The House of Thunder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE - Fear Comes Quietly...

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART TWO - Opening the Curtain ...

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART THREE - Going Into Town...

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  The acclaimed bestsellers by

  Dean Koontz

  THE EYES OF DARKNESS

  “Koontz puts his readers through the emotional wringer!” -The Associated Press

  THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT

  “A master storyteller... always riveting.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  MR. MURDER

  “A truly harrowing tale... superb work by a master at the top of his form.”

  -The Washington Post Book World

  THE FUNHOUSE

  “Koontz is a terrific what-if storyteller.” -People

  DRAGON TEARS

  “A razor-sharp, nonstop, suspenseful story... a first-rate literary experience.”

  -The San Diego Union-Tribune

  SHADOWFIRES

  “His prose mesmerizes... Koontz consistently hits the bull’s-eye.” -Arkansas Democrat

  HIDEAWAY

  “Not just a thriller but a meditation on the nature of good and evil.” -Lexington Herald-Leader

  COLD FIRE

  “An extraordinary piece of fiction... It will be a classic.” -UPI

  THE HOUSE OF THUNDER

  “Koontz is brilliant.” -Chicago Sun-Times

  THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT

  “A fearsome tour of an adolescent’s psyche. Terrifying, knee-knocking suspense.”

  -Chicago Sun-Times

  THE BAD PLACE

  “A new experience in breathless terror.”—UPI

  THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT

  “A great storyteller.” —New York Daily News

  MIDNIGHT

  “A triumph.” -The New York Times

  LIGHTNING

  “Brilliant... a spine-tingling tale... both challenging and entertaining.” -The Associated Press

  THE MASK

  “Koontz hones his fearful yarns to a gleaming edge.” -People

  WATCHERS

  “A breakthrough for Koontz... his best ever.”

  -Kirkus Reviews

  TWILIGHT EYES

  “A spine-chilling adventure... will keep you turning pages to the very end.” —Rave Reviews

  STRANGERS

  “A unique spellbinder that captures the reader on the first page. Exciting, enjoyable, and an intensely satisfying read.” -Mary Higgins Clark

  PHANTOMS

  “First-rate suspense, scary and stylish.”

  -Los Angeles Times

  WHISPERS

  “Pulls out all the stops... an incredible, terrifying tale.” —Publishers Weekly

  NIGHT CHILLS

  “Will send chills down your back.”

  -The New York Times

  DARKFALL

  “A fast-paced tale... one of the scariest chase scenes ever.” -Houston Post

  SHATTERED

  “A chilling tale... sleek as a bullet.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  THE VISION

  “Spine-tingling—it gives you an almost lethal shock.” -San Franciso Chronicle

  THE FACE OF FEAR

  “Real suspense... tension upon tension.”

  -The New York Times

  Berkley titles by Dean Koontz

  THE EYES OF DARKNESS

  THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT

  MR. MURDER

  THE FUNHOUSE

  DRAGON TEARS

  SHADOWFIRES

  HIDEAWAY

  COLD FIRE

  THE HOUSE OF THUNDER

  THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT

  THE BAD PLACE

  THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT

  MIDNIGHT

  LIGHTNING

  THE MASK

  WATCHERS

  TWILIGHT EYES

  STRANGERS

  DEMON SEED

  PHANTOMS

  WHISPERS

  NIGHT CHILLS

  DARKFALL

  SHATTERED

  THE VISION

  THE FACE OF FEAR

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M4V 3B2, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE HOUSE OF THUNDER

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Nkui, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Pocket Books edition published 1982

  Dark Harvest edition published 1988

  Berkley edition / June 1992

  Copyright © 1982 by Nkui, Inc.

  Visit our website at www.penguin.com

  eISBN : 978-0-425-13295-1

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is for Gerda,

  as it surely should have been

  from the start.

  PART ONE

  Fear Comes Quietly...

  The year was 1980-an ancient time,

  so long ago and far away....

  1

  When she woke, she thought she was blind. She opened her eyes and could see only purple darkness, ominous and shapeless shadows stirring within other shadows. Before she could panic, that gloom gave way to a pale haze, and the haze resolved into a white, acoustic-tile ceiling.

  She smelled fresh bed linens. Antiseptics. Disinfectants. Rubbing alcohol.

