THE HOUSE OF THUNDER
by DEAN R. KOONTZ

 __This book is for Gerda,
as it surely should have been
from the _start.
THE HOUSE OF THUNDER 1
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. 3

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." 5

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 7
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. 9

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." 11

"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?"
"Yes. I'm Susan Thorton."
"That's right. Middle name?"
"Kathleen."
"Good. How old are you?"
"Thirty-two."
"Good. Very good. You seem clear-headed."
Her voice had become dry and scratchy again. She cleared her throat and said, "But that's just about _all I'm able to remember."
He hadn't entirely relinquished his frown,
and the lines in his broad, square face became sharply etched once more. "What do you mean?"
"Well, I can't remember where I live
... or what kind of work I do ... or whether I'm married ..."
He studied her for a moment, then said, "You
live in Newport Beach, California."
As soon as he mentioned the town, she could see
her house: a cozy Spanish-style place with a
red tile roof, white stucco walls, mullioned windows, tucked in among several tall palms.
But no matter how hard she thought about it, the name
of the street and the number of the house eluded her.
"You work for the Milestone Corporation in Newport," the doctor said.
"Milestone?" Susan said. She sensed a distant glimmer of memory in her mental fog.
The doctor looked down at her intensely.
"What's wrong?" she asked shakily. "Why
are you staring like that?"
He blinked in surprise, then smiled somewhat sheepishly. Clearly, smiles did not come easily to him, and this one was strained. "Well ... I'm concerned about you, of course. And I want
to know what we're up against here. Temporary amnesia is to be expected in a case like this, and
it can be easily treated. But if you're suffering from
more than temporary amnesia, we'll have to change our entire approach. So you see, it's important for me to know whether the name Milestone means anything to you."
"Milestone," she said thoughtfully. "Yes,
it's familiar. _Vaguely familiar."
"You're a physicist at Milestone. 13
You earned your doctorate at UCLA a few years ago, and you went to work at Milestone
immediately thereafter."
"Ah," she said as the glimmer of memory
grew brighter.
"We've learned a few things about you from the people
at Milestone," he said. "You have no children. You aren't married; you never have been." He watched her
as she tried to assimilate what he'd told
her. "Is it starting to fall into place now?"
Susan sighed with relief. "Yes. To an extent, it is. Some of it's coming back to me ...
but not everything. Just random bits and pieces."
"It'll take time," he assured her. "After
an injury like yours, you can't expect
to recuperate overnight."
She had a lot of questions to ask him, but her curiosity was equaled by her bone-deep weariness
and exceeded by her thirst. She slumped back against
the pillows to catch her breath, and she asked for more water.
He poured only a third of a glass this time.
As before, he warned her to take small sips.
She didn't need to be warned. Already, after
having consumed nothing more than a few ounces of water, she felt slightly bloated, as if
she'd eaten a full-course dinner.
When she had finished drinking, she said, "I don't know your name."
"Oh. I'm sorry. It's Viteski.
Dr. Leon Viteski."
"I've been wondering about your accent," she
said. "I do detect one, don't I?
Viteski ... Is your heritage Polish?"
He looked uncomfortable, and his gaze slid away from hers. "Yes. I was a war orphan.
I came to this country in 1946, when I was seventeen. My uncle took me in." The spontaneity had gone out of his voice; he sounded
as if he were reciting a carefully memorized speech. "I've lost most of my Polish
accent, but I suppose I'll never shake it entirely."
Apparently, she had touched a sore spot.
The mere mention of his accent made him strangely defensive.
He hurried on, speaking faster than he had spoken before, as if he were eager to change the subject. "I'm chief physician here, head
of the medical staff. By the way ... do you 15
have any idea where `here` is?"
"Well, I remember that I was on vacation in Oregon, though I can't remember exactly where I was going. So this must be somewhere in Oregon,
right?"
"Yes. The town's Willawauk. About eight thousand people live here. It's the county seat. Willawauk County is mostly rural, and this
is its only hospital. Not a huge
facility. It's just four floors, two hundred
and twenty beds. But we're good. In fact I like to think we're better than a lot of more sophisticated big-city hospitals because we're able to give more personal attention to patients here. And personal attention often makes an enormous difference in the rate of recovery."
His voice contained no trace of pride or enthusiasm, as it ought to have, considering what he was saying. It was almost as flat and monotonous as the voice of a machine.
Or is it just me? She wondered. Is it just that my perceptions are out of whack?
In spite of her weariness and in spite of the hammering that had just started up again inside her
skull, she raised her head from the pillow and said, "Doctor, why am I here? What happened
to me?"
"You don't recall anything about the accident?"
"No."
"Your car's brakes failed. It was on an extremely twisty stretch of road, two
miles south of the Viewtop turnoff."
"Viewtop?"
"That's where you were headed. You had a confirmation of your reservation in your purse."
"It's a hotel?"
"Yes. The Viewtop Inn. A resort.
A big, rambling old place. It was built fifty or sixty years ago, and I'd guess it's more popular now than it was then. A real get-away-from-it-all hotel."
As Dr. Viteski spoke, Susan slowly remembered. She closed her eyes and could see the resort in a series of colorful photographs
that had illustrated an article in _Travel magazine last February. She'd booked a
room for part of her vacation as soon as she'd read about the place, for she had been charmed by the
pictures of the inn's wide verandas, many-gabled
roofline, pillared lobby, and extensive 17
gardens.
"Anyway," Viteski said, "your brakes failed, and you lost control of your car. You went
over the edge of a steep embankment, rolled
twice, and slammed up against a couple of
trees."
"Good God!"
"Your car was a mess." He shook his head. "It's a miracle you weren't killed."
She gingerly touched the bandage that covered half
her forehead. "How bad is this?"
Viteski's thick, dark eyebrows drew
together again, and it suddenly seemed to Susan that his expression was theatrical, not genuine.
"It isn't too serious," he said. "A
wide gash. You bled heavily, and it healed rather slowly at first. But the stitches are scheduled to come
out tomorrow or the day after, and I really don't
believe there'll be any permanent scarring. We took considerable care to make sure the wound was neatly sewn."
"Concussion?" she asked.
"Yes. But only a mild one, certainly
nothing severe enough to explain why you were in a coma."
She had been growing more tired and headachy by the minute. Now she was abruptly alert again.
"Coma?"
Viteski nodded. "We did a brain scan,
of course, but we didn't find any indication of
an embolism. There wasn't any swelling of brain tissue, either. And there was no buildup of fluid in the skull, no signs whatsoever of cranial pressure. You did take a hard knock on the head, which surely had _something to do
with the coma, but we can't be much more specific than that, I'm afraid. Contrary to what the television medical dramas would have you believe, modern medicine doesn't always have an answer for everything. What's important is that you've come out of the coma
with no apparent long-term effects. I know those holes in your memory are frustrating, even frightening, but I'm confident that, given sufficient time, they'll heal over, too."
He still sounds as if he's reciting well-rehearsed lines from a script, Susan
thought uneasily.
But she didn't dwell on that thought, for this time Viteski's odd manner of speech was less interesting than what he had said. _Coma. That word
chilled her. _Coma. 19

"How long was I unconscious?" she asked.
"Twenty-two days."
She stared at him, _gaped at him in
disbelief.
"It's true," he said.
She shook her head. "No. It can't be
true."
She had always been firmly in control of her life. She was a meticulous planner who tried to prepare for every eventuality. Her private
life was conducted with much the same scientific methodology that had made it possible for her
to earn her doctorate in particle physics more
than a year ahead of other students who were her
age. She disliked surprises, and she disliked having to depend on anyone but herself, and she was virtually terrified of being helpless. Now Viteski was telling her that she had spent twenty-two days in a state of utter
helplessness, totally dependent on others, and that realization deeply disturbed her.
What if she had never come out of the coma?
Or worse yet--what if she had awakened to find herself paralyzed from the neck down, condemned
to a life of utter dependency? What if she'd
had to be fed and dressed and taken to the bathroom
by paid attendants for the rest of her life?
She shivered.
"No," she told Viteski. "I can't have
lost that much time. I _can't have. There must be some mistake."
"Surely you've noticed how thin you are," Viteski said. "You've dropped fifteen pounds or more."
She held up her arms. Like two sticks. Earlier, she had realized how frightfully thin they looked, but she hadn't wanted to think about what that meant.
"You've been getting fluids intravenously,
of course," Dr. Viteski said. "Otherwise, you'd have died of dehydration long ago. There's
been some nourishment in the fluids you've gotten, primarily glucose. But you've had no real food--no solid food, that is--in more than
three weeks."
Susan was five-foot-five, and her ideal weight (considering her delicate bone
structure) was about a hundred and ten pounds. At
the moment she weighed between ninety and ninety-five,
and the effect of the loss was dramatic. She 21
put her hands on the blanket, and even through the covers she could feel how sharp and bony her hips were.
"Twenty-two days," she said wonderingly.
At last, reluctantly, she accepted the unacceptable.
When she stopped resisting the truth, her
headache and her extreme weariness returned. As limp as a bundle of wet straw, she fell
back against the pillows.
"That's enough for now," Viteski said. "I think I've let you talk too much. You've tired
yourself unnecessarily. Right now you need plenty of rest."
"Rest?" she said. "No. For God's sake, I've _been resting for twenty-two days!"
"There's no genuine rest when you're in a coma," Viteski said. "It isn't the same thing as normal sleep. Rebuilding your strength and
stamina is going to take a while."
He picked up the control switch, pushed one
of the four buttons, and lowered the head of the bed.
"No," Susan said, suddenly panicky. "Wait. Please, wait a minute."
He ignored her protests and put the bed all
the way down.
She hooked her hands around the rails and tried to pull herself into a sitting position, but for the moment
she was too exhausted to lift herself.
"You don't expect me to go to sleep, do you?" she asked, although she couldn't deny that she needed sleep. Her eyes were grainy, hot, and tired. Her eyelids felt as heavy as lead.
"Sleep is precisely what you need most," he assured her.
"But I _can't."
"You look as if you can," he said. "You're plainly worn out. And no wonder."
"No, no. I mean, I don't _dare go to sleep. What if I don't wake up?"
"Of course you will."
"What if I slip into another coma?"
"You won't."
Frustrated by his inability to understand her fear, Susan gritted her teeth and said, "But what if I _do?"
"Listen, you can't go through life being afraid to sleep," Viteski said slowly, patiently,
as if he were reasoning with a small child. "Just
relax. You're out of the coma. You're going 23
to be fine. Now, it's quite late, and I need a bite of dinner and some sleep myself. Just relax. All right? Relax."
If this is his best bedside manner, Susan thought, then what is he like when he isn't _trying to be nice?
He went to the door.
She wanted to cry out: __Don't leave me _alone! But her strong streak of self-reliance
would not permit her to behave like a frightened child. She didn't want to lean on Dr. Viteski or
on anyone else.
"Get your rest," he said. "Everything'll
look better in the morning."
He turned out the overhead light.
Shadows sprang up as if they were living creatures that had been hiding under the furniture
and behind the baseboard. Although Susan couldn't remember ever having been afraid of the dark, she
was uneasy now; her heartbeat accelerated.
The only illumination was the cold, shimmering fluorescence that came through the open door from the hospital corridor, and the soft glow from a
small lamp that stood on a table in one corner
of the room.
Standing in the doorway, Viteski was starkly silhouetted by the hall light. His face was no longer visible; he looked like a black paper cutout. "Good night," he said.
He closed the door behind him, shutting out the corridor light altogether.
There was only one lamp now, no more than a
single fifteen-watt bulb. The darkness crowded closer to Susan, laid long fingers across the bed.
She was alone.
She looked at the other bed, which was shrouded in shadows like banners of black crepe; it reminded her of a funeral bier. She wished ardently for a roommate.
This isn't right, she thought. I shouldn't be left alone like this. Not after I've just come out of a coma. Surely there ought to be somebody in attendance--a nurse, an orderly, _somebody.
Her eyes were heavy, incredibly heavy.
_No, she told herself angrily. I mustn't fall asleep. Not until I'm absolutely sure that my nice little nap won't turn
into another twenty-two-day coma.
For a few minutes Susan struggled against the
ever-tightening embrace of sleep, clenching 25
her fists so that her fingernails dug painfully
into her palms. But her eyes burned and ached, and
at last she decided that it wouldn't hurt to close them for just a minute, just long enough to rest them. She was sure she could close her eyes without going
to sleep. Of course she could. No problem.
She fell over the edge of sleep as if she were
a stone dropping into a bottomless well.
She dreamed.
In the dream, she was lying on a hard, damp floor in a vast, dark, cold place. She wasn't alone. _They were with her. She ran,
staggering blindly across the lightless room, down narrow corridors of stone, fleeing from a nightmare that was, in fact, a memory of a real place, a real time, a real horror that she had lived through
when she was nineteen.
The House of Thunder. 3

