The Road to Wellville Read Online Free Page B

bird with glass eyes perched atop a wire twig) and the chair beside her for the man (too much nose, unruly hair, dressed up like a prince on his way to the opera). Charlie took an immediate dislike to them, but then he softened a bit, always willing to make concessions for the rich.
    “Good evening,” Charlie offered. He was wearing a blue serge suit himself—a bit linty, maybe, but his pink-and-white-striped shirt had been worn only three or four times, and his cuffs and collar were new from the shop that morning.
    The woman smiled—nice teeth, too. And lips. “Evening,” the man murmured, handing the wine list back to the waiter as if it were a bit of offal and turning the menu face down without even glancing at it. He fixed Charlie with an ever-so-slightly cross-eyed gaze, held it perhaps a beat too long, and then broke into a grin. Suddenly, a fleshless hand, chased by a bony wrist, shot out across the table, and Charlie, startled, took it in his own. “Will Lightbody,” the man said, his voice booming out now in an excess of enthusiasm.
    Charlie spoke his own name, disengaged his hand, and turned to the woman.
    “Mr. Ossining,” Will pronounced, and there was an odd hollowness to his voice, as if he were speaking from the bottom of a well, “I’d like you to meet my wife, Eleanor.”
    The towering hat trembled beneath its excrescences, a pair of sharp mocking eyes took hold of Charlie’s like pincers, and Eleanor Lightbody was murmuring a standard greeting. A moment of silence followed, Eleanor glancing down at her menu, Will grinning inappropriately, nakedly, a thirty-year-old schoolboy with a new plaything. Charlie began to wonder if he wasn’t a bit unbalanced.
    “Oysters,” Will said suddenly. Eleanor lifted her eyes from the menu.
    Charlie glanced at the half-dozen shellfish remaining on his plate and then looked up into Will’s horse-toothed grin. “Yes. Bluepoints. And they’re delicious, really sweet … would you care to try one?”
    The grin vanished. Will’s lower lip seemed to tremble. He glanced out the window. It was Eleanor who broke the silence this time. “It’s his stomach,” she said.
    His stomach. Charlie hesitated, wondering at the appropriate response. Sympathy? Surprise? A spirited defense of the digestive properties of oysters? He gazed wistfully on the plate of shellfish—the air had to be cleared before he communed with another, that much was apparent. “Dyspepsia?” he wondered aloud.
    “I haven’t slept in three weeks,” Will announced. He was fidgeting with the corners of the menu, and his leg had begun to thump nervously beneath the table. Without benefit of the grin, his face had grown longer and narrower, his eyes had retreated into his skull, and there were two pronounced caverns beneath his cheekbones. He looked ready for the grave.
    “Really? You don’t say?” Charlie glanced from husband to wife and back again. She had stunning eyes, she did, but the mocking gleam was gone from them now, vanished like her husband’s grin. “Three weeks?”
    Will shook his head sadly. “Afraid so. I lie there in bed staring at the ceiling and my stomach is like a steam engine, like a boiler, and pretty soon I start seeing all these visions in the dark….” He leaned forward. “Pies, oranges, beefsteaks—and every one of them with legs and arms, dancing round the room and mocking me. Do you know what I mean?”
    The waiter reappeared at that moment, hovering over the table with his order pad and sparing Charlie the awkwardness of a reply. “May I take your order, sir? Madame?”
    Night was settling in beyond the windows, a descent of the dead gray sky over the dead gray landscape, shadows deepening, trees falling away into oblivion, the river running black. Charlie was suddenly aware ofhis reflection staring back at him—he saw a hungry man in a linty blue suit hunkered over a plate of oysters. Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, he hastily slid an