by Dean Koontz
“—hell, cut her heart out—”
“—bitch doesn’t have a heart—”
They can’t hurt me.
“—nothing but a stinking Jew-lover anyway—”
“—not bad looking—”
“—ought to screw her before we kill her—”
“—little on the scrawny side—”
“—she’ll fatten up a bit by Friday—”
“—ever been screwed by a dead man?—”
She refused to open her eyes.
They’re not real.
“—we’ll all get on you—”
“—get in you—”
They can’t hurt me.
“—all of that dead meat—”
“—shoved up in you—”
They can’t hurt me, can’t hurt me, can’t hurt...
“—Friday—”
“—Friday—”
A hand touched her breasts, and another hand clamped over her eyes.
She screamed.
Someone put a hard, rough hand over her mouth.
Harch said, “Bitch.” And it must have been Harch who pinched her right arm; hard; harder still.
And then she passed out.
9
The dark dissolved. It was replaced by milky fluorescent light, waltzing shadows that spun lazily in time to some unheard music, and blurred shapes that bobbled above her and spoke to her in fuzzy but familiar voices.
“Look who we’ve got here, Murf.”
“Who’s that, Phil?”
“Sleeping Beauty.”
Her vision cleared. She was lying on the stretcher. She blinked at the two orderlies who were looking down at her.
“And you think you’re the handsome prince?” Murf said to Phil.
“Well, you’re certainly no prince,” Phil said.
Susan saw an acoustic-tile ceiling above the two men.
“He thinks he’s a prince,” Murf said to Susan. “Actually, he’s one of the dwarfs.”
“Dwarfs?” Phil said.
“Dwarfs,” Murf said. “Either Ugly or Grumpy.”
“There wasn’t one named Ugly.”
“Then Grumpy.”
Susan turned her head left and right, bewildered. She was in the Physical Therapy Department’s waiting room.
“Besides,” Phil said, “Sleeping Beauty wasn’t mixed up with any dwarfs. That was Snow White.”
“Snow White?”
“Snow White,” Phil said, gripping the bar at the foot of the stretcher and pushing as Murf guided from the other end.
They started moving toward the double doors that opened onto the first-floor corridor.
Her bewilderment was suddenly overlaid with fear. She tried to sit up, but she was restrained by the single strap across her middle. She said, “No, wait. Wait. Wait a minute, dammit!”
They stopped moving. Both men appeared to be startled by her outburst. Murf’s bushy gray eyebrows were drawn together in a frown. Phil’s round, childlike face was a definition of puzzlement.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded.
“Well ... back to your room,” Murf said.
“What’s wrong?” Phil asked.
She ran her hands over the fabric belt that held her down, felt desperately for the means by which it could be released. She found the buckle, but before she could tug at it, Murf put his hand on hers and gently moved it away from the strap.
“Wait,” he said. “Just calm down, Miss Thorton. What’s wrong?”
She glared up at them. “You already took me out of here once, took me as far as the elevators—”
“We didn’t—”
“—then just pushed me in there with them, just abandoned me to them. I’m not going to let you do anything like that again.”
“Miss Thorton, we—”
“How could you do that to me? Why in the name of God would you want to do that to me? What could you possibly have against me? You don’t know me, really. I’ve never done anything to either of you.”
Murf glanced at Phil.
Phil shrugged.
To Susan, Murf said, “Who’s them?”
“You know,” she said bitterly, angrily. “Don’t pretend with me. Don’t treat me like a fool.”
“No, really,” Murf said. “I really don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Me either,” Phil said.
“Them!” she said exasperatedly. “Harch and the others. The four dead men, dammit!”
“Dead men?” Phil said.
Murf looked down at her as if she had lost her mind; then he abruptly broke into a smile. “Ah, I understand. You must’ve been dreaming.”
She looked from one man to the other, and they appeared to be genuinely perplexed by her accusations.
