The House of Thunder by Dean Koontz

and compassion. She could see that he knew how painful it was for her to talk about Jerry Stein.
     
    The same expression was in Mrs. Baker’s eyes. The nurse looked as if she might rush around to the side of the bed and give Susan a motherly hug.
     
    Again, McGee gently encouraged her to continue her story. “The humiliation ritual was held in the House of Thunder?”
     
    “Yeah. It was night. We were led into the cavern with flashlights, and then several candles were lit and placed on the rocks around us. There were just Jerry, me, and four of the fraternity brothers. I’ll never forget their names or what they looked like. Never. Carl Jellicoe, Herbert Parker, Randy Lee Quince ... and Ernest Harch. Harch was the fraternity’s pledge master that year.”
     
    Outside, the day was rapidly growing darker under a shroud of thunderheads. Inside, the blue-gray shadows crawled out of the corners and threatened to take full possession of the hospital room.
     
    As Susan talked, Dr. McGee switched on the bedside lamp.
     
    “As soon as we were in the caverns, as soon as the candles had been lit, Harch and the other three guys pulled out flasks of whiskey. They had been drinking earlier. I was right about that. And they continued to drink all through the hazing. The more they drank, the uglier the whole scene got. At first they subjected Jerry to some funny, pretty much innocent teasing. In fact, everyone was laughing at first, even Jerry and me. Gradually, however, their taunting became nastier ... meaner. A lot of it was obscene, too. Worse than obscene. Filthy. I was embarrassed and uneasy. I wanted to leave, and Jerry wanted me to get out of there, too, but Harch and the others refused to let me have a flashlight or a candle. I couldn’t find my way out of the caverns in pitch blackness, so I had to stay. When they started needling Jerry about his being Jewish, there wasn’t any humor in them at all, and that was when I knew for sure there was going to be trouble, bad trouble. They were all obviously drunk by then. But it wasn’t just the whiskey talking. Oh, no. Not the whiskey alone. You could see that the prejudice—the hatred— wasn’t just an act. Harch and the others—but especially Ernest Harch—had a streak of anti-Semitism as thick as sludge in a sewer.
     
    “Briarstead wasn’t a particularly sophisticated place,” Susan continued. “There wasn’t the usual cultural mix. There weren’t many Jews on campus, and there weren’t any in the fraternity that Jerry wanted to join. Not that the fraternity had a policy against admitting Jews or anyone else. There had been a couple of Jewish members in the past, though none for the last several years. Most of the brothers wanted Jerry in. It was only Harch and his three cronies who were determined to keep him out. They planned to make Hazing Month so rough for him, so utterly intolerable, that he would withdraw his application before the month was over. The humiliation ritual in the House of Thunder was to be the start of it. They didn’t really intend to kill Jerry. Not in the beginning, not when they took us to the cavern, not when they were at least half sober. They just wanted to make him feel like dirt. They wanted to rough him up a little bit, scare him, let him know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t welcome. The verbal abuse escalated to physical abuse. They stood in a circle around him, shoving him back and forth, keeping him off balance. Jerry wasn’t a fool. He realized this wasn’t any ordinary hazing ritual. He wasn’t a wimp, either. He couldn’t be intimidated easily. When they shoved him too hard, he shoved back—which only made them more aggressive, of course. When they wouldn’t stop shoving, Jerry hit Harch in the mouth and split the bastard’s lip.”
     
    “And that was the trigger,” McGee said.
     
    “Yes. Then all hell broke loose.”
     
    Thunder grumbled again, and the hospital lights flickered briefly, and Susan had