The only response was a new fit of scratching.
“Listen, if you’ll just please tell me who you are, I’ll open the door.”
That promise accomplished nothing, either.
She listened worriedly to the fingernails that picked determinedly along the edges of the door, exploring the cracks between the door and the frame, as if purchase and leverage might be found there, sufficient to tear the door open or rip it from its hinges with one mighty heave.
Finally, after two or three more minutes of fruitless but busy scraping and probing, the noise stopped abruptly.
Susan tensed herself and prepared to recommence the struggle with the doorknob, but, much to her surprise and relief, the battle did not begin again.
She waited hopefully, hardly daring to breathe.
The bathroom gleamed in the hard fluorescent light, and a drop of water made a soft, soft
tink
as it fell from the faucet onto the metal stopper in the sink.
Gradually, Susan’s panic subsided. A trickle of doubt found its way into her mind; the trickle became a stream, a flood. Slowly, reason reasserted itself. She began to consider, once more, the possibility that she had been hallucinating. After all, if there really had been a man—or something else—behind the curtain, and if he really had wanted to get his hands on her, she would not have been able to hold the door against him. Not in her enfeebled condition. If someone actually had been twisting the doorknob—and now she was virtually awash in doubt, floundering in it—then the person on the other side had been markedly weaker than she was. And no one in such poor health could have posed a serious threat to her.
She waited. Leaned hard against the door.
Her breath came to her more easily now.
Time passed at a measured, plodding pace, and her heart slowed, and the silence continued without interruption.
But as yet she was unable to relax her grip on the doorknob. She stared at her hand. Her knuckles were sharp and bloodless. Her fingers looked like talons curled around the metal knob.
She realized that Mrs. Seiffert was the only one around who was weaker than she herself. Had Mrs. Seiffert tried to get out of bed on her own? Is that what all the thrashing behind the curtain had been about? And had the old woman somehow crossed the room in drugged confusion or in desperate pain? Had it been Mrs. Seiffert clawing at the door, unable to speak, seeking help, scratching and scratching at the wood in a frantic bid to gain attention?
Good God, Susan thought, was I defending the door against a dying woman who was seeking nothing but my help?
But she didn’t open the door. Couldn’t. Not yet.
Eventually, she thought: No. No, Mrs. Seiffert, if she exists, is too debilitated to get out of bed and cross the room all by herself. She’s an invalid, a limp bag of flesh and bones. It couldn’t possibly have been Mrs. Seiffert. Besides, the threatening form that had risen up behind the curtain couldn’t have been Mrs. Seiffert, either. It was too big.
In the sink, a drop of water fell.
On the other hand, maybe there hadn’t been a rising form behind the curtain to begin with. Maybe the curtain had never really moved, either. Maybe there had been no mysterious voice, no hand turning the knob, no persistent scratching at the door. All in her head.
Brain dysfunction.
A sand-grain blood clot.
A tiny cerebral capillary with an even tinier hemorrhage.
A chemicoelectrical imbalance of some kind.
The more she thought about it, the easier it was to rule out supernatural and conspiratorial explanations. After a lot of consideration, she seemed to be left with only two possibilities: either she had imagined the entire thing ... or Mrs. Seiffert now lay dead just the other side of the bathroom door, a victim of Susan’s mental problems.
In either case, there was no one after her, no reason to continue to guard the door. At last she leaned away from it; her shoulder ached, and her entire left side was stiff. She relaxed her iron-tight grip on the knob, which was now slick and shiny with her sour sweat.
She opened the door. Just a crack.
No one tried to force his way into the bathroom.
Still frightened, prepared to slam the door shut at the slightest sign of movement, she opened it wider: two inches, three. She looked down, expecting the worst, but there was no elderly dead woman sprawled on the floor, no gray face contorted in an eternal expression of contempt and accusation.
The hospital room looked normal. The lamp burned beside her bed, and her covers were heaped in a tangled mess, as she had left them. The night light was still on, too. The curtain around Jessica Seiffert’s bed was in place, hanging straight from the ceiling to the floor, stirred neither by a draft nor by a malevolent hand.
Susan slowly opened the door all the way.
No one leaped at her.
No dust-choked, half-human voice called to her.
So ... every bit of it was the product of my imagination, she thought dismally. My runaway imagination, galloping merrily off on another journey through temporary madness. My damned, sick, traitorous brain.
