The House of Thunder

by Dean Koontz

  She had awakened in bed, in her hospital room, only a few minutes after fainting in the corridor. When she came to, McGee was taking her blood pressure. She had patiently allowed him to examine her before she had told him that she was in danger.

  Now he stood beside the bed, one hand on the side rail, leaning forward a bit, a stethoscope dangling from his neck. “In danger from what?”

  “That man,” Susan said.

  “What man?”

  “The man who stepped out of the elevator.”

  McGee glanced at Mrs. Baker.

  The nurse said, “He’s a patient here.”

  “And you think he’s somehow dangerous?” McGee asked Susan, still clearly perplexed.

  Nervously fingering the collar of her pajama top, Susan said, “Dr. McGee, do you remember what I told you about an old boyfriend of mine named Jerry Stein?”

  “Of course I remember. He was the one you were almost engaged to.”

  Susan nodded.

  “The one who died in a fraternity hazing,” McGee said.

  “Ah, no,” Mrs. Baker said sympathetically. This was the first that she had heard about Jerry. “That’s a terrible thing.”

  Susan’s mouth was dry. She swallowed a few times, then said, “It was what the fraternity called a ‘humiliation ritual.’ The pledge had to withstand intense humiliation in front of a girl, preferably his steady date, without responding to his tormentors. They took Jerry and me to a limestone cavern a couple of miles from the Briarstead campus. It was a favorite place for hazing rituals; they were fond of dramatic settings for their damned silly games. Anyway, I didn’t want to go. Right from the start, I didn’t want to be a part of it. Not that there was anything threatening about it. The mood was light-hearted at first, playful. Jerry was actually looking forward to it. But I suppose, on some deep subliminal level, I sensed an undercurrent of ... malice. Besides, I suspected the fraternity brothers in charge of the hazing had been drinking. They had two cars, and I didn’t want to get into either one, not if a drunk was driving. But they reassured me, and finally I went with them because Jerry wanted in the fraternity so badly. I didn’t want to be a spoiler.”

  She looked out the window at the lowering September sky. A wind had risen, stirring the branches of the tall pines.

  She hated talking about Jerry’s death. But she had to tell McGee and Mrs. Baker everything, so that they would understand why Ernest Harch posed a very real, very serious threat to her.

  She said, “The limestone caverns near Briarstead College are extensive. Eight or ten underground rooms. Maybe more. Some of them are huge. It’s a damp, musty, moldy place, though I suppose it’s paradise to a spelunker.”

  Gently urging her on, McGee said, “Caverns that large must be a tourist attraction, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them.”

  “Oh, no, they haven’t been developed for tourism,” Susan said. “They’re not like the Carlsbad Caverns or the Luray Caverns or anything like that. They’re not pretty. They’re all gray limestone, dreary as Hell. They’re big, that’s all. The largest cave is about the size of a cathedral. The Shawnee Indians gave that one a name: ‘House of Thunder.’”

  “Thunder?” McGee asked. “Why?”

  “A subterranean stream enters the cave high in one corner and tumbles down a series of ledges. The sound of the falling water echoes off the limestone, so there’s a continuous rumbling in the place.”

  The memory was still far too vivid for her to speak of it without feeling the cold, clammy air of the cavern. She shivered and pulled the blankets across her outstretched legs.

  McGee’s gaze met hers. In his eyes there was understanding and compassion. She could see that he knew how painful it was for her to talk about Jerry Stein.

  The same expression was in Mrs. Baker’s eyes. The nurse looked as if she might rush around to the side of the bed and give Susan a motherly hug.

  Again, McGee gently encouraged her to continue her story. “The humiliation ritual was held in the House of Thunder?”

  “Yeah. It was night. We were led into the cavern with flashlights, and then several candles were lit and placed on the rocks around us. There were just Jerry, me, and four of the fraternity brothers. I’ll never forget their names or what they looked like. Never. Carl Jellicoe, Herbert Parker, Randy Lee Quince ... and Ernest Harch. Harch was the fraternity’s pledge master that year.”

