Hulk (11 page)

“But didn’t she used to date Talbot? Wouldn’t it be worse if she were married to him by now?”

Ross glared at him. “I don’t recall asking you to provide worst-case scenarios, Lieber. Dismissed.” Lieber tossed off a salute, which Ross quickly returned, and then quickly departed the office, leaving Ross to stew in his own annoyance and frustration.

Well, at least Talbot would be along shortly, and perhaps they could get this whole thing cleared up. Because if they didn’t, then there would be hell to pay, and Thunderbolt Ross intended to be standing there collecting the tolls.

in dreams, the
knowledge he seeks
are memories he
cannot grasp

Once Bruce Krenzler reached his house, he parked his bike and limped inside. He considered sliding into a bath and soaking his aching legs, but his mind couldn’t stop racing. He knew in a vague way that he was hungry, and the only reason he became at all aware that he had made himself dinner was because at one point—while tending a small Zen moss garden atop his makeshift desk—he suddenly realized that his stomach was full.

He put down the gardening tools, walked into the kitchen, and found an empty tray from a frozen dinner in the garbage can. Granted, a frozen dinner wasn’t the most memorable of suppers, but even so he couldn’t help but think he shouldn’t be so much in a world of his own that he would completely forget making and eating dinner within moments of having done so.

Then, as problems he’d been having with an equation suddenly presented themselves with possible answers, he pushed thoughts of his absentmindedness out of his brain. Within five minutes, he was back to wondering why he was no longer hungry, but was so busy scribbling figures, calculations, sketches, and DNA sequences onto scratch pads that he stopped thinking about it altogether.

After a while Bruce got up and stretched, scratching absently under his chin and wondering how long he’d been working. He’d gotten home around seven or so, and been at it . . . what? An hour? Two at most? He glanced at a clock, rubbed his eyes in order to clear them, and looked again. And the clock said the same time it had an instant before: 2:27
A
.
M
., the numbers and letters of the digital readout glowing in the dimness.

Had time flown by that quickly? Was it possible?

Well, it didn’t really matter if it was possible or not; it had, so there was no point in debating the possibilities of it. He stretched his arms, yawned, shook out the cramped muscles of his legs, and moved to the window.

One of the things Bruce had gotten used to about himself—indeed, one of his strengths as a scientist—was his ability to see patterns in everything around him. Sometimes they were utterly pointless: mundane digits in a checking account number that recombined, or sequences of letters drawn from various sources that spelled out something. At other times the result would be sudden bursts of insight that invariably led to a flurry of activity that might or might not lead to a new and even more interesting breakthrough. Betty likened the ability to that of the protagonist from that movie about the mathematician who developed psychotic behavior, a comparison that didn’t exactly thrill Bruce.

So it didn’t surprise Bruce at all when, while staring out at a willow tree illuminated by a street lamp, the shadows and branches of the tree seemed to form an intricate latticework of shapes and patterns. It was like nature was giving him a Rorschach inkblot test. The shapes kept changing as the wind blew: one moment they were octopus tentacles writhing through a sea of air, now they were long fingers interlacing like the hands of a silent film villain, who was rubbing his hands together in gleeful anticipation of his malevolent plan reaching fruition.

And now they looked like a stairway, and now they looked like two interlocking faces of . . . of . . .

He stared and stared, and continued to stare, and even though the branches moved a dozen times more, the image they had formed just a bit earlier remained in Bruce’s brain, frozen there like a gray-cell snapshot. Two faces, ensnared in each other, but they weren’t human faces. They were like—like a pair of animals. Animals that were . . .

An association floated through his mind, and almost escaped unmolested, but then he snagged it and pulled it down to him, and the thought came to him:
stuffed toys
.

Yes. That was it. The shadow imagery had born a resemblance to a couple of stuffed toys. But what kind of toys they were precisely, and whose they were, he couldn’t say. He suspected, for no particular reason, that they were his. But he didn’t know when he had received them and, more important, from whom.

