OCR Text |
Show 283 a dentist's drill boring into his mastoid. On this morning he did as he had always done, coming out of an unhappy dream to do it, and his palm and fingers, expecting only the hard cold edge of the electric Seth Thomas, had come down instead on the back of another hand; a hand, moreover, that did not move after he had touched it. It was not his companion's hand. As he lay there, his eyes still closed, he knew he was hearing Sorenson in the bathroom, and that the penetrating buzz that still vibrated his nerves was not the alarm clock at all but Sorenson's electric shaver. He could of course have opened his eyes, but for several reasons he didn't want to. For one thing, as long as they were closed he could prolong the chance that he was still dreaming, though he knew perfectly well that the dream he had been having had not contained a hand on his alarm clock. It had been about himself and his first companion, Elder Cobb, driving through the night in Lorin's green Pontiac, which was packed full of wet paintings. They were trying to get back to an investigator whom they had left on the beach tied under the seats of an overturned rowboat with the tide creeping in. It had only just occurred to them that they had forgotten he was there, but the closer they approached the more the sandy beach became a housing development crisscrossed by freeways along which millions of headlights bobbed. For another thing he was not sure what level of reality he was willing to confront. If he were to open his eyes and discover the hand was connected to some fangy horror, some livid creature of the night world with warts on its eyelids, that would be one thing. But suppose it was not one of those things. Suppose he opened his eyes and saw something ordinary sitting there, a sweet old man, say, whom he had never seen before In his life, smiling placidly at the walls. Suppose it were someone he knew to be dead. The hand seemed to be male. That is, it was hard and |