But he suspected that what he wanted did not matter. That was the real horror; he had touched some terrible paranormal talent in himself, but he could not control it. The very idea of control in this matter was a joke.
And he believed that before this was over, they would be back. Thad shuddered and went back to the house. He slipped into his own pantry like a burglar, then locked the door behind him and took his throbbing hand up to bed. Before he went, he swallowed another Percodan, washing it down with water from the kitchen tap. Liz did not wake when he lay down beside her. Some time later he escaped into three hours of grainy, fitful sleep in which nightmares flew and circled around him, always just out of reach..
Chapter Ninteen
Stark Makes a Purchase
1
Waking up wasn't like waking up.
When you came right down to it, he didn't think he had ever really been awake or asleep, at least in the way normal people used those words. In a way it was as if he were always asleep, and only moved from one dream to another. In that way, his life - what little of it he remembered - was like a nest of Chinese boxes that never ended, or like peering into an endless hall of mirrors.
This dream was a nightmare.
He came slowly out of sleep knowing he hadn't really been asleep at all. Somehow Thad Beaumont had managed to capture him for a little while; had managed to bend him to his will for a little while. Had he said things, revealed things, while Beaumont had been in control of him? He had a feeling he might have done . . . but he also felt quite sure Beaumont would not know how to interpret those things, or how to tell the important things he might have said from the things that didn't matter.
He also came out of sleep to pain.
He had rented a two-room 'efficiency' in the East Village, just off Avenue B. When he opened his eyes he was sitting at the lopsided kitchen table with an open notebook in front of him. A rivulet of bright blood ran across the faded oilcloth which covered the table, and there was nothing very surprising about that, because there was a Bic pen sticking out of the back of his right hand. Now the dream began to come back.
That was how he had been able to drive Beaumont out of his mind, the only way he had been able to break the bond the cowardly shit had somehow forged between them. Cowardly? Yes. But he was also sly, and it would be a bad idea to forget that. A very bad idea, indeed. Stark could vaguely remember dreaming that Thad was with him, in his bed - they were talking together, whispering together, and at first this had seemed both pleasant and oddly comforting - like talking with your brother after lights out. Except they were doing more than talking, weren't they?
What they had been doing was exchanging secrets . . . or, rather, Thad was asking him questions and Stark found himself answering. It was pleasant to answer, it was comforting to answer. But it was also alarming. At first his alarm was centered on the birds - why did Thad keep asking him about birds? There were no birds. Once, perhaps . . . a long, long time ago . . . but not anymore. It was just a mind-game, a puny effort to freak him out. Then, little by little, his sense of alarm became entwined with his almost exquisitely attuned survival instinct - it grew sharper and more specific as he continued trying to struggle awake. He felt as if he were being held underwater, drowned . . .
So, still in that half-waking, half-dreaming state, he had gone into the kitchen, opened the notebook, and picked up the ballpoint pen. Thad hadn't tipped to any of that; why should he have?.Wasn't he also writing five hundred miles away? The pen wasn't right, of course - didn't even feel right -in his hand - but it would do. For now.
Falling APART, he had watched himself write, and by then he had been very close to the magic mirror that divided sleep from wakefulness, and he struggled to impose his own thoughts upon the pen, his own will upon what would and would not appear on the blankness of the paper, but it was hard, good God, good Christ, it was so damned hard.
He had bought the Bic pen and half a dozen notebooks in a stationery shop right after he had arrived in New York City; had done it even before renting the wretched 'efficiency'. There were Berol pencils in the shop, and he had wanted to buy them, but he hadn't. Because, no matter whose mind it was that had driven the pencils, it had been Thad Beaumont's hand which held them, and he needed to know if that was a bond he could break. So he had left the pencils and had taken the pen instead.