The House of Thunder Read online

  “Don’t worry about it. The only patients who had appointments this morning were all just hypochondriacs anyway.”

  She laughed, surprised that she still could laugh.

  He kissed her cheek. It was just a peck, a quick buss, and it was over before she realized it was happening. Yesterday, she had thought that he was going to kiss her on the cheek, but he had backed off at the last second. Now he had done it—and she still didn’t know what it meant. Was it merely an expression of sympathy, pity? Was it just affection? Just friendship? Or was it something more than that?

  As soon as he had kissed her, he stood up, straightened his rumpled lab coat. “Spend the rest of the morning relaxing as best you can. Read, watch TV, anything to keep your mind off the House of Thunder.”

  “I’ll call in the four look-alikes and get a poker game going,” she said.

  McGee blinked, then shook his head and grinned. “You sure spring back fast.”

  “Just obeying doctor’s orders. He wants me to keep a positive attitude, no matter what.”

  “Mrs. Baker’s right.”

  “About what?”

  “About you. She says you’ve got plenty of moxie.”

  “She’s too easily impressed.”

  “Mrs. Baker? She wouldn’t be impressed if the Pope and the President walked through that door arm-in-arm.”

  Self-conscious, feeling that she didn’t really deserve this praise after having broken down and wept, Susan straightened the blanket and the sheets around her and avoided responding to his compliment.

  “Eat everything they give you for lunch,” McGee said. “Then this afternoon, I want you to take the physical therapy you were scheduled for this morning.”

  Susan stiffened.

  McGee must have seen the sudden change in her, for he said, “It’s important, Susan. You need to have physical therapy. It’ll get you back on your feet considerably faster. And if we discover some physical cause for your perceptual problems, something that necessitates major surgery, you’ll withstand the stress and strain of the operation a great deal better if you’re in good physical condition.”

  Resigned, she said, “All right.”

  “Excellent.”

  “But please ...”

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t send Jelli—” She cleared her throat. “Don’t send Bradley and O’Hara to take me downstairs.”

  “No problem. We’ve got plenty of other orderlies.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And remember—chin up.”

  Susan put one fist under her chin, as if propping up her head, and she assumed a theatrical expression of heroic, iron-hard determination.

  “That’s the spirit,” he said. “Think of yourself as Sylvester Stallone in Rocky.”

  “You think I look like Sylvester Stallone?”

  “Well ... more than you look like Marlon Brando.”

  “Gee, you sure know how to flatter a girl, Dr. McGee.”

  “Yeah. I’m a regular lady-killer.” He winked at her, and it was the right kind of wink, very different from that which Bill Richmond had given her in the hall yesterday. “I’ll see you later, when I make my evening rounds.”

  And then he was gone.

  She was alone. Except for Jessica Seiffert. Which was the same as being alone.

  She still hadn’t seen the woman.

  Susan looked at the curtained bed. There was not even the slightest movement or noise from behind it.

  At the moment, she did not want to be alone, so she said, “Mrs. Seiffert?”

  There was no response.

  She considered getting out of bed, going over there, and seeing if Mrs. Seiffert was all right. For reasons she could not explain, however, she was afraid to open that curtain.

  8

  Susan tried to follow doctor’s orders. She picked up a book and read for a few minutes, but she couldn’t get interested in the story. She switched on the TV, but she couldn’t find a program that held her attention. The only thing that engaged her interest was the mystery of the four look-alikes, the puzzle of their purpose. What did they intend to do to her? In spite of McGee’s advice, she spent a large part of the morning thinking about Harch and the other three, worrying.

  Clear evidence of an unnatural fixation, obsession, psychological illness or brain dysfunction, she thought. I say I don’t believe in elaborate fantasies. I say I don’t believe in the occult. And yet I believe these four are real, including the two who are dead. It makes no sense.

  But she worried anyway, and she looked forward with unalloyed dread to the prospect of being taken from her room for therapy. Not that she felt safe in her room. She didn’t. But at least her room was known territory. She didn’t want to go downstairs. She recalled the way Jellicoe ... the way Dennis Bradley had said it: “We’re here to take you downstairs.” It had an ominous sound.

