Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway

by Hideaway(Lit)

  that could undo everything that had been achieved in the resuscitation

  room. Helga had smoothed Harrison's hair with a comb that she was now

  tucking away in the nightstand drawer. Gina was delicately applying a

  lubricant to his eyelids to prevent them from sticking together, a

  danger with comatose patients who spent long periods of time without

  opening their eyes or even blinking and who sometimes suffered from

  diminished lachrymal-gland secretion.

  "Heart's still steady as a metronome," Gina said when she saw Jonas.

  "I have a hunch, before the end of the week, this one's going to be out

  playing golf, dancing, doing whatever he wants." She brushed at her

  bangs, which were an inch too long and hanging in her eyes. "He's a

  lucky man."

  "One hour at a time," Jonas cautioned, knowing too well how Death liked

  to tease them by pretending to retreat, then returning in a rush to

  snatch away their victory.

  When Gina and Helga left for the night, Jonas turned off all the lights.

  Illuminated only by the faint fluorescent wash from the corridor and the

  green glow of the cardiac monitor, room 518 was replete with shadows.

  It was silent, too. The audio signal on the EKG had been turned off,

  leaving only the rhythmically bouncing light endlessly making its way

  across the screen. The only sounds were the soft moans of the wind at

  the window and the occasional faint tapping of rain against the glass.

  Jonas stood at the foot of the bed, looking at Harrison for a moment.

  Though he had saved the man's life, he knew little about him.

  Thirty--eight years old. Five-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds. Brown

  hair, brown eyes.

  Excellent physical condition.

  But what of the inner person? Was Hatchford Benjamin Harrison a good

  man? Honest? Trustworthy? Faithful to his wife? Was he reasonably

  free of envy and greed, capable of mercy, aware of the difference

  between right and wrong?

  Did he have a kind heart?

  Did he love?

  In the heat of a resuscitation procedure, when seconds counted and there

  was too much to be done in too short a time, Jonas never dared to think

  about the central ethical dilemma facing any doctor who assumed the role

  of reanimator, for to think of it then might have inhibited him to the

  patient's disadvantage. Afterward, there was time to doubt, to wonder.

  Although a physician was morally committed and professionally obligated

  to saving lives wherever he could, were all lives worth saving?

  When Death took an evil man, wasn't it wiser and more ethically

  correct-to let him stay dead?

  If Harrison was a bad man, the evil that he committed upon resuming his

  life after leaving the hospital would in part be the responsibility of

  Jonas Nyebern. The pain Harrison caused others would to some extent

  stain Jonas's soul, as well.

  Fortunately, this time the dilemma seemed moot. Harrison appeared to be

  an upstanding citizen-a respected antique dealer, they said-married to

  an artist of some reputation, whose name Jonas recognized. A good

  artist had to be sensitive, perceptive, able to see the world more

  clearly than most people saw it. Didn't she? If she was married to a

  bad man, she would know it, and she wouldn't remain married to him.

  This time there was every reason to believe that a life had been saved

  that should have been saved.

  Jonas only wished his actions had always been so correct.

  He turned away from the bed and took two steps to the window. Five

  stories below, the nearly deserted parking lot lay under hooded pole

  lamps. The falling rain churned the puddles, so they appeared to be

  boiling, as if a subterranean fire consumed the blacktop from

  underneath.

  He could pick out the spot where Kari Dovell's car had been parked, and

  he stared at it for a long time. He admired Kari enormously. He also

  found her attractive. Sometimes he dreamed of being with her, and it

  was a surprisingly comforting dream. He could admit to wanting her at

  times, as well, and to being pleased by the thought that she might also

  want him.

  But he did not need her. He needed nothing but his work, the

  satisfaction of occasionally beating Death, and the-"something's . out

  . there The first word interrupted Jonas's thoughts, but the voice was

  so thin and soft that he didn't immediately perceive the source of it.

  He turned around, looking toward the open door, assuming the voice had

  come from the corridor, and only by the third word did he realize that

  the speaker was Harrison.

  The patient's head was turned toward Jonas, but his eyes were focused on

  the window.

  Moving quickly to the side of the bed, Jonas glanced at the

  electrocardiograph and saw that Harrison's heart was beating fast but,

  thank God, slowing.

  "Something's ... out there," Harrison repeated.

  His eyes were not focused on the window sill, on nothing so close as

  that, but on some distant point in the stormy night.

  "Just rain," Jonas assured him.

  "No."

  "Just a little winter rain."

