Dick's firm, clear thought filled his head, making him weak with relief: Christ, you can't go around looking like that, Newt. You'll scare people. Come in here. I'm going to call Haze].
(The phone, of course, was really not necessary, but old habits died hard.)
In Dick's kitchen, under the fluorescent ring in the ceiling, Newt had seen clearly enough that Dick was wearing makeup - Hazel, Dick said, had shown him how to put it on. Yes, it had happened to all the others except Adley, who had gone into the shed for the first time only two weeks ago.
Where does it all end, Dick? Newt had asked uneasily. The mirror in Dick's hallway drew him like a magnet and he stared at himself, seeing his tongue behind and through his pallid lips, seeing a tangled undergrowth of small, pulsing capillaries in his forehead. He pressed the tips of his fingers against the shelf of bone over his eyebrows, hard, and saw faint finger indentations when he took them away again - they were like fingermarks in hard wax, right down to the discernible loops and sworls of his fingerprints sunk into the livid skin. Looking at that had made him feel sick.
I don't know, Dick had answered. He was talking on the phone with Hazel at the same time. But it doesn't really matter. It's going to happen to everyone eventually. Like everything else. You know what I mean.
He knew, all right. The first changes, Newt thought, looking into the mirror on this hot Monday morning, had in many ways been even worse, even more shocking, because they had been so ... well, intimate.
But he had gone a ways toward getting used to it, which only went to show, he supposed, that a person could get used to anything, given world enough and time.
Now he stood by the mirror, dimly hearing the deejay on the radio informing his listening audience that an influx of hot southern air coming into the area meant they could look forward to at least three days and maybe a week of muggy weather and temps in the upper eighties and low nineties. Newt cursed the coming humid weather - it would make his hemorrhoids itch and burn, it always did - and went on trying to cover his increasingly transparent cheeks, forehead, nose and neck with Elinor's Max Factor Pan-Cake. He finished cursing the weather and went fluently on to the makeup with never a break
in his monologue, having no idea that makeup grew old and cakey after a long enough period of time (and this particular lot had been in the back of a bathroom drawer since long before Elinor's death in February 1984).
But he supposed he would get used to putting the crap on ... until such time as it was no longer necessary, anyhow. A person could get used to damn near anything. A tentacle, white at its tip, then shading to rose and finally to a dark blood-red as it thickened toward its unseen base, fell out through the fly of his pajama bottoms. Almost as if to prove his thesis, Newt Berringer only tucked it absently back in and went on trying to get his dead wife's makeup to spread evenly on his disappearing face.
14
Tuesday, August 9th:
Old Doc Warwick slowly pulled the sheet up over Tommy Jacklin and let it drop. It billowed slightly, then settled. The shape of Tommy's nose was clearly defined. He'd been a handsome kid, but he'd had a big nose, just like his dad.
His dad, Bobbi Anderson thought sickly. Someone's going to have to tell his dad, and guess who's going to be elected? Such things shouldn't bother her anymore, she knew - things like the Jacklin boy's death, things like knowing she would have to get rid of Gard when they reached the ship's hatchway - but they sometimes still did.
She supposed that would burn away in time.
A few more trips to the shed. That was all it would take.
She brushed aimlessly at her shirt and sneezed.
Except for the sound of the sneeze and the stertorous breathing of Hester Brookline in the other bed of the makeshift little clinic the doc had set up in his sitting-cum-examination room, there was only shocked silence for a moment.
Kyle: He's really dead?
No, I just like to cover 'em up that way sometimes for a joke, Warwick said crossly. Shit, man! I knew he was going at four o'clock. That's why I called you all here. After all,