  Downstairs.

  Feeling guilty about ignoring much of McGee’s advice, Susan made a point of eating everything she was served for lunch, which was what he had told her to do.

  The condemned woman ate a hearty last meal, she thought with gallows humor. Then, angry with herself, she thought: Dammit, stop this! Get your act together, Thorton.

  Just as she finished eating, the phone rang. It was a call from a couple of her fellow workers at Milestone. She didn’t remember them, but she tried to be pleasant, tried to think of them as friends. It was nevertheless an awkward and disturbing conversation, and she was relieved when they finally hung up.

  An hour after lunch, two orderlies came with a wheeled stretcher. Neither of them even faintly resembled any of the four fraternity men.

  The first was a burly, fiftyish man with a beer gut. He had thick graying hair and a gray mustache. “Hi ya, gorgeous. You ordered a taxi?”

  The second man was about thirty-five. He was bald and had a smooth, open, almost childlike face. He said, “We’re here to take you away from all this.”

  “I was expecting a limousine,” she said.

  “Hey, sweetheart, what d’ya think this is?” the older one asked. He swept his open hand across the wheeled stretcher as if he were presenting an elegant motor coach. “Look at those classic lines!” He slapped the stretcher’s three-inch foam mattress. “Look at that upholstery. Nothing but the best, the finest.”

  The bald one said, “Is there any other mode of transportation, other than a limousine, in which you could ride lying down?”

  “With a chauffeur,” said the older one, putting down the rail on her bed.

  “With two chauffeurs,” the bald one said, pushing the stretcher against the side of her bed. “I’m Phil. The other gent is Elmer Murphy.”

  “They call me Murf.”

  “They call him worse than that.”

  Although she was still afraid of being taken downstairs, into unknown territory, Susan was amused by their patter. Their friendliness, their efforts to make her feel at ease, and her determination not to disappoint McGee gave her sufficient courage to slide off the bed and onto the stretcher. Looking up at them, she said, “Are you two always like this?”

  “Like what?” Murf asked.

  “She means charming,” Phil said, slipping a small, somewhat hard pillow under her head.

  “Oh, yeah,” Murf said. “We’re always charming.”

  “Cary Grant has nothing on us.”

  “It’s just something we were born with.”

  Phil said, “If you look under ‘charm’ in the dictionary—”

  “—you’ll see our faces,” Murf finished for him.

  They put a thin blanket over her, put one strap across her to keep the blanket in place, and wheeled her into the hall.

  Downstairs.

  To keep from thinking about where she was going, Susan said, “Why this contraption? Why not a wheelchair?”

  “We can’t deal with patients in wheelchairs,” Phil said.

  “They’re too mobile,” Murf said.

  “Americans
love mobility.”

  “They hate to sit still.”

  Phil said, “If we leave a patient alone in a wheelchair for just ten seconds—”

  “—he’s halfway to Mesopotamia by the time we get back,” Murf finished.

  They were at the elevators. Murf pushed the white button labeled Down.

  “Lovely place,” Phil said as the doors opened wide.

  “What?” Murf said. “This elevator? Lovely?”

  “No,” Phil said. “Mesopotamia.”

  “You been there, huh?”

  “That’s where I spend my winters.”

  “Ya know, I don’t think there is a Mesopotamia any more.”

  “Better not let the Mesopotamians hear you say that,” Phil warned him.

  They kept up their chatter in the elevator and all the way along the first-floor hall into the Physical Therapy Department, which was in one of the building’s short wings. There, they turned her over to Mrs. Florence Atkinson, the specially trained therapist who was in charge of the hospital’s PT program.

