Insomnia

CHAPTER 11

The Derry of the Old Crocks was not the only secret city existing quietly within the place Ralph Roberts had always thought of as home; as a boy growing up in Mary Mead, where the various Old Cape housing developments stood today, Ralph had discovered there was, in addition to the Derry that belonged to the grownups, one that belonged strictly to the children. There were the abandoned hobo jungles near the railroad depot on Neibolt Street, where one could sometimes find tomato soup cans half-full of mulligatawny stew and bottles with a swallow or two of beer left in them; there was the alley behind the Aladdin Theater, where Bull Durham cigarettes were smoked and Black Cat firecrackers sometimes set off; there was the big old elm which overhung the river, where scores of boys and girls had learned to dive; there were the hundred (or perhaps it was closer to two hundred) tangled trails winding through the Barrens, an overgrown valley which slashed through the center of town like a badly healed scar.

These secret streets and highways in hiding were all below the adults’ plane of vision and were consequently overlooked by them… although there had been exceptions. One of them had been a cop named Aloysius Nell-Mr. Nell to generations of Derry children walked up toward the picnic area near and it was only now, as he the place where Harris Avenue became the Harris Avenue Extension, that it occurred to Ralph that Chris Nell was probably old Mr. Nell’s son… except that couldn’t be quite right, because the cop Ralph had first seen in the company of John Leydecker wasn’t old enough to be old Mr. Nell’s son. Grandson, more like it.

Ralph had become aware of a second secret city-one that belonged to the old folks-around the time he retired, but he hadn’t fully realized that he himself was a citizen of it until after Carol’s death.

What he had discovered then was a submerged geography eerily similar to the one he had known as a child, a place largely ignored by the hurry-to-work, hurry-to-play world which thumped and hustled all around it. The Derry of the Old Crocks overlapped yet a third secret city: the Derry of the Damned, a terrible place inhabited mostly by winos, runaways, and lunatics who could not be keptlocked up.

It was in the picnic area that Lafayette Chapin ha Ralph to one of life’s most important considerations… once you’d become a bona ride Old Crock, that was. This consideration had to do with one’s “real life.” The subject had come up while the two men were just getting to know one another. Ralph had asked Faye what he had done before he started coming out to the picnic area.

“Well, in my real life I was a carpenter n fancy cabinetmaker,” Chapin had replied, exposing his remaining teeth in a wide grin, “but all that ended almost ten year ago.” As if, Ralph remembered thinking, retirement was something like a vampire’s kiss, pulling those ’ who survived it into the world of the undead. And when you got right down to cases, was that really so far off the mark?

Now, with McGovern safely behind him (at least he hoped so), Ralph stepped through the screen of mixed oak and maple which shielded the picnic area from the Extension. He saw that eight or nine people had drifted in since his earlier walk, most with bag lunches or Coffee Pot sandwiches. The Eberlys and Zells were play I ing hearts with the greasy deck of Top Hole cards which was kept stashed in a knothole of a nearby oak; Faye and Doc Mulhare, a retired vet, were playing chess; a couple of kibbitzers wandered back and forth between the two games.

Games were what the picnic area was about-what most of the places in the

Derry of the Old Crocks were about-but Ralph thought the games were really just framework. What people actually came here for was to touch base, to report in, to confirm (if only to themselves) that they were still living some kind of life, real or otherwise.

Ralph sat on an empty bench near the Cyclone fence and traced one finger absently over the engraved carvings-names, initials, lots Of FUCK You’s-as he watched planes land at orderly two-minute intervals: a Cessna, a Piper, an Apache, a Twin Bonanza, the elevenforty-five Air Express out of Boston. He kept one ear cocked to the ebb and flow of conversation behind him. May Locher’s name was mentioned more than once. She had been known by several of these people, and the general opinion seemed to be Mrs. Perrine’s-that God had finally shown mercy and ended her suffering. Most of the talk today, however, concerned the impending visit of Susan Day.

As a rule, Politics wasn’t much of a conversational draw with the Old Crocks, who preferred a good bowel-cancer or stroke any day, but even out here the abortion issue exercised its singular ability to engage, inflame, and divide.

“She picked a bad town to come to, and the hell of it is, I doubt she knows it,” Doc Mulhare said, watching the chessboard with glum concentration as Faye Chapin blitzkrieged his king’s remaining defenders. “Things have a way of happening here. Remember the fire at the Black Spot, Faye?”

Faye grunted and captured the Doc’s remaining bishop.

“What I don’t understand is these cootie-bugs,” Lisa Zell said, picking up the front section of the News from the picnic table and slapping the photograph of the hooded figures marching in front of WomanCare. “It’s like they want to go back to the days when women gave themselves abortions with coathangers.”

“That’s what they do want,” Georgina Eberly said. “They figure if a woman’s scared enough of dying, she’ll have the baby. It never seems to cross their minds that a woman can be more scared of having a kid than using a coathanger to get rid of it.”

“What does being afraid have to do with it?” one of the kibbitzers-a shovel-faced oldster named Pedersen-asked truculently.

“Murder is murder whether the baby’s inside or outside, that’s the way I look at it. Even when they’re so small you need a microscope to see em, it’s still murder. Because they’d be kids if you let em alone.

“

“I guess that just about makes you Adolf Eichmann every time you jerk off,” Faye said, and moved his queen. “Check.”

“La-fayette Cha-pin!” Lisa Zell cried.

“Playin with yourself ain’t the same at all, Pedersen said, glowering.

“Oh no? Wasn’t there some guy in the Bible got cursed by God for hammerin the old haddock?” the other kibbitzer asked.

“You’re probably thinking of Onan,” said a voice from behind Ralph. He turned, startled, and saw Old Dor standing there. In one hand he held a paperback with a large number 5 on the cover. Where the hell did you come from? Ralph wondered. He could almost have sworn there had been no one standing behind him a minute or so before.

“Onan, Shmonan,” Pedersen said. “Those sperms aren’t the same as a baby-”

“No?” Faye asked. “Then why ain’t the Catholic Church sellin rubbers at Bingo games? Tell me that.”

“That’s just ignorant,” Pedersen said. “And if you don’t see-”

“But it wasn’t masturbation Onan was punished for,” Dorrance said in his high, penetrating old man’s voice. “He was punished for refusing to impregnate his brother’s widow, so his brother’s line could continue. There’s a poem, by Allen Ginsberg, I think-”

“Shut up, you old fool!” Pedersen yelled, and then glowered at Faye Chapin. “And if you don’t see that there’s a big difference between a man beating his meat and a woman flushing the baby God put in her belly down the toilet, you’re as big a fool as he is.”

“This is a disgusting conversation,” Lisa Zell said, sounding more fascinated than disgusted. Ralph looked over her shoulder and saw a section of chainlink fencing had been torn loose from its post and bent backward, probably by the kids who took this place over at night. That solved one mystery, anyway. He hadn’t noticed Dorrance because the old man hadn’t been in the picnic area at all; he’d been wandering around the airport grounds.

It occurred to Ralph that this was his chance to grab Dorrance and maybe get some answers out of him… except that Ralph would likely end up more confused than ever. Old Dor was too much like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland-more smile than substance.

“Big difference, huh?” Faye was asking Pedersen.

“Yeah!” Red patches glowered in Pedersen’s chapped cheeks.

Doc Mulhare shifted uneasily on his seat.

“Look, let’s just forget it and finish the game, Faye, all right?”

Faye took no notice; his attention was still fixed on Pedersen.

“Maybe you ought to think again about all the little spermies that died in the palm of your hand every time you sat on the toilet seat thinking about how nice it’d be to have Marilyn Monroe cop your-” Pedersen reached out and slapped the remaining chess-pieces off the board. Doc Mulhare winced backward, mouth trembling, eyes wide and frightened behind pink-rimmed glasses which had been mended in two places with electrical tape.

“Yeah, good! “Faye shouted. “That’s a very reasonable fuckin argument, you geek! “Pedersen raised his fists in an exaggerated John

L. Sullivan pose.

“Want to do something about it?” he asked. “Come on, let’s go!”

Faye got slowly to his feet. He stood easily a foot taller than the shovel-faced Pedersen and outweighed him by at least sixty pounds.

Ralph could hardly believe what he was seeing. And if the poison had seeped this far, what about the rest of the city? It seemed to him that Doc Mulhare was right; Susan Day must not have the slightest idea of how bad an idea bringing her act to Derry really was. In some ways-in a lot of ways, actually-Derry wasn’t like other places.

He was moving before he was consciously aware of what he meant to do, and he was relieved to see Stan Eberly doing the same thing.

They exchanged a glance as they approached the two men standing nose to nose, and Stan nodded slightly. Ralph slipped an arm around Faye’s shoulders a bare second before Stan gripped Pedersen’s upper left arm.

“You ain’t doing none of that,” Stan said, speaking directly into one of Pedersen’s tufted ears. “We’ll end up taking the both of you over to Derry Home with heart-attacks, and you don’t need another one of those, Harley-you had two already. Or is it three?”

“I ain’t letting him make jokes about wimmin murderin babies!”

Pedersen said, and Ralph saw there were tears rolling down the man’s cheeks. “My wife died having our second daughter! Sepsis carried her off back in ’46! So I ain’t having that talk about murderin babies!

“

“Christ,” Faye said in a different voice. “I didn’t know that, Harley. I’m sorry-”

“Ah, fuck your sorry!” Pedersen cried, and ripped his arm out of Stan Eberly’s grip. He lunged toward Faye, who raised his fists and then lowered them again as Pedersen went blundering past without looking at him. He took the path through the trees which led back out to the Extension and was gone. What followed his departure was thirty seconds of pure shocked silence, broken only by the waspwhine of an incoming Piper Cub, 3

“Jesus,” Faye said at last. “You see a guy every few days over five, ten years, and you start to think you know everything. Christ, Ralphie, I didn’t know how his wife died. I feel like a fool.”

“Don’t let it get you down,” Stan said. “He’s prob’ly just having his monthlies.”

“Shut up,” Georgina said. “We’ve had enough dirty talk for one morning.”

“I’ll be glad when that Day woman comes n goes n things can get back to normal,” Fred Zell said.

Doc Mulhare was down on his hands and knees, collecting chesspieces. “Do you want to finish, Faye?” he asked. “I think I remember where they all were.”

“No,” Faye said. His voice, which had remained steady during the confrontation with Pedersen, now sounded trembly. “Think I’ve had enough for awhile. Maybe Ralph’ll give you a little tourney prelim.”

“Think I’m going to pass,” Ralph said. He was looking around for Dorrance, and at last spotted him. He had gone back through the hole in the fence. He was standing in knee-high grass at the edge of the service road over there, bending his book back and forth in his hands as he watched the Piper Cub taxi toward the Genera Aviation terminal.

Ralph found himself remembering how Ed had come tearing along that service road in his old brown Datsun, and how he had sworn

(Hurry up! Hurry up and lick shit.)

at the slowness of the gate. For the first time in over a year he found himself wondering what Ed had been doing in there to begin with. than you did.”

“Huh?” He made an effort and focused on Faye again.

“I said you must be sleepin again, because you look a hell of a lot better than you did. But now your hearin’s going to hell, I guess.”

“I guess so,” Ralph said, and tried a little smile. “Think I’ll go grab myself a little lunch. You want to come, Faye? My treat.”

“Nah, I already had a Coffee Pot,” Faye said. “It’s sittin in my gut like a piece of lead right now, to tell you the truth. Cheer, Ralph, the old fart was crying, did you see that?”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t make it into a big deal if I were you,” Ralph said. He started walking toward the Extension, and Faye ambled along beside him. With his broad shoulders slumped and his head lowered, Faye looked quite a lot like a trained bear in a man-suit.

“Guys our age cry over just about anything. You know that.”

