The House of Thunder

by Dean Koontz

  “So my best hope is brain dysfunction,” Susan said with heavy irony.

  He sobered. “Well, listen, it can’t be anything really life-threatening. It’s certainly not a major hemorrhage or anything like that. If it was, you wouldn’t be as fit and aware as you are. Besides, it wasn’t serious enough to show up on the brain scan that we did while you were in the coma. It’s something small, Susan, something treatable.”

  She nodded.

  “But you’re still scared of Bradley and O’Hara and the other two,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Even though you know it’s most likely all in your head.”

  “The operative words are‘most likely.’”

  “I’d go so far as to say it’s definitely a perceptual problem resulting from brain dysfunction.”

  “I imagine you’re right.”

  “But you’re still scared of them.”

  “Very.”

  “Your recovery mustn’t be set back by stress or depression,” he said, frowning.

  “I can cope, I guess. My middle name is Pollyanna.”

  He smiled again. “Good. That’s the spirit.”

  Except that, in my heart, Susan thought, I don’t for a minute believe that I’ve got either a psychological problem or any kind of brain dysfunction. Those answers just don’t feel right. Intellectually, I can accept them, but on a gut level they seem wrong. What feels right is the answer that is no answer, the answer that makes no sense: These men are dead ringers for Harch, Quince, Jellicoe, and Parker, not just in my eyes but in reality; and they want something from me—probably my life.

  Wiping one hand across her face as if she could slough off her weariness and cast it aside, Susan said, “Well ... let’s get this over with. Bring in Jellicoe and Parker, and let’s see what happens.”

  “Bradley and O’Hara.”

  “Yeah, them.”

  “Listen, if you think of them as Jellicoe and Parker, then you’re bound to see them as Jellicoe and Parker. You’re playing right into your perceptual problem. Think of them as Denny Bradley and Pat O’Hara, and that might help you keep your perceptions clear; it might help you see them as they are.”

  “Okay. I’ll think of them as Bradley and O’Hara. But if they still look like Jellicoe and Parker, I might want to see an exorcist instead of a neurologist.”

  He laughed.

  She didn’t.

  McGee had briefly explained the situation to Bradley and O’Hara before he had brought them back to her room. They appeared to be concerned about Susan’s condition, and they seemed eager to help in any way they could.

  She tried not to let them see how much their presence still disturbed her. Although her stomach was clenched and although her heart was racing, she forced a smile for their benefit and tried to appear relaxed. She wanted to give McGee a fair chance to prove that these two men, on closer inspection, would turn out to be nothing but a pair of ordinary, innocuous young fellows without an ounce of meanness between them.

  McGee stood beside the bed, one hand on the rail, occasionally touching her shoulder, offering moral support.

  The orderlies stood at the foot of the bed. Initially, they were stiff, like a couple of schoolboys reciting a lesson in front of a stern teacher. But gradually they loosened up.

  Dennis Bradley spoke first. He was the one who had held her down on the bed while the nurse had prepared to give her an injection.

  “First of all,” Bradley said, “I want to apologize if I was maybe a little too rough with you. I didn’t mean to be. It’s just that I was kind of scared, you know.” He shifted his weight awkwardly from one foot to the other. “I mean, considering what you said ... you know ... about what you’d do ... well, what you’d do to our eyes...”

  “It’s all right,” Susan said, though she could still feel his fierce grip, his fingers pressing cruelly into her thin arms. “I was scared, too. Actually, I guess I owe you an apology. Both of you.”

  At McGee’s urging, Bradley talked about himself. He had been born in Tucson, Arizona, twenty years ago last July. His parents had moved to Portland, Oregon, when he was nine. He had no brothers, one older sister. He had attended a two-year junior college and had taken special courses to prepare for a career as a paramedic. One year ago, he had accepted this job in Willawauk as a combination orderly and ambulance superintendent. He answered all of Susan’s questions. He was unfailingly candid, outgoing, and helpful.

  So was Patrick O’Hara, the redhead. He had been born and raised, he said, in Boston. His family was Irish Catholic. No, he’d never known anyone named Herbert Parker. In fact he’d never known anybody in Boston named Parker, Herbert or otherwise. Yes, he had an older brother, but, no, his brother didn’t really look much like him. No, he’d never been to Briarstead College in Pennsylvania; never even heard of it before this minute. He had come West when he was eighteen, three years ago. He’d been in Willawauk for, let’s see, sixteen, no, more like seventeen months.

  Susan had to admit that both Dennis Bradley and Pat O’Hara were friendly. Now that she had gotten to know a little about them, she could cite no logical reason why she should any longer regard them as a threat to herself.

  Neither of them appeared to be lying.

  Neither of them seemed to be hiding anything.

  Yet to her eyes, confused perception or not, Bradley still looked exactly like Carl Jellicoe.

  Exactly.

  O’Hara was still a dead ringer for Herbert Parker.

  And Susan had the feeling, unsupported by anything that the two young men had just said or done, that they were not what they presented themselves to be, that they were lying and were hiding something. Intuitively, in spite of all the solid evidence to the contrary, she sensed that this show-and-tell had been nothing more than a well-wrought performance, an act which they had brought off with consummate skill.

