A drum was booming loudly and relentlessly in her head. She seemed to be turning on a carousel, faster and faster, and she wished she could put a stop to the room’s nauseating movement.
The nurse must have seen the panic in Susan’s eyes, for she said, “Easy now. Easy, kid. Everything’ll be all right.” She checked the IV drip, then lifted Susan’s right wrist to time her pulse.
My God, Susan thought, if I can’t speak, maybe I can’t
walk,
either.
She tried to move her legs under the sheets. She didn’t seem to have any feeling in them; they were even more numb and leaden than her arms.
The nurse let go of her wrist, but Susan clutched at the sleeve of the woman’s white uniform and tried desperately to speak.
“Take your time,” the nurse said gently.
But Susan knew she didn’t have much time. She was teetering on the edge of unconsciousness again. The pounding pain in her head was accompanied by a steadily encroaching ring of darkness that spread inward from the edges of her vision.
A doctor in a white lab coat entered the room, apparently in answer to the call button that the nurse had pushed. He was a husky, dour-faced man, about fifty, with thick black hair combed straight back from his deeply lined face.
Susan looked beseechingly at him as he approached the bed, and she said,
Are my legs paralyzed?
For an instant she thought she had actually spoken those words aloud, but then she realized she still hadn’t regained her voice. Before she could try again, the rapidly expanding darkness reduced her vision to a small spot, a mere dot, then a pinpoint.
Darkness.
She dreamed. It was a bad dream, very bad, a nightmare.
For at least the two-hundredth time, she dreamed that she was in the House of Thunder again, lying in a pool of warm blood.
2
When Susan woke again, her headache was gone. Her vision was clear, and she was no longer dizzy.
Night had fallen. Her room was softly lighted, but only featureless blackness lay beyond the window.
The IV rack had been taken away. Her needle-marked, discolored arm looked pathetically thin against the white sheet.
She turned her head and saw the husky, dour-faced man in the white lab coat. He was standing beside the bed, staring down at her. His brown eyes possessed a peculiar, disturbing power; they seemed to be looking
into
her rather than at her, as if he were carefully examining her innermost secrets, yet they were eyes that revealed nothing whatsoever of his own feelings; they were as flat as painted glass.
“What’s... happened... to me?” Susan asked.
She could speak. Her voice was faint, raspy, and rather difficult to understand, but she was not reduced to a mute existence by a stroke or by some other severe brain injury, which was what she had feared at first.
She was still weak, however. Her meager resources were noticeably depleted even by the act of speaking a few words at a whisper.
“Where... am I?” she asked, voice cracking. Her throat burned with the passage of each rough syllable.
The doctor didn’t respond to her questions right away. He picked up the bed’s power control, which dangled on a cord that was wrapped around the side rail, and he pushed one of the four buttons. The upper end of the bed rose, tilting Susan into a sitting position. He put down the controls and half filled a glass with cold water from a metal carafe that stood on a yellow plastic tray on the nightstand.
“Sip it slowly,” he said. “It’s been a while since you’ve taken any food or liquid orally.”
She accepted the water. It was indescribably delicious. It soothed her irritated throat.
When she had finished drinking, he took the glass from her and returned it to the nightstand. He unclipped a penlight from the breast pocket of his lab coat, leaned close, and examined her eyes. His own eyes remained flat and unreadable beneath bushy eyebrows that were knit together in what seemed to be a perpetual frown.
While she waited for him to finish the examination, she tried to move her legs under the covers. They were weak and rubbery and still somewhat numb, but they moved at her command. She wasn’t paralyzed after all.
When the doctor finished examining her eyes, he held his right hand in front of her face, just a few inches away from her. “Can you see my hand?”
“Sure,” she said. Her voice was faint and quavery, but at least it was no longer raspy or difficult to understand.
His voice was deep, colored by a vague guttural accent that Susan could not quite identify. He said, “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three,” she said, aware that he was testing her for signs of a concussion.
