The House of Thunder (9 page)

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.

“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 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 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 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 ...”

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 Johnson? Are you sure of that? Are you sure his name’s not Randy Lee Quince?”

The nurse frowned. “Quince? No. It’s Peter Johnson, all right. I’m sure of that.”

Talking to herself as much as to the nurse, Susan said, “Thirteen years ago ... back in Pennsylvania ... I knew a young man who looked exactly like that.”

“Thirteen years ago?” the nurse said. “Well, then for sure it wasn’t this guy. Peter’s only nineteen or twenty. Thirteen years ago, he’d have been a little boy.”

Startled, but only for a moment, Susan quickly realized that this man had been young. Hardly more than a kid. He looked just like Randy Quince had looked, but not as Quince would look today. The only way he could be Randy Lee Quince was if Quince had spent the past thirteen years in suspended animation.

 
 
For lunch, she was given fewer soft foods than before, more solid fare. It was a welcome change of diet, and she cleaned her plate. She was eager to regain her strength and get out of the hospital.

To please Mrs. Baker, Susan lowered her bed, curled on her side, and pretended to nap. Of course, sleep was impossible. She couldn’t stop thinking about Bill Richmond and Peter Johnson.

Two look-alikes? Dead ringers, both showing up in the same place, within one day of each other?

What were the odds on that? Astronomical. It wasn’t merely unlikely; it was impossible.

Yet not impossible. Because they were here, dammit. She had seen them.

Rather than the chance arrival of two dead ringers, it seemed at least marginally more likely that the real Harch and the real Quince had, by chance, checked into the same hospital that she had checked into. She spent some time considering the possibility that they weren’t merely look-alikes, that they were the genuine articles, but she couldn’t make much of a case for that notion. They might both have changed their names and assumed entirely new identities after their individual periods of probation had expired, after they could quietly slip away without alerting probation officers. They might have stayed in touch during the years Harch was in prison, and later on they might have moved together to the same town in Oregon. There wasn’t really any coincidence involved in that part of the scenario; after all, they had been close friends. They might even both have become ill at the same time and might have gone to the hospital on the same day; that would be a coincidence, all right, but not a particularly incredible one. Where it didn’t hold up, where the whole house of cards collapsed, was when you considered their miraculously youthful appearance. Perhaps one of them might have passed thirteen years without noticeably aging; perhaps one of them might have been fortunate enough to inherit Methuselah’s genes. But surely both men wouldn’t have remained utterly untouched by the passing of so many years. No, that was simply too much to accept.

So where does that leave me? she wondered. With two look-alikes? The old doppelgänger theory again? If they are just a couple of doubles for Harch and Quince, were they cast up here by chance? Or is there a purpose to their arrival in this place, at this particular time? What sort of purpose? Is someone out to get me? And isn’t that a crazy thought, for God’s sake!

She opened her eyes and stared through the bed railing, across the adjacent bed, at the iron-gray sky beyond the window. Chilled, she pulled the covers tighter around her.

She considered other explanations.

Maybe they didn’t look as much like Harch and Quince as she thought they did. McGee had suggested that her memory-pictures of their faces were certain to have grown cloudy over the years, whether or not she recognized that fact. He could be right. If you rounded up the real Harch and the real Quince, and if you stood them beside Richmond and Johnson, there might be only a mild resemblance. This dead ringer stuff could be mostly in her head.