Then he blinked, and partially turned away, only to snap his head back and look again, for Bruce was sure that he had seen something else that was most definitely not a shadow. It was a figure, standing tall, shoulders squared, and—
could I be anymore melodramatic?
—radiating an aura of menace.

But when Bruce focused his full attention on the spot, he saw nothing save the waving branches.

Perhaps there had never been a man there. It might have been nothing more than his sleep-deprived mind adding yet more shapes to the wavering shadows of the deceptive willow. It was certainly a supposition preferable to the idea that someone was lurking about in the shadows at 2:30 in the morning, watching him . . .

Half past two in the morning. God Almighty.

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” he said to no one in particular, perhaps as much to convince himself of the necessity of it as anything else. As if to underscore for him just how tired he was, it seemed that an instant later that he had tossed on his nightclothes and climbed into bed. He didn’t remember the action at all. He felt as if his entire being was fading out and in, as if some of his actions were attributable to another person entirely. Which was, of course, ridiculous.

He decided to be pragmatic about it: If this were indeed the case, certainly this “other person” was benign enough if the worst he was doing was getting Bruce’s pajamas on for him.

Bruce pulled the sheet up, flopped onto his back . . . and lay there.

And lay there.

He stared at the ceiling for some time until he began to count the holes in the tiles, at which point he flipped himself over and mashed his head sideways into the pillow. And as he lay there, he slowly became aware that he could hear his own heart beating, or perhaps it was just his pulse, but either way it was there, just thudding, thudding, thudding along, and he started to wonder if by picturing Betty naked he could get his heart rate to increase, and if so, how fast could a person make his heart beat through sheer willpower, and was it perhaps possible to create an entire aerobics program designed around messages or even images that would be fed directly into the brain while the subject slept, causing the . . .

He turned over onto his side, curling his legs up and up until he was almost in a fetal position, and wasn’t it interesting how many descriptions of ideas derived terms from reproduction, ranging from an embryonic idea to a notion that arrived stillborn.

Bruce looked at his clock.

It was 3:30.

He knew he hadn’t slept. His mind had continued to career from one notion to the next. Perhaps . . . perhaps what he needed to do was just tire out his eyes. Yes, that might work. Clinging to that forlorn hope, he sat up and started pulling out a couple of sheets of data from the nightstand. He didn’t even turn on the table lamp, instead preferring to work by the light of the moon. That seemed the ideal way to hasten the ocular exhaustion process.

In a few minutes, more data sheets joined the others, and within an hour the bed was covered with them. It seemed to Bruce that the only noise existing in the entirety of the world at that very instant was the insistent scratching of his pencil upon the pad—and unfortunately the noise was starting to annoy the hell out of him.

“Damn,” he said and threw the pencil down, and decided,
All right, fine
. First he had tried to sleep, and then he had endeavored to trick himself into sleeping. There was only one thing left to do: stay awake.

So he simply sat there in bed, staring at his reflection in the screen of the television that was perched on the dresser opposite him. He was just going to wait until the sun came up and start the new day. There was nothing else for it.

He continued to sit there, fighting to stay awake, and naturally by the time the glowing numbers of the digital clock read 4:48, his eyes were fluttering closed. Reality and fantasy blurred for him and he
heard the haunting, echoing sound of footsteps and a dog whimpering somewhere, and a small boy, four years old, played with a pair of stuffed toys with long beaks, floppy ears, and oversize feet, and his little voice squealed in innocent joy as he lifted the toys into the air before crashing them back down to Earth, and he continued to make noises, small shouts of surprise coupled with his own sound effects of crashes and skids, and as he moved the toys about they took on lives not exactly of their own, but like aspects of his life, and they started to move ever so slightly, winking and nodding and smiling, and then they frowned because they, along with Bruce, heard voices, adult, human voices, a man and the woman in the background, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying, only that their voices were raised to a fever pitch, and there was yelling, and an unearthly, primal scream emerged from the boy’s mouth . . .

And Bruce was up, out of bed, as if warned by some inner system that bordered on the supernatural. Without understanding why, he moved to the window, and the figure was back again.

