“While he was in the ICU,” O’Brien continued, “his respiration, heartbeat, and brain function were continuously monitored and sent by telemetry to the unit nurses’ station. That’s always been standard procedure.” He used the mouse to click on a series of icons and numbered choices. “The rest is relatively new. The system digitally records data collected by the electronic monitoring devices during the patient’s entire stay in the ICU. For later review.”
Ethan figured they kept a digital record as evidence to defend against frivolous lawsuits.
“Here’s Whistler’s EEG when first admitted to the ICU at four-twenty P.M. last Friday.”
An unseen stylus drew a continuous line left to right across an endlessly scrolling graph.
“These are the brain’s electrical impulses as measured in microvolts,” O’Brien continued.
A monotonous series of peaks and valleys depicted Dunny’s brain activity. The peaks were low and wide; the valleys were comparatively steep and narrow.
“Delta waves are the typical pattern of normal sleep,” O’Brien explained. “These are delta waves but not those associated with an ordinary night’s rest. These peaks are broader and much lower than common delta waves, with a smoother oscillation into and out of the troughs. The electrical impulses are few in number, attenuated, weak. This is Whistler in a deep coma. Okay. Now let’s fast-forward to the evening of the day before his death.”
“Sunday night.”
“Yes.”
On the screen, as hours of monitoring flew past in a minute, the uncommon delta waves blurred and jumped slightly, but only slightly because the variation from wave to wave was minuscule. An hour of compressed data, viewed in seconds, closely resembled any minute of the same data studied in real time.
Indeed, the sameness of the patterns was so remarkable that Ethan would not have realized how many hours—days—of data were streaming by if there hadn’t been a time display on the screen.
“The event occurred at one minute before midnight, Sunday,” O’Brien said.
He clicked back to real-time display, and the fast-forwarding stopped at 11:23:22, Sunday night. He speeded the data again in two quick spurts, until he reached 11:58:09.
“Less than a minute now.”
Ethan found himself leaning forward in his chair.
Shatters of rain clattered against the windowpanes, as though the wind, in wounded anger, had spat out broken teeth.
One of the people at the other work stations had left the room.
The remaining woman murmured into her phone. Her voice was soft, singsong, slightly spooky, as might be the voices that left messages on the answering machine that served Line 24.
“Here,” said Dr. O’Brien.
At 11:59, the lazy, variant delta waves began to spike violently into something different: sharp, irregular peaks and valleys.
“These are beta waves, quite extreme beta waves. The low, very fast oscillation indicates that the patient is concentrating on an external stimulus.”
“What stimulus?” Ethan asked.
“Something he sees, hears, feels.”
“External? What can he see, hear, or feel in a coma?”
“This isn’t the wave pattern of a man in a coma. This is a fully conscious, alert, and disturbed individual.”
“And it’s a machine malfunction?”
“A couple people here think it has to be machine error. But…”
“You disagree.”
O’Brien hesitated, staring at the screen. “Well, I shouldn’t get ahead of the story. First…when the ICU nurse saw this coming in by telemetry, she went directly to the patient, thinking he’d come out of his coma. But he remained slack, unresponsive.”
“Could he have been dreaming?” Ethan asked.
O’Brien shook his head emphatically. “The wave patterns of dreamers are distinctive and easily recognizable. Researchers have identified four stages of sleep, and a different signature wave for each stage. None of them is like this.”
The beta waves began to spike higher and lower than before. The peaks and valleys were mere needle points instead of the former rugged plateaus, with precipitous slopes between them.
“The nurse summoned a doctor,” O’Brien said. “That doctor called in another. No one observed any physical evidence that Whistler had ascended by any degree from deep coma. The ventilator still handled respiration. Heart was slow, slightly irregular. Yet according to the EEG, his brain produced the beta waves of a conscious, alert person.”
“And you said ‘disturbed.’”
The beta tracery on the screen jittered wildly up and down, valleys growing narrower, the distance between the apex and nadir of each pattern increasing radically, until it was reminiscent of the patterns produced on a seismograph during a major earthquake.
“At some points you might accurately say he appears ‘disturbed,’ at others ‘excited,’ and in this passage you’re watching now, I’d say without any concern about being melodramatic, that these are the brain waves of a terrified individual.”
“Terrified?”
“Thoroughly.”
“Nightmare?” Ethan suggested.
“A nightmare is just a dream of a darker variety. It can produce radical wave patterns, but they’re nevertheless recognizable as those of a dream. Nothing like this.”
O’Brien speeded the flow of data again, forwarding through eight minutes’ worth in a few seconds.
When the screen returned to real-time display, Ethan said, “This looks the same…yet different.”
“These are still the beta waves of a conscious person, and I would say this guy is still frightened, although the terror may have declined here to high anxiety.”
The serpent-voiced wind, singing in a language of hiss-shriek-moan, and the claw-tap of rain on window glass seemed to be the perfect music to accompany the jagged images on the screen.
“Although the overall pattern remains one of conscious anxiety,” Dr. O’Brien continued, “within it are these irregular subsets of higher spikes, each followed by a subset of lower spikes.”
He pointed at the screen, calling examples to Ethan’s attention.
