Seven

He awakened in a private room, found his hands stitched up, freshly bandaged and immobilized. Minus one index finger, which he figured was a cheap price. His left ankle was also bandaged, and he had no sensation in his foot. Dead nerves, he thought. He'd always believed a cane made a man look distinguished.

He didn't know how much time had passed, because his wristwatch had been taken away with his bloody clothes. The sun had gone down, though, and the reading light above his bed was on. The taste of medicine was in his mouth, and his tongue felt furry. Tranquilizers, he thought. He could still hear rain tapping at the window, behind the blinds.

The door opened, and a young fresh-faced nurse came in. Before it closed. Jack caught a glimpse of a policeman standing out in the corridor. The nurse stopped, seeing he was awake.

"Hi." Jack was hoarse, probably from the pressure of that arm around his throat. "Mind telling me what time it is?"

"About seven-thirty. How are you feeling?"

"Alive," he answered. "Barely." The nurse looked out through the door and said, "He's awake," to the policeman, then she came to Jack's bedside and checked his temperature and pulse. She peered into his pupils with a little penlight. Jack had noted there was no telephone in the room, and he said, "Think I could get somebody to call my wife? I imagine she'd like to know what's happened to me."

"You'll have to ask the lieutenant about that. Follow the light, please."

Jack obeyed. "The babies," he said. "They're all right, aren't they?"

She didn't answer.

"I knew he'd go for the babies. I knew it. I remember what the boy said, that Satan—" He stopped speaking, because the nurse was looking at him as if he were a raving lunatic and had taken a pace away from the bed. She doesn't know, he thought. Of course not. The security would have clamped down by now, and the shifts had changed. All the blood had been cleaned up, the bodies zippered into bags and spirited to the morgue, the witnesses cautioned and counseled, the relatives of the dead consoled by hospital administrators, the physical damage already under repair by workmen. Jack was glad he wasn't director of public relations at Marbury Memorial, because there was going to be hell to pay.

"Sorry," he amended. "I'm babbling."

She gave him the choices for dinner—chopped steak or ham—and when he'd told her what he wanted, she left him. He lay musing that seven hours ago he'd been fighting a trio of demons from the inner sanctum of a young boy's insanity, and now he was choosing chopped steak over ham. Such was life, he thought; there was an absurdity in reality, and he felt like the victim of a car crash who stands amid blood and wreckage and frets about what television shows he's going to miss tonight. Demons or not, the world kept turning, and chopped steaks were being cooked down in the kitchen. He laughed, and realized then that the tranquilizers in his system were either very potent or else the shock had really knocked his train off the tracks.

It wasn't long before the door opened again. This time Jack's visitor was a man in his mid-forties, with curly gray hair and a somber, hard-lined face. The man was wearing a dark blue suit, and he looked official and stiff-backed. A policeman, Jack guessed. "Dr. Shannon," the man said, with a slight nod. "I'm Lieutenant Boyette, Birmingham Police." He pulled out his wallet and displayed the badge. "Mind if I sit?"

"Go ahead."

Boyette positioned a chair closer to the bed and sat down. He had dark brown eyes, and they did not waver as he stared at Jack Shannon. "I hope you're up to some questions."

"I suppose now's as good a time as any." He tried to prop himself up on his pillows, but his head spun. "I'd like to call my wife. Let her know I'm all right."

"She knows. We called her this afternoon. I guess you'll understand we couldn't tell her the whole story. Not until we figure it out ourselves." He took a little notebook from the inside pocket of his coat and flipped it open. "We've taken statements from Miss Douglas, Mrs. Partain, Mr. Crisp, and the maternity ward staff. I expect you'll agree that what happened here today was ... a mite bizarre."

"A mite," Jack said, and laughed again. Now he knew he must be doped with something very strong. Everything was dreamlike around the edges.

"From what we can tell, you saved the lives of a lot of infants down on two. I'm not going to pretend I know what those things were, or where they came from. It's all in Miss Douglas's statement about what happened to Dr. Cawthorn, Mr. Moon and the others. Even the psychiatric patients gave statements that corroborated Mrs. Partain's. Hell, I kind of think some of them were so shaken up they got their wits back, if that makes any sense to you."

"I wouldn't doubt it. Probably the same effect as a shock treatment. Is Miss Douglas all right?"

"She will be. Right now she's in a room a few doors down."

"What about Rosalee?"

