Free House of Thunder by Dean Koontz Page A

just stepped through the looking glass. She was now in that part of Wonderland in which the usual laws of perspective did not apply. Here, little was big, and big was little; near was far; far was near; there was no difference whatsoever between up and down, in and out, over and under. This sleep-induced, drug-induced confusion made her nauseous; she tasted bile in the back of her throat. Could she taste something like that if she were dreaming? She wasn’t sure. She wished fervently that she could at least be certain whether she was awake or still fast asleep. “Long time no see,” Harch said. Susan blinked at him, trying to keep him in focus, but he kept fading in and out. Sometimes, for just a second or two, he had the shining eyes of a wolf. “Did you think you could hide from me forever?” he asked, speaking in a whisper, leaning even closer, until his face was nearly touching hers. His breath was foul, and she wondered if her ability to smell was an indication that she was awake, that Harch was real. “Did you think you could hide from me forever?” Harch demanded again. She could not respond to him; her voice was frozen in her throat, a cold lump that she could neither spit out nor swallow. “You rotten bitch,” Harch said, and his smile became a broad grin. “You stinking, rotten, smug little bitch. How do you feel now? Huh? Are you sorry you testified against me? Hmmm? Yeah. I’ll bet you’re real sorry now.” He laughed softly, and for a moment the laughter became the low growling of a wolf, but then it turned into laughter again. “You know what I’m going to do to you?” he asked. His face began to blur. “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” She was in a cavern. There were black flowers growing out of the stone floor. She was running from baying wolves. She turned a corner, and the cavern opened onto a shadowy city street. A wolf stood on the sidewalk, under a lamppost, and it said, “Do you know what I’m going to do to you?” Susan ran and kept on running through a long, frightening, amorphous night.
    Monday, shortly after dawn, she woke, groggy and damp with sweat. She remembered dreaming about wolves and about Ernest Harch. In the flat, hard, gray light of the cloudy morning, it seemed ridiculous for her to entertain the thought that Harch actually had been in her room last night. She was still alive, uninjured, utterly unmarked. It had all been a nightmare. All of it. Just a terrible nightmare.

5
    Not long after Susan woke, she took a sponge bath with the help of a nurse. Refreshed, she changed into her spare pajamas, a green pair with yellow piping. A nurse’s aide took the soiled blue silk pajamas into the bathroom, rinsed them in the sink, and hung them to dry on a hook behind the door.
    Breakfast was larger this morning than it had been yesterday. Susan ate every bite of it and was still hungry.
    A few minutes after Mrs. Baker came on duty with the morning shift, she came to Susan’s room with Dr. McGee, who was making his morning rounds before attending to his private practice at his offices in Willawauk. Together, McGee and Mrs. Baker removed the bandages from Susan’s forehead. There was no pain, just a prickle or two when the sutures were snipped and tugged loose.
    McGee cupped her chin in his hand and turned her head from side to side, studying the healed wound. “It’s a neat bit of tailoring, even if I do say so myself.”
    Mrs. Baker got the long-handled mirror from the nightstand and gave it to Susan.
    She was pleasantly surprised to find that the scar was not nearly as bad as she had feared it would be. It was four inches long, an unexpectedly narrow line of pink, shiny, somewhat swollen skin, bracketed by small red spots where the stitches had been.
    “The suture marks will fade away completely in ten days or so,” McGee assured her.
    “I thought it was a huge, bloody gash,” Susan said, raising one hand to touch the new, smooth skin.
    “Not huge,”