Murf said to Phil, “I guess she dreamed that we took her out of here and put her in the elevator with some other patients who were ... deceased.” He looked down at Susan. “Is that it? Is that what you dreamed?”
“I can’t have been dreaming. I wasn’t even asleep,” she said sharply.
“Of course you were asleep,” Phil said, his voice every bit as patient and understanding as hers was sharp and angry. “We just now watched you wake up.”
“A regular Sleeping Beauty,” Murf said.
She shook her head violently, side to side. “No, no, no. I mean, I wasn’t sleeping the first time you came in,” she said, trying to explain but realizing that she sounded irrational. “I... I just closed my eyes for a second or two after Mrs. Atkinson left me here, and before I could possibly have had a chance to doze off, you came and took me out to the elevator and—”
“But that was all a dream, don’t you see?” Murf said gently, smiling encouragingly.
“Sure,” Phil said. “It had to be a dream because we don’t ever move the deceased patients to the morgue by way of the public elevators.”
“Not ever,” Murf said.
“The deceased are transported in the service elevators,” Phil explained.
“That’s more discreet,” Murf said.
“Discreet,” Phil agreed.
She wanted to scream at them: That’s not the kind of dead men I’m talking about, you conniving bastards! I mean the dead men who’ve come back from the grave, the ones who walk and talk and somehow manage to pass for the living, the ones who want to kill me.
But she didn’t scream a word of that because she knew it would sound like the ravings of a lunatic.
“A dream,” Murf said placatingly.
Phil said, “Just a bad dream.”
She studied their faces, which loomed over her and appeared disproportionately huge from her awkward perspective. The gray-haired, fatherly Murf had kind eyes. And could Phil’s smooth, round, childlike countenance successfully conceal vicious, hateful thoughts? No, she didn’t believe that it could. His wide-eyed innocence was surely as genuine as her own fear and confusion.
“But how could it have been a dream?” she asked. “It was so real ... so vivid.”
“I’ve had a couple of dreams so vivid that they hung on for a minute or so after I woke up,” Phil said.
“Yeah,” Murf said. “Me, too.”
She thought of Quince’s speech about his suicide. She thought of the hand on her breasts, the other hand over her eyes, the third hand sealing shut her mouth when she tried to scream for help.
“But this was ... real,” she said, though she was increasingly coming to doubt that. “At least ... it seemed real ... frighteningly real...”
“I swear to you, it wasn’t more than five minutes ago that we got the call from Mrs. Atkinson, asking us to come and pick you up,” Murf said.
“And we came straight down,” Phil said.
“And here we are. But we weren’t here before.”
She licked her dry lips. “I guess...”
“A dream,” Murf said.
“Had to’ve been a bad dream,” Phil said.
At last, grudgingly, Susan nodded. �
�Yeah. I suppose so. Listen ... I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t worry your pretty head,” Murf told her. “There’s no need for you to be sorry.”
“I shouldn’t have snapped at you the way I did,” she said.
“Did she hurt your feelings, Phil?”
“Not in the least. Did she hurt your feelings, Murf?”
“Not one bit.”
“There, you see,” Phil said to Susan. “Absolutely no reason for you to apologize.”
“No reason at all,” Murf concurred.
“Now, do you feel up to traveling?” Phil asked her.
“We’ll make it a nice, gentle ride,” Murf promised.
Phil said, “We’ll take the scenic route.”
“First-class accommodations all the way,” Murf said.
“Gourmet meals at the captain’s table.”
“Dancing in the ship’s ballroom every night.”
“Free deck chairs and shuffleboard, plus a complimentary happy-hour cocktail,” Murf said.
She wished they would stop their bantering; it no longer amused her. She was somewhat dizzy, queasy, still considerably confused, as if she had drunk too much or had been drugged. Their swift patter was like a ball bouncing frenetically back and forth inside her head; it made her dizzier by the minute. But she didn’t know how to tell them to be quiet without hurting their feelings; and if the terror in the elevator had been just a dream, she had already been unjustifiably rude.