  Florence Atkinson was a small, dark, birdlike woman, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. She guided Susan through half an hour of exercises, using a variety of machines and modified gym equipment that gave a workout to every muscle group. There was nothing in the least strenuous about it; a healthy person would have found it all laughably easy. “For your first couple of visits,” Mrs. Atkinson said, “we’ll concentrate primarily on passive exercise.” But at the end of the half hour, Susan was exhausted and achy. Following the exercise period, she was given a massage that made her feel as if she were a loose collection of disjointed bones and ligaments that God had neglected to assemble into human form. After the massage, there was a session in the whirlpool. The hot, swirling water leeched the remaining tension out of her, so that she felt not just loose but liquid. Best of all, she was allowed to take a shower in a stall that was equipped with a seat and handrails for invalids. The glorious feeling and scent of soap, hot water, and steam was so wonderful, so exquisite, that merely taking a bath seemed deliciously sinful.

  Florence Atkinson dried Susan’s shaggy blond hair with an electric blower while she sat in front of a dressing table mirror. It was the first time she had looked in a mirror in more than a day, and she was delighted to see that the bags under her eyes were entirely gone. The skin around her eyes was still a bit on the bluish side, but not much, and she actually had a touch of rosy color in her cheeks. The thin scar on her forehead was less red and swollen than it had been yesterday morning, when the bandages had come off, and she had no difficulty believing that it really would be all but invisible when it was entirely healed.

  In her green pajamas again, she got onto the wheeled stretcher, and Mrs. Atkinson pushed her into the PT Department’s waiting room. “Phil and Murf will be around for you in a few minutes.”

  “They can take their time. I feel like I’m floating on a warm, blue ocean. I could lay here forever,” she said, wondering how on earth she could ever have been so afraid of being brought downstairs to PT.

  She stared at the acoustic-tile ceiling for a minute or two, finding outlines of objects in the pattern of dots: a giraffe, a sailboat, a palm tree. Drowsy, she closed her eyes and yawned.

  “She looks too satisfied, Phil.”

  “Yes, she does, Murf”

  She opened her eyes and smiled up at them.

  “Got to be careful about pampering the patients too much,” Phil said.

  “Massages, whirlpools, chauffeurs ...”

  “Pretty soon, she’ll be wanting breakfast in bed.”

  “What is this, Phil, a hospital or a country club?”

  “Sometimes I wonder, Murf.”

  “Well, if it isn’t the Laurel and Hardy of Willawauk Hospital,” Susan said.

  They wheeled her out of the PT waiting room.

  Murf said, “Laurel and Hardy? No, we think of ourselves more as the Bob and Ray of Willawauk.”

  They turned the corner into the long main hall. The hard pillow raised Susan’s head just enough so she could see that the corridor was deserted. It was the first time she’d seen an empty hallway in the bustling hospital.

  “Bob and Ray?” Phil said to Murf. “Speak for yourself. Me, I think I’m the Robert Redford of Willawauk.”

  “Robert Redford doesn’t need a toupee.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Right. You need an entire bearskin rug to cover that dome.”

  They had reached the elevators.

  “You’re being cruel, Murf.”

  “Just helping you face reality, Phil.”

  Murf pushed the white button labeled Up.

  Phil said, “Well, Miss Thorton, I hope you’ve enjoyed your little trip.”

  “Immensely,” she said.

  “Good,” Murf said. “And we guarantee you that the next part of it will be interesting.”

  “Very interesting,” Phil agreed.

  The elevator doors opened behind her.

  They pushed her inside but didn’t follow.

  There were other people already in there. Four of them. Harch, Quince, Jellicoe, Parker. Harch and Quince were wearing pajamas and robes; they were standing at her left side. Jellicoe and Parker, in hospital whites, were at her right.

  Shocked, disbelieving, she raised her head, looked out at Murf and Phil, who were standing in the elevator alcove on the first floor, staring in at her, smiling. They waved goodbye.

  The doors closed. The lift started up.

  Ernest Harch punched a button on the control panel, and they stopped between floors. He looked down at her. His frosty gray eyes were like circles of dirty ice, and they transmitted a chill to the heart of her.

  Harch said, “Hello, bitch. Imagine meeting you here.”

