Doctor Who_ Warlock - Andrew Cartmel [127]
As he thought this he was rewarded with an almost instant easing of his heartbeat. It slowed down gradually from its panic rhythm. Creed smiled. He had to let the drug show him what it wanted to show him. He made himself open his eyes again.
The sky was still white with the strange red patches on it. The red patches were oddly like roses and slowly Creed realised he wasn’t looking out of the window at all.
He was staring at a patch of faded floral wallpaper.
But how could that be? From where he was lying on the bed he faced directly towards the window. Why was he suddenly face to face with the wall?
That was when Creed realized he was no longer on the bed. He was on his feet, standing on the other side of the room, leaning on the scarred pine bureau where he’d set his wallet and car keys, staring at the wallpaper a few inches from his nose.
He had no memory of getting up and crossing the room. But he must have done so. He turned around and saw the bed behind him and, beyond that, the open window with the night sky framed in it.
Once again he felt a tremendous rush of fear. Take it easy, he told himself. His heart was hammering and sweat trickling down his spine. He looked at his hands, planted on either side of the old wooden bureau.
His own fingers looked odd to him; strange, thin, pinkish structures that flowed back into the fleshy pads of his hands and back from there into his wrists. He wondered how he could ever have believed they were part of his body. As he watched they moved like thin broken sea creatures, floating down to pick up his wallet and put it in his pocket. His heartbeat was still abnormally fast, racing loud in his ears.
Creed realized that all the sounds around him had abated. The voices of the gamblers across the hall, the Cypriot couple below, even the rattle of the bead curtain and the passing cars in the street seemed to be hanging in suspense. Waiting and listening.
One of the card players cleared his throat again. The Cypriot woman spoke, a brief frightened monosyllable, and her husband hissed for her to be quiet. The tense silence grew and Creed felt his body getting hot. He couldn’t tell if the tension was coming into him from the world outside or if it was originating in him and spreading outwards into the world, infecting everything with his own anxiety.
The radio in the shop across the street kept playing, echoing tinnily in the suspended silence. Then it suddenly died as someone reached out and switched it off.
All the random sounds of the hotel – creak of staircase, slam of door, rattle of old elevator – had ceased. It was as if the whole building, the whole street didn’t dare make a sound. As if it was waiting for something.
Creed heard a car passing a few blocks away. It was getting closer for a moment, then it slowed and stopped. Even the more distant traffic murmur seemed to be growing gradually more quiet.
The room across the hallway was radiating uneasy stillness. There was no longer even the slap of cards on the table. The players had suspended their game. The silence had that peculiar strained quality of a group of people waiting for something to happen.
Creed realized that he was holding his breath. He forced himself to open his mouth and breathe slowly and deeply, letting the air into his lungs again. He felt dizzy as the oxygen returned to his bloodstream.
Noises began again. Two kids started yelling at each other from a nearby street. A baby began to cry in a distant window. In the next room one of the gamblers cursed and moved a chair, scraping it across the floor. An engine buzzed raggedly as an air‐conditioner came on somewhere.
The radio in the shop came on again, tentative and low at first, then rising in volume as a pounding pop song began. A breeze from the window swayed the beaded curtain behind Creed until it rattled like wooden wind‐chimes.
It was as if the whole street had been holding its breath with him and had suddenly let it out again.
Creed went into the bathroom and wiped the sweat off his chest with a towel. He put