The House of Thunder (21 page)
She almost sighed aloud with relief. “Stage fright?” she said, hoping he wouldn’t see how much she had feared the possibility of a hot romance in his life. “Not you. I can’t imagine you being afraid of anything.”
“Among other things,” he said, “I’m afraid of snakes, and I have a mild case of claustrophobia, and I dread public speaking.”
“What about English sheepdogs?”
“I adore English sheepdogs,” he said, and he kissed her on the cheek again.
“They’ll love your speech,” she assured him.
“Well, anyway, it won’t be the worst part of the evening,” he said. “No matter how bad the speech is, it’s sure to be better than the banquet food at the Holiday Inn.”
She smiled. “See you in the morning.”
He hesitated. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Remember, if you see any of them again, just tell yourself they aren’t real and—”
“—they can’t hurt me.”
“Remember that.”
“I will.”
“And listen, all the nurses on this floor have been apprised of your condition. If you have any attacks ... hallucinations, just call for a nurse, and she’ll help you. She’ll talk you down.”
“That’s good to know.”
“You aren’t alone.”
“I’m aware of that—and I’m grateful.”
He left, turning at the door to smile and wave.
He had been gone for several minutes before Susan’s sweet, warm, liquid feeling of sexual arousal faded, before her body heat subsided to a mere 98.6 degrees.
God, she thought wonderingly, he makes me feel like a young girl. A sex-crazy teenager.
She laughed softly at herself.
Then, although she wasn’t alone, she
felt
alone.
felt
alone.
Later, as she was eating dinner, she remembered what McGee had said about her inability to accept any of his compliments graciously. It was true. And odd. She thought about it for a while. She had never wanted compliments from a man half as much as she wanted them from Jeff McGee. Maybe she repeatedly turned aside his compliments as a means of forcing him to repeat them and elaborate upon them. No ... The more she thought about it, the more she suspected that she ducked any praise from him because, deep down inside, she was afraid of the strong pull that he exerted on her, was afraid of the tremendous attraction she felt for him. Over the years, she’d had a few lovers, not many, but a few, and in every case she had been very much in control of the relationship. With each man, when the time had finally come to say goodbye, she had broken off the romance with regret but always without serious emotional trauma. She had been as thoroughly in command of her heart as she had been in command of her career as a physicist. But she sensed that it couldn’t be like that with Jeff McGee. This would be a more intense relationship, more emotional, more entangling. Maybe it scared her a bit—even as she longed for it.
She knew she wanted Jeff McGee. His effect on her was undeniable. But aside from wanting him, did she also love him? That was a question which she had never needed to ask herself before.
Love?
It’s impossible, dammit, she told herself. I can’t be in love with a man I met only three short days ago. I hardly know anything about him. I haven’t even given him a real kiss. Or received one from him. Just pecks on the cheek. For God’s sake, I can’t say for sure that his feelings for me are even remotely passionate. No one falls in love overnight. It simply doesn’t happen that way.
Yet she knew it had happened to her. Just like in the movies.
All right, she thought, if it is love, then why is it? Have I fallen in love with him only because I’m sick and weak and helpless, only because I’m grateful to have a strong, reliable man on my side? If that’s it, then it could hardly be called love; it’s merely gratitude and a shameless, headlong flight from responsibility for my own life.
However, the more she thought about it, the more she came to feel that the love had been there first. Or at the very least, the love and the desperate need for McGee’s strength had come to her simultaneously.
Which came first, she thought, the chicken or the egg? And does it matter anyway? What matters is how I feel about him—and I really want him.
Since, for the time being, romance had to take second place to recuperation, she tried to put the subject out of her mind. After dinner, she read several chapters of a good mystery novel and ate three or four chocolates. The night nurse, a perky brunette named Tina Scolari, brought Susan some ginger ale. She read more of the mystery, and it got even better. Outside, the rain stopped falling, and the irritatingly monotonous drumming of water on the windowpane ceased at last. She asked for and was given a second glass of ginger ale. The evening was relatively pleasant. For a while.
10
Nurse Scolari came in at 9:15. “You’ve got an early day tomorrow. Lots of tests.” She gave Susan a small pill cup that contained a single pink tablet, the mild sedative that McGee had prescribed for her. While Susan washed the pill down with the last of her second glass of ginger ale, Nurse Scolari checked on Jessica Seiffert in the next bed, drawing back the curtain just far enough to ease behind it. When she reappeared, she said to Susan, “Lights out as soon as you feel drowsy.”
“Sooner than that, even. I just want to finish this chapter,” Susan said, indicating the book she had been reading. “Just two more paragraphs.”
“Want me to help you to the bathroom then?”
“Oh, no. I can make it on my own.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes, positive.”
The nurse stopped by the door and flipped up the switch that turned on the small night light at the far end of the room, so that Susan wouldn’t have to cross the room to do it later. The swinging door had been propped open all day; on her way out, Nurse Scolari pushed up the rubber-tipped prop that was fixed to the base of the door, and she pulled the door shut behind her.
