The House of Thunder (9 page)
“So?”
“You may not remember him quite as well as you think you do,” McGee said.
“Oh, I remember. Perfectly. This Richmond is the same height as Harch, the same weight, the same build.”
“It’s a fairly common body type.”
“He has the same blond hair, the same square features, the same
eyes.
Such light gray eyes, almost transparent. How many people have eyes like that? Not very many. Feature by feature, this Bill Richmond and Ernest Harch are duplicates. It’s not just a simple resemblance. It’s a lot stranger than that. It’s downright uncanny.”
eyes.
Such light gray eyes, almost transparent. How many people have eyes like that? Not very many. Feature by feature, this Bill Richmond and Ernest Harch are duplicates. It’s not just a simple resemblance. It’s a lot stranger than that. It’s downright uncanny.”
“Okay, okay,” McGee said, holding up one hand to stop her. “Perhaps they are remarkably alike, virtually identical. If that’s the case, then it’s an incredible coincidence that you’ve encountered both of them, thirteen years apart, at opposite ends of the country; but that’s all it is—a coincidence.”
Her hands were cold. Freezing. She rubbed them together, trying to generate heat.
She said, “When it comes to the subject of coincidences, I agree with Philip Marlowe.”
“Who?”
“Marlowe. He’s a private detective in those novels by Raymond Chandler.
The Lady in the Lake, The Big Sleep,
The Long
Goodbye...”
The Lady in the Lake, The Big Sleep,
The Long
Goodbye...”
“Of course. Marlowe. Okay, so what did he have to say about coincidences?”
“He said,‘Show me a coincidence, and when I open it up for you, I’ll show you at least two people inside, plotting some sort of mischief.”’
McGee frowned and shook his head. “That philosophy might be suitable for a character in a detective story. But out here in the real world, it’s a little paranoid, don’t you think?”
He was right, and she couldn’t sustain her anger with him. As her fury faded, so did her strength, and she sank back against the pillows once more. “Could two people really look so much alike?”
“I’ve heard it said that everyone has an unrelated twin somewhere in the world, what some people call a ’doppelgänger.’”
“Maybe,” Susan said, unconvinced. “But this was ... different. It was weird. I’d swear he recognized me, too. He smiled so strangely. And he—winked at me!”
For the first time since he had returned to her room, McGee smiled. “Winked at you? Well, there’s certainly nothing strange or uncanny about that, dear lady.” His intensely blue eyes sparkled with amusement. “In case you didn’t know it, men frequently wink at attractive women. Now don’t tell me you’ve never been winked at before. Don’t tell me you’ve spent your life in a nunnery or on a desert island.” He grinned.
“There’s nothing attractive about me at the moment,” she insisted.
“Nonsense.”
“My hair needs a real washing, not just brushed with powder. I’m emaciated, and I’ve got bags under my eyes. I hardly think I inspire romantic thoughts in my present condition.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself. Emaciated? No. You’ve just got a haunting Audrey Hepburn quality.”
Susan resisted his charm, which wasn’t easy. But she was determined to say everything that was on her mind. “Besides, it wasn’t that kind of wink.”
“Ahhhh,” he said. “So now you admit you’ve been winked at in the past. Suddenly you’re an expert on winking.”
She refused to be coaxed and kidded into forgetting the man who had stepped out of the elevator.
“What kind of wink was it, exactly?” he asked, a teasing tone still in his voice.
“It was a smartass wink. Smug. There wasn’t anything at all flirtatious about it, either. It wasn’t warm and friendly, like a wink ought to be. It was cold. Cold and smug and nasty and ... somehow threatening,” she said, but even as she spoke she realized how ludicrous it sounded to give such an exhaustively detailed interpretation to something as simple as a wink.
“It’s a good thing I didn’t ask you to interpret his entire facial expression,” McGee said. “We’d have been here until tomorrow morning!”
Susan finally succumbed: She smiled. “I guess it does sound pretty silly, huh?”
“Especially since we know for a fact that his name’s Bill Richmond and that he’s only twenty-one.”
“So the wink was just a wink, and the threat was all in my head?”
