Coma

by Robin Cook

  Scrambling to her feet despite a sharp pain in her left ankle, mindlessly clutching at her package, Susan tried to run again on the ties. Just within the mouth of the tunnel, there was a series of switches, creating a maze of tracks and a bewildering pattern of rail and ties underfoot. With no time to figure out the intricacies of the track, Susan stumbled ahead. But her dragging left boot snagged between two rails. She fell again.

  Expecting her pursuer to be on her at any second, Susan struggled to one knee. Her left foot was jammed fast between the two rails. She pulled to try to extricate herself, straining forward with effect. All she managed to do was to aggravate the pain in her ankle. Bending down, she clutched at her leg with her hands and pulled in desperation. She didn’t allow herself to look back.

  Suddenly an agonizing screech filled the air, forcing Susan to let go of her leg and gasp for breath. She thought that something had happened to her but she was still alive. Then it happened again; a noise so loud in the underground cavern that she instinctively covered her ears with her palms. Even so, the noise caused a sharp pain deep within her middle ears. Then she knew what it was. It was the train! It was the shriek of the train whistle.

  Susan looked up into the blackness of the tunnel and saw the single penetrating light. She began to feel the thundering vibration of the tons of steel bearing down at her at great speed. Then there was another sound, deeper yet even more penetrating than the whistle. It was the rasp of steel against steel as the wheels of the oncoming train locked in a vain and desperate attempt to stop. But it was useless. The momentum was too great.

  Susan had no idea which track her foot was caught in, nor could she tell which track bore the train. The light seemed to be coming directly at her. With a desperate, manic jerk she pulled her foot from her boot and wrenched herself in the direction of the outbound track.

  Her outstretched arms and hands cushioned the fall as she sprawled across a rail. By reflex she pulled herself into a ball and covered her head with her arms. The vibration and the rasp came to a crescendo and with a whoosh the train passed some five feet away.

  Susan didn’t move for a moment. She couldn’t believe what had happened. Her pulse was racing and her hands were wet. But she was alive and, except for some bruises, she was all right. Her overcoat was torn and several buttons had popped off. There was a band of grease across it and part of the white lab coat she wore beneath it. Her pens and penlight were gone, scattered in the tunnel. One of the earpieces to her stethoscope was bent at right angles.

  She stood up and brushed off the larger pieces of debris and reclaimed her boot. By merely depressing the heel and lifting the toe, she extricated it with ease that belied her earlier difficulties. By the time she had it on, she could see several men running toward her with lights.

  When she was helped onto the platform, the whole experience already seemed like a total figment of her imagination, as if she were totally out of control. There was no man in a dark coat. There was just a large crowd of people who excitedly shouted with each other about what had happened and what should happen. Someone found her parcel on the track and brought it to her.

  Susan denied injury. She thought about saying something about the man, but then again she was unsure of her own grasp of what had been real and what had been imagined. She had panicked and was still overwrought. She couldn’t think and she wanted to go home more than anything else.

  She had to spend fifteen minutes assuring the train crew that she had simply slipped off the platform, was now perfectly fine, and definitely didn’t need an ambulance. Susan insisted that all she wanted was to get to Park Street to catch the Huntington line. Finally Susan and the others entered the train, the doors closed, and it pulled out of the station.

  Susan inspected her clothes in the light. She noticed that the man across from her was staring at her. And the woman next to him was doing the same. In fact as Susan’s eyes moved around the car, she realized that everyone was staring at her as if she were some sort of freak. The eyes and the faces were unbearable. She tried to look outside as the train crossed the Longfellow Bridge. Still there was no conversation. Everyone was watching her fixedly.

  The train pulled into Charles Street. With great relief Susan jumped off the car and ran down the platform. In front of the Phillips Drugstore she caught a cab. Only then did she begin to calm down. Looking at her hands, she realized she was visibly trembling.

  Wednesday

  February 25

  1:30 P.M.

