She nodded.
“Old family,” she said.
“Well. . . . Good,” he said. “You know I wish you happiness.”
She rose and embraced him again.
“I've missed you,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“I've got errands to run, too, now. I'll see you later.”
“Yes.”
“You take it easy today.”
When she left he stretched his arms as far as they would go, trying to relieve the ache in his shoulders. His shirt tore down the back as he did this. He looked in the hall mirror. His shoulders were wider today than they had been yesterday. In fact, his entire body looked wider, huskier. He returned to his room and stripped. Most of his torso was covered with a red rash. Just looking at it made him want to scratch, but he restrained himself. Instead, he filled the bathtub and soaked in it for a long while. The water level had lowered itself visibly by the time he got out. When he studied himself in the bathroom mirror he seemed even larger. Could he have absorbed some of the water through his skin? At any rate, the inflammation seemed to have vanished, though his skin was still rough in those areas where it had been prominent.
He dressed himself in clothing he had left from an earlier time when he had been larger. Then he went out and rode the subways to the clothing store he had visited the previous day. There, he re-outfitted himself completely and rode back, feeling vaguely nauseous as the car jounced and swayed. He noted that his hands looked dry and rough. When he rubbed them, flakes of dead skin fell off like dandruff.
After he left the subway he walked on until he came to the Sarzannos' apartment building. The woman who opened the door was not Joe's mother, Rose, however.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I'm looking for Joe Sarzanno,” he said.
“Nobody here by that name. Must be someone who moved out before we moved in.”
“So you wouldn't know where they went?”
“No. Ask the manager. Maybe he knows.”
She closed the door.
He tried the manager's apartment, but there was no answer. So he made his way home, feeling heavy and bloated. The second time that he yawned he was abruptly fearful. It seemed too soon to be going back to sleep. This transformation was more puzzling than usual.
He put a fresh pot of coffee on the stove and paced while he waited for it to percolate. While there was no certainty that he would awaken with a special power on each occasion, the one thing that had been constant was change. He thought back over all of the changes he had undergone since he had been infected. This was the only one where he had seemed neither joker nor ace, but normal. Still . . .
When the coffee was ready, he sat down with a cup and became aware that he had been scratching his right thigh, half-consciously. He rubbed his hands together and more dry skin flaked off. He considered his increased girth. He thought of all the little twinges and creaks, of the fatigue. It was obvious that he was not completely normal this time, but as to what his abnormality actually constituted, he was uncertain. Could Dr. Tachyon help him? He wondered. Or at least give him some idea as to what was going on?
He called the number that he had committed to memory. A woman with a cheerful voice told him that Tachyon was out but would be back that afternoon. She took Croyd's name, seemed to recognize it, and told him to come in at three.
He finished the pot of coffee; the itching had increased steadily all over his body as he sat drinking the final cup. He went upstairs and ran the water in the bathtub again. While the tub was filling he undressed and studied his body. All of his skin now had the dry, flaky appearance of his hands. Wherever he brushed himself a small flurry occurred.
He soaked for a long while. The warmth and the wetness felt good. After a time he leaned back and closed his eyes. Very good . . .
He sat up with a start. He had begun dozing. He had almost drifted off to sleep just then. He seized the washcloth and began rubbing himself vigorously, not only to remove all of the detritus. When he had finished he toweled himself briskly as the tub drained, then rushed to his room. He located the pills at the back of a clothing drawer and took two of them. Whatever games his body was playing, sleep was very much his enemy now.
He returned to the bathroom, cleaned the tub, dressed. It would feel good to stretch out on his bed for a time. To rest, as Claudia had suggested. But he knew that he couldn't.
Tachyon took a blood sample and fed it to his machine. On his first attempt, the needle had only gone in a short distance and stopped. The third needle, backed with considerable force, penetrated a subdermal layer of resistance and the blood was drawn.
While awaiting the machine's findings, Tachyon conducted a gross examination.
“Were your incisors that long when you awoke?” he asked, peering into Croyd's mouth.
“They looked normal when I brushed them,” Croyd replied. “Have they grown?”
“Take a look.”
Tachyon held up a small mirror. Croyd stared. The teeth were an inch long, and sharp looking.
“That's a new development,” he stated. “I don't know when it happened.”
Tachyon moved Croyd's left arm up behind his back in a gentle hammerlock, then pushed his fingers beneath the protruding scapula. Croyd screamed.
“That bad, is it?” Tachyon asked.
“My God!” Croyd said. “What is it? Is something broken back there?”
The doctor shook his head. He examined some of the skin flakes under a microscope. He studied Croyd's feet next.
“Were they this wide when you woke up?” he asked.
“No. What the hell is happening, Doc?”
“Let's wait another minute or so for my machine to finish with your blood. You've been here three or four times in the past . . .”
“Yes,” Croyd said.
“Fortunately, you came in once right after you woke up. Another time, you were in about six hours after you awoke. On the former occasion you possessed a high level of a very peculiar hormone which I thought at the time might be associated with the change process itself. The other time—six hours after awakening—you still had traces of the hormone, but at a very low level. Those were the only two times it was evident.”
