Strangers by Dean Koontz Page B

the thin edge of wakefulness, she finally understood why she had been frightened this afternoon. She had not been seized by The Clutch. Although she had not been able to admit it until now, she had been afraid that, in the midst of surgery, she would black out, plummet into a state of fugue, as she had done that Tuesday, two weeks ago. If an attack came while she held a scalpel, while she was doing delicate cutting, or while stitching in a vascular graft…
    That thought brought her eyes wide open. The creeping form of sleep retreated like a thief caught in the middle of a burglary. For a long time she lay there, stiff, staring at the dark and newly ominous shapes of the bedroom furniture and at the window, where incompletely drawn draperies revealed a band of glass silvered by a fall of moonlight and by the rising beams of streetlamps below.
    Could she accept the responsibility of chief surgeon on an aortal graft? Her seizure had surely been a one-time occurrence. It would never happen again. Surely not. But did she dare test that theory?
    Sleep crept back again and claimed her, though not for hours.
    •
    Tuesday, after a successful trip to Bernstein’s Delicatessen, much food, and several lazy hours in an easy chair with a good book, her self-confidence was knit up again, and she began to look forward to the challenge ahead, with only an ordinary degree and kind of apprehension.
    On Wednesday, Johnny O’Day continued to recover from his triple bypass and was in high spirits.
This
was what made the years of study and hard work worthwhile: preserving life, relieving suffering, bringing hope and happiness to those who had known despair.
    She assisted in a pacemaker implantation that went without a hitch, and she performed an aortagram, a dye test on a patient’s circulation. She also sat in with George while he examined seven people who had been referred to him by other physicians.
    When all the new patients had been seen, George and Ginger huddled for half an hour over the file of the candidate for the aortal graft—a fifty-eight-year-old woman, Viola Fletcher. After studying the file, Ginger decided she wanted Mrs. Fletcher admitted to Memorial on Thursday for testing and preparation. If there were no counterindications, surgery could take place first thing Monday morning. George agreed, and all the necessary arrangements were made.
    Thus Wednesday progressed, always busy, never dull. By six-thirty she had put in a twelve-hour day, but she was not tired. In fact, although she had nothing to keep her at the hospital, she was reluctant to leave. George Hannaby was home already. But Ginger hung around, chatting with patients, double-checking charts, until at last she went to George’s office, where she intended to look again at Viola Fletcher’s file.
    The professional offices were in the back wing of the building, separate from the hospital itself. At that hour the corridors were virtually deserted. Ginger’s rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the highly polished tile floors. The air smelled of pine-scented disinfectant.
    George Hannaby’s waiting room, examining rooms, and private office were dark and quiet, and Ginger did not switch on all the lights as she moved through the outer rooms into the inner sanctum. There, she snapped on only the desk lamp as she passed it on her way to the file-room door, which was locked. George had given her keys to everything, and in a minute she had withdrawn Viola Fletcher’s records from the cabinet and returned with them to George’s desk.
    She sat down in the big leather chair, opened the folder in the pool of light from the desk lamp—and only then noticed an object that riveted her attention and caused her breath to catch in her throat. It lay on the green blotter, along the curvature of light: a hand-held ophthalmoscope, an instrument used to examine the interior of the eye. There was nothing unusual—certainly nothing ominous—about the ophthalmoscope. Every doctor used such