“I spose.” He gave Ralph a grateful smile. “Anyway, thanks for stoppin me before I could make it worse. You know how I am, sometimes.”

I only wish someone had been there when Bill got zito ZI, Ralph thought. Out loud he said, “NO problem. It’s me t hat should be thanking you, actually. It’s something else to Put on my resume when I apply for that high-paying job at the U.N.”

Faye laughed, delighted, and clapped Ralph on the shoulder.

Yeah, Secretary-General! Peacemaker Number One! You could do it, Ralph, no shit!”

“No question about it. Take care of yourself, Faye.

He started to turn away and Faye touched his arm. “You’re still up for the tournament next week, aren’t you? The Runway 3 Classic?”

It took a moment for Ralph to figure out what he was talking about, although it had been the retired carpenter’s main topic of conversation ever since the leaves had begun to show color. Faye had been putting on the chess tournament he called The Runway 3 Classic ever since the end of his “real life” in 1984. The trophy was an oversized chrome hubcap with a fancy crown and scepter engraved on it. Faye, easily the best player among the Old Crocks on the west side of town, at least), had awarded the trophy to himself on six of the nine occasions it had been given out, and Ralph had a suspicion that he had gone in the tank the other three times, just to keep the rest of the tourney participants interested. Ralph hadn’t thought much about chess this fall; he’d had other things on his mind.

“Sure,” he said, “I guess I’ll be playing.”

Faye grinned. “Good. We should have had it last weekend-that was the schedule-but I was hopin that if I put it off, jimmy V. would be able to play. He’s still in the hospital, though, and if I put it off much longer it’ll be too cold to play outdoor and we’ll end up in the back of Dully Sprague’s barber shop, like we did in ’90.”

“What’s wrong with Jimmy V.?”

“Cancer come back on him again,” Faye said, then added in a lower tone: “I don’t think he’s got a snowball’s chance in hell of beating it this time.”

Ralph felt a sudden and surprisingly sharp pang of sorrow at this news. He and jimmy Vandermeer had known each other well during their own “real lives.” Both had been on the road back then, jimmy in candy and greeting cards, Ralph in printing supplies and paper products, and the two of them had gotten on well enough to team up on several New England tours, splitting the driving and sharing rather more luxurious accommodations than either could have afforded alone.

They had also shared the lonely, unremarkable secrets of travelling men. Jimmy told Ralph about the whore who’d stolen his wallet in 1958, and how he’d lied to his wife about it, telling her that a hitchhiker had robbed him. Ralph told jimmy about his realization, at the age of forty-three, that he had become a terpin hydrate junkie, and about his painful, ultimately successful struggle to kick the habit.

He had no more told Carolyn about his bizarre cough-syrup addiction than jimmy V. had told his wife about his last B-girl.

A lot of trips; a lot of changed tires; a lot of jokes about the travelling salesman and the farmer’s beautiful daughter; a lot of late night talks that had gone on till all hours of the morning.

Sometimes it was God they had talked about, sometimes the IRS.

All in all, jimmy Vandermeer had been a damned good pal. Then Ralph had gotten his desk-job with the printing company and fallen out of touch with jimmy. He’d only begun to reconnect out here, and at a few of the other dim landmarks which dotted the Derry of the Old Crocks-the library, the pool-hall, the back room of Dully Sprague’s barber shop, four or five others. When jimmy told him hortly after Carolyn’s death that he had come through a bout with cancer a lung shy but otherwise okay, what Ralph had remembered was the man talking baseball or fishing as he fed smoldering Camel stubs into the slipstream rushing by the wing-window of the car, one after another.

I got lucky was what he had said. Me and the Duke, we both got it neither of them had stayed lucky, it seemed. Not that

“Oh, man,” Ralph said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He’s been in Derry Home almost three weeks now,” Faye said.

“Havin those radiation treatments and getting injects of poison that’s supposed to kill the cancer while it’s half-killing you. I’m surprised you didn’t know, Ralph.”

I suppose you are, but I’m not. The insomnia keeps swallowing stuff, you see. One day it’s the last Cup-A-Soup envelope you lose track of,next day it’s your sense of time,-the day after that it’s your old

???? friends.

???? Faye shook his head. "Fucking cancer. It’s spooky, how it waits.”

???? Ralph nodded, now thinking of Carolyn. "What room’s Jimmy in, do you

???? know? Maybe I’ll go visit him.”

????

“Just so happens I do. 315. Think you can remember it?” Ralph grinned. “For awhile, anyway.”

“Go see him if you can, sure-they got him pretty doped up, but he still knows who comes in, and I bet he’d love to see you. Him and you had a lot of high old times together, he told me once.”

“Well, you know,” Ralph said. “Couple of guys on the road, that’s all. If we flipped for the check in some diner, jimmy V. always called tails.” Suddenly he felt like crying.

“Lousy, isn’t it?” Faye said quietly. “Yes.”

“Well, you go see him. He’ll be glad, and you’ll feel better. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. And don’t you go and forget the damn chess tournament!” Faye finished, straightening up and making a heroic effort to look and sound cheerful. “If you step out now, you’ll fuck up the seedings.”

“I’ll do my best.”

lucky. Except anyone did, in the end.

“Yeah, I know you will.” He made a fist and punched Ralph’s upper arm lightly. “And thanks again for stopping me before I could do something I’d, you know, feel bad about later.”

“Sure. Peacemaker Number One, that’s me.” Ralph started down the path which led to the Extension, then turned back. “You see that service road over there? The one that goes from General Aviation out to the street?” He pointed. A catering truck was currently driving away from the private terminal, its windshield reflecting bright darts of sunlight into their eyes. The truck stopped just short of the gate, breaking the electric-eye beam. The gate began to trundle open.

“Sure I do,” Faye said.

“Last summer I saw Ed Deepneau using that road, which means he had a key-card to the gate. Any idea how he would have come by a thing like that?”

“You mean The Friends of Life guy? Lab scientist who did a little research in wife-beating last summer?”

Ralph nodded. “But it’s the summer of ’92 I’m talking about. He was driving an old brown Datsun.”

Faye laughed. “I wouldn’t know a Datsun from a Toyota from a Honda, Ralph-I stopped being able to tell cars apart around the time Chevrolet gave up the gullwing tailfins. But I can tell you who mostly uses that road: caterers, mechanics, pilots, crew, and flightcontrollers. Some passengers have key-cards, I think, if they fly private a lot. The only scientists over there are the ones who work at the air-testing station. Is that the kind of scientist he is?”

“Nope, a chemist. He worked at Hawking Labs until just a little while ago.”

“Played with the white rats, did he? Well there aren’t any rats over at the airport-that I know of, anyway-but now that I think of it, there is one other bunch of people who use that gate.”

“Oh? Who?”

Faye pointed at a prefab building with a corrugated-tin roof standing about seventy yards from the General Aviation terminal. “See that building? That’s SoloTech.”

“What’s SoloTech?”

“A school,” Faye said. “They teach people to fly.”

Ralph walked back down Harris Avenue With his big hands stuffed into his pockets and his head lowered so he did not see much more than the cracks in the sidewalk passing beneath his sneakers. His mind was fixed on Ed Deepneau again… and on SoloTech. He had no way of knowing if SoloTech was the reason Ed had been out at the airport on the day he had run into Mr. West Side Gardeners, but all of a sudden that was a question to which Ralph very much wanted an answer. He was also curious as to just where Ed was living these days. He wondered if John Leydecker might share his curiosity on these two points, and decided to find out.

He was passing the unpretentious double storefront which housed George Lyford, C.P.A on one side and Maritime jewelry (WE BUY YOUR OLD GOLD AT TOP PRICES on the other, when he was pulled out of his thoughts by a short, strangled bark. He looked up and saw Rosalie sitting on the sidewalk just outside the upper entrance to Strawford Park. The old dog was panting rapidly; saliva drizzled off her lolling tongue, building up a dark puddle on the concrete between her paws.

Her fur was stuck together in dark clumps, as if she had been running, and the faded blue bandanna around her neck seemed to shiver with her rapid respiration. As Ralph looked at her, she gave another bark, this one closer to a yelp.

He glanced across the street to see what she was barking at and saw nothing but the Burry-Burry Laundromat. There were a few women moving around inside, but Ralph found it impossible to believe Rosalie was barking at them. No one at all was currently passing on the sidewalk in front of the coin-op laundry.

Ralph looked back and suddenly realized that Rosalie wasn’t just sitting on the sidewalk but crouching there… cowering there. She looked scared almost to death.

Until that moment, Ralph had never thought much about how eerily human the expressions and body language of dogs were: they grinned when they were happy, hung their heads when they were ashamed registered anxiety in their eyes and tension in the set of their shoulders-all things that people did. And, like people, they registered abject, total fear in every quivering line of the body.

He looked across the street again, at the spot where Rosalie’s attention seemed focused, and once again saw nothing but the laundry and the empty sidewalk in front of it. Then, suddenly, he remembered Natalie, the Exalted amp; Revered Baby, snatching at the grayblue contrails his fingers left behind as he reached out with them to wipe the milk from her chin. To anyone else she would have looked as if she were grabbing at nothing, the way babies always appeared to be grabbing at nothing… but Ralph had known better.

He had seen better.

Rosalie uttered a string of panicky yelps that grated on Ralph’s ear like the sound of unoiled hinges.

So far it’s only happened on its own but maybe I can make it happen. Maybe I can make myself seeSee what?

Well, the auras. Them, of course. And maybe whatever Rosalie (three-six-nine lion) was looking at, as well. Ralph already had a pretty good idea (the goose drank wine) of what it was, but he wanted to be sure. The question was how to do it.

How does a person see in the first place?

By looking, of course.

Ralph looked at Rosalie. Looked at her carefully, trying to see everything there was to see: the faded pattern on the blue bandanna which served as her collar, the dusty clumps and tangles in her uncared-for coat, the sprinkle of gray around her long muzzle, After a few moments of this she seemed to feel his gaze, for she turned, looked at him, and whined uneasily.

As she did, Ralph felt something turn over in his mind-it felt like the starter-motor of a car. There was a brief but very clear sense of being suddenly lighter, and then brightness flooded into the day.

He had found his way back into that more vivid, more deeply textured world. He saw a murky membrane-it made him think of spoiled eggwhite-swim into existence around Rosalie, and saw a dark gray balloon-string rising from her. Its point of origin wasn’t the skull, however, as had been the case in all the people Ralph had seen while in this heightened state of awareness; Rosalie’s balloon string rose from her muzzle.

Now you know the most essential difference between dogs and me, he thought. Their souls reside in different places.

“Doggy. Here, doggy, c’mere.”

Ralph winced and drew back from that voice, which was like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. The heels of his palms rose most of the way to his ears before he realized that wouldn’t help; he wasn’t really hearing it with his ears, and the part that the voice hurt the worst was deep inside his head, where his hands couldn’t reach.

[Hey, you fucking flea suitcase! You think I’ve got all day? Get your raggedy ass over here.”

Rosalie whined and switched her gaze from Ralph back toward whatever she had been looking at before. She started to get up, then shrank back down on her haunches again. The bandanna she wore was shaking harder than ever, and Ralph saw a dark crescent begill to spread around her left flank as her bladder let go.

He looked across the street and there was Doc #3, standing between the laundromat and the elderly apartment house next door, Doc #3 in his white smock (it was badly stained, Ralph noticed, as if he had been wearing it for a long time) and his midget-sized bluejeans.

He still had McGovern’s Panama on his head.

The hat now appeared to balance on the creature’s ears; it was so big for him that the top half of his head seemed submerged in it. He was grinning ferociously at the dog, and Ralph saw a double row of pointed white teeth-the teeth of a cannibal. In his left hand he was holding something which was either an old scalpel or a straight-razor.

