The House of Thunder (33 page)
Susan could see what they wanted her to believe. They wanted her to think that she had seen Millie’s mezuzah on the bathroom floor and had linked it subconsciously to Jerry Stein’s mezuzah, and thereby triggered another attack of nasty hallucinations.
But Millie’s behavior had made Susan suspicious. And now she was sure that her problem was not merely psychological. They were running her through some kind of... test or program... a charade, the purpose of which she could not begin to understand. She was sure of that now.
But who were
they?
they?
“I hope you find it,” she said to Millie, smiling sweetly.
“The chain must have broke,” Millie said. “It could have fallen off anywhere, I guess.”
The nurse wasn’t a good liar. Neither her eyes nor her voice contained any conviction.
An orderly entered, pushing a cafeteria cart. Millie put Susan’s breakfast tray on the bed table. Then both she and the orderly left.
Alone again, Susan opened her hand. The mezuzah was damp with perspiration.
Susan went into the bathroom, snapped on the fluorescent lights, and closed the door, leaving her untouched breakfast to get cold on the tray.
She began to examine the walls, starting behind the commode. It was drywall construction, not plaster; it was a pebbly surface, white, freshly painted, without a visible crack. At the corner, she examined the drywall joint with special care, but she didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. The second wall bore no cracks, either, and the second corner was as smooth and seamless as the first one had been. The sink stood in the middle of the third wall; above the sink, the mirror filled in from the backsplash to the ceiling. On both sides of the sink and the mirror, the wall was perfectly even in texture, unmarked, normal.
Three-quarters of the way around the small room, in the third corner, behind the door, she found what she was looking for. The drywall joint was marred by an unnaturally straight hairline crack that extended all the way from the mitered junction of the three-inch-high base molding to the ceiling.
This is madness.
She raised her hands to her face, rubbed her eyes gently with her fingertips, blinked, looked at the corner again. The crack was still there, a knife-edge line that clearly had not been caused by the settling of the building over the years. It was a deliberate feature of the wall.
She went to the sink again, stared at the mirror, looking at the surface of it, not at her own reflection. It was a single sheet of glass; there was no division down the middle of it, nothing as obvious as that. Apparently, it served as an unconnected flange; it was probably fixed to the wall only on the left side, neatly concealing the pivot point behind it.
She knelt on the cold tile floor and peered beneath the sink. All of the plumbing, both the drain and the two water lines, came up out of the floor; nothing came out of the wall. She squirmed under the sink as far as she could and peered at the shadowed drywall back there. It was scarred by another crack that evidently came down from the ceiling, for the most part hidden by the mirror and the sink, appearing here and running all the way to the baseboard; this crack was as straight as a plumb line, just as the one in the corner was. The base molding had been cut through; the cut aligned with the crack in the wall. Susan was able to insert a fingernail into the crevice where the two sections of molding met; it had never been filled with putty.
She could feel a faint, cold draft puffing through that narrow gap, a vague but icy breath against her fingertips.
She retreated from beneath the sink and stood up, brushing her dusty hands together.
She stared thoughtfully at the six-foot-wide expanse of drywall between the corner by the door and the middle of the sink. Apparently, that entire section of the wall swung inward, away from the bathroom.
This was how Ernest Harch had exited, the severed head tucked under his arm, unaware that the mezuzah had fallen to the floor behind him.
What lay on the other side?
Madness.
Behind the second bed, the one in which Jessica Seiffert had lain until yesterday afternoon, Susan inspected the wall. It was marked by another hairline, ruler-straight crack that extended from the floor to the ceiling. From a distance of more than six or eight feet, the line was invisible. A similar seam was hidden in the corner.
Susan put one hand flat against the wall and pressed hard at several points on both sides of both cracks, hoping that the hidden doorway was operated by a pressure latch of some kind. But the wall remained in place in spite of her careful prodding.
She knelt down and squinted at the baseboard. Felt along it with one hand.
Again, there was a draft coming out of the gaps; faint but detectable, and cold.
Near the left-hand crack, she found a trace of grease. Lubricant for the swinging partition’s secret hinges?
