Creature (39 page)

And of course he’d never asked what that treatment was. Or what happened to the boys after they left Silverdale.

He hadn’t wanted to know.

It had been easier to assume the boys were all right, living with their families in other parts of the country, going on with their lives.

But now, as he stared at Mark Tanner, he had to face what he’d known, deep inside, all along.

“They’re still here, aren’t they?” he asked, his voice hollow as he heard once again the bestial howl that had echoed through the corridors a few minutes before.

Ames nodded. “Of course they’re here,” he said.

“B-But you told me they were all right,” Collins protested. He was grasping at straws now, trying to justify what he’d allowed himself to do, to become a part of. “You told
me you’d just stopped the treatments! You told me they’d be fine!”

“And you believed it,” Ames replied, his voice hard. “You believed it because you wanted to believe it. You wanted to believe in magic—in a miracle with no price—but there isn’t any such thing! There’s only science, and experimentation, and a lot of failure before you find success. And there’s always a price, Collins.” His voice dropped slightly and a cold smile twisted his lips. “Do you really think the lives of a few boys are too high a price for what TarrenTech and I have given this town?”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned his back on Collins and began issuing orders on what was to be done with Mark Tanner.

24

Sharon could see the Rocky Mountain High campus now. It was only a quarter of a mile ahead, but the large building in the center of the lawns and playing fields was clearly visible, and as she approached it, Sharon found herself wondering how she could ever have thought that it looked like anything but a prison. Now that she was certain that something evil was happening within its rustic-looking walls, the lodge had taken on a forbidding look that sent a chill down her spine.

She slowed the car and turned up the side road that led toward the sprawling grounds of the sports center, telling herself that the eerie feeling she suddenly had of being watched was only a trick of her imagination. Against her will she found herself looking around, examining every tree she passed, searching for signs of a sophisticated security system. And yet she knew her observations were futile, for if, indeed, a system of cameras and alarms guarded the premises, surely it would have been designed to be totally invisible.

She slowed the car even more as she approached the gates, resisting her impulse to turn around and go back to town. But even if she did, what could she say? An image of herself striding into the tiny Silverdale police department
came to mind. She could picture the skeptical looks of guarded incredulity on the officers’ faces as she tried to tell them she was certain her son had been made the victim of some kind of medical experimentation. At best they would dismiss her as a crank; at worst they’d consider her deranged. And so she drove on, passing through the gates and starting along the drive toward the lodge itself.

Glancing into the rearview mirror, she saw the gates swing slowly closed behind her. For an instant a wave of panic threatened to engulf her. Had she come here only to become a prisoner?

She told herself it was ridiculous, that the situation couldn’t be nearly as serious as she was letting herself imagine it. And yet, as she parked Elaine Harris’s car in front of the lodge, left the keys dangling in the ignition, and mounted the steps to the wide veranda, she had to fight down the urge to turn and run away.

She touched the front door almost tentatively, only realizing as it started to open that she’d half expected to find it locked. When she stepped into the lobby itself and saw that it was deserted, she felt her senses heighten, her nerves begin to tingle.

Danger.

She sensed danger all around her.

But nothing in the lobby had changed since the last time she’d been here.

The same comfortable sofas and chairs were arranged in groups on the polished hardwood floors, and in the immense hearth, a fire had been laid. A few magazines were scattered on the top of the large burl coffee table that separated two of the sofas. Rocky Mountain High still looked for all the world like the lobby of a resort hotel.

Except that nobody was there.

She walked through the lobby to the dining room, her heels echoing loudly on the bare floor, then turned left and headed toward the suite of offices that belonged to Martin Ames.

The feeling of being watched—of having her every movement closely monitored—increased. Twice she found herself glancing back over her shoulder, anticipating seeing someone behind her, moving up close to her, ready to seize her.

But the corridor remained empty, and then she was standing at the closed door to Ames’s office. She hesitated a moment, reached out and twisted the knob.

