to the challenge ahead, with only an ordinary degree and kind of apprehension.
On Wednesday, Johnny O’Day continued to recover from his triple bypass and was in high spirits. This was what made the years of study and hard work worthwhile: preserving life, relieving suffering, bringing hope and happiness to those who had known despair.
She assisted in a pacemaker implantation that went without a hitch, and she performed an aortagram, a dye test on a patient’s circulation. She also sat in with George while he examined seven people who had been referred to him by other physicians.
When all the new patients had been seen, George and Ginger huddled for half an hour over the file of the candidate for the aortal graft—a fifty-eight-year-old woman, Viola Fletcher. After studying the file, Ginger decided she wanted Mrs. Fletcher admitted to Memorial on Thursday for testing and preparation. If there were no counterindications, surgery could take place first thing Monday morning. George agreed, and all the necessary arrangements were made.
Thus Wednesday progressed, always busy, never dull. By six-thirty she had put in a twelve-hour day, but she was not tired. In fact, although she had nothing to keep her at the hospital, she was reluctant to leave. George Hannaby was home already. But Ginger hung around, chatting with patients, double-checking charts, until at last she went to George’s office, where she intended to look again at Viola Fletcher’s file.
The professional offices were in the back wing of the building, separate from the hospital itself. At that hour the corridors were virtually deserted. Ginger’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the highly polished tile floors. The air smelled of pine-scented disinfectant.
George Hannaby’s waiting room, examining rooms, and private office were dark and quiet, and Ginger did not switch on all the lights as she moved through the outer rooms into the inner sanctum. There, she snapped on only the desk lamp as she passed it on her way to the file-room door, which was locked. George had given her keys to everything, and in a minute she had withdrawn Viola Fletcher’s records from the cabinet and returned with them to George’s desk.
She sat down in the big leather chair, opened the folder in the pool of light from the desk lamp—and only then noticed an object that riveted her attention and caused her breath to catch in her throat. It lay on the green blotter, along the curvature of light: a hand-held ophthalmoscope, an instrument used to examine the interior of the eye. There was nothing unusual—certainly nothing ominous—about the ophthalmoscope. Every doctor used such an instrument during a routine physical examination. Yet the sight of this one not only inhibited her breathing but filled her with a sudden sense of terrible danger.
She had broken out in a cold sweat.
Her heart was hammering so hard, so loud, that the sound of it seemed to come not from within but without, as if a parade drum was thumping in the street beyond the window.
She could not take her eyes off the ophthalmoscope. As with the black gloves in Bernstein’s Delicatessen more than two weeks ago, all other objects in George’s office began to fade, until the shining instrument was the only thing that she could see in any detail. She was aware of every tiny scratch and minute nick on its handle. Every humble feature of its design seemed abruptly and enormously important, as if this were not a doctor’s ordinary tool but the linchpin of the universe, an arcane instrument with the potential for catastrophic destruction.
Disoriented, suddenly made claustrophobic by a heavy, insistent, pressing mantle of irrational
fear that had descended over her like a great sodden cloak, she pushed the chair away from the desk and stood up. Gasping, whimpering, she felt suffocated yet chilled to the bone at the same time.
The shank of the ophthalmoscope glistened as if made of ice.
The lens shone like an iridescent and chillingly alien eye.
Her resolve to stand fast now swiftly melted, even as her heart seemed to freeze under the cold breath of terror.
Run or die, a voice said within her. Run or die.
A cry escaped her, and it sounded like the tortured appeal of a lost and frightened child.
She turned from the desk, stumbled around it, almost fell over a chair. She crossed the room, burst into the outer office, fled into the deserted corridor, keening shrilly, seeking safety, finding none. She wanted help, a friendly face, but she was the only person on the floor, and the danger was closing in. The unknown threat that was somehow embodied in the harmless ophthalmoscope was drawing nearer, so she ran as fast as she could, her footsteps booming along the hallway.
Run or die.
The mist descended.
Minutes later, when the mist cleared, when she was again aware of her surroundings, she found herself in the emergency stairwell at the end of the office wing, on a concrete landing between floors. She could not remember leaving the office corridor and taking to the stairs. She was sitting on the landing, squeezed into the corner, her back pressed to the cinderblock wall, staring out at the railing along the far side of the steps. A single bare bulb burned behind a wire basket overhead. To her left and right, flights of stairs led up and down into shadow before coming to other lighted landings. The air was musty and cool. If not for her ragged breathing, silence would have ruled.
It was a lonely place, especially when your life was coming apart at the seams and you needed the reassurance of bright lights and people. The gray walls, stark light, looming shadows, the metal railing... The place seemed like a reflection of her own despair.
Her wild flight and whatever other bizarre behavior she exhibited in her inexplicable fugue had evidently not been seen, or she would not now be alone. At least that was a blessing. At least no one knew.
She knew, however, and that was bad enough.
She shivered, not entirely from fear, for the mindless terror that had gripped her was gone. She shivered because she was cold, and she was cold because her clothes clung to her, damp, soaked with sweat.
She raised one hand, wiped her face.
She rose, looked up the stairwell, then down. She did not know whether she was above or below the floor on which George Hannaby had his office. After a moment she decided to go up.
Her footsteps echoed eerily.
For some reason, she thought of tombs.
“Meshuggene, ” she said shakily.
It was November 27.
6. Chicago, Illinois
The first Sunday morning in December was cold, under a low gray sky that promised snow. By afternoon the first scattered flakes would begin to fall, and by early evening the city’s grimy face and soiled skirts would be temporarily concealed beneath the white pancake makeup and pristine cloak of snow. This night, from the Gold Coast to the slum tenements, everywhere in the city, the number-one topic of conversation would be the storm. Everywhere, that is, but in the Roman Catholic homes throughout the parish of St. Bernadette’s, where they would still be talking about the shocking thing Father Brendan Cronin had done during the early Mass that morning.
Father Cronin rose at five-thirty a.m., said prayers, showered, shaved, dressed in cassock and biretta, picked up his breviary, and left the parish house without bothering to put on a coat. He stood for a moment on the rear porch, breathing deeply of the crisp December air.
He was thirty years old, but with his direct green eyes and unruly auburn hair and freckled face, he looked younger than he was. He was fifty or sixty pounds overweight, though not particularly thick in the middle. On him, fat distributed evenly, filling him out equally in face, arms, torso, and legs. From childhood through college, until his second year at the seminary, his nickname had been “Pudge.”
Regardless of his emotional state, Father Cronin nearly always looked happy. His face had a natural cherubic aspect, and the round lines of it were not designed for the clear and easy expression of anger, melancholy, or grief. This morning he looked mildly pleased with himself and with the world, though he was deeply troubled.
He followed a flagstone path across the yard, past denuded flower beds where the bare earth lay in frozen clumps. He unlocked the door of the sacristy and let himself in. Myrrh and spikenard blended with the scent of the lemon-oil furniture polish with which the old church’s oak paneling, pews, and other wooden objects were anointed.
Without switching on the lights, with only the flickering ruby glow of the sacristy lamp to guide him, Father Cronin knelt at the prie-dieu and bowed his head. In silence, he petitioned the Divine Father to make him a worthy priest. In the past, this private devotion, before the arrival of the sexton and the altar boy, had sent his spirits soaring and had filled him with exultation at the