“So?”
“The main test in which I am interested right now is a check for its presence in your blood. Ah! I believe we have something now.”
A series of strange symbols flashed upon the screen of the small unit.
“Yes. Yes, indeed,” he said, studying them. “You have a high level of the substance in your blood—higher even than it was right after awakening. Hm. You've been taking amphetamines again, too.”
“I had to. I was starting to get sleepy, and I've got to make it to Saturday. Tell me in plain words what this damn hormone means.”
“It means that the process of change is still going on within you. For some reason you awoke before it was completed. There seems to be a regular cycle of it, but this time it was interrupted.”
“Why?”
Tachyon shrugged, a movement he seemed to have learned since the last time Croyd had seen him.
“Any of a whole constellation of possible biochemical events triggered by the change itself. I think you probably received some brain stimulation as a side effect of another change that was in progress at the time you were aroused. Whatever that particular change was, it is completed—but the rest of the process isn't. So your body is now trying to put you back to sleep until it finishes its business.”
“In other words, I woke up too soon?”
“Yes.”
“What should I do?”
“Stop taking the drugs immediately. Sleep. Let it run its course.”
“I can't. I have to stay awake for two more days—a day and a half will do, actually.”
“I suspect your body will fight this, and as I said once before, it seems to know what it's doing. I think you would be taking a chance to keep yourself awake much longer.”
“
What kind of chance? Do you mean it might kill me—or will it just make me uncomfortable?”
“Croyd, I simply do not know. Your condition is unique. Each change takes a different course. The only thing we can trust is whatever accommodation your body has made to the virus—whatever it is within you that brings you through each bout safely. If you try to stay awake by unnatural means now, this is the very thing that you will be fighting.”
“I've put off sleep lots of times with amphetamines.”
“Yes, but those times you were merely postponing the onset of the process. It doesn't normally begin until your brain chemistry registers a sleep state. But now it is already under way, and the presence of the hormone indicates its continuance. I don't know what will happen. You may turn an ace phase into a joker phase. You may lapse into a really lengthy coma. I simply have no way of telling.”
Croyd reached for his shirt.
“I'll let you know how it all turns out,” he said.
Croyd did not feel like walking as much as he usually did. He rode the subway again. His nausea returned and this time brought with it a headache. And his shoulders were still hurting badly. He visited the drugstore near his subway stop and bought a bottle of aspirins.
He stopped by the apartment building where the Sarzannos had formerly resided, before he headed home. This time the manager was in. He was unable to help him, however, for Joe's family had left no forwarding address when they departed. Croyd glanced in the mirror beside the man's door as he left, and he was shocked at the puffiness of his eyes, at the deep circles beneath them. They were beginning to ache now, he noted.
He returned home. He had promised to take Claudia and Carl to a good restaurant for dinner, and he wanted to be in the best shape he could for the occasion. He returned to the bathroom and stripped again. He was huge, bloated-looking. He realized then that with all of his other symptoms, he had forgotten to tell Tachyon that he had no relieved himself at all since awakening. His body must be finding some use for everything that he ate or drank. He stepped on the scale, but it only went up to three hundred and he was over that. He took three aspirins and hoped that they would work soon. He scratched his arm and a long strip of flesh came away, painlessly and without bleeding. He scratched more gently in other areas and the flaking continued. He took a shower and brushed his fangs. He combed his hair and big patches of it came out. He stopped combing. For a moment he wanted to cry, but he was distracted by a yawning jag. He went to his room and took two more amphetamines. Then he recalled having heard somewhere that body mass had to be taken into account in calculating doses of medication. So he took another one, just to be safe.
Croyd found a dark restaurant and he slipped the waiter something to put them in a booth toward the rear, out of sight of most of the other diners.
“Croyd, you're really looking—unwell,” Claudia had said when she'd returned earlier.
“I know,” he replied. “I went to see my doctor this afternoon.”
“What did he say?”
“I'm going to need a lot of sleep, starting right after the wedding.”
“Croyd, if you want to skip it, I'll understand. Your health comes first.”
“I don't want to skip it. I'll be okay.”
How could he say it to her when he did not fully understand it himself? Say that it was more than his favorite relative's wedding?—that the occasion represented the final rending of his home and that it was unlikely he would ever have another? Say that this was the end of a phase of his existence and the beginning of a big unknown?
Instead, he ate. His appetite was undiminished and the food was particularly good. Carl watched with the fascination of a voyeur, long after he had finished his own meal, as Croyd put away two more chateaubriands-for-two, pausing only to call for extra baskets of rolls.
When they finally rose Croyd's joints were creaking again.
He sat on his bed later that evening, aching. The aspirins weren't helping. He had removed his clothing because all of his garments were feeling tight again. Whenever he scratched himself now, his skin did more than flake. Big pieces of it came away, but they were dry and pale with no signs of blood. No wonder I look pasty-faced, he decided. At the bottom of one particularly large rent in his chest he saw something gray and hard. He could not figure what it was, but its presence frightened him.