Part of Ralph’s mind tried to convince him that it was blood he saw on the blade, but he was pretty sure it was just rust.

Doc #3 slipped the first two fingers of his right hand into the corners of his mouth and blew a piercing whistle that went through Ralph’s head like a drillbit. Down the sidewalk, Rosalie flinched backward and then voiced a brief howl.

[Get your fucking ass over, Rover Do it now.”

Rosalie got up, tail between her legs, and began to slink toward the street. She whined as she went, and her fear had worsened her limp to the point where she was barely able to stagger; her hindquarters threatened to slide out from under her at each reluctant, lurching step.

“HEY!”

Ralph only realized that he had yelled when he saw the small blue cloud float up in front of his face. It was etched with gossamer silver lines that made it look like a snowflake.

The bald dwarf wheeled toward the sound of Ralph’s shout, instinctively raising the weapon he held as he did. His expression was one of snarling surprise. Rosalie had stopped with her front paws in looking at Ralph with wide, anxious brown eyes.

[What do you want, Shorts?] There was fury at being interrupted in that voice, fury at being challenged… but Ralph thought there were other emotions underneath. Fear? He wished he could believe it.

Perplexity and SLirprise seemed surer bets. Whatever this creature was, it wasn’t used to being seen by the likes of Ralph, let alone challenged.

[What’s the matter, Short-Time, cat got your tongue? Or have you already forgotten what you wanted?] [“I want you to leave that dog alone!”] Ralph heard himself in two different ways. He was fairly sure he was speaking aloud, but the sound of his actual voice was distant and tinny, like music drifting up from a pair of Walkman headphones which have been temporarily laid aside. Someone standing right beside him might have heard what he said, but Ralph knew the words would have sounded like a weak, out-of-breath gasptalk from a man who has just been gutpunched. Inside his head, however, he sounded as he hadn’t in years-young, strong, and confident.

Doc #3 must have heard it that second way, for he recoiled momentarily, again raising his weapon (Ralph was now almost certain it was a scalpel) for a moment, as if in self-defense. Then he seemed to regroup. He left the sidewalk and strode to the edge of Harris Avenue, standing on the leaf-drifted strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. He hitched at the waistband of his jeans, yanking it through the dirty smock, and stared grimly at Ralph for several moments. Then he raised the rusty scalpel in the air and made an unpleasantly suggestive sawing gesture with it.

[You can see me-big deal! Don’t poke your nose into what don’t concern you, Short-Time.” The mutt belongs to me!] The bald doc turned back to the cringing dog.

[I’m done fooling with you, Rover! Get over here! Right now.”

Rosalie gave Ralph a beseeching, despairing look and then began to cross the street.

I don’t mess in with long-time business, Old Dor had told him on the day he’d given him the book of Stephen Dobyns poems. I told you not to, either.

I Yes, he had, yes indeed, but Ralph had a feeling it was too late now. Even if it wasn’t, he had no intention of leaving Rosalie to the unpleasant little gnome standing in front of the coin-op laundry across the street. Not if he could help it, that was.

[“Rosalie.” Over here, girl! Heel!”] Rosalie gave a single bark and trotted over to where Ralph stood.

She placed herself behind his right leg and then sat down, panting and looking up at him. And here was another expression Ralph found he could read with ease: one part relief, two parts gratitude.

The face of Doc #3 was twisted into a grimace of hate so severe it was almost a cartoon.

[Better send her across, Shorts I’m warning you.”] [“No.

I’ll fuck you over, Shorts. I’ll fuck you over big-time. And I’ll fuck your friends over. Do you get me? Do you-] Ralph suddenly raised one hand to shoulder height with the palm turned inward toward the side of his head, as if he meant to administer a karate chop. He brought it down and watched, amazed, as a tight blue wedge of light flew off the tips of his fingers and sliced across the street like a thrown spear. Doc #3 ducked just in time, clapping one hand to McGovern’s Panama to keep it from flying off. The blue wedge skimmed two or three inches over that small, clutching hand and struck the front window of the Burry-Burry.

There it spread like some supernatural liquid, and for a moment the dusty glass became the brilliant, perfect blue of today’s sky. It faded after only a moment and Ralph could see the women inside the laundromat again, folding their clothes and loading their washers exactly as if nothing had happened.

The bald dwarf straightened, rolled his hands into fists, and shook them at Ralph. Then he snatched McGovern’s hat off his head, stuck the brim in his mouth, and tore a bite out of it. As he performed this bizarre equivalent of a child’s tantrum, the sun struck splinters of fire from the lobes of his small, neatly made ears. He spat out the chunk of splintery straw and then clapped the hat back on his head.

[That dog was mine, Shorts! I was gonna play with her. I guess maybe I’ll have to play with You instead, huh? You and your asshole friends.”

[“Get out of here.”)] [Cuntlicker! Fucked your mother and licked her cunt!] Ralph knew where he had heard that charming sentiment before: Ed

Deepneau, out at the airport, in the summer of ’92. It wasn’t the sort of thing you forgot, and all at once he was terrified.

What in God’s name had he stumbled into?

Ralph lifted his hand to the side of his head again, but something inside had changed. He could bring it down in that chopping gesture again, but he was almost Positive that this time no bright blue flying wedge would result.

The doc apparently didn’t know he was being threatened with an empty gun, however. He shrank back, raising the hand holding the scalpel in a shielding gesture. The grotesquely bitten hat slipped down over his eyes, and for a moment he looked like asta cmelodrama version of Jack the Ripper… one who might have been working out pathologic inadequacies caused by extreme shortness.

[Gonna get you for this, Shorts You wait. You]. just wait! No Short-Timer runs the game on me.

But for the time being, the little bald doctor had had enough. He wheeled around and ran into the weedy lane between the laundromat and the apartment house with his dirty, too-long smock flapping and snapping at the legs of his jeans. The brightness slipped out of the day with him. Ralph marked its passage to a large extent with senses he had never before even suspected. He felt totally awake, totally energized, and almost exploding with delighted excitement.

I drove it off, by God! I drove the little sonofawhore off! He had no idea what the creature in the white smock really was, but he knew he had saved Rosalie from it, and for now that was enough.

Nagging questions about his sanity might creep back in tomorrow morning, as he sat in the wing-chair looking down at the deserted street below… but for the time being, he felt like a million bucks.

“You saw him, didn’t you, Rosalie? You saw the nasty little-” He looked down, saw that Rosalie was no longer sitting by his heel, and looked up in time to see her limping into the park, head down, right leg slueing stiffly off to the side with every pained stride.

“Rosalie!” he shouted. “Hey, girl!” And, without really knowing why-except that they had just gone through something extraordinary together-Ralph started after her, first just jogging, then running, finally sprinting all out.

He didn’t sprint for long. A stitch that felt like a hot chrome needle buried itself in his left side, then spread rapidly across the left half of his chest wall. He stopped just inside the park, standing bent over at the intersection of two paths, hands clamped on his legs just above the knees. Sweat ran into his eyes and stung like tears.

He panted harshly, wondering if it was just the ordinary sort of stitch he remembered from the last lap of the mile run in highschool track, or if this was how the onset of a fatal heart-attack felt.

After thirty or forty seconds the pain began to abate, so maybe it had just been a stitch, after all. Still, it went a good piece toward supporting McGovern’s thesis, didn’t it? Let me tell you something, Ralph-at our age, mental illness is common.” At our age it’s common as hell.” Ralph didn’t know if that was true or not, but he did know that the year he had made All-State Track was now more than half a century in the past, and sprinting after Rosalie the way he’d done was stupid and probably dangerous. If his heart had seized up, he supposed he wouldn’t have been the first old guy to be punished with a coronary thrombosis for getting excited and forgetting that when eighteen went, it went forever.

The pain was almost gone and he was getting his wind back, but his legs still felt untrustworthy, as if they might unlock at the knees and spill him onto the gravel path without the slightest warning.

Ralph lifted his head, looking for the nearest park bench, and saw something that made him forget stray dogs, shaky legs, even possible heart-attacks. The nearest bench was forty feet farther along the left hand path, at the top of a gentle, sloping hill. Lois Chasse was sitting on that bench in her good blue fall coat. Her gloved hands were folded together in her lap, and she was sobbing as if her heart would break.

CHAPTER 12

“What’s wrong, Lois?”

She looked up at him, and the first thought to cross Ralph’s mind see at the was actually a memory: a play he had taken Carolyn to Penobscot Theater in Bangor eight or nine years ago. Some of the characters in it had supposedly been dead, and their makeup had consisted of clown-white greasepaint with dark circles around the eyes to give the impression of huge empty sockets.

His second thought was much simpler: Raccoon.

She either saw some of his thoughts on his face or simply realized how she must look, because she turned away, fumbled briefly at the clasp of her purse, then simply raised her hands and used them to shield her face from his view.

“Go away, Ralph, would you?” she asked in a thick, choked voice.

“I don’t feel very well today.”

Under ordinary circumstances, Ralph would have done as she asked, hurrying away without looking back, feeling nothing but a vague shame at having come across her with her mascara smeared and her defenses down. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances, and Ralph decided he wasn’t leaving-not yet, anyway. He still retained some of that strange lightness, and still felt that other world, that other Derry, was very close. And there was something else, something perfectly simple and straightforward. He hated to see Lois, whose happy nature he had never even questioned, sitting here by herself and bawling her eyes out.

“What’s the matter, Lois?”

“I just don’t feel well!” she cried. “Can’t you leave me alone?”

Lois buried her face in her gloved hands. Her back shook, the sleeves of her blue coat trembled, and Ralph thought of how Rosalie had looked when the bald doctor had been yelling at her to get her ass across the street: miserable, scared to death.

Ralph sat down next to Lois on the bench, slipped an arm around her, and pulled her to him. She came, but stiffly… as if her body were full of wires.

“Don’t you look at me! “she cried in that same wild voice.

“Don’t you dare My makeup’s a mess! I put it on special for my son and daughter-in-law… they came for breakfast… we were going to spend the morning… ’We’ll have a nice time, Ma,” Harold said. but the reason they came… you see, the real reason-” Communication broke down in a fresh spate of weeping. Ralph groped in his back pocket, came up with a handkerchief which was wrinkled but clean, and put it in one of Lois’s hands. She took it without looking at him.

“Go on,” he said, “Scrub up a little if you want, although you don’t look bad, Lois; honest you don’t.”

A little raccoon all, he thought. He began to smile, and then the smile died. He remembered the day in September when he had set off for the Rite Aid to check out the over-the-counter sleep aids the p h e n and had encountered Bill and Lois standing outside the park, talking about the doll-throwing demonstration which Ed had orchestrated at WomanCare. She had been clearly distressed that day-Ralph ing that she looked tired in spite of her excitement remembered think and concern-but she had also been close to beautiful: her considerable bosom heaving, her eyes flashing, her cheeks flushed with a maid’s high color. That all but irresistible beauty was hardly more than a memory today; in her melting mascara Lois Chasse looked like a sad and elderly clown, and Ralph felt a quick hot spark of fury for whatever or whoever had wrought the change.

“I,” Lois said, applying Ralph’s handkerchief vigorously look horrible.

“I’m alright.”

“No, ma’am. Just a little smeary.

Lois at last turned to face him. It clearly took a lot of effort with her rouge and eye makeup now mostly on Ralph’s handkerchief.

“How bad am I?” she breathed. “Tell the truth, Ralph Roberts, or I’ll cross your eyes He bent forward and kissed one moist cheek. “Only lovely, Lois.

You’ll have to save ethereal for another day, I guess.”

She gave him an uncertain smile, and the upward movement of her face caused two fresh tears to spill from her eyes. Ralph took the crumpled handkerchief from her and gently wiped them away.