  Of course maybe I’m just a raving paranoid, completely starkers, she thought grimly.

  When the two orderlies had left the room, McGee said, “Well?”

  “It didn’t work. I thought of them as Bradley and O’Hara, but they still looked like Jellicoe and Parker.”

  “You realize that doesn’t prove or disprove the theory that you’ve got brain-injury-related perceptual problems.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll begin another series of tests first thing tomorrow, starting with new X rays.”

  She nodded.

  He sighed. “Damn, I was hoping that a talk with Bradley and O’Hara would set your mind at ease, make you feel more comfortable and less anxious until we can pinpoint the cause of your condition and correct this perceptual confusion.”

  “I’m about as comfortable as a cat on a hot stove.”

  “I don’t want you to be overwhelmed with stress or anxiety. That’s going to slow your recuperation. I guess it wouldn’t help to reason with you?”

  “No. As I said, intellectually, I accept your explanation. But emotionally, instinctually, on a gut level, I still feel that the four fraternity men are coming back ... ganging up on me.”

  She was cold. She put her hands and arms under the covers.

  “Look,” McGee said, deciding to attempt to reason with her even though she’d said it was no use. “Look, maybe you have good cause to be suspicious of Richmond and Johnson. It’s not probable, but it is possible, remotely possible, that they’re Harch and Quince living under new names.”

  “Hey, you’re supposed to be making me feel more comfortable, less anxious. Remember?”

  “My point is that you have absolutely no cause to be suspicious of Bradley and O’Hara. They can’t be Jellicoe and Parker because those men are dead.”

  “I know. Dead.”

  “So you should feel better about Bradley and O’Hara.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “Furthermore, Bradley and O’Hara can’t have been brought here as part of some complicated, nefarious plot to get even with you for your testimony in th
at trial. They were here long before you ever arrived, before you even planned to take your vacation in Oregon, before you’d ever even heard of the Viewtop Inn. Are you saying someone knew—in some fantastic, magical, clairvoyant fashion—that you would have an accident here one day and wind up in Willawauk Hospital? Are you saying someone foresaw this and that he then set out to plant O’Hara here seventeen months ago—and then Dennis Bradley, a year ago?”

  Her face was hot, for he was making her feel ridiculous. “Of course I don’t believe that.”

  “Good.”

  “It’s silly.”

  “Yes, it is. So you should feel perfectly safe with Bradley and O’Hara.”

  She could only speak the truth: “But I don’t feel safe with them.”

  “But you should.”

  The building pressure in her passed the critical point. She exploded: “Dammit, do you think I like being a prisoner of my emotions, the helpless victim of fear? I hate it. It’s not like me. I’m not this way. I feel ... out of control. Never in my life, never have I made decisions or in any other way operated primarily on emotion. I’m a scientist, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been a woman of science, a woman of reason, all of my adult life. And I’ve been proud of that. In a world that sometimes seems like a madhouse, I’ve been proud of my rationality, my unfailing stability. Don’t you see? Don’t you see what this is doing to me? I had a scientific, mathematical mind even as a child. I wasn’t given to tantrums even back then, not even as a little girl. Sometimes, it seems as if I never really had a childhood.”

  Suddenly, to her surprise, a torrent of regrets, frustrations, and private pains, long held, long hidden, came pouring out of her, a deluge greater than that which had been released by the storm outside.

  In a voice she hardly recognized as her own, a voice distorted by anguish, she said, “There’ve been times—usually late at night when I’m alone, which is most nights, most days, most always, God help me—times when I’ve thought there’s something missing in me, some tiny piece that’s an essential part of being human. I’ve felt different from other people, almost as if I’m a member of another species. I mean, God, the rest of the world seems driven at least as much by emotion as by intellect, as much by sentiment as by truth. I see others giving in to their emotions, abandoning reason, doing absurd things just for the hell of it. Just for the hell of it! I’ve never done anything in my life just for the hell of it. And the thing is, when I see friends or acquaintances just giving themselves over to their emotions, just flowing with their emotions ... the thing of it is, they seem to enjoy it. And I can’t. Never could. Too uptight. Too controlled. Always controlled. The iron maiden. I mean, I never cried over my mother’s death. Okay, so maybe at seven I was too young to understand that I should cry. But I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral, either. I dealt with the mortician and ordered flowers and arranged for the grave to be dug and handled all the details with commendable efficiency, but I didn’t cry for him. I loved him, in spite of his standoffish manner, and I missed him—God, how I missed him—but I didn’t cry. Shit. I didn’t cry for him. And so I told myself that it was good that I was different from other people. I told myself I was a better person than they were, superior to most of the rabble. I took tremendous pride in my unshakable self-control, and I built a life on that pride.” She was shaking. Violently. She hugged herself. She looked at McGee. He seemed shocked. And she couldn’t stop talking. “I built a life on that pride, dammit. Maybe not a very exciting life by most standards. But a life. I was at peace with myself. And now this has to happen to me. I know it isn’t rational to fear Richmond, Johnson, Bradley, O’Hara ... But I do fear them. I can’t help myself. I have this intellectually stupid but emotionally powerful conviction that something extraordinary, something indescribably bizarre, maybe even something occult is happening here. I’ve lost control. I’ve given in to my emotions. I’ve become what I thought I wasn’t. I’ve thrown over what I was, tipped it over and rolled it down a long hill. I’m no longer the Susan Thorton I was ... and ... it’s ... tearing ... me ... apart.”