The following morning, a few minutes after Susan woke, the plump, gray-haired nurse appeared. As before, her glasses were suspended from
a beaded chain around her neck, and they bobbled on
her motherly bosom with each step she took. She slipped a thermometer under Susan's tongue, took hold of Susan's wrist, timed the
pulse, then put on her glasses to read the thermometer. As she worked, she kept up a steady line of chatter. Her name was Thelma Baker. She said she'd always known that Susan would pull through eventually. She had been a nurse for
thirty-five years, first in San Francisco
and then here in Oregon, and she had seldom been wrong about a patient's prospects for
recovery. She said she was such a natural-born nurse that she sometimes wondered if she was the reincarnation of a woman who had been a first-rate nurse in a previous life. "Of course,
I'm not much good at anything _else," she said with a hearty laugh. "I'm sure as the devil not much
of a housekeeper!" She said she wasn't very good
at managing money, either; to hear her tell it, just balancing the checkbook every month was a Herculean task. Wasn't much good at marriage, she said. Two husbands, two divorces, no children.
Couldn't cook very well, either. Hated to sew; _loathed it. "But I'm a darned good nurse and
proud of it," she said emphatically, more 27
than once, always with that charming smile that involved
her brown eyes as well as her mouth, a smile
that showed how much she truly did enjoy her work.
Susan liked the woman. Ordinarily, she
had little or no patience with nonstop talkers. But Mrs. Baker's chatter was amusing, frequently self-deprecating, and oddly soothing.
"Hungry?" Mrs. Baker asked.
"Starved." She had awakened with a ravenous appetite.
"You'll start taking solid food today,"
Mrs. Baker said. "A soft diet, of
course."
Even as the nurse spoke, a young, blond, male orderly arrived with breakfast: cherry-flavored Jell-O, unbuttered toast
with a single spoonful of grape jelly, and a thin, chalky-looking tapioca. To Susan, no other meal had ever been so appealing. But she was
disappointed by the size of the portions, and she said as much.
"It doesn't look like a lot," Mrs.
Baker said, "but believe me, honey, you'll be stuffed before you've eaten half of it. Remember,
you haven't taken solid food in three weeks. Your stomach's all shrunk up. It'll be a
while before you'll have a normal appetite."
Mrs. Baker left to attend to other
patients, and before long Susan realized that the nurse was right. Although there wasn't a great deal of food on the tray, and although even this simple fare tasted like ambrosia, it was more than she could eat.
As she ate, she thought about Dr. Viteski. She still felt that he had been wrong to let her alone, unattended. In spite of Mrs.
Baker's sprightly manner, the hospital still
seemed cold, unfriendly.
When she could eat no more, she wiped her mouth
with the paper napkin, pushed the rolling bed table out of her way--and suddenly had the feeling she was being watched. She glanced up.
He was standing in the open door: a tall, elegant man of about thirty-eight. He was
wearing dark shoes, dark trousers, a white lab coat, a white shirt, and a green tie, and he was holding a clipboard in his left hand. His face
was arresting, sensitive; his superbly balanced features looked as if they had been carefully chiseled from stone by a gifted sculptor. His
blue eyes were as bright as polished gems, 29
and they provided an intriguing contrast to his lustrous black hair, which he wore full and
combed straight back from his face and forehead.
"Miss Thorton," he said, "I'm
delighted to see you sitting up, awake and
aware." He came to the bed. His smile was even nicer than Thelma Baker's. "I'm your physician. Doctor McGee. Jeffrey McGee."
He extended his hand to her, and she took it. It
was a dry, hard, strong hand, but his touch was light
and gentle.
"I thought Dr. Viteski was my
physician."
"He's chief of the hospital medical
staff," McGee said, "but I'm in charge of your case." His voice had a reassuringly
masculine timbre, yet it was pleasingly soft and soothing. "I was the admitting physician when you
were brought into the emergency room."
"But yesterday, Dr. Viteski--was
"Yesterday was my day off," McGee said.
"I take two days off from my private practice every week, but only one day off from my hospital rounds--only _one day, mind you--so of course you chose that day. After you laid there like a
stone for twenty-two days, after you worried me
sick for twenty-two days, you had to come out of your
coma when I wasn't here." He shook his head, pretending to be both astonished and hurt. "I didn't even find out about it until this morning." He frowned at her with mock disapproval.
"Now, Miss Thorton," he teased, "if there
are going to be any medical miracles involving
my patients, I insist on being present when they occur, so that I can take the credit and bask in the glory. Understood?"
Susan smiled up at him, surprised by his lighthearted manner. "Yes, Dr. McGee.
I understand."
"Good. Very good. I'm glad we got that straightened out." He grinned. "How are you
feeling this morning?"
"Better," she said.
"Ready for an evening of dancing and
bar-hopping?"
"Maybe tomorrow."
"It's a date." He glanced at her
breakfast tray. "I see you've got an
appetite." 31

"I tried to eat everything, but I couldn't."
"That's what Orson Welles said."
Susan laughed.
"You did pretty well," he said, indicating
the tray. "You've got to start off with small, frequent meals. That's to be expected. Don't worry too much about regaining your strength. Before you know it, you'll be making a pig of yourself, and you'll
be well along the road to recovery. Feeling headachy this morning? Drowsy?"
"No. Neither."
"Let me take your pulse," he said, reaching
for her hand.
"Mrs. Baker took it just before breakfast."
"I know. This is just an excuse to hold hands
with you."
Susan laughed again. "You're different from most doctors."
"Do you think a physician should be
businesslike, distant, somber, humorless?"
"Not necessarily."
"Do you think I should try to be more like Dr. Viteski?"
"Definitely not."
"He iz an _egg-cellent doktor," McGee said, doing a perfect imitation of Viteski's accented voice.
"I'm sure he is. But I suspect you're even better."
"Thank you. The compliment is duly noted and
has earned you a small discount off my final bill."
He was still holding her hand. He finally looked
at his watch and took her pulse.
"Will I live?" she asked when he finished.
"No doubt about it. You're bouncing back
fast." He continued to hold her hand as he said, "Seriously now, I think a little humor between doctor and patient is a good thing. I believe
it helps the patient maintain a positive attitude, and a positive attitude speeds healing. But some people don't _want a cheerful doctor. They want someone who acts as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders. It makes
them feel more secure. So if my joking bothers
you, I can tone it down or turn it off. The important thing is that you feel comfortable and
confident about the care you're getting."
"You go right ahead and be as cheerful as you want,"
Susan said. "My spirits need lifting." 33

