Thinner - Stephen King [22]
Houston got up to see him out: Halleck noticed with quiet amusement that there was a dusting of white powder under Houston's nose.
'If you continue to lose weight, we'll run an entire metabolic series on you,' Houston said. 'I may have given you the idea that tests like that aren't very good, but sometimes they can show us a lot. Anyway, I doubt if we'll have to go to that. My guess is your weight loss will start to taper off - five pounds this week, three next week, one the week after that. Then you're going to get on the scales and see that you've put on a pound of two.'
'You've eased my mind a lot,' Halleck said, and gripped Houston's hand hard.
Houston smiled complacently, although he had really done no more than present Halleck with negatives - no, he didn't know what was wrong with Halleck, but no, it wasn't cancer. Whew. 'That's what we're here for, Billyboy.'
Billy-boy went home to his wife.
'He said you're okay?'
Halleck nodded.
She put her arms around him and hugged him hard. He could feel the tempting swell of her breasts against his chest.
'Want to go upstairs?'
She looked at him, her eyes dancing. 'My, you are okay, aren't you?'
'You bet.'
They went upstairs and had magnificent sex. For one of the last times.
Afterward, Halleck fell asleep. And dreamed.
The Gypsy had turned into a huge bird. A vulture with a rotting beak. It was cruising over Fairview and casting down a gritty, cindery dust like chimney soot that seemed to come fro beneath its dusky pinions its wingpits?
Chapter Seven
Bird Dream
'Thinner.' The Gypsy-vulture croaked, passing over the common, over the Village Pub, the Waldenbooks on the corner of Main and Devon, over Esta-Esta, Fairview's moderately good Italian restaurant, over the post office, over the Amoco station, the modern glass-walled Fairview Public Library, and finally over the salt marshes and out into the bay.
Thinner, just that one word, but it was a malediction enough, Halleck saw, because everyone in this affluent upper-class-commute-to-the-city-and-have-a-few-drinks-in-the-club-car-on-the-wayhome suburb, everyone in this pretty little New England town set squarely in the heart of John Cheever country, everyone in Fairview was starving to death.
He walked faster and faster up Main Street, apparently invisible - the logic of dreams, after all, is only whatever the dream demands - and horrified by the results of the Gypsy's curse. Fairview had become a town filled with concentration-camp survivors. Big-headed babies with wasted bodies screamed from expensive prams. Two women in expensive designer dresses staggered and lurched out of Cherry on Top, Fairview's version of the old ice-cream shoppe. Their faces were all cheekbones and bulging brows stretching parchment-shiny skin; the necklines of their dresses slipped from jutting skin-wrapped collarbones and deep shoulder hollows in a hideous parody of seduction.
Here came Michael Houston, staggering along on scarecrow-thin legs, his Savile Row suit flapping around his unbelievably gaunt frame, holding out a vial of cocaine in one skeletal hand. 'Toot-sweet?' he screamed at Halleck - it was the voice of a rat caught in a trap and squealing out the last of its miserable life. 'Toot-sweet? It helps speed up your metabolism, Billy-boy! Toot-sweet? Toot -'
With deepening horror Halleck realised the hand holding the vial was not a hand at all but only clattering bones. The man was a walking, talking skeleton.
He turned to run, but in the way of nightmares, he could seem to pick up no speed. Although he was on the Main Street sidewalk, he felt as if he was running in thick, sticky mud. At any moment the skeleton that had been Michael Houston would reach out and he - it - would touch his shoulder. Or perhaps that bony hand would begin to scrabble at his throat.
'Toot-sweet, toot-sweet, toot-sweet!'