  She turned her head, and pain flashed the length of her forehead, as if an electric shock had snapped through her skull from temple to temple. Her eyes immediately swam out of focus. When her vision cleared again, she saw that she was in a hospital room.

  She could not remember being admitted to a hospital. She didn’t even know the
name of it or in what city it was located.

  What’s wrong with me?

  She raised one dismayingly weak arm, put a hand to her brow, and discovered a bandage over half of her forehead. Her hair was quite short, too. Hadn’t she worn it long and full?

  She had insufficient strength to keep her arm raised; she let it drop back to the mattress.

  She couldn’t raise her left arm at all, for it was taped to a heavy board and pierced by a needle. She was being fed intravenously: the chrome IV rack, with its dangling bottle of glucose, stood beside the bed.

  For a moment she closed her eyes, certain that she was only dreaming. When she looked again, however, the room was still there, unchanged: white ceiling, white walls, a green tile floor, pale yellow drapes drawn back at the sides of the large window. Beyond the glass, there were tall evergreens of some kind and a cloudy sky with only a few small patches of blue. There was another bed, but it was empty; she had no roommate.

  The side rails on her own bed were raised to prevent her from falling to the floor. She felt as helpless as a baby in a crib.

  She realized she didn’t know her name. Or her age. Or anything else about herself.

  She strained against the blank wall in her mind, attempting to topple it and release the memories imprisoned on the other side, but she had no success; the wall stood, inviolate. Like a blossom of frost, fear opened icy petals in the pit of her stomach. She tried harder to remember, but she had no success.

  Amnesia. Brain damage.

  Those dreaded words landed with the force of hammer blows in her mind. Evidently, she had been in an accident and had sustained a serious head injury. She considered the grim prospect of permanent mental disorientation, and she shuddered.

  Suddenly, however, unexpected and unsought, her name came to her. Susan. Susan Thorton. She was thirty-two years old.

  The anticipated flood of recollections turned out to be just a trickle. She could recall nothing more than her name and age. Although she probed insistently at the darkness in her mind, she couldn’t remember where she lived. How did she earn her living? Was she married? Did she have any children? Where had she been born? Where had she gone to school? What foods did she like? What was her favorite kind of music? She could find no answers to either important or trivial questions.

  Amnesia. Brain damage.

  Fear quickened her heartbeat. Then, mercifully, she remembered that she had been on vacation in Oregon. She didn’t know where she had come from; she didn’t know what job she would return to once her vacation came to an end; but at least she knew where she was. Somewhere in Oregon. The last thing she could recall was a beautiful mountain highway. An image of that landscape came to her in vivid detail. She had been driving through a pine forest, not far from the sea, listening to the radio, enjoying a clear blue morning. She drove through a sleepy village of stone and clapboard houses, then passed a couple of slow-moving logging trucks, then had the road all to herself for a few miles, and then... then...

  Nothing. After that, she had awakened, confused and blurry-eyed, in the hospital.

  “Well, well. Hello there.”

  Susan turned her head, searching for the person who had spoken. Her eyes slipped out of focus again, and a new dull pain pulsed at the base of her skull.

  “How are you feeling? You do look pale, but after what you’ve been through, that’s certainly to be expected, isn’t it? Of course it is. Of course.”

  The voice belonged to a nurse who was approaching the bed from the direction of the open door. She was a pleasantly plump, gray-haired woman with warm brown eyes and a wide smile. She wore a pair of white-framed glasses on a beaded chain around her neck; at the moment, the glasses hung unused on her matronly bosom.

  Susan tried to speak. Couldn’t.

  Even the meager effort of straining for words made her so light-headed that she thought she might pass out. Her extreme weakness scared her.

  The nurse reached the bed and smiled reassuringly. “I knew you’d come out of it, honey. I just knew it. Some people around here weren’t so sure as I was. But I knew you had moxie.” She pushed the call button on the headboard of the bed.

  Susan tried to speak again, and this time she managed to make a sound, though it was only a low and meaningless gurgle in the back of her throat. Suddenly she wondered if she would ever speak again. Perhaps she would be condemned to making grunting, gibbering animal noises for the rest of her life. Sometimes, brain damage resulted in a loss of speech, didn’t it? Didn’t it?