  Jellicoe giggled. It was a burbling, chortling, piggish sound that matched his piggish face.

  “No,” she said numbly.

  “Not going to scream?” Parker asked, grinning like a naughty, freckle-faced altar boy.

  “We had hoped for a scream,” Quince said, his long face looking even longer from her perspective.

  “Too surprised to scream,” Jellicoe said, and he giggled again.

  She closed her eyes and did what Jeffrey McGee had suggested. She told herself that they were not real. She told herself that they couldn’t hurt her. She told herself that they were just phantoms, the stuff of daydreams or, rather, daymares. Not real.

  Someone put a hand on her throat.

  Heart pounding, she opened her eyes. ,It was Harch. He squeezed lightly, and the feel of her flesh in his grip apparently pleased him, for he laughed softly.

  Susan put both of her hands on his, tried to pull it away. Couldn’t. He was strong.

  “Don’t worry, bitch,” he said. “I won’t kill you.”

  He sounded exactly like Harch had sounded at the trial and in the House of Thunder. That was one voice she would never forget. It was deep, with a gravelly edge to it, a cold and merciless voice.

  “No, we won’t kill you yet,” Quince said. “Not yet.”

  “When the time is right,” Harch said.

  She dropped her hands. She felt increasingly numb in her extremities. Her feet and hands were cold. She was shaking like an old car whose engine was badly out of tune; her rattling, banging heart was shaking her to pieces.

  Harch stroked her throat softly, tenderly, as if he were admiring the graceful curve of it.

  She shuddered with revulsion and turned her head away from him, looked at Jellicoe.

  His pig eyes glinted. “How did you like our little song and dance in your room this morning?”

  “Your name’s Bradley,” she said, willing it to be so, willing reality to return.

  “No,” he said. “Jellicoe.”

  “And I’m Parker, not O’Hara,” the redhead said.

  “You’re both dead,” she said shakily.

  “All four of us are dead,” Quince said.

  She looked at the ha
wk-faced man, bewildered by his statement.

  He said, “After I was kicked out of Briarstead, I went home to Virginia. My family wasn’t very supportive. In fact they didn’t want much contact with me at all. Very proper, very old-line Virginia hunt-country family, you understand. No breath of scandal must ever sully the family name.” His face grew dark with anger. “I was given a modest income to tide me over until I could find work, and I was sent away. Sent away! My father—the self-righteous, sanctimonious, fucking bastard-cut me off as if I was a dead limb on a tree. What work was I to find that wasn’t beneath me? I mean, I was from a privileged family. I wasn’t bred to be a common laborer.” He was virtually speaking through clenched teeth now. “I didn’t get a chance to go to law school, as I’d wanted. Because of you, your testimony at the trial. Jesus, I hate your guts. It was because of you that I ended up in that dismal motel in Newport News. It was because of you that I slashed my wrists in that grubby little bathroom.”

  She closed her eyes. She thought: They aren’t real. They can’t hurt me.

  “I was killed in prison,” Harch said.

  She kept her eyes tightly closed.

  “Thirty-two days before I was scheduled to be paroled,” he said. “Christ, I’d served almost five years, and with one month to go, I had the bad luck to cross a nigger who’d had a knife smuggled into his cell.”

  They’re not real. They can’t hurt me.

  “And now I’ve finally come after you,” Harch said. “I swore I would. In prison, a thousand times, ten thousand times, I swore I’d come after you some day. And you know what this Friday is, bitch? It’s the anniversary of my death, that’s what it is. This Friday makes seven years since that nigger shoved me up against the wall and cut my throat. Friday. That’s when we’re going to do it to you. Friday night. You’ve got about three days left, bitch. Just wanted to let you know. Just wanted you to sweat for a while first. Friday. We’ve got something really special planned for you on Friday.”

  “We’re all dead because of you,” Jellicoe said.

  They’re not real.

  Their voices slashed at her.

  “—if we could have found where she was hiding—”

  “—woutd’ve kicked her head in, too—”

  “—cut her pretty throat—”