“I’m so glad it was you who came along and not Bill,” she told len “I would have died of shame if Bill had seen me crying in. public,” Ralph looked around. He saw Rosalie, safe and sound at the bottom of the hill-she was lying between the two Portosans that stood down there, her muzzle resting on one paw-but otherwise this part of the park was empty. “I think we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves, at least for now,” he said.

“Thank God for small favors.” Lois took the handkerchief back and went to work on her makeup again, this time in a rather more businesslike manner. “Speaking of Bill, I stopped into the Red Apple on my way down here-that was before I got feeling sorry for myself and started to bawl my silly head off-and Sue said you two had a big argument just a little while ago. Yelling and everything, right out in your front yard.”

“Nah, not that big,” Ralph said, smiling uneasily, “Can I be nosy and ask what it was about?”

“Chess,” Ralph said. It was the first thing to pop into his mind.

“The Runway 3 Tournament Faye Chapin has every year. Only ’ really wasn’t about anything. You know how it is-sometimes people get out of bed on the wrong side and just grab the first excuse.”

“I wish that was all it was with me,” Lois said. She opened her purse, managing the clasp effortlessly this time, and took out her compact. Then she sighed and stuffed it back into the bag again without opening it. “I can’t. I know I’m being a baby, but I just can’t.”

Ralph darted his hand into her purse before she could close it, removed the compact, opened it, and held the mirror up in front of her.

“See? That’s not so bad, is it?”

She averted her face like a vampire turning away from a crucifix.

“Ugh,” she said. “Put it away.”

“If You promise to tell me what happened.”

“Anything, just Put it away.”

He did. For a little while Lois said nothing but only sat and watched her hands fiddle restlessly with the clasp of her purse. He was about to prod her when she looked up at him with a pitiful expression of defiance.

“ “it just so happens you’re not the only one who can’t get a decent night’s sleep, Ralph,”

“What are you talking ab-”

“Insomnia!”

she snapped. “I go to sleep at about the same time I always did, but I don’t sleep through anymore.

And it’s worse than that. I wake up earlier every morning, it seems.”

Ralph tried to remember if he had told Lois about that aspect of his own problem. He didn’t think he had.

“Why are you looking so surprised?” Lois asked. “You didn’t really think you were the only person in the world to ever have a sleepless night, did you?”

“Of course not!” Ralph responded with some indignation but had it it often felt as if he were the only person in the world to have n that particular kind of sleepless night? Standing helplessly by as his good sleep-time was eroded minute by minute and quarter hour by quarter hour? It was like a weird variant of the Chinese water-torture.

“When did yours start?” he asked.

“A month or two before Carol died.”

How much sleep are you getting?”

“Barely an hour a night since the start of October.” Her voice was calm, but Ralph heard a tremor which might have been panic just below the surface. “The way things are going, I’ll have entirely quit sleeping by Christmas, and if that really happens, I don’t know how I’ll survive it, I’m barely surviving now.”

Ralph struggled for speech and asked the first question to come into his mind: “How come I’ve never seen your light?”

“For the same reason I hardly ever see yours, I imagine,” she said.

“I’ve been living in the same place for thirty-five years, and I don’t need to turn on the lights to find my way around. Also, I like to keep my troubles to myself. You keep turning on the lights at two in the morning and sooner or later someone sees them. It gets around, and then the nosybirds start asking questions. I don’t like nosybird questions, and I’m not one of those people who feel like they have to take an ad out in the paper every time they have a little constipation.”

Ralph burst out laughing. Lois looked at him in round-eyed perplexity for a moment, then Joined in. His arm was still around her? (or had it crept back on its own after he had taken it away Rap I didn’t know and didn’t really care), and he hugged her tightly. This time she pressed against him easily; those stiff little wires had gone out of her body. Ralph was glad.

“You’re not laughing at me, are you, Ralph?”

“Nope. Absolutely not.”

She nodded, still smiling, “That’s all right, then. You never even saw me moving ing around in my living room, did you?”

“No.”

“That’s because there’s no streetlamp in front of my house. But there’s one in front of yours. I’ve seen you in that ratty old wing chair of yours many times, sitting and looking out and drinking tea,” I always assumed I was the only one, he thought, and suddenly a question-both comic and embarrassing-popped into his head.

How many times had she seen him sitting there and picking his nose? Or picking at his crotch?

Either reading his mind or the color in his cheeks, Lois said, “I really couldn’t make out much more than your shape, you know, and you were always wearing your robe, perfectly decent. So you don’t have to worry about that. Also, I hope you know that if you’d ever started doing anything you wouldn’t want people to see you doing, I wouldn’t have looked. I wasn’t exactly raised in a barn, you know.” He smiled and patted her hand. “I do know that, Lois. it’s just…

“I was sitting there and you know, it was a surprise. To find out that while I was watching the street, somebody was watching me.”

She fixed him with an enigmatic smile that might have said, Don’t worry, Ralph-you were just another part of the scenery to me.

He considered this smile for a moment, then groped his way back to the main point. “So what happened, Lois? Why were you sitting here and crying? JUST sleeplessness? If that’s what it was, I certainly sympathize. There’s really no just about it, is there?”

Her smile slipped away. Her gloved hands folded together again in her lap and she looked somberly down at them. “There are worse things than insomnia. Betrayal, for instance. Especially when the people doing the betraying are the people you love.”

She fell quiet. Ralph didn’t prompt her. He was looking down the hill at Rosalie, who appeared to be looking up at him. At both of them, maybe.

“Did you know we share the same doctor as well as the same problem, Ralph?”

“You go to Litchfield, too?”

“Used to go to Litchfield. He was Carolyn’s recommendation.

I’ll never go to him again, though. He and I are quits.” Her upper lip drew back. “Double-crossing son of a bitch!”

“What happened?”

“I went along for the best part of a year, waiting for things to get better by themselves-for nature to take her course, as they say.

Not that I didn’t try to help nature along every now and then. We probably tried a lot of the same things.”

“Honeycomb?” Ralph asked, smiling again. He couldn’t help it.

What ’ an amazing day this has been, he thought. What a perfectly amazing day… and it’s not even one in the afternoon yet.

“Honeycomb? What about it? Does that help?”

“No,” Ralph said, grinning more widely than ever, “doesn’t help a bit, but it tastes wonderful.”

She laughed and squeezed his bare left hand in both of her gloved ones. Ralph squeezed back.

“You never went to see Dr. Litchfield about it, did you, Ralph?

“Nope. Made an appointment once, but cancelled it.”

“Did you put it off because you didn’t trust him? Because you felt he missed the boat on Carolyn?”

Ralph looked at her, surprised.

“Never mind,” Lois said. “I had no right to ask that.”

“No, it’s okay. I guess I’m just surprised to hear the idea from someone else. That he… you know… that he might have misdiagnosed her.”

“Huh!” Lois’s pretty eyes flashed. “It crossed all our minds!

Bill used to say he couldn’t believe you didn’t have that fumble-fingered bastard in district court the day after Carolyn’s funeral. Of course back then I was on the other side of the fence, defending Litchfield like mad. Did you ever think of suing him?”

“No. I’m seventy, and I don’t want to spend whatever time I have left flogging a malpractice suit. Besides-would it bring Carol back?”

She shook her head.

Ralph said, “What happened to Carolyn was the reason I didn’t go see him, though. I guess it was, at least. I just couldn’t seem to trust him, or maybe… I don’t know…”

No, he didn’t really know, that was the devil of it. All he knew for sure was that he had cancelled the appointment with Dr. Litchfield, as he had cancelled his appointment with James Roy Hong, known in some quarters as the pin-sticker man. That latter appointment had been scratched on the advice of a ninety-two or -three-year-old man who could probably no longer remember his own middle name. His mind slipped to the book Old Dor had given him, and to the poem Old Dor had quoted from-“Pursuit,” it had been the p h e n called, and Ralph couldn’t seem to get it out of his head… especially the part where the poet talked about all the things he saw falling away behind him: the unread books, the untold jokes, the trips that would never be taken.

“Ralph? Are you there?”

“Yeah-just thinking about Litchfield. Wondering why I cancelled that appointment.”

She patted his hand. “Just be glad you did. I kept mine.”

“Tell me.”

Lois shrugged. “When it got so bad I felt I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went to him and told him everything. I thought he’d give me a prescription for sleeping pills, but he said he couldn’t even do that-I sometimes have an irregular heartbeat, and sleeping pills can make that worse.”

“When did you see him?”

“Early last week. Then, yesterday, my son Harold called me out of a clear blue sky and said he and Janet wanted to take me out to breakfast. Nonsense, I said. I can still get around the kitchen. If you’re coming all the way down from Bangor, I said, I’ll get up a nice little feed for you, and that’s the end of it. Then, after, if you want to take me out-I was thinking of the mall, because I always like to go out there-why, that would be fine. That’s just what I said.”

She turned to Ralph with a smile that was small and bitter and fierce.

“It never occurred to me to wonder why both of them were coming to see me on a weekday, when both of them have jobs-and they must really love those jobs, because they’re about all they ever talk about. I just thought how sweet of them it was… how thoghtful… and I put out a special effort to look nice and do everything right so Janet wouldn’t suspect I was having a problem. I think that rankles most of all. Silly old Lois, ’Our Lois,” as Bill always says… don’t look so surprised, Ralph! Of course I knew abol]t that; cild you think I fell off a stump just yesterday? And he’s right, I am foolish, I am silly, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hurt just like anybody. She was beginning to cry.

“Of course it doesn’t,” Ralph said, and patted her hand.

“You would have laughed if you’d seen me,” she said, “baking fresh squash muffins at four o’clock in the morning and slicing mushrooms for an Italian omelette at four-fifteen and starting in with the makeup at four-thirty just to be sure, absolutely sure that Jan wouldn’t get going with that ’Are you sure you feel all right, Mother Lois?” stuff, I hate it when she starts in with that crap. And do you know what, Ralph? She knew what was wrong with me all the time, They both did.

So I guess the laugh was on me, wasn’t it?”

Ralph thought he had been following closely, but apparently he had lost her on one of the turns. “Knew? How could they know?”

“Because Litchfield told them!” she shouted. Her face twisted again, but this time it was not hurt or sorrow Ralph saw there but a terrible rueful rage. “That tattling son of a bitch called my son on the telephone and TOLD him EVERYTHING!”

Ralph was dumbfounded.

“Lois, they can’t do that,” he said when he finally found his voice again. “The doctor-patient relationship is. -well, it’s privileged.

Your son would know all about it, because he’s a lawyer, and the same thing applies to them. Doctors can’t tell anyone what their patients tell them unless the patient-”

“Oh Jesus,” Lois said, rolling her eyes.

“Crippled wheelchair Jesus. What world are you living in, Ralph? Fellows like Litchfield do whatever they think is right. I guess I knew that all along, which makes me double-stupid for going to him at all, Carl Litchfield is a vain, arrogant man who cares more about how he looks in Ills suspenders and designer shirts than he does about his patients.”

else when I’m taken advantage of. again.

“That’s awfully cynical.”

“And awfully true, that’s the sad part. You know what? He’s thirty-five or thirty-six, and he’s somehow gotten the idea that when he hits forty, he’s just going to… stop. Stay forty for as long as he wants to. He’s got an idea that people are old once they get to be sixty, and that even the best of them are pretty much in their dotage by the age of sixty-eight or so, and that once you’re past eighty, it’d be a mercy if your relatives would turn you over to that Dr. Kevorkian. Children don’t have any rights of confidentiality from their parents, and as far as Litchfield is concerned, old poops like us don’t have any rights of confidentiality from our kids. It wouldn’t be in our best interests, you see.

“What Carl Litchfield did practically the minute I was out of his examining room was to phone Harold in Bangor. He said I wasn’t sleeping, that I was suffering from depression, and that I was having the sort of sensory problems that accompany a premature decline in cognition. And then he said, ’You have to remember that your mother is getting on in years, Mr. Chasse, and if I were you I’d think very seriously about her situation down here in Derry.”