  Outside, the day was rapidly growing darker under a shroud of thunderheads. Inside, the blue-gray shadows crawled out of the corners and threatened to take full possession of the hospital room.

  As Susan talked, Dr. McGee switched on the bedside lamp.

  “As soon as we were in the caverns, as soon as the candles had been lit, Harch and the other three guys pulled out flasks of whiskey. They had been drinking earlier. I was right about that. And they continued to drink all through the hazing. The more they drank, the uglier the whole scene got. At first they subjected Jerry to some funny, pretty much innocent teasing. In fact, everyone was laughing at first, even Jerry and me. Gradually, however, their taunting became nastier ... meaner. A lot of it was obscene, too. Worse than obscene. Filthy. I was embarrassed and uneasy. I wanted to leave, and Jerry wanted me to get out of there, too, but Harch and the others refused to let me have a flashlight or a candle. I couldn’t find my way out of the caverns in pitch blackness, so I had to stay. When they started needling Jerry about his being Jewish, there wasn’t any humor in them at all, and that was when I knew for sure there was going to be trouble, bad trouble. They were all obviously drunk by then. But it wasn’t just the whiskey talking. Oh, no. Not the whiskey alone. You could see that the prejudice—the hatred— wasn’t just an act. Harch and the others—but especially Ernest Harch—had a streak of anti-Semitism as thick as sludge in a sewer.

  “Briarstead wasn’t a particularly sophisticated place,” Susan continued. “There wasn’t the usual cultural mix. There weren’t many Jews on campus, and there weren’t any in the fraternity that Jerry wanted to join. Not that the fraternity had a policy against admitting Jews or anyone else. There had been a couple of Jewish members in the past, though none for the last several years. Most of the brothers wanted Jerry in. It was only Harch and his three cronies who were determined to keep him out. They planned to make Hazing Month so rough for him, so utterly intolerable, that he would withdraw his application before the month was over. The humiliation ritual in the House of Thunder was to be the start of it. They didn’t really intend to kill Jerry. Not in the beginning, not when they took us to the cavern, not when they were at least half sober. They just wanted to make him feel like dirt. They wanted to rough him up a little bit, scare him, let him know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t welcome. The verbal abuse escalated to physical abuse. They stood in a circle around him, shoving him back and forth, keeping him off balance. Jerry wasn’t a fool. He realized this wasn’t any ordinary hazing ritual. He wasn’t a wimp, either. He couldn’t be intimidated easily. When they shoved him too hard, he shoved back—which only made them more aggressive, of course. When they wouldn’t stop shoving, Jerry hit Harch in the mouth and split the bastard’s lip.”

  “And that was the trigger,” McGee said.

  “Yes. Then all hell broke loose.”

  Thunder grumbled again, and the hospital lights flickered briefly, and Susan had the strange, disquieting notion that some supernatural force was trying to carry her back in time, back to the waterfall roar and the darkness of the cavern.

  She said, “Something about the mood of that place—the bone-deep chill, the dampness, the darkness, the steady roar of the waterfall, the sense of isolation—made it easier for the savage in them to come out. They beat Jerry ... beat him to the floor and kept on beating him.”

  She trembled. The trembling became a more violent quivering; the quivering grew into a shudder of revulsion and of remembered terror.

  “It was as if they were wild dogs, turning on an interloper from a strange pack,” she sai
d shakily. “I ... I screamed at them ... but I couldn’t stop them. Finally, Carl Jellicoe seemed to realize that he’d gone too far, and he backed away. Then Quince, then Parker. Harch was the last to get control of himself, and he was the first to realize they were all going to wind up in prison. Jerry was unconscious. He was ...”

  Her voice cracked, faltered.

  It didn’t seem like thirteen years; it seemed almost like yesterday.

  “Go on,” McGee said quietly.

  “He was ... bleeding from the nose ... the mouth ... and from one ear. He’d been very badly hurt. Although he was unconscious, he kept twitching uncontrollably. It looked like there might have been nerve or brain damage. I tried to ...”

  “Go on, Susan.”

