“Robert Redford doesn’t need a toupee.”
“Neither do I.”
“Right. You need an entire bearskin rug to cover that dome.”
They had reached the elevators.
“You’re being cruel, Murf.”
“Just helping you face reality, Phil.”
Murf pushed the white button labeled Up.
Phil said, “Well, Miss Thorton, I hope you’ve enjoyed your little trip.”
“Immensely,” she said.
“Good,” Murf said. “And we guarantee you that the next part of it will be interesting.”
“Very interesting,” Phil agreed.
The elevator doors opened behind her.
They pushed her inside but didn’t follow.
There were other people already in there. Four of them. Harch, Quince, Jellicoe, Parker. Harch and Quince were wearing pajamas and robes; they were standing at her left side. Jellicoe and Parker, in hospital whites, were at her right.
Shocked, disbelieving, she raised her head, looked out at Murf and Phil, who were standing in the elevator alcove on the first floor, staring in at her, smiling. They waved goodbye.
The doors closed. The lift started up.
Ernest Harch punched a button on the control panel, and they stopped between floors. He looked down at her. His frosty gray eyes were like circles of dirty ice, and they transmitted a chill to the heart of her.
Harch said, “Hello, bitch. Imagine meeting you here.”
Jellicoe giggled. It was a burbling, chortling, piggish sound that matched his piggish face.
“No,” she said numbly.
“Not going to scream?” Parker asked, grinning like a naughty, freckle-faced altar boy.
“We had hoped for a scream,” Quince said, his long face looking even longer from her perspective.
“Too surprised to scream,” Jellicoe said, and he giggled again.
She closed her eyes and did what Jeffrey McGee had suggested. She told herself that they were not real. She told herself that they couldn’t hurt her. She told herself that they were just phantoms, the stuff of daydreams or, rather, daymares. Not real.
Someone put a hand on her throat.
Heart pounding, she opened her eyes. ,It was Harch. He squeezed lightly, and the feel of her flesh in his grip apparently pleased him, for he laughed softly.
Susan put both of her hands on his, tried to pull it away. Couldn’t. He was strong.
“Don’t worry, bitch,” he said. “I won’t kill you.”
He sounded exactly like Harch had sounded at the trial and in the House of Thunder. That was one voice she would never forget. It was deep, with a gravelly edge to it, a cold and merciless voice.
“No, we won’t kill you yet,” Quince said. “Not yet.”
“When the time is right,” Harch said.
She dropped her hands. She felt increasingly numb in her extremities. Her feet and hands were cold. She was shaking like an old car whose engine was badly out of tune; her rattling, banging heart was shaking her to pieces.
Harch stroked her throat softly, tenderly, as if he were admiring the graceful curve of it.
She shuddered with revulsion and turned her head away from him, looked at Jellicoe.
His pig eyes glinted. “How did you like our little song and dance in your room this morning?”
“Your name’s Bradley,” she said, willing it to be so, willing reality to return.
“No,” he said. “Jellicoe.”
“And I’m Parker, not O’Hara,” the redhead said.
“You’re both dead,” she said shakily.
“All four of us are dead,” Quince said.
She looked at the hawk-faced man, bewildered by his statement.
He said, “After I was kicked out of Briarstead, I went home to Virginia. My family wasn’t very supportive. In fact they didn’t want much contact with me at all. Very proper, very old-line Virginia hunt-country family, you understand. No breath of scandal must ever sully the family name.” His face grew dark with anger. “I was given a modest income to tide me over until I could find work, and I was sent away. Sent away! My father—the self-righteous, sanctimonious, fucking bastard-cut me off as if I was a dead limb on a tree. What work was I to find that wasn’t beneath me? I mean, I was from a privileged family. I wasn’t bred to be a common laborer.” He was virtually speaking through clenched teeth now. “I didn’t get a chance to go to law school, as I’d wanted. Because of you, your testimony at the trial. Jesus, I hate your guts. It was because of you that I ended up in that dismal motel in Newport News. It was because of you that I slashed my wrists in that grubby little bathroom.”
She closed her eyes. She thought: They aren’t real. They can’t hurt me.
