Amnesia. Brain damage.
Those dreaded words landed with the force of hammer blows in her mind. Evidently, she had been in an accident and had sustained a serious head injury. She considered the grim prospect of permanent mental disorientation, and she shuddered.
Suddenly, however, unexpected and unsought, her name came to her. Susan. Susan Thorton. She was thirty-two years old.
The anticipated flood of recollections turned out to be just a trickle. She could recall nothing more than her name and age. Although she probed insistently at the darkness in her mind, she couldn’t remember where she lived. How did she earn her living? Was she married? Did she have any children? Where had she been born? Where had she gone to school? What foods did she like? What was her favorite kind of music? She could find no answers to either important or trivial questions.
Amnesia. Brain damage.
Fear quickened her heartbeat. Then, mercifully, she remembered that she had been on vacation in Oregon. She didn’t know where she had come from; she didn’t know what job she would return to once her vacation came to an end; but at least she knew where she was. Somewhere in Oregon. The last thing she could recall was a beautiful mountain highway. An image of that landscape came to her in vivid detail. She had been driving through a pine forest, not far from the sea, listening to the radio, enjoying a clear blue morning. She drove through a sleepy village of stone and clapboard houses, then passed a couple of slow-moving logging trucks, then had the road all to herself for a few miles, and then... then...
Nothing. After that, she had awakened, confused and blurry-eyed, in the hospital.
“Well, well. Hello there.”
Susan turned her head, searching for the person who had spoken. Her eyes slipped out of focus again, and a new dull pain pulsed at the base of her skull.
“How are you feeling? You
do
look pale, but after what you’ve been through, that’s certainly to be expected, isn’t it? Of course it is. Of course.”
The voice belonged to a nurse who was approaching the bed from the direction of the open door. She was a pleasantly plump, gray-haired woman with warm brown eyes and a wide smile. She wore a pair of white-framed glasses on a beaded chain around her neck; at the moment, the glasses hung unused on her matronly bosom.
Susan tried to speak. Couldn’t.
Even the meager effort of straining for words made her so light-headed that she thought she might pass out. Her extreme weakness scared her.
The nurse reached the bed and smiled reassuringly. “I knew you’d come out of it, honey. I just knew it. Some people around here weren’t so sure as I was. But I knew you had moxie.” She pushed the call button on the headboard of the bed.
Susan tried to speak again, and this time she managed to make a sound, though it was only a low and meaningless gurgle in the back of her throat. Suddenly she wondered if she would ever speak again. Perhaps she would be condemned to making grunting, gibbering animal noises for the rest of her life. Sometimes, brain damage resulted in a loss of speech, didn’t it?
Didn’t it?
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.”