She said, “Well... okay. Let’s pull up anchor and get this ship out of the harbor.”
“Bon voyage,” Phil said.
“Lifeboat drill at sixteen hundred hours,” Murf said.
They rolled the stretcher through the swing-hinged double doors, into the first-floor hallway.
“You’re sure Sleeping Beauty wasn’t mixed up with a bunch of dwarfs?” Murf asked Phil.
“I told you, it was Snow White. Murf, I’m beginning to think you’re a hopeless illiterate.”
“What a vile thing to say, Phil. I’m an educated man.”
They turned into the long main hall and wheeled Susan toward the elevators.
Murf said, “It’s just that I don’t read children’s fairy tales any more. I’m sure such stuff is adequate for you, but I prefer more complex literature.”
“You mean the Racing Form?” Phil asked.
“Charles Dickens is more like it, Phil.”
“And the National Enquirer?”
They reached the elevators.
Susan felt watchspring tense.
“I’ll have you know that I’ve read all the published works of Louis L’Amour,” Murf said, pressing the white button that was marked Up.
“Dickens to L’Amour,” Phil said. “That’s quite a spread, Murf.”
“I’m a man of wide interests,” Murf said.
Susan held her breath, waiting for the doors to open. A scream crouched in her chest, ready to leap up into her throat and out.
Please, God, she thought, not again.
“And what about you, Phil? Have you read any good cereal boxes lately?”
The elevator doors opened with a soft hum. They were behind Susan’s head; she couldn’t see into the cab.
Murf and Phil rolled her inside and came with her this time. There were no dead men waiting.
She let out her breath in a rush and closed her eyes. Relief brought with it a headache.
The trip back to her room was uneventful, but when she was transferring herself from the stretcher to her bed, she felt a twinge of pain in her right arm, just above the inner crook of the elbow. She abruptly remembered that Harch—or maybe one of the others—had pinched that arm hard, very hard, just before she had passed out in the elevator.
After the two orderlies left, Susan sat for a while with her hands in her lap, afraid to look at her arm. At last, however, she pushed up the right sleeve of her green pajamas. There was a bruise on her frail biceps, a darker oval on the pale skin, two inches above the elbow joint. It was a light bruise, but it was getting darker. About the size of a nickel. The color of a strawberry birthmark. Quite sore to the touch. A fresh bruise: no doubt about that.
But what did it mean? Was it proof that the encounter with Harch and the other three men had actually taken place, proof that it had not been merely a bad dream during a short nap? Or had she acquired the bruise while exercising in the PT Department, and—not consciously but subconsciously aware of it—had she then cleverly incorporated the injury into the dream about the dead men in the elevator?
She tried to remember if she had bumped her arm at any time during the therapy session. She couldn’t be sure. She thought back to the shower that she had taken in the PT Department. Had her arm shown any discoloration then? Had there been a small spot of tenderness on the biceps? She didn’t recall that there had been either a mark or any soreness whatsoever. However, it might have been so slight that it had escaped her notice then; after all, most bruises developed slowly.
I must have gotten it when I was exercising, she told herself. That’s the only explanation that isn’t ... insane. Ernest Harch and the other fraternity brothers aren’t real. They can’t hurt me. They’re only phantoms generated by some peculiar form of brain dysfunction. If I regain my strength, if McGee finds out what’s wrong with me, if I get well again, that will be the last I’ll ever see of these walking, talking dead men. In the meantime, they simply cannot hurt me.
Jeff McGee showed up for his evening rounds at half past five, dressed as if he were going to a fancy dinner party. He was wearing a dark blue suit that was well-tailored to his tall, trim frame, a pearl-gray shirt, a blue- and gray-striped necktie, and a sky-blue display handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit jacket.