“I was killed in prison,” Harch said.
She kept her eyes tightly closed.
“Thirty-two days before I was scheduled to be paroled,” he said. “Christ, I’d served almost five years, and with one month to go, I had the bad luck to cross a nigger who’d had a knife smuggled into his cell.”
They’re not real. They can’t hurt me.
“And now I’ve finally come after you,” Harch said. “I swore I would. In prison, a thousand times, ten thousand times, I swore I’d come after you some day. And you know what this Friday is, bitch? It’s the anniversary of my death, that’s what it is. This Friday makes seven years since that nigger shoved me up against the wall and cut my throat. Friday. That’s when we’re going to do it to you. Friday night. You’ve got about three days left, bitch. Just wanted to let you know. Just wanted you to sweat for a while first. Friday. We’ve got something really special planned for you on Friday.”
“We’re all dead because of you,” Jellicoe said.
They’re not real.
Their voices slashed at her.
“—if we could have found where she was hiding—”
“—woutd’ve kicked her head in, too—”
“—cut her pretty throat—”
“—hell, cut her heart out—”
“—bitch doesn’t have a heart—”
They can’t hurt me.
“—nothing but a stinking Jew-lover anyway—”
“—not bad looking—”
“—ought to screw her before we kill her—”
“—little on the scrawny side—”
“—she’ll fatten up a bit by Friday—”
“—ever been screwed by a dead man?—”
She refused to open her eyes.
They’re not real.
“—we’ll all get on you—”
“—get in you—”
They can’t hurt me.
“—all of that dead meat—”
“—shoved up in you—”
They can’t hurt me,
can’t
hurt me, can’t
hurt...
“—Friday—”
“—Friday—”
A hand touched her breasts, and another hand clamped over her eyes.
She screamed.
Someone put a hard, rough hand over her mouth.
Harch said, “Bitch.” And it must have been Harch who pinched her right arm; hard; harder still.
And then she passed out.
9
The dark dissolved. It was replaced by milky fluorescent light, waltzing shadows that spun lazily in time to some unheard music, and blurred shapes that bobbled above her and spoke to her in fuzzy but familiar voices.
“Look who we’ve got here, Murf.”
“Who’s that, Phil?”
“Sleeping Beauty.”
Her vision cleared. She was lying on the stretcher. She blinked at the two orderlies who were looking down at her.
“And you think you’re the handsome prince?” Murf said to Phil.
“Well, you’re certainly no prince,” Phil said.
Susan saw an acoustic-tile ceiling above the two men.
“He thinks he’s a prince,” Murf said to Susan. “Actually, he’s one of the dwarfs.”
“Dwarfs?” Phil said.
“Dwarfs,” Murf said. “Either Ugly or Grumpy.”
“There wasn’t one named Ugly.”
“Then Grumpy.”
Susan turned her head left and right, bewildered. She was in the Physical Therapy Department’s waiting room.
“Besides,” Phil said, “Sleeping Beauty wasn’t mixed up with any dwarfs. That was Snow White.”
“Snow White?”
“Snow White,” Phil said, gripping the bar at the foot of the stretcher and pushing as Murf guided from the other end.
They started moving toward the double doors that opened onto the first-floor corridor.
Her bewilderment was suddenly overlaid with fear. She tried to sit up, but she was restrained by the single strap across her middle. She said, “No, wait. Wait. Wait a minute, dammit!”
They stopped moving. Both men appeared to be startled by her outburst. Murf’s bushy gray eyebrows were drawn together in a frown. Phil’s round, childlike face was a definition of puzzlement.
“Where are you taking me?” she demanded.
“Well ... back to your room,” Murf said.
“What’s wrong?” Phil asked.
She ran her hands over the fabric belt that held her down, felt desperately for the means by which it could be released. She found the buckle, but before she could tug at it, Murf put his hand on hers and gently moved it away from the strap.
“Wait,” he said. “Just calm down, Miss Thorton. What’s wrong?”
She glared up at them. “You already took me out of here once, took me as far as the elevators—”
“We didn’t—”
“—then just pushed me in there with them, just abandoned me to them. I’m not going to let you do anything like that again.”
