by Dean Koontz
An old woman lay in the bed, so small, so shrunken, so badly withered by disease that she looked, ironically, like a wrinkle-faced baby mistakenly placed in an adult’s bed. Except—her skin was waxy and mottled, not smooth like a baby’s skin, and her complexion was yellow, not newborn-pink. Her hair was yellow-gray. Her wrinkled mouth resembled a drawstring purse that had been pulled as tight as only a miser could pull it. An IV drip seeped into her through a gleaming needle that punctured her left arm, an arm that was far skinnier than Susan’s.
“So that’s Jessica Seiffert,” Susan said, greatly relieved that such a person actually existed, but shocked that her befuddled brain could so easily—and more to the point, so convincingly—transform the old woman into a super-naturally animated male corpse.
“The poor old dear,” said Beth.
“She’s been the most popular citizen of Willawauk since I was a toddler,” Tina said.
“Since before you were even around to toddle,” Beth said.
“Everybody loves her,” Tina said.
Jessica continued to sleep, her nostrils flaring almost imperceptibly with each shallow breath.
“I know two hundred people who’d be here to visit if Jessie would accept visitors,” Beth said.
“But she doesn’t want anyone seeing her like this,” Tina said. “As if anyone would think less of her just because of what the cancer’s done to her.”
“It’s always been the inner Jessie that Willawauk loves,” Beth said.
“Exactly,” Tina said.
“Feel better now?” Beth asked Susan.
“I guess so.”
Beth closed the curtain.
Susan said, “You looked in the bathroom?”
“Oh, yes,” Beth said. “It’s empty.”
“I’d like to have a look myself, if you don’t mind,” Susan said. She felt like a fool, but she was still a prisoner of her fear.
“Sure,” Beth said obligingly. “Let’s have a look and set your mind at ease.”
Tina pushed the wheelchair to the open bathroom door, and Beth switched on the light in there.
No dead man waited in the white-on-white room.
“I feel like a perfect idiot,” Susan said, feeling a blush creep into her cheeks.
“It’s not your fault,” Beth said.
Tina Scolari said, “Dr. McGee circulated a fairly long memo about your condition. He made it perfectly clear.”
“We’re all on your side,” Beth said.
“We’re all pulling for you,” Tina agreed.
“You’ll be well in no time. Really you will. McGee’s a whiz. The best doctor we’ve got.”
They helped Susan get into bed.
“Now,” Tina Scolari said, “at the discretion of the night nurse, you are permitted to have a second sedative if the first one doesn’t do the trick. They’re mild enough. And in my judgment, you sure do need another one.”
“I’ll never get to sleep without it,” Susan said. “And I was wondering ... could you...”
“What is it?”
“Do you think ... could someone stay with me ... just until I fall asleep?”
Susan felt like a child for making that pathetic request: a dependent, emotionally immature, thumb-sucking, goblin-fearing, thirty-two-year-old child. She was disgusted with herself. But she couldn’t help it. No matter how often she told herself about the bizarre effects of temporal-lobe brain lesions and sand-grain blood clots, regardless of how earnestly she argued to convince herself that one of those— or perhaps one of a dozen other—medical maladies was the cause of her imaginary, entirely imaginary, encounters with dead men, she was nonetheless terrified of being awake and alone in room 258—or anywhere else, in fact.
Tina Scolari looked at Beth Howe and raised her eyebrows inquiringly.
Beth considered it for a moment, then said, “Well, we aren’t short-handed tonight, are we?”
“Nope,” Tina said. “Everyone who was scheduled for duty showed up this evening. And so far there haven’t been any big crises.”
Beth smiled at Susan. “Slow night. No three-car crashes or barroom brawls or anything. I think one of us can spare an hour to sit with you until the sedative works.”
“It probably won’t even take an hour,” Tina said. “You’ve overtaxed yourself, Susan. It’ll catch up with you in a few minutes, and you’ll go out like a light.”
“I’ll stay here,” Beth said.
“I’d really appreciate it,” Susan said, loathing herself for her inability to face the night alone.
Tina left but returned shortly with the second sedative in a pill cup.
When Susan took the pink tablet, she poured only a half-measure of water for herself because her hands were shaking too badly to safely manage a full tumbler. When she drank, the glass rattled against her teeth, and for a moment the pill stuck in her throat.
“I’m sure you’ll have a good night now,” Nurse Scolari said before she left.
Beth pulled up a chair beside the bed, smoothed her uniform skirt over her round knees, and sat quietly, reading a magazine.
Susan stared at the ceiling for a while, then glanced at Jessica Seiffert’s curtained bed.
She looked the other way, too, at the darkness beyond the half-opened bathroom door.
She thought of the corpse scratching insistently at the closed bathroom door against which she had been leaning. She remembered the click-snickety-click of his fingernails as he probed the cracks around the door frame.
Of course that had never happened. Purely imaginary.
She closed her eyes.
