by Dean Koontz
“Before we check out the rest of this level, maybe I’d better call security and get them moving on a search of the entire hospital. Mr. Yamataka?”
Hal glanced at her, then back at the empty bed. “Uh ... yeah. Yeah, that’s a good idea. He might wander off to ... God knows where.”
Nurse Fulgham hurried away.
Weak-kneed, Hal went to the door, closed it, put his back against it, and stared at the bed across the room. After a while he said, “Are you there, Frank?”
He received no answer. He had not expected one. Frank Pollard had not turned invisible; he had gone somewhere, somehow.
Not sure why he was less wonderstruck than frightened by what he had seen, Hal hesitantly crossed the room to the bed. He gingerly touched the stainless-steel railing, as if he thought that Pollard’s vanishing act had tapped some elemental force, leaving a deadly residual current in the bed. But no sparks crackled under his fingertips; the metal was cool and smooth.
He waited, wondering how soon Pollard would reappear, wondering if he ought to call Bobby now or wait until Pollard materialized, wondering if the man would materialize again or disappear forever. For the first time in memory, Hal Yamataka was gripped by indecision; he was ordinarily a quick thinker, and quick to act, but he had never come face to face with the supernatural before.
The only thing he knew for sure was that he must not let Fulgham or Soto or anyone else in the hospital know what had really happened. Pollard was caught up in a phenomenon so strange that word of it would spread quickly from the hospital staff to the press. Protecting a client’s privacy was always one of Dakota & Dakota’s prime objectives, but in this case it was even more important than usual. Bobby and Julie had said that someone was hunting for Pollard, evidently with violent intentions ; therefore, keeping the press out of the case might be essential if the client was to survive.
The door opened, and Hal jumped as if he’d been stuck with a hatpin.
In the doorway stood Grace Fulgham, looking as if she had just either guided a tugboat through stormy seas or chopped and carried a couple of cords of firewood that Pa had been too lazy to deal with. “Security’s putting a man at every exit to stop him if he tries to leave, and we’re mobilizing the nursing staff on each floor to look for him. Do you intend to join the search?”
“Uh, well, I’ve got to call the office, my boss....”
“If we find him, where will we find you?”
“Here. Right here. I’ll be here, making some calls.”
She nodded and went away. The door eased shut after her.
A privacy curtain hung from a ceiling track that described an arc around three sides of the bed. It was bunched against the wall, but Hal Yamataka drew it to the foot of the bed, blocking the view from the doorway, in case Pollard materialized just as someone stepped in from the corridor.
His hands were shaking, so he jammed them in his pockets. Then he took his left hand out to look at his wristwatch: 1:48.
Pollard had been missing for perhaps eighteen minutes—except, of course, for the few seconds during which he had flickered into existence and talked about fireflies in a windstorm. Hal decided to wait until two o’clock to call Bobby and Julie.
He stood at the foot of the bed, clutching the railing with one hand, listening to the night wind crying at the window and the rain snapping against the glass. The minutes crawled past like snails on an incline, but at least the wait gave him time to calm down and think about how he would tell Bobby what had happened.
As the hands on his watch lined up at two o’clock, he went the rest of the way around the bed and was reaching for the phone on the nightstand when he heard the eerie ululation of a distant flute. The half-drawn bed-curtain fluttered in a sudden draft.
He returned to the foot of the bed and looked past the end of the curtain to the hallway door. It was closed. That was not the source of the draft.
The flute died. The air in the room grew still, leaden.
Abruptly the curtain shivered and rippled, gently rattling the bearings in the overhead track, and a breath of cool air swept around the room, ruffling his hair. The atonal, ghostly music rose again.
With the door shut and the window closed tight, the only possible source of the draft was the ventilation grille in the wall above the nightstand. But when Hal stood on his toes and raised his right hand in front of that outlet, he felt nothing issuing from it. The chilly currents of air appeared to have sprung up within the room itself.
He turned in a circle, moved this way and that, trying to get a fix on the flute. Actually, it didn’t sound like a flute when he listened closely; it was more like a fluctuant wind whistling through a lot of pipes at the same time, big ones and little ones, threading together many vague but separate sounds into a loosely woven keening that was simultaneously eerie and melancholy, mournful yet somehow ... threatening. It faded, then returned a third time. To his surprise and bewilderment, the tuneless notes seemed to be issuing from the empty air above the bed.
Hal wondered if anyone else in the hospital could hear the flute this time. Probably not. Though the music was louder now than when it had begun, it remained faint; in fact, if he had been asleep, the mysterious serenade would not have been loud enough to wake him.
