He climbed in behind the wheel and advised her to fasten her seat belt. The engine stuttered a little when he cranked it, as if some moisture had crept in where it didn’t belong.
He said as they pulled away from the curb, “Have you talked to Abby? She must be worried.”
The wipers, on double-speed, did very little to improve visibility. The road in front of him was a liquid blur.
“I would have liked to talk to Abby,” Miriam said, “but the phone stopped working twenty minutes ago. Dr. Wheeler, may I ask why you were so late?”
“Believe me, Miriam, it isn’t something you want to know.” She examined him over the rims of her eyeglasses and rendered a judgment: “Maybe you’re right.”
He took a different route back to the hospital, longer but higher; he was afraid of flooding down by the marina. The road rose along the foothills of Mt. Buchanan and Matt was forced to crawl along in the breakdown lane, away from the winds that had begun to sweep up the hillside with devastating force. Many of the houses he passed were already windowless and the road surface was littered with broken glass. Debris rolled past the car at a constant rate—loose garbage bins, cardboard boxes, green matter.
At the apex of the drive, where the road began a descent into the hospital district, the battering rain suddenly eased. Matt spared a glance to the west. The clouds, skimming overhead at a dizzying speed, had briefly lifted. He could see the water of the bay driven up beyond the marina and nearly to Commercial Street, the hulls of overturned pleasure boats bobbing level with the roofs of warehouses and restaurants. The bay itself was a furious caldron, though calmer than the sea beyond, where waves the size of houses battered the stony southern tip of Crab Pot Island. The last daylight came from the west—seemed to come from the storm itself, a strange, weak radiance.
He turned his attention back to the road and swerved to avoid a cartwheeling tree limb. The wind made his steering awkward; it was like driving into a tide of molasses.
“Dear God,” Miriam said suddenly. “Look at that.”
And he looked again, reluctantly, toward the west.
Offshore, the racing overcast had begun to dimple.
Black clouds grew lazy tails, which spiraled toward the sea.
Where they touched, white foam erupted.
Waterspouts, Matt thought. He counted five of them. It was fascinating, almost hypnotic, how they moved. There was something awful about their twisting, like the lash of a cat’s tail, plucking the water here and there, then lifting and falling again. Moving in the dim light. Moving toward shore.
A sudden curtain of rain obscured the view.
“Maybe you had better drive a little more quickly,” Miriam said.
Everything would have been all right, Abby Cushman thought, except for the ventilator ducts.
The storm was way too big, and coming way too fast, and Matt Wheeler was still out there somewhere, hadn’t even arrived at Miriam Flett’s house when the phones went dead… and then the lights in the basement cafeteria began to dim, and Tom Kindle ambled away to some other corner of the building to start up a generator, leaving Abby alone with six more or less terrified people in the flickering dark… and all this would have been endurable, except for what she had begun to think of as the God Damn Noise.
She had no idea how the hospital was ventilated. She knew only that several pressed-tin ducts ran along the ceiling above the fluorescent fixtures, and that the wind had somehow penetrated these conduits. Worse, the wind had begun to play them like a pipe organ. Not any ordinary pipe organ, Abby thought, but a pipe organ for mastodons and great whales; a pipe organ that produced sounds too fundamental for the human ear, perceptible only, like fear, in the hollow of the stomach.
The God Damn Noise had begun a little after six o’clock. It was innocuous at first, almost a whisper; then above that, as the velocity of the wind increased, came an intermittent keening note—eerie, but bearable.
Then the whisper rose to shouting volume, the sound of a bathroom shower running full tilt. And other noises began to creep in along the columns of hammered tin, in particular a low wail that made Abby think, uncomfortably, of a crying child; and periodic creaks and pops, as of sheet metal stressed beyond its tolerance.
She endured that… though it made her feel absurd, serving Oreos and lukewarm coffee to six individuals huddled knees-to-chest on hospital mattresses on a cold linoleum floor. Pollyanna in a pantsuit. She felt like a jennyass, frankly.
But then Bob Ganish began to complain of claustrophobia: It was too close in here, he insisted, especially with the fluorescents out and the damn battery lanterns casting such a dreadful low light—seemed like the air had gone bad. So Abby had to sit with him and share her cookies and change the subject. Hey, what was the best sale he ever made down there at Highway Five Ford? The drop-dead pinnacle of his sales career? And Bob smiled nervously and launched into a description of the near-criminal flogging of a used 1990 Pinto. The monologue lasted twenty minutes, by Abby’s watch, including details on the financing. All the while the ducts screaming and Abby beginning to feel that Ganish’s hysteria, by some reverse osmosis, was draining into her.
Okay, all that, and Dr. Wheeler still out in the storm…
But then the wind made a sound that was, in Abby’s imagination, precisely the sound the last T. Rex might have made, dying in a pool of hot Cretaceous mud…
(—her grandson Cory had been a dinosaur buff—)
…and to top it all off, that was the moment Paul Jacopetti picked to have his goddamn heart attack.
Abby was startled by the sudden commotion of voices. She turned away from Bob Ganish, spilling her coffee onto his pant leg. (“Ouch, Abby, hey!”)
Jacopetti lay face-up on his mattress, his hands clutched over his chest. His face was pale, and he was breathing rapidly, wheezing.
Worse, everyone seemed to expect Abby to do something about it.
She hurried to Jacopetti’s mattress and crouched over him. “Paul? What is it?”
“I’m having a fucking heart attack,” he gasped, “what does it look like!”
Her first impulse—she was instantly ashamed of it—was to slap him. Tell him: Not now! This isn’t the time or the place, you idiot. Have your heart attack later.
Instead she asked, not too intelligently, “Does your chest hurt?”
“Yes, it hurts. Hurts like a son of a bitch.” He closed his eyes and grimaced.
Abby looked up. Everyone had gathered in a circle around the mattress, their attention on Jacopetti, or worse, on her. The ventilator ducts screamed. Abby heard the sound of a window breaking, perhaps up on the second floor, a nerve-wrenching sound conducted directly into her eardrums.
She said, half to herself, “I don’t know what to do.” Then, as the last buckles of restraint broke loose, louder: “I don’t know what to do! Stop staring at me!”
She felt a hand on her shoulder, gently pulling her aside—Beth Porter’s hand.
Abby bit her lip but retreated from the mattress. Dazed, she watched Beth kneeling over Paul Jacopetti. “Mr. Jacopetti?” Beth said. “Mr. Jacopetti, can you hear me?” He opened his eyes. “You… what do you want?”
“Mr. Jacopetti, you have to tell me what’s wrong.” Perhaps the pain had gotten worse—Jacopetti seemed suddenly more malleable. “Chest hurts.”