The Dark Half - Stephen King [169]
'Yes.'
'And?'
'They were negative.'
'I'm not surprised. ' Pritchard fell silent for a few moments, then said: 'You're being less than honest with me, young man, aren't you?'
Alan stopped making shadow animals and sat forward in his chair. 'Yes, I suppose I am. But I very badly want to know what you mean when you say Thad Beaumont didn't have a brain tumor in 'the usually accepted sense of the term'. I know all about the confidentiality rule in doctorpatient relationships, and I don't know if you can trust a man you're talking to for the first time — and over the phone, at that — but I hope you'll believe me when I say that I'm on Thad's side here, and I'm sure he would want you to tell me what I want to know. And I can't take the time to have him call you and give you the go-ahead, Doctor — I need to know now.'
And Alan was surprised to find that this was true — or he believed it to be true. A funny tenseness had begun to creep over him, a feeling that things were happening. Things he didn't know about . . . but soon would.
'I have no problem with telling you about the case,' Pritchard said calmly. 'I have thought, on many occasions, that I ought to get in touch with Beaumont myself, if only to tell him what happened at the hospital shortly after his surgery was complete. I felt it might interest him.'
'What was that?'
'I'll get to it, I assure you. I didn't tell his parents what the operation had uncovered because it didn't matter — not in any practical way — and I didn't want anything more to do with them. With his father in particular. That man should have been born in a cave and spent his life hunting woolly mammoths. I decided at the time to tell them what they wanted to hear and get shot of them as fast as I could. Then, of course, time itself became a factor. You lose touch with your patients. I thought of writing to him when Helga showed me that first book, and I have thought of it on several occasions since then, but I also felt he might not believe me . . . or wouldn't care . . . or that he might think I was a crackpot. I don't know any famous people, but I pity them — I suspect they must five defensive, disorganized, fearful lives . It seemed easier to let sleeping dogs lie. Now this. As my grandchildren would say, it's a bummer.
'What was wrong with Thad? What brought him to you?'
'Fugues. Headaches. Phantom sounds. And finally — '
'Phantom sounds?'
'Yes — but you must let me tell it in my own way, Sheriff.' Again Alan heard that unconscious arrogance in the man's voice.
'All right.'
'Finally there was a seizure. The problems were all being caused by a small mass in the prefrontal lobe. We operated, assuming it was a tumor. The tumor turned out to be Thad Beaumont's twin.'
'What!'
'Yes, indeed,' Pritchard said. He sounded as if the unalloyed shock in Alan's voice rather pleased him. 'This is not entirely uncommon — twins are often absorbed in utero, and in rare cases the absorption is incomplete — but the location was unusual, and so was the growth-spurt of the foreign tissue. Such tissue almost always remains inert. I believe that Thad's problems may have been caused by the early onset of puberty.'
'Wait,' Alan said. 'Just wait.' He had read the phrase 'his mind reeled' a time or two in books, but this was the first time he had ever experienced such a feeling himself. 'Are you telling me that Thad was a twin, but he . . . he somehow . . . somehow ate his brother?'
'Or sister,' Pritchard said. 'But I suspect it was a brother, because I believe absorption is much more rare in cases of fraternal twins. That's based on statistical frequency, not hard fact,