Before Hal’s eyes, the air over the bed shimmered. For a moment he could not breathe, as if the room had become a temporary vacuum chamber. He felt his ears pop the way they did during a too-rapid altitude change.
The strange warbling and the draft died together, and Frank Pollard reappeared as abruptly as he had vanished. He was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up in the fetal position. For a few seconds he was disoriented; when he realized where he was, he clutched the bed railing and pulled himself into a sitting position. The skin around his eyes was puffy and dark, but otherwise he was dreadfully pale. His face had a greasy sheen to it, as if it wasn’t perspiration pouring from him but clear beads of oil. His blue cotton pajamas were rumpled, darkly mottled with sweat, and caked with dirt in places.
He said, “Stop me.”
“What the hell’s going on here?” Hal asked, his voice cracking.
“Out of control.”
“Where did you go?”
“For God’s sake, help me.” Pollard was still clutching the bed rail with his right hand, but he reached entreatingly toward Hal with his left. “Please, please ...”
Stepping closer to the bed, Hal reached out—
—and Pollard vanished, this time not only with a hissing sound, as before, but with a shriek and sharp crack of tortured metal. The stainless-steel railing, which he had been gripping so fiercely, had torn loose of the bed and vanished with him.
Hal Yamataka stared in astonishment at the hinges to which the adjustable railing had been fixed. They were twisted and torn, as if made of cardboard. A force of incredible power had pulled Pollard out of that room, snapping quarter-inch steel.
Staring at his own outstretched hand, Hal wondered what would have happened to him if he had been gripping Pollard. Would he have disappeared with the man? To where? Not someplace he would want to be: he was sure of that.
Or maybe only part of him would have gone with Pollard. Maybe he would have come apart at a joint, just as the bed railing had done. Maybe his arm would have ripped out of his shoulder socket with a crack almost as sharp as that with which the steel hinges had separated, and maybe he would have been left screaming in pain, with blood squirting from snapped vessels.
He snatched his hand back, as if afraid Pollard might suddenly reappear and seize it.
As he rounded the bed to the phone, he thought that his legs were going to fail him. His hands were shaking so badly, he almost dropped the receiver and had difficulty dialing the Dakotas’ home number.
37
BOBBY AND Julie left for the hospital at 2:45. The night looked deeper than usual; streetlamps and headlights did not fully penetrate the gloom. Shatters of rain fell with such force, they appeared to bounce off
the blacktop streets, as if they were hard fragments of a disintegrating vault that arced through the night above.
Julie drove because Bobby was only three-quarters awake. His eyes were heavy, and he couldn’t stop yawning, and his thoughts were fuzzy at the edges. They had gone to bed only three hours before Hal Yamataka had awakened them. If Julie had to get by on only that much sleep, she could do it, but Bobby needed at least six—preferably eight—hours in the sack in order to function well.
That was a minor difference between them, no big deal. But because of several such minor differences, Bobby suspected that Julie was tougher overall than he was, even if he could whip her ten times out of ten in an arm-wrestling competition.
He chuckled softly.
She said, “What?”
She braked for a traffic light as it phased to red. Its bloody image was reflected in distorted patterns by the black, mirrorlike surface of the rain-slick street.
“I’m crazy to give you an advantage by admitting this, but I was thinking that in some ways you’re tougher than me.”
She said, “That’s no revelation. I’ve always known I’m tougher.”
“Oh, yeah? If we arm wrestle, I’ll whip you every time.”
“How sad.” She shook her head. “Do you really think beating up someone smaller than you, and a woman to boot, makes you a macho man?”
“I could beat up a lot of women bigger than me,” Bobby assured her. “And if they’re old enough, I could take them on two or three or four at a time. In fact, you throw half a dozen big grandmothers at me, and I’ll take them all on with one hand tied behind my back!”
The traffic light turned green, and she drove on.
“I’m talking big grandmothers,” he said. “Not frail little old ladies. Big, fat, solid grandmothers, six at a time.”
“That is impressive.”
“Damn right. Though it’d help if I had a tire iron.”
She laughed, and he grinned. But they could not forget where they were going or why, and their smiles faded to a pair of matching frowns. They drove in silence. The thump of the windshield wipers, which ought to have lulled Bobby to sleep, kept him awake instead.
Finally Julie said, “You think Frank actually vanished in front of Hal’s eyes, the way he says?”
“I’ve never known Hal to lie or give in to hysteria.”
