The House of Thunder (31 page)

Although Willawauk was like ten thousand other towns in so many details, a couple of things seemed...
wrong.
It seemed to Susan that everything in town was too neat. Every one of the stores looked as if it had been painted within the last month. Even the Arco, Union 76, and Mobil stations sparkled pristinely in the rain, gasoline pumps gleaming, service bay doors raised to proudly reveal brightly lighted, neatly ordered garages. There was not a single piece of litter in the gutters. Trees were planted in regularly spaced cutouts in the sidewalks on both sides of the street, and these were not merely well pruned, but meticulously shaped into two long lines of perfect clones. In all of the many street lamps, not one bulb was burned out. Not one. The only advertising sign with a fluttering neon letter was the one at the Dew Drop Inn, and that seemed to be the town’s worst example of blight.

Perhaps Willawauk had an exceptionally strong and widely shared civic pride and an especially energetic citizenry. Or perhaps the rain and the thin veil of fog were softening the scene, concealing the frayed and tattered edges of everything. Except that rain usually made a town look drearier and shabbier than it actually was, not better. And could civic pride really explain a town that looked almost as if robots inhabited it?

Another strange thing was the small number of cars in view. In three blocks, she had passed only three cars and a camper van parked at the curb. In the lot beside the Main Street Cinema, there had been only two cars, and at the Dew Drop Inn, there had been only one other and one pickup truck. So far, she hadn’t passed another car in motion; she was the only one driving tonight.

Well, the weather
was
wretched. People were wise to stay home on a night like this.

On the other hand, how many people did she know who usually did the wise thing?

Not very damned many.

Not
this
many.

The Dew Drop Inn was the kind of place that did good business in the middle of a blizzard. A simple rain wouldn’t stop the serious drinkers from making their way to their favorite hangout, and most of them would come in cars, the better to kill each other as they weaved blearily home at two o’clock in the morning.

Keep driving, Susan told herself. Drive all the way through this burg and keep on going. Don’t stop here. Something is wrong with this place.

But she didn’t have a map, and she wasn’t familiar with the countryside around these parts, and she didn’t know how far it was to the nearest town, and she was also afraid that what had happened to her in the hospital—in
Milestone—
was turning her into a paranoid after all. Then, at the beginning of the fourth block, she saw a place where she was sure to find help, and she pulled her car into the parking lot.

 
 
It was a squat, stone building with a slate roof and all-glass front doors, just south of the considerably more stately county courthouse.

Susan parked the stolen Pontiac near the entrance. She was glad to be getting out of the car; already, the odor of stale tobacco smoke had ceased to be the least bit appealing, even if it didn’t remind her of the hospital.

She ran through the hammering rain. She ducked under a mammoth spruce tree, through which the cold wind soughed in an enormous chorus of whispers. From there she dashed to the shelter of a white aluminum awning, and thus to the glass doors, through which she pushed.

She found herself in a typically drab, institutional room with gray walls, fluorescent lights and a speckled, multicolored Armstrong tile floor designed to conceal wear. A U-shaped counter separated the largest part of the main room from a waiting area just inside the doors. Susan walked past several uncomfortable-looking metal chairs, past two small tables on which were stacked a variety of public service pamphlets, and went straight to the counter.

On the other side, there were several desks, file cabinets, a large work table, a bottled-water dispenser, a photocopier, a giant wall map of the county, and a huge bulletin board that was covered with tacked-on bulletins and photographs and wanted notices and odd scraps of paper.

In an adjacent alcove, out of sight, a woman dispatcher was talking to a patrol officer on a shortwave radio. The storm was throwing in bursts of static.

In the main room, there was only one man. He was sitting at a desk, typing on an IBM Selectric, his back turned to the counter and to Susan.

“Excuse me,” Susan said, brushing at her rain-beaded eyelashes with the back of one hand. “Can you help me?”

He swung around on his swivel chair, smiled, and said, “I’m Officer Whitlock. What can I do for you?”

