noticed several dark streaks on his face. He rubbed at the stains,
sniffed the residue, then put it on his tongue. Blood. Surprised, he
opened the door and examined himself in the glow of the ceiling light.
Dried blood was spattered over his trousers and smeared all over his
short-sleeved shirt. The soft white hairs on his left arm were now
stiff and purple with dried blood.
Where had it come from?
And when?
He knew he had not hurt himself, yet he could not understand whose blood
this was if not his own. Thinking about it, he sensed the approach of
one of his fierce migraine headaches. Then, in the back of his mind,
something ugly stirred and turned over heavily; and although he still
could not recall whose blood had been spilled on him, he knew that he
dared not attempt to rent a room for the night while he was wearing the
stuff.
Praying that his headache would hold off for a while, he readjusted the
mirror, closed the door, started the truck, and drove away from the
motel. He went half a mile down 78 the road and parked in front of an
abandoned service station. He opened his suitcase and took out a change
of 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 attaclied 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,