Jerry, she thought, I loved you once. At least it was as close to love as an inexperienced, nineteen-year-old girl could ever get. And you said that you loved me. So why in the name of God would you come back now to terrorize me?
Of course it had never happened. Purely imaginary.
Please, Jerry, stay in the cemetery there in Philadelphia, where we put you so long ago. Please stay there. Don’t come back here again. Please stay there. Please.
Without realizing that she was approaching sleep, she stepped over the rim of it and was gone.
11
A nurse woke Susan at six o’clock Wednesday morning. It was another gray day, but no rain was falling.
Jeffrey McGee arrived before six-thirty. He kissed her on the cheek again, but his lips lingered there for a couple of seconds longer than they had before.
“I didn’t realize you’d be here so early,” Susan said.
“I want to personally oversee most of the tests.”
“But weren’t you up late last night?”
“Nope. I inflicted my after-dinner speech on the Medical Association, and then I quickly slipped away before they had time to organize a lynching party.”
“Seriously, how did it go?”
“Well, no one threw his dessert at me.”
“I told you that you’d be a big success.”
“Of course, maybe no one threw his dessert at me because it was the only edible part of the meal, and no one wanted to give it up.”
“I’m sure you were wonderful.”
“Well, I don’t think I should plan to have a career on the lecture circuit. Anyway, enough about me. I understand there was some excitement here last night.”
“Jeez, did they have to tell you about that?”
“Of course. And so do you. In detail.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“And the doctor must be obeyed.”
“Right. So tell me.”
Embarrassed, she told him everything about the corpse behind the curtain. Now, after a good night’s sleep, the whole affair sounded ludicrous, and she wondered how she could ever have been convinced that any part of it was real.
When Susan finished talking, McGee said, “God, that’s a hair-raising little tale!”
“You should’ve been there.”
“But now that you’ve had time to think, you do realiz
e it was just another episode.”
“Of the Susan Thorton Soap Opera?”
“I mean, another attack, another hallucination,” he said. “You do see that now?”
“Yes,” she said miserably.
He blinked at her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He scowled at her and put his hand against her forehead to see if she was running a noticeable temperature. “Do you feel all right?”
“As right as I can feel under the circumstances,” she said morosely.
“Cold?”
“No.”
“You’re shaking.”
“A little.”
“A lot.”
She hugged herself and said nothing.
“What’s wrong?” he asked again.
“I’m... scared.”
“Don’t be scared.”
“Jesus, what’s wrong with me?”
“We’ll find out.”
She couldn’t stop shaking.
Yesterday morning, after she had broken down in front of McGee, after she wept against his shoulder, she had thought that she’d reached the bottom for sure. She had been ready and eager to believe that the future could only be brighter. For the first time in her life, she had admitted that she needed other people; she had confronted and accepted the unpleasant truth of her own vulnerability. That had been a shocking discovery for a woman who had built her life upon the erroneous but fiercely held assumption that she was strictly a creature of intellect, immune to emotional excess. But now she faced another realization that was even more shocking than the one whose impact she had already, somehow, absorbed: Having placed her fate in the hands of McGee and the Willawauk County Hospital’s medical staff, having relinquished to them the responsibility for her survival, she now realized that the people upon whom she depended might fail her. Not intentionally, of course. But they were only human, too. They couldn’t always control events, either. And if they failed to make her well, it wouldn’t matter whether their failure was intentional or accidental or inevitable; in any case, she would be condemned to a chaotic existence, unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, and in time she would be driven completely mad.
And so she couldn’t stop shaking.
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“You’ll be all right,” McGee said.
“But... it’s getting worse,” she said, her voice quavering in spite of her determination to keep it steady.
“No. No, it isn’t getting worse.”
“Much worse,” she insisted.
“Listen, Susan, last night’s hallucination might have been more gruesome than the others—”
“Might have been?”
“Okay, it was more gruesome than the others—”
“And more vivid, more real.”
“—and more real. But it was the first one you’ve had since early yesterday morning, when you thought the two orderlies were Jellicoe and Parker. You’re not in a constant state of flux between reality and—”
Susan shook her head and interrupted him. “No. The business with the orderlies ... and the apparition later, here in the room ... they weren’t the only things I saw yesterday. There was an ... an attack in between those two.”
He frowned. “When?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“You were with Mrs. Atkinson, downstairs in PT, yesterday afternoon.”
“That’s right. It happened shortly after I’d completed the therapy session, before I was brought back up here.”
She told him how Murf and Phil had shoved her into the elevator with the four fraternity men.
“Why didn’t you report all of this last evening when I was here?” McGee asked, a reprimanding tone to his voice.
“You were in such a hurry...”
“Not that much of a hurry. Am I a good doctor? I think I am. And a good doctor always has time for a patient in distress.”
“I wasn’t in distress by the time you made your evening rounds,” she protested.
“Like hell you weren’t. You had it all bottled up inside of you, but you were in distress sure enough.”