He was young, perhaps twenty or twenty-one.

He was a bit on the pudgy side.

He had dirty blond hair, a round face, a dimpled chin, a pug nose, and the small quick eyes of a pig.

He had a twisted, nasty smile.

He was Carl Jellicoe.

Susan sucked in a breath that seemed to pierce her lungs as if it were a nail, and she wasn’t able to expel it.

When he had been wearing a hospital orderly’s uniform, he had called himself Dennis Bradley. Now he was wearing a brown uniform with the County Sheriff’s Department seal stitched to his left sleeve and to the breast pocket of his shirt, and he carried a .45-caliber revolver in a black leather holster on his hip, and he called himself Officer Whitlock.

Susan couldn’t speak. Shock had seared her vocal cords as thoroughly as a gas flame could have; her throat was parched, cracking; her mouth was suddenly hot, dry, and filled with a burnt-out taste.

She couldn’t move.

She finally let out her breath with a sob, and she gasped for more air, but she still couldn’t move.

“Surprise, surprise,” Jellicoe said, giggling, getting up from his swivel chair.

Susan shook her head, slowly at first, then vehemently, trying to deny his existence.

“Did you really think you could get away from us that easily? Did you really?” he asked, standing with his legs spread, hitching up his holster.

Susan stared at him, transfixed, her feet fused to the floor. Her hands were clenched tightly around the edge of the wooden counter, as if that were her only grip on reality.

Not taking his piggish little eyes off Susan, Jellicoe called out to someone in an adjoining room. “Hey, come look at what we’ve got here!”

Another deputy appeared. He was twenty or twenty-one, tall, with red hair and hazel eyes and a fair complexion that was spattered with freckles. In his hospital orderly’s uniform, he had called himself Patrick O’Hara. Susan didn’t know what he called himself now, but she knew what he had called himself thirteen years ago, when he had been a student at Briarstead College, when he had helped kill Jerry Stein in the House of Thunder: Herbert Parker.

“My, my,” Parker said. “The lady looks distressed.”

“Well, you see, the poor thing thought she’d gotten away from us,” Jellicoe said.

“Did she really?” Parker said.

“Really.”

“Doesn’t she know she can never get away from us? Doesn’t she know we’re dead?”

Jellicoe grinned at her. “Don’t you know we’re dead, you silly little bitch?”

“You read about it in the newspapers,” Parker reminded her. “Don’t you recall?”

“The car accident?” Jellicoe prodded.

“About eleven years ago, it was.”

In the communications alcove, the unseen dispatcher continued to talk with cruising patrol officers over the shortwave radio, as if nothing unusual were happening out here in the main room. But the woman
must
know.

“We rolled that damned car over like it was just a little toy,” Jellicoe said.

“Rolled it twice,” Parker said.

“What a mess it was.”

“What a mess
we
were.”

“All because of this slut.”

They both started toward the counter, neither of them in a hurry, ambling between the desks, smiling.

“And now she thinks it’ll be easy to run away from us,” Carl Jellicoe said.

Parker said, “We’re dead, you stupid bitch. Don’t you understand what that means? You can’t
hide
from dead men.”

“Because we can be anywhere—”

“—everywhere—”

“—all at the same time.”

“That’s one of the advantages of being dead.”

“Which doesn’t
have
many advantages.”

Jellicoe giggled again.

They were almost to the counter.

Susan was gasping now, breathing as frantically as a pumping bellows in a blazing forge.

“You aren’t dead, damn you,” she said, abruptly finding her voice.

“Oh, yes. We’re dead—”

“—and buried—”

“—and gone to Hell—”

“—and come back again.”

“And now this place is Hell.”

“For you, it is, Susan. For you, for a little while, this is Hell.”

Jellicoe was moving around to the gate, where a section of the countertop lifted to allow passage between the waiting area and the bullpen.