She pressed every couple of inches along the molding, but she could find no pressure latch there, either.
Secret doors? It seemed too bizarre to be true.
Shadowy conspirators moving clandestinely through the walls? That was a classic paranoid fantasy.
But what about the seams in the drywall?
Imagination.
And the drafts seeping through from hidden rooms?
Perceptual confusion.
And the grease?
Misirtterpretatiou of visual and tactile stimuli due to brain dysfunction. A tiny cerebral hemorrhage. Or a sand-grain blood clot. Or a brain lesion. Or a-
“Like hell it is,” she muttered.
Her oatmeal had gotten cold and gummy. She ate it anyway ; more than ever, she needed to keep up her strength.
While she ate, she tried to figure out what the hell was going on. She seemed stuck with the conspiracy theory, though it made no sense at all.
Who could possibly have the resources and the determination to organize such an elaborate plot, such an incredible masquerade, involving four dead ringers that must have been located with only the most titanic effort? And for what purpose? Why all this expenditure of time and money and energy? What could be gained? Was some relative of one of the dead fraternity men—a father, mother, sister, brother—seeking revenge on Susan for her testimony at the trial, even though she had told only the truth? Seeking revenge—after thirteen years? By trying to drive her out of her mind? No. Good heavens, that was absurd! That was a scenario straight out of a comic book. People didn’t seek revenge by means of such complicated—and
expensive-
conspiracies
.
If you were dead set on getting revenge for something like this, then you did it with a knife or a gun or poison. And you didn’t wait thirteen years, either. Surely, a raging hatred—a hatred sufficiently powerful to inspire a vengeance killing—could not be sustained for thirteen years.
expensive-
conspiracies
.
If you were dead set on getting revenge for something like this, then you did it with a knife or a gun or poison. And you didn’t wait thirteen years, either. Surely, a raging hatred—a hatred sufficiently powerful to inspire a vengeance killing—could not be sustained for thirteen years.
But what kind of hospital had hidden rooms and secret doors in its walls?
In a madhouse clinic, in a sanitarium for the hopelessly insane, there might be such secret doors—but only in the fevered minds of the most severely disturbed patients. Yet these doors were not merely figments of her demented imagination; she wasn’t just a disassociated schizophrenic sitting in a padded cell, fantasizing that she was in some ordinary hospital in a town called Willawauk. She was
here,
damn it all. This was really happening. The secret doors did exist.
here,
damn it all. This was really happening. The secret doors did exist.
As she thought back over the past four days, she remembered a few strange incidents that hadn’t seemed important at the time but which seemed vitally important now. They were incidents that should have alerted her to the fact that this place and the people in it were not what they pretended to be.
Viteski. The first indication that something was amiss had come from him.
Saturday night, when Susan had awakened from her coma, Dr. Viteski had been stiff, ill at ease, noticeably uncomfortable with her. When he had told her about her accident and about Willawauk County Hospital, his voice had been so stilted, so wooden, that each word had seemed like a cast-off splinter. At times he had sounded as if he were reciting lines from a well-memorized script. Perhaps that was precisely what he
had
been doing.
had
been doing.
Mrs. Baker had made a mistake, too. On Monday, as the nurse was finishing up her shift and preparing to go home for the day, she had spoken of having a hot date that night with a man whose shoulders were big enough “to measure a doorway.” Two days later, when Susan had asked belatedly whether the date was a success or not, Mrs. Baker had been lost for a moment, utterly baffled. For a
long
moment. Too long. Now, it seemed perfectly clear to Susan that the story about the lumberman and the bowling date and the hamburger dinner had been nothing but a spur-of-the-moment ad-lib, the kind of sharp and colorful detail that a good actor frequently invents in order to contribute to the verisimilitude of a role. In actuality, there had been no aging, virile lumberman. No bowling date. Poor pudgy, graying Thelma Baker had not enjoyed a wild night of unrestrained passion, after all. The nurse merely improvised that romantic tale to flesh out her characterization, then later forgot what she had improvised—untit Susan reminded her.
long
moment. Too long. Now, it seemed perfectly clear to Susan that the story about the lumberman and the bowling date and the hamburger dinner had been nothing but a spur-of-the-moment ad-lib, the kind of sharp and colorful detail that a good actor frequently invents in order to contribute to the verisimilitude of a role. In actuality, there had been no aging, virile lumberman. No bowling date. Poor pudgy, graying Thelma Baker had not enjoyed a wild night of unrestrained passion, after all. The nurse merely improvised that romantic tale to flesh out her characterization, then later forgot what she had improvised—untit Susan reminded her.
