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 you.”
Leland looked up and saw her sitting on the foot of the bed. This time
he was not the least bit surprised by her magical materialization.
“It was so bad, Courtney,” he said.
“Headache?
“And nightmares.”
“Did you ever go back to Dr. Penebaker?”
she asked.
” No.”
Her gentle voice came to him as if she were speaking from the far end of
a tunnel. The hollow, distant tone was curiously in harmony with the
shabby room. “You should have let Dr. Penebaker-”
“I don’t want to hear about Penebaker!”
She said nothing more.
Several minutes later he said, “I stood by you when your parents were
killed in the accident. Why didn’t you stand by me when things first
started to go sour?”
“Don’t you remember what I told you then, George? I would have stood by
you, if you had been willing to get help. But when you refused to admit
that your headaches owl and your emotional problems might be caused by
some-”
“oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up! Shut up!
You’re a rotten, nagging, holier-than-thou bitch, and I don’t want to
listen to you.”
She did not vanish, but neither did she speak again.
Quite some time later he said, “We could have it as good as it once was,
Courtney. Don’t you agree?” He wanted her to agree more than he had
ever wanted anything else.
“I agree, George,” she said.
He smiled. “it could be just like it was. The only thing that’s really
keeping us apart is this Doyle. And Colin, too. You were always closer
to Colin than to me. If Doyle and Colin were dead, I’d be all you had.
You would have to come back to me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, just as he wanted her to say.
“We’d be happy again, wouldn’t we?”
“Yes.”
“You’d let me touch you again.”
“Yes, George.”
“Let me sleep with you again.”
“Yes.
“Live with me?”
“Yes.
“And people would stop being nasty to me.
“Yes.”
“You’re my lucky piece, always were.
With you back, it would almost be as if the last two years never even
happened.”
“Yes,” she said.
But it was no good. She was not as responsive and warm and open as he
would have liked. indeed, talking with her was almost like talking with
himself, a curiously masturbatory enterprise.
Angry with her, he turned away and refused to talk any more. A few
minutes later, when he looked back to see if she was showing any signs
of contrition, he found that she had vanished. She had left him again.
She was always leaving him. She was always going away to Doyle or Colin
or somebody else and leaving him alone. He did not think that he could
tolerate much more of that sort of treatment.
A police cruiser blocked the entrance to the rest area off interstate
70, dome light and emergency blinkers flashing. Behind it, up on the
clearing in the shelter of the pines, half a dozen other official cars
were parked in a semicircle with their headlights on and engines