The House of Thunder by Dean Koontz Page A

into bed yourself. Regardless of what you think, you’re still weak and shaky. You call for me.”
    “I will,” Susan said, although she thought she might just carefully try getting into bed under her own steam, depending on how she felt after taking her wheelchair constitutional.
    Mrs. Baker left the room, and Susan sat by the window for a while, enjoying the view.
    After a couple of minutes, however, she realized that it was not the view that was delaying her. She hesitated to leave the room because she was afraid. Afraid of meeting Bill Richmond, the Harch look-alike. Afraid that he would smile that hard smile, turn those moonlight-pale eyes on her, wink slyly at her, and perhaps ask her how good old Jerry Stein was getting along these days.
    Hell’s bells, that’s just plain ridiculous! she thought, angry with herself.
    She shook herself, as if trying to throw off the irrational fear that clung to her.
    He’s not Ernest Harch. He’s not the boogeyman, for God’s sake, she told herself severely. He’s thirteen years too young to be Harch. His name’s Richmond, Bill Richmond, and he comes from Pine Wells, and he doesn’t know me. So why the devil am I sitting here, immobilized by the fear of encountering him out there in the corridor? What’s wrong with me?
    She shamed herself into motion. She put her hands to the chair’s wheels and rolled out of the room, into the hallway.
    She was surprised when her arms began to ache before she had gone even a fifth of the distance that she had planned to cover. By the time she traveled both of the short halls, across the top of the hospital’s T-shaped floor plan, her muscles began to throb. She stopped the chair for a moment and massaged her arms and shoulders. Her fingers told her what she had wanted to forget: that she was terribly thin, wasted, far from being her old self.
    She gritted her teeth and went on, turning the wheelchair into the long main hall. The effort to move and maneuver the chair was sufficiently demanding to require concentration on the task; therefore, it was amazing that she even saw the man at the nurses’ station. But she did see him, and she stopped her wheelchair only fifteen feet from him. She gaped at him, stunned. Then she closed her eyes, counted slowly to three, opened them—and he was still there, leaning against the counter, chatting with a nurse.
    He was tall, about six feet two, with brown hair and brown eyes. His face was long, and so were his features, as if someone had accidentally stretched the putty he was made from before God had had an opportunity to pop him into the kiln to dry. He had a long forehead, a long nose with long, narrow nostrils, and a chin that came to a sharp point. He was wearing white pajamas and a wine-red robe, just as if he were an ordinary patient. But as far as Susan was concerned, there wasn’t anything ordinary about him.
    She had half expected to encounter Bill Richmond, the Harch look-alike, somewhere in the halls. She had prepared herself for that, had steeled herself for it. But she hadn’t expected this.
    The man was Randy Lee Quince.
    Another of the four fraternity men.
    She stared at him in shock, in disbelief, in fear, willing him to vanish, praying that he was nothing more than an apparition or a figment of her fevered imagination. But he refused to do the gentlemanly thing and disappear; he remained—unwavering, solid, real.
    As she was deciding whether to confront him or flee, he left the nurses’ station, turning his back on Susan without glancing at her. He walked away and entered the fifth room past the elevators, on the left side of the hall.
    Susan realized she’d been holding her breath. She gasped, and the air she drew into her lungs seemed as sharp and cold as a February night in the High Sierras, where she sometimes went skiing.
    For a moment she didn’t think she’d ever move again. She felt brittle, icy, as if she had crystallized.
    A nurse walked by, her rubber-soled shoes