“Don’t you figure that’s probably the case?” he asked diplomatically.
She sighed. “Yeah, I guess I do. And I suppose I should apologize for causing so much trouble about this.”
“It wasn’t any trouble,” he said graciously.
“I’m awfully tired, weak, and my perceptions aren’t as sharp as they should be. Last night, I dreamed about Harch, and when I saw that man step out of the elevator, looking so much like Harch, I just ... lost my head. I panicked.”
That was a difficult admission for her to make. Other people might act like Chicken Little at the slightest provocation, but Susan Kathleen Thorton expected herself to remain—and previously always had remained—calm and collected through any crisis that fate threw at her. She had been that way since she was just a little girl, for the circumstances of her lonely childhood had required her to be totally self-reliant. She hadn’t even panicked in the House of Thunder, when Ernest Harch had kicked in Jerry’s skull; she had run, had hidden, had survived—all because she had kept her wits about her at a time when most people, if thrust into the same situation, would surely have lost theirs. But now she had panicked; worse, she had let others see her lose control. She felt embarrassed and humbled by her behavior.
“I’ll be a model patient from now on,” she told Dr. McGee. “I’ll take my medicine without argument. I’ll eat real well, so I’ll regain my strength just as quickly as possible. I’ll exercise when I’m told to and only as much as I’m told to. By the time I’m ready to be discharged, you’ll have forgotten all about the scene I caused today. In fact you’ll wish that all of your patients were like me. That’s a promise.”
“I already wish all of my patients were exactly like you,” he said. “Believe me, it’s much more pleasant treating a pretty young woman than it is treating cranky old men with heart conditions.”
After McGee had gone for the day, Susan arranged with one of the orderlies to have a rental television installed in her room. As afternoon faded into evening, she watched the last half of an old episode of “The Rockford Files,” then the umpteenth rerun of an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” In spite of frequent bursts of storm-caused static, she watched the five o’clock news on a Seattle station, and she was dismayed to discover that the current international crises were pretty much the same as the international crises that had been at the top of the news reports more than three weeks ago, before she had fallen into a coma.
Later, she ate all the food on her dinner tray. Later still, she rang for one of the second-shift nurses and asked for a snack. A pert blonde named Marcia Edmonds brought her a dish of sherbet with sliced peaches. Susan ate all of that, too.
She tried not to think about Bill Richmond, the Harch look-alike. She tried not to think about the House of Thunder, or about the precious days she had lost in a coma, or about the remaining gaps in her memory, or about her current state of helplessness, or about anything else that might upset her. She concentrated on being a good patient and developing a positive attitude, for she was eager to get well again.
Nevertheless, an unspecific but chilling presentiment of danger disturbed her thoughts from time to time. A shapeless portent of evil.
Each time that her thoughts turned into that dark pathway, she forced herself to think only of pleasing things. Mostly, she thought about Dr. Jeffrey McGee: the grace with which he moved; the ear-pleasing timbre of his voice; the sensitivity and the intriguing scintillation of his exceptionally blue eyes; his strong, well-formed, long-fingered hands.
Near bedtime, after she had taken the sedative that McGee had prescribed for her, but before she had begun to get drowsy, the rain stopped falling. The wind, however, did not die down. It continued to press insistently against the window. It murmured, growled, hissed. It sniffed all around the window frame and thumped its paws of air against the glass, as if it were a big dog searching diligently for a way to get inside.
Perhaps because of the sound of the wind, Susan dreamed of dogs that night. Dogs and then jackals. Jackals and then wolves. Werewolves. They changed fluidly from lupine to human form, then into wolves again, then back into men, always pursuing her or leaping at her or waiting in the darkness ahead to pounce on her. When they took the form of men, she recognized them: Jellicoe, Parker, Quince, and Harch. Once, as she was fleeing through a dark forest, she came upon a moonlit clearing in which the four beasts, in wolf form, were crouched over the corpse of Jerry Stein, tearing the flesh from its bones. They looked up at her and grinned malevolently. Blood and ragged pieces of raw flesh drooled from their white teeth and vicious jowls. Sometimes she dreamed they were chasing her through the caverns, between thrusting limestone stalagmites and stalactites, along narrow corridors of rock and earth. Sometimes they chased her across a vast field of delicate black flowers; sometimes they prowled deserted city streets, following her scent, forcing her to flee from a series of hiding places, snapping relentlessly at her heels. Once, she even dreamed that one of the creatures had slunk into her hospital room; it was a crouching wolf-thing, swathed in shadows, visible only in murky silhouette, watching her from the foot of the bed, one wild eye gleaming. Then it moved into the weak amber glow of the night light, and she saw that it had undergone another metamorphosis, changing from wolf to man this time. It was Ernest Harch. He was wearing pajamas and a bathrobe—
(This isn’t part of the dream! she thought as icy shards of fear thrilled through her.)