“I see them,” Ethan said. “What do they mean?”
“They’re indicative of conversation.”
“Conversation? He’s talking to himself?”
“First of all, he isn’t talking aloud to anyone, not even to himself, so we shouldn’t be seeing these patterns.”
“I understand. I think.”
“But what these represent is not arguable. During the subsets of higher spikes, the subject should be speaking. During the subsets of lower spikes, he should be listening. A subject having a bit of mental give-and-take with himself, even when he’s awake, produces no such subsets. After all, for one thing, when you’re talking to yourself, conducting a little interior debate—”
“Technically, you’re always talking,” Ethan said. “You’re both sides of the debate. You’re never really listening.”
“Exactly. These subsets are indicative of conscious conversation between this individual and another person.”
“What other person?”
“I don’t know.”
“He’s in a coma.”
“Yes.”
Frowning, Ethan said, “Then how is he talking to anyone? By telepathy?”
“Do we believe in telepathy?” O’Brien asked.
“I don’t.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then why couldn’t this be a malfunctioning machine?” Ethan wondered.
O’Brien accelerated the data flow until the brain-wave patterns disappeared from the screen, replaced by the words DATA INTERRUPT.
“They took Whistler off the EEG, the one they thought must be malfunctioning,” the doctor said. “They connected him to a different machine. The switchover took six minutes.”
He fast-forwarded through the gap, until the patterns appeared once more.
“They look the s
ame on the new machine,” Ethan said.
“Yeah, they are. Beta waves representing consciousness, lots of anxiety, and with subsets suggesting vigorous conversation.”
“A second malfunctioning machine?”
“There’s one holdout who still thinks so. Not me. These wave patterns ran nineteen minutes on the first EEG, apparently for six minutes between hookups, and then thirty-one minutes on the second machine. Fifty-six minutes total before they abruptly stopped.”
“How do you explain it?” Ethan asked.
Instead of answering him, O’Brien worked the keyboard, calling up a second display of data, which appeared above the first: another moving white line on the blue background, spiking from left to right. In this case, all the spikes were above the base line, none below.
“This is Whistler’s respiration synchronized with the brain-wave data,” O’Brien said. “Each spike is an inhalation. Exhalation takes place between spikes.”
“Very regular.”
“Very. Because the ventilator is breathing for him.”
The physician tapped the keys again, and a third display shared the screen with the first two.
“This is heart function. Standard three-phase action. Diastole, atrial systole, ventricular systole. Slow but not too slow. Weak but not too weak. Slight irregularities, but nothing dangerous. Now look here at the brain waves.”
The beta waves were doing the earthquake jitterbug once more.
Ethan said, “He’s terrified again.”
“In my opinion, yes. Yet there’s no change in heart function. It’s the same slow, somewhat weak beat with tolerable irregularities, exactly his deep-coma pattern ever since he was first admitted to the hospital almost three months ago. He’s in a state of terror…yet his heart is calm.”
“The heart’s calm because he’s comatose. Right?”
“Wrong. Even in a profound coma, Mr. Truman, there isn’t this complete disconnect between the mind and body. When you’re having a nightmare, the terror is imagined, not real, but heart function is affected just the same. The heart races during a nightmare.”
For a moment, Ethan studied the violently jumping beta waves and compared them to the slow, steady heartbeat. “After fifty-six minutes of this, his brain activity returned to the long, slow delta waves?”
“That’s right. Until he died the next morning.”
“So if it’s not two machines malfunctioning, how do you explain all of this, Doctor?”
“I don’t. I can’t. You asked me if there was anything unusual in the patient’s file. Specifically, something…uncanny.”
“Yes, but—”
“I don’t have a dictionary handy, but I believe uncanny means something not normal, something extraordinary, something that can’t be explained. I can only tell you what happened, Mr. Truman, not a damn thing about why.”
Tongues of rain licked the windows.
With snuffle, growl, and keening petition, the wolfish wind begged entry.
Across the fabled city rolled a low protracted rumble.
Ethan and O’Brien looked toward the windows, and Ethan supposed that the physician, too, had envisioned a terrorist attack somewhere, women and babies murdered by the fascistic Islamic radicals who fed on wickedness and crawled the modern world with demon determination.
They listened to the sound slowly fade, and finally Dr. O’Brien said with relief, “Thunder.”
“Thunder,” Ethan agreed.
Thunder and lightning were not common to storms in southern California. This peal, in place of bomb blast, suggested a turbulent day ahead.
Beta waves, as jagged as lightning, struck repeatedly across the computer screen.
Comatose, Dunny had experienced a terrifying encounter that had occurred neither in this world nor in the land of dreams, but in some realm mysterious. He had engaged in a conversation without spoken words, as if he’d breathed in a ghost that had traveled to his lungs and thence into his arteries, by blood from heart to brain, there to haunt him in the shadowy rooms of his mind for fifty-six minutes.
CHAPTER 53
LIKE AN ARAB SHEIK IN YELLOW KAFFIYEH AND yellow cloak, brought here by the rubbing of a lamp and the magic of a genie, Corky Laputa was a bright whirl in the otherwise dismal house of the three-eyed freak.
