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Authors: Dean Koontz
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clothes. He undressed, washed his face and hands with paper tissues and his own spittle, then put on the clean clothes.
He still felt travel-weary and headachy, but he was now presentable enough to face the night clerk at the motel.
Fifteen minutes later he was in his room in Dreamland. It was not much of a room. Ten-foot square, with a tiny attached bath, it seemed more like a place where a man was put than like one to which he went voluntarily. The walls were a dirty yellow, scarred, finger-stained, even marked with dust webs in the high corners. The easy chair was new and functional yet ancient. The desk was green tubular steel with a Masonite work surface darkened with the wormlike marks of cigarette burns. The bed was narrow, soft, the sheets patched.
George Leland did not really notice the condition of the room. it was merely a place to him, like any other place.
At the moment he was chiefly concerned with staving off the headache which he could feel building behind his right eye. He dropped his suitcase at the foot of the sagging bed and stripped out of his clothes. In the tiny bathroom's bare shower stall, he let the spray of hot water sluice the weariness from him. For long minutes he stood with the water drumming pleasantly against the back of his skull and neck, for he had found that this would, on rare occasion, lessen the severity of and even cure altogether an oncoming migraine.
This time, however, the water did no good. When he toweled off, all the warning signs of the migraine were still there: dizziness, a pinpoint of bright light whirling round and round and growing larger behind his right eye, clumsiness, a faint but persistent nausea
He remembered that he had skipped breakfast and supper and had taken only half a lunch in-between. Perhaps the headache was caused by hunger. He was not hungry-or at least he did not suffer the pangs of unconscious self-denial. Nevertheless, he dressed and went outside, where he bought food from vending machines by the pay telephones in the motel's badly lighted breezeway. He dined on two bottles of Coke, a package of peanut-butter crackers, and a Hershey Bar with almonds.
He suffered the headache anyway. It pulsed out from the core of him, rhythmic waves of pain that forced him to be perfectly still lest he make the agony unbearable. Even when he lifted a hand to his forehead, the responding thunder of pain brought him close to the edge of delirium. He stretched out on his bed, flat on his back, twisting the gray sheets in both big hands, and after a while he was not merely approaching the edge of delirium but had leapt deep into it. For more than two hours he lay as rigid as a wooden construction, perspiration rolling off him like moisture from an icy cold water glass. Exhausted, wrung dry, moaning softly, he eventually passed from a half-aware trance into a troubled but comparatively painless sleep.
As always, there were nightmares. Grotesque images flickered through his shattered mind like visions formed at the bottom of a satanic kaleidoscope, each independent of the other, each a horrifying minim to recall later: long slender knives dripping blood into a woman's cupped palm, maggots crawling in a corpse, enormous breasts enfolding him and smothering him in a damp warm sexless caress, acres of scuttling cockroaches, herds of watchful red-eyed rats waiting to leap upon him, bloody lovers writhing ecstatically on a marble floor, Courtney nude and writhing on a bloody floor, a revolver snapping bullets into a woman's slim stomach
The nightmares passed. Soon after, sleep passed as well. Leland groaned and sat up in bed, held his head in both hands. The head ache was gone, but the memory of it was a new agony. Afterward he always felt crushingly helpless, vulnerable. And lonely. Lonelier than a man could endure to be.
Don't feel lonely, Courtney said. I'm here with
He still felt travel-weary and headachy, but he was now presentable enough to face the night clerk at the motel.
Fifteen minutes later he was in his room in Dreamland. It was not much of a room. Ten-foot square, with a tiny attached bath, it seemed more like a place where a man was put than like one to which he went voluntarily. The walls were a dirty yellow, scarred, finger-stained, even marked with dust webs in the high corners. The easy chair was new and functional yet ancient. The desk was green tubular steel with a Masonite work surface darkened with the wormlike marks of cigarette burns. The bed was narrow, soft, the sheets patched.
George Leland did not really notice the condition of the room. it was merely a place to him, like any other place.
At the moment he was chiefly concerned with staving off the headache which he could feel building behind his right eye. He dropped his suitcase at the foot of the sagging bed and stripped out of his clothes. In the tiny bathroom's bare shower stall, he let the spray of hot water sluice the weariness from him. For long minutes he stood with the water drumming pleasantly against the back of his skull and neck, for he had found that this would, on rare occasion, lessen the severity of and even cure altogether an oncoming migraine.
This time, however, the water did no good. When he toweled off, all the warning signs of the migraine were still there: dizziness, a pinpoint of bright light whirling round and round and growing larger behind his right eye, clumsiness, a faint but persistent nausea
He remembered that he had skipped breakfast and supper and had taken only half a lunch in-between. Perhaps the headache was caused by hunger. He was not hungry-or at least he did not suffer the pangs of unconscious self-denial. Nevertheless, he dressed and went outside, where he bought food from vending machines by the pay telephones in the motel's badly lighted breezeway. He dined on two bottles of Coke, a package of peanut-butter crackers, and a Hershey Bar with almonds.
He suffered the headache anyway. It pulsed out from the core of him, rhythmic waves of pain that forced him to be perfectly still lest he make the agony unbearable. Even when he lifted a hand to his forehead, the responding thunder of pain brought him close to the edge of delirium. He stretched out on his bed, flat on his back, twisting the gray sheets in both big hands, and after a while he was not merely approaching the edge of delirium but had leapt deep into it. For more than two hours he lay as rigid as a wooden construction, perspiration rolling off him like moisture from an icy cold water glass. Exhausted, wrung dry, moaning softly, he eventually passed from a half-aware trance into a troubled but comparatively painless sleep.
As always, there were nightmares. Grotesque images flickered through his shattered mind like visions formed at the bottom of a satanic kaleidoscope, each independent of the other, each a horrifying minim to recall later: long slender knives dripping blood into a woman's cupped palm, maggots crawling in a corpse, enormous breasts enfolding him and smothering him in a damp warm sexless caress, acres of scuttling cockroaches, herds of watchful red-eyed rats waiting to leap upon him, bloody lovers writhing ecstatically on a marble floor, Courtney nude and writhing on a bloody floor, a revolver snapping bullets into a woman's slim stomach
The nightmares passed. Soon after, sleep passed as well. Leland groaned and sat up in bed, held his head in both hands. The head ache was gone, but the memory of it was a new agony. Afterward he always felt crushingly helpless, vulnerable. And lonely. Lonelier than a man could endure to be.
Don't feel lonely, Courtney said. I'm here with
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