by Dean Koontz
If she got on the stretcher and let them take her downstairs, she would never be brought back again. That would be the end of her. She knew it. She knew it.
“I’ll claw your eyes out if you try to take me from this room,” she said, struggling to keep the tremor out of her voice. “I mean it.”
Jellicoe looked at Parker. “Better get a nurse.”
Parker hurried out of the room.
The hospital’s lights dimmed, went off, and for a moment there was only the funereal light of the storm-gray day, and then the power came on again.
Jellicoe turned his small, close-set eyes on Susan and favored her with an utterly empty smile that made her chilled blood even colder. “Just take it easy, huh? Look, lady, just relax. Will you do that for me?”
“Stay away.”
“Nobody’s going to come near you. So just stay calm,” he said in a soft, singsong voice, making a placating gesture with his hands. “Nobody wants to hurt you. We’re all your friends here.”
“Dammit, don’t pretend that you think I’m crazy,” she said. She was both terrified and furious. “You know damned well I’m not nuts. You know what’s going on here. I don’t know, but you sure as hell do.”
He stared at her, saying nothing. But there was mockery in his eyes and in the smug half-smile that turned up only one corner of his mouth.
“Get back,” Susan said. “Get away from the bed. Now!”
Jellicoe retreated to the open door, but he didn’t leave the room.
The sound of Susan’s own heartbeat was so loud in her ears that it challenged the rain-wind-thunder-lightning chorus of the autumn storm.
Each breath caught in her dry, jagged throat and had to be torn loose with conscious effort.
Jellicoe watched her.
This can’t be happening, she told herself frantically. I’m a rational woman. I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in miraculous coincidences, and as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, I don’t believe in the supernatural. There aren’t such things as ghosts. Dead men don’t come back. They don’t!
Jellicoe watched her.
Susan cursed her weak, emaciated body. Even if she had a chance to run, she wouldn’t get more than a few steps. And if they forced her to fight for her life, she wouldn’t last very long.
Finally, Herbert Parker returned with a nurse, a severe looking blonde who was a stranger to Susan.
“What’s wrong here?” the nurse asked. “Miss Thorton, why are you upset?”
“These men,” she said.
“What about them?” the nurse asked, coming to the bed.
“They want to hurt me,” Susan said.
“No, they only want to take you down to the physical therapy department on the first floor,” the nurse said. She was at the bed now, at the side where Carl Jellicoe had lowered the safety railing.
“You don’t understand,” Susan said, wondering how in the name of God she could explain the situation to this woman without sounding like a raving lunatic.
Parker was standing at the open door. He said, “She threatened to claw our eyes out.”
Jellicoe had drifted closer and was near the foot of the bed; too near.
“Back off, you bastard,” Susan said, virtually spitting the words at him.
He ignored her.
To the nurse, Susan said, “Tell him to back off. You don’t understand. I’ve got good reason to be afraid of him. Tell him!”
“Now, there’s no reason on earth for you to be upset,” the nurse said.
“We’re all your friends here,” Jellicoe said.
“Susan, do you know where you are?” the nurse asked in a tone of voice usually reserved for very young children, very old people, and the mentally disturbed.
Frustrated, angry, Susan shouted at her. “Hell, yes, I know where I am. I’m in the Willawauk County Hospital. I suffered a head injury, and I was in a coma for three weeks, but I’m not suffering any kind of relapse. I’m not having hallucinations or delusions. I’m not hysterical. These men are—”
“Susan, would you do something for me?” the nurse asked, still using that excessively reasonable, syrupy, patronizing tone of voice. “Would you not shout? Would you please lower your voice? If you would just lower your voice and take a minute to catch your breath, I’m sure you’ll feel calmer. Just take a few deep breaths and try to relax. Nothing can be accomplished until we’re all relaxed and at ease with one another, until we’re all polite to one another.”
“Christ!” Susan said, burning with frustration.
