F Paul Wilson - Secret History 02 (54 page)

           
When her eyes reopened, the
afternoon light was fading and the clock said 4:32.

           
"I feel better now.
Stronger."

           
Her body sat up, then stood and
walked a few wobbling steps around the dining room before stumbling back to the
couch.

           
"Though not strong enough to
negotiate the steps, I fear. But that is not important now. What is important
is a little phone call we must make."

           
Kara watched her hand reach out and
lift the phone receiver, saw it dial 4-1-1. She heard the operator come on the
line.

           
And then she heard her own voice
speaking.

           
"Manhattan, please. The Midtown
North police precinct."

           
Her own voice, speaking someone
else's words. Mentally she jumped at the sound of it, but her body remained
still. She heard the recorded answer, then watched her hand punch in the
number.

           
She listened as she asked for
Detective Harris, heard herself explain how she wasn't feeling well and wanted
to go to bed early tonight. She heard the concern and disappointment in Rob's
voice and tried to scream out,
Rob! No!
It's not me! Not me
! But instead her voice went on lying, promising that
they'd get together tomorrow.

           
After hanging up with Rob, her eyes
closed and she spent another couple of hours in terrified darkness, listening
to the clock and the street.

           
When her eyes opened again she saw
that it was almost seven.

           
"We'll have to call Aunt
Ellen."

           
She thought she had become inured to
shock by then, but she was jolted by watching herself dial Ellen's number and
listening as her voice glibly informed her aunt that she would be staying at
Kelly's again and would explain later.

           
"There! That should give us a
respite." .

           
Sudden fury blazed up in Kara. She
wanted to attack this thing, this voice… but it was only a voice. How did you
attack a voice?

           
And
who
was the voice?

           
She thought she knew. Words formed
in her mind. A question. Mentally, she spoke the thought.

           
You're
not Janine, are you?

           
"No."

           
Something about the voice… something
familiar. The rhythm, the choice of words. She was sure now who it was.

           
Are
you Doctor Gates?

           
"Doctor Gates is dead."

           
Then
who
—?

           
"Quiet! I need to rest."

           
There came another period behind
closed eyelids, a long one during which Kara thought she might have slept—not
because she felt safe enough, but to escape the horror temporarily, and maybe
to awaken and learn that it was all a terrible nightmare.

           
She was roused by abrupt movements
of her body, and by noises from the front door. Someone was rattling it.

           
The dining room was dark but light
poured down the hall from the chandelier. Her body rose from the couch and
walked unsteadily but stealthily to the kitchen where it pulled a long-bladed
knife from a drawer.

           
She waited. The door rattled once
more, briefly, then all was silent.

           
"That, I would say, was your
friend, Detective Harris. Even after midnight, when he believes you home and
asleep, he is still nosing round. He is going to be trouble."

           
Kara had no doubts now.

           
You
are
Doctor Gates
!

           
"I told you: Doctor Gates is
dead."

           
Then
who are you? And why are you doing this to me?

           
"You'll know in a moment. I
believe I'm strong enough now." Her body moved to one of the cabinets and
she pulled out two jars of junior foods, the kind Kara used to feed Jill when
she was a baby. Then she was heading across the hall toward the door to the
cellar.

           
"I'm not being coy. It's simply
that it's easier to show you who I am than to explain. And now you will
see."

           
Steadying itself on the banister,
her body started down the cellar stairs.

           
Rob turned downtown on Seventh after
leaving the townhouse. As he passed the Kramer Medical Arts building, he
checked his coat pocket. He still had them: the keys he had taken from Gates'
secretary this morning. He pulled into the curb.

           
Up in the office he searched Gates'
desk for keys to the filing cabinets but found nothing. Frustrated, edgy, he
sat in Gates' high-backed chair. He realized that it wasn't the files that had
drawn him back to the office. It was the other back room—the padded cell. He
needed one more look at it.