  "Something bad," Harrison whispered.

  Hurried footsteps echoed in the corridor, and a young nurse burst

  through the open door, into the nearly dark room. Her name was Ramona

  Perez, and Jonas knew her to be competent and concerned.

  "Oh, Doctor Nyebern, good, you're here. The telemetry unit, his

  heartbeat "Accelerated, yes, I know. He just woke up."

  Ramona came to the bed and switched on the lamp above it, revealing the

  patient more clearly.

  Harrison was still staring beyond the rain-spotted window, as if

  oblivious of Jonas and the nurse. In a voice even softer than before,

  heavy with weariness, he repeated: "Something's out there." Then his

  eyes fluttered sleepily, and fell shut.

  "Mr. Harrison, can you hear me?" Jonas asked.

  The patient did not answer.

  The EKG showed a quickly de-accelerating heartbeat: from one-forty to

  one-twenty to one hundred beats a minute.

  "Mr. Harrison?"

  Ninety per minute. Eighty.

  "He's asleep again," Ramona said.

  "Appears to be."

  "Just sleeping, though," she said. "No question of it being a coma

  now."

  "Not a coma," Jonas agreed.

  "And he was speaking. Did he make sense?"

  "Sort of. But hard to tell," Jonas said, leaning over the bed railing

  to study the man's eyelids, which fluttered with the rapid movement of

  the eyes under them. REM sleep. Harrison was dreaming again.

  Outside, the rain suddenly began to fall harder than before. The wind

  picked up, too, and keened at the window.

  Ramona said, "The words I heard were clear, not slurred."

  "No. Not slurred. And he spoke some complete sentences."

  "Then he's not aphasic," she said. "That's terrific."

  Aphasia, the complete inability to speak or understand spoken or written

  language, was one of the most devastating forms of brain damage

  resulting from disease or injury. Thus affected, a patient was reduced

  to using gestures to communicate, and the i
nadequacy of pantomime soon

  cast him into deep depression, from which there was sometimes no coming

  back.

  Harrison was evidently free of that curse. If he was also free of

  paralysis, and if there were not too many holes in his memory, he had a

  good chance of eventually getting out of bed and leading a normal life.

  "Let's not jump to conclusions," Jonas said. "Let's not build up any

  false hopes. He still has a long way to go. But you can enter on his

  record that he regained consciousness for the first time at

  eleven-thirty, two hours after resuscitation."

  Harrison was murmuring in his sleep.

  Jonas leaned over the bed and put his ear close to the patient's lips,

  which were barely moving. The words were faint, carried on his shallow

  exhalations. It was like a spectral voice heard on an open radio

  channel, broadcast from a station halfway around the world, bounced off

  a freak inversion layer high in the atmosphere and filtered through so

  much space and bad weather that it sounded mysterious and prophetic in

  spite of being less than half-intelligible.

  "What's he saying?" Ramona asked.

  With the howl of the storm rising outside, Jonas was unable to catch

  enough of Harrison's words to be sure, but he thought the man was

  repeating what he'd said before: "Something's ... out there Abruptly

  the wind shrieked, and rain drummed against the window so hard that it

  seemed certain to shatter the glass.

  Vassago liked the rain. The storm clouds had plated over the sky,

  leaving no holes through which the too-bright moon could gaze. The

  downpour also veiled the glow of streetlamps and the headlights of

  oncoming cars, moderated the dazzle of neon signs, and in general

  softened the Orange County night, making it possible for him to drive

  with more comfort than could be provided by his sunglasses alone.

  He had traveled west from his hideaway, then north along the coast, in

  search of a bar where the lights might be low and a woman or two

  available for consideration. A lot of places were closed Mondays, and

  others didn't appear too active that late at night, between the

  half-hour and the witching hour.

  At last he found a lounge in Newport Beach, along the Pacific Coast

  Highway. It was a tony joint with a canopy to the street, rows of

  miniature white lights defining the roof line, and a sign advertising

  DANCING WED TIIRU sAT/JoIINNY WITH BIG BAND. Newport was the most

  affluent city in the county, with the world's largest private yacht

  harbor, so almost any establishment that pretended to a monied clientele

  most likely had one.

  Beginning mid-week, valet parking was probably provided, which would not

  have been good for his purposes, since a valet was a potential witness,

  but on a rainy Monday no valet was in sight.

