satisfaction of occasionally beating Death, and the-“something’s . out
. there The first word interrupted Jonas’s thoughts, but the voice was
so thin and soft that he didn’t immediately perceive the source of it.
He turned around, looking toward the open door, assuming the voice had
come from the corridor, and only by the third word did he realize that
the speaker was Harrison.
The patient’s head was turned toward Jonas, but his eyes were focused on
the window.
Moving quickly to the side of the bed, Jonas glanced at the
electrocardiograph and saw that Harrison’s heart was beating fast but,
thank God, slowing.
“Something’s … out there,” Harrison repeated.
His eyes were not focused on the window sill, on nothing so close as
that, but on some distant point in the stormy night.
“Just rain,” Jonas assured him.
“No.”
“Just a little winter rain.”
“Something bad,” Harrison whispered.
Hurried footsteps echoed in the corridor, and a young nurse burst
through the open door, into the nearly dark room. Her name was Ramona
Perez, and Jonas knew her to be competent and concerned.
“Oh, Doctor Nyebern, good, you’re here. The telemetry unit, his
heartbeat “Accelerated, yes, I know. He just woke up.”
Ramona came to the bed and switched on the lamp above it, revealing the
patient more clearly.
Harrison was still staring beyond the rain-spotted window, as if
oblivious of Jonas and the nurse. In a voice even softer than before,
heavy with weariness, he repeated: “Something’s out there.” Then his
eyes fluttered sleepily, and fell shut.
“Mr. Harrison, can you hear me?” Jonas asked.
The patient did not answer.
The EKG showed a quickly de-accelerating heartbeat: from one-forty to
one-twenty to one hundred beats a minute.
“Mr. Harrison?”
Ninety per minute. Eighty.
“He’s asleep again,” Ramona said.
“Appears to be.”
“Just sleeping, though,” she said. “No question of it being a coma
now.”
“Not a coma,” Jonas agreed.
“And he was speaking. Did he make sense?”
“Sort of. But hard to tell,” Jonas said, leaning over the bed railing
to study the man’s eyelids, which fluttered with the rapid movement of
the eyes under them. REM sleep. Harrison was dreaming again.
Outside, the rain suddenly began to fall harder than before. The wind
picked up, too, and keened at the window.
Ramona said, “The words I heard were clear, not slurred.”
“No. Not slurred. And he spoke some complete sentences.”
“Then he’s not aphasic,” she said. “That’s terrific.”
Aphasia, the complete inability to speak or understand spoken or written
language, was one of the most devastating forms of brain damage
resulting from disease or injury. Thus affected, a patient was reduced
to using gestures to communicate, and the inadequacy of pantomime soon
cast him into deep depression, from which there was sometimes no coming
back.
Harrison was evidently free of that curse. If he was also free of
paralysis, and if there were not too many holes in his memory, he had a
good chance of eventually getting out of bed and leading a normal life.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Jonas said. “Let’s not build up any
false hopes. He still has a long way to go. But you can enter on his
record that he regained consciousness for the first time at
eleven-thirty, two hours after resuscitation.”
Harrison was murmuring in his sleep.
Jonas leaned over the bed and put his ear close to the patient’s lips,
which were barely moving. The words were faint, carried on his shallow
exhalations. It was like a spectral voice heard on an open radio
channel, broadcast from a station halfway around the world, bounced off
a freak inversion layer high in the atmosphere and filtered through so
much space and bad weather that it sounded mysterious and prophetic in
spite of being less than half-intelligible.
“What’s he saying?” Ramona asked.
With the howl of the storm rising outside, Jonas was unable to catch
enough of Harrison’s words to be sure, but he thought the man was
repeating what he’d said before: “Something’s … out there Abruptly
the wind shrieked, and rain drummed against the window so hard that it
seemed certain to shatter the glass.
Vassago liked the rain. The storm clouds had plated over the sky,