"There's no reason to be glum. The worst is behind you now."
He squeezed her hand gently before finally
letting go of it.
To her surprise, Susan felt a tug of regret that he had released her hand so soon.
"Dr. Viteski tells me there are lapses
in your memory," he said.
She frowned. "Fewer than there were yesterday.
I guess it'll all come back to me sooner or later. But there are still a lot of holes."
"I want to talk with you about that. But first I've got to make my rounds. I'll come back in a couple of hours, and I'll help you prod your memory--if that's all right with you."
"Sure," she said.
"You rest."
"What else is there to do?"
"No tennis until further notice."
"Darn! I had a match scheduled with Mrs. Baker."
"You'll just have to cancel it."
"Yes, Dr. McGee."
Smiling, she watched him leave. He moved with self-assurance and with considerable natural grace.
He'd already had a positive influence on
her. A simmering paranoia had been heating up slowly within her, but now she realized that her uneasiness had been entirely subjective in origin, a result of her weakness and disorientation; there was no rational justification for it. Dr. Viteski's odd behavior no longer seemed important, and the hospital no longer seemed the least bit threatening.
Half an hour later, when Mrs. Baker looked in on her again, Susan asked for a
mirror, then wished she hadn't. Her reflection revealed a pale, gaunt face. Her
gray-green eyes were bloodshot and circled
by dark, puffy flesh. In order to facilitate the treatment and bandaging of her gashed forehead, an emergency room orderly had clipped her long blond hair; he had hacked at it with no
regard for her appearance. The result was a shaggy mess. Furthermore, after twenty-two days of neglect, her hair was greasy and tangled.
"My God, I look terrible!" she said.
"Of course you don't," Mrs. Baker said.
"Just a bit washed out. There's no 35
permanent damage. As soon as you gain back the weight you lost, your cheeks will fill in, and those bags under your eyes will go away."
"I've got to wash my hair."
"You wouldn't be able to walk into the bathroom and
stand at the sink. Your legs would feel like rubber. Besides, you can't wash your hair until the bandages come off your head, and that won't be until at least tomorrow."
"No. Today. Now. My hair's oily, and
my head itches. It's making me miserable, and
that's not conducive to recuperation."
"This isn't a debate, honey. You can't win,
so save your breath. All I can do is see that you get a dry wash."
"Dry wash? What's that?"
"Sprinkle some powder in your hair, let it soak up some of the oil, then brush it out," Mrs. Baker said. "That's what we did for you twice a week while you were in a coma."
Susan put one hand to her lank hair. "Will
it help?"
"A little."
"Okay, I'll do it."
Mrs. Baker brought a can of powder and a brush.
"The luggage I had with me in the car,"
Susan said. "Did any of it survive the crash?"
"Sure. It's right over there, in the closet."
"Would you bring me my makeup case?"
Mrs. Baker grinned. "He _is a handsome devil, isn't he? And so nice, too." She winked as she said, "He isn't married, either."
Susan blushed. "I don't know what you
mean."
Mrs. Baker laughed gently and patted Susan's hand. "Don't be embarrassed, kid. I've never seen one of Dr. McGee's
female patients who _didn't try to look her best. Teenage girls get all fluttery when he's around. Young ladies like you get a certain unmistakable glint in their eyes. Even white-haired grannies, half crippled with arthritis, twenty years older than me--_forty years older than the doctor--they all make
themselves look nice for him, and looking nice
makes them feel better, so it's all sort of therapeutic."
Shortly before noon, Dr. McGee 37
returned, pushing a stainless-steel cafeteria
cart that held two trays. "I thought we'd have lunch together while we talk about your memory problems."
"A doctor having lunch with his patient?" she asked, amazed.
"We tend to be less formal here than in your
city hospitals."
"Who pays for lunch?"
"You do, of course. We aren't _that informal."
She grinned. "What's for lunch?"
"For me, a chicken-salad sandwich and apple pie. For you, unbuttered toast and tapioca
and--was
"Already, this is getting monotonous."
"Ah, but this time there's something more exotic than berry Jell-O," he said. "_Lime Jell-O."
"I don't think my heart can stand it."
"And a small dish of canned peaches. Truly
a gourmet spread." He pulled up a chair,
then lowered her bed as far as it would go, so they could talk comfortably while they ate.
As he put her tray on the bed table and
lifted the plastic cover from it, he blinked at
her and said, "You look nice and fresh."
"I look like death warmed over," she said.
"Not at all."
"Yes, I do."
"Your _tapioca looks like death warmed over,
but _you look nice and fresh. Remember, I'm
the doctor, and you're the patient, and the patient
must never, never, never disagree with the doctor. Don't you know your medical etiquette? If
I say you look nice and fresh, then, by God,
you look nice and fresh!"
Susan smiled and played along with him. "I see. How could I have been so gauche?"
"You look nice and fresh, Susan."
"Why, thank you, Dr. McGee."
"That's much better."
She had "washed" her hair with talcum powder, had lightly applied some makeup, and had put
on lipstick. Thanks to a few drops of Murine, her eyes were no longer bloodshot,
though a yellowish tint of sickness colored the whites of them. She had also changed from her hospital gown into a pair of blue silk pajamas that had been in her luggage. She knew
she looked far less than her best; 39
however, she looked at least a little better, and looking a little better made her feel a _lot better, just as Mrs. Baker had said it would.
While they ate lunch, they talked about the
blank spots in Susan's memory, trying to fill in the holes, which had been numerous and
huge only yesterday, but which were fewer and far
smaller today. Upon waking this morning, she had found
that she could remember most things without effort.
She had been born and raised in suburban Philadelphia, in a pleasant, white, two-story house on a maple-lined street of similar houses. Green lawns. Porch swings. A block party every Fourth of July. Carolers
at Christmas. An Ozzie and Harriet neighborhood.
"Sounds like an ideal childhood," McGee said.
Susan swallowed a bit of lime
Jell-O, then said, "It was an ideal _setting
for an ideal childhood, but unfortunately it didn't turn out that way. I was a very lonely kid."
"When you were first admitted here," McGee said, "we tried to contact your family, but we couldn't find anyone to contact."
She told him about her parents, partly because she wanted to be absolutely sure that there were no holes in those memories, and partly because McGee
was easy to talk to, and partly because she felt a strong need to talk after twenty-two days of
silence and darkness. Her mother, Regina, had been killed in a traffic accident when Susan was
only seven years old. The driver of a beer delivery truck had suffered a heart attack
at the wheel, and the truck had run a red light,
and Regina's Chevy had been in the middle of the intersection. Susan couldn't remember a great
deal about her mother, but that lapse had nothing
whatsoever to do with her own recent accident and amnesia. After all, she had known her mother for
only seven years, and twenty-five years had passed since the beer truck had flattened the Chevy; sadly but inevitably, Regina had
faded from Susan's memory in much the same way
that an image fades from an old photograph that has been left too long in bright sunlight. However, she could remember her father clearly. Frank Thorton had been a tall, somewhat
portly man who had owned a moderately 41
successful men's clothing store, and Susan had loved him. She always knew that he loved her,
too, even though he never told her that he did. He was quiet, soft-spoken, rather shy, a
completely self-contained man who was happiest
when he was alone in his den with just a good book and his pipe. Perhaps he would have been more forthcoming with a son than he had been with his daughter. He always was more
at ease with men than with women, and raising a
girl was undoubtedly an awkward proposition for him. He died of cancer ten years after Regina's passing, the summer after Susan graduated from
high school. And so she had entered adulthood
even more alone than she had been before.
Dr. McGee finished his chicken-salad sandwich, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and said, "No aunts, no uncles?"
"One aunt, one uncle. But both of them were strangers to me. No living grandparents. But you
know something--having such a lonely childhood
wasn't _entirely a bad thing. I learned to be _very self-reliant, and that's paid off over the years."
As McGee ate his apple pie, and as
Susan nibbled at her canned peaches, they
talked about her university years. She had done
her undergraduate work at Briarstead College
in Pennsylvania, then had gone to California and had earned both her master's and doctorate at UCLA. She recalled those years with perfect clarity, although she actually would have preferred
to forget some of what had happened during her sophomore year at Briarstead.
"Is something wrong?" McGee asked, putting down a forkful of apple pie that had been
halfway to his mouth.
She blinked. "Huh?"
"Your expression ..." He frowned. "For a moment there, you looked as if you'd seen a ghost."
"Yeah. In a way I did." Suddenly she
was not hungry any more. She put down her spoon
and pushed the bed table aside.
"Want to talk about it?"
"It was just a bad memory," she said. "Something I wish to God I _could forget."
McGee put his own tray aside, leaving the pie unfinished. "Tell me about it."
"Oh, it's nothing I should burden you with."
"Burden me."
"It's a dreary story." 43

"If it's bothering you, tell me about it. Now
and then, I like a good, dreary story."
She didn't smile. Not even McGee could make the House of Thunder amusing. "Well ...
in my sophomore year at Briarstead, I was dating a guy named Jerry Stein. He was
sweet. I liked him. I liked him a lot.
In fact, we were even beginning to talk about getting married after we graduated. Then he was killed."
"I'm sorry," McGee said. "How did it happen?"
"He was pledging a fraternity."
"Oh, Christ!" McGee said, anticipating her.
"The hazing ... got out of hand."
"That's such a rotten, stupid way to die."
"Jerry had so much potential," she said
softly. "He was bright, sensitive, a hard worker ..."
"One night, when I was an intern on emergency-room duty, they brought in a kid
who'd been severely burned in a college
hazing ritual. They told us it was a test
by fire, some macho thing like that, some _childish
damned thing like that, and it got out of hand. He was burned over eighty percent of his body. He
died two days later."
"It wasn't fire that killed Jerry Stein," Susan said. "It was hate."
She shuddered, remembering.
"Hate?" McGee asked. "What do you
mean?"
She was silent for a moment, her thoughts turning back thirteen years. Although the hospital room
was comfortably warm, Susan felt cold, as bitterly cold as she had been in the House of Thunder.
McGee waited patiently, leaning forward slightly in his chair.
At last she shook her head and said, "I
don't feel like going into the details. It's just
too depressing."
"There were an unusual number of deaths in your life before you were even twenty-one."
"Yeah. At times it seemed as if I were
cursed or something. Everyone I really cared about
died on me."
"Your mother, your father, then your fiancé."
"Well, he wasn't actually my fiancé.
Not quite." 45

"But he was the next thing to it."
"Everything but the ring," Susan said.
"All right. So maybe you need to talk about his death in order to finally get it out of your system."
"No," she said.
"Don't dismiss it so quickly. I mean, if he's still haunting you thirteen years later--was
She interrupted him. "But you see, no matter how much I talk about it, I'll _never get it out
of my system. It was just too awful to be
forgotten. Besides, you told me that a positive mental attitude will speed up the healing
process. Remember?"
He smiled. "I remember."
"So I shouldn't talk about things that just depress me."
He stared at her for a long moment. His eyes were incredibly blue, and they were so expressive that
she had no doubt about the depth of his concern for her well-being.
He sighed and said, "Okay. Let's get
back to the matter at hand--your amnesia. It seems like you remember nearly everything. What holes haven't filled in yet?"
Before she answered him, she reached for the bed
controls and raised the upper end of the mattress a bit more, forcing herself to sit straighter than she had been sitting. Her back ached dully, not from an injury but from being immobilized in bed for more than three weeks. When she felt more comfortable, she
put down the controls and said, "I still can't
recall the accident. I remember driving along
a twisty section of two-lane blacktop. I
was about two miles south of the turnoff to the
Viewtop Inn. I was looking forward to getting
there and having dinner. Then, well, it's as if somebody just turned the lights out."
"It wouldn't be unusual if you _never regained any memory of the accident itself," McGee
assured her. "In cases like this, even when the patient eventually recalls all the other
details of his life, he seldom remembers the incident or the impact that was the cause of the amnesia. That's the one blank spot that often remains."
"I suspected as much," she said. "And I'm
not really upset about that. But there's one other thing
I can't recall, and _that's driving me nuts.
My job. Dammit, I can't remember even the
most minor thing about it, not even one little 47
detail. I mean, I know I'm a physicist. I remember getting the degrees at UCLA,
and all that sophisticated, specialized knowledge is still intact. I could start to work today without having to take
a refresher course. But _who was I working for? And what was I doing--_exactly? Who was my boss? Who were my co-workers? Did I have an office?
A laboratory? I must have worked in a lab, don't you think? But I can't remember what it looked like, how it was equipped, or where on earth
it was!"
"You're employed by the Milestone Corporation
in Newport Beach, California," McGee
said.
"That's what Dr. Viteski told me. But
the name doesn't mean a thing to me."
"All the rest of it has come back to you. This
will, too. Just give it time."
"No," she said, shaking her head. "This is different somehow. The other blank spots were like
mists ... like banks of heavy fog. Even when
I couldn't remember something, I could at least
sense that there _were memories stirring in the mist.
And eventually the mist evaporated; everything
cleared up. But when I try to recall what my job was, it's not like those misty blank spots. Instead, it's dark ... very dark ... black, just
a perfectly black and empty hole that goes
down and down and down forever. There's something ... frightening about it."
McGee slid forward, sitting on the edge of
his chair. His brow was knitted. "You were carrying a Milestone ID card in your wallet when you were brought into the emergency room," he said. "Maybe that'll refresh your memory."
"Maybe," she said doubtfully. "I'd sure
like to see it."
Her wallet was in the bottom drawer of the nightstand. He got it for her.
She opened the wallet and found the card. It was laminated and bore a small photograph of
her. At the top of the card, in blue letters against a white background, were three words: THE
MILESTONE CORPORATION. Under that heading, her
name was printed in bold black letters, and below her
name was a physical description of her, including information about her age, height, weight, hair color, and eye color. At the bottom of the
card, an employee identification number was
printed in red ink. Nothing else. 49