  He parked in the lot beside the club, and as he switched off the engine,

  the seizure hit him. He felt as if he'd received a mild but sustained

  electrical shock. His eyes rolled back in his head, and for a moment he

  thought he was having convulsions, because he was unable to breathe or

  swallow. An involuntary moan escaped him. The attack lasted only ten

  or fifteen seconds, and ended with three words that seemed to have been

  spoken inside his head: Something's . out ...

  there ... It was not just a random thought sparked by some short

  circuiting synapse in his brain, for it came to him in a distinct voice,

  with the timbre and inflection of spoken words as distinguished from

  thoughts. Not his own voice, either, but that of a stranger. He had an

  overpowering sense of another presence in the car, as well, as if a

  spirit had passed through some curtain between worlds to visit with him,

  an alien presence that was real in spite of being invisible.

  Then the episode ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  He sat for a while, waiting for a reoccurrence.

  Rain hammered on the roof.

  The car ticked and pinged as the engine cooled down.

  Whatever had happened, it was over now.

  He tried to understand the experience. Had those word something's out

  there-been a warning, a psychic premonition? A threat? To what did it

  refer?

  Beyond the car, there seemed to be nothing special about the night.

  Just rain. Blessed darkness. The distorted reflections of electric

  lights and signs

  shimmered on the wet pavement, in puddles, and in the torrents pouring

  along the overflowing gutters. Sparse traffic passed on Pacific Coast

  Highway, but as far as he could see, no one was on foot-and he could see

  as well as any cat.

  After a while he decided that he would understand the episode when he

  was meant to understand it. Nothing was to be gained by brooding over

  it. If it was a threat, from whatever source, it did not trouble him.

  He was incapable of fear. That was the best thing about having left the

  world of the living, even if he was temporarily stuck in the borderland

  this side of death: nothing in existence held any terror for him.

  Nevertheless, that inner voice had been one of the strangest things he

  had ever experienced. And he was not exactly without a store of strange

  experiences with which to compare it.

  He got out of his silver Camaro, slammed the door, and walked to the

  club entrance. The rain was cold. In the blustering wind, the fronds

  of the palm trees rattled like old bones.

  Lindsey Harrison was also on the fifth floor, at the far end of the main

  corridor from her husband. Little of the room was revealed when Jonas

  entered and approached the side of the bed, for there was not even the

  green light from a cardiac monitor. The woman was barely visible.

  He wondered if he should try to wake her, and was surprised when she

  spoke: "Who're you?"

  He said, "I thought you were asleep."

  "Can't sleep."

  "Didn't they give you something?"

  "It didn't help."

  As in her husband's room, the rain drove against the window with sullen

  fury. Jonas could hear torrents cascading through the confines of a

  nearby aluminum downspout.

  "How do you feel?" he asked.

  "How the hell do you think I feel?" She tried to infuse the words with

  anger, but she was too exhausted and too depressed to manage it.

  He put down the bed railing, sat on the edge of the mattress, and held

  out one hand, assuming that her eyes were better adapted to the gloom

  than his were. "Give me your hand."

  "Why?"

  "I'm Jonas Nyebern. I'm a doctor. I want to tell you about your

  husband, and somehow I think it'll be better if you'll just let me hold

  your hand."

  She was silent.

  "Humor me he said.

  Although the woman believed her husband to be dead, Jonas did not mean

  to torment her by withholding his report of the resuscitation. From

  experience, he knew that good news of this sort could be as shocking to

  the recipient as bad news; it had to be delivered with care and

  sensitivity.

  She had been mildly delirious upon admission to the hospital, largely as

  a result of exposur
e and shock, but that condition had been swiftly

  remedied with the administration of heat and medication. She had been

  in possession of all her faculties for a few hours now, long enough to

  absorb her husband's death and to begin to find her way toward a

  tentative accommodation of her loss. Though deep in grief and far from

  adjusted to her widowhood, she had by now found a ledge on the emotional

  cliff down which she had plunged, a narrow perch, a precarious stability

  from which he was about to knock her loose.

  Still, he might have been more direct with her if he'd been able to

  bring her unalloyed good news. Unfortunately, he could not promise that

  her husband was going to be entirely his former self, unmarked by his

  experience, able to reenter his old life without a hitch. They would

  need hours, perhaps days, in which to examine and evaluate Harrison

  before they could hazard a prediction as to the likelihood of a full

  recovery. Thereafter, weeks or months of physical and occupational

  therapy might lie ahead for him, with no guarantee of effectiveness.

  Jonas was still waiting for her hand. At last she offered it

  diffidently.

  In his best bedside manner, he quickly outlined the basics of