by Dean Koontz
Fear?
Before she could decide what that might mean, before she could even be sure that she had actually seen fear in his eyes, the silence was broken, and the spell, too.
“You surprised me,” Jeff said. “I didn’t ...”
“I was afraid I’d offended you or ...”
“No, no. I just ... didn’t realize ...”
“... that both of us ...”
“... the feeling was mutual.”
“I thought I understood and ... Well, the signals you were sending out seemed ...”
“... the kiss put an end to any doubts that you ...”
“God, yes!”
“What a kiss,” he said.
“Some kiss.”
He kissed her again, but only briefly, glancing at the door with evident uneasiness. She couldn’t blame him for holding back. He was a doctor, after all, and she was a patient; and necking with the patients was a couple of thousand miles below the level of decorum that was expected of a physician. She wanted to throw her arms around him and draw him tight against her; she wanted to possess him and be possessed by him. But she knew this was neither the right time nor the right place, and she let him draw back from her.
She said, “How long have you ...”
“I don’t know. Maybe even before you came out of the coma.”
“Before that? Loved me ... ?”
“You were so beautiful.”
“But you didn’t even know me then.”
“So it probably really wasn’t love at that point. But something. Even then, I felt something.”
“I’m glad.”
“And after you came out of the coma ...”
“You found out what a charmer I am, and you were hooked.”
He smiled. “Exactly. And I found out that you had what Mrs. Baker calls ‘moxie.’ I like a woman with moxie.”
For a few seconds they were silent again, just staring at each other.
Then she said, “Can it really happen this fast?”
“It has.”
“There’s so much to talk about.”
“A million things,” he said.
“A billion,” she said. “I hardly know a thing about your background.”
“It’s shady.”
“I want to know everything there is to know about you,” she said, holding one of his hands in both of hers. “Everything. But I guess ... here, in this place ...”
“It’s too awkward here.”
“Yes. It’s hardly the right place for new lovers to become better acquainted with each other.”
“I think we ought to keep our relationship on a strictly doctor-patient basis as long as you’ve got to be here. Later, when you’re feeling better, when you’ve been discharged and our time together isn’t so public ...”
“That’s probably wise,” she said, although she wanted to touch him and to be touched by him in ways that doctors and patients didn’t touch each other. “But does it have to be strictly doctor-patient? Can’t we bend a little? Can’t you at least kiss me on the cheek now and then?”
Jeff smiled and pretended to think hard about it. “Well ... uh ... let’s see now ... so far as I remember, the Hippocratic Oath doesn’t contain any admonishment against kissing patients on the cheek.”
“So how about right now?”
He kissed her on the cheek.
“Seriously,” he said, “I think the most important thing now is for both of us to concentrate our energies on getting you well. If we can make you well again, then everything else—everything else there might be between us—will follow.”
“You’ve given me a new motivation for beating this thing,” Susan said.
“And you will beat it, too,” he said in a tone of voice that admitted to no doubt. “We’ll beat it. Together.”
Looking at him now, Susan realized that she had seen fear in his eyes a couple of minutes ago. Although he would not express any pessimistic thoughts to her, there had to be a part of him that wondered if they really could find a way to put an end to her terrifying hallucinations. He wasn’t a fool; he knew that failure was a lurking possibility. Fear? Yes. Yes, he had every right to be afraid. He was afraid that he had fallen in love with a woman who was on a fast train to a nervous breakdown or, worse, to the madhouse at the end of the line.
“Don’t worry,” she said.
“I’m not worried.”
“I’m strong.”
“I know.”
“Strong enough to make it—with your help.”
He kissed her on the cheek again.
Susan thought of what she’d said earlier about ghosts. She really did wish there were such things. If only her problem were that simple. Just ghosts. Just walking dead men who could be harried back to their graves by the recital of the proper prayers and by the liberal sprinkling of holy water. How nice it would be to discover that the problem was not within her, that the source lay outside of her. Knowing it was impossible, she nonetheless wished that they would find proof that the phantom Harch and the other phantoms were all real, that ghosts were real, and that she had never been sick at all.
A short while later, she got her wish—or something rather like it.
12
Lunch came so soon after her late breakfast that Susan couldn’t finish everything, but she ate enough to win Mrs. Baker’s approval.
An hour and a half later, she was taken downstairs for her second physical therapy session with Mrs. Atkinson. A new pair of orderlies came for her, but, happily, neither of them had a face from out of her past.
At the elevators, she expected the worst. Nothing happened.
She had not hallucinated since last night, when she had seen Jerry Stein’s corpse in Jessica Seiffert’s bed. As the orderlies wheeled her along the first-floor corridor toward the PT Department, she counted up the hours since that attack: almost sixteen.
Almost sixteen hours of peace.
Maybe there would never be another attack. Maybe the visions would stop as suddenly as they had begun.
The therapy session with Florence Atkinson was slightly more strenuous than the one Susan had been through yesterday, but the massage felt even better this time, and the shower was no less of a treat than it had been yesterday.
At the elevators once more, on the way back upstairs, Susan held her breath.
Again, nothing bad happened to her.
More than seventeen hours had passed now.
