Creature (32 page)

So today he put on his shorts and T-shirt eagerly, then trotted out onto the field with the others. Again to his surprise, immediately after he’d fallen in for the ten minutes of calisthenics that began each hour, the teacher called him out of the ranks and sent him to the gym.

His heart sank as he saw Phil Collins waiting for him, and he wondered what he might have done wrong that called for a dressing-down from the football coach. But to his surprise, Collins was smiling amiably at him.

“I’ve been hearing good things about you, Tanner,” Collins called to him. The coach was at the far end of the gym, idly hefting a large leather-covered medicine ball. “Marty Ames tells me you’re putting on a lot of muscle.”

Mark grinned bashfully. “I guess so,” he admitted.

“So let’s see what you can do,” Collins went on. Without warning he hurled the ball toward Mark, and Mark found that instead of giving in to his usual instinct to duck away from the heavy object, he stepped forward, caught it, and immediately shot it back toward the coach with enough force that Collins staggered slightly as it hurtled into his hands.

“Not bad,” the coach observed, his right eyebrow arching appreciatively. “Want to try the rope?” He nodded toward a heavy strand of twisted nylon, its length studded with large knots at regular intervals, which was suspended from a heavy hook in the ceiling.

Mark said nothing, but walked over to the rope and gave it an experimental tug. Then, grasping it with both hands, he lifted his weight off the floor. He released his left hand and quickly moved it to the knot above, then repeated the process with his right hand. Without even thinking about it, he automatically bent his body at the hips so that as he moved steadily toward the ceiling his legs were nearly parallel to the floor. He paused at the top for a second, then slapped the ceiling with his right hand. A moment later, on a sudden whim, he released the rope completely, dropping nearly fifteen
feet to the floor. His knees bent gracefully and he tumbled to one side, then scrambled back to his feet.

“Careful there,” Collins said after whistling admiringly at the maneuver. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can break an ankle that way.”

“But I didn’t, did I?” Mark replied, grinning.

For the next thirty minutes Collins put Mark through a rigorous set of exercises, but even when he was finished, Mark’s breathing was only a little heavier than normal. Though a sheen of sweat showed on his forehead, his shirt was still dry and his muscles felt as if he could have gone on for another hour.

“Definitely not bad,” Collins commented when it was over. He signaled Mark to follow him, and went into his office. Flopping down in the chair behind his desk, he eyed Mark speculatively. “Ever thought about going out for football?”

Mark licked his lips nervously. “N-Not until a couple of weeks ago,” he said finally. His eyes fixed on the floor a few feet in front of the coach’s desk. “I’m kind of small, aren’t I?”

Collins wiggled his right hand indifferently. “A lot of guys make up for small size with other things,” he observed. “Speed, agility, all kinds of things can make the difference. And there’s the basic will to win,” he added. “If you have that, it can make up for a lot.”

Mark turned the coach’s words over in his mind. He knew it was true—knew it if only from the rowing exercises he’d been doing at the sports center, where the sight of other rowers overtaking him had been enough to send adrenaline streaming into his blood, giving him that extra surge of power he needed to catch up.

“I think I’d like to try it,” he said finally, and Collins grinned at him, standing up.

“Then I’ll see you after school today,” he said. “Talk to Toby Miller about a practice uniform.”

Mark’s eager expression faded. “I’m supposed to go see
Dr. Ames today,” he began, but Collins silenced him with a gesture.

“It’s okay,” he said, winking at Mark. “I thought you might want to take a shot at it, so I already fixed it with him. You’re rescheduled for later, after practice.”

Mark stared at the coach in surprise, then a slow smile spread across his face. “Hey, thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot. See you later.”

He trotted out to the locker room, stripped off his gym clothes, and hit the showers. As the hot needle spray stung his skin, he felt a sharp surge of joy run through him.

It was going to be great, he thought. He was going to make the team, and his father would finally be proud of him.