She pushed the door open.

Marjorie Jackson glanced up from the phone. As she recognized Sharon, an expression of surprise came into her eyes. She stopped dialing and dropped the receiver she was holding back in its cradle.

“Well,” she exclaimed a little too brightly. “I guess I can stop trying to track you down, can’t I?”

It was the last thing Sharon had expected to hear. She stared at Ames’s assistant, nonplussed. “Y-You’ve been trying to reach me?” she asked.

Marge Jackson pursed her lips sympathetically. “You must have already heard about Mark,” she said.

Sharon recovered then and nodded tersely. “I want to see him,” she said. “And I want to know why he was brought here.”

The smile faded from Marjorie Jackson’s lips, and her brow creased fretfully. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I—I’m not certain you
can
see Mark right now. I believe he’s in treatment with Dr. Ames. If you’ll just let me check—” She reached for the phone again, but Sharon cut her off.

“What kind of treatment?” she demanded. “No one here has any right to treat my son without my permission. The school had no right to send him here, and you have no right to treat him.”

Mrs. Jackson seemed stunned by the cold anger in Sharon’s voice. “Mrs. Tanner—I—I’m not sure what to say. Perhaps there’s been some mistake.”

“The only mistake,” Sharon said, her voice harsh, “was my husband letting Mark get involved at all in whatever’s going on out here.”

“But he’s ill, Mrs. Tanner,” Ames’s assistant began again, licking her lips nervously. “We’re just trying to help him.”

“Is that what you believe?” Sharon flared. She glared at the woman. “Well, let me tell you that Mark was perfectly fine until he came out here. Now where is he?” Her voice rose and she leaned forward, bracing herself on the assistant’s desk. “I want to see my son,” she said once more. “And I want to see him this instant! Do you understand me?”

Marge Jackson’s demeanor changed. Her look of sympathy congealed into officiousness and she rose to her feet. “I understand that you’re upset,” she said, her voice stern. “And you have a right to be. If my son were ill, I’d be upset, too. But you do not have the right to storm in here making demands that are impossible to meet. We’re trying to help your son—at the request of your husband—and if you will calm down, I’m sure Dr. Ames will be able to explain everything to your satisfaction. But he cannot attend to both you and Mark at the same time, so I would suggest that you make up your mind right now what is more important to you—having your questions answered or having your son cared for?”

Sharon took a step backward. Her tone, as well as her words, had pierced Sharon’s armor of indignation. She suddenly felt uncertain of herself. What if she were wrong?

As she stood staring at the assistant, trying to judge the sincerity of the woman’s words, the silence that had fallen over the office was broken by a faint scream.

Sharon stiffened.

And then it came again, louder this time.

Like a wild animal howling in the night.

Sharon froze, remembering Kelly’s nightmare and the sound she had heard drifting through the early morning darkness as she’d opened her daughter’s window.

The sound of an animal howling in the night.

She spun around and strode to the door, her mind made up. She knew Mark was here, knew she had to find him. The sound she’d just heard hadn’t come from an animal at all.

It had come from a human being.

Or at least something that had once been a human being.

As she stepped into the corridor, two white-coated attendants appeared on either side of her, seizing her arms.

“No!” She tried to jerk free, but knew she had no chance. Both of them were far larger than she was, and their hands closed tighter, digging into her flesh like bands of iron.

My God, it
is
a prison, she thought as one of the guards gagged her and both of them hustled her along the corridor. It was a prison, and now she was a prisoner.

She knew now that it had indeed been a mistake to come here.

But she also knew it was too late.

   Blake Tanner sat staring at the computer terminal in front of him, but his mind refused to focus on the columns of figures that covered the screen. Finally he leaned back, stretched, stood up and walked to the window. He gazed out at the mountains rising to the north and east, their jagged, forbidding peaks covered with snow. In another couple of weeks the skiing season would begin. It had been years since he’d taken the time to go skiing in California, and he was looking forward to it now. In fact, on the coming weekend he might take Mark shopping and get him outfitted for the winter sports ahead.