           
He propped the cell door open with
copies of the
PDR
and
Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary
—he
didn't want to be accidentally locked in here. He'd probably die of starvation
before anybody found him. He turned on the overhead light and stood in the
center of the cell.

           
What on earth had Gates used this
for? Who had he kept here?

           
The questions plagued him. Questions
existed to be answered. They never went away until they were answered.

           
He paced the narrow dimensions of
the room, tapping on the padding with the heel of his hand and the side of his
shoe. It was thick. If you were the sort who was inclined toward such things,
you might be able to knock yourself out by banging your head against these
walls, but you wouldn't be able to crack your skull. You might even—

           
Something crunched.

           
Rob's shoe had tapped against a
slight bulge in the lower padding. Something else was under the fabric. He
reached down and found a split seam along the floorline. Dropping to his knees,
he wriggled his fingers up under the fabric. There was paper crammed in there.
He vised a couple of sheets between his fingers and yanked them out. Then he
pulled more out. The space was stuffed with scraps from notepads, prescription
blanks, used envelopes, all covered with tiny script. And a pencil, short,
looking as if someone had sharpened it with his teeth.

           
Rob studied the script. He was no
handwriting expert, but these looked like they were written by the same hand
that had sent Kara the warning note. And they were dated.

           
Rob began setting them in order. He
had some reading to do.

           
He had a feeling one of his
questions was about to be answered.

           
The basement was small, as Rob had
mentioned earlier. Had it been less than twelve hours since they'd arrived here
together? It seemed ages. After all the high ceilings upstairs, these low-slung
pipes overhead gave her a hemmed-in feeling, seemed to press down on her.

           
Her body took her to a paneled
partition. Her hand reached up among the pipes and pulled a lever. Something
clicked inside the wall. She pushed on a panel which dropped back then slid to
the left, revealing a small room.

           
A foul odor wafted out—urine, feces.
Had she been in control of her body she might have gagged.

           
"Unpleasant, isn't it? But if
I've got to smell it, so should you. I've been living in that for almost two
days."

           
A Tiffany-type floor lamp threw a
cone of light on the room's single piece of furniture. A crib. In the crib was
the source of the odor.

           
"Let me introduce myself
properly. My name is Gabor. This is my body."

           
Had she a voice, Kara would have
screamed. In the crib was a wrinkled, shrunken thing with thick, mottled skin
and whispy white hair trailing off its scalp. The head was too big for its body—adult-sized
on a body no bigger than the average five-year old's. It's face was a
caricature of humanity with its flattened nose, its drooling, toothless mouth,
its white-coated eyes stared blindly upward. In contrast to its short, warped,
wizened limbs, its body was a bloated, corpulent, barrel-chested mass, the
pelvis sheathed in a stained, fouled diaper.

           
"Loathsome, aren't I?"

           
Kara was numb. Had she been able,
she wasn't sure she would have dared to frame a reply.

           
"You needn't worry about
injuring my feelings. Even I find myself repulsive."

           
She detected something behind the
words, a cosmic rage, a tragic self-loathing.

           
But
this is Doctor Gates' house!

           
"The man you know as Doctor
Gates was my brother, Lazlo. The body, at least, was Lazlo's. The intellect you
dealt with, pouring your heart out to in your therapy sessions, was I. Gabor.
So, in a real sense, Doctor Gates isn't dead.
I
am Doctor Gates.
I
went
through pre-med and medical school,
I
sat through those tedious lectures,
I
studied those dry texts till my eyes burned like heated coals in my head,
I
passed those tests and board exams,
spent those years in residency. The medical degree and license may have Lazlo's
name on them, but they are the result of
my
work. They are
mine
."

           
Where…
where was Lazlo all this time?

           
"With me. A passenger in his
own body. Like you."

           
Oh,
God!

           
"It wasn't so bad for him. I
left him alone at times. And after all, we were brothers. Twins, would you
believe?
Twins
! Like you and Kelly.
Yet something went wrong with me in utero, early on, when we were both little
more than collections of cells. My body became distorted while his grew
perfectly. Twins should share, don't you think?"