“

“He didn’t!”

Ralph cried, amazed and horrified. “I mean… did he?”

Lois was nodding grimly. “He said it to Harold and Harold said it to me and now I’m saying it to you. Silly old me, I didn’t even know what ’a premature decline in cognition’ meant, and neither of them wanted to tell me. I looked up ’cognition’ in the dictionary, and do you know what it means?”

“Thinking,” Ralph said. “Cognition is thinking.”

“Right. My doctor called my son to tell him I was going senile!

Lois laughed angrily and used Ralph’s handkerchief to wipe fresh tears off her cheeks.

“I can’t believe it,” Ralph said, but the hell of it was he could.

Ever since Carolyn’s death he had been aware that the naievety with which he had regarded the world up until the age of eighteen or so had apparently not departed forever when he crossed the threshold between childhood and manhood; that peculiar innocence seemed to be returning as he stepped over the threshold between manhood and old manhood. Things kept surprising him… except surprise was really too mild a word. What a lot of them did was knock him ass over teakettle.

The little bottles under the Kissing Bridge, for instance. He had taken a long walk out to Bassey Park one day in July and had gone under the bridge to rest out of the afternoon sun for awhile. He had barely gotten comfortable before noticing a little pile of broken glass in the weeds by the stream that trickled beneath the bridge. He had swept at the high grass with a length of broken branch and discovered six or eight small bottles. One had some crusty white stuff in the bottom.

Ralph had picked it up, and as he turned it curiously before his eyes, he realized he was looking at the remains of a crackparty. He had dropped the bottle as if it were hot. He could still remember the numbed shock he had felt, his unsuccessful attempt to convince himself that he was nuts, that it couldn’t be what he thought it was, not in this hick town two hundred and fifty miles north of Boston. It was that emerging naif which had been shocked, of course; that part of him seemed to believe (or had until he had discovered the little bottles under the Kissing Bridge) that all those news stories about the cocaine epidemic had just been make-believe, no more real than a TV crime show or a jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

He felt a similar sensation of shock now.

“Harold said they wanted to ’run me up to Bangor’ and show me the place,” Lois was saying. “He never takes me for rides these days; he just runs me places. Like I’m an errand. They had lots of brochures, and when Harold gave Janet the nod, she whipped them Out so fast-”

“Whoa, slow down. What place? What brochures?”

“I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? It’s a place in Bangor called Riverview Estates.”

Ralph knew the name; had gotten a brochure himself, as a matter of fact. One of those mass-mailing things, this one targeted at people sixty-five and over. He and McGovern had shared a laugh about it… but the laugh had been just a touch uneasy-like kids whistling past the graveyard, “Shit, Lois-that’s a retirement home, isn’t it?”

“No, sir!” she said, widening her eyes innocently. “That’s what I said, but Harold and Janet set me straight. No, Ralph, Riverview Estates is a condominium development site for community-oriented senior citizens.” When Harold said that I said, ’Is that so? Well, let me tell you both something-you can put a fruit pie from McDonald’s in a sterling-silver chafing dish and call it a French tart, but it’s still just a fruit pie from McDonald’s, as far as I am concerned.”

“When I said that, Harold started to sputter and get red in the face, but Jan just gave me that sweet little smile of hers, the one she saves up for special occasions because she knows it drives me crazy.

She says, Well, why don’t we look at the brochures anyway, Mother Lois? You’ll do that much, won’t you, after we both took Personal Days from work and drove all the way down here to see you?”

“Like Derry was in the heart of Africa,” Ralph muttered.

Lois took his hand and said something that made him laugh. “Oh, to her it is!”

“Was this before or after you found out Litchfield had tattled?”

Ralph asked. He used the same word Lois had on purpose; it seemed to fit this situation better than a fancier word or phrase would have done.

“Committed a breach of confidentiality” was far too dignified for this nasty bit of work. Litchfield had run and tattled, simple as that.

“Before. I thought I might as well look at the brochures; after all, they’d come forty miles, and it wouldn’t exactly kill me. So I looked while they ate the food I’d fixed-there wasn’t any that had to be scraped into the swill later on, either-and drank coffee.

“That’s quite a place, that Riverview. They have their own medical staff on duty twenty-four hours a day, and their own kitchen.

When you move in they give you a complete physical and decide what you can have to eat. There’s a Red Diet Plan, a Blue Diet Plan, a Green Diet Plan, and a Yellow Diet Plan. There were three or four other colors as well. I can’t remember what all of them were, but Yellow is for diabetics and Blue is for fatties.”

Ralph thought of eating three scientifically balanced meals a day for the rest of his life-no more sausage pizzas from Gambino’s, no more Coffee Pot sandwiches, no more chiliburgers from Mexico Milt’s-and found the prospect almost unbearably grim.

“Also,” Lois said brightly, “they have a pneumatic-tube system that delivers your daily pills right to your kitchen. Isn’t that a marvelous idea, Ralph?”

“I guess so,” Ralph said.

“Oh, yes, it is. It’s marvelous, the wave of the future.

There’s a computer to oversee everything, and I bet it never has a decline in cognition. There’s a special bus that takes the Riverview people to places of scenic or cultural interest twice a week, and it also takes them shopping. You have to take the bus, because Riverview people aren’t allowed to have cars.”

“Good idea,” he said, giving her hand a little squeeze. “What are a few drunks on Saturday night compared to an old fogey with a slippery cognition on the loose in a Buick sedan?”

She didn’t smile, as he had hoped she would. “The pictures in those brochures turned my blood. Old ladies playing canasta. Old men throwing horseshoes. Both flavors together in this big pinepanelled room they call the River Hall, square-dancing. Although that is sort of a nice name, don’t you think? %ver Hall?”

“I guess it’s okay.”

“I think it sounds like the kind of room you’d find in an enchanted castle. But I’ve visited quite a few old friends in Strawberry Fieldsthat’s the geriatrics’ home in Skowhegan-and I know an old folks’ rec room when I see one. It doesn’t matter how pretty a name you give it, there’s still a cabinet full of board games in the corner and ix pieces missing from each one and the jigsaw puzzles with five or s’ TV’s always tuned to something like Family Feud and never to the kind of movies where good-looking young people take off their clothes and roll around on the floor together in front of the fireplace.

Those rooms always smell of paste… and piss… and the fiveand-dime watercolors that come in a long tin box… and despair.”

Lois looked at him with her dark eyes.

“I’m only sixty-eight, Ralph. I know that sixty-eight doesn’t seem like only anything to Dr. Fountain of Youth, but it does to me, because my mother was ninety-two when she died last year and my dad lived to be eighty-six. In my family, dying at eighty is dying young… and if I had to spend twelve years living in a place where they announce dinner over the loudspeaker, I’d go crazy.”

“I would, too.”

“I looked, though. I wanted to be polite. When I was finished, I made a neat little pile of them and handed them back to Jan. I said they were very interesting and thanked her. She nodded and smiled and put them back in her purse. I thought that was going to be the end of it and good riddance, but then Harold said, ’Put your coat on, Ma.”

“For a second I was so scared I couldn’t breathe. I thought they’d already signed me up! And I had an idea that if I said I wasn’t going, Harold would open the door and there would be two or three men in white coats outside, and one of them would smile and say, ’don’t worry, Mrs. Chasse; once you get that first handful of pills delivered direct to your kitchen, you’ll never want to live anywhere else.”

“I don’t tvant to put my coat on,” I told Harold, and I tried to sound the way I used to when he was only ten and always tracking mud into the kitchen, but my heart was beating so hard I could hear it tapping in my voice.

“I’ve changed my mind about going out. I forgot how much I had to do today.” And then Ian gave the laugh “Why, Mother I hate even more than her syrupy little smile and said, Lois, what would you have to do that’s so important you can’t go up to Bangor with us after we’ve taken time off to come down to Derry and see you?”

“That woman always gets my back hair up, and I guess I do the same to her. I must, because I’ve never in my life known one woman to smile that much at another without hating her guts. Anyway, I told her I had to wash the kitchen floor, to start with. ’Just look at it,” I said.

“dirty as the devil.”

“’Huh!” Harold says. ’I can’t believe you’re going to send us back to the city empty-handed after we came all the way down here, Ma Well I’m not moving into that place no matter how far you came,” I said back, ’so you can get that idea right out of your head.

I’ve been living in Derry for thirty-five years, half my life.

All my friends are here, and I’m not moving.”

“They looked at each other the way parents do when they’ve got a kid who’s stopped being cute and started being a pain in the tail.

Janet patted my shoulder and said, ’Now don’t get all upset, Mother Lois-we only want you to come and look.” Like it was the brochures again, and all I had to do was be polite. just the same, her saying it was just to set my mind at ease a little. I should have known they couldn’t make me live there, or even afford it on their own.

It’s Mr. Chasse’s money they’re counting on to swing it-his pension and the railroad insurance I got because he died on the job.

“It turned out they had an appointment all made for eleven o’clock, and a man lined up to show me around and give me the whole pitch. I was mostly over being scared by the time I got all that straight in my mind, but I was hurt by the high-handed way they were treating me, and mad at how every other thing out of Janet’s mouth was Personal Days this and Personal Days that. it was pretty clear that she could think of a lot better ways to spend a day off than coming to Derry to see her fat old bag of a mother-in-law.

“’stop fluttering and come on, Mother,” she says after a little more back-and-forth, like I was so pleased with the whole idea I couldn’t even decide which hat to wear. ’Hop into your coat. I’ll help you clean up the breakfast things when we get back.”

“’You didn’t hear me,” I said. ’I’m not going anywhere. Why waste a beautiful fall day like this touring a place I’ll never live in?

And what gives you the right to drive down here and give me this kind of bum’s rush in the first place? Why didn’t one of you at least call and say, “We have an idea, Mom, want to hear it?” Isn’t that how you would have treated one of your friends?”

“And when I said that, they traded another glance.

Lois sighed, wiped her eyes a final time, and gave back Ralph’s handkerchief, damper but otherwise none the worse for wear.

“Well, I knew from that look that we hadn’t reached bottom yet.

Mostly it was the way Harold looked-like he did when he’d just hooked a handful of chocolate bits out of the bag in the pantry. And Janet… she gave him back the expression I dislike most of all. Her bulldozer look, I call it. And then she asked him if he wanted to tell me what the doctor had said, or if she should do it.

“In the end they both told it, and by the time they were done I was so mad and scared that I felt like yanking my hair out by the roots. The thing I just couldn’t seem to get over no matter how hard I tried was the thought of Carl Litchfield telling Harold all the things I thought were private. just calling him up and telling him, like there was nothing in the world wrong with it.

“’so you think I’m senile?” I asked Harold. ’Is that what it comes down to? You and Jan think I’ve gone soft in the attic at the advanced age of sixty-eight?”

“Harold got red in the face and started shuffling his feet under his chair and muttering under his breath. Something about how he didn’t think any such thing, but he had to consider my safety, just like I’d always considered his when he was growing up.

And all the time Janet was sitting at the counter, nibbling a muffin and giving him a look I could have killed her for-as if she thought he was just a cockroach that had learned to talk like a lawyer.

Then she got up and asked if she could ’use the facility.” I told her to go ahead, and managed to keep from saying it would be a relief to have her out of the room for two minutes.

“’Thanks, Mother Lois,” she says. ’I won’t be long. Harry and I have to leave soon. If you feel you can’t come with us and keep your appointment, then I guess there’s nothing more to say.”

“What a peach,” Ralph said.

“Well, that was the end of it for me; I’d had enough. ’I keep my appointments, Janet Chasse,” I said, ’but only the ones I make for myself. I don’t give a fart in a high wind for the ones other people make for me.”

