Thinner (Signet) by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 1985-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

A manila envelope full of photographs and automobile information arrived for Halleck on his third day in South Portland. He shuffled through the photographs slowly, looking at each. Here was the young man who had been juggling the pins; his name was also Lemke, Samuel Lemke. He was looking at the camera with an uncompromising openness that looked as ready for pleasure and friendship as it did anger and sullenness. Here was the pretty young girl who had been setting up the slingshot target-shoot when the cops landed—and yes, she was every bit as lovely as Halleck had surmised from his side of the common. Her name was Angelina Lemke. He put her picture next to the picture of Samuel Lemke. Brother and sister. The grandchildren of Susanna Lemke? he wondered. The great-grandchildren of Taduz Lemke?

Here was the elderly man who had been handing out fliers—Richard Crosskill. Other Crosskills were named. Stanchfields. Starbirds. More Lemkes. And then. . . near the bottom. . .

It was him. The eyes, caught in twin nets of wrinkles, were dark and level and filled with clear intelligence. A kerchief was drawn over his head and knotted beside the left cheek. A cigarette was tucked into the deeply cracked lips. The nose was a wet and open horror, festering and terrible.

Billy stared at the picture as if hypnotized. There was something almost familiar about the old man, some connection his mind wasn’t quite making. Then it came to him. Taduz Lemke reminded him of those old men in the Dannon yogurt commercials, the ones from Russian Georgia who smoked unfiltered cigarettes, drank popskull vodka, and lived to such staggering ages as a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy. And then a line of a Jerry Jeff Walker song occurred to him, the one about Mr. Bojangles: He looked at me to be the eyes of age . . .

Yes. That was what he saw in the face of Taduz Lemke—he was the very eyes of age. In those eyes Billy saw a deep knowledge that made all the twentieth century a shadow, and he trembled.

That night when he stepped on the scales in the bathroom adjoining his wedge-shaped bedroom, he was down to 137.

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