She had the feeling that she would be forever free of the hallucinations if she could only get through one entire day without them; one ghost-free day might be all she needed to cleanse her mind and her soul.
Less than seven hours to go.
When she got back to her room from the PT Department, two bouquets of fresh flowers were waiting for her; crysanthemums, carnations, roses, and sprays of baby’s breath. There were cards attached to both arrangements. The first card urged her to get well soon, and it was signed, “As ever, Phil Gomez.” The second one said, “We all miss you here at the slave pit.” It was signed by a number of people. Susan recognized some of their names, but only because Phil Gomez had mentioned them on the telephone Monday morning. She stared at the list: Ella Haversby, Eddie Gilroy, Anson Breckenridge, Tom Kavinsky ... Nine names altogether. She couldn’t summon up a face to go with any one of them.
As on every other occasion when the Milestone Corporation had come to mind, the mere thought of it was sufficient to send a chill through her.
And she didn’t know why.
She was determined to keep a positive attitude and let nothing disturb her, so she turned her mind away from Milestone. At least the flowers were pretty. She could enjoy them without thinking about where they had come from.
In bed again, she tried to read a book but discovered that the therapy session and the hot shower had made her sleepy. She napped. She didn’t dream.
When she awoke, the room was playing host to a large party of shadows. Outside, the sun had just touched th
e mountains; although true sunset was still some time away, the cloud-darkened day was already slouching toward evening. She yawned, sat up, wiped at her matted eyes with the back of one hand.
The second bed was still empty.
According to the nightstand clock, it was four-thirty. Now nineteen hours since her most recent attack.
She wondered if the blossoming of her relationship with Jeff McGee was responsible for keeping the ghosts at bay. Having someone to love and being loved: that couldn’t hurt. She hadn’t wanted to believe that her problem was psychological, but now that it looked as if her troubles might be behind her, she was more willing to consider psychological explanations. Perhaps Jeff’s love was all the medicine she had needed.
She got out of bed, stepped into her slippers, and made her way to the bathroom. Snapped on the light.
Jerry Stein’s decapitated head was resting on the closed commode seat.
Susan stood on the white ceramic tiles, in the harsh white fluorescent light, her face equally as white as anything in the snow-white bathroom. She didn’t want to believe her eyes.
It’s not real.
The head was in the same terrible state of decomposition that it had been in last night, when Jerry had risen out of Jessie Seiffert’s bed, moaning Susan’s name through lips that glistened with corruption. The skin was still gray and gray-green. Both corners of the mouth were clotted with thick suppuration. Hideous blisters on the upper lip. And around the swollen nose. Dark, bubbled spots of decay at the corners of the eyes. Eyes open wide. Bulging from their sockets. They were opaque, sheathed in pearly cataracts, as they had been last night, and the whites of them were badly discolored, yellowish and streaked with blood. But at least these were unseeing eyes, as the eyes of a dead man ought to be: inanimate, blind. The head had been severed from the rest of the corpse with savage glee; a ragged mantle of flesh lay like a rumpled, frilly collar at the termination of the neck. Something small and bright lay twisted in a fold of that gray neck-skin, something that caught the light and gleamed. A pendant. A religious pendant. It was the small, gold-plated mezuzah that Jerry Stein had always worn.
It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real...
That three-word charm seemed even less effective than usual; if anything, the grisly head became more vivid, more real, the longer that she stared at it.
Rigid with horror, yet determined to dispel the vision, Susan shuffled one step closer to the commode.
The dead eyes stared through her, unaware of her, fixed on something in another world.
It isn’t real.
She reached out to touch the gray face. Hesitated.
What if the face came alive just as she put her hand against it? What if those graveyard eyes rolled and focused on her? What if that gaping, ruined mouth suddenly snapped at her, bit her fingers, and wouldn’t let go? What if—
Stop it! she told herself angrily.
She heard a strange wheezing noise—and realized that it was the sound of her own labored breathing.
Relax, she said to herself. Dammit, Susan Kathleen Thorton, you’re too old to believe in this nonsense.
But the head didn’t fade away like a mirage.
Finally she pushed her trembling hand forward, through air that seemed as thick and resistant as water. She touched the dead man’s cheek.
It felt solid.
It felt real.
Cold and greasy.
She jerked her hand back, shuddering and gagging.
The cataract-sheathed eyes didn’t move.
Susan looked at the fingertips with which she had touched the head, and she saw that they were wet with a silvery slime. The scum of decomposition.
Sickened almost to the point of vomiting, Susan frantically wiped her sticky fingers on one leg of her blue pajamas, and she saw that the disgusting slime was staining the fabric.
It isn’t real, isn’t real, isn’t, isn’t ...
Although she dutifully repeated that incantation, which was supposed to summon sanity, she had lost the courage required to continue with this confrontation. She wanted only to get the hell out of the bathroom, into the hospital room, into the corridor, down to the nurses’ station by the elevators, where there was help. She turned—
—and froze.
Ernest Harch was standing in the open bathroom doorway, blocking her escape.
“No,” she said thickly.
Harch grinned. He stepped into the bathroom with her and closed the door behind him.