“Me neither.”
She turned left at the next corner. A few blocks ahead, beyond billowing curtains of rain, the lights of the hospital appeared to pulse and flicker and stream like an iridescent liquid, which made it look every bit as miragelike as a phantom oasis shimmering behind veils of heat rising from desert sands.
WHEN THEY entered the room, Hal was standing at the foot of the bed, which was largely concealed by the privacy curtain. He looked like a guy who had not only seen a ghost, but had embraced it and kissed it on its cold, damp, putrescent lips.
“Thank God, you’re here.” He looked past them, into the hall. “The head nurse wants to call the cops, file a missing person—”
“We’ve dealt with that,” Bobby said. “Dr. Freeborn talked to her by phone, and we’ve signed a release absolving the hospital.”
“Good.” Gesturing toward the open door, Hal said, “We’ll want to keep this as private as we can.”
After closing the door, Julie joined them at the foot of the bed.
Bobby noted the missing railing and broken hinges. “What’s this?”
Hal swallowed hard. “He was holding the railing when he vanished ... and it went with him. I didn’t mention it on the phone, ’cause I figured you already thought I was nuts, and this would confirm it.”
“Tell us now,” Julie said quietly. They were all talking softly, for otherwise Nurse Fulgham was certain to stop by and remind them that most of the patients on the floor were sleeping.
When Hal finished his story, Bobby said, “The flute, the peculiar breeze ... that’s what Frank told us he heard shortly after he regained consciousness that night in the alleyway, and somehow he knew it meant someone was coming.”
Some of the dirt that Hal had observed on Frank’s pajamas, after his second reappearance, was on the bed sheets. Julie plucked up a pinch of it. “Not dirt exactly.”
Bobby examined the grains on her fingertips. “Black sand.”
To Hal, Julie said, “Frank hasn’t reappeared since he vanished with the railing?”
“No.”
“And when was that?”
“A couple of minutes after two o’clock. Maybe two-oh-two, two-oh-three, something like that.”
“About an hour and twenty minutes ago,” Bobby said.
They stood in silence, staring at the mountings from which the bed railing had been torn. Outside, a squall of wind threw rain against the window with sufficient force to make it sound like out-of-season Halloween pranksters pitching handsful of dried corn.
Finally Bobby looked at Julie. “What do we do now?”
She blinked. “Don’t ask me. This is the first case I’ve ever worked on that involves witchcraft.”
“Witchcraft?” Hal said nervously.
“Just a figure of speech,” Julie assured him.
Maybe, Bobby thought. He said, “We’ve got to assume he’ll come back before morning, perhaps a couple of times, and sooner or later he’ll stay put. This must be what happens every night when he sleeps; this is the traveling he doesn’t remember when he wakes up.”
“Traveling,” Julie said. Under the circumstances, that ordinary word seemed as exotic and full of mystery as any in the language.
CAREFUL NOT to wake the patients, they borrowed two additional chairs from other rooms along the corridor. Hal sat tensely just inside the closed door of room 638, in a position to prevent any of the hospital staff from walking in unimpeded. Julie sat at the foot of the bed, and Bobby stationed himself at the side of it nearest the window, where the railing was still in place.
They waited.
From her chair, Julie only had to turn her head slightly to look across the room at Hal. When she glanced the other way she could see Bobby. But because of the privacy curtain that was drawn along the side of the bed with the missing railing, Hal and Bobby were not in each other’s line of sight.
She wondered if Hal would have been astonished to see how quickly Bobby went to sleep. Hal was still pumped up by what had happened, and Julie, only having heard about Frank’s sorcerous disappearance second-hand, was nonetheless eagerly—and nervously—anticipating the chance to witness the same bit of magic herself. Bobby was a man of considerable imaginative powers, with a childlike sense of wonder, so he was probably more excited about these events than either she or Hal was; furthermore, because of his premonition of trouble, he suspected that the case was going to be full of surprises, some nasty, and these events no doubt alarmed him. Yet he could slump against the inadequately padded arm of his chair, let his chin drop against his chest, and doze off. He would never be felled by stress. At times his sense of proportion, his ability to put anything in a manageable perspective, seemed superhuman. When Bobby McFerrin’s song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” had been a hit a couple of years ago, she had not been surprised that her own Bobby had been enamored of it; the tune was essentially his personal anthem. Apparently by an act of will, he could readily achieve serenity, and she admired that.