“She tossed up her hands like I was the most unreasonable woman who ever walked the face of the earth, and left me with Harold.

He was looking at me with those big brown eyes of his, like he expected me to apologize. I almost felt like I should apologize, too, if only to get that cocker spaniel look off his face, but I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I just looked back at him, and after awhile he couldn’t stand it anymore and told me I ought to stop being mad. He said he was)’List worried about me down here all by myself, that he was only trying to be a good son and Janet was only trying to be a cood daughter.

“I guess I understand that,” I said, ’but you should know that sneaking around behind a person’s back is no way to express love and concern.” He got all stiff then, and said he and Jan didn’t see it as sneaking around. He cut his eyes toward the bathroom for a second or two when he said it, and I pretty much got the idea that what he meant was Jan didn’t see it as sneaking around. Then he told me it wasn’t the way I was making it out to be-that Litchfield it had called him, not the other way around.

“’All right,” I said back, ’but what kept you from hanging up once you realized what he’d called to talk to you about? That was just plain wrong, Harry. What in God’s good name got into you?”

“He started to flutter and flap around-I think he might even have been starting to apologize-when Jan came back and the youknow-what really hit the fan.

She asked where my diamond earrings were, the ones they’d given me for Christmas. It was such a change of direction that at first I could only sputter, and I suppose I sounded like I was going senile. But finally I managed to say they were in the little china dish on my bedroom bureau, same as always.

I have a jewelry box, but I keep those earrings and two or three other nice pieces out because they are so pretty that looking at them always cheers me up. Besides, they’re only clusters of diamond chips-it’s not like anyone would want to break in just to steal those.

Same with my engagement ring and my ivory cameo, which are the other two pieces I keep in that dish.”

Lois gave Ralph an intense, pleading look. He squeezed her hand again.

She smiled and took a deep breath. “This is very hard for me.”

“If you want to stop-”

“No, I want to finish… except that, past a certain point, I can’t remember what happened, anyway. It was all so horrible. You see, Janet said she knew where I kept them, but they weren’t there. My engagement ring was, and the cameo, but not my Christmas earrings. I went in to check myself, and she was right. We turned the place upside down, looked everywhere, but we didn’t find them. They’re gone.”

Lois was now gripping Ralph’s hands in both of her own, and seemed to be talking mostly to the zipper of his jacket.

“We took all the clothes out of the bureau… Harold pulled the bureau itself out from the wall and looked behind it… under the bed and the sofa cushions… and it seemed like every time I

looked at Janet, she was looking back at me, giving me that sweet, wide-eyed look of hers. Sweet as melting butter, it is-except in the eyes, anyway-and she didn’t have to come right out and say what she was thinking, because I already knew. ’You see? You see how right Dr. Litchfield was to call us, and how right we were to make that appointment? And how pigheaded you’re being? Because you need to be in a place like Riverview Estates, and this just proves it. You’ve lost the lovely earrings we gave you for Christmas, you’re having a serious decline in cognition, and this just proves it. It won’t be long before you’re leaving the stove-burners on… or the bathroom heater…”

“She began to cry again, and these tears made Ralph’s heart hurt. They were the deep, scouring sobs of someone who has been shamed to the deepest level of her being. Lois hid her face against his jacket.

He tightened his arm around her. Lois, he thought. Our Lois.

But no; he didn’t like the sound of that anymore, if he ever had.

My Lois, he thought, and at that instant, as if some greater power had approved, the day began to fill with light again. Sounds took on a new resonance. He looked down at his hands and Lois’s, entwined on her lap, and saw a lovely blue-gray nimbus around them, the color of cigarette smoke, The auras had returned.

“You should have sent them away the minute you realized the earrings were gone,” he heard himself say, and each word was separate and gorgeously unique, like a crystal thunderclap. “The very second.”

“Oh, I know that now,” Lois said. “She was just waiting for me to stick my foot in my mouth, and of course I obliged. But I was so upset-first the argument about whether or not I was going to Bangor i Ri with them to look at verview Estates, then hearing my doctor had told them things he had no right to tell them, and on top of all that, finding out I’d lost one of my most treasured possessions. And do you know what the cherry on top was? Having her be the one to discover those earrings were gone! Do you blame me for not knowing what to do?”

“No,” he said, and lifted her gloved hands to his mouth. The sound of them passing through the air was like the hoarse whisper of a palm sliding down a wool blanket, and for a moment he clearly saw the shape of his lips on the back of her right glove, printed there in a blue kiss.

Lois smiled. “Thank you, Ralph.”

“Welcome.”

“I suppose you have a pretty good idea of how things turned out, don’t you? Jan said, ’You really should take better care, Mother Lois, only Dr. Litchfield says you’ve come to a time of life when you really can’t take better care, and that’s why we’ve been thinking about Riverview Estates. I’m sorry we ruffled your feathers, but it seemed important to move quickly. Now you see why.”

“Ralph looked up.

Overhead, the sky was a cataract of green-blue fire filled with clouds that looked like chrome airboats. He looked down the hill and saw Rosalie still lying between the Portosans. The dark gray balloon-string rose from her snout, wavering in the cool October breeze.

“I got really mad, then-” She broke off and smiled. Ralph thought it was the first smile he’d seen from her today which expressed real humor instead of some less pleasant and more complicated emotion.

“No-that’s not right. I did more than just get mad.

If my great-nephew had been there, he would have said ’Nana went nuclear.”

“Ralph laughed and Lois laughed with him, but her half sounded a trifle forced.

“What galls me is that Janet knew I would,” she said. “She wanied me to go nuclear, I think, because she knew how guilty I’d feel later on. And God knows I do. I screamed at them to get the hell out.

Harold looked like he wanted to sink right through the floorboards-shouting has always made him so embarrassed-but Jan just sat there with her hands folded in her lap, smiling and actually nodding her head, as if to say ’That’s right, Mother Lois, you go on and get all that nasty old poison out of your system, and when it’s gone, maybe you’ll be ready to hear sense.” Lois took a deep breath.

“Then something happened. I’m not sure just what. This wasn’t the first time, either, but it was the worst time. I’m afraid it was some kind of… well… some kind of seizure. Anyway, I started to see Janet in a really funny way… a really scary way. And I said something that finally got to her. I can’t remember what it was, and I’m not sure I want to know, but it certainly wiped that sweetysweety-sweet smile I hate so much off her face. In fact, she just about dragged Harold out. The last thing I remember her saying is that one of them would call me when I wasn’t so hysterical that I couldn’t help making ugly accusations about the people who loved me.

“I stayed in my house for a little while after they were gone, and then I came out to sit in the park. Sometimes just sitting in the sun makes a body feel better. I stopped in the Red Apple for a snack and that’s when I heard you and Bill had a fight. Are you and he’ really on the outs, do you think?”

Ralph shook his head. “Nah-we’ll make it up. I really like Bill, but-”

ri

“-but you have to be careful what you say with him,” she rushed.

“Also, Ralph, may I add that you can’t take what he says back to YOu too seriously?”

This time it was Ralph who gave their linked hands a squeeze.

“That might be good advice for you, too, Lois-you shouldn’t take what happened this morning too seriously.”

She sighed. “Maybe, but it’s hard not to. I said some terrible things at the end, Ralph. Terrible. That awful smile of hers…”

A rainbow of understanding suddenly lit Ralph’s consciousness.

In its glow he saw a very large thing, so large it seemed both unquestionable and preordained. He fully faced Lois for the first time since the auras had returned to him… or since he had returned to them. She sat in a capsule of translucent gray light as bright as fog on a summer morning which is about to turn sunny. It transformed the woman Bill McGovern called “Our Lois” into a creature of great dignity… and almost unbearable beauty.

She looks like Eos, he thought. Goddess of the dawn.

Lois stirred uneasily on the bench. “Ralph? Why are you looking at me that way?”

Because you’re beautiful, and because I’ve fallen in love with you, Ralph thought, amazed. Right now I’m so in love with you that I feel as if I’m drowning, and the dying’s fine.

“Because you remember exactly what you said.”

She began to play nervously with the clasp of her purse again.

“No, I-”

“Yes you do. You told your daughter-in-law that she took your earrings. She did it because she realized you were going to stick to your guns about not going with them, and not getting what she wants makes your daughter-in-law crazy… it makes her go nuclear. She did it because you pissed her off. Isn’t that about the size of it?”

Lois was looking at him with round, frightened eyes. “How do you know that, Ralph? How do you know that about her?”

“I know it because you know it, and you know it because you saw it.”

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “No, I didn’t see anything. I was in the kitchen with Harold the whole time.”

“Not then, not when she did it, but when she came back. You saw it in her and all around her.”

As he himself now saw Harold Chasse’s wife in Lois, as if the woman sitting beside him on the bench had become a lens. Janet Chasse was tall, fair-skinned, and long-waisted. Her cheeks were spattered with freckles she covered with makeup, and her hair was a vivid, gingery shade of red. This morning she had come to Derry with that fabulous hair lying over one shoulder in a bulky braid like a sheaf of copper wire. What else did he know about this woman he had never met?

Everything, everything.

She covers her freckles With pancake because she thinks they make her look childish. that people don’t take women with freckles seriously.

Her legs are beautiful and she knows it. She wears short skirts to work, but today when she came to see (the old bitch) Mother Lot’s, she was wearing a cardigan and an old pair of jeans.

Derry dress-downs. Her period I’s overdue. She’s reached that time Of life when it doesn’t come as regular as clockwork anymore, and during that uneasy two-or three-day pause she suffers through every month, a pause when the whole world seems made of glass and everyone in it seems either stupid or wicked, her behave. or and her moods have become erratic. That’s probably the real reason she did what she did.

Ralph saw her coming out of Lois’s tiny bathroom. Saw her shoot an intense, furious glance toward the kitchen door-there is no sign of the sweety-sweety-sweet smile on that narrow, intense face now and then scoop the earrings out of the china dish. Saw her cram them into the left front pocket of her jeans.

No, Lois had not actually witnessed this small, ugly theft, but it had changed the color of Jan Chasse’s aura from pale green to a complex, layered pattern of browns and reds which Lois had seen and understood at once, probably without the slightest idea of what was really happening to her.

“She took them, all right,” Ralph said. He could see a gray mist drifting dreamily across the pupils of Lois’s wide eyes. He could have looked at it for the rest of the day.

“Yes, but-”

“If you’d agreed to keep the appointment at Riverview Estates after all, I bet you would have found them again after her next visit… or she would have found them, I guess that’s more likely. just a lucky accident-’Oh, Mother Lois, come see what I found!”

Under the bathroom sink, or in a closet, or lying in some dark corner.”

“Yes.” She was looking into his face now, fascinated, almost hypnotized. “She must feel terrible… and she won’t dare bring them back, will she? Not after the things I said. Ralph, how did you know?”

“The same way you did. How long have you been seeing the auras, Lois?”

“Auras? I don’t know what you mean.” Except she did.

“Litchfield told your son about the insomnia, but I doubt if that alone would have been enough to get even Litchfield to… you know, tattle. The other thing-what you said he called sensory problems-went right by me. I was too amazed by the idea of anyone thinking you could possibly be prematurely senile, I guess, even though I’ve been having my own sensory problems lately.”

You.

“Yes ma’am. Then, just a little bit ago, you said something even more interesting. You said you started to see Janet in a really funny way. A really scary way. You couldn’t remember what you said just before the two of them walked out, but you knew exactly how you felt.

You’re seeing the other part of the world-the rest of the world.

Shapes around things, shapes inside things, sounds within sounds.

I call it the world of auras, and that’s what you’re experiencing.

Isn’t it, Lois?”

She looked at him silently for a moment, then put her hands over her face. “I thought I was losing my mind,” she said, and then said it again: “Oh Ralph, I thought I was losing my mind.”