After Susan had read two more paragraphs, she got out of bed and went into the bathroom, trailing one hand lightly along the wall, so she could lean on it for support if that were suddenly necessary. After she brushed her teeth, she returned to bed. Her legs were weak and sore, especially the calves and the backs of her thighs, but she was no longer dangerously shaky. She walked without fear of falling, even though she was not yet entirely sure-footed, and even though she knew she still couldn’t travel any great distance under her own steam.
In bed, she fluffed her pillows and used the power controls to lower the upper end of the mattress. She switched off the lamp that stood on her nightstand.
The moon-soft beams of the night light fell upon the curtain that enclosed Jessica Seiffert’s bed and, as it had done last night, the white fabric seemed to absorb the light, magnify it, and cast back a phosphoric glow all of its own, making it by far the most prominent object in the shadowy room. Susan stared at it for a minute or two and felt a renewal of the curiosity and uneasiness that had plagued her ever since the unseen Seiffert woman had been brought into the room.
“Susan...”
She nearly exploded off the bed in surprise, sat straight up, quivering, the covers thrown back, her breath quick-frozen in her lungs, her heart briefly stilled.
“Susan...”
The voice was thin, dry, brittle, a voice of dust and ashes and time-ravaged vocal cords. It possessed a disturbing, bone-chilling quality that seemed, to Susan, to be inexplicably yet undeniably sinister.
“Susan ... Susan...”
Even as low as it was, even as raspy and tortured as it was, that ruined voice was nevertheless clearly, indisputably masculine. And it was coming from behind the luminous curtain, from Jessica Seiffert’s shrouded bed.
Susan finally managed to draw a breath, with a shudder and a gasp. Her heart started again with a thud.
“Susan ...”
Last night, waking in the dead and lonely hours of the morning, she had thought she’d heard a voice calling to her from behind the curtain, but she had convinced herself that it had been only part of a dream, and she had gone back to sleep. Her senses had been dulled by sedatives, and she had not been sufficiently clear-headed to recognize that the voice was, indeed, real. Tonight, however, she was not asleep nor even sleepy yet; the sedative hadn’t begun to take effect. Wide-eyed, not the least bit drowsy, she had no doubt whatsoever that the voice was real.
“Susan ...”
It was the pleading cry of some grim and grisly siren, and it exerted an emotional, visceral pull that was almost physical in its intensity. Although she was afraid of the bizarre voice and was afraid, too, of whatever man—whatever create—owned that voice, she had the urge to get up and go to Mrs. Seiffert’s bed; she felt strangely compelled to draw back the white curtain and confront the being who was summoning her. She gripped a wad of sheets in one hand, seized the cold bed rail with the other hand, and resisted that crazy urge with all her might.
“Susan...”
She fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp, found it after too many seconds had ticked by in darkness, clicked it. Light drove back the shadows, which seemed to retreat only with the greatest reluctance, as if they were hungry wolves that were slinking grudgingly away from prey that had at first appeared to be easy pickings.
Susan stared at the curtained bed. Waited.
There wasn’t a sound.
Ten seconds passed. Twenty. Half a minute.
Nothing. Silence.
At last she said, “Who’s there?”
No response.
More than twenty-four hours had passed since Susan had returned from her wheelchair constitutional to discover that a roommate had been installed in the other bed. Mrs. Baker had told her that it was Jessica Seiffert; otherwise, she wouldn’t have known with whom she was sharing her room. More than twenty-four hours, and still she hadn’t gotten a glimpse of Mrs. Seiffert. Nor had she heard the old woman speak a single word: she’d heard only that vague, wordless murmur that had answered Jeff McGee’s questions, that soft mumbled response to the various nurses who had gone behind the curtain. People had come and gone and come again, attending to Mrs. Seiffert with commendable concern and diligence—emptying the old woman’s bedpan, taking her temperature and her blood pressure, timing her pulse, feeding her meals, giving her medicine, changing her bed linens, offering her encouragement—but in spite of all that activity, Susan had not gotten even one brief peek at the mysterious occupant of the other bed.
And now she was troubled by the unsettling notion that Jessie Seiffert had never been in that bed to begin with. It was someone else. Ernest Harch? One of the other three fraternity men? Or something even worse than that?
This is insane.
It had to be Jessica Seiffert in that bed, for if it was not her, then everyone in the hospital was involved in some grotesque conspiracy. Which was impossible. Thoughts like those—paranoid fantasies of complicated conspiracies—were only additional proof of her brain dysfunction. Mrs. Baker hadn’t lied to her. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name. Yet she couldn’t stop considering the possibility that Jessica Seiffert didn’t exist, that the unseen roommate was someone far less innocent and far less harmless than an old woman dying of cancer.
“Who’s there?” she demanded again.
Again, there was no reply.
“Dammit,” she said, “I know I didn’t just imagine you!”
Or did I?
“I heard you call me,” she said.
Or did I only think I heard it?
“Who are you? What are you doing here? What do you want from me?”
“Susan...”
She jerked as if she had been slapped, for the voice was even eerier in bright light than it had been in darkness. It belonged to darkness; it seemed impossible, twice as monstrous, when heard in the light.
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