The House of Thunder Read Online Free

“Everything’ll look better in the morning.”
    He turned out the overhead light.
    Shadows sprang up as if they were living creatures that had been hiding under the furniture and behind the baseboard. Although Susan couldn’t remember ever having been afraid of the dark, she was uneasy now; her heartbeat accelerated.
    The only illumination was the cold, shimmering fluorescence that came through the open door from the hospital corridor, and the soft glow from a small lamp that stood on a table in one corner of the room.
    Standing in the doorway, Viteski was starkly silhouetted by the hall light. His face was no longer visible; he looked like a black paper cutout. “Good night,” he said.
    He closed the door behind him, shutting out the corridor light altogether.
    There was only one lamp now, no more than a single fifteen-watt bulb. The darkness crowded closer to Susan, laid long fingers across the bed.
    She was alone.
    She looked at the other bed, which was shrouded in shadows like banners of black crepe; it reminded her of a funeral bier. She wished ardently for a roommate.
    This isn’t right, she thought. I shouldn’t be left alone like this. Not after I’ve just come out of a coma. Surely there ought to be somebody in attendance—a nurse, an orderly, somebody.
    Her eyes were heavy, incredibly heavy.
    No, she told herself angrily. I mustn’t fall asleep. Not until I’m absolutely sure that my nice little nap won’t turn into another twenty-two-day coma.
    For a few minutes Susan struggled against the ever-tightening embrace of sleep, clenching her fists so that her fingernails dug painfully into her palms. But her eyes burned and ached, and at last she decided that it wouldn’t hurt to close them for just a minute, just long enough to rest them. She was sure she could close her eyes without going to sleep. Of course she could. No problem.
    She fell over the edge of sleep as if she were a stone dropping into a bottomless well.
    She dreamed.
    In the dream, she was lying on a hard, damp floor in a vast, dark, cold place. She wasn’t alone. They were with her. She ran, staggering blindly across the lightless room, down narrow corridors of stone, fleeing from a nightmare that was, in fact, a memory of a real place, a real time, a real horror that she had lived through when she was nineteen.
    The House of Thunder.

3
    The following morning, a few minutes after Susan woke, the plump, gray-haired nurse appeared. As before, her glasses were suspended from a beaded chain around her neck, and they bobbled on her motherly bosom with each step she took. She slipped a thermometer under Susan’s tongue, took hold of Susan’s wrist, timed the pulse, then put on her glasses to read the thermometer. As she worked, she kept up a steady line of chatter. Her name was Thelma Baker. She said she’d always known that Susan would pull through eventually. She had been a nurse for thirty-five years, first in San Francisco and then here in Oregon, and she had seldom been wrong about a patient’s prospects for recovery. She said she was such a natural-born nurse that she sometimes wondered if she was the reincarnation of a woman who had been a first-rate nurse in a previous life. “Of course, I’m not much good at anything else, ” she said with a hearty laugh. “I’m sure as the devil not much of a housekeeper!” She said she wasn’t very good at managing money, either; to hear her tell it, just balancing the checkbook every month was a Herculean task. Wasn’t much good at marriage, she said. Two husbands, two divorces, no children. Couldn’t cook very well, either. Hated to sew; loathed it. “But I’m a darned good nurse and proud of it,” she said emphatically, more than once, always with that charming smile that involved her brown eyes as well as her mouth, a smile that showed how much she truly did enjoy her work.
    Susan liked the woman. Ordinarily, she had little or no patience with nonstop talkers. But Mrs. Baker’s