It must have rained lightly in the intervening time, because a fog had settled over the area. Even through the mist, though, he could see that the man appeared to be standing a little taller, looking even a bit stronger, as if—fanciful and ludicrous as it sounded—he had drawn some sort of demonic psychic strength from the inner torment rampaging through Bruce’s sleeping mind.

You’re losing it
, thought Bruce, and he slammed the blinds closed.
You are a rational man, a man of science, and if there’s some freak out there casing your house, you confront him on it or call the police, but you don’t start concocting demented notions of psychic vampires
. He took several deep breaths to cleanse his mind and his soul, and then peered out through the blinds once more, separating the metal slats with his left hand while, with his right, he reached for the telephone in order to call the police.

The mists were swirling and undulating outside as if they were themselves sentient, and in the fog, walking away, he caught a glimpse of the man once more, surrounded by three dogs of varying sizes. For half a heartbeat, Bruce thought one of them might have been that poodle he’d seen back at the lab. Or it could just have been a small dog. Whatever it was, an instant later it, along with the other two dogs and their master, had been swallowed up by the fog and were gone.

A man walking his dogs.

Bruce Krenzler, doctor, scientist, brilliant theoretician, had allowed himself to be spooked out by a bad dream and a guy taking his mutts for an early morning walk.

He wondered what in the world Betty would have thought of such a thing . . . and that turned his thoughts to Betty and to Talbot, which irked him.

So Bruce climbed back into bed, curled up with the utter conviction that attempting to get any sleep tonight was a complete waste of time . . . and promptly fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

The dog walker unlocked a padlock on the gate of a chain-link fence in front of the small weedy yard of a run-down row house. The dogs ran in ahead of him, snapping and growling in low, unpleasant tones. Then they turned and looked at him expectantly, with an air that seemed to indicate they’d just as soon devour him as anything else if they weren’t sated. But he was prepared; he knew his babies all too well. He reached into his coat and pulled out strips and chunks of meat and old vegetables from a bag that had been sealed to prevent the dogs from smelling its contents, and tossed the food to them. They snapped it up immediately, fighting with each other over the scraps that fell to the ground unclaimed. As the three canines—a mastiff, a pit bull, and a poodle with rotting teeth—busied themselves, the dog walker unlocked the padlock and entered the ramshackle house that sat like a pustule upon the face of the neighborhood. It also happened to have once belonged to Benny Goodman; it was amazing how quickly a home could go downhill.

The interior was illuminated by light from a single bulb hanging from a bare wire in the ceiling. To call the interior furnishings decor would have been an insult to the French language. There had been other furniture there before, but the dog walker had gotten rid of it all. It had borne a passing resemblance to furnishings from another time in his life, and he had no desire to be reminded of it. All that remained was a sagging, stained mattress in one corner, and on the opposite side of the room a long worn table, with stacks of papers, books, journals, and a small work area. The dog walker removed his overcoat and tossed it on a pile of clothing off to one side that included his janitor’s uniform, then went to the workstation and shoved a pile of material to one side. This revealed a gleaming, superthin notebook computer.

David Banner opened the screen, pressed a button, and sat down. The light from the screen illuminated his face, causing him to resemble a grinning Halloween jack-o’-lantern. On the wall behind the computer screen was a bulletin board filled with images and clippings: various scenes from Bruce Banner’s career, as well as yearbook and graduation photos.

Banner sat there for a moment, pensive, taut as piano wire, looking as if he wanted to explode out of his skin with the urgency of his many pent-up desires. Then he raised a hand and touched one of the photos.

“Bruce,” he said softly, “my Bruce.”

He pulled open a drawer and removed from it a small container in which a hair had been soaking in a specially designed solution. Banner held it up, his eyes narrowing as he studied it, and then grinned approvingly with a smile that would have chilled any onlooker. He placed the container down, twisted off the top, and then used a pair of tweezers to deftly remove the hair from the solution. It would have been an impressive display for anyone watching, who would likely have assumed from appearances that the old man with the graying hair and the wild-eyed look was a burned-out alcoholic who couldn’t keep his hand steady if his next drink depended upon it.