The House of Thunder Read online

Squeezing his hand, she said, “What were the results of the spinal?”

  With his free hand, McGee pulled thoughtfully on his ear. “The protein analysis showed no abnormalities. Then we did a blood count. If there had been too many red cells, that would’ve told us that there was bleeding either inside the skull, at the base of the brain, or somewhere along the spine.”

  “But the red count was normal,” Susan said, anticipating him.

  “Yes. Now, if there was an abundance of white cells, we’d know there was a cerebral or spinal infection.”

  “But the white count was normal, too.”

  “Yes.”

  Susan felt as if she were being backed into a corner by an advancing army of cold, hard facts. You’re as healthy as a teenager, the facts seemed to be shouting at her. Your body hasn’t betrayed you. Your brain hasn’t betrayed you, either. It’s your mind that has gone rotten. You’re not physically ill, Susan. There’s no organic problem. You’re just plain crazy; that’s all. Nuts. You’re as nutty as a jumbo-size can of Planter’s Party Mix.

  She tried very hard not to listen to those invidious inner voices, tried to tune out the increasingly loud chorus of self-doubt, self-loathing, and confusion.

  Plaintively, she said, “Didn’t the spinal show anything out of the ordinary?”

  “Not a thing. We even analyzed the sugar content of your spinal fluid. There are some diseases in which bacteria eat that particular sugar, so a low count would have set off alarms. But your spinal sugar is two-thirds the level of your blood sugar, and that’s also normal.”

  “Sounds as if I’m a textbook example of a thirty-two-year-old woman in perfect health,” she said with heavy irony.

  McGee was clearly troubled by the difficulty he was having in pinpointing her illness. “No. Something is wrong somewhere.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not terribly reassuring.”

  “We’ll just keep looking.”

  “I have a feeling I’m going to be here a long time.”

  “No. We’ll find it soon. We have to.”

  “But how?”

  “Well, first of all, I’m taking the EEG printouts, the X rays, and all the lab data home with me. I’m going to go over everything one more time, with a magnifying glass if I have to. Maybe we didn’t look carefully this morning. Maybe the answer was there and we just failed to spot it. Some little thing that was easily overlooked ... some subtle anomaly ...

  “And what if you still don’t find anything?”

  He hesitated, and he looked worried as he finally said, “Well, then ... there’s another test we can run.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “It’s not a simple procedure.”

  “I could figure that much just by taking a look at your face,” she said.

  “A cerebral angiogram. It’s a diagnostic technique that we usually reserve for functionally impaired stroke victims who’ve got to undergo brain surgery for clot removal or for the repair of a hemorrhaged blood vessel.”

  “What’s it entail?”

  “We’d inject a radiopaque substance into your bloodstream, into an artery between the heart and the brain, which means in the neck, and that isn’t pleasant.”

  “I guess not.”

  “There’s pain involved.”

  Susan put one hand to the side of her neck and rubbed the tender flesh uneasily.

  McGee said, “And the procedure isn’t entirely risk-free. A small percentage of patients suffer complications leading to death subsequent to an angiogram. Notice that I didn’t say it was a ‘tiny’ percentage or an ‘infinitesimal’ percentage.”

  “You said it was a ‘small’ percentage, and I gather that means it’s not large, but that it’s also not small enough to be considered insignificant.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What we’re talking about is a more sophisticated series of cranial X rays,” she said. “Is that right?”

  “Yes. As soon as the radiopaque tracer reaches the blood vessels in the brain, we take a long, rapid sequence of X rays, following its dispersal. That gives us the most detailed look at your cerebral circulatory system that we could hope to get. We’re able to clearly define the size and shape of all the veins and arteries. We can pinpoint a clot, a hemorrhage, a bulge in an arterial wall, virtually anything, no matter how small it might be.”

  “Sounds like just the thing for getting to the bottom of my problem,” Susan said.

  “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t even resort to an angiogram unless the patient had serious functional impairment—loss of speech, loss of motor control, partial paralysis—or was suffering from apoplectic stroke-related mental confusion of such severity that not even a hope of leading a normal life existed.”

  “Sounds like me,” she said glumly.

  “Oh, no. Not at all. There’s an enormous difference between stroke-related mental disorientation and the kind of hallucinations you’ve been having. Believe it or not, your condition is the less life-disrupting of the two.”

  For a long moment, neither of them said anything. McGee stood beside the bed, and Susan sat there in it, feeling small and weak, and they just held hands in silence.

  Then she said, “Suppose you still don’t find anything when you look over the X rays and lab reports again this evening.”

  “Suppose.” “Would you order an angiogram for me then?”

  He closed his eyes and thought about it for a moment.

  Susan saw that there was a nervous tic in his left eyelid.

  Finally he said, “I just don’t know. It depends on so many things. I’d have to consider the old physician’s credo: ‘If you can’t do any good, at least don’t do any harm.’ I mean, if there’s not the slightest indication that your problem is physical, then scheduling an angiogram would be—”

  “It is physical,” Susan insisted.

