The House of Thunder (22 page)
Stay calm, she told herself. Stay cool. Stay collected. If I’ve got a brain injury that causes me to see things that are not really there, then it’s entirely logical that it also causes me to hear sounds that were never made. Auditory hallucinations. There are such things.
“Susan...”
She had to regain control of herself before this episode progressed any further; she had to quickly squelch this incipient hysteria. She had to prove to herself that there was no voice coming from behind the curtain, that it was only an imagined voice. The best way to prove it was to go straight over there and draw back the curtain. The only thing she would find in Jessica Seiffert’s bed was an old woman who was dying of cancer.
“Susan...”
“Shut up,” she said.
Her hands were cold and damp. She wiped the icy sweat on the sheets. She took a deep breath, as if she thought that courage was merely a vapor that could be siphoned out of the air.
“Susau... Susan
...”
...”
Stop procrastinating, she told herself. Get up, get moving, get it over with.
She put down the safety rail and pushed back the covers and sat on the edge of the bed, legs dangling. She stood up, holding on to the mattress. She had gotten out of the bed on the side nearest Jessica Seiffert. Her slippers were on the other side, out of reach, and the green tile floor was cold against her bare feet. The distance between the two beds was only nine or ten feet. She could cover it in three shuffling steps, four at most. She took the first one.
“S.ssuuuuusssaaaaannn
...”
...”
The thing in the bed—and in spite of her brave and oh-so-rational thoughts about auditory hallucinations, she could only think of it now as a
thing
—seemed to sense both her approach and her timidity. Its voice became even more hoarse, even more insistent and sinister than it had been; it did not speak her name so much as moan it.
thing
—seemed to sense both her approach and her timidity. Its voice became even more hoarse, even more insistent and sinister than it had been; it did not speak her name so much as moan it.
“Sssuuuuusssaaaaannn ...”
She considered returning to the bed and pushing the call button that would summon a nurse. But what if the nurse came and heard nothing? What if the nurse pulled back the curtain and found only an old, pathetic, dying woman who was murmuring senselessly in a drug-induced stupor? Which was almost certainly what she would find, of course. What then?
She took a second step toward the other bed, and the cold floor seemed to be getting colder.
The curtain fluttered as if something had brushed against the other side of it.
Susan’s ice-water blood grew colder and moved sluggishly through her veins in spite of the rapid beating of her heart.
“Sssuuuuusssaaaaannn ...”
She retreated one step.
The curtain fluttered again, and she saw a dark shape behind it.
The voice called her again, and this time there was definitely a threatening tone to it.
The curtain rustled, then flapped violently. It rattled the hooks by which it was suspended from the ceiling track. A dark form, shapeless but surely much too large to be a cancer-withered woman, groped clumsily against the far side of the white fabric, as if searching for a place to part it.
Susan was stricken by a premonition of death. Perhaps that was a sure sign of her mental imbalance; perhaps it was irrefutable proof that she was irrational and was imagining everything, yet the premonition was too powerful to be ignored. Death. Death was very near. Suddenly, the last thing on earth she wanted was to see what lay beyond the curtain.
She turned and fled. She stumbled around the foot of her own bed, then glanced back.
The curtain appeared to be caught in a turbulent whirlpool of crossdrafts—though she could feel no air moving in the room. It trembled and fluttered and rustled and billowed. And it was beginning to slide open.
She shuffled quickly into the bathroom—the door to the hall seemed too far away-and her legs protested at the speed that she demanded from them. In the bathroom, she closed the door and leaned against it, breathless.
It
isn’t
real. It can’t hurt me.
isn’t
real. It can’t hurt me.
The bathroom was dark, and she could not tolerate being alone in the dark now. She felt for the switch and finally located it; the white walls, the white sink and commode, and the white ceramic-tile floor all gleamed brightly.
It can’t hurt me.
She was still holding the doorknob. It moved in her hand. Someone was turning it from the other side.
She twisted the latch. It was loose, broken.
“No,” she said. “No.”
She held the knob as tightly as she could, and she put her shoulder to the door, digging her heels into the tile floor of the bathroom. For interminably long seconds, seconds that seemed like minutes, the person on the other side continued to try the knob, working it back and forth; it strained against Susan’s hand, but she gritted her teeth and tensed her wasted muscles and refused to let herself be budged. After a while the knob stopped moving. She thought the surrender might be only a trick, so she maintained a firm grip.
Something scratched on the other side of the door. The sound, so near her face, startled her. It was a stealthy noise at first, but it quickly grew louder. Fingernails. Clawing at the wood.
“Who’s there?”
She received no answer.
The nails scratched furiously for perhaps half a minute. Then paused. Then scratched again, but languidly this time. Now—steadily and relentlessly. Now—desultorily.
“What do you want?”
The only response was a new fit of scratching.
“Listen, if you’ll just please tell me who you are, I’ll open the door.”
That promise accomplished nothing, either.
She listened worriedly to the fingernails that picked determinedly along the edges of the door, exploring the cracks between the door and the frame, as if purchase and leverage might be found there, sufficient to tear the door open or rip it from its hinges with one mighty heave.
