The House of Thunder by Dean Koontz Page B

squeaking slightly on the highly polished floor.
    The squeak made Susan think of bats.
    Her skin broke out in gooseflesh.
    There had been bats in the House of Thunder. Bats rustling secretly, disturbed by the flashlights and the candles. Bats chittering nervously during the beating that the fraternity men had administered to poor Jerry. Bats cartwheeling through the pitch blackness, fluttering frantically against her as she doused her stolen flashlight and fled from Harch and the others.
    The nurse at the counter, the one to whom Quince had been talking, noticed Susan and must have seen the fright in her face. “Are you all right?”
    Susan breathed out. The expelled air was warm on her teeth and lips. Thawed, she nodded at the nurse.
    The sound of squealing bats became distant, then swooped away into silence.
    She rolled her wheelchair to the counter and looked up at the nurse, a thin brunette whose name she didn’t know. “The man you were just talking to ...”
    The nurse leaned over the counter, looked down at her, and said, “The fellow who went into two-sixteen?”
    “Yes, him.”
    “What about him?”
    “I think I know him. Or knew him. A long time ago.” She glanced nervously toward the room into which Quince had gone, then back at the nurse again. “But if he isn’t who I think he is, I don’t want to burst in on him and make a fool of myself. Do you know his name?”
    “Yes, of course. He’s Peter Johnson. Nice enough guy, if a little bit on the talky side. He’s always coming out here to chat, and I’m beginning to fall behind on my record-keeping because of it.”
    Susan blinked. “Peter Johnson? Are you sure of that? Are you sure his name’s not Randy Lee Quince?”
    The nurse frowned. “Quince? No. It’s Peter Johnson, all right. I’m sure of that.”
    Talking to herself as much as to the nurse, Susan said, “Thirteen years ago ... back in Pennsylvania ... I knew a young man who looked exactly like that.”
    “Thirteen years ago?” the nurse said. “Well, then for sure it wasn’t this guy. Peter’s only nineteen or twenty. Thirteen years ago, he’d have been a little boy.”
    Startled, but only for a moment, Susan quickly realized that this man had been young. Hardly more than a kid. He looked just like Randy Quince had looked, but not as Quince would look today. The only way he could be Randy Lee Quince was if Quince had spent the past thirteen years in suspended animation.
     
 
For lunch, she was given fewer soft foods than before, more solid fare. It was a welcome change of diet, and she cleaned her plate. She was eager to regain her strength and get out of the hospital.
    To please Mrs. Baker, Susan lowered her bed, curled on her side, and pretended to nap. Of course, sleep was impossible. She couldn’t stop thinking about Bill Richmond and Peter Johnson.
    Two look-alikes? Dead ringers, both showing up in the same place, within one day of each other?
    What were the odds on that? Astronomical. It wasn’t merely unlikely; it was impossible.
    Yet not impossible. Because they were here, dammit. She had seen them.
    Rather than the chance arrival of two dead ringers, it seemed at least marginally more likely that the real Harch and the real Quince had, by chance, checked into the same hospital that she had checked into. She spent some time considering the possibility that they weren’t merely look-alikes, that they were the genuine articles, but she couldn’t make much of a case for that notion. They might both have changed their names and assumed entirely new identities after their individual periods of probation had expired, after they could quietly slip away without alerting probation officers. They might have stayed in touch during the years Harch was in prison, and later on they might have moved together to the same town in Oregon. There wasn’t really any coincidence involved in that part of the scenario; after all, they had been close friends. They might even both have become