Free Umney's Last Case by Stephen King Page A

centered, two more words: THE END.
    I read it again, now running my fingers over my stomach. I was doing it because there
    was something wrong with my
    skin, something that wasn't exactly painful but was certainly bothersome. As soon as
    it rose to the fore in my mind, I
    realized that weird sensation was going on everywhere--the nape of my neck, the backs
    of my thighs, in my crotch.
    Shingles, I thought suddenly. I've got Landry's shingles. What I'm feeling is itching,
    and the reason I didn't recognize it
    right away is because-``Because I've never had an itch before,'' I said, and then the rest of it clicked
    into place. The click was so sudden and so
    hard that I actually swayed on my feet. I walked slowly across to a mirror on the
    wall, trying not to scratch my weirdly
    crawling skin, knowing I was going to see an aged version of my face, a face cut with
    lines like old dry washes and
    topped with a shock of lackluster white hair.
    Now I knew what happened when writers somehow took over the lives of the characters
    they had created. It wasn't
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    exactly theft after all.
    More of a swap.
    I stood staring into Landry's face--my face, only aged fifteen hard years--and felt my
    skin tingling and buzzing.
    Hadn't he said his shingles had been getting better? If this was better, how had he
    endured worse without going
    completely insane?
    I was in Landry's house, of course--my house, now--and in the bathroom off the study,
    I found the medication he took
    for his shingles. I took my first dose less than an hour after I came to on the floor
    below his desk and the humming
    machine on it, and it was as if I had swallowed his life instead of medicine.
    As if I'd swallowed his whole life.
    These days the shingles are a thing of the past, I'm happy to report. Maybe it just
    ran its course, but I like to think that
    the old Clyde Umney spirit had something to do with it--Clyde was never sick a day in
    his life, you know, and
    although I seem to always have the sniffles in this run-down Sam Landry body, I'll be
    damned if I'll give in to them . . .
    and since when did it hurt to turn on a little of that positive thinking? I think the
    correct answer to that one is ``since
    never.''
    There have been some pretty bad days, though, the first one coming less than twentyfour
    hours after I showed up in the
    unbelievable year of 1994. I was looking through Landry's fridge for something to eat
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    (I'd pigged out on his Black
    Horse Ale the night before and felt it couldn't hurt my hangover to eat something)
    when a sudden pain knifed into my
    guts. I thought I was dying. It got worse, and I knew I was dying. I fell to the
    kitchen floor, trying not to scream. A
    moment or two later, something happened, and the pain eased.
    Most of my life I've been using the phrase `Ì don't give a shit.'' All that has
    changed, starting that morning. I cleaned
    myself up, then climbed the stairs, knowing what I'd find in the bedroom: wet sheets
    in Landry's bed.
    My first week in Landry's world was spent mostly in toilet-training myself. In my
    world, of course, nobody ever went
    to the bathroom. Or to the dentist, for that matter, and my first trip to the one
    listed in Landry's Rolodex is something I
    don't even want to think about, let alone discuss.
    But there's been an occasional rose in this nest of brambles. For one thing, there's
    been no need to go job-hunting in
    Landry's confusing, jet-propelled world; his books apparently continue to sell very
    well, and I have no problem cashing
    the checks that come in the mail. My signature and his are, of course, identical. As
    for any moral compunctions I might
    have about doing that, don't make me laugh. Those checks are for stories about me.
    Landry only wrote them; I lived
    them. Hell, I deserved fifty thou and a rabies shot just for getting within