The Changed Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

here to make sure you don’t do anything else. To yourself or to anyone.”
    Yes. Yes, please. I can’t be trusted.
    â€œDon’t wallow in it, Howard. Don’t enjoy it. Don’t make yourself even more disgusting than you were before.”
    All right.
    They were drifting off to sleep when Alice said, “Oh, when the doctor called he wondered if I knew what had caused those sores all over your arms and chest.”
    But Howard was asleep, and didn’t hear her. Asleep with no dreams at all, the sleep of peace, the sleep of having been forgiven, of being clean. It hadn’t taken that much, after all. Now that it was over, it was easy. He felt as if a great weight had been taken from him.
    He felt as if something heavy was lying on his legs. He awoke, sweating even though the room was not hot. He heard breathing. And it was not Alice’s low-pitched,
slow breath, it was quick and high and hard, as if the breather had been exerting himself.
    Itself.
    Themselves.
    One of them lay across his legs, the flippers plucking at the blanket. The other two lay on either side, their eyes wide and intent, creeping slowly toward where his face emerged from the sheets.
    Howard was puzzled. “I thought you’d be gone,” he said to the children. “You’re supposed to be gone now.”
    Alice stirred at the sound of his voice, mumbled in her sleep.
    He saw more of them stirring in the gloomy corners of the room, another writhing slowly along the top of the dresser, another inching up the wall toward the ceiling.
    â€œI don’t need you anymore,” he said, his voice oddly high-pitched.
    Alice started breathing irregularly, mumbling, “What? What?”
    And Howard said nothing more, just lay there in the sheets, watching the creatures carefully but not daring to make a sound for fear Alice would wake up. He was terribly afraid she would wake up and not see the creatures, which would prove, once and for all, that he had lost his mind.
    He was even more afraid, however, that when she awoke she would see them. That was the one unbearable thought, yet he thought it continuously as they relentlessly approached with nothing at all in their eyes, not even hate, not even anger, not even contempt. We are with you, they seemed to be saying, we will be with you from now on. We will be with you, Howard, forever.
    And Alice rolled over and opened her eyes.

QUIETUS
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    I T CAME TO him suddenly, a moment of blackness as he sat working late at his desk. It was as quick as an eye-blink, but before the darkness the papers on his desk had seemed terribly important, and afterward he stared at them blankly, wondering what they were and then realizing that he didn’t really give a damn what they were and he ought to be going home now.
    Ought definitely to be going home now. And C. Mark Tapworth of CMT Enterprises, Inc., arose from his desk without finishing all the work that was on it, the first time he had done such a thing in the twelve years it had taken him to bring the company from nothing to a multi-million-dollar-a-year business. Vaguely it occurred to him that he was not acting normally, but he didn’t really care, it didn’t really matter to him a bit whether any more people bought—bought—
    And for a few seconds C. Mark Tapworth could not remember what it was that his company made.

    It frightened him. It reminded him that his father and his uncles had all died of strokes. It reminded him of his mother’s senility at the fairly young age of sixty-eight. It reminded him of something he had always known and never quite believed, that he was mortal and that all the works of all his days would trivialize gradually until his death, at which time his life would be his only act, the forgotten stone whose fall had set off ripples in the lake that would in time reach the shore having made, after all, no difference.
    I’m tired, he decided. Maryjo is right. I need