Mark.

His son had been on his mind all morning. Indeed, he’d gotten little sleep the night before as he’d lain restlessly on the sofa in the den, his head propped up at an awkward angle by the hard pillow that had never been intended to serve as anything more than an armrest. But it was more than the discomfort of the sofa that kept him awake, for despite the stance he’d taken with Sharon, he was beginning to worry about his son, too.

That morning he’d once again gone over the material waiting for him the morning after Mark had been beaten up,
when Jerry Harris had first suggested putting his son under Martin Ames’s care. And this morning all the data he’d reviewed still looked totally innocuous.

There was a lot of theoretical work, speculating on the relationship between vitamins and hormone production within the human body, and even more data—not all of which Blake had understood—that purported to demonstrate the factual basis of the theorizing. All of it, this morning as well as when he’d first studied it, seemed totally harmless.

Too harmless?

He tried to reject the question but found he couldn’t. For if the compounds being administered to Mark were truly as innocuous as the data made them out to be, how could the changes in Mark have taken place so quickly and been so radical?

Nor was it simply a matter of the physical changes—perhaps, if there’d been nothing more, Blake could have accepted them at face value. But the personality changes?

About those Blake wasn’t nearly so comfortable, despite the assurances he’d made over and over to Sharon that their son was merely going through the normal vacillations and inconsistencies of adolescence. Indeed, as the night had worn on, he’d begun to wonder whom he’d truly been trying to convince: his wife or himself.

This morning, his eyes heavy with lack of sleep, he’d tried to study Mark as the boy gulped down his orange juice and gobbled a bowl of cold cereal before departing for school, but he still wasn’t convinced he’d actually seen anything.

Perhaps, after the argument with Sharon, he’d only imagined that Mark’s features looked coarser and his eyes sunken. For a moment he’d thought that Mark’s fingers looked oddly oversized, too, but he decided that was ridiculous and dismissed it from his mind.

And yet …

The intercom buzzed, rousing him from his thoughts. He turned away from the window, returned to his desk and pressed a key beneath a flashing light. “Tanner.”

“It’s Jerry, Blake. Can you come over to my office?”

Though the words were innocent enough, there was something in Jerry Harris’s voice that made Blake frown. “Problem?” he asked.

There was an empty silence for a moment, then the speaker in the intercom crackled to life again. “You might say that,” Harris finally replied. “Just get over here, will you?”

Blake released the switch and saw the light go out. Leaving his computer screen still glowing with the report he’d been staring at all morning, he headed for the door to the corridor, then changed his mind and went toward his secretary’s office instead. As he came out of the inner office, Meg Chandler glanced up at him. “Shall I hold your calls or forward them?”

“Hold them, I guess,” he said. Then: “Anything going on this morning?”

The young woman shrugged. “Nothing that I know of. Why?”

Now it was Blake who shrugged. “Who knows? Harris just called me and he sounds sort of …” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “I don’t know—sort of funny.”

Meg shook her head. “Don’t ask me. One thing that’s not in my job description is to know what’s going on in Jerry Harris’s mind.”

“Remind me to revise your job description, then,” Blake observed darkly as he left the office to go to the suite next door.

Jerry Harris’s secretary waved him directly into the inner office, and when he entered, Harris himself waved him to a chair. His voice dropped as he quickly finished the phone conversation he’d been involved in. When he finally turned to face Blake, his eyes were grave.

“I’m afraid we do have a problem,” he said. His eyes met Blake’s, and suddenly Blake was certain the problem concerned his son.

“It’s Mark, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to keep his voice steady.

Harris nodded. “I’m afraid he got sick at school this morning,” he said. “He’s at the sports center right now, and Marty Ames is taking care of him.”