By 4:40, when Bobby had been slumbering contentedly for nearly an hour, she watched him doze with admiration that rapidly escalated to unhealthy envy. She had the urge to give his chair a kick, toppling him out of it. She restrained herself only because she suspected that he would merely yawn, curl up on his side, and sleep even more comfortably on the floor, at which point her envy would become so all-consuming that she would simply have to kill him where he lay. She imagined herself in court: I know murder is wrong, Judge, but he was just too laid-back to live.
A cascade of soft, almost melancholy notes fell out of the air in front of her.
“The flute!” Hal said
, leaving his chair with the suddenness of a popcorn kernel bursting off a heated pan.
Simultaneously, a breath of cool air stirred through the room, without apparent source.
Getting to her feet, Julie whispered, “Bobby!”
She shook him by the shoulder, and he came awake just as the atonal music faded and the air turned crypt-still.
Bobby rubbed his eyes with his palms, and yawned. “What’s wrong?”
Even as he spoke, the haunting music swelled again, faint but louder than before. Not music, actually, just noise. And Hal was right: listening closely, you could also tell it was not a flute.
She stepped toward the bed.
Hal had left his station by the door. He put a hand on her shoulder, halting her. “Be careful.”
Frank had reported three—maybe four—separate trillings of the faux flute, and as many agitations of the air, before Mr. Blue Light had appeared on his trail that night in Anaheim, and Hal had noticed that three episodes had preceded each of Frank’s own reappearances. However, those accompanying phenomena evidently could not be expected in an immutable pattern, for when the second rivulet of unharmonious notes finished spilling out of the ether, the air immediately above the bed shimmered, as if a double handful of pale tarnished sequins had been swept up and set aflutter in rising currents of heat, and suddenly Frank Pollard winked into existence atop the rumpled sheets.
Julie’s ears popped.
“Holy cow!” Bobby said, which was just what Julie would have expected him to say.
She, on the other hand, was unable to speak.
Gasping, Frank Pollard sat up in bed. His face was bloodless. Around his rheumy eyes, the skin looked bruised. Sour perspiration glistened on his face and beaded in his beard stubble.
He was holding a pillowcase half filled with something. The end was twisted and held shut with a length of cord. He let go of it, and it fell off the side of the bed where the railing was missing, striking the floor with a soft plop.
When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and strange. “Where am I?”
“You’re in the hospital, Frank,” Bobby said. “It’s all right. You’re where you belong now.”
“Hospital ... ,” Frank said, savoring the word as if he had just heard it—and was now pronouncing it—for the first time. He looked around, obviously bewildered; he still didn’t know where he was. “Don’t let me slip—”
He vanished midsentence. A brief hiss accompanied his abrupt departure, as if the air in the room was escaping through a puncture in the skin of reality.
“Damn!” Julie said.
“Where were his pajamas?” Hal said.
“What?”
“He was wearing shoes, khaki pants, a shirt and sweater,” Hal said, “but the last time I saw him, a couple of hours ago, he still had on his pajamas.”
At the far end of the room, the door began to open but bumped against Hal’s empty chair. Nurse Fulgham poked her head through the gap. She looked down at the chair, then across the room at Hal and Julie, then at Bobby, who stepped to the foot of the bed to peer past his two associates and the half-drawn privacy curtain.
Their astonishment at Frank’s vanishing act must have been ill concealed, for the woman frowned and said, “What’s wrong?”
Julie quickly crossed the room as Grace Fulgham slid the chair aside and opened the door all the way. “Everything’s fine. We just spoke by phone with our man heading up the search, and he says they’ve found someone who saw Mr. Pollard earlier tonight. We know which way he was heading, so now it’s only a matter of time until we find him.”
“We didn’t expect you’d be here so long,” Fulgham said, frowning past Julie at the curtained bed.
Even through the heavy door, maybe she had heard the faint warble of the flute that wasn’t a flute.
“Well,” Julie said, “this is the easiest place from which to coordinate the search.”
By standing just inside the door, with Hal’s empty chair between them, Julie was trying to block the nurse’s advance without appearing to do so. If Fulgham got past the curtain, she might notice the missing railing, the black sand in the bed, and the pillowcase that was filled with God-knew-what. Questions about any of those things might be difficult to answer convincingly, and if the nurse remained in the room too long, she might be there when Frank returned.
Julie said, “I’m sure we haven’t disturbed any of the other patients. We’ve been very quiet.”
“No, no,” Nurse Fulgham said, “you haven’t disturbed anyone. We just wondered if you might like some coffee to help keep you awake.”