He isn’t real.
“Surprise,” he said in that familiar, low, gravelly voice.
He can’t hurt me.
“Bitch,” he said.
Harch was no longer masquerading as William Richmond, the hospital patient. The pajamas and bathrobe had been discarded. Now he was wearing the clothes that he had worn in the House of Thunder on the night he had murdered Jerry Stein, thirteen years ago. Black shoes, black socks. Black jeans. A very dark blue shirt, almost black. She remembered that outfit because, in the House of Thunder, in the sputtering candlelight and the glow of the flashlights, he had reminded her of a Nazi in an old war movie. An SS man. Gestapo. Whatever the ones were who dressed all in black. His square face, his perfectly square features, pale yellow hair, ice-colored eyes—all of those things contributed to the image of a cold-blooded storm trooper, an image which, in life, he had always seemed to cultivate not only consciously but with care, with attention to detail, with a certain perverse pleasure.
“Do you like my little gift?” Harch asked, pointing to the head on the commode seat.
She couldn’t speak.
“I know how much you loved your Jewboy,” Harch said, his cold voice filled with an ice-hard hate. “So I thought I’d bring a piece of him back to you. Something for you to remember him by. Wasn’t that thoughtful of me?” He laughed softly.
The power of speech returned to Susan with a jolt, and words burst from her: “You’re dead, damn you, dead! You told me so yourself. You’re dead.”
Don’t play along with this, she told herself desperately. For God’s sake, listen to what you just said. Don’t step into the hallucination willingly; back away from it.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course I’m dead.”
She shook her head. “I won’t listen to this. You’re not here. You’re not real.”
He stepped forward, farther into the small room.
She was backed against the wall, with the sink on her left side, the commode on her right. Nowhere to run.
Jerry Stein’s dead eyes stared into space, oblivious of Harch’s arrival.
One of Harch’s strong hands snapped out, quick as a lashing whip, and seized Susan’s left wrist before she knew what he was doing.
She tried to pull loose; couldn’t.
Her mouth had gone as dry as ashes. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her burned-out mouth.
Harch held her hand in a viciously tight grip. Grinning down at her, he dragged her to him—her slippers scraping on the tile—and he pressed her captive hand firmly against his slab-solid, rock-muscled chest.
“Do I feel real enough to suit you?” he demanded.
She sucked air. The weight of the indrawn breath seemed tremendous, sufficient to bring her crashing to the floor and on down, down into darkness.
No! she thought, terrified of surrendering to unconsciousness, afraid that she would wake up a madwoman. Mustn’t pass out, for God’s sake. Got to fight this. Got to fight it with all my heart.
“Do I feel real, you bitch? Do I? How do you like the way I feel?”
In the fluorescent light, his gray eyes, usually the color of dirty ice, looked almost white now, bright and utterly alien—just as they had looked that night in the House of Thunder, in the glow of the candles.
He rubbed Susan’s hand back and forth across his big chest. The fabric had a coarse feel, and the buttons on the shirt were cold against Susan’s skin.
Buttons ? Would she actually imagine that she could feel
the buttons—a tiny detail of that kind—in a vision? Would hallucinatory images be this vivid, this concrete, this thoroughly detailed?
“Now do you think I’m here?” Harch asked, grinning broadly but mirthlessly.
Somehow she found the strength to speak and to deny him one more time. Her dry tongue peeled off the powdery roof of her mouth with a sound she could almost hear, and she said, “No. Not here. Not here.”
“No?”
“You aren’t real.”
“What a complete bitch!”
“You can’t hurt me.”
“We’ll see about that, you little bitch. Oh, yeah, we’ll sure see about that.”
Still gripping her left hand, he slid it over his chest, up to his shoulder, down his arm, made her feel his hard, flexed biceps.
Again, she tried to pull loose. And again, she failed. He was hurting her; his hand was like a steel pincer clenched around her fragile wrist.
He moved her captive hand back to his chest, then down to his flat, muscular belly.
“Am I real? Huh? What do you think? What’s your considered opinion, Susan? Am I real?”
Susan felt something crumbling inside of her. Hope. Or maybe the last vestiges of her self-control. Or both.
It’s only a vision, a sick fantasy generated by a damaged brain. Just an evil vision. Just a vision. It’ll be over soon. Very soon. After all, how long can a vision last?
She thought of a frightening answer to her own question : It could last forever; it could last for the rest of her life, until she drew her last breath in some padded room. Why not?
Harch forced her hand onto his crotch.
He was very aroused. Even through his jeans, she could feel the great heat of him. The stiff, thick, pulsing shape of his maleness.
But he’s dead.
“Feel that?” he demanded lasciviously, with a little laugh, a sneer. “Is that real?”
In the dark turmoil that whirled within her, a mad hilarity began to rise like a feeding shark in a night sea, streaking up toward the precious fragments of her sanity that still bobbled on the surface.
“Friday night, I’ll shove this old poker right into you. Do you know what Friday night is? Seventh anniversary of my untimely demise. Seven years ago Friday, that nigger shoved a knife in my throat. So this Friday, I’ll shove my poker all the way up into you, and then I’ll use a knife on you.”