He hugged her, then let her go and tilted her chin up. “No more tears,” he said. “I didn’t bring a spare hanky.”

“No more tears,” she agreed, but her eyes were already brimming again. “Ralph, if you only knew how awful it’s been-”

“I do know.”

She smiled radiantly. “Yes… you do, don’t you?”

“What made that idiot Litchfield decide you were slipping into senility-except Alzheimer’s is probably what he had in mindwasn’t just Insomnia but insomnia accompanied by something else… something he decided were hallucinations. Right?”

“I guess, but he didn’t say anything like that at the time. When I told him about the things I’d been seeing-the colors and all-he seemed very understanding.”

“Uh-huh, and the minute you were out the door he called your son and told him to get the hell down to Derry and do something about old Mom, who’s started seeing people walking around in colored envelopes with long balloon-strings floating up from their heads.”

“You see those, too? Ralph, you see those, too?”

“Me too,” he said, and laughed. It sounded a bit loonlike, and he wasn’t surprised. There were a hundred things he wanted to ask her; wasn’t he felt crazed with impatience. And there was something else, something so unexpected he hadn’t even been able to identify it at first: he was horny. Not just interested; actually horny.

Lois was crying again. Her tears were the color of mist on a still lake, and they smoked a little as they slipped down her cheeks.

Ralph knew they would taste dark and mossy, like fiddleheads in spring.

“Ralph… this… this is… oh my!”

“Bigger than Michael Jackson at the Super Bowl, isn’t it?” She laughed weakly. “Well, just… you know, just a little.”

“There’s a name for what’s happening to us, Lois, and it’s not insomnia or senility or Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s hyper-reality.”

“Hyper-reality,” she murmured. “God, what an exotic word!”

“Yes, it is. A pharmacist down the street at Rite Aid, Joe Wyzer, told it to me. Only there’s a lot more to it than he knew. More than anyone in their right minds would guess.”

“Yes, like telepathy… if it’s really happening, that is. Ralph, are we in our right minds?”

“Did your daughter-in-law take your earrings?”

“I… she… yes.” Lois straightened. “Yes, she did.”

“No doubts?”

“No.”

“Then you’ve answered your own question. We’re sane, all right… but I think you’re wrong about the telepathy part. It isn’t minds we read, but auras. Listen, Lois, there’s all sorts of things I want to ask you, but I have an idea that right now there’s only one thing I really have to know. Have you seen-” He stopped abruptly, wondering if he really wanted to say what was on the tip of his tongue.

“Have I seen what?”

“Okay. This is going to sound crazier than anything you’ve told me, but I’m not crazy. Do you believe that? I’m not. “I believe you,” she said simply, and Ralph felt a vast weight slip from his heart. She was telling the truth. There was no question about it;

her belief shone all around her. “Okay, listen. Since this started happening to you, have you seen certain people who don’t look like they belong on Harris Avenue-?

People who don’t look like they belong anywhere in the ordinary world?” Lois was looking at him with puzzled incomprehension. “They’re bald, they’re very short, they wear white smock tops, and what they look like more than anything are the drawings of space aliens they sometimes have on the front pages of those tabloid newspapers they sell in the Red Apple. You haven’t seen anyone like that when you’ve been having one of these hyper-reality attacks?”

“No, no one.”

He banged a fist on his leg in frustration, thought for a moment, then looked up again. “Monday morning,” he said. “Before the cops showed up at Mrs. Locher’s… did you see me?”

Very slowly, Lois nodded her head. Her aura had darkened slightly, and spirals of scarlet, thin as threads, began to twist slowly up through it on a diagonal.

“I imagine you have a pretty good idea of who called the police, then,” Ralph said. “Don’t you?”

“Oh, I know it was you,” Lois said in a small voice. “I suspected before, but I wasn’t sure until just now. Until I saw it… you know, in your colors.”

In my colors, he thought. It was what Ed had called them, too.

“But you didn’t see two pint-sized versions of Mr. Clean come out of her house?”

“No,” she said, “but that doesn’t -mean anything. I can’t even see Mrs. Locher’s house from my bedroom window. The Red Apple’s roof is in the way.”

Ralph laced his hands together on top of his head. Of course it was, and he should have known it.

“The reason I thought you called the police is that just before I went to take a shower, I saw you looking at something through a pair of binoculars. I never saw you do that before, but I thought maybe you just wanted a better look at the stray dog who raids the garbage cans on Thursday mornings.” She pointed down the hill. “Him.” Ralph grinned. “That’s no him, that’s the gorgeous Rosalie.”

“Oh. Anyway, I was in the shower a long time, because there’s a special rinse I put in my hair. Not color,” she said sharply, as if he had accused her of this, “just proteins and things that are supposed to keep it looking a little thicker. When I came out, the police were flocking all around. I looked over your way once, but I couldn’t see you anymore. You’d either gone into a different room or kind of scrunched back in your chair. You do that, sometimes.”

Ralph shook his head as if to clear it. He hadn’t been in an empty theater on all those nights, after all; someone else had been there, too. They had just been in separate boxes.

“Lois, the fight Bill and I had wasn’t really about chess. It-” Down the hill, Rosalie voiced a rusty bark and began struggling to her feet.

Ralph looked in that direction and felt an icicle slip into his belly.

Although the two of them had been sitting here for going on half an hour and no one had even come near the comfort stations at the bottom of the hill, the pressed plastic door of the Portosan marked MEN was now slowly opening.

Doc #3 emerged from it. McGovern’s hat, the Panama with the crescent bitten in the brim, was cocked back on his head, making him look weirdly as McGovern had on the day Ralph had first seen him in his brown fedora-like an enquiring newshawk in a forties crime drama.

Upraised in one hand the bald stranger held the rusty scalpel.

CHAPTER 13

“Lois?” To Ralph’s own ears, his voice seemed to be an echo winding down a long, deep canyon. “Lois, do you see that?”

“I don’t-” Her voice broke off. “Did the wind blow that bathroom door open? It didn’t, did it? Is someone there? Is that why the dog’s making that racket?”

Rosalie backed slowly away from the bald man, her ragged ears laid back, her muzzle wrinkled to expose teeth so badly eroded that they were not much more menacing than hard rubber pegs. She uttered a cracked volley of barks, then began to whine desperately.

“Yes! Don’t you see him, Lois? Look! He’s right there.i”

Ralph got to his feet. Lois got up with him, shielding her eyes with one hand. She peered down the slope with desperate intensity, “I see a shimmer, that’s all. Like the air over an incinerator.”

“I told you to leave her alone.” Ralph shouted down the hill.

“Quit it! Get the hell out!”

The bald man looked in Ralph’s direction, but there was no surprise in the glance this time; it was casual, dismissive. He raised the middle finger of his right hand, flicked it at Ralph in the ancient salute, then bared his own teeth-much sharper and much more menacing than Rosalie’s-in a silent laugh.

Rosalie cringed as the little man in the dirty smock began to walk toward her again, then actually raised a paw and put it on her own head, a cartoonish gesture that should have been funny and was horribly expressive of her terror instead.

“What can’t I see, Ralph?” Lois moaned. “I see something, but-”

“Get AWAYfrom her.” Ralph shouted, and raised his hand in that karate-chop gesture again. The hand inside-the hand which earlier had produced that wedge of tight blue light-still felt like an unloaded gun, however, and this time the bald doc seemed to know it. He glanced in Ralph’s direction and offered a small, jeering wave.

[Aw, quit it, Shorts-sit back, shut up, and enjoy the show.] The creature at the foot of the hill returned his attention to Rosalie, who sat huddled at the base of an old pine. The tree was emitting a thin green fog from the cracks in its bark. The bald doctor bent over Rosalie, one hand outstretched in a gesture of solicitude that went very badly with the scalpel curled into his left fist.

Rosalie whined… then stretched her neck forward and humbly licked the bald creature’s palm.

Ralph looked down at his own hands, sensing something in them, not the power he’d had before, nothing like that, but something.

Suddenly there were snaps of clear white light dancing just above his nails. It was as if his fingers had been turned into sparkplugs.

Lois was grabbing frantically at him now. “What’s wrong with the dog? Ralph, what’s wrong with it?”

With no thought about what he was doing or why, Ralph put his hands over Lois’s eyes, like someone playing Guess Who with a loved one. His fingers flashed a momentary white so bright it was almost blinding. Must be the white they’re always talking about in the detergent commercials, he thought.

Lois screamed. Her hands flew to his wrists, clamped on them, then loosened. “My God, Ralph, what did you do to me?”

He took his hands away and saw a glowing figure-eight surrOLinding her eyes; it was as if she had just taken off a pair of goggles which had been dipped in confectioners’ sugar. The white began to dim almost as soon as his hands were gone… except…

It’s not dimming, he thought. It’s sinking in.

“Never mind,” he said, and pointed. “Look!”

The widening of her eyes told him what he needed to know.

Doc #3, completely unmoved by Rosalie’s desperate effort to make friends, shoved her muzzle aside with the hand holding the scalpel, He seized the old bandanna hanging around her neck in his other hand and yanked her head up. Rosalie howled miserably. Slobber ran back along the sides of her face. The bald man voiced a scabrous chuckle that made Ralph’s flesh crawl.

[“Hi! Leave off! Leave off teasing that dog.t"l The bald man’s head snapped around. The grin ran off his face and he snarled at Lois, sounding a little like a dog himself, [Yahh, go fuck Yourself, You fat old Short-Time cunt. Dog’s mine, just like I already told your limpdick boyfriend!] The bald man had let go of the blue bandanna when Lois shouted at him, and Rosalie was now cringing back against the pine again, her eyes rolling, curds of foam dripping from the sides of her muzzle.

Ralph had never seen such a completely terrified creature in his life.

“Run!” Ralph screamed. “Get away.", She seemed not to hear him, and after a moment Ralph realized she wasn’t hearing him, because Rosalie was no longer entirely there.

The bald doctor had done something to her already-had pulled her at least partway out of ordinary reality like a farmer using his tractor and a length of chain to pull a stump.

Ralph tried once more, anyway.

[“Run, Rosalie.” Run away."’] This time her laid-back ears cocked forward and her head began to turn in Ralph’s direction. He didn’t know if she would have obeyed him or not, because the bald man renewed his hold on the bandanna before she could even begin to move. He yanked her head up again.

“He’s going to kill it!” Lois screamed. “He’s going to cut its throat with that thing he has! Don’t let him, Ralph! Make him stop!”

“I can’t! Maybe you can! Shoot him! Shoot your hand at him!”

She looked at him, not understanding. Ralph made frantic woodchopping gestures with his right hand, but before Lois could respond, Rosalie gave a dreadful lost howl. The bald doc raised the scalpel and brought it down, but it wasn’t Rosalie’s throat he cut.

He cut her balloon-string.

A thread emerged from each of Rosalie’s nostrils and floated upward.

They twined together about six inches above her snout, making a delicate pigtail, and it was at this point that Baldy #3’s scalpel did its work. Ralph watched, frozen with horror, as the severed pigtail rose into the sky like the string of a released helium balloon. It was unravelling as it went. He thought it would tangle in the branches of the old pine, but it didn’t. When the ascending balloon-string finally did meet one of the branches, it simply passed through.

Of course, Ralph thought. The same way this guy’s buddies walked through May Locher’s locked front door after they finished doing the same thing to her.

This idea was followed by a thought too simple and gruesomely logical not to be believed: not space-aliens, not little bald doctors, but Centurions. Ed Deepneau’s Centurions. They didn’t look like the Roman solders you saw in tin-pants epics like Spartacus and Ben Hur, true, but they had to be Centurions… didn’t they?

Sixteen or twenty feet above the ground, Rosalie’s balloon-string simply faded away to nothingness.