Finally, after two or three more minutes of fruitless but busy scraping and probing, the noise stopped abruptly.
Susan tensed herself and prepared to recommence the struggle with the doorknob, but, much to her surprise and relief, the battle did not begin again.
She waited hopefully, hardly daring to breathe.
The bathroom gleamed in the hard fluorescent light, and a drop of water made a soft, soft
tink
as it fell from the faucet onto the metal stopper in the sink.
tink
as it fell from the faucet onto the metal stopper in the sink.
Gradually, Susan’s panic subsided. A trickle of doubt found its way into her mind; the trickle became a stream, a flood. Slowly, reason reasserted itself. She began to consider, once more, the possibility that she had been hallucinating. After all, if there really had been a man—or something else—behind the curtain, and if he really had wanted to get his hands on her, she would not have been able to hold the door against him. Not in her enfeebled condition. If someone actually had been twisting the doorknob—and now she was virtually awash in doubt, floundering in it—then the person on the other side had been markedly weaker than she was. And no one in such poor health could have posed a serious threat to her.
She waited. Leaned hard against the door.
Her breath came to her more easily now.
Time passed at a measured, plodding pace, and her heart slowed, and the silence continued without interruption.
But as yet she was unable to relax her grip on the doorknob. She stared at her hand. Her knuckles were sharp and bloodless. Her fingers looked like talons curled around the metal knob.
She realized that Mrs. Seiffert was the only one around who was weaker than she herself. Had Mrs. Seiffert tried to get out of bed on her own? Is that what all the thrashing behind the curtain had been about? And had the old woman somehow crossed the room in drugged confusion or in desperate pain? Had it been Mrs. Seiffert clawing at the door, unable to speak, seeking help, scratching and scratching at the wood in a frantic bid to gain attention?
Good God, Susan thought, was I defending the door against a dying woman who was seeking nothing but my help?
But she didn’t open the door. Couldn’t. Not yet.
Eventually, she thought: No. No, Mrs. Seiffert, if she exists, is too debilitated to get out of bed and cross the room all by herself. She’s an invalid, a limp bag of flesh and bones. It couldn’t possibly have been Mrs. Seiffert. Besides, the threatening form that had risen up behind the curtain couldn’t have been Mrs. Seiffert, either. It was too big.
In the sink, a drop of water fell.
On the other hand, maybe there hadn’t been a rising form behind the curtain to begin with. Maybe the curtain had never really moved, either. Maybe there had been no mysterious voice, no hand turning the knob, no persistent scratching at the door. All in her head.
Brain dysfunction.
A sand-grain blood clot.
A tiny cerebral capillary with an even tinier hemorrhage.
A chemicoelectrical imbalance of some kind.
The more she thought about it, the easier it was to rule out supernatural and conspiratorial explanations. After a lot of consideration, she seemed to be left with only two possibilities: either she had imagined the entire thing ... or Mrs. Seiffert now lay dead just the other side of the bathroom door, a victim of Susan’s mental problems.
In either case, there was no one after her, no reason to continue to guard the door. At last she leaned away from it; her shoulder ached, and her entire left side was stiff. She relaxed her iron-tight grip on the knob, which was now slick and shiny with her sour sweat.
She opened the door. Just a crack.
No one tried to force his way into the bathroom.
Still frightened, prepared to slam the door shut at the slightest sign of movement, she opened it wider: two inches, three. She looked down, expecting the worst, but there was no elderly dead woman sprawled on the floor, no gray face contorted in an eternal expression of contempt and accusation.
The hospital room looked normal. The lamp burned beside her bed, and her covers were heaped in a tangled mess, as she had left them. The night light was still on, too. The curtain around Jessica Seiffert’s bed was in place, hanging straight from the ceiling to the floor, stirred neither by a draft nor by a malevolent hand.
Susan slowly opened the door all the way.
No one leaped at her.
No dust-choked, half-human voice called to her.
So ... every bit of it was the product of my imagination, she thought dismally. My runaway imagination, galloping merrily off on another journey through temporary madness. My damned, sick, traitorous brain.
All of her life, Susan had limited her drinking to infrequent social occasions, and even then she had allowed herself no more than two cocktails in one evening, for she had always hated being drunk. She had been booze-blasted once, just once, when she was a senior in high school, and that had been a memorable and extremely nasty experience. No artificially induced high, no matter how pleasant it might be, had ever seemed worth the loss of control that went along with it.
Now, without taking a single sip of alcohol, she could lose control in an instant and not even be aware that she had lost it. At least when you got drunk, you relinquished the reins of reason slowly, in stages, and you knew that you were no longer in the driver’s seat. Drunk, you knew that your senses could not be trusted. But brain dysfunction was more insidious than that.
It scared her.
What if Jeff McGee couldn’t find the problem?
What if there was no cure?
What if she was forced to spend the rest of her life teetering on the razor-edge of insanity, frequently toppling over the brink for short but devastating travels in the shadowy land of Never-Was?
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