And then, unbidden, an image of his mother came into his mind. His joy was suddenly blunted. He could already hear her telling him he was too small for football, that all that would happen would be that he’d get hurt.

Even as he began dressing, the tiny germ of anger toward his mother that had sprouted in the shower was already beginning to grow.

20

Sharon Tanner stared dolefully at the list of Colorado mental hospitals she’d copied at the library on Monday. Since then she’d called every one of them, and yesterday had even driven over to Canon City to inquire after Charlotte LaConner personally. But of course she’d gotten nowhere. Although most of the private hospitals had simply denied that they had a patient named LaConner at all, others had simply refused to answer her questions, citing policies and confidentiality laws.

It was an exercise in futility, and Sharon knew it. Even if Charlotte or Jeff were patients in one of the hospitals she’d called, they might have been admitted under other names, or they might have notations in their records to the effect that no information was to be given out.

And now, on Wednesday afternoon, she was finally ready to face the fact that what she had really been doing was procrastinating, putting off the moment when she would finally have to deal with the mice in the freezer—the one that seemed so normal, the other that was so grotesquely de-
sports center at all. And yet, every time she thought about them, an image of the Silverdale High football team kept coming unbidden into her mind.

Big boys—oversized boys—all of them.

But it wasn’t possible, was it? Surely TarrenTech wouldn’t allow any kind of experimentation on human subjects, let alone on the children of their own employees? After all, Jerry and Elaine Harris’s own son was on the football team.

And he was big, she reminded herself. Much bigger than either of his parents.

Once more she remembered the skinny asthmatic boy who had left San Marcos three years before. Was it really possible that nothing more than a regimen of vitamins and exercise, combined with clean mountain air, had effected such a change in Robb? It sounded too good to be true.

But if something was going on at TarrenTech and at the sports center, it meant that Mark was already involved.

That, of course, was what she’d been avoiding facing up to. She didn’t want to believe that the changes in Mark—the changes she’d tried to deny were taking place until Kelly had talked about them this morning—could be anything except the natural changes that occur in every teenage boy.

But the mice kept coming back to haunt her.

She looked at the phone again, reaching out to pick it up, then hesitated. She told herself there was no reason for her to be worried, that she’d done nothing wrong in calling around, trying to locate Charlotte LaConner. And yet several times as she’d talked on the phone during recent days, she’d heard an odd hollowness, as if someone, somewhere, had picked up an extension. Twice she was certain she’d heard faint clicks, as if someone had either come on the line or gotten off it.

Could her telephone be tapped?

My God, she groaned to herself, I’m starting to sound as paranoid as Charlotte LaConner! She gasped out loud at the thought. Hadn’t she herself insisted that perhaps Charlotte wasn’t paranoid, that maybe something really was going on and that Charlotte had stumbled onto it?

Taking her fears firmly in hand, she picked up the phone and dialed the county hospital. A moment later she recognized Mac MacCallum’s friendly voice at the other end of the line.

“D-Dr. MacCallum?” she stammered, still not quite certain what she was going to say. “It’s Sharon Tanner—Mark’s mother.”

“Well, hello,” MacCallum said, then his voice took on a note of concern. “What’s going on? Mark’s all right, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Sharon said. Then, even though she knew the doctor couldn’t see her, she shook her head. “I mean—well, I guess he’s all right. But I was just wondering if I could talk to you about something.”

In his office, MacCallum frowned. He could tell from Mrs. Tanner’s voice that she was upset, but if there was something wrong with Mark, why had she said he was all right? “What’s the problem, Mrs. Tanner?”

Sharon hesitated, and was just about to try to explain her fears when she heard a soft click and the phone took on that odd, hollow quality she’d noticed before. She felt a chill run through her body, and when she spoke again, she knew she sounded nervous. “It—Well, it’s not something I feel comfortable discussing on the phone,” she said.

MacCallum’s frown deepened. What was going on? Had someone come into the room as she spoke? Was the woman afraid her phone was tapped? “I see,” he said slowly. “Then perhaps you’d like to come out here,” he suggested, glancing at the appointment book that lay open on his desk. “How about four o’clock this afternoon?”