  “Even if there was evidence of a physical cause, sufficient evidence to justify putting you through an angiogram, I’d want to wait a few days until you were a little stronger.”

  She licked her lips, which felt dry and rough. “And if we did go through with an angiogram, and if it didn’t reveal any physical damage to the brain, and if the hallucinations continued anyway—what then?” she asked.

  “We’d have exhaused every avenue offered by traditional medicine.”

  “Surely not.”

  “We’d have to rule out a diagnosis of physical cause and start looking elsewhere.”

  “No.”

  “Susan, we’d simply have to.”

  “No.”

  “Consulting a psychiatrist is nothing that you should be ashamed of. It’s only an—”

  “I’m not ashamed of it,” she said. “I just don’t believe it would do any good.”

  “Modern psychiatry has achieved—”

  “No,” she said, cutting him off, afraid even to consider the possibility of submitting to years of therapy, years and years of continuing hallucinations. “No. There must be something wrong that you can locate, something you can do. There must be. There has to be.”

  He dropped the subject of psychiatry. “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all I’m asking.”

  “I’m not licked yet.”

  “Didn’t think you were.”

  Apparently he saw that her lips were dry, for he said, “Like a drink of water?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He poured it for her, and she drank all of it in several long, greedy swallows; then he returned the empty glass to the tray on the nightstand.

  “Have you remembered anything at all about your job?” McGee asked.

  His question startled her. The last time she had given a thought to the Milestone Corporation or to her job there was when she had telephoned Philip Gomez in Newport Beach on Monday morning. More than two days ago. Since then, she had pushed the entire subject to the back of her mind, had thrown a dark cloth over it—as if she were frightened
of it. And she was frightened. Now, the mere mention of Milestone sent a chill through her. Furthermore, she was suddenly stricken by the strange and unnerving conviction that her bizarre hallucinations—the encounters with dead men—were all somehow directly related to her work at Milestone.

  McGee evidently sensed her fear, for he leaned closer to her and said, “Susan? What’s wrong?”

  She told him what she had been thinking: that there was a link between the Milestone Corporation and her hallucinations.

  “Link?” McGee asked. He was clearly perplexed. “What sort of link?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. But I feel it.”

  “Are you suggesting that you were having similar hallucinations prior to your auto accident?”

  “No, no. How could that be?”

  “You mean that you aren’t sure if you were or weren’t having them prior to the accident.”

  “I wasn’t. Definitely not.”

  “You don’t sound certain enough to please me.”

  So she thought about it for a minute.

  He watched her with keen anticipation.

  At last she said, “Yes. Yes, I’m sure. These attacks have come only since the accident. If I’d had them before, I wouldn’t have forgotten them. Not something like this.”

  McGee cocked his head and regarded her at an angle. “If there’s a physical cause of your condition—which is what both you and I want very much to believe—then it must be an injury arising out of the car crash.”

  “I know.”

  “It can’t be something that was sparked by your work at Milestone. Because if it’s caused by the pressure of your work or something like that—”

  “—then we’d be talking about a psychological condition,” she finished for him. “A nervous breakdown.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which it isn’t.”

  “Then how can there be a link to Milestone?”

  She frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “So you must be wrong.”

  “I guess so. But I still...”

  “Feel frightened?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s easily explained,” McGee said. “You’re afraid of the Milestone Corporation for pretty much the same reason that you were afraid of the drawn curtain around Jessie’s bed. You couldn’t see what was on the other side of that curtain, which gave your imagination a chance to run wild. And your job has that same quality of the unknown about it. There’s a curtain drawn around that part of your life, and because you can’t see what lies beyond it, your imagination is given an opportunity to supply you with frightening possibilities. Perhaps because of an almost immeasurably small amount of brain damage, you’re fixated on the House of Thunder and on what happened to you in that cavern; so it follows that your imagination, whenever it does have a chance to run wild, invariably harkens back to those events of thirteen years ago. Your hallucinations have nothing to do with your job, they can’t have anything to do with it, because Milestone has nothing to do with the House of Thunder. You’re just trying to tie them all together because ... well, that’s what it means to be psychologically obsessed with a single event in your life. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet the Milestone Corporation still frightens you.”

  “Every time you mention the name, a cold wave passes through me,” she admitted.

  She could see goose bumps on her arm where the sleeve of her pajamas had slid back.

  McGee had been leaning against the bed all this time. Now he boosted himself up and sat on the edge of it, still holding her hand.

  “I know it scares you,” he said sympathetically. “Your hand is freezing. It wasn’t cold at all when I first took hold of it, but the moment we started talking about your job, it just turned to ice.”

  “You see?”

  “Yes, but those cold waves, those feelings of suspicion directed toward Milestone, all of those things are just facets of your obsession. This fear is like a miniature episode, a very small version of the kind of attack in which you thought you saw Jerry Stein’s corpse. You have no logical reason to be afraid of Milestone or of anyone who works there.”

  She nodded, dismayed by the ever-complicating nature of her condition. “I guess I don’t.”

  “You know you don’t.”

