Thinner - Stephen King [29]
'Does it look like I'm dieting?' Halleck said, pointing at his plate with his fork, which dripped gravy.
He spoke mildly enough, but Linda's face began to work and a moment later she fled from the table, sobbing, her napkin pressed to her face.
Halleck looked bleakly at his wife, who looked bleakly back at him.
This is the way the world ends, Halleck thought inanely. Not with a bang but a thinner.
'I'll talk to her,' he said, starting to get up.
'If you go see her looking like you do right now, you'll scare her to death,' Heidi said, and he felt that surge of bright metallic hate again.
186. 183. 181. 180. It was as if someone - the old Gypsy with the rotting nose, for instance - was using some crazy supernatural eraser on him, rubbing him out, pound by pound. When had he last weighed 180? College? No probably not since he had been a senior in high school.
On one of his sleepless nights between the fifth of May and the twelfth, he found himself remembering an explanation of voodoo he had once read - it works because the victim thinks it works. No big supernatural deal; simply the power of suggestion.
Perhaps, he thought, Houston was right and I'm thinking myself thin because that old Gypsy wanted me to. Only now I can't stop. I could make a million bucks writing a response to that Norman Vincent Peale book call it The Power of Negative Thinking.
But his mind suggested the old power-of-suggestion idea was, in this case at least, a pile of crap. All that Gypsy said was 'Thinner.' He didn't say 'By the power vested in me I curse you to lose six to nine pounds a week until you die.' He didn't say 'Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie, soon you will need a new Niques belt or you will be filing objections in your Jockey shorts.' Hell, Billy, you didn't even remember what he said until after you'd started to lose the weight.
Maybe that's just when I became consciously aware of what he said, Halleck argued back. But
And so the argument raged.
If it was psychological, though, if it was the power of suggestion, the question of what he was going to do about it remained. How was he supposed to combat it? Was there a way he could think himself fat again? Suppose he went to a hypnotist - hell, a psychiatrist! - and explained the problem. The shrink could hypnotize him and plant a deep suggestion that the old Gypsy man's curse was invalid. That might work.
Or, of course, it might not.
Two nights before he was scheduled to check into Glassman Clinic, Billy stood on the scales looking dismally down at the dial - 179 tonight. And as he stood looking down at the dial, it occured to him in a perfectly natural way - the way things so often occur to the conscious mind after the subconscious has mulled them over for days and weeks that the person he really ought to talk to about these crazy fears was Judge Cary Rossington.
Rossington was a tit-grabber when he was drunk, but he was a fairly sympathetic and understanding guy when he was sober up to a point, at least. Also, he was relatively close-mouthed. Halleck supposed it was possible that at some drunken party or other (and as with all the other constants of the physical universe - sunrise in the east, sunset in the west, the return of Halley's Comet you could be certain that somewhere in town after nine P.M, people were guzzling manhattans, fishing green olives out of martinis, and, quite possibly, grabbing the tits of other men's wives), he might be indiscreet about ole Billy Halleck's paranoid-schizo ideas regarding Gypsies and curses, but he suspected that Rossington might think twice about spilling the tale even while in his cups. It was not that anything illegal had been done at the hearing; it had been a textbook case of municipal hardball, sure, but no witnesses had been suborned, no evidence had been eighty-sixed. It was a sleeping dog just the same, though, and old shrewdies like Cary Rossington did not go around kicking such animals. It was always possible - not likely, but fairly possible - that a question concerning