“Miss Thorton, we—”
“How could you do that to me? Why in the name of God would you
want
to do that to me? What could you possibly have against me? You don’t know me, really. I’ve never done anything to either of you.”
Murf glanced at Phil.
Phil shrugged.
To Susan, Murf said, “Who’s them?”
“You know,” she said bitterly, angrily. “Don’t pretend with me. Don’t treat me like a fool.”
“No, really,” Murf said. “I really don’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Me either,” Phil said.
“Them!” she said exasperatedly. “Harch and the others. The four dead men, dammit!”
“Dead men?” Phil said.
Murf looked down at her as if she had lost her mind; then he abruptly broke into a smile. “Ah, I understand. You must’ve been dreaming.”
She looked from one man to the other, and they appeared to be genuinely perplexed by her accusations.
Murf said to Phil, “I guess she dreamed that we took her out of here and put her in the elevator with some other patients who were ... deceased.” He looked down at Susan. “Is that it? Is that what you dreamed?”
“I can’t have been dreaming. I wasn’t even asleep,” she said sharply.
“Of course you were asleep,” Phil said, his voice every bit as patient and understanding as hers was sharp and angry. “We just now watched you wake up.”
“A regular Sleeping Beauty,” Murf said.
She shook her head violently, side to side. “No, no, no. I mean, I wasn’t sleeping the first time you came in,” she said, trying to explain but realizing that she sounded irrational. “I... I just closed my eyes for a second or two after Mrs. Atkinson left me here, and before I could possibly have had a chance to doze off, you came and took me out to the elevator and—”
“But that was all a dream, don’t you see?” Murf said gently, smiling encouragingly.
“Sure,” Phil said. “It had to be a dream because we don’t ever move the deceased patients to the morgue by way of the public elevators.”
“Not ever,” Murf said.
“The deceased are transported in the service elevators,” Phil explained.
“That’s more discreet,” Murf said.
“Discreet,” Phil agreed.
She wanted to scream at them: That’s not the kind of dead men I’m talking about, you conniving
bastards!
I mean the dead men who’ve come
back from
the grave, the ones who walk and talk and somehow manage to pass for the living, the ones who want to kill me.
But she didn’t scream a word of that because she knew it would sound like the ravings of a lunatic.
“A dream,” Murf said placatingly.
Phil said, “Just a bad dream.”
She studied their faces, which loomed over her and appeared disproportionately huge from her awkward perspective. The gray-haired, fatherly Murf had kind eyes. And could Phil’s smooth, round, childlike countenance successfully conceal vicious, hateful thoughts? No, she didn’t believe that it could. His wide-eyed innocence was surely as genuine as her own fear and confusion.
“But how could it have been a dream?” she asked. “It was so real ... so vivid.”
“I’ve had a couple of dreams so vivid that they hung on for a minute or so after I woke up,” Phil said.
“Yeah,” Murf said. “Me, too.”
She thought of Quince’s speech about his suicide. She thought of the hand on her breasts, the other hand over her eyes, the third hand sealing shut her mouth when she tried to scream for help.
“But this was ...
real,”
she said, though she was increasingly coming to doubt that. “At least ... it seemed real ... frighteningly real...”
“I swear to you, it wasn’t more than five minutes ago that we got the call from Mrs. Atkinson, asking us to come and pick you up,” Murf said.
“And we came straight down,” Phil said.
“And here we are. But we weren’t here before.”
She licked her dry lips. “I guess...”
“A dream,” Murf said.
“Had to’ve been a bad dream,” Phil said.
At last, grudgingly, Susan nodded. “Yeah. I suppose so. Listen ... I’m sorry.”
“Oh, don’t worry your pretty head,” Murf told her. “There’s no need for you to be sorry.”
“I shouldn’t have snapped at you the way I did,” she said.
“Did she hurt your feelings, Phil?”
“Not in the least. Did she hurt your feelings, Murf?”
“Not one bit.”
“There, you see,” Phil said to Susan. “Absolutely no reason for you to apologize.”
“No reason at all,” Murf concurred.