Lisey's Story: A Novel by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: King, Stephen - Prose & Criticism, Horror, Fiction - Horror, General, Horror - General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781416523352
Publisher: Pocket
Published: 2010-08-20T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2

* * *

She knows something’s wrong with him, and it isn’t bronchitis, as he’s been claiming. He has no cough, and his skin’s cool to the touch, so even though he won’t let her take his temperature, won’t even let her put one of those fever–strip thingies on his forehead, she’s pretty sure he’s not running a fever. The problem seems to be mental rather than physical, and that scares the hell out of her. The one time she gets up enough courage to suggest he go see Dr. Bjorn, he just about tears her head off, accuses her of being a doctor–junkie “like the rest of your nut–box sisters.”

And how is she supposed to respond to that? What, exactly, are the symptoms he’s displaying? Would any doctor — even a sympathetic one like Rick Bjorn — take them seriously? He’s stopped listening to music when he writes, that’s one thing. And he’s not writing much, that’s another, much bigger, thing. Forward progress on his new novel — which Lisey Landon, admittedly no great book critic, happens to love — has slowed from his usual all–out sprint to a labored crawl. Bigger still … dear Christ, where’s his sense of humor? That boisterous sense of good humor can be wearing, but its sudden absence as fall gives way to cold weather is downright spooky; it’s like the moment in one of those old jungle movies where the native drums suddenly fall silent. He’s drinking more, too, and later into the night. She has always gone to bed earlier than he does — usually much earlier — but she almost always knows when he turns in and what she smells on his breath when he does. She also knows what she sees in his trashcans up in his study, and as her worries grow, she makes a special point to look every two or three days. She’s used to seeing beer cans, sometimes a great lot of them, Scott has always liked his beer, but in December of 1995 and early January of 1996 she also begins to see Jim Beam bottles. And Scott is suffering hangovers. For some reason this bothers her more than all the rest. Sometimes he wanders the house — pale, silent, ill — until the middle of the afternoon before finally perking up. On several occasions she has heard him vomiting behind the closed bathroom door, and she knows by the speed with which the aspirin is disappearing that he’s suffering bad headaches. Nothing unusual in that, you might say; drink a case of beer or a bottle of Beam between nine and midnight, you’re gonna pay the price, Patrick. And maybe that’s all it is, but Scott has been a heavy drinker since the night she met him in that University lounge, when he had a bottle squirreled away in his jacket pocket (he shared it with her), and he’s never suffered more than the mildest of hangovers. Now when she sees the empties

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