End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3) - Stephen King Page 0,40

were law enforcement types, checking up on him to make sure he wasn’t faking. He both was and wasn’t. The truth, like that concerning Frankie’s death, was complex.

At first he opened his eyes only when he was sure he was alone, and didn’t open them often. There wasn’t a lot in his room to look at. Sooner or later he would have to come awake all the way, but even when he did they must not know that he could think much, when in fact he was thinking more clearly every day. If they knew that, they would put him on trial.

Brady didn’t want to be put on trial.

Not when he still might have things to do.

A week before Brady spoke to Nurse Norma Wilmer, he opened his eyes in the middle of the night and looked at the bottle of saline suspended from the IV stand beside his bed. Bored, he lifted his hand to push it, perhaps even knock it to the floor. He did not succeed in doing that, but it was swinging back and forth from its hook before he realized both of his hands were still lying on the counterpane, the fingers turned in slightly due to the muscle atrophy physical therapy could slow but not stop – not, at least, when the patient was sleeping the long sleep of low brainwaves.

Did I do that?

He reached out again, and his hands still did not move much (although the left, his dominant hand, trembled a bit), but he felt his palm touch the saline bottle and put it back in motion.

He thought, That’s interesting, and fell asleep. It was the first honest sleep he’d had since Hodges (or perhaps it had been his nigger lawnboy) put him in this goddam hospital bed.

On the following nights – late nights, when he could be sure no one might come in and see – Brady experimented with his phantom hand. Often as he did so he thought of a high school classmate named Henry ‘Hook’ Crosby, who had lost his right hand in a car accident. He had a prosthetic – obviously fake, so he wore it with a glove – but sometimes he wore a stainless steel hook to school, instead. Henry claimed it was easier to pick things up with the hook, and as a bonus, it grossed out girls when he snuck up behind them and caressed a calf or bare arm with it. He once told Brady that, although he’d lost the hand seven years ago, he sometimes felt it itching, or prickling, as if it had gone numb and was just waking up. He showed Brady his stump, smooth and pink. ‘When it gets prickly like that, I’d swear I could scratch my head with it,’ he said.

Brady now knew exactly how Hook Crosby felt … except he, Brady, could scratch his head with his phantom hand. He had tried it. He had also discovered that he could rattle the slats in the venetian blinds the nurses dropped over his window at night. That window was much too far away from his bed to reach, but with the phantom hand he could reach it, anyway. Someone had put a vase of fake flowers on the table next to his bed (he later discovered it was Head Nurse Becky Helmington, the only one on staff to treat him with a degree of kindness), and he could slide it back and forth, easy as pie.

After a struggle – his memory was full of holes – he recalled the name for this sort of phenomenon: telekinesis. The ability to move objects by concentrating on them. Only any real concentration made his head ache fiercely, and his mind didn’t seem to have much to do with it. It was his hand, his dominant left hand, even though the one lying splay-fingered on the bedspread never moved.

Pretty amazing. He was sure that Babineau, the doctor who came to see him most frequently (or had; lately he seemed to be losing interest), would be over the moon with excitement, but this was one talent Brady intended to keep to himself.

It might come in handy at some point, but he doubted it. Wiggling one’s ears was also a talent, but not one that had any useful value. Yes, he could move the bottles on the IV stand, and rattle the blinds, and knock over a picture; he could send ripples through his blankets, as though a big fish were swimming beneath.