  A drum was booming loudly and relentlessly in her head. She seemed to be turning on a carousel, faster and faster, and she wished she could put a stop to the room’s nauseating movement.

  The nurse must have seen the panic in Susan’s eyes, for she said, “Easy now. Easy, kid. Everything’ll be all right.” She checked the IV drip, then lifted Susan’s right wrist to time her pulse.

  My God, Susan thought, if I can’t speak, maybe I can’t walk, either.

  She tried to move her legs under the sheets. She didn’t seem to have any feeling in them; they were even more numb and leaden than her arms.

  The nurse let go of her wrist, but Susan clutched at the sleeve of the woman’s white uniform and tried desperately to speak.

  “Take your time,” the nurse said gently.

  But Susan knew she didn’t have much time. She was teetering on the edge of unconsciousness again. The pounding pain in her head was accompanied by a steadily encroaching ring of darkness that spread inward from the edges of her vision.

  A doctor in a white lab coat entered the room, apparently in answer to the call button that the nurse had pushed. He was a husky, dour-faced man, about fifty, with thick black hair combed straight back from his deeply lined face.

  Susan looked beseechingly at him as he approached the bed, and she said, Are my legs paralyzed?

  For an instant she thought she had actually spoken those words aloud, but then she realized she still hadn’t regained her voice. Before she could try again, the rapidly expanding darkness reduced her vision to a small spot, a mere dot, then a pinpoint.

  Darkness.

  She dreamed. It was a bad dream, very bad, a nightmare.

  For at least the two-hundredth time, she dreamed that she was in the House of Thunder again, lying in a pool of warm blood.

  2

  When Susan woke again, her headache was gone. Her vision was clear, and she was no longer dizzy.

  Night had fallen. Her room was softly lighted, but only featureless blackness lay beyond the window.

  The IV rack had been taken away. Her needle-marked, discolored arm looked pathetically thin against the white sheet.

  She turned her head and saw the husky, dour-faced man in the white lab coat. He was standing beside the bed, staring down at her. His brown eyes possessed a peculiar, disturbing power; they seemed to be looking into her rather than at her, as if he were carefully examining her innermost secrets, yet they were eyes that revealed nothing whatsoever of his own feelings; they were as flat as painted glass.

  “What’s... happened... to me?” Susan asked.

  She could speak. Her voice was faint, raspy, and rather difficult to understand, but she was not reduced to a mute existence by a stroke or by some other severe brain injury, which was what she had feared at first.

  She was still weak, however. Her meager resources were noticeably depleted even by the act of speaking a few words at a whisper.

  “Where... am I?” she asked, voice cracking. Her throat burned with the passage of each rough syllable.

  The doctor didn’t respond to her questions right away. He picked up the bed’s power control, which dangled on a cord that was wrapped around the side rail, and he pushed one of the four buttons. The upper end of the bed rose, tilting Susan into a sitting position. He put down the controls and half filled a glass with cold water from a metal carafe that stood on a yellow plastic tray on the nightstand.

  “Sip it slowly,” he said. “It’s
been a while since you’ve taken any food or liquid orally.”

  She accepted the water. It was indescribably delicious. It soothed her irritated throat.

  When she had finished drinking, he took the glass from her and returned it to the nightstand. He unclipped a penlight from the breast pocket of his lab coat, leaned close, and examined her eyes. His own eyes remained flat and unreadable beneath bushy eyebrows that were knit together in what seemed to be a perpetual frown.

  While she waited for him to finish the examination, she tried to move her legs under the covers. They were weak and rubbery and still somewhat numb, but they moved at her command. She wasn’t paralyzed after all.

  When the doctor finished examining her eyes, he held his right hand in front of her face, just a few inches away from her. “Can you see my hand?”

  “Sure,” she said. Her voice was faint and quavery, but at least it was no longer raspy or difficult to understand.

  His voice was deep, colored by a vague guttural accent that Susan could not quite identify. He said, “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Three,” she said, aware that he was testing her for signs of a concussion.

  “And now—how many?”

  “Two.”

  “And now?”

  “Four.”

  He nodded approval, and the sharp creases in his forehead softened a bit. His eyes still probed at her with an intensity that made her uncomfortable. “Do you know your name?”