"Mrs. Partain's a mighty strong woman. Some of the others—like Mr. Crisp—might wind up on mental wards themselves. He can't stop crying, and he thinks he feels something on his back. I guess it could've been worse, though."

"Yes," Jack agreed. "Much worse." He tried to move his fingers, but his hands had been deadened. He figured the nurse would have to hand-feed him the forthcoming chopped steak. A weariness throbbed deep in his bones: the call of the tranquilizer for sleep.

It must have shown in his face, because Boyette said, "Well, I won't keep you long. I'd like to know what happened after Mrs. Partain locked you and Mr. Chambers on the eighth floor." He brought out a pen, poised to jot notes.

Jack told him. The telling was hard and got more difficult as his bruised throat rasped and his body and brain yearned for rest. He trailed off a couple of times, had to gather his strength and keep going, and Boyette leaned closer to hear. "I knew where Adolf was headed," Jack said. "The babies. I knew, because I remembered what the boy said. That's why I went down there." He blinked, felt the darkness closing in again. Thank God it was all over. Thank God he was alive, and so were the babies. "What . . . what floor am I on?"

"Three." Boyette's brow was furrowed. He had leaned very close to the bed. "Dr. Shannon ... about the bodies. The demons, or things, or whatever the hell they were."

"Demons, yes. That's right. They were holding the boy together." Hard to stay awake, he thought. The sound of rain was soothing, and he wanted to let his eyes close and drift away and in the morning maybe the sun would be out again.

"Dr. Shannon," Boyette said, "we only found two bodies."

"What?" Jack asked—or thought he'd asked. His voice was almost gone.

"We found the body of the one in the nursery. And the one that looks like a spider. We wrapped them up and got them out of here. I don't know where they were taken, and I don't want to know. But what happened to the third one? The one you called 'Frog'?"

"Shot it. Shot it twice. It split open." His heart had kicked, and he tried to lift himself up but could not move. "Killed it." Oh God, he thought. "Didn't I?"

"There was only the one that looks like a spider up on eight." Boyette's voice sounded very far away, as if at the end of an impossibly long tunnel. "We searched the entire floor. Took the place to pieces. But there's no third body."

"There is ... there is," Jack whispered, because whispering was all he could do. He could no longer hold his head upright, and it slid to one side. His body felt boneless, but a cold panic had flooded him. He caught sight of something across the room near the door: a vent grill. What if Frog had recombined itself? he thought through the brain-numbing frost. What if Frog had crawled into the vent on the eighth floor? But that was over seven hours ago! If Frog was going to the maternity ward, why hadn't it struck there already? "The ducts," he managed to rasp. "In the ducts."

"We thought of that. We've got people taking the ducts apart right now, but it's going to be a long job. There are two possibilities, the way I see it: either that thing got out of the hospital, or it died in the ducts somewhere. I want to believe it died, but we'll keep looking until we find the body or we take the whole system apart—that could be days."

Jack tried to speak, but his voice was gone. There's a third possibility, he'd realized. Oh, yes. A third possibility. That Frog, the smartest of Tim Clausen's best friends, is searching from floor to floor, room to room, peering through the grills and scuttling away until it finds who it wants.

The one who killed its own best friends.

Me.

But maybe it died. Jack thought. I shot it twice, and it split open. Yes. Maybe it died, and it's lying jammed in the duct, and very soon someone will remove the screws and a gelatinous thing with staring eyes and a mouth like a leech will slide out.

Maybe it died.

Maybe.

"Well, I can tell you're tired. God knows you've had one hell of a day." Jack heard the chair scrape back as Boyette stood up. "We'll talk again, first thing in the morning. Okay?"

Jack trembled, could not answer. Could only stare at the grill.

"You try to sleep. Dr. Shannon. Good night." There was the sound of the door opening and closing, and Lieutenant Boyette had gone.

Jack struggled against sleep. How long would it take Frog to reach his room in a methodical, slow search? How long before it would come to that grill, see him lying here in a straitjacket of bandages and tranquilizers, and begin to push itself through the vent?

But Frog was dead. Frog had to be dead.

The sun would be out in the morning, and by then the third of Tim Clausen's best friends would be lying in a garbage bag, just limp wet flesh conjured up by infernal madness.

Jack's struggling weakened. His eyelids fluttered, and his view of the vent went dark.

But just before he drifted off to a dreamless sleep he thought the young nurse must have come in again, because he was sure he smelled the meaty odor of chopped steak.