  “I tried to get to Jerry, but Harch pushed me out of the way, knocked me down. He told the others that they were all going to go to prison if they didn’t do something drastic to save themselves. He said that their futures had been destroyed, that they had no real future at all ... unless they covered up what they’d done. He tried to convince them that they had to finish Jerry off and then kill me, too, and dump our bodies down one of the deep holes in the cavern floor. Jellicoe, Parker, and Quince were half sobered up by the shock of what they’d done, but they were still half drunk, too, and confused and scared. At first they argued with Harch, then agreed with him, then had second thoughts and argued again. They were afraid to commit murder, yet they were afraid not to. Harch was furious with them for being so wishy-washy, and he suddenly decided to force them to do what he wanted by simply giving them no other choice. He turned to Jerry and he ... he...”

  She felt sick, remembering.

  McGee held her hand.

  Susan said, “He kicked Jerry ... in the head ... three times ... and caved in one side of his skull.”

  Mrs. Baker gasped.

  “Killed him,” Susan said.

  Outside, lightning slashed open the sky, and thunder roared through the resultant wound. The first fat droplets of rain struck the window.

  McGee squeezed Susan’s hand.

  “I grabbed one of the flashlights and ran,” she said. “Their attention was focused so completely on Jerry’s body that I managed to get a bit of a head start on them. Not much but enough. They expected me to try to leave the caverns, but I didn’t head toward the exit because I knew they’d catch me if I went that way, so I gained a few more seconds before they realized where I’d gone. I went deeper into the caves, through a twisty stone corridor, down a slope of loose rocks, into another underground room, then into another beyond that one. Eventually, I switched off the flashlight, so they wouldn’t be able to follow the glow of it, and I went on as far as I could in complete darkness, feeling my way, inch by inch, stumbling, until I found a niche in the wall, a crawl hole, nothing more than that, hidden behind a limestone stalagmite. I slithered into it, as far back into it as 1 could possibly go, and then I was very, very quiet. Harch and the others spent hours searching for me before they finally decided I’d somehow gotten out of the caverns. I waited another six or eight hours, afraid to come out of hiding. I finally left the caverns when I couldn’t deal with my thirst and claustrophobia any longer.”

  Rain pattered on the window, blurring the wind-tossed trees and the black-bellied clouds.

  “Jesus,” Mrs. Baker said, her face ashen. “You poor kid.”

  “They were put on trial?” McGee asked.

  “Yes. The district attorney didn’t think he could win if he charged them with first- or second-degree murder. Too many extenuating circumstances, including the whiskey and the fact that Jerry had actually struck the first blow when he’d busted Harch’s lip. Anyway, Harch was convicted of manslaughter and got a five-year term in the state penitentiary.”

  “Just five years?” Mrs. Baker asked.

  “I thought he should have been put away forever,” Susan said, as bitter now as she had been the day she’d heard the judge hand down the sentence.

  “What about the other three?” McGee asked.

  “They were convicted of assault and of being accomplices to Harch, but because they’d had no previous run-ins with the law and were from good families, and because none of them actually struck the killing blows, they were all given suspended sentences and put on probation.”

  “Outrageous!” Mrs. Baker said.

  McGee continued to hold Susan’s hand, and she was glad that he did.

  “Of course,” she said, “all four of them were immediately expelled from Briarstead. And in a strange way, fate took a hand in punishing Parker and Jellicoe. They were taking the pre-med course at Briarstead, and they managed to finish their last year at another university, but after that they quickly discovered that no top-of-the-line medical school would accept students with serious criminal records. They hustled for another year, submitting applications everywhere, and they finally managed to squeeze into the medical program at a distinctly second-rate university. The night they were notified of their acceptance, they went drinking to celebrate, got stinking drunk, and were both killed when Parker lost control of the car and rolled it over twice. Maybe I should be ashamed to say this, but I was relieved and grateful when I heard what had happened to them.”

  “Of course you were,” Mrs. Baker said. “That’s only natural. Nothing to be ashamed of at all.”