  Susan sighed. “You know what I wish? I wish there were such things as ghosts. I wish this were a case of dead men returning from the grave to take revenge on me, like something out of one of those EC Horror Comics. I mean, Jeez, how much easier it would be to deal with that. No spinal taps. No angiograms. No sharply clawed little self-doubts tearing me apart from inside. All I’d have to do is call up a priest and ask him, please, to come over here and chase these nasty demonic spirits all the way back to Hell, where they belong.”

  McGee frowned at her, and there was a troubled expression in his eyes when he said, “Hey, I don’t think I like to hear you talking that way.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Susan quickly assured him, “I’m not going to go mystical on you. I’m perfectly aware that there ain’t no such things as ghosts. Besides, if there were ghosts, and if that’s what these things were that’ve been bothering me lately, then they’d be transparent, wouldn’t they? Or they’d look like a bunch of bed sheets with eye holes cut out of them. That’s a ghost. They wouldn’t be warm-skinned and solid like the things I’ve been running into and away from lately.” She smiled at him. “Hey, I know why you’re so worried all of a sudden! You’re afraid that if it did turn out to be ghosts, then I wouldn’t need you any more. Doctors don’t perform exorcisms, right?”

  He smiled, too. “Right.”

  “You’re afraid that I’d cast you aside, just throw you over in favor of some priest with a prayer book in one hand and a golden crucifix in the other.”

  “Would you do that to me?” he asked.

  “Never. For heaven’s sake, too many things could go wrong if I relied on a priest. Like... what if I entrusted myself to a priest who’d lost his faith? Or what if I went to a Catholic priest for help—and then the ghosts all turned out to be Protestants? What good would an exorcism do me then?”

  She was certain that McGee hadn’t been conned by her forced good humor; he knew that she was still depressed and scared. But he played along with her anyway, for he apparently sensed, as she had done, that she’d dwelt on her problems far too much this morning and that chewing them over any longer would be harmful to her. She needed a change of subject, needed to kid around for a while, and McGee obliged.

  “Well,” he said, “as I understand it, the exorcism is supposed to work regardless of the spirit’s religious affiliation in any prior life it might have lived. After all, what kind of mess would the supernatural world be in if it had to take logic into account? I mean, if Catholic exorcisms didn’t work against Protestant ghosts, then a crucifix wouldn’t repel a Jewish vampire.”

  “In that case, how would you repel a Jewish vampire?”

  “You’d probably have to brandish a mezuzah at him instead of a crucifix.”

  “Or maybe you could just offer him a ham dinner,” Susan said.

  “That would only repel him if he was a devout, practicing Jewish vampire. And then what about Moslem vampires?”

  “See?” she said. “It’s all too complicated. I can’t possibly fire you and hire a priest.”

  “Ah, it’s so nice to know I’m needed.”

  “Oh, you’re definitely needed,” she assured him. “I need you. I do need you.” She heard her voice change abruptly as she was speaking, heard the bantering tone evaporate in the intense heat of her true feelings for him. “There’s no doubt about that.” She was as startled by her own boldness as McGee appeared to be, but she couldn’t stop herself. She could only plunge ahead recklessly, speaking too fast, in too much of a rush to express what had been on her mind and in her heart for the past day or two. “I need you, Jeff McGee. And if you want me to, I’ll sit here all day, say
ing it over and over again, until my voice wears out.”

  He stared at her, his beautiful blue eyes a darker and more intense blue than she had ever seen them before.

  She tried to read those eyes, but she couldn’t tell a thing about the thoughts behind them.

  As she waited for him to respond to her, Susan wondered if she had done something stupid. Had she misinterpreted his treatment of her and his reactions to her during the past few days? Where she had thought she’d seen romantic interest—was there really only doctorly concern? If she had mistaken his usual bedside manner for special interest, the next few minutes were going to be among the most socially awkward in her life.

  She wished desperately that she could call back the words she had spoken, roll back the clock just one minute.

  Then McGee kissed her.

  It was not like any of the kisses that he had planted on her cheek or on the corner of her mouth during the past couple of days. There was nothing chaste or timid about it this time. He kissed her full upon the lips, tenderly yet forcefully, both giving and taking, seeking and demanding. She responded to him with an instancy and with a heat that were not at all like her; this time, there was no trace of the ice maiden in her, nothing whatsoever held in reserve, no part of her that stopped to think about keeping control of the situation and of the relationship that might follow. This would be different from all other love affairs she’d ever known. This time she, too, was being swept away. This kiss involved not only lips and tongues, but passion, hunger, need. He put his hands on her face, one on each side of her face, holding her gently but firmly, as if he was afraid that she would reconsider her commitment and would pull back from him—as if he could not bear the thought of her doing so.

  When at last the kiss ended and they drew apart a few inches to look at each other, to decide how the kiss had changed them, Susan saw a mixture of emotions in McGee’s face: happiness, surprise, awe, confusion, embarrassment, and more.

  His breathing was fast.

  Hers was faster.

  For a moment she thought she saw something else in his eyes, too; something ... darker. For only a second or two, she thought she saw fear in his eyes, just a flicker of it, a fluttering bat-wing apprehension.