“Susan, I want to give you this,” the nurse said. She raised one hand; she was holding a damp cotton pad and a hypodermic syringe that she had already filled with an amber fluid.
“No,” Susan said, shaking her head.
“It’ll help you relax.”
“No.”
“Don’t you want to relax?”
“I want to keep my guard up.”
“It won’t hurt, Susan.”
“Get away from me.”
The nurse leaned across the bed toward her.
Susan snatched up the paperback book that she’d been reading and threw it in the woman’s face.
The nurse took a step backwards, but she was unhurt. She looked at Jellicoe. “Can you help me?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Stay away,” Susan warned him.
Jellicoe started around the side of the bed.
She twisted to her left, scooped a drinking glass off the nightstand, and pitched it at Jellicoe’s head.
He ducked, and the glass missed, shattered explosively against the wall beyond him.
Susan looked for something else to throw.
He moved in fast, and she tried to claw his face, and he seized her wrists in his viselike hands. He was stronger than he looked. She couldn’t have wrenched free of him even if she’d been in better condition.
“Don’t struggle,” the nurse said.
“We’re all your friends here,” Carl Jellicoe said for the third time.
Susan fought back but without effect. Jellicoe forced her back against the mattress. She slid down on the bed until she was stretched out flat, helpless.
Jellicoe pinned her arms at her sides.
The nurse pushed up the sleeve of her green pajamas.
Susan thrashed and drummed her feet on the bed and cried out for help.
“Hold her still,” the nurse said.
“Not easy” Jellicoe said. “She’s got a lot of fire in her.”
What he said was true. She was surprised that she could resist at all. Panic had brought new energy with it.
The nurse said, “Well, at least, the way she’s straining, I can see the vein. It’s popped up real nice.”
Susan screamed.
The nurse quickly swabbed her arm with the cotton pad. It was wet and cold.
Susan smelled alcohol and screamed again.
A freight train of thunder roared in and derailed with a hard, sharp crash. The hospital lights flickered out, on, out, on.
“Susan, if you don’t hold perfectly still, I might accidentally break off the needle in your arm. Now, you don’t want that to happen, do you?”
She refused to go peacefully. She writhed and twisted and tried to snake her way out of Jellicoe’s grip.
Then a familiar voice said, “What in heaven’s name is going on here? What’re you doing to her?”
The blond nurse drew the needle back just as it was about to prick Susan’s bare skin.
Jellicoe’s grip relaxed as he turned to see who had spoken.
Susan strained to lift her head from the mattress.
Mrs. Baker was at the foot of the bed.
“Hysteria,” the blond nurse said.
“She was violent,” Jellicoe said.
“Violent?” Mrs. Baker said, clearly not believing it. She looked at Susan. “Honey, what’s the matter?”
Susan looked up at Carl Jellicoe, who was still holding her. His gaze cut into her.
He subtly increased the pressure he was applying with his fingers, and for the first time she realized that his flesh was warm, not cold and clammy like the flesh of the dead. She looked back at Mrs. Baker, and in a calm voice she said, “Do you remember what happened to me thirteen years ago? Yesterday, I told you and Dr. McGee all about it.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Baker said, lifting her chain-hung glasses off her bosom and putting them on her face. “Of course I remember. A terrible thing.”
“Well, I was just having a nightmare about it when these two orderlies came into the room.”
“All this is just because of a nightmare?” Mrs. Baker asked.
“Yes,” Susan lied. She just wanted to get Jellicoe, Parker, and the blond nurse out of the room. When they were gone, perhaps then she could explain the true situation to Thelma Baker. If she tried to explain it now, Mrs. Baker might well agree with the blond nurse’s diagnosis: hysteria.
“Let her go,” Mrs. Baker said. “I’ll handle this.”
“She was violent,” Jellicoe said.
“She was having a nightmare,” Mrs. Baker said. “She’s fully awake now. Let her go.”
“Thelma,” the blond nurse said, “it didn’t seem like she was asleep when she threw that book at me.”
