Thinner by Richard Bachman Page A

basis of the complaint might have been, Leda Rossington didn't know); on Tuesday morning the trouble had begun. After his shower, Cary had come downstairs to the breakfast nook wearing only his bathrobe and had said: 'Look at this.'
    'This' turned out to be a patch of roughened skin just a little above his solar plexus. The skin was a shade lighter than the surrounding flesh, which was an attractive coffeewith-cream shade (golf, tennis, swimming, and a UV sunlamp in the winter kept his tan unvarying). The rough patch looked yellowish to her, the way the calluses on the heels of her feet sometimes got in very dry weather. She had touched it (her voice faltered momentarily here) and then drawn her finger away quickly. The texture was rough, almost pebbly, and surprisingly hard. Armored - that was the word that had risen unbidden in her mind.
    'You don't think that damned Gypsy gave me something, do you?' Cary asked worriedly. 'Ringworm or impetigo or some damned thing like that?'
    'He touched your face, not your chest, dear,' Leda had replied. 'Now, get dressed quick as you can. We've got brioche. Wear the dark gray suit with the red tie and dress up Tuesday for me, will you? What a love you are.'
    Two nights later he had called her into the bathroom, his voice so like a scream that she had come on the run (All our worst revelations come in the bathroom, Billy thought.) Cary was standing with his shirt off, his razor humming forgotten in one hand, his wide eyes staring into the mirror.
    The patch of hard, yellowish skin had spread - it had become a blotch, a vaguely treelike shape that spread upward to the area between his nipples and downward, widening, toward his belly button. This changed flesh was raised above the normal flesh of his belly and stomach by almost an eighth of an inch, and she saw there were deep cracks running through it; several of them looked deep enough to slip the edge of a dime into. For the first time she thought he was beginning to look ... well, scaly. And felt her gorge rise.
    'What is it?' he nearly screamed at her. 'Leda, what is it?'
    'I don't know,' she said, forcing her voice to remain calm, 'but you've got to see Michael Houston. That much is clear. Tomorrow, Cary.'
    'No, not tomorrow,' he said, still staring at himself in the mirror, staring at the raised arrowhead-shaped hump of harsh yellow flesh. 'It may be better tomorrow. Day after tomorrow if it isn't better. But not tomorrow.'
    'Cary -'
    'Hand me that Nivea cream, Leda.'
    She did, and stood there a moment longer - but the sight of him smearing the white goo over that hard yellow flesh, listening to the pads of his fingers rasp over it - that was more than she could stand, and she fled back to her room. That was the first time, she told Halleck, that she had been consciously glad for the twin beds, consciously glad he wouldn't be able to turn over in his sleep and ... touch her. She had lain wakeful for hours, she said, hearing the soft rasp-rasp of his fingers moving back and forth across that alien flesh.
    He told her the following night that it was better; the night after that he claimed it was better still. She supposed she should have seen the lie in his eyes ... and that he was lying to himself more than he was to her. Even in his extremity, Cary had remained the same selfish son of a bitch she supposed he had always been. But it hadn't all been Cary's doing, she added sharply, still not turning back from the bar where she was now fiddling aimlessly with the glasses. She had developed her own brand of highly specialized selfishness over the years. She had wanted, needed the illusion almost as much as he had. On the third night, he had walked into their bedroom wearing only his pajama pants. His eyes were soft and hurt, stunned. She had been rereading a Dorothy Sayers mystery ~ they were, for always and ever, her favorites and it dropped from her fingers as she saw him. She would have screamed, she told Billy, but it seemed to her