  By one-thirty in the afternoon, Bellows had already had a full day by most people’s standards. He wasn’t physically tired, because he was well accustomed to his schedule. But he was emotionally tired, on edge. The day had begun auspiciously enough when he had awakened with Susan still at his side. He had enjoyed their evening together immensely, although he was doubtful about the potential longevity of their affair. Susan was hardly the type of girl he was accustomed to escape with. She had none of that wide-eyed feminine Naiveté which formed the basis of Bellows’s idea of women. To his pleasant surprise, and despite his fears, sex had come naturally with Susan, although for him it was without the aggressive overtones he had learned to recognize as normal. Susan, and his own response to her, remained an absorbing enigma.

  Getting up and leaving Susan sleeping in his bed had provided a certain comforting feeling for Bellows. It made his role more traditional. Had Susan gotten up and come to the hospital at the same time as he did, it would have diluted his sense of sacrifice. And a sense of sacrifice was important for Bellows since it served as a fertile source of inner satisfaction.

  But then the day had deteriorated. To Bellows’s horror, Stark had made a surprise appearance on early-morning rounds, and the chief was in a particularly vindictive mood. Stark had started rounds by asking Bellows what he had done to the attractive medical student assigned to him that made it so difficult for her to show up for rounds. Bellows had inwardly shuddered, realizing that Stark’s off-color implications were truer than Stark himself realized. For Bellows knew that at that very moment Susan lay sleeping in his bed.

  Stark’s question had caused some short laughs and a few snide remarks by the others on rounds. Bellows had felt his face tingle with blood flowing through dilated capillaries. At the same time he had felt a sudden defensiveness.

  Before Bellows had been given a chance to say anything, Stark had launched into a tirade about attendance and interest, performance, and reward. He had essentially told Bellows that any future absence by Susan would be debited to Bellows’s own record. Bellows was to make it his personal goal to see that all the students assigned to him performed exemplarily.

  During actual rounds Stark had been as nasty as ever, particularly toward Bellows. In almost every case Bellows had been asked some difficult question and his answers never satisfied the irate chief. Even some of the other residents had realized that Bellows was being raked over the coals and they had tried to interfere by answering questions even when the questions were clearly directed at Bellows.

  At the end of rounds, Stark had called Bellows aside to tell him that he was not performing up to his usual level, nor to the department’s expectations. Finally Stark had gotten around to what was really bothering him. After a rather lengthy pause, the Chief of Surgery had asked Bellows exactly what role he had played with respect to the drugs found in locker 338.

  Bellows had denied any knowledge whatsoever of the drugs, except what Chandler had told him. Bellows had told Stark directly that he had used locker 338 for about one week before his permanent locker came available. Stark’s only comment to this information had been that he wanted the affair cleaned up in short order.

  For Bellows, even being remotely related to such a situation caused him a disproportionate amount of anxiety. His horribly compulsive mentality magnified the whole affair out of proportion. His tendency toward professional paranoia began to feed on itself and, as the morning passed, his anxiety had waxed rather than waned.

 
; Bellows operated on two cases himself that morning, allowing the students to come into the OR. On the first case, Goldberg and Fairweather had scrubbed, more to wet their hands than actually to help. On the second case, Carpin and Niles had scrubbed. Bellows had been particularly careful and encouraging for Niles and it had paid off. There had been no fainting episodes. In fact, Niles had turned out to be the most dextrous of the students and had been allowed to close the skin.

  During lunch Bellows found the opportunity to corner Chandler. The chief resident had reiterated what Bellows already knew—namely, that Stark was really uptight about the drugs.

  “The whole Goddamned thing is ridiculous,” said Bellows. “Has Stark talked with Walters yet to get me off the hook?”

  “I haven’t even talked with Walters,” said Chandler. “I went into the OR area to talk with him but he hasn’t shown up today. Nobody has seen him all day.”