Finally, despite the hour, he phoned Bentley. He had to talk to someone who knew his condition. And Bentley usually gave good advice.
After many rings Bentley answered, and Croyd told him his story.
“You know what I think, kid?” Bentley said at last. “You ought to do what the doctor said. Sleep it off.”
“I can't. Not yet. I just need a little over a day. Then I'll be all right. I can keep awake that long, but I hurt so damn much and my appearance—”
“Okay, okay. Here's what we'll do. You come by about ten in the morning. I can't do anything for you now. But I'll talk to a man I know first thing, and we'll get you a really strong painkiller. And I want to have a look at you. Maybe there's some way of playing down your appearance a bit.”
“Okay. Thanks, Bentley. I appreciate it.”
“It's all right. I understand. It was no fun being a dog either. G'night.”
“'Night.”
Two hours later, Croyd was stricken with severe cramps followed by diarrhea; also, his bladder felt as if it were bursting. This continued through the night. When he weighed himself at three-thirty he was down to 276. By six o'clock he weighed 242 pounds. He gurgled con stantly. Its only benefit, he reflected, was that it kept his mind off the itching and the aches in his shoulders and joints. Also, it was sufficient to keep him awake without additional amphetamines.
By eight o'clock he weighed 216 and he realized—when Carl called him—that he had finally lost his appetite. Strangely, his girth had not decreased at all. His general body structure was unaltered from the previous day, though he was pale now to the point of albinism—and this, combined with his prominent teeth, gave him the look of a fat vampire.
At nine o'clock he called Bentley because he was still gurgling and running to the john. He explained that he had the shits and couldn't come for the medicine. Bentley said that he'd bring it by himself as soon as the man dropped it off. Carl and Claudia had already left for the day. Croyd had avoided them this morning, claiming an upset stomach. He now weighed 198.
It was near eleven o'clock when Bentley came by. Croyd had lost another twenty pounds by then and had scratched off a large flap of skin from his lower abdomen. The area of exposed tissue beneath it was gray and scaly.
“My God!” Bentley said when he saw him.
“Yeah.”
“You've got big bald patches.”
“Right.”
“I'll get you a hairpiece. Also, I'll talk to a lady I know. She's a beautician. We'll get you some kind of cream to rub in. Give you some normal color. I think you'd better wear dark glasses, too, when you go to the wedding. Tell 'em you got drops in your eyes. You're getting hunchbacked, too. When'd that happen?”
“I didn't even notice. I've been—occupied.”
Bentley patted the lump between his shoulders and Croyd screamed.
“Sorry. Maybe you'd better take a pill right away.”
“Yeah.”
“You're going to need to wear a big overcoat, too. What size do you take?”
“I don't know—now.”
“That's okay. I know someone's got a warehouse full. We'll send you a dozen.”
“I've got to run, Bentley. I'm gurgling again.”
“Yeah. Take your medicine and try to rest.”
By two o'clock, Croyd weighed 155. The painkiller had worked fine, and he was without aches for the first time in a long while. Unfortunately, it had also made him sleepy and he had had to take amphetamines again. On the plus side, this combination gave him his first good feeling since the whole business had started, even though he knew it was fake.
When the load
of coats was delivered at three-thirty he was down to 132 pounds and felt very light on his feet. Somewhere deep within him his blood seemed to be singing. He found a coat that fit him perfectly and took it back to his room, leaving the others on the sofa. The beautician—a tall, lacquered blonde who chewed gum—came by at four o'clock. She combed out most of his hair, shaved the rest, and fitted him with a hairpiece. She made up his face then, instructing him in the use of the cosmetics as she went along. She also advised him to keep his mouth closed as much as possible to hide his fangs. He was pleased with the results and gave her a hundred dollars. She observed then that there were other services she might perform for him, but he was gurgling again and had to bid her a good afternoon.
By six o'clock his guts began to ease up on him. He was down to 116 by then and still feeling very good. The itching had finally stopped also, though he had scratched more skin from his thorax, forearms, and thighs.
When Carl came in, he yelled upstairs, “What the hell are all these coats doing here?”
“It's a long story,” Croyd answered. “You can have them if you want.”
“Hey, they're cashmere!”
“Yeah.”
“This one's my size.”
“So take it.”
“How you feeling?”
“Better, thanks.”
That evening he felt his strength returning, and he took one of his long walks. He raised the front end of a parked car high into the air to test it. Yes, he seemed to be recovering now. With the hair and the makeup he looked like a garden-variety fat man, so long as he kept his mouth closed. If only he'd had a little more time he'd have sought a dentist to do something about the fangs. He did not eat anything that night or in the morning. He did feel a peculiar pressure on the sides of his head, but he took another pill and it did not turn to pain.
Before he and Carl left for Ridgewood, Croyd had indulged in another soak. More of his skin had come away, but that was all right. His clothes would cover his patchwork body. His face, at least, had remained intact. He applied his makeup carefully and adjusted the hairpiece. When he was fully dressed and had put on a pair of sunglasses, he thought that he looked fully presentable. And the overcoat did minimize the bulging of his back somewhat.
Wild Cards Page 10