He looked so elegant and moved with such exceptional grace that Susan found herself suddenly responding to him sexually. From the moment she had seen him Sunday morning, she thought he was an extremely attractive man, but this was the very first time since waking from her long coma that she had experienced the warm, welcome, delicious fluttering-tingling-melting of sexual desire.
My God, she thought with amusement, I must be getting well: I’m horny!
McGee came directly to her bedside, and without hesitation this time, he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, near the corner of her mouth. He was wearing a subtle after-shave lotion that smelled vaguely of lemons and even more vaguely of several unidentifiable herbs, but beneath that crisp fragrance, Susan detected the even more appealing, freshly scrubbed scent of his own skin.
She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and hold on to him, cling to him; she wanted to draw him close and take strength from him, strength she needed, strength he seemed to possess in such abundance. But however far their personal relationship had come in these past few days, it most certainly had not come that far. McGee felt considerable affection for her; she was sure of that. But given the natural restraints of the doctor-patient relationship, to which any romantic feelings had to remain strictly secondary, she could not cast aside all reserve. And given the fact that she couldn’t entirely trust her perceptions—which told her that Jeff McGee felt a great deal more than mere affection for her—she dared risk nothing other than a swift, chaste kiss planted lightly on his cheek in return for the kiss that he had bestowed upon her.
“I’m in a bit of a hurry tonight,” he said, drawing away from her too soon. “Let me have a quick look at Jessie Seiffert, see how’s she’s coming along, and then I’ll be back for a few minutes.”
He went to the other bed and slipped behind the curtain.
A whip of jealousy lashed through Susan. She wondered for whom he had put on his best suit. With whom was he having dinner tonight? A woman? Well, of course it would be a woman, and a pretty woman, too. A man didn’t dress up like that, pocket handkerchief and all, just to grab a bite and have a few beers with the boys. Jeffrey McGee was a most desirable man, and there was never any shortage of women for desirable men. And he certainly didn’t
have the air of a celibate; good heavens, no! He had enjoyed a private life, a romantic life—all right, face up to it, a sex life—long before one Susan Kathleen Thorton had arrived on the scene. She could claim absolutely no right to be jealous of his relations with other women. Absolutely no right whatsoever. There was nothing serious between her and him; he was under no obligation to remain faithful to her. The very idea of that was patently ridiculous. Still, she was jealous; terribly, surprisingly jealous.
He stepped out from behind the curtain and returned to Susan’s bedside. He took her hand and smiled at her; his hand was strong and warm, and his teeth were very white and even. “So tell me how it went down in PT. Did you have a good afternoon with Flo Atkinson?”
Susan had intended to recount the terror of that strikingly vivid dream in which she had been trapped in the elevator with Ernest Harch and the other fraternity men. But now she decided against telling McGee anything about it. She didn’t want him to see her as just a weak, frightened, dependent woman. She didn’t want him to pity her.
“It was a terrific afternoon in every detail,” she lied.
“That’s great. I’m glad to hear it.”
“Yeah. The physical therapy is exactly what I need,” she said, and at least that much was true.
“You’ve got some color in your face now.”
“Washed my hair, too.”
“Yes, it looks very nice.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Dr. McGee. It won’t look nice for another six weeks or two months, thanks to your emergency room hairdresser, who apparently trims the incoming patients with a chain saw. At least now it’s clean.”
“I think it looks clean and nice,” he insisted. “It’s cute. Shaggy like that, it reminds me of ... Peter Pan.”
“Thanks a lot. Peter Pan was a boy.”
“Well, you certainly can’t be mistaken for a boy. Forget I said Peter Pan. It makes you look like...”
“An English sheepdog?”
“Are you determined to fend off any compliment I give you?”
“Come on, admit it. English sheepdog, right?”
He pretended to scrutinize her for canine qualities. “Well, now that you mention it ... Do you know how to fetch a pair of slippers?”
“Arf, arf,” she said.