The door opened, and Hal jumped as if he’d been stuck with a hatpin.
In the doorway stood Grace Fulgham, looking as if she had just either
guided a tugboat through stormy seas or chopped and carried a couple of
cords of firewood that Pa had been too lazy to deal with.
“Security’s putting a man at every exit to stop him if he tries to
leave, and we’re mobilizing the nursing staff on each floor to look for
him. Do you intend to join the search?”
“Uh, well, I’ve got to call the office, my boss.
“If we find him, where will we find you?”
“Here. Right here. I’ll be here, making some calls.” She nodded and
went away. The door eased shut after her.
A privacy curtain hung from a ceiling track that described an arc around
three sides of the bed. It was bunched against the wall, but Hal
Yamataka drew it to the foot of the bed, blocking the view from the
doorway, in case Pollard materialized just as someone stepped in from
the corridor.
His hands were shaking, so he jammed them in his pockets.
Then he took his left hand out to look at his wristwatch: 1:48.
Pollard had been missing for perhaps eighteen minutes, except, of
course, for the few seconds during which he had flickered into existence
and talked about fireflies in a windstorm. Hal decided to wait until
two o’clock to call Bobby and Julie.
He stood at the foot of the bed, clutching the railing with one hand,
listening to the night wind crying at the window and the rain snapping
against the glass. The minutes crawled past like snails on an incline,
but at least the wait gave him time to calm down and think about how he
would tell Bobby what had happened.
As the hands on his watch lined up at two o’clock, he went the rest of
the way around the bed and was reaching for the phone on the nightstand
when he heard the eerie ululation of a distant flute. The half-drawn
bed-curtain fluttered in a sudden draft.
He returned to the foot of the bed and looked past the end of the
curtain to the hallway door. It was closed. That was the source of the
draft.
The flute died. The air in the room grew still, leaden.
Abruptly the curtain shivered and rippled, gently rattling the bearings
in the overhead track, and a cool breeze swept around the room, ruffling
his hair. The music rose again.
With the door shut and the window closed tight, the only possible source
of the draft was the ventilation grille in the wall above the
nightstand. But when Hal stood on his toes and raised his right hand in
front of that outlet, he felt nothing coming from it. The chilly
currents of air appeared to have sprung up within the room itself.
He turned in a circle, moved this way and that, trying to get a fix on
the flute. Actually, it didn’t sound like a flute. He listened
closely; it was more like a fluctuation of wind whistling through a lot
of pipes at the same time, big ones and little ones threading together
many vague but separate sounds that loosely sounded like keening that
was simultaneously eerie and, mournful yet somehow… threatening. It
faded, returned a third time. To his surprise and bewilderment,
tuneless notes seemed to be issuing from the empty air around the bed.
Hal wondered if anyone else in the hospital could hear the flute this
time. Probably not. Though the music was louder now than when it had
begun, it remained faint; in fact, if he had been asleep, the mysterious
serenade would not have been loud enough to wake him.
Before Hal’s eyes, the air over the bed shimmered. For a moment he
could not breathe, as if the room had become a temporary vacuum chamber.
He felt his ears pop the same way they did during a too-rapid altitude
change.
The strange warbling and the draft died together, and Frank Pollard
reappeared as abruptly as he had vanished. He was lying on his side,
with his knees drawn up in the fetal position. For a few seconds he was