“She’s had a tough time, poor kid,” Mrs. Baker said, pushing in to the side of the bed, nudging the other nurse away. “Go on, the rest of you, go on. Susan and I will talk this out.”
“In my judgment—” the blond nurse began.
“Millie,” Mrs. Baker said, “you know I trust your judgment implicitly. But this is a special case. I can handle it. I really can.”
Reluctantly, Jellicoe let go of Susan.
Susan went limp with relief, then sat up in bed. She massaged one wrist, then the other. She could still feel where Jellicoe’s fingers had dug into her.
The two orderlies drifted out of the room, taking the wheeled stretcher with them.
The blond nurse hesitated, biting her thin lower lip, but at last she left, too, still carrying the damp cotton pad and the syringe.
Mrs. Baker walked around the bed, being careful not to step on any shards of the broken drinking glass. She looked in on Mrs. Seiffert, came back to Susan, and said, “The old dear slept right through all the ruckus.” She got another tumbler out of the nightstand and filled it with water from the dew-beaded metal pitcher that stood on a plastic tray atop the stand.
“Thank you,” Susan said, accepting the water. She drank thirstily. Her throat was slightly sore from screaming, and the water soothed it.
“More?”
“No, that was enough,” she said, putting the glass on the nightstand.
“Now,” Mrs. Baker said, “for Pete’s sake, what was all that about?”
Susan’s relief quickly gave way to tension, to dread, for she realized that the terror wasn’t over yet. In fact it had probably just begun.
PART TWO
Opening the Curtain ...
7
The lightning and thunder had moved off toward the next county, but the gray rain continued to fall, an ocean of it, and the day was dreary, still.
Susan sat in bed, feeling small and washed out, as if the rain, though never touching her, were nonetheless somehow sluicing away her very substance.
Standing beside the bed, hands thrust into the pockets of his lab coat, Jeffrey McGee said, “So now you’re saying that look-alikes for three of those fraternity men have shown up here.”
“Four.”
“What?”
“I didn’t tell you about the one I saw yesterday.”
“That would be ... Quince?”
“Yes.”
“You saw him here? Or someone who looked like him?”
“In the hall, while I was in the wheelchair. He’s a patient, just like Harch. Room two-sixteen. His name’s supposed to be Peter Johnson.” She hesitated, then said, “He looks nineteen.”
McGee studied her in silence for a moment.
Although he had not yet been judgmental, although he seemed to be trying hard to find a way to believe her story, she could not meet his eyes. The things she had told him were so outlandish that the scientist in her was embarrassed merely by the need to speak of them. She looked down at her hands, which were knotted together in her lap.
McGee said, “Is that how old Randy Lee Quince was when he helped kill Jerry Stein? Was he just nineteen?”
“Yes. He was the youngest of the four.”
And I know what’s going through your mind right now, she thought. You’re thinking about my head injury, about the coma, about the possibility of minor brain damage that didn’t show up on any of your X rays or other tests, a tiny embolism, or perhaps an exceedingly small hemorrhage in a threadlike cerebral capillary. You’re wondering if I’ve received a brain injury that just, by sheerest chance, happens to affect that infinitesimal lump of gray tissue in which the memories of the House of Thunder are stored; you’re wondering if such an injury—a sand-grain blood clot or a minuscule, ruptured vessel—could cause those memories to become excessively vivid, resulting in my preoccupation with that one event in my life. Am I fixated on Jerry’s murder for the simple reason that some abnormal pressure in my brain is focusing my attention relentlessly upon the House of Thunder? Is that pressure causing me to fantasize new developments in that old nightmare? Is that nearly microscopic rotten spot in my head altering my perceptions so that I believe I see dead ringers for Harch and the others, when, in reality, neither Bill Richmond nor Peter Johnson nor the two orderlies bear any resemblance whatsoever to the quartet of fraternity brothers? Well, maybe that is what’s happening to me. But then again, maybe not. One minute, I think that is the explanation. The next minute, I know it must be something else altogether. They’re not dead ringers. They are dead ringers. They’re not the real Harch, Quince, Jellicoe, and Parker. They are the real Harch, Quince, Jellicoe, and Parker. I just don’t know. God help me, I just don’t know what’s happening to me, so dear Dr. McGee, I can’t blame you for your confusion and your doubts.