All of her life, Susan had limited her drinking to infrequent social occasions, and even then she had allowed herself no more than two cocktails in one evening, for she had always hated being drunk. She had been booze-blasted once, just once, when she was a senior in high school, and that had been a memorable and extremely nasty experience. No artificially induced high, no matter how pleasant it might be, had ever seemed worth the loss of control that went along with it.
Now, without taking a single sip of alcohol, she could lose control in an instant and not even be aware that she had lost it. At least when you got drunk, you relinquished the reins of reason slowly, in stages, and you knew that you were no longer in the driver’s seat. Drunk, you knew that your senses could not be trusted. But brain dysfunction was more insidious than that.
It scared her.
What if Jeff McGee couldn’t find the problem?
What if there was no cure?
What if she was forced to spend the rest of her life teetering on the razor-edge of insanity, frequently toppling over the brink for short but devastating travels in the shadowy land of Never-Was?
She knew she couldn’t live that way. Death would be far preferable to such a tortured existence.
She snapped off the bathroom light and fancied that she could feel the weight of the darkness on her back.
She followed the wall to her bed, wincing at the pain in the backs of her legs.
When she reached the bed, she used the power controls to lower it, and she put down the safety railing as she had done on the other side when she’d gotten out, and she started to sit down on the mattress, but then she hesitated. She raised up again and stood for a long while, staring at the curtain. Eventually, she accepted the fact that she could not simply go to sleep now; not yet. She had to find the courage to do what she had been unable to do earlier. She had to go over there, pull back the curtain, and prove to herself that her roommate was only an old, sick woman. Because if she did not do it now, the hallucinations might start again the moment that she turned out the light and put her head down on her pillow. Because if she didn’t fight this sickness every step of the way, it would probably overwhelm her much sooner than if she resisted. Because she was Susan Kathleen Thorton, and Susan Kathleen Thorton never ran away from trouble.
She was standing beside her slippers. She put her cold feet in them.
She moved creakily around the bottom of her bed, holding on to it as she went. She shuffled across the space between the two beds and, standing in the open with nothing to hold on to, she raised one hand and touched the curtain.
The room seemed extraordinarily quiet—as if she were not the only one holding her breath.
The air was as still as the air in a crypt.
She closed her hand, clenching a wad of drapery material in her fist.
Open it, for heaven’s sake! she told herself when she realized that she had been hesitating for almost a minute. There’s nothing threatening behind here, nothing but one old lady who’s sleeping through the last few days of her life.
Susan pulled the curtain aside. Overhead, the dozens of small metal hooks rattle-clattered along the stainless-steel track in the ceiling.
As she swept the curtain out of the way, Susan stepped closer to the bed, right up to the safety railing, and she looked down. In that gut-wrenching moment, she knew that there was a Hell and that she was trapped in it.
Mrs. Seiffert wasn’t in the bed, as she should have been. Something else. Something hideous. A corpse. Jerry Stein’s corpse.
No. It was just imagination.
Confused perceptions.
Brain dysfunction.
A minuscule hemorrhage in a tiny capillary.
And ... oh yes ... the well-known, oft-discussed, mischievous, sand-grain blood clot.
Susan went through the entire litany of medical explanations, but the corpse did not vanish or magically metamorphose into Mrs. Seiffert.
Nevertheless, Susan did not scream. She did not run. She was determined to sweat this one out; she would force herself back to reality. She clung to the safety railing to keep from collapsing.
She closed her eyes.
Counted to ten.
It isn’t real.
She opened her eyes.
The corpse was still there.
The dead man was lying on his back, the covers drawn up to the middle of his chest, as if merely sleeping. One side of his skull had a crumpled look; it was indented, matted with dark, dry blood, where Ernest Harch had kicked him three times. The body’s bare arms were atop the covers, stretched straight out at its sides; the hands were turned palms-up, and the fingers were bent into rigid curves, as if the dead man had made one last, futile grasp at life.
The corpse didn’t look exactly like Jerry Stein, but that was only because it wasn’t in very good condition; death had corrupted it somewhat. The skin was gray with greenish-black patches around the sunken eyes and at the corners of the purple, swollen, suppurating lips. The eyelids were mottled and crusty. Dark, peeling, oozing blisters extended out of the nostrils and across the upper lip. On both sides of the bloated, misshapen nose, other blisters glistened with some foul, brown fluid. In spite of the swelling and the discoloration and the disgusting disfigurement, the dead man was clearly Jerry Stein.
