Godplayer [antikvár]

bruce Wilkinson went from dead asleep to full awake with such suddenness that he felt overwhelmed with a sense of fear, like a child awakening from a nightmare. He had no idea what had awakened him hut guessed it was some noise or movement. He wondered if some- thing had touched him. He stayed still, holding his breath, and stared straight ahead, listening. At first he was disoriented, hut as his mind took in his limited field of vision, he remembered he was in the Boston Memo- rial Hospital: in room 1832 to be exact. At about the same instant that he realized where he was, Bruce per- ceived that it was the middle of the night. The hospital was clothed in a heavy stillness. On his current admission for cardiac bypass surgery, Bruce had been in the hospital for over a week. But a month or so before he'd spent three weeks several floors down, recovering from his unexpected heart attack. As a consequence Bruce had become accustomed to the hospital routine. Such things as the squeak of the nurse's medication cart as it was pushed up the hall, or the distant sounds of an arriving ambulance, or even the hospital page calling a doctor's name had become reas- suring phenomena. In fact, Bruce could often tell merely by listening to these familiar sounds what time of day it