  “Walters?” Bellows was greatly surprised. “He hasn’t missed a day here in a quarter of a century.”

  “What can I tell you? He’s not here.”

  Bellows responded to this information by going up to the personnel office to get Walters’s home phone number. It turned out that Walters did not have a telephone. Bellows had to be satisfied with an address: 1833 Stewart Street, Roxbury.

  By one-thirty Bellows was very much on edge. Another call to the OR desk confirmed the fact that Walters still had not appeared, and Bellows made a decision. He decided that he would take the time and make the effort to go and visit Walters. It was the only way that he could think of to extricate himself immediately from the drug affair. It wasn’t all that difficult a decision, although it was very irregular for Bellows to leave the hospital in the middle of the day. But Bellows had the distressing feeling that over the last forty-eight hours his comfortable and promising position at the Memorial had been put in jeopardy. As he saw it, he had two problems: the first, the drug problem, was simple, because he knew that he was not involved and that all he had to do was to establish that fact; the second problem, Susan and her so-called project, was something else.

  Bellows managed to foist his medical students off on Dr. Larry Beard, a grandson of the Beard wing benefactor. Then, with his beeper on his belt, the operators notified, and a fellow resident by the name of Norris willing to cover for an hour, Bellows slipped out of the hospital at one-thirty-seven, and flagged a cab.

  “Stewart Street, Roxbury? You sure about that?” The taxi driver’s face contorted into a questioning, disdainful expression when Bellows gave his destination.

  “Number 1833,” added Bellows.

  “It’s your money!”

  With dirty steaming piles of snow pushed aside here and there, the city looked particularly depressing. It was raining almost as hard as it had been when Bellows had walked to work in the morning. Very few people were visible along the route the driver took. The peculiar, uninhabited look of the city recalled the deserted cities of the Mayans. It was as if things had gotten so bad that everyone decided to just close their doors and leave.

  As the cab penetrated Roxbury deeper and deeper, the city got worse. Their route took them down through a disintegrating warehouse area, then through decaying slums. The mid-thirties temperature, the relentless rain, and the rotting snow made it that much more depressing. Finally the cab pulled to the right and Bellows leaned forward, catching sight of the street sign for Stewart Street. At the same time the right front wheel descended into a pothole filled with rainwater and the bottom of the front part of the cab crashed against the pavement. The driver swore and threw the steering wheel to the right to avoid the same hole with the rear tire. But the rear of the car slammed down and then lurched upward with a shudder. Bellows’s head hit the ceiling hard enough to hurt.

  “Sorry, but you wanted Stewart Street!”

  Rubbing his head, Bellows looked out at the numbers: 1831, and then 1833. After paying the fare, he stepped out and closed the door. The cab raced off, weaving its way between the potholes and turning off as soon as possible. Bellows watched it disappear from sight, wishing that he had told the driver to wait. Then he looked around, thankful that the rain had stopped. There were several gutted hulks of automobiles with everything of even questionable value removed. There were no other cars parked on the grim street, or moving, for that matter. There were no people in sight either. When Bellows looked up at the row house in front of him, he realized it was deserted, most of the windows boarded up. Then he looked at the surrounding houses. All were the same. Most were boarded up; any windows exposed were smashed.

  A torn sign nailed to the front door said that the building was condemned and owned by the BHA, the Boston Housing Authority. The date on the sign was 1971. It was another Boston project that had got completely fouled up.

  Bellows was perplexed. Walters had no phone, and this seemed a phony address. Remembering Walters’s appearance, it didn’t seem so surprising. Curiosity made Bellows mount the stairs to read the BHA sign. There was another smaller sign saying “No Trespassing” and that the police had the premises under surveillance.

  The door had once been attractive, with a large oval stained glass window. The glass was now broken and several pieces of roughcut lumber were haphazardly nailed across the opening. Bellows tried the door, and to his surprise it opened. One of the straps of the hasp was unattached, with the screws gone despite the fact that the hasp had a large steel padlock.