Dr. McGee stood beside the bed, looking down at her as she examined the card. "Does it
help?"
"No," she said.
"Not just a little bit?"
"I can't remember seeing this before."
She turned the card over and over in her hands, straining to make a connection, trying hard to switch
on the current of memory. She couldn't
possibly have been more amazed by the card if it had been an artifact from a nonhuman civilization
and had just that very minute been brought back from the planet Mars; it could not have been more _alien.
"It's all so weird," she said. "I've
tried to remember back to when I last went to work,
the day before I started my vacation. I can recall
some of it. Parts of the day are crystal clear. I remember getting up that morning, having
breakfast, glancing at the newspaper. That's
all as fresh in my mind as the memory of the lunch I just ate. I recall going into the garage that morning, getting in the car, starting the engine ..." She let her voice trail off as she stared down at the card. She fingered that small rectangle as if she were a clairvoyant feeling for some sort
of psychic residue on the plastic. "I remember backing the car out of my driveway that morning ... and the next thing I remember is ... coming home again at the end of the day. In between, there's nothing but blackness, emptiness. And that's the way
it is with _all my memories of work, not just that day
but _every day. No matter how I try to sneak up
on them, they elude me. They aren't there in the
mist. Those memories simply don't exist
any more."
Still standing beside the bed, McGee spoke to her in
a soft, encouraging voice. "Of course they
exist, Susan. Nudge your subconscious a
little bit. Think about sitting behind the wheel of your
car that morning."
"I have thought about it."
"Think about it again."
She closed her eyes.
"It was probably a typical August day in Southern California," he said, helping her set
the scene in her mind. "Hot, blue, maybe a
little smoggy."
"Hot and blue," she said, "but there wasn't
any smog that day. Not even a single cloud,
either." 51

"You got in the car and backed out of the
driveway. Now think about the route you drove to work."
She was silent for almost a minute. Then she
said, "It's no use. I can't remember."
He persisted gently. "What were the names of the streets you used?"
"I don't know."
"Sure you do. Give me the name of just one street. Just _one to start the ball rolling."
She tried hard to snatch at least a single
meager scrap of memory out of the void--a face,
a room, a voice, _anything--but she failed.
"Sorry," she said. "I can't come up with the name
of even one street."
"You told me that you remembered backing down
your driveway that morning. All right. If you remember that, then surely you remember which way you went when you pulled _out of your driveway. Did
you turn left, or did you turn right?"
Her eyes still closed, Susan considered his question until her head began to ache. Finally she opened
her eyes, looked up at McGee, and shrugged. "I just don't know."
"Philip Gomez," McGee said.
"What?"
"Philip Gomez."
"Who's that? Somebody I should know?"
"The name doesn't mean anything to you?"
"No."
"He's your boss at Milestone."
"Really?" She tried to picture Philip Gomez. She couldn't summon up an image of
his face. She couldn't recall anything whatsoever about the man. "My boss? Philip Gomez?
Are you sure about that?"
McGee put his hands in the pockets of his
lab coat. "After you were admitted to the
hospital, we tried to locate your family.
Of course, we discovered you didn't _have a family, no close relatives at all. So
we called your employer. I've talked
to Phil Gomez myself. According to him, you've worked
at Milestone for more than four years. He was extremely concerned about you. In fact he's
called here, asking about you, four or five times since the accident."
"Can we call him now?" Susan asked.
"If I hear his voice, maybe something will
click into place for me. It might help 53
me remember."
"Well, I don't have his home number," McGee said, "and we can't call him at work until tomorrow."
"Why not?"
"Today's Sunday."
"Oh," she said.
She hadn't even known what day of the week it was, and that realization left her feeling somewhat disoriented again.
"We'll definitely call tomorrow," McGee said.
"What if I talk to him and still can't remember anything about my work?"
"You will."
"No, listen, please don't be glib. Be straight with me. Okay? There's a chance I'll never remember anything about my job, isn't
there?"
"That's not likely."
"But possible?"
"Well ... anything's possible."
She slumped back against her pillows,
suddenly exhausted, depressed, and worried.
"Listen," McGee said, "even if you never remember anything about Milestone, that doesn't
mean you can't go back to work there. After all, you haven't forgotten what you know about physics;
you're still a competent scientist. You've lost none
of your education, none of your knowledge. Now, if you were suffering from global amnesia, which is the worst
kind, you'd have forgotten nearly everything you ever learned, including how to read and write. But you don't have global amnesia, and that's _something
to be thankful for. Anyway, given time, you'll remember all of it. I'm sure of that."
Susan hoped he was correct. Her
carefully structured, orderly life was in temporary disarray, and she found her condition to be enormously distressing. If that disarray were
to become a permanent feature of her existence,
she would find life almost unbearable. She had always been in control of her life; she needed to be in control.
McGee took his hands out of his pockets and looked at his watch. "I've got to be going. I'll stop by again for a couple of minutes before I
go home for the day. Meanwhile, you relax, eat more
of your lunch if you can, and don't worry. You'll
remember all about Milestone when the time 55
is right."
Suddenly, as she listened to McGee, Susan sensed--without understanding why or how she sensed it--that
she would be better off if she never remembered anything about Milestone. She was seized by an arctic-cold, iron-hard fear for which she could find no explanation.
She slept for two hours. She didn't
dream this time--or if she did dream, she
didn't remember it.
When she woke, she was slightly clammy.
Her hair was tangled; she combed it, wincing as she pulled out the knots.
Susan was just putting the comb back on the
nightstand when Mrs. Baker entered the room,
pushing a wheelchair ahead of her. "It's time for
you to do a bit of traveling, kid."
"Where are we going?"
"Oh, we'll explore the hallways and byways of the exotic second floor of
mysterious, romantic, colorful Willawauk County Hospital," Mrs. Baker said. "The trip of a lifetime. It'll be loads of fun. Besides, the doctor wants you to start getting some exercise."
"It's not going to be much exercise if I'm sitting in a wheelchair."
"You'll be surprised. Just sitting up,
holding on, and gawking at the other patients will be
enough to tire you out. You're not exactly in the same physical condition as an Olympic track and field star, you know."
"But I'm sure I can walk," Susan said. "I might need a little assistance, but if I could
just lean on your arm at first, then I'm positive I could--was
"Tomorrow, you can try walking a few steps,"
Mrs. Baker said as she put down the side
rail on the bed. "But today you're going to ride, and I'm going to play chauffeur."
Susan frowned. "I hate being an
invalid."
"Oh, for heaven's sake, you're not an
invalid. You're just temporarily
incapacitated."
"I hate that, too."
Mrs. Baker positioned the wheelchair beside the bed. "First, I want you to sit up on the edge
of the bed and swing your legs back and forth for a 57
minute or two."
"Why?"
"It flexes the muscles."
Sitting up, without the bed raised to support
her back, Susan felt woozy and weak. She clutched the edge of the mattress because she thought she
was going to tumble off the bed.
"Are you all right?" Mrs. Baker asked.
"Perfect," Susan lied, and forced a
smile.
"Swing your legs, kid."
Susan moved her legs back and forth from the knees down. They felt as if they were made of lead.
Finally, Mrs. Baker said, "Okay. That's enough."
Susan was dismayed to find that she was already perspiring. She was shaky, too.
Nevertheless, she said, "I _know I can walk."
"Tomorrow," Mrs. Baker said.
"Really, I feel fine."
Mrs. Baker went to the closet and got the
robe that matched Susan's blue pajamas. While Susan put on the robe, the nurse located a pair of slippers in one of the suitcases and put them on Susan's dangling feet.
"Okay, honey. Now, just slide off the bed nice and easy, lean your weight against me, and I'll help lower you into the chair."
As she came off the bed, Susan intended to disobey the nurse, intended to stand up straight
all by herself and prove that she wasn't an
invalid. However, as her feet touched the floor, she knew instantly that her legs would not support her if she dared to put all of her weight on
them; a moment ago, they seemed to be made of
lead, but now they were composed of knotted rags. Rather than collapse in a heap and be humiliated, she clutched Mrs. Baker and allowed herself to be settled into the wheelchair almost as if she were a
baby being put into a stroller.
Mrs. Baker winked at her. "Still think you can run the mile?"
Susan was both amused and embarrassed by her
own stubbornness. Smiling, blushing, she said,
"Tomorrow. I'll do so much walking tomorrow that I'll
wear big holes in my slippers. You just wait
and see."
"Well, kid, I don't know if you 59
have a whole lot of common sense or not, but you've sure as the devil got more than your share of
spunk, and I've always admired spunkiness."
Mrs. Baker stepped behind the wheelchair and
pushed it out of the room. Initially, the rolling
motion caused Susan's stomach to flop and
twist, but after several seconds she got control
of herself.
The hospital was T-shaped, and Susan's room was at the end of the short, right-hand wing at the top of the T. Mrs. Baker took her out to the junction of the corridors and wheeled her into the
longest wing, heading toward the bottom of the T.
Just being out of bed and out of her room made
Susan feel better, fresher. The halls had dark green vinyl-tile floors, and the walls were painted a matching shade up to the height of three feet, after which they were a pale yellow, as was the pebbly, acoustic-tile ceiling; the effect of this--darkness below, light above--was to lift one's eyes upward, giving the hall a soaring, airy quality. The corridors were as spotlessly clean
as Susan's room. She remembered the big Philadelphia hospital in which her father had
finally succumbed to cancer; that place had been ancient, dreary, in need of paint, with dust
thick on the windowsills, with years of grime pressed deep into its cracked tile floors.
She supposed she ought to be thankful that she had
wound up in Willawauk County Hospital.
The doctors, nurses, and orderlies here were
also different from those in the hospital where her father
had died. All of these people smiled at her. And they seemed genuinely concerned about the patients. As Susan was wheeled through the halls, many staff members paused in their tasks to have a word with her;
every one of them expressed pleasure at seeing her awake, alert, and on the way to a full
recovery.
Mrs. Baker pushed her to the end of the long main hallway, then turned and started back. Although Susan was already beginning to tire, she was nevertheless
in relatively high spirits. She felt better
today than she had felt yesterday, better this afternoon than this morning. The future seemed sure to grow brighter almost by the hour.
When the mood changed, it changed with the frightening abruptness of a shotgun blast.
As they passed between the elevators and the nurses
station--which faced each other midpoint in the 61
corridor--one set of elevator doors
opened, and a man stepped out directly in front
of the wheelchair. He was a patient in blue- and white-striped pajamas, a dark brown robe, and brown slippers. Mrs. Baker stopped the wheelchair in order to let him pass. When
Susan saw who he was, she nearly screamed. She _wanted to scream but couldn't.
Chest-tightening, throat-constricting fear had
stricken her dumb.
His name was Ernest Harch. He was a squarely built man with a square face, squared-off features, and gray eyes the shade of dirty
ice.
When she had testified against him in court, he
had fixed her with those chilling eyes and hadn't
glanced away from her for even the briefest moment. She had clearly read the message in his intimidating stare: __You're going to be sorry you ever took the witness _stand.
But that had been thirteen years ago. In the meantime, she had taken precautions to be sure
he would not find her when he got out of prison.
She had long ago stopped looking over her
shoulder.
And now here he was.
He looked down at her as she sat helpless
in the wheelchair, and she saw recognition
flicker in his wintry eyes. In spite of the
years that had passed, in spite of the emaciation that
had altered her appearance in the last three
weeks, he knew who she was.
She wanted to bolt out of the chair and run. She
was rigid with fear; she couldn't move.
Only a second or two had passed since
the elevator doors had opened, yet it seemed
as if she had been confronting Harch for at least a quarter of an hour. The usual flow of time had slowed to a sludgelike crawl.
Harch smiled at her. To anyone but Susan,
that smile might have appeared innocent, even
friendly. But she saw hatred and menace in it.
Ernest Harch had been the pledge master in the fraternity that Jerry Stein had wanted to join. Ernest Harch had killed Jerry. Not by accident. Deliberately. In cold blood. In the
House of Thunder.
Now, still smiling, he winked at Susan.
The fear-induced paralysis relaxed its tight
grip on her, and somehow she found the 63
strength to push up from the wheelchair, onto her feet. She took one step, trying to turn away
from Harch, trying desperately to run, and she
heard Mrs. Baker call out in surprise.
She took a second step, feeling as if she were walking underwater, and then her legs buckled, and
she started to fall, and someone caught her just in time.
As everything began to spin and wobble and grow dark, she realized that Ernest Harch was the one who had caught her. She was in his arms. She looked up into his face, which was as big as the moon.
Then for a while there was only darkness. 4