A heavy glass ashtray was on the counter, within Susan’s reach. She finally moved, snatched up the ashtray, and threw it at Jellicoe’s head.

He didn’t just stand there and let the missile pass magically through his body to prove that he was, indeed, a ghost. For a dead man, Jellicoe exhibited a surprisingly healthy fear of being hurt. He ducked behind the counter.

The ashtray missed him, struck the metal desk, cracked apart, and clattered in pieces to the floor.

A long-handled, police-issue flashlight also stood on the counter, and Susan seized that, too. She swung it back over her shoulder, prepared to let it fly at Jellicoe, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Herbert Parker was drawing his revolver, so she fled across the waiting area, through the glass doors, into the night.

The boughs of the giant spruce flailed at one another, and the tree’s tens of thousands of green needles were briefly colored silver by a flash of lightning.

Susan ran to the stolen Pontiac and jerked open the door. She got in and reached for the keys, which she had left dangling in the ignition.

The keys were gone.

She glanced toward the glass doors.

Jellicoe and Parker were just coming out of the slumpstone building. They weren’t in a hurry.

Susan slid across the seat, frantically pushed open the door on the passenger’s side, and got out of the car, putting it between her and the two men.

She looked around, determining the best route of escape, hoping that her legs would hold up. Thank God for those physical therapy sessions with Mrs. Atkinson! Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gotten this far. But four days of exercise and good food didn’t mean she was back to full power. Eventually, she would collapse, and that moment would come for her long before it would come for either Jellicoe or Parker.

Above the roar of the rain, above the trumpeting of the wind, Jellicoe called to her. “There’s no use running, Susan.”

“There’s no place to hide!” Parker shouted.

“Fuck you,” she said, and she ran.

16

The house had a welcoming look to it. There was a white picket fence, a shrub-bordered walkway, and a wide front porch with an ornate wooden railing and an old-fashioned porch swing suspended from the rafters. Warm yellow light shone through the lace curtains that covered the downstairs windows.

For a few minutes, Susan stood at the gate in the fence, studying the house, wondering if it was a safe place. She was cold, thoroughly wet, and miserable, and the rain was still coming down hard. She was eager to get inside where it was warm and dry, but she didn’t intend to walk into another trap if she could avoid it; she wanted to feel
right
about the house before she went up to the door, rang the bell, and asked for help.

Go on, she urged herself. Do it. Don’t just stand here. The whole damned town can’t be part of the conspiracy, for God’s sake!

Everyone at the hospital was a part of it, of course, but then it wasn’t a
real
hospital. It was the Milestone Corporation, whatever the hell
that
was.

The police were involved, too, which was outrageous and scary, constituting a stunning setback for her, but she understood how such a thing was possible. Sometimes, in a small town like Willawauk, if one major company totally dominated the economic life of the community—through the jobs it provided and the taxes it paid—then it wielded tremendous power over the local authorities, even to the extent of being able to use the police as a sub rosa enforcement arm for the company’s own purposes and protection. Susan didn’t know for sure that Milestone was
the
employer of note in town, but it clearly had used its influence and a lot of money to corrupt the sheriff’s department. The situation was outlandish, although not unbelievable.

But that was where the conspiracy ended, surely. Milestone, all of its employees, and the police were part of it; all right, she could accept that much. Already, however, the size of the conspiracy was unwieldy. It couldn’t possibly encompass anyone else without starting to unravel at the seams. By their very nature, conspiracies could not include
thousands
of people.

Nevertheless, she stood in the rain by the gate, studying the house, envying the people who were warm and dry inside—and fearing them, too.

She was three blocks from the sheriff’s offices. She had gotten away from Jellicoe and Parker with little trouble, running down alleyways, staying in the shadows, darting from tree to tree across several lawns.

In fact, now that she thought about it, avoiding Jellicoe and Parker had been too easy. Like finding the keys in the Pontiac when she needed a car. With good reason, she had come to distrust easy escapes.