Then he stopped. He didn't want Beaumont dead. At least not yet. Not until Beaumont had taught him how to live on his own. Stark slowly relaxed his fist, and as he did, he felt the fist in which he held Beaumont's essence
- the mental fist, which had proved every bit as quick and merciless as his physical one - also open. He felt Beaumont, the plump white maggot, slip away, squealing and moaning..'Only for now,'
he whispered, and turned to the other necessary business. He closed his left hand around the pen jutting out of his right hand. He drew it smoothly out. Then he dropped it into the wastebasket.
3
There was a bottle of Glenlivet standing on the stainless-steel dish-drainer by the sink. Stark picked it up and walked into the bathroom. His right hand swung by his side as he walked, splattering dime-sized droplets of blood on the warped and faded linoleum. The hole in his hand was about half an inch above the ridge of the knuckles and slightly to the right of the third one. It was perfectly round. The stain of the black ink around the edge of the hole, combined with the internal bleeding and trauma, made it look like a gunshot wound. He tried to flex the hand. The fingers moved . . . but the sickening wave of pain that resulted was too great for further experimentation.
He pulled the chain depending from the fixture above the medicine cabinet mirror, and the unshaded sixty-watt bulb came on. He used his right arm to hold the bottle of whiskey clamped against his side so he could unscrew the cap. Then he held his wounded hand splayed out over the basin. Was Beaumont doing the same thing in Maine? He doubted it. He doubted if Beaumont had the guts to clean up his own mess. He would undoubtedly be on his way to the hospital by now. Stark tipped whiskey into the wound, and a bolt of pure, steely pain leaped up his arm to his shoulder. He saw the whiskey bubbling in the wound, saw little threads of blood in the amber, and had to bury his face against the sweat-soaked arm of his shirt again. He thought the pain would never fade, but at last it began to. He tried to put the bottle of whiskey on the shelf bolted to the tile wall below the mirror. His hand was shaking too badly for this operation to stand much chance of success, so he set it on the rust-splotched tin floor of the shower stall instead. He would want a drink in a minute. He raised the hand to the light and peered into the hole. He could see the bulb through it, but dimly - it was like looking through a red filter bleared with some kind of membranous muck. He hadn't driven the pen all the way through his hand, but it had been damned close. Maybe Beaumont had done better.
He could always hope.