"In danger?" McGee said, looking
puzzled.
At the foot of the bed, Mrs. Baker frowned.
Susan was trying hard to remain calm and
convincing. She possessed sufficient presence of mind to know that a hysterical woman was never taken seriously--especially not a hysterical woman recuperating from a head injury. There was a very real danger that she would appear to be confused or suffering
from delusions. It was vital that Jeffrey
McGee believe what she was going to tell him.
She had awakened in bed, in her hospital room, only a few minutes after fainting in the corridor. When she came to, McGee was
taking her blood pressure. She had
patiently allowed him to examine her before she had told him that she was in danger.
Now he stood beside the bed, one hand on the side rail, leaning forward a bit, a stethoscope dangling from his neck. "In danger from what?"
"That man," Susan said.
"What man?"
"The man who stepped out of the elevator."
McGee glanced at Mrs. Baker.
The nurse said, "He's a patient here."
"And you think he's somehow dangerous?"
McGee asked Susan, still clearly perplexed.
Nervously fingering the collar of her pajama
top, Susan said, "Dr. McGee, do you remember what I told you about an old boyfriend
of mine named Jerry Stein?"
"Of course I remember. He was the one you were almost engaged to."
Susan nodded.
"The one who died in a fraternity 65
hazing," McGee said.
"Ah, no," Mrs. Baker said
sympathetically. This was the first that she had heard about Jerry. "That's a terrible thing."
Susan's mouth was dry. She swallowed a
few times, then said, "It was what the fraternity called a `humiliation ritual.` The pledge
had to withstand intense humiliation in front of a
girl, preferably his steady date, without responding to his tormentors. They took Jerry
and me to a limestone cavern a couple of miles
from the Briarstead campus. It was a favorite place for hazing rituals; they were fond of dramatic settings for their damned silly
games. Anyway, I didn't want to go. Right
from the start, I didn't want to be a part of it.
Not that there was anything threatening about it. The mood was light-hearted at first, playful. Jerry was
actually looking forward to it. But I suppose,
on some deep subliminal level, I sensed an undercurrent of ... malice. Besides, I
suspected the fraternity brothers in charge of the hazing had been drinking. They had two cars, and
I didn't want to get into either one, not if a drunk was driving. But they reassured me, and
finally I went with them because Jerry wanted in the fraternity so badly. I didn't want to be a spoiler."
She looked out the window at the lowering
September sky. A wind had risen, stirring the branches of the tall pines.
She hated talking about Jerry's death. But she had to tell McGee and Mrs. Baker everything,
so that they would understand why Ernest Harch posed a very real, very serious threat to her.
She said, "The limestone caverns near Briarstead College are extensive. Eight
or ten underground rooms. Maybe more. Some of them are huge. It's a damp, musty, moldy
place, though I suppose it's paradise to a spelunker."
Gently urging her on, McGee said, "Caverns that large must be a tourist attraction,
but I don't think I've ever heard of them."
"Oh, no, they haven't been developed for tourism," Susan said. "They're not like the Carlsbad Caverns or the Luray Caverns
or anything like that. They're not pretty. They're all gray limestone, dreary as Hell.
They're big, that's all. The largest 67
cave is about the size of a cathedral. The
Shawnee Indians gave that one a name:
`House of Thunder.`"
"Thunder?" McGee asked. "Why?"
"A subterranean stream enters the cave high
in one corner and tumbles down a series of
ledges. The sound of the falling water echoes off the limestone, so there's a continuous rumbling in the place."
The memory was still far too vivid for her
to speak of it without feeling the cold, clammy air of the cavern. She shivered and pulled the blankets across her outstretched legs.
McGee's gaze met hers. In his eyes there
was understanding and compassion. She could see that he knew how painful it was for her to talk about Jerry Stein.
The same expression was in Mrs. Baker's eyes. The nurse looked as if she might rush around to the side of the bed and give Susan a motherly hug.
Again, McGee gently encouraged her to continue her story. "The humiliation ritual was held in
the House of Thunder?"
"Yeah. It was night. We were led into the cavern
with flashlights, and then several candles were lit and placed on the rocks around us. There were just Jerry, me, and four of the fraternity brothers. I'll
never forget their names or what they looked like.
Never. Carl Jellicoe, Herbert Parker,
Randy Lee Quince ... and Ernest Harch.
Harch was the fraternity's pledge master that year."
Outside, the day was rapidly growing darker under
a shroud of thunderheads. Inside, the blue-gray shadows crawled out of the corners and threatened
to take full possession of the hospital room.
As Susan talked, Dr. McGee switched on the bedside lamp.
"As soon as we were in the caverns, as soon as
the candles had been lit, Harch and the other three guys pulled out flasks of whiskey. They _had been drinking earlier. I was right about that. And they, continued to drink all through the hazing. The more they drank, the uglier the whole scene got. At first they subjected Jerry to some funny, pretty much innocent teasing. In fact, everyone was laughing at first, even Jerry and me. Gradually, however, their taunting became nastier ... meaner. A lot of
it was obscene, too. Worse than obscene. _Filthy. I was embarrassed and uneasy. I
wanted to leave, and Jerry wanted me 69
to get out of there, too, but Harch and the others
refused to let me have a flashlight or a candle. I couldn't find my way out of the caverns in pitch blackness, so I had to stay. When they started
needling Jerry about his being Jewish, there wasn't any humor in them at all, and that was when I
knew for sure there was going to be trouble, bad
trouble. They were all obviously drunk by then. But
it wasn't just the whiskey talking. Oh, no. Not
the whiskey alone. You could see that the prejudice --the _hatred--wasn't just an act. Harch and the others--but especially Ernest Harch-had a streak
of anti-Semitism as thick as sludge in a sewer.
"Briarstead wasn't a particularly sophisticated place," Susan continued. "There wasn't the usual cultural mix. There weren't many Jews on campus, and there weren't any in the fraternity that Jerry wanted to join. Not that the fraternity had a policy against admitting Jews or anyone else. There had been a couple of Jewish members in the past, though none for the last several years. Most of the brothers wanted Jerry in. It was only Harch and his three cronies who
were determined to keep him out. They planned to make Hazing Month so rough for him, so utterly intolerable, that he would withdraw his application before the month was over. The humiliation ritual in the
House of Thunder was to be the start of it. They
didn't really intend to kill Jerry. Not in the beginning, not when they took us to the cavern, not when
they were at least half sober. They just wanted
to make him feel like dirt. They wanted to rough
him up a little bit, scare him, let him know in
no uncertain terms that he wasn't welcome.
The verbal abuse escalated to physical
abuse. They stood in a circle around him,
shoving him back and forth, keeping him off balance. Jerry wasn't a fool. He realized this
wasn't any ordinary hazing ritual. He wasn't a wimp, either. He couldn't be
intimidated easily. When they shoved him too hard, he shoved back--which only made them more aggressive, of course. When they wouldn't stop shoving, Jerry hit Harch in the mouth and split the bastard's lip."
"And that was the trigger," McGee said.
"Yes. Then all hell broke loose."
Thunder grumbled again, and the hospital lights
flickered briefly, and Susan had the 71
strange, disquieting notion that some supernatural force was trying to carry her back in time, back to the waterfall roar and the darkness of the cavern.
She said, "Something about the mood of that place--
the bone-deep chill, the dampness, the darkness, the steady roar of the waterfall, the sense of isolation --made it easier for the savage in them to come out.
They beat Jerry ... beat him to the floor and
kept on beating him."
She trembled. The trembling became a more violent quivering; the quivering grew into a shudder
of revulsion and of remembered terror.
"It was as if they were wild dogs, turning on
an interloper from a strange pack," she said shakily. "I ... I screamed at them ... but
I couldn't stop them. Finally, Carl Jellicoe seemed to realize that he'd gone too far, and he backed away. Then Quince, then Parker. Harch
was the last to get control of himself, and he was the first to realize they were all going to wind up in prison. Jerry was unconscious. He was ..."
Her voice cracked, faltered.
It didn't seem like thirteen years; it
seemed almost like yesterday.
"Go on," McGee said quietly.
"He was ... bleeding from the nose ... the mouth ... and from one ear. He'd been very badly hurt. Although he was unconscious, he kept twitching uncontrollably. It looked like there might have
been nerve or brain damage. I tried to
..."
"Go on, Susan."
"I tried to get to Jerry, but Harch pushed me
out of the way, knocked me down. He told the
others that they were all going to go to prison if they didn't do something drastic to save themselves. He
said that their futures had been destroyed, that they
had no real future at all ... unless they covered up what they'd done. He tried to convince them that they had to finish Jerry off and then kill
me, too, and dump our bodies down one of the
deep holes in the cavern floor. Jellicoe, Parker, and Quince were half sobered up by the
shock of what they'd done, but they were still half drunk, too, and confused and scared. At first they argued with Harch, then agreed with him, then had
second thoughts and argued again. They were afraid to commit murder, yet they were afraid _not to.
Harch was furious with them for being so wishy-washy, and
he suddenly decided to _force them to do what 73
he wanted by simply giving them no other choice. He turned to Jerry and he ... he ..."
She felt sick, remembering.
McGee held her hand.
Susan said, "He kicked Jerry ... in the head ... three times ... and caved in one side
of his skull."
Mrs. Baker gasped.
"Killed him," Susan said.
Outside, lightning slashed open the sky, and
thunder roared through the resultant wound. The first fat droplets of rain struck the window.
McGee squeezed Susan's hand.
"I grabbed one of the flashlights and ran," she said. "Their attention was focused so completely on Jerry's body that I managed to get a bit of a head start on them. Not much but enough. They
expected me to try to leave the caverns, but I didn't head toward the exit because I knew they'd catch me if I went that way, so I gained a
few more seconds before they realized where I'd
gone. I went deeper into the caves, through a
twisty stone corridor, down a slope of
loose rocks, into another underground room, then into another beyond that one. Eventually, I switched
off the flashlight, so they wouldn't be able to follow
the glow of it, and I went on as far as I could in complete darkness, feeling my way, inch by inch, stumbling, until I found a niche in the wall,
a crawl hole, nothing more than that, hidden behind a limestone stalagmite. I slithered into it, as far back into it as I could possibly go, and then I was very, very quiet. Harch and the others spent hours
searching for me before they finally decided I'd somehow gotten out of the caverns. I waited another six
or eight hours, afraid to come out of hiding. I finally left the caverns when I couldn't deal with
my thirst and claustrophobia any longer."
Rain pattered on the window, blurring the wind-tossed trees and the black-bellied clouds.
"Jesus," Mrs. Baker said, her face
ashen. "You poor kid."
"They were put on trial?" McGee asked.
"Yes. The district attorney didn't think he could win if he charged them with first- or second-degree murder. Too many extenuating circumstances, including the whiskey and the fact that Jerry had actually struck the first blow when he'd busted Harch's lip. Anyway, Harch was
convicted of manslaughter and got a 75
five-year term in the state penitentiary."
"Just five years?" Mrs. Baker asked.
"I thought he should have been put away forever," Susan said, as bitter now as she had been the day she'd heard the judge hand down the sentence.
"What about the other three?" McGee asked.
"They were convicted of assault and of being accomplices to Harch, but because they'd had no previous run-ins with the law and were from good
families, and because none of them actually struck the killing blows, they were all given suspended
sentences and put on probation."
"Outrageous!" Mrs. Baker said.
McGee continued to hold Susan's hand, and
she was glad that he did.
"Of course," she said, "all four of them were immediately expelled from Briarstead. And in a
strange way, fate took a hand in punishing Parker and Jellicoe. They were taking the pre-med course at Briarstead, and they managed to finish
their last year at another university, but after that
they quickly discovered that no top-of-the-line medical school would accept students with serious criminal records. They hustled for another year,
submitting applications everywhere, and they finally managed to squeeze into the medical program at
a distinctly second-rate university. The
night they were notified of their acceptance, they went drinking to celebrate, got stinking drunk, and were both killed when Parker lost control of the car and rolled it over twice. Maybe I should be
ashamed to say this, but I was relieved and grateful when I heard what had happened to them."
"Of course you were," Mrs. Baker said. "That's only natural. Nothing to be ashamed of
at all."
"What about Randy Lee Quince?" McGee asked.
"I never heard what happened to him," Susan said. "And I don't ... just as long as he suffered."
Two closely spaced explosions of lightning
and thunder shook the world outside, and for a moment
Susan and McGee and Mrs. Baker stared at
the window, where the rain struck with greater force than before.
Then Mrs. Baker said, "It's a horrible story, just horrible. But I'm not sure I understand exactly what it has to do with your fainting spell
in the hall a while ago." 77