—and he came around to the side of the bed. He bent down to look more closely at her. She tried to cry out; couldn’t. She could not move, either. His face began to blur in front of her, and she struggled to keep it in focus, but she sensed that she was slipping back to the field of black flowers—
(I’ve got to shake this off. Wake up. All the way. It was supposed to be a mild sedative. Just a mild one, dammit!)
—and Harch’s features ran together in one gray smear. The hospital room dissolved completely, and again she was plunging across a field of strange black flowers, with a pack of wolves baying behind her. The moon was full; oddly, however, it provided little light. She couldn’t see where she was going, and she tripped over something, fell into the flowers, and discovered that she had stumbled over Jerry Stein’s mutilated, half-eaten cadaver. The wolf appeared, loomed over her, snarling, leering, pushing its slavering muzzle down at her, down and down, until its cold nose touched her cheek. The beast’s hateful face blurred and reformed into an even more hateful countenance: that of Ernest Harch. It wasn’t a wolf’s nose touching her cheek any longer; it was now Harch’s blunt finger. She flinched, and her heart began pounding so forcefully that she wondered why it didn’t tear loose of her. Harch pulled his hand away from her and smiled. The field of black flowers was gone. She was dreaming that she was in her hospital room again—
(Except it’s not a dream. It’s real. Harch is here, and he’s going to kill me.)
—and she tried to sit up in bed but was unable to move. She reached for the call button that would summon a nurse or an orderly, and although the button was only a few inches away, it suddenly seemed light-years beyond her reach. She strained toward it, and her arm appeared to stretch and stretch magically, until it was bizarrely elongated; her flesh and bones seemed to be possessed of an impossible elasticity. Still, her questing finger fell short of the button. She felt as if she were Alice, as if she had just stepped through the looking glass. She was now in that part of Wonderland in which the usual laws of perspective did not apply. Here, little was big, and big was little; near was far; far was near; there was no difference whatsoever between up and down, in and out, over and under. This sleep-induced, drug-induced confusion made her nauseous; she tasted bile in the back of her throat. Could she taste something like that if she were dreaming? She wasn’t sure. She wished fervently that she could at least be certain whether she was awake or still fast asleep. “Long time no see,” Harch said. Susan blinked at him, trying to keep him in focus, but he kept fading in and out. Sometimes, for just a second or two, he had the shining eyes of a wolf. “Did you think you could hide from me forever?” he asked, speaking in a whisper, leaning even closer, until his face was nearly touching hers. His breath was foul, and she wondered if her ability to smell was an indication that she was awake, that Harch was real. “Did you think you could hide from me forever?” Harch demanded again. She could not respond to him; her voice was frozen in her throat, a cold lump that she could neither spit out nor swallow. “You rotten bitch,” Harch said, and his smile became a broad grin. “You stinking, rotten, smug little bitch. How do you feel now? Huh? Are you sorry you testified against me? Hmmm? Yeah. I’ll bet you’re real sorry now.” He laughed softly, and for a moment the laughter became the low growling of a wolf, but then it turned into laughter again. “You know what I’m going to do to you?” he asked. His face began to blur. “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” She was in a cavern. There were black flowers growing out of the stone floor. She was running from baying wolves. She turned a corner, and the cavern opened onto a shadowy city street. A wolf stood on the sidewalk, under a lamppost, and it said, “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” Susan ran and kept on running through a long, frightening, amorphous night.
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