to Doyle breathe. Occasionally, the man woke from a bad dream and
turned over and wrestled with the bedclothes until he could sleep again.
At least he was dozing. Doyle’s equanimity in these dangerous
circumstances impressed Colin quite a bit.
of course, he had always been impressed with Alex Doyle-more than he had
ever been able to let the man know. Sometimes he wanted to grab hold of
Doyle and hug him and hold onto him forever. He was afraid, all through
the courtship, that Courtney would lose Doyle. He knew how much they
cared for each other and suspected the intensity of their physical
relationship, yet he had been sure Doyle would leave them.
Now that Doyle was theirs, he wanted to hug him and be around him and
learn from him. But he was not capable of that hug, for it seemed too
juvenile a means of expressing what he felt. He had worked too hard and
too long at being an adult to let himself slip now, no matter how much
he loved, liked, and admired Alex Doyle. Therefore, he had to let his
feelings be known in small ways, in hundreds of separate, simple
gestures that would say it all as well as that one hug would say it, if
less forcefully.
He got off his bed when the first morning light found its way around
the edges of the heavy drapes, and he went into the bathroom to shower.
With Alex in the room beyond, with the warm water cascading down on him
and the yellow soap foaming pleasantly against his thin limbs, Colin
worried less and less about the stranger in the Chevrolet van. with
just a little bit of luck, everything would be fine. it had to come out
all right in the end, because Alex Doyle was here to make certain that
nothing really bad happens to him or to Courtney.
By the time George Leland reached the automover which was parked near
the front of the Rockies Motor Hotel, he had forgotten all about Doyle
and the boy. He fumbled with his keys, dropped them. He pawed clumsily
in an inch-deep puddle until he found them again. Unlocking the cab
door, he climbed into the truck, unable to recall the silent chase
through the motel corridors or the ax-swinging madness in the
maintenance room when he had come within seconds and inches of killing a
man. He was too beaten down with pain to care about this sudden
amnesia.
It was the worst headache yet. The pain was most fierce in and area
around the right eye, but now it also fanned out across his entire
forehead and back to the top of his skull. It brought tears to his
eyes. He could even hear his teeth grinding together like sandstone
wheels, but he could not stop the hard, involuntary chewing motion; it
was as if he were possessed, and as if his possessor thought that the
pain could be masticated, shredded into fine pieces, swallowed, and
digested away.
There had been no warning signs. Usually, at least one hour in advance
of the first wave of pain, he grew dizzy and nauseated, and he saw that
spiral of hot multicolored light turning around and around behind his
eye. But not tonight. One moment he had felt just fine, even
exhilarated, and the next, pain had hit him like a hammer blow.
It had been an ugly but comparatively small pain to begin with-hadn’t
it? A small pain at the start?
He could not remember exactly where he had been when it first struck
him, but he was sure the pain had been only mild, initially.
Certainly bearable. However, it had rapidly gotten worse until, now, he
despaired of reaching his own motel before he was completely
incapacitated.
He drove out of the motel lot, slammed off a four-inch curb and onto the
highway, the van’s springs squealing beneath him. He did not feel like
a part of the vehicle tonight. He was no extension of it.
He had lost his usual empathy with machines. He was a stranger in
this contraption, and the steering wheel felt like an alien artifact, an