Before Susan could respond, McGee said, "Apparently, the man who stepped out of the elevator, in front of Susan's wheelchair,
was one of those fraternity brothers from Briarstead."
"Yes," Susan said.
"Either Harch or Quince."
"Ernest Harch," Susan said.
"An incredible coincidence," McGee said, giving her hand one last, gentle squeeze before letting go of it. "Thirteen years after the fact--
and a whole continent away from where the two of you last saw each other."
Mrs. Baker frowned. "But you must be mistaken."
"Oh, no," Susan said, shaking her head vigorously. "I'll never forget that face. Never."
"But his name's not Harch," Mrs. Baker said.
"Yes, it is."
"No. It's Richmond. Bill
Richmond."
"Then he's changed his name since I knew
him."
"I wouldn't think a convicted criminal would be allowed to change his name," Mrs. Baker said.
"I didn't mean he changed it legally, in court, or anything like that," Susan said,
frustrated by the nurse's reluctance to accept the truth. The man _was Harch.
"What's he here for?" McGee asked Thelma Baker.
"He's having surgery tomorrow," the nurse said. "Dr. Viteski's going to remove two rather
large cysts from his lower back."
"Not spinal cysts?"
"No. Fatty tissue cysts. But they're large ones."
"Benign?" McGee asked.
"Yes. But I guess they're deeply
rooted, and they're causing him some discomfort."
"Admitted this morning?"
"That's right."
"And his name's Richmond. You're sure of
that?"
"Yes."
"But it used to be _Harch," Susan insisted.
Mrs. Baker took off her glasses and let them dangle on the beaded chain around her neck.
She scratched the bridge of her nose, looked
quizzically at Susan, and said, "How 79
old was this Harch when he killed Jerry Stein?"
"He was a senior at Briarstead that year," Susan said. "Twenty-one years old."
"That settles it, then," the nurse said.
"Why?" McGee asked.
Mrs. Baker put her glasses on again and
said, "Bill Richmond is only in his early twenties."
"He can't be," Susan said.
"In fact I'm pretty sure he's just twenty-one himself. He'd have been about eight years old when Jerry Stein was killed."
"He's not twenty-one," Susan said anxiously. "He's thirty-four by now."
"Well, he certainly doesn't _look any older than twenty-one," Mrs. Baker said.
"In fact he looks younger than that. A good
deal younger than that. He's hardly more than a
kid. If he was lying about it one way or the
other, I'd think he was actually adding on a few years, not taking them off."
As the lights flickered again, and as thunder rolled across the hollow, sheet-metal sky, Dr. McGee looked at Susan and said, "How old did he look to you when he stepped out of the elevator?"
She thought about it for a moment, and she got a
sinking feeling in her stomach. "Well ... he looked _exactly like Ernest Harch."
"Exactly like Harch looked back then?"
"Uh ... yeah."
"Like a twenty-one-year-old college man?"
Susan nodded reluctantly.
McGee pressed the point. "Then you mean that
he didn't look thirty-four to you?"
"No. But maybe he's aged well. Some thirty-four-year-olds could pass for ten years younger. She was confused about the apparent age discrepancy, but she was not the least bit confused about
the man's identity: "He _is Harch."
"Perhaps it's just a strong resemblance," Mrs. Baker said.
"_No," Susan insisted. "It's him, all right. I recognized him, and I saw him recognize me, too. And I don't feel safe. It was my testimony that sent him
to prison. If you'd have seen the way he glared
at me in that courtroom ..."
McGee and Mrs. Baker stared at her, and
there was something in their eyes that made her 81
feel as if this were a courtroom, too, as if she
were standing before a jury, awaiting judgment. She
stared back at them for a moment, but then she lowered
her eyes because she was made miserable by the doubt she saw in theirs.
"Listen," McGee said, "I'll go take a look at this guy's records. Maybe I'll even have a word or two with him. We'll see if
we can straighten this out."
"Sure," Susan said, knowing it was hopeless.
"If he's really Harch, we'll make sure he doesn't get anywhere near you. And if he _isn't Harch, you'll be able to rest easy."
_It's _him, _dammit!
But she didn't say anything; she merely
nodded.
"I'll be back in a few minutes,"
McGee said.
Susan stared down at her pale, interlocked hands.
"Will you be okay?" McGee asked.
"Yeah. Sure."
She sensed a meaningful look and an unspoken message passing between the doctor and the nurse. But she didn't look up.
McGee left the room.
"We'll get this straightened out real quick, honey," Mrs. Baker assured her.
Outside, thunder fell out of the sky with the sound of
an avalanche.
Night would come early. Already, the storm had
torn apart the autumn afternoon and had blown it
away. The twilight had been swept in ahead of schedule.
"His name's definitely Bill
Richmond," McGee said when he returned a few minutes later.
Susan sat stiffly in bed, still disbelieving.
The two of them were alone in the room. The
nurses had changed shifts, and Mrs. Baker
had gone home for the day.
McGee toyed with the stethoscope around his
neck. "And he's definitely just twenty-one
years old."
"But you weren't gone nearly long enough to've checked out his background," Susan said. "If
all you did was read through his medical records,
then nothing has really been proved. He could have
lied to his doctor, you know." 83

"Well, it turns out that Leon--Dr. Viteski, that is--has known Bill's parents, Grace and Harry Richmond, for twenty-five years. Viteski says he delivered all
three of the Richmond babies himself, right here in this
very hospital."
Doubt nibbled at Susan's solid
conviction.
McGee said, "Leon treated all of Bill Richmond's childhood illnesses and injuries. He knows for an absolute fact that the kid was only eight years old, living in Pine
Wells, just doing what eight-year-olds do, when Ernest Harch killed Jerry Stein, thirteen
years ago, back there in Pennsylvania."
"Three thousand miles away."
"Exactly."
Susan sagged under a heavy burden of weariness
and anxiety. "But he looked just like Harch. When
he stepped out of the elevator this afternoon, when I looked up and saw that face, those damned gray eyes, I could have sworn ..."
"Oh, I'm certain you didn't panic without
good reason," he said placatingly. "I'm sure there's a resemblance."
Although she had come to like McGee a lot in just
one day, Susan was angry with him for letting even
a vaguely patronizing tone enter his voice.
Her anger rejuvenated her a bit, and she sat
up straighter in bed, her hands fisted at her sides. "Not just a resemblance," she said
sharply. "He looked _exactly like Harch."
"Well, of course, you've got to keep in
mind that it's been a long time since you've seen Harch."
"So?"
"You may not remember him quite as well as you
think you do," McGee said.
"Oh, I remember. Perfectly. This Richmond is the same height as Harch, the
same weight, the same build."
"It's a fairly common body type."
"He has the same blond hair, the same square features, the same _eyes. Such light gray eyes, almost transparent. How many people have eyes like that? Not very many. Feature by feature, this Bill Richmond and Ernest Harch are duplicates. It's not just a simple
resemblance. It's a lot stranger than that.
It's downright uncanny." 85