Singing “Reunited” and then “Shake Your Groove Thing,” both Peaches and Herb hits, he searched these cluttered chambers, rating them on a crud scale—cruddy, cruddier, cruddiest—as he sought what might remain of the first twenty thousand dollars that he had given Hokenberry a few weeks ago.
The beefy one might have written Corky’s name in an address book, on an index card—even on a wall, considering how much these shabby walls resembled those of the grungiest public restroom. Corky didn’t care about that. He hadn’t given Hokenberry his real name, anyway.
Surely, with a memory about as reliable as that of a chuck steak, Hokenberry had scribbled Corky’s phone number on a piece of paper somewhere in the bungalow. Corky wasn’t worried about that, either. If eventually the police found it, the number would never lead them to him.
Every month or six weeks, Corky bought a new cell phone. It came with a new number and a virgin account in a false name with a phony address. He used this for all his sensitive calls related to his work in the service of chaos.
These phones were provided by a computer hacker nonpareil and anarchist-multimillionaire named Mick Sachatone. Mick sold them for six hundred bucks a pop. He guaranteed their viability for thirty days.
Usually, the phone company didn’t realize that their system had been manipulated and didn’t identify the bad account for two months. Then they shut off service and sought the perpetrator. By that time, Corky had thrown the phone in a Dumpster and had obtained a new one.
His purpose wasn’t to save money but to guarantee his anonymity when engaged in activities that were against the law. Making a minor contribution to the eventual financial ruination of the phone company was a pleasant bonus.
Now Corky located Ned Hokenberry’s trove of cash in a bedroom one degree more civilized than the hibernation cave of a bear. The floor was littered with dirty socks, magazines, empty bags of fried bacon rinds, empty paper buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, and sucked-clean chicken bones. The money had been stuffed in an empty box of jerky under the bed.
Of the twenty thousand, only fourteen remained. The other six thousand evidently had been spent on fast food and pork-fat snacks.
Corky took the money and left the jerky box.
In the dinette alcove off the living room, Hokenberry was still dead and no less ugly than before.
During their three previous encounters, Corky had deduced that Hokenberry was estranged from his family. Unmarried, less than ideal dating material, and not the type to have a network of friends who dropped in unannounced, the former rock-tour beef would probably not be found until the FBI came knocking, subsequent to young master Manheim’s kidnapping.
Nevertheless, to guard against the accidental discovery of the body by a nosy neighbor or some such, Corky took Hokenberry’s keys from a pegboard in the kitchen and locked the front door on his way out of the house. He dropped the keys into the overgrown shrubbery.
Like a growling hellhound loose in the halls of Heaven, thunder barked and grumbled through the low gray sky.
Corky’s heart leaped with delight.
He looked up into the falling rain, in search of lightning, and then remembered that it would have come before the thunder. If there had been lightning, the bolt had not penetrated the clouds or had struck far away in the sprawling city.
The thunder must be an omen.
Corky didn’t believe in any god or any devil. He did not believe in supernatural things of any shape or meaning. He believed only in the power of chaos.
Nonetheless, he chose to believe that the thunder should be taken as an omen, signifying that his trip this coming evening to Palazzo Rospo would unfold as planned and that he would retu
rn to his home with the sedated boy.
The universe might be a dumb machine, clattering nowhere but moving fast, with no purpose other than its own eventual cataclysmic destruction. Yet even so, it might from time to time cast off a bolt or a broken gear from which a thoughtful person could foretell its next turn of direction. The thunder was such a broken gear, and based upon the timbre and duration of it, Corky confidently predicted the success of his scheme.
If the biggest movie star in the world, living behind fortified walls and an electronic moat, with full-time security and bodyguards, could not keep his family safe, if the only son of the Face could be plucked from his Bel Air estate and spirited away, even though the actor had been explicitly warned by the delivery of six packages wrapped in black, then no family was safe anywhere. Neither the poor nor the rich. Neither the unknown nor the famous. Neither the godless nor the God-fearing.
That message would penetrate the public hour by hour, day by grueling day, as Channing Manheim’s long and excruciating ordeal unfolded.
Corky intended first to destroy the captive boy emotionally, then mentally, and last of all physically. He would videotape this process, which he expected to take weeks. He would edit the tape, make copies on equipment that he had acquired for this project, and periodically pepper selected publications and television-news operations with evidence of Aelfric’s brutalization.
Certain media would be loath to show any of the video or even still frames from it, but others would recognize the competitive advantage of acting without conscience or taste, and with noble words would justify a plunge into the grossly sensational. Thereafter, some of the squeamish would do likewise.
The boy’s terror-stricken face would haunt the nation, and yet another blow in a long series would be struck at the foundations of America’s order and stability. Millions of citizens would be robbed of their already shaky sense of security.
Two streets from Hokenberry’s bungalow, as Corky approached his BMW, a lance of lightning pierced the clouds, thunder cracked, and a boil in the heavens burst. Rain that had drizzled suddenly fell by the ton, weight enough to press half the huff out of the wind.
If thunder alone had been an omen of his triumph, more thunder preceded by lightning was confirmation that he’d properly interpreted that first rolling peal.