“And now—how many?”
“Two.”
“And now?”
“Four.”
He nodded approval, and the sharp creases in his forehead softened a bit. His eyes still probed at her with an intensity that made her uncomfortable. “Do you know your name?”
“Yes. I’m Susan Thorton.”
“That’s right. Middle name?”
“Kathleen.”
“Good. How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“Good. Very good. You seem clear-headed.”
Her voice had become dry and scratchy again. She cleared her throat and said, “But that’s just about
all
I’m able to remember.”
He hadn’t entirely relinquished his frown, and the lines in his broad, square face became sharply etched once more. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I can’t remember where I live... or what kind of work I do... or whether I’m married...”
He studied her for a moment, then said, “You live in Newport Beach, California.”
As soon as he mentioned the town, she could see her house: a cozy Spanish-style place with a red tile roof, white stucco walls, mullioned windows, tucked in among several tall palms. But no matter how hard she thought about it, the name of the street and the number of the house eluded her.
“You work for the Milestone Corporation in Newport,” the doctor said.
“Milestone?” Susan said. She sensed a distant glimmer of memory in her mental fog.
The doctor looked down at her intensely.
“What’s wrong?” she asked shakily. “Why are you staring like that?”
He blinked in surprise, then smiled somewhat sheepishly. Clearly, smiles did not come easily to him, and this one was strained. “Well... I’m concerned about you, of course. And I want to know what we’re up against here. Temporary amnesia is to be expected in a case like this, and it can be easily treated. But if you’re suffering from more than temporary amnesia, we’ll have to change our entire approach. So you see, it’s important for me to know whether the name Milestone means anything to you.”
“Milestone,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, it’s familiar.
Vaguely
familiar.”
“You’re a physicist at Milestone. You earned your doctorate at UCLA a few years ago, and you went to work at Milestone immediately thereafter.”
“Ah,” she said as the glimmer of memory grew brighter.
“We’ve learned a few things about you from the people at Milestone,” he said. “You have no children. You aren’t married; you never have been.” He watched her as she tried to assimilate what he’d told her. “Is it starting to fall into place now?”
Susan sighed with relief. “Yes. To an extent, it is. Some of it’s coming back to me ... but not everything. Just random bits and pieces.”
“It’ll take time,” he assured her. “After an injury like yours, you can’t expect to recuperate overnight.”
She had a lot of questions to ask him, but her curiosity was equaled by her bone-deep weariness and exceeded by her thirst. She slumped back against the pillows to catch her breath, and she asked for more water.
He poured only a third of a glass this time. As before, he warned her to take small sips.
She didn’t need to be warned. Already, after having consumed nothing more than a few ounces of water, she felt slightly bloated, as if she’d eaten a full-course dinner.
When she had finished drinking, she said, “I don’t know your name.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. It’s Viteski. Dr. Leon Viteski.”
“I’ve been wondering about your accent,” she said. “I do detect one, don’t I? Viteski... Is your heritage Polish?”
He looked uncomfortable, and his gaze slid away from hers. “Yes. I was a war orphan. I came to this country in 1946, when I was seventeen. My uncle took me in.” The spontaneity had gone out of his voice; he sounded as if he were reciting a carefully memorized speech. “I’ve lost most of my Polish accent, but I suppose I’ll never shake it entirely.”
Apparently, she had touched a sore spot. The mere mention of his accent made him strangely defensive.
He hurried on, speaking faster than he had spoken before, as if he were eager to change the subject. “I’m chief physician here, head of the medical staff. By the way... do you have any idea where ‘here’ is?”
“Well, I remember that I was on vacation in Oregon, though I can’t remember exactly where I was going. So this must be somewhere in Oregon, right?”