  The door opened in, scratching over the broken glass. Bellows took one look up and down the deserted street, then stepped over the threshold. The door closed quickly behind him, extinguishing most of the meager daylight. Bellows waited until his eyes adjusted to the semidarkness.

  The hall in which he found himself was in ruins. The stairs ascended directly in front of him. The banister had been pushed over and broken into pieces, presumably for firewood. The wallpaper was hanging in streamers. A small dirty drift of snow half-covered the debris on the floor and extended toward the rear of the building. Within six or seven feet it dissipated. But directly in front of him, Bellows saw several footprints. Examining them more closely, he could tell that there were at least two different sets. One set was huge, made by feet half again as large as his own. But more interesting was that the tracks did not seem very old.

  Bellows heard a car coming down the street and he straightened up. Conscious of trespassing, Bellows moved over to one of the boarded-up windows in what had been the parlor, to see if the car passed. It did.

  Then he climbed up the stairs and partially explored the second floor. Several crumbling mattresses were the only contents. The air had a musty, heavy odor. The ceiling in the front room had collapsed, covering the floor with chunks of plaster. Each room had a fireplace, layers of filth, and dusty cobwebs hanging from the ceiling.

  Bellows glanced up the stairs to the third floor but decided not to go up. Instead he returned to the first floor and was preparing to leave when he heard a sound. It was a soft thud coming from the back of the house.

  Feeling a certain quickening of his pulse, Bellows hesitated. He wanted to leave. There was something about the house that made him feel uneasy. But the sound was repeated and Bellows walked down the hall toward the rear of the building. At the end of the hall he had to turn right into what had been the dining room. The fixture for the gaslight was still in the center of the ceiling. Walking through the dining room, Bellows found himself in the remains of the kitchen. Everything had been removed except a few naked pipes, which protruded from the floor. The rear windows were all boarded up like those in front.

  Bellows took a few steps into the room and there was a sudden movement to his left. Bellows froze. His heart leaped into high gear, thumping audibly in his chest. The movement had come from the direction of several large cardboard boxes.

  Having recovered from his sudden fright, Bellows gingerly approached the boxes. With his foot he nudged them. To his horror several large rats scurried from their cover and disappeared into the
dining room.

  Bellows’s nervousness surprised him. He had always thought of himself as being the calm one, not easily shaken. His reaction to the rats had been one of paralyzing fear, and it took him several minutes to recover. He kicked the cardboard boxes to reassure himself that he was in control and was about to return to the dining room when he noticed another footprint in the dust and debris by the boxes. Looking back and forth from his own footprints to the one he had just found, Bellows realized that the strange footprint must be fairly fresh. Just beyond the cardboard boxes was a door, open by a few inches. The footprint pointed in its direction.

  Bellows approached the door and opened it slowly. Beyond was darkness and steps leading down into it. The steps presumably led to the cellar but were quickly swallowed in darkness. Bellows reached into the breast pocket of his white coat and pulled out his penlight. Switching it on, he found that its small beam could penetrate only five or six feet down.

  Every ounce of rationality told him to leave the building. Instead he started down the cellar stairs, as much to prove to himself that he wasn’t afraid as to find out what was there. But he was afraid. His imagination was working swiftly to remind him how easily horror movies affected him. He remembered the scenes in Psycho of the descent into the cellar.

  As he advanced step by step, the penlight beam advanced until it played on a closed door. Bellows examined it, and then tried the knob. The door swung open easily.

  Bellows had expected that there would be some sunken cellar windows to allow some light in but there was only darkness. He peered ahead after the pale shaft from his penlight into what seemed like a rather large room. His penlight was little help beyond six feet. By moving around the room counterclockwise, Bellows found some broken but serviceable furniture, including a bed covered with newspapers and two moth-eaten blankets. A few cockroaches fled Bellows’s encroaching penlight.