  “What about Randy Lee Quince?” McGee asked.

  “I never heard what happened to him,” Susan said. “And I don’t care ... just as long as he suffered.”

  Two closely spaced explosions of lightning and thunder shook the world outside, and for a moment Susan and McGee and Mrs. Baker stared at the window, where the rain struck with greater force than before.

  Then Mrs. Baker said, “It’s a horrible story, just horrible. But I’m not sure I understand exactly what it has to do with your fainting spell in the hall a while ago.”

  Before Susan could respond, McGee said, “Apparently, the man who stepped out of the elevator, in front of Susan’s wheelchair, was one of those fraternity brothers from Briarstead.”

  “Yes,” Susan said.

  “Either Harch or Quince.”

  “Ernest Harch,” Susan said.

  “An incredible coincidence,” McGee said, giving her hand one last, gentle squeeze before letting go of it. “Thirteen years after the fact—and a whole continent away from where the two of you last saw each other.”

  Mrs. Baker frowned. “But you must be mistaken.”

  “Oh, no,” Susan said, shaking her head vigorously. “I’ll never forget that face. Never.”

  “But his name’s not Harch,” Mrs. Baker said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No. It’s Richmond. Bill Richmond.”

  “Then he’s changed his name since I knew him.”

  “I wouldn’t think a convicted criminal would be allowed to change his name,” Mrs. Baker said.

  “I didn’t mean he changed it legally, in court, or anything like that,” Susan said, frustrated by the nurse’s reluctance to accept the truth. The man was Harch.

  “What’s he here for?” McGee asked Thelma Baker.

  “He’s having surgery tomorrow,” the nurse said. “Dr. Viteski’s going to remove two rather large cysts from his lower back.”

  “Not spinal cysts?”

  “No. Fatty tissue cysts. But they’re large ones.”

  “Benign?” McGee asked.

  “Yes. But I guess they’re deeply rooted, and they’re causing him some discomfort.”

  “Admitted this morning?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And his name’s Richmond. You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it used to be Harch,” Susan insisted.

  Mrs. Baker took off her glasses and let them dangle on the beaded chain around her neck. She scratched the bridge of her nose, looked quizzically at Susan, and said, “How old was this Harch when he killed Jerry Stein?”

  “He was a senior at Briarstead
that year,” Susan said. “Twenty-one years old.”

  “That settles it, then,” the nurse said.

  “Why?” McGee asked.

  Mrs. Baker put her glasses on again and said, “Bill Richmond is only in his early twenties.”

  “He can’t be,” Susan said.

  “In fact I’m pretty sure he’s just twenty-one himself. He’d have been about eight years old when Jerry Stein was killed.”

  “He’s not twenty-one,” Susan said anxiously. “He’s thirty-four by now.”

  “Well, he certainly doesn’t look any older than twenty-one,” Mrs. Baker said. “In fact he looks younger than that. A good deal younger than that. He’s hardly more than a kid. If he was lying about it one way or the other, I’d think he was actually adding on a few years, not taking them off.”

  As the lights flickered again, and as thunder rolled across the hollow, sheet-metal sky, Dr. McGee looked at Susan and said, “How old did he look to you when he stepped out of the elevator?”

  She thought about it for a moment, and she got a sinking feeling in her stomach. “Well ... he looked exactly like Ernest Harch.”

  “Exactly like Harch looked back then?”

  “Uh ... yeah.”

  “Like a twenty-one-year-old college man?”

  Susan nodded reluctantly.

  McGee pressed the point. “Then you mean that he didn’t look thirty-four to you?”

  “No. But maybe he’s aged well. Some thirty-four-year-olds could pass for ten years younger.” She was confused about the apparent age discrepancy, but she was not the least bit confused about the man’s identity: “He is Harch.”

  “Perhaps it’s just a strong resemblance,” Mrs. Baker said.

  “No,” Susan insisted. “It’s him, all right. I recognized him, and I saw him recognize me, too. And I don’t feel safe. It was my testimony that sent him to prison. If you’d have seen the way he glared at me in that courtroom ...”