  She shuddered, choked, doubled over on the bed, sitting with her head to her knees, and gasped for breath, and wept, wept.

  McGee was speechless at first. Then he got her some Kleenex. Then some more Kleenex.

  He said, “Susan, I’m sorry.”

  He said, “Are you all right?”

  He got her a glass of water.

  Which she didn’t want.

  He put it back on the nightstand.

  He seemed confused.

  He said, “What can I do?”

  He said, “Jesus.”

  He touched her.

  He held her.

  That was what he could do.

  She put her head against his shoulder and sobbed convulsively. Gradually, she became aware that her tears did not make her feel even more miserable, as she had expected they would when she had been trying so hard to repress them. Instead, they made her feel cleaner and better, as if they were flushing out the pain and misery that had caused them.

  He said, “It’s all right, Susan.”

  He said, “You’re going to be fine.”

  He said, “You’re not alone.”

  He comforted her, and that was something that no one had ever done for her before—perhaps because she had never allowed it.

  A few minutes later.

  “More Kleenex?” he asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Wrung out.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t anything you did.”

  “I kept browbeating you about Bradley and O’Hara.”

  “No, you didn’t. You were only trying to help.”

  “Some help.”

  “You did help. You forced me to face up to something that I didn’t want to face up to, something I desperately needed to face up to. I’m not as tough as I thought I was. I’m a different person than I thought I was. And maybe that’s a good thing.”

  “All those things you said about yourself, all that stuff about how you thought you were different from other people—did you really believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “All those years?”

  “Yes.”

  “But everyone has a breaking point.”

  “I know that now.”

  “And there’s nothing wrong with being unable to cope now and then,” he said.

  “I’ve sure been unable recently. In spades.”

  He put one hand under her chin, lifted her head, and looked at her. His marvelous eyes were the bluest that she had yet seen them.

  He said, “Whatever’s wrong with you, no matter how subtle it might be, no matter how difficult it is to uncover the root of the problem, I’ll find it. And I’ll make you well again. Do you believe me, Susan?”

  “Yes,” she said, realizing that for the first time in her life she was, at least to some extent, willingly placing her fate in the hands of another person.

  “We will discover what’s causing this perceptual confusion, this quirky fixation on the House of Thunder, and we’ll correct it. You won’t have to go through the rest of your life seeing Ernest Harch and those other three men in the faces of total strangers.”

  “If that’s what’s happening.”

  “That is what’s happening,” he said.

  “Okay. Until you’ve found the cause of my condition, until you’ve made me well, I’ll try to cope with this craziness, with dead men who suddenly come back to life as hospital orderlies. I’ll do my best to handle it.”

  “You can. I know it.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I won’t be scared.”

  “You’re allowed to be scared now,” he said. “You’re no longer the iron maiden.”

  She smiled and blew her nose.

  He sat there on the edge of the bed for a minute, thinking, and then he finally said, “The next time you think you see Harch or Jellicoe or Quince or Park
er, there’s something you can do to keep from panicking.”

  “I’d like to hear it.”

  “Well, when I was completing my residency at a hospital in Seattle—more years ago than I like to remember—we had a lot of cases of drug overdose. People were always coming into the emergency ward—or being brought in by police—suffering from bad drug trips, uncontrollable hallucinations that had them either climbing walls or shooting at phantoms with a real shotgun. No matter whether it was LSD, PCP, or some other substance, we didn’t treat the patient with just counteractive drugs. We also talked him down. Encouraged him to loosen up. We held his hand and soothed him. Told him the big bad boogeymen he was seeing weren’t real. And you know something? Usually, the talk did the trick, had a tremendous calming effect. I mean, frequently the talking down seemed more effective than the counteractive drugs that we administered.”

  “And that’s what you want me to do when I see Harch or one of the others. You want me to talk myself down.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just tell myself they aren’t real?”

  “Yes. Tell yourself they’re not real and they can’t hurt you.”

  “Like saying a prayer to ward off vampires.”

  “In fact if you feel that praying would ward them off, don’t hesitate. Don’t be embarrassed to pray.”

  “I’ve never been a particularly religious person.”

  “Doesn’t matter. If you want to pray, do it. Do whatever works for you. Do whatever you need to do to keep yourself calm until I’ve had a chance to come up with a permanent, medical solution for your condition.”

  “All right. Whatever you say.”

  “Ah, I’m pleased to see that you’ve finally got the proper subservient attitude toward your doctor.”

  She smiled.

  He glanced at his wristwatch.

  Susan said, “I’ve made you late to the office.”

  “Only a few minutes.”

  “I’m sorry.”