“So now there are four of them,” he said. “Four dead ringers, all here in the hospital.”
“Well ... I don’t know exactly.”
“But didn’t you just tell me—”
“I mean, yes, they look identical to the men who killed Jerry. But I don’t know if they’re nothing more than dead ringers or if they’re ...”
“Yes?”
“Well, maybe they’re ... something else.”
“Such as?”
“In the case of Parker and Jellicoe ...”
“Go on,” he urged.
Susan simply couldn’t bring herself to speculate aloud on the existence of ghosts. When Carl Jellicoe had been holding her down against the mattress, his hands clamped tightly on her arms, supernatural explanations had not been beyond consideration. But now it seemed like sheer lunacy to talk seriously about dead men returning from their graves to extract bloody vengeance from the living.
“Susan?”
She met his eyes at last.
“Go on,” he urged again. “If the two orderlies aren’t just look-alikes for Jellicoe and Parker, if they’re something else, as you say, then what did you have in mind?”
Wearily, she said, “Oh, Jeez, I just don’t know. I don’t know what to say to you, how to explain it to you—or to myself, as far as that goes. I don’t know what to think about it. I can only tell you what I saw with my own eyes—or what I thought I saw.”
“Listen, I didn’t mean to pressure you,” he said quickly. “I know this can’t be easy for you.”
She saw pity in his lovely blue eyes, and she immediately looked away from him. She didn’t want to be an object of pity to anyone, especially not to Jeffrey McGee. She loathed the very thought of it.
He was silent for a while, staring at the floor, apparently lost in thought.
She wiped her damp palms on the sheets and leaned back against the pillow. She closed her eyes.
Outside, the marching tramp-tramp-tramp of the rain transformed the entire Willawauk Valley into a parade ground.
He said, “Suggestion.”
“I’m sure ready for one.”
“You might not like it.”
She opened her eyes. “Try me.”
“Let me bring Bradley and O’Hara in here right now.”
“Jellicoe and Parker.”
“Their names are really Bradley and O’Hara.”
“So Mrs. Baker told me.”
“Let me bring them in here. I’ll ask each of them to tell you a little something about himself: where he was born and raised, where he went to school, how he came to be working at this hospital. Then you can ask them any questions you want, anything at all. Maybe if you talk to them for a while, maybe if you get to know them a bit...”
“Maybe then I’ll decide they don’t look so much like Parker and Jellicoe after all,” she said, completing the thought for him.
He moved closer, putting a hand on her shoulder, leaving her no choice but to look up at him and see the pity again. “Isn’t it at least a possibility that, once you know them, you might see them differently?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s not only possible or probable. It’s almost a certainty.”
Clearly, her awareness and her objectivity surprised him.
She said, “I’m fully aware that my problem is most likely either psychological or the result of some organically rooted brain dysfunction related to the auto accident, or possibly not to the accident directly but to the effects of spending three weeks in a coma.”
McGee shook his head and smiled; it was his turn to look embarrassed. “I keep forgetting you’re a scientist.”
“You don’t have to coddle me, Dr. McGee.”
Virtually glowing with relief, he put his hands behind him, palms flat on the mattress, and boosted himself up; he sat on the edge of the bed, beside her. That casual and unaffected act, such a spontaneous physical expression of the pleasure he took from her no-nonsense response, made him seem ten years younger than he was—and even more appealing than he had been. “You know, I was going crazy trying to think of some nice, gentle way to tell you that this whole look-alike business was probably in your head, and here you knew it all the time. Which means we can probably rule out one of the two diagnoses that you just outlined; I mean, it’s probably not a psychological boogeyman that’s riding you. You’re too stable for that. You’re amazing!”