Sharon hesitated a split-second, and tried to keep her voice casual. “That’s not very good for me,” she countered. “I mean—well, this isn’t really a medical matter. It’s just something I need some advice about, and … well …”

MacCallum sat up straight in his chair. When Mark had been in the hospital that night, Sharon Tanner had struck him as a strong woman who knew her own mind and seldom
hesitated to speak her thoughts. But now she was floundering around, searching for words, apparently unable to tell him what was on her mind.

She
was
afraid her line was tapped.

And her husband was second in command at TarrenTech.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I have a couple of errands to run in the village. If you’re going to be down there, maybe we could have a cup of coffee.”

Sharon felt almost weak with relief. He’d understood and gone along with her. “As a matter of fact, I do have some shopping to do,” she said. “Shall we say half an hour?”

“Sounds good,” MacCallum replied. He hung up the phone, sat pensively at the desk for a moment, then headed toward the main doors. As he passed the admissions desk, Susan Aldrich glanced up at him curiously. “Since when do you take the afternoon off?”

MacCallum grinned. “Since that phone call,” he told her. “It seems like we might just have a chink in the great wall of security around TarrenTech.”

   Jerry Harris’s private intercom buzzed discreetly and he immediately picked up the receiver that would connect him directly with the security office in the basement. “Harris. What’s up?”

“Might be nothing,” the voice at the other end replied. “But Mrs. Tanner’s been on the phone a lot the last couple of days, trying to find Charlotte LaConner. And now she’s set up a meeting with MacCallum.”

Harris frowned thoughtfully. “Okay,” he said after a few seconds of silence. “I want that meeting monitored, and I want to know what happens right away.” Knowing his orders would be obeyed without question, he put the receiver back on its cradle and returned to the file he’d been studying.

It was a complete report of the experimental procedures Martin Ames had implemented in the case of Mark Tanner.

* * *

Sharon nearly took the car to the village that afternoon, but changed her mind at the last minute. She knew it was stupid—knew she was once more giving in to the same kind of paranoid thoughts that had made her wonder if her phone were tapped. Still, better to look as if she had nothing more on her mind than a leisurely walk to the store. She pulled the collapsible shopping cart out of the broom closet, struggled with it for a moment before it suddenly expanded in her hands, its wire bottom falling into place, then went to the hall closet and pulled out her parka. Only when she was ready to leave the house did she finally go to the freezer and pick up the small package containing the dead animals she’d brought home from TarrenTech. Her stomach feeling vaguely queasy at the knowledge of what the little package contained, she carefully tucked it into the bottom of her large carryall, then slung the bag itself over her shoulder. At last, awkwardly pulling the little cart behind her, she went out the back door and up the driveway to the street.

It was a chilly afternoon, but the sky was clear, a deep cobalt-blue dome over the valley which made it seem as if Silverdale had been cut off from the rest of the world and was now accessible only to those few people fortunate enough to live here.

Except that every day the perfection of the village had felt more and more claustrophobic to Sharon. Eventually she had come to believe that one way or another, nearly all the people in Silverdale were living lives that were as artificially decorated and as carefully planned as the community that housed them.

She saw a few other women walking in the streets that afternoon, their shopping carts rolling along behind them like so many tiny cabooses. Sharon nodded to the ones she didn’t recognize, spoke to the ones she did.

As she walked, she had to force herself not to look back to see if she were being followed.

By the time she got to the village, she was beginning to
feel a bit foolish about the whole thing, but still, the knowledge of what was in her bag—and the changes that had taken place in Mark—kept her wary. Even as she recognized Mac MacCallum lounging on one of the benches on the boardwalk that connected the shops, she hesitated, her eyes scanning the area for anything suspicious. She chuckled hollowly to herself as she realized ruefully that she wasn’t even certain what she should consider suspicious and what she shouldn’t. At last, striding purposefully, she approached MacCallum.