Thinner - Stephen King [10]
'I'm sure you've felt fine,' she said, 'and that's great. But a checkup would be great, too. You haven't had one in over eighteen months, and I bet Dr Houston misses you -'
'I think he's a little dope freak,' Halleck muttered.
'A little what?'
'Nothing.'
'But I'm telling you, Billy, you can't lose almost twenty pounds in two weeks just by exercising.'
'I am not sick!'
'Then just humor me.'
They rode the rest of the way to Fairview in silence. Halleck wanted to pull her to him and tell her sure, okay, he would do what she wanted. Except a thought had come to him. An utterly absurd thought. Absurd but nevertheless chilling.
Maybe there's a new style in old Gypsy curses, friends and neighbors - how about that possibility? They used to change you into a werewolf or send a demon to pull Off your head in the middle of the night, something like that, but everything changes, doesn't it? What if that old man touched me and gave me cancer? She's right, it's one of the tattletales - losing twenty pounds just like that is like when the miners' canary drops dead in his cage. Lung cancer.
leukemia melanoma
It was crazy, but the craziness didn't keep the thought away: What if he touched me and gave me cancer?
Linda greeted them with extravagant kisses and, to their mutual amazement, produced a very creditable lasagna from the oven and served it on paper plates bearing the face of that lasagna-lover extraordinaire, Garfield the cat. She asked them how their second honeymoon had been ('A phrase that belongs right up there with second childhood,' Halleck observed dryly to Heidi that evening, after the dishes had been done and Linda had gone flying off with two of her girlfriends to continue a Dungeons and Dragons game that had been going on for nearly a year), and before they could do more than begin to tell her about the trip, she had cried, 'Oh, that reminds me!' and spent the rest of the meal regaling them with Tales of Wonder and Horror from Fairview Junior High - a continuing story which held more fascination for her than it did for either Halleck or his wife, although both tried to listen with attention. They had been gone for almost a week, after all.
As she rushed out, she kissed Halleck's cheek loudly and cried, "Bye, skinny!'
Halleck watched her mount her bike and pedal down the front walk, ponytail flying, and then turned to Heidi. He was dumbfounded.
'Now,' she said, 'will you please listen to me?'
'You told her. You called ahead and told her to say that. Female conspiracy.'
'No.'
He scanned her face and then nodded tiredly. 'No, I guess not.'
Heidi nagged him upstairs, where he finally ended up in the bathroom, naked except for the towel around his waist. He was struck by a strong sense of deja vu - the temporal dislocation was so complete that he felt a mild physical nausea. It was an almost exact replay of the day he had stood on this same scale with a towel from this same powder-blue set wrapped around his waist. All that was lacking was the good smell of frying bacon coming up from downstairs. Everything else was exactly the same.
No. No, it wasn't. One other thing was remarkably different.
That other day he had craned over in order to read the bad news on the dial. He had to do that because his bay window was in the way.
The bay window was there, but it was smaller. There could be no question about it, because now he could look straight down and still read the numbers.
The digital readout said 229.
'That settles it,' Heidi said flatly. 'I'm making you an appointment with Dr Houston.'
'This scale weighs light,' Halleck said weakly. 'It always has. That's why I like it.'
She looked at him coldly. 'Enough bullshit is enough bullshit, my friend. You've spent the last five years bitching about how it weighs heavy, and we both