But Jerry had been dead for thirteen years. In that time, death would have visited upon him considerably more corruption than this. His flesh should have completely decomposed years ago. By now he should have been little more than a skeleton with a few strands of brittle hair clinging to its fleshless skull, the bleached bones bound together loosely by scraps of mummified skin and leathery ligaments. Yet he appeared to have been dead for only about ten days or a week, perhaps less.
Which is proof that this is a hallucination, Susan told herself, squeezing the bed’s safety railing so hard that she wondered why it didn’t bend in her hands. Only a hallucination. It doesn’t conform to reality, to the laws of nature, or to logic; not in any detail. So it’s only a vision, a horror that exists nowhere else but in my mind.
More proof of the corpse’s nonexistence was the fact that Susan couldn’t detect even the mildest odor of decay. If the dead man actually were here, even in this inexplicably early stage of decomposition, the stench would be overpowering. But the air, while not exactly sweet, was hospital clean, tainted only by Lysol.
Touch it, she told herself. That would dispel it. No one can touch and feel a mirage. Embracing a mirage is like embracing empty air: your arms come together around yourself. Go ahead. Touch it and prove it isn’t really there.
She couldn’t do it. She tried hard to pry her hand off the railing in order to reach out to the dead man’s cold gray arm, but she didn’t have the courage.
Instead, she said aloud, as if chanting magical words that would banish the vision: “It’s not here. It’s not real. It’s all in my mind.”
The crusted eyelids of the corpse fluttered.
No!
They opened.
No, she thought desperately. No, no, no, this is not happening to me.
Even open, these were not the eyes of a living man: they were rolled far back in the head, so that only the whites were visible; however, the whites were not white at all, but yellow and smeared with streaks of red-brown blood. Then those terrible eyes moved, rolled, bulged, and the brown irises were visible, though coated by milky cataracts. The eyes jittered for a moment, seeing nothing, and then they focused on Susan.
She screamed but didn’t make a sound. The noise of the scream fell back inside of her, like a rubber ball bouncing down a long, long set of dark cellar stairs, until it came to the bottom and was still. She shook her head violently, and she gagged with revulsion, choked on her own sour saliva.
The corpse raised one stiff, gray hand. The rigormortised fingers gradually uncurled. It reached toward her.
She tore her hands off the bed’s safety railing as if the metal had suddenly become red hot.
The corpse opened its filthy, oozing mouth. With rotting tongue and lips, it formed her name:
“Sssuuuuusssaaaaannn...”
She stumbled backwards one step.
It isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t, isn’t...
Jerkily, as if animated by a sputtering electrical current, the dead man sat up in bed.
It’s all in my mind, she told herself, trying very hard to talk herself down, as McGee had advised.
The dead man called her name again and smiled.
Susan swung away from the apparition and bolted for the door to the hall, her slippered feet slapping flatly against the tile floor, and she
(I’m
out of control) reached the door after what seemed like hours, grabbed the big handle, tugged on it, but the door (I’ve got to stop, get calm) seemed to weigh a thousand tons, and she cursed her weakness, which was costing her precious seconds, and she heard a wet gurgling noise behind her (Imagination!), and she grunted and put her back into the should-have-been-simple task of opening the damned door, and finally she did drag it open, and she (I’m running from a mirage) plunged into the corridor, not daring to glance behind her to see if the corpse was in pursuit (Just a mirage), then she staggered, nearly fell, turned left, weaved down the hall, unable to progress in a straight line, her leg muscles afire, her knees and ankles melting more rapidly with each step she took, and she careened into the wall, put her hand against it, gasping, and shuffled forward, didn’t think she could go on, then felt (Imagined!) the dead man’s bitterly cold breath against the bare nape of her neck, and somehow she did go on, and she reached the main corridor, saw the nurses’ station down by the elevators, tried to cry out, still couldn’t produce a sound, and pushed away from the wall, hurrying as best she could along the dark green floor, beneath the pale yellow ceiling, hurrying toward the nurses’ station. Toward help. Safety.