"Okay, okay," McGee said, holding up
one hand to stop her. "Perhaps they are remarkably alike, virtually identical. If that's the
case, then it's an incredible coincidence that you've encountered both of them, thirteen years apart, at opposite ends of the country; but that's all it is --a coincidence."
Her hands were cold. Freezing. She rubbed them together, trying to generate heat.
She said, "When it comes to the subject of coincidences, I agree with Philip Marlowe."
"Who?"
"Marlowe. He's a private detective in those novels by Raymond Chandler. __The Lady
in the _Lake, _The _Big _Sleep, _The
_Long _Goodbye ..."
"Of course. Marlowe. Okay, so what did
he have to say about coincidences?"
"He said, `Show me a coincidence, and when
I open it up for you, I'll show you at least two
people inside, plotting some sort of mischief.`"
McGee frowned and shook his head. "That philosophy might be suitable for a character in a detective story. But out here in the real world,
it's a little paranoid, don't you think?"
He was right, and she couldn't sustain her anger with him. As her fury faded, so did her strength, and she sank back against the pillows once more. "Could two people really look so much alike?"
"I've heard it said that everyone has an unrelated twin somewhere in the world, what some people
call a `doppelgánger.`"
"Maybe," Susan said, unconvinced. "But
this was ... different. It was weird. I'd swear
he recognized me, too. He smiled so strangely. And he--_winked at me!"
For the first time since he had returned to her
room, McGee smiled. "Winked at you?
Well, there's certainly nothing strange or uncanny about that, dear lady." His intensely
blue eyes sparkled with amusement. "In case
you didn't know it, men frequently wink at attractive women. Now don't tell me
you've never been winked at before. Don't tell
me you've spent your life in a nunnery or on
a desert island." He grinned.
"There's nothing attractive about me at the moment," she insisted.
"Nonsense."
"My hair needs a real washing, not just 87
brushed with powder. I'm emaciated, and I've
got bags under my eyes. I hardly think I inspire romantic thoughts in my present
condition."
"You're being too hard on yourself. Emaciated? No. You've just got a haunting Audrey Hepburn quality."
Susan resisted his charm, which wasn't easy.
But she was determined to say everything that was on her mind. "Besides, it wasn't that kind of wink."
"Ahhhh," he said. "So now you admit you've been winked at in the past. Suddenly you're an _expert on winking."
She refused to be coaxed and kidded into forgetting
the man who had stepped out of the elevator.
"What kind of wink was it, exactly?" he asked, a teasing tone still in his voice.
"It was a smartass wink. Smug. There
wasn't anything at all flirtatious about it,
either. It wasn't warm and friendly, like a wink ought to be. It was cold. Cold and smug and nasty and ... somehow threatening," she said, but even as she spoke she realized how ludicrous it sounded
to give such an exhaustively detailed interpretation to something as simple as a wink.
"It's a good thing I didn't ask you
to interpret his entire facial expression," McGee said. "We'd have been here until tomorrow morning!"
Susan finally succumbed: She smiled. "I guess it does sound pretty silly, huh?"
"Especially since we know for a fact that his
name's Bill Richmond and that he's only twenty-one."
"So the wink was just a wink, and the threat was all in my head?"
"Don't you figure that's probably the
case?" he asked diplomatically.
She sighed. "Yeah, I guess I do. And
I suppose I should apologize for causing so
much trouble about this."
"It wasn't any trouble," he said
graciously.
"I'm awfully tired, weak, and my
perceptions aren't as sharp as they should be. Last night, I dreamed about Harch, and when I saw that man step out of the elevator, looking so much like Harch, I just ... lost my head. I
panicked."
That was a difficult admission for her 89
to make. Other people might act like Chicken Little at
the slightest provocation, but Susan Kathleen Thorton expected herself to remain--and
previously always _had remained--calm and collected through any crisis that fate threw at her. She had been that way since she was just a little girl, for the circumstances of her lonely
childhood had required her to be totally self-reliant. She hadn't even panicked in
the House of Thunder, when Ernest Harch had kicked
in Jerry's skull; she had run, had hidden,
had survived--all because she had kept her wits
about her at a time when most people, if thrust into the
same situation, would surely have lost theirs. But
now she had panicked; worse, she had let
others see her lose control. She felt embarrassed and humbled by her behavior.
"I'll be a model patient from now on," she told Dr. McGee. "I'll take my
medicine without argument. I'll eat real well,
so I'll regain my strength just as quickly as possible. I'll exercise when I'm told to and only as much as I'm told to. By the time I'm ready to be discharged, you'll have forgotten all about the scene I caused today. In fact you'll wish that
all of your patients were like me. That's a promise."
"I _already wish all of my patients were exactly like you," he said. "Believe me, it's
much more pleasant treating a pretty young woman
than it is treating cranky old men with heart conditions."
After McGee had gone for the day, Susan arranged with one of the orderlies to have a rental television installed in her room. As afternoon faded into evening, she watched the last half of an old episode of "The Rockford Files," then the umpteenth rerun of an episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." In spite of frequent bursts of storm-caused static, she watched the five o'clock news on a Seattle station, and she was dismayed to discover that the current international
crises were pretty much the same as the international crises that had been at the top of the news
reports more than three weeks ago, before she had fallen into a coma.
Later, she ate all the food on her dinner tray. Later still, she rang for one of the second-shift nurses and asked for a snack. A
pert blonde named Marcia Edmonds 91
brought her a dish of sherbet with sliced peaches. Susan ate all of that, too.
She tried not to think about Bill Richmond, the Harch look-alike. She tried not to think about the House of Thunder, or about the precious days she
had lost in a coma, or about the remaining gaps in
her memory, or about her current state of helplessness, or about anything else that might
upset her. She concentrated on being a good
patient and developing a positive attitude,
for she was eager to get well again.
Nevertheless, an unspecific but chilling presentiment of danger disturbed her thoughts from time to time. A shapeless portent of evil.
Each time that her thoughts turned into that dark pathway, she forced herself to think only of pleasing things. Mostly, she thought about Dr. Jeffrey McGee: the grace with which he moved; the
ear-pleasing timbre of his voice; the sensitivity and the intriguing scintillation of his exceptionally
blue eyes; his strong, well-formed, long-fingered hands.
Near bedtime, after she had taken the sedative that McGee had prescribed for her, but before she had begun to get drowsy, the rain stopped falling. The wind, however, did not die down. It continued to press insistently against the window. It
murmured, growled, hissed. It sniffed all
around the window frame and thumped its paws of air against the glass, as if it were a big dog searching diligently for a way to get inside.
Perhaps because of the sound of the wind, Susan dreamed
of dogs that night. Dogs and then jackals. Jackals and then wolves. Werewolves. They changed fluidity from lupine to human form, then into wolves again, then back into men, always pursuing
her or leaping at her or waiting in the darkness
ahead to pounce on her. When they took the form of men, she recognized them: Jellicoe, Parker, Quince, and Harch. Once, as she was fleeing through
a dark forest, she came upon a moonlit clearing
in which the four beasts, in wolf form, were crouched over
the corpse of Jerry Stein, tearing the flesh from
its bones. They looked up at her and grinned malevolently. Blood and ragged pieces of
raw flesh drooled from their white teeth and
vicious jowls. Sometimes she dreamed they were chasing her through the caverns, between thrusting limestone stalagmites and stalactites, along narrow
corridors of rock and earth. Sometimes 93
they chased her across a vast field of delicate black flowers; sometimes they prowled deserted city streets, following her scent, forcing her to flee from
a series of hiding places, snapping
relentlessly at her heels. Once, she even dreamed that one of the creatures had slunk into her hospital room; it was a crouching wolf-thing, swathed in shadows, visible only in murky silhouette, watching her from the foot of the bed, one wild eye gleaming. Then it moved into the weak
amber glow of the night light, and she saw that it had undergone another metamorphosis, changing from
wolf to man this time. It was Ernest Harch. He was wearing pajamas and a bathrobe--

(__This isn't part of the _dream! She thought as
icy shards of fear thrilled through her.)
--and he came around to the side of the bed. He
bent down to look more closely at her. She
tried to cry out; couldn't. She could not move, either. His face began to blur in front of her, and she struggled to keep it in focus, but she sensed that she
was slipping back to the field of black flowers--

(__I've got to shake this off. Wake up. All the way. It was supposed to be a mild sedative. Just a mild one, _dammit!)
--and Harch's features ran together in one gray smear. The hospital room dissolved
completely, and again she was plunging across a field
of strange black flowers, with a pack of wolves baying behind her. The moon was full; oddly,
however, it provided little light. She couldn't see where she was going, and she tripped over something,
fell into the flowers, and discovered that she had stumbled over Jerry Stein's mutilated, half-eaten cadaver. The wolf appeared, loomed over her, snarling, leering, pushing its slavering muzzle down at her, down and down, until its cold nose touched her cheek. The beast's hateful face blurred and reformed into an even more hateful
countenance: that of Ernest Harch. It wasn't a wolf's nose touching her cheek any longer; it was now Harch's blunt finger. She flinched, and her heart began pounding so forcefully that she wondered
why it didn't tear loose of her. Harch pulled
his hand away from her and smiled. The field of
black flowers was gone. She was dreaming that she was
in her hospital room again--

(__Except it's not a dream. It's real. Harch is here, and he's going to kill _me.)
--and she tried to sit up in bed but was 95
unable to move. She reached for the call button that
would summon a nurse or an orderly, and although
the button was only a few inches away, it suddenly seemed light-years beyond her reach. She strained toward it, and her arm appeared to stretch and stretch magically, until it was bizarrely elongated; her flesh and bones seemed to be possessed of an impossible elasticity. Still,
her questing finger fell short of the button. She felt as if she were Alice, as if she had just stepped through the looking glass. She was now in that
part of Wonderland in which the usual laws of perspective did not apply. Here, little was big,
and big was little; near was far; far was near; there was
no difference whatsoever between up and down, in and out, over and under. This sleep-induced, drug-induced confusion made her nauseous; she tasted bile in
the back of her throat. Could she taste something like
that if she were dreaming? She wasn't sure. She wished fervently that she could at least be certain
whether she was awake or still fast asleep. "Long time no see," Harch said. Susan blinked at
him, trying to keep him in focus, but he kept fading in and out. Sometimes, for just a second or
two, he had the shining eyes of a wolf. "Did you think you could hide from me forever?" he asked,
speaking in a whisper, leaning even closer, until
his face was nearly touching hers. His breath was
foul, and she wondered if her ability to smell was an indication that she was awake, that Harch was real. "Did you think you could hide from me forever?" Harch demanded again. She could not respond to him; her
voice was frozen in her throat, a cold lump
that she could neither spit out nor swallow. "You
rotten bitch," Harch said, and his smile became
a broad grin. "You stinking, rotten, smug little bitch. How do you feel now? Huh? Are you
sorry you testified against me? Hmmm? Yeah. I'll bet you're real sorry now." He
laughed softly, and for a moment the laughter became the low growling of a wolf, but then it turned
into laughter again. "You know what I'm going to do
to you?" he asked. His face began to blur. "Do
you know what I'm going to do to you?" She was in a cavern. There were black flowers growing out of the stone floor. She was running from baying wolves. She turned a corner, and the cavern opened onto a shadowy city street. A wolf stood on the sidewalk, under a lamppost, and it said, "Do you
know what I'm going to do to you?" Susan 97
ran and kept on running through a long, frightening, amorphous night.
Monday, shortly after dawn, she woke,
groggy and damp with sweat. She remembered
dreaming about wolves and about Ernest Harch. In the flat, hard, gray light of the cloudy morning, it seemed ridiculous for her to entertain the thought that Harch actually had been in her room last night. She was still alive, uninjured, utterly unmarked. It had all been a nightmare. All of it. Just
a terrible nightmare. 5

Not long after Susan woke, she took a
sponge bath with the help of a nurse. Refreshed,
she changed into her spare pajamas, a green
pair with yellow piping. A nurse's aide
took the soiled blue silk pajamas into the bathroom, rinsed them in the sink, and hung them
to dry on a hook behind the door.
Breakfast was larger this morning than it had been yesterday. Susan ate every bite of it and was still hungry.
A few minutes after Mrs. Baker came on duty with the morning shift, she came to Susan's room with Dr. McGee, who was making his morning rounds before attending to his private practice
at his offices in Willawauk. Together,
McGee and Mrs. Baker removed the bandages
from Susan's forehead. There was no pain, just a prickle or two when the sutures were snipped and tugged loose.
McGee cupped her chin in his hand and turned
her head from side to side, studying the healed wound. "It's a neat bit of tailoring, even if I do say so myself."
Mrs. Baker got the long-handled mirror from
the nightstand and gave it to Susan.
She was pleasantly surprised to find that the
scar was not nearly as bad as she had feared it would be. It was four inches long, an unexpectedly narrow line of pink, shiny, somewhat swollen skin, bracketed by small red spots where the stitches
had been.
"The suture marks will fade away completely
in ten days or so," McGee assured her.
"I thought it was a huge, bloody gash," Susan said, raising one hand to touch the new,
smooth skin. 99