Susan finished eating the cold, gummy oatmeal. She started on the hardened whole-wheat toast, upon which the butter had congealed in milky-looking swirls, and she washed it down with swigs of orange juice.
The bruise,
she thought as she continued to eat.
she thought as she continued to eat.
The bruise was another thing that should have made her suspicious. On Tuesday afternoon, when she had been trapped in the elevator with the four dead fraternity men, Harch had pinched her arm very hard. Later, there had been a small bruise on her biceps, two inches above the crook of her arm. She had told herself that she had unwittingly sustained the bruise during the exercise period in the therapy room, and that her subconscious mind had incorporated that injury into the hallucination. But that had not been the case. The bruise had been proof that Harch and the others were real; it had been like the mezuzah in the sense that both the bruise and the religious pendant were fragments of supposed hallucinations that had survived the dissipation of the rest of those night-mares.
Suddenly, Susan thought she knew why Harch had pinched her. He hadn’t just been delighting in the opportunity to torture her. He had pinched her a moment or two before she had grown dizzy, seconds before she had swooned and passed out on the wheeled stretcher. She now understood that the cruel pinch was intended to cover the sting of a hypodermic needle. Harch had pinched her hard enough to make her cry, and then one of the other three men had quickly administered an injection before the first pain subsided, before she could distinguish the second pain as a separate event. Once the four men had thoroughly terrorized her, there had been, of course, no way for them to bring a dramatic and credible conclusion to the scene, unless she conveniently passed out—
because they were neither ghosts who could simply vanish in a puff of supernatural light and smoke, nor hallucinated images that would fade away as
she
finally
regained her senses. When she had failed to oblige them by fainting, they had been forced to knock her unconscious with a drug. And they had covered the injection with a pinch because, after all, no self-respecting ghost would require the assistance of sodium pentathol or some like substance in order to effect a suitably mysterious exit.
because they were neither ghosts who could simply vanish in a puff of supernatural light and smoke, nor hallucinated images that would fade away as
she
finally
regained her senses. When she had failed to oblige them by fainting, they had been forced to knock her unconscious with a drug. And they had covered the injection with a pinch because, after all, no self-respecting ghost would require the assistance of sodium pentathol or some like substance in order to effect a suitably mysterious exit.
Susan paused as she was about to start eating a sweet roll with lemon icing, and she pushed up the sleeve of her hospital gown. The bruise was still there on her biceps, yellowing now. She peered closely at it, but too much time had elapsed for her to be able to find the tiny point at which the needle had pierced her skin.
Undoubtedly, her tormentors had made other mistakes which she had failed to notice. Indeed, she wouldn’t have made anything of the mistakes that she
had
noticed, not if the Harch look-alike hadn’t accidentally left the mezuzah behind in the bathroom, for the mezuzah had set her imagination ablaze and had cast a bright light of healthy suspicion upon her memories of other curious incidents.
had
noticed, not if the Harch look-alike hadn’t accidentally left the mezuzah behind in the bathroom, for the mezuzah had set her imagination ablaze and had cast a bright light of healthy suspicion upon her memories of other curious incidents.
All things considered, the conspirators had brought it off exceptionally well thus far; brilliantly, in fact.
But who
were
these people? Who had put so much money and energy and time into the painstakingly detailed creation of this three-dimensional drama? And for what purpose?
were
these people? Who had put so much money and energy and time into the painstakingly detailed creation of this three-dimensional drama? And for what purpose?
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