“I didn’t want to make you late for the Medical Association meeting.”
“Susan, that’s no excuse. I’m your doctor. You’ve got to level with your doctor at all times.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at her hands, unable to meet his forthright, blue-blue eyes. She couldn’t bring herself to explain why she hadn’t told him about the elevator vision. She had been worried that she would appear hysterical, that he would think less of her because she had panicked yet again. Worse, she had been afraid that he would pity her. And now that she was beginning to think that she was falling in love with him, the very last thing she wanted was for him to pity her.
“You don’t dare hide things from me. You’ve got to tell me everything that happens, everything you feel. And I mean everything. If you don’t tell me everything, then I might not be aware of an important symptom that would explain the root cause of all your troubles. I need every piece of information I can gather in order to make an informed diagnosis.”
She nodded. “You’re right. From now on, I won’t hide anything from you.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Good.”
“But you see,” she said, still staring at her hands, which she was flexing and unflexing in nervous agitation, “it is getting a lot worse.”
He put a hand against the side of her face, caressed her cheek.
She looked up at him.
“Listen,” he said softly, reassuringly, “even if you are having more frequent attacks, at least you come out of them. And when one of these episodes passes, you’re able to see it for what it was. After the fact, you’re always aware that you were only hallucinating. Now, if you still believed that a dead man had come to get you last night, if you still thought that it had really happened, then you’d be in very deep trouble. If that’s the way it was, then maybe I’d be sweating. But I’m not sweating yet. Am I? Do you see rivers of sweat streaming down my face? Are there dark, damp circles under my arms? Do I look as if I belong in a TV ad for Right Guard? Huh? Do I?”
She smiled. “You look as dry as toast.”
“As dry as a sandbox,” he said. “As dry as a stick of chalk. As dry as chicken cordon bleu when I try to cook it myself. Can you cook chicken cordon bleu, by the way?”
“I’ve made it a few times,” she said.
“Does yours come out dry?”
She smiled again. “No.”
“Good. I was hoping you could cook.”
And what does he mean by that? she thought. His blue eyes seemed to say that he meant just what she thought he meant: He was as interested in her as she was in him. But still she couldn’t trust her perceptions; she couldn’t be positive of his intentions.
“Now,” he said, “will you please think positive?”
“I’ll try,” she said.
But she couldn’t stop shaking.
“Do more than try. Keep your chin up. That’s doctor’s orders. Now, I’ll go find a couple of orderlies and a stretcher, and we’ll go downstairs to diagnostic and get these tests out of the way. Are you ready to go?”
“I’m ready,” she said.
“Smile?”
She did.
So did he. And he said, “Okay, now keep it on your face until further notice.” He headed toward the door, and over his shoulder he said, “I’ll be right back.”
He left, and her smile slipped off.
She glanced at the curtained bed.
She wished it wasn’t there.
She longed for a glimpse of the sky, even if it was as gray and somber as it had been yesterday. Perhaps if she could see the sky, she wouldn’t feel quite so trapped.
She had never before been this miserable; she felt wrung out and useless, even though her physical recuperation was coming along well. Depression. That was the enemy now. She wa
s depressed not merely because other people had taken some control of her life, but because they had taken over all control of it. She was helpless. She could do absolutely nothing to shake off her illness. She could only lie on an examining table as if she were a mindless hunk of meat, letting them poke and prod her in their search for answers.
She looked at Mrs. Seiffert’s bed again. The white curtain hung straight and still.
Last night, she had not merely opened a privacy curtain that had enclosed a hospital bed. She had opened another curtain, too, a curtain beyond which lay madness. For a few nightmarish minutes, she had stepped beyond the veil of sanity, into a shadowy and moldering place from which few people ever returned.
She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t run away from her hallucination last night. What would have happened if she had bravely and foolishly refused to back off from Jerry Stein’s decomposing corpse? She was afraid she knew the answer. If she had held her ground, and if her long-dead lover had clambered out of his bed and had touched her, if he had embraced her, if he had pressed his rotting lips against her lips, stealing a warm kiss and giving her a cold one in return, she would have snapped. Real or not, hallucination or not, she would have snapped like a taut rubber band, and after that she would have been forever beyond repair. They would have found her curled up on the floor, gibbering and chuckling, lost far down inside herself, and they would have transferred her from Willawauk County Hospital to some quiet sanitarium, where she would have been assigned to a nice room with soft, quilted walls.
She couldn’t take much more of this. Not even for McGee. Not even for whatever future they might have together if she got well again. She was stretched taut.
Please, God, she thought, let the tests reveal something. Let McGee find the problem. Please.
The walls and ceiling were the same shade of robin’s-egg blue. Lying flat on her back on the wheeled stretcher, her head raised just a few inches by a firm little pillow, looking up, Susan almost felt as if she were suspended in the middle of a summer sky.
Jeff McGee appeared beside her. “We’re going to start with an EEG.”