"Not huge," McGee said. "But it bled like a faucet gushing water when you were first brought in here.
And it resisted healing for a while, probably because
you frowned a lot while you were comatose, and the
frowning wrinkled your forehead. There wasn't much
we could do about that. Blue Cross wouldn't pay for an around-the-clock comedian in your room." He smiled. "Anyway, after the suture marks have faded, the scar itself will just about vanish, too. It won't look as wide as it looks now, and, of course, it won't be discolored. When it's
fully healed, if you think it's still too
prominent, a good plastic surgeon can use dermabrasion techniques to scour away some of the
scar tissue."
"Oh, I'm sure that won't be necessary,"
Susan said. "I'm sure it'll be almost
invisible. I'm just relieved that I don't look
like Frankenstein's monster."
Mrs. Baker laughed. "As if that were ever a possibility, what with your good looks. Goodness gracious, kid, it's a crime the way you
underrate yourself!"
Susan blushed.
McGee was amused.
Shaking her head, Mrs. Baker picked up the scissors and the used bandages, and she left the room.
"Now," McGee said, "ready to talk to your boss at Milestone?"
"Phil Gomez," she said, repeating the name McGee had given her yesterday. "I still can't remember a thing about him."
"You will." McGee looked at his wristwatch. "It's a bit early, but not much. He might be in
his office now."
He used the phone on the nightstand and asked the hospital operator to dial the Milestone
number in Newport Beach, California.
Gomez was already at work, and he took the call.
For a couple of minutes, Susan listened to one side of the conversation. McGee told Phil Gomez that she was out of her coma, and he explained
about the temporary spottiness of her memory,
always stressing the word "temporary." Finally, he passed the receiver to her.
Susan took it as if she were being handed a snake. She wasn't sure how she felt about making contact with Milestone. On one hand, she
didn't want to go through the rest of her 101
life with a gaping hole in her memory. On the
other hand, however, she remembered how she had
felt yesterday when the subject of Milestone had come up during her talk with McGee: She'd had
the disquieting feeling that she might be better off
if she never found out what her job had been. A worm of fear had coiled up inside of her yesterday. Now, again, she felt that same inexplicable fear, squirming.
"Hello?"
"Susan? Is that really you?"
"Yes. It's me."
Gomez had a high, quick, puppy-friendly
voice. His words bumped into one another.
"Susan, thank God, how good to hear from you, how
very good indeed, really, I mean it, but of course you know I mean it. We've all been so concerned about you, worried half to death. Even Breckenridge
was worried sick about you, and who would ever have thought
_he had any human compassion? So how are you?
How are you feeling?"
The sound of his voice kindled no memories in Susan. It was the voice of an utter stranger.
They talked for about ten minutes, and Gomez tried hard to help her recall her work. He said
that the Milestone Corporation was an independent, private-industry think tank working on contracts
with ITT, IBM, Exxon, and other major corporations. That meant nothing to Susan; she had no idea what an independent,
private-industry think tank _was. Gomez told her that she was--or, rather, _had _been--working on a wide variety of laser applications for the communications industry. She couldn't remember a
thing about that. He described her office at Milestone; it sounded like no place she had ever been. He talked about her friends and co-workers there: Eddie Gilroy, Ella Haversby, Tom Kavinsky, Anson Breckenridge, and others. Not one of the names was even slightly familiar
to her. By the end of the conversation, Gomez's disappointment and concern were evident in his voice.
He urged her to call him again, any time, if she thought it would help, and he suggested that she call
some of the others at Milestone, too.
"And listen," he said, "no matter how long it takes you to recuperate, your job will be waiting for
you here."
"Thank you," she said, touched by his generous spirit
and by the depth of his concern for her. 103

"No need to thank me," he said. "You're one of the best we have here, and we don't want to lose
you. If you weren't nearly a thousand miles
away, we'd be there, camping out in your hospital room, doing our best to cheer you up and speed along
the healing process."
A minute later, when Susan finally said
goodbye to Gomez and hung up, McGee said, "Well? Any luck?"
"None. I still can't remember a thing about my job. But Phil Gomez seemed like a sweet man."
In fact Gomez seemed so nice, seemed to care about her so much, that she wondered how she could
have forgotten him so completely.
And then she wondered why a dark dread had
grown in her like a malignant tumor during the entire conversation. In spite of Phil Gomez, even the thought of the Milestone Corporation made
her uneasy. Worse than uneasy. She was
... afraid of Milestone. But she didn't know _why.
Later Monday morning, she sat up on the
edge of her bed and swung her legs back and forth
for a while, exercising them.
Mrs. Baker helped her into a wheelchair and said, "This time I think you ought to make the trip
yourself. Once around the entire second floor.
If your arms get too tired, just ask any
nurse to bring you back here."
"I feel great," Susan said. "I won't get tired. Actually I think maybe I'll
try to make at least two trips around the
halls."
"I knew that's what you'd say," Mrs.
Baker told her. "You just set your mind to getting around once, and that'll be enough for now. Don't try to make a marathon out of it. After lunch and a nap, _then you can do the second lap."
"You're pampering me too much. I'm a lot stronger than you think I am."
"I knew you'd say that, too. Kiddo, you're incorrigible."
Remembering yesterday's humiliation--when she
had insisted she could walk but then hadn't even been able to lower herself into the wheelchair without Mrs. Baker's assistance--Susan blushed. "Okay. Once around. But after lunch and a nap, I'm going
to make two _more laps. And yesterday you 105
said I might try walking a few steps today, and
I intend to hold you to that, too."
"Incorrigible," Mrs. Baker repeated, but
she was smiling.
"First," Susan said, "I want to have a
better look out of this window."
She wheeled herself away from her own bed, past the other bed, which was still empty, and she stopped
alongside the window through which she had been able to see (from her bed) only the sky and the upper portions of a few trees. The windowsill was high, and from the wheelchair she had to crane her neck to peer outside.
She discovered that the hospital stood atop a hill, one of a circle of hills that ringed a
small valley. Some of the slopes were heavily forested with pines, fir, spruce, and a variety of other trees, while some slopes were covered with emerald-green meadows. A town occupied the
floor of the valley and extended some of its neighborhoods into the lower reaches of the hills.
Its brick, stone, and wood-sided buildings were tucked in among other trees, facing out on
neatly squared-off streets. Although the day was
drab and gray, and although ugly storm clouds
churned across the sky, threatening rain, the town nonetheless looked serene and quite beautiful.
"It's lovely," Susan said.
"Isn't it?" Mrs. Baker said. "I'll
never regret moving out of the city." She sighed. "Well, I've got work to do. Once you've
made your circuit of the halls, call me so that
I can help you get back into bed." She shook
one plump finger at Susan. "And don't you
dare try climbing out of that chair and into bed yourself. Regardless of what you think, you're still weak and
shaky. You call for me."
"I will," Susan said, although she thought she
might just carefully try getting into bed under her own steam, depending on how she felt after taking her wheelchair constitutional.
Mrs. Baker left the room, and Susan
sat by the window for a while, enjoying the view.
After a couple of minutes, however, she
realized that it was not the view that was delaying her.
She hesitated to leave the room because she was afraid. Afraid of meeting Bill
Richmond, the Harch look-alike. Afraid that he would smile that hard smile, turn those
moonlight-pale eyes on her, wink 107
slyly at her, and perhaps ask her how good old Jerry Stein was getting along these days.
Hell's bells, that's just plain ridiculous! She thought, angry with herself.
She shook herself, as if trying to throw off the irrational fear that clung to her.
He's not Ernest Harch. He's not the boogeyman, for God's sake, she told herself severely. He's thirteen years too young to be Harch. His name's Richmond, Bill
Richmond, and he comes from Pine Wells, and he doesn't know me. So why the devil am I
sitting here, immobilized by the fear of encountering
him out there in the corridor? What's _wrong with
me?
She shamed herself into motion. She put her hands
to the chair's wheels and rolled out of the room, into the hallway.
She was surprised when her arms began to ache
before she had gone even a fifth of the distance that she
had planned to cover. By the time she traveled both of the short halls, across the top of the hospital's T-shaped floor plan, her muscles began to throb. She stopped the chair for a moment and massaged her arms and shoulders. Her fingers told her what she had wanted to forget: that she was
terribly thin, wasted, far from being her old self.
She gritted her teeth and went on, turning the wheelchair into the long main hall. The effort
to move and maneuver the chair was sufficiently demanding to require concentration on the task;
therefore, it was amazing that she even saw the man at
the nurses' station. But she _did see him, and she stopped her wheelchair only fifteen feet from
him. She gaped at him, stunned. Then she
closed her eyes, counted slowly to three, opened them--and he was still there, leaning against the counter,
chatting with a nurse.
He was tall, about six feet two, with brown hair and brown eyes. His face was long, and so were
his features, as if someone had accidentally
stretched the putty he was made from before God had
had an opportunity to pop him into the kiln
to dry. He had a long forehead, a long nose with long, narrow nostrils, and a chin that came to a sharp point. He was wearing white pajamas and a
wine-red robe, just as if he were an ordinary patient. But as far as Susan was concerned, there wasn't anything ordinary about him.
She had half expected to encounter 109
Bill Richmond, the Harch look-alike,
somewhere in the halls. She had prepared herself for that, had steeled herself for it. But she hadn't expected _this.
The man was Randy Lee Quince.
Another of the four fraternity men.
She stared at him in shock, in disbelief, in fear, willing him to vanish, praying that he was
nothing more than an apparition or a figment of her fevered imagination. But he refused to do the gentlemanly thing and disappear; he remained--
unwavering, solid, real.
As she was deciding whether to confront him or flee, he left the nurses' station, turning his back on Susan without glancing at her. He walked away and entered the fifth room past the elevators, on the left side of the hall.
Susan realized she'd been holding her
breath. She gasped, and the air she drew into her lungs seemed as sharp and cold as a February night in the High Sierras, where she sometimes went skiing.
For a moment she didn't think she'd ever move again. She felt brittle, icy, as if she had crystallized.
A nurse walked by, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking slightly on the highly polished
floor.
The squeak made Susan think of bats.
Her skin broke out in gooseflesh.
There had been bats in the House of Thunder. Bats rustling secretly, disturbed by the flashlights and the candles. Bats chittering
nervously during the beating that the fraternity men had administered to poor Jerry. Bats cartwheeling
through the pitch blackness, fluttering frantically
against her as she doused her stolen flashlight and
fled from Harch and the others.
The nurse at the counter, the one to whom Quince had been talking, noticed Susan and must have seen
the fright in her face. "Are you all right?"
Susan breathed out. The expelled air was warm on her teeth and lips. Thawed, she nodded at the nurse.
The sound of squealing bats became distant, then swooped away into silence.
She rolled her wheelchair to the counter and
looked up at the nurse, a thin brunette whose
name she didn't know. "The man you were just talking
to ..." 111

The nurse leaned over the counter, looked down
at her, and said, "The fellow who went into two-sixteen?"
"Yes, him."
"What about him?"
"I think I know him. Or _knew him. A
long time ago." She glanced nervously toward the room into which Quince had gone, then back at the nurse again. "But if he isn't who I think he is, I don't want to burst in on him and make
a fool of myself. Do you know his name?"
"Yes, of course. He's Peter
Johnson. Nice enough guy, if a little bit on
the talky side. He's always coming out here to chat,
and I'm beginning to fall behind on my
record-keeping because of it."
Susan blinked. "Peter John