“Yes. The town’s Willawauk. About eight thousand people live here. It’s the county seat. Willawauk County is mostly rural, and this is its only hospital. Not a huge facility. It’s just four floors, two hundred and twenty beds. But we’re good. In fact I like to think we’re better than a lot of more sophisticated big-city hospitals because we’re able to give more personal attention to patients here. And personal attention often makes an enormous difference in the rate of recovery.”
His voice contained no trace of pride or enthusiasm, as it ought to have, considering what he was saying. It was almost as flat and monotonous as the voice of a machine.
Or is it just me? she wondered. Is it just that my perceptions are out of whack?
In spite of her weariness and in spite of the hammering that had just started up again inside her skull, she raised her head from the pillow and said, “Doctor, why am I here? What happened to me?”
“You don’t recall anything about the accident?”
“No.”
“Your car’s brakes failed. It was on an extremely twisty stretch of road, two miles south of the Viewtop turnoff.”
“Viewtop?”
“That’s where you were headed. You had a confirmation of your reservation in your purse.”
“It’s a hotel?”
“Yes. The Viewtop Inn. A resort. A big, rambling old place. It was built fifty or sixty years ago, and I’d guess it’s more popular now than it was then. A real get-away-from-it-all hotel.”
As Dr. Viteski spoke, Susan slowly remembered. She closed her eyes and could see the resort in a series of colorful photographs that had illustrated an article in Travel magazine last February. She’d booked a room for part of her vacation as soon as she’d read about the place, for she had been charmed by the pictures of the inn’s wide verandas, many-gabled roofline, pillared lobby, and extensive gardens.
“Anyway,” Viteski said, “your brakes failed, and you lost control of your car. You went over the edge of a steep embankment, rolled twice, and slammed up against a couple of trees.”
“Good God!”
“Your car was a mess.” He shook his head. “It’s a miracle you weren’t killed.”
She gingerly touched the bandage that covered half her forehead. “How bad is this?”
Viteski’s thick, dark eyebrows drew together again, and it suddenly seemed to Susan that his expression was theatrical, not genuine.
“It isn’t too serious,” he said. “A wide gash. You bled heavily, and it healed rather slowly at first. But the stitches are scheduled to come out tomorrow or the day after, and I really don’t believe there’ll be any permanent scarring. We took considerable care to make sure the wound was neatly sewn.”
“Concussion?” she asked.
“Yes. But only a mild one, certainly nothing severe enough to explain why you were in a coma.”
She had been growing more tired and headachy by the minute. Now she was abruptly alert again. “Coma?”
Viteski nodded. “We did a brain scan, of course, but we didn’t find any indication of an embolism. There wasn’t any swelling of brain tissue, either. And there was no buildup of fluid in the skull, no signs whatsoever of cranial pressure. You did take a hard knock on the head, which surely had
something
to do with the coma, but we can’t be much more specific than that, I’m afraid. Contrary to what the television medical dramas would have you believe, modern medicine doesn’t always have an answer for everything. What’s important is that you’ve come out of the coma with no apparent long-term effects. I know those holes in your memory are frustrating, even frightening, but I’m confident that, given sufficient time, they’ll heal over, too.”
He still sounds as if he’s reciting well-rehearsed lines from a script, Susan thought uneasily.
But she didn’t dwell on that thought, for this time Viteski’s odd manner of speech was less interesting than what he had said.
Coma.
That word chilled her.
Coma.
“How long was I unconscious?” she asked.
“Twenty-two days.”
She stared at him,
gaped
at him in disbelief.
“It’s true,” he said.
She shook her head. “No. It can’t be true.”
She had always been firmly in control of her life. She was a meticulous planner who tried to prepare for every eventuality. Her private life was conducted with much the same scientific methodology that had made it possible for her to earn her doctorate in particle physics more than a year ahead of other students who were her age. She disliked surprises, and she disliked having to depend on anyone but herself, and she was virtually terrified of being helpless. Now Viteski was telling her that she had spent twenty-two days in a state of utter helplessness, totally dependent on others, and that realization deeply disturbed her.
What if she had never come out of the coma?