Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

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