Ralph looked back down in time to see the bald dwarf pull the faded blue bandanna off over the dog’s head and then push hr down at the base of the tree. Ralph looked at her more closely and felt all his flesh shrink closer to his bones. His dream of Carolyn recurred with cruel intensity, and he found himself struggling to bottle up a shriek of terror.

Right, that’s right, Ralph, don’t scream. You don’t Want to do that because once you start, you might not be able to stop-you might just go on doing it until your throat bursts. Remember Lois, because she’s in this now, too. Remember Lois and don’t start screaming.

I Ah, but it was hard not to, because e the dream-bugs which had come spewing out of Carolyn’s head were now pouring from Rosalie’s nostrils in writhing black streams.

Those aren’t bugs. I don’t know What they are, but they are not bugs.

No, not bugs-just another kind of aura. Nightmarish black stuff, neither liquid nor gas, was pumping out of Rosalie with each exhaled breath. It did not float away but instead began to surround her in slow, nasty coils of anti-light. That blackness should have hidden her from view, but it didn’t. Ralph could see her pleading, terrified eyes as the darkness gathered around her head and then began to ooze down her back and sides and legs, It was a deathbag, a real deathbag this time, and he was chilled as Rosalie, her balloon-string now cut, wove it relentlessly about herself like a Poisonous placental sac.

This metaphor triggered the voice of Ed Deepneau inside his head, Ed saying that the Centurions were ripping babies from the wombs of their mothers and taking them away in covered trucks.

Ever onder what was under most of those tarps? Ed had asked.

Doc #3 stood grinning down at Rosalie. Then he untied the knot in her bandanna and put it around his own neck, tying it in a loose knot, making it look like a bohemian artist’s necktie. This done, he looked up at Ralph and Lois with an expression of loathsome complacency.

There his look said. I took care of my business after all, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it, was there?

[“Do something, Ralph! Please do something Make him stop!”] Too late for that, but maybe not too late to send him packing before he could enjoy the sight of Rosalie dropping dead at the foot of the tree.

He was pretty sure Lois couldn’t produce a karate-chop of blue light as he had done, but maybe she could do something else.

Yes-she can shoot him in her own way.

He didn’t know why he was so sure of that, but suddenly he was.

He grabbed Lois by the shoulders to make her look at him, then raised his right hand. He cocked his thumb and pointed his forefinger at the bald man. He looked like a small child playing cops and robbers.

Lois responded with a look of dismay and incomprehension.

Ralph grabbed her hand and stripped off her glove.

[“You! You, Lois.” She got the idea, raised her own hand, extended her forefinger, and made the child’s shooting gesture: Pow!

Pow!

Two compact lozenge shapes, their gray-blue shade identical to Lois’s aura but much brighter, flew from the end of her finger and streaked down the hill.

Doc #3 screeched and leaped upward, fisted hands held at shoulder-height, the heels of his black shoes clipping against his buttocks, as the first of these “bullets” went under him. It struck the ground, rebounded like a flat stone skipped across the surface of a pond, and hit the Portosan marked WOMEN. For a moment the entire front of it glowed fiercely, as the window of the Burry-Burry had done.

The second blue-gray pellet clipped the baldy’s left hip and ricocheted up into the sky. He screamed-a high, chattery sound that seemed to twist like a worm in the middle of Ralph’s head. Ralph raised his hands to his ears even though it could do no good, and saw Lois doing the same thing, He felt sure that if that scream went on for long, it would burst his head open just as surely as high C shatters fine crystal.

Doc #3 fell to the needle-carpeted ground beside Rosalie and rolled back and forth, howling and holding his hip the way a small child will hold the place he banged when he tumbled off his tricycle.

After a few moments of this, his cries began to diminish and he scrambled to his feet. His eyes blazed at them from below the white expanse of his brow. Bill’s Panama was tilted far back on his head now, and the left side of his smock was black and smoking.

[I’ll get you I’ll get you both! Goddam interfering Short-Timed fucks! I’ll GET YOU BOTH.” He whirled and bounded down the path which led to the playground and the tennis courts, running in big flying leaps like an astronaut on the moon. Lois’s shot didn’t appear to have done any real damage, judging by his speed afoot.

Lois seized Ralph’s shoulder and shook him. As she did, the auras began to fade again.

“The children! It’s going to-” She was fading out, and that seemed to make perfect sense, because he suddenly saw that Lois wasn’t really talking at all, only staring at him fixedly with her dark eyes as she clutched his shoulder.

“I can’t hear you!” he yelled. “Lois, I can’t hear you!”

“What’s wrong, are you deaf? It’s going toward the playground!

Toward the children! We can’t let it hurt the children-!”

Ralph let out a deep, shuddering sigh. “It won’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I don’t know. I just am.”

“I shot it.” She turned her finger toward her face, for a moment looking like a woman who mimes suicide. “I shot it with my finger.”

“Uh-huh. It stung him, too. Hard, from the way he looked.”

“I can’t see the colors anymore, Ralph.”

He nodded. “They come and go, like radio stations at night.”

“I don’t know how I feel… I don’t even know how I want to feel!” She wailed this last, and Ralph folded her into his arms. In spite of everything that was going on in his life right now, one fact registered very clearly: it was wonderful to be holding a woman again.

“That’s okay,” he told her, and pressed his face against the top of her head. Her hair smelled sweet, with none of the underlying murk of beauty-shop chemicals he’d gotten used to in Carolyn’s hair over the last ten or fifteen years of their life together. “Let go of it for now, okay?”

She looked at him. He could no longer see the faint mist drifting across her pupils, but felt sure it was still there. And besides, they were very pretty eyes even without the extra added attraction.

“What’s it for, Ralph? Do you know what it’s for?”

He shook his head. His mind was whirling with igsaw pieceshats, docs, bugs, protest signs, dolls that exploded in splatters of fake blood-that would not fit together. And for the time being, at least, the thing that seemed to recur with the most resonance was Old Doris nonsense saying: Done-bun-can’the-undone.

Ralph had an idea that was nothing but the truth.

A sad little whine came to his ears and Ralph looked down the hill.

Rosalie was lying at the base of the big pine, trying to get up.

Ralph could no longer see the black bag around her, but he was sure it was still there.

“Oh Ralph, the poor thing! What can we do?”

There was nothing they could do. Ralph was sure of it. He took Lois’s right hand in both of his and waited for Rosalie to lie back and die.

Instead of that, she gave a whole-body lurch that sent her so strongly to her feet that she almost toppled over the other way. She stood still for a moment, her head held so low her muzzle was almost on the ground, and then sneezed three or four times, With that out of the way, she shook herself and looked up at Ralph and Lois. She yapped at them once, a short, brisk sound. To Ralph it sounded as if she were telling them to quit worrying. Then she turned and made off through a little grove of pine trees toward the park’s lower entrance. Before Ralph lost sight of her, she had achieved the limping yet insouciant trot which was her trademark. The hum leg was no better than it had been before Doc #3’s interference, but it seemed no worse. Clearly old but seemingly a long way from dead (just like the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks, Ralph thought), she disappeared into the trees.

“I thought that thing was going to kill her,” Lois said. “In fact, I thought it had killed her.”

“Me too,” Ralph said.

“Ralph, did all that really happen? It did, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“The balloon-strings… do you think they’re lifelines?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes. Like umbilical cords. And Rosalie.

He thought back to his first real experience with the auras, of how he’d stood outside the Rite Aid with his back to the blue mailbox and his jaw hanging down almost to his breastbone. Of the sixty or seventy people he had observed before the auras faded again, only a few had been walking inside the dark envelopes he now thought of as deathbags, and the one Rosalie had knitted around herself just now had been blacker by far than any he had seen that day. Still, those people in the parking lot whose auras had been dingy-dark had invariably looked unwell… like Rosalie, whose aura had been the color of old sweat-socks even before Baldy #3 started messing with her.

Maybe he Just hurried up what may otherwise be a perfectly natural process, he thought.

“Ralph?” Lois asked. “What about Rosalie?”

“I think my old friend Rosalie is living on borrowed time now,” Ralph said.

Lois considered this, looking down the hill and into the sun-dusty grove where Rosalie had disappeared. At last she turned to Ralph ’ “That midget with the scalpel was one of the men you saw again coming out of May Locher’s house, wasn’t he?”

“No. Those were two other ones.”

“Have you seen more?”

“No.”

“Do you think there are more?”

“I don’t know.”

He had an idea that next she’d ask if Ralph had noticed that the creature had been wearing Bill’s Panama, but she didn’t. Ralph supposed it was possible she hadn’t recognized it. Too much weirdness swirling around, and besides, there hadn’t been a chunk bitten out of the brim the last time she’d seen Bill wearing it. Retired history teachers just aren’t the hat-biting type, he reflected, and grinned.

“This has been quite a morning, Ralph.” Lois met his gaze frankly,?

eye to eye. “I think we need to talk about this, don’t you I really need to know what’s going on.”

Ralph remembered this morning-a thousand years ago, now-walking back down the street from the picnic area, running over his short list of acquaintances, trying to decide whom he should talk to.

He had crossed Lois off that mental list on the grounds that she might gossip to her girlfriends, and he was now embarrassed by that facile judgement, which had been based more on McGovern’s picture of Lois than on his own. It turned out that the only person Lois had spoken to about the auras before today was the one person she should have been able to trust to keep her secret.

He nodded at her. “You’re right. We need to talk.”

“Would you like to come back to my house for a little late lunch?

I make a pretty mean stir-fry for an old gal who can’t keep track of her earrings,”

“I’d love to. I’ll tell you what I know, but it’s going to take awhile.

When I talked to Bill this morning, I gave him the Reader’s Digest version.

“So,” Lois said. “The fight was about chess, was it?”

“Well, maybe not,” Ralph said, smiling down at his hands.

“Maybe it was actually more like the fight you had with your son and your daughter-in-law. And I didn’t even tell him the craziest parts.”

“But you’ll tell me?”

“Yes,” he said, and started to get up. “I’ll bet you’re a hell of a good cook, too, In fact-” He stopped suddenly and clapped one hand to his chest. He sat back down on the bench, heavily, his eyes wide and his mouth ajar.

“Ralph? Are you all right?”

Her alarmed voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. In his mind’s eye he was seeing Baldy #3 again, standing between the Burry-Burry and the apartment house next door. Baldy #3 trying to get Rosalie to cross Harris Avenue so he could cut her balloon-string.

He’d failed then, but he’d gotten the job done (I was gonna play with her before the morning was out.

Maybe the fact that Bill McGovern isn’t the hat-biting type wasn’t the only reason Lot’s didn’t notice whose hat Baldy #3 was wearing, Ralph old buddy. Maybe she didn’t notice because she didn’t want to notice. Maybe there are a couple of pieces here that fit together, and if you’re right about that, the implications are wide-ranging. You see that, don’t you.)

“Ralph? What’s wrong?”

He saw the dwarf snatching a bite from the brim of the Panama and then clapping it back on his head. Heard him saying he guessed he would have to play with Ralph instead.

But not just me. Me and my friends, he said. Me and my asshole friends.

Now, thinking back on it, he saw something else, as well. He saw the sun striking splinters of fire from the lobes of Doc #3’s ears as he-or it-chomped into the brim of McGovern’s hat. The memory was too clear to deny, and so were those implications.

Those wide-ranging implications.

Take it easy-you don’t know a thing for sure, and the funny-farm is just over the horizon, my friend. I think you need to remember that, maybe use it as an anchor. I don’t care if Lois is also seeing all this stuff or not. The other men in the white coats, not the pint-sized baldies but the muscular guys with the butterfly nets and the Thorazine shots, can show up at any time. Any old time at all.

But still.

Still.

“Ralph! Jesus Christ, talk to me!” Lois was shaking him now and shaking hard, like a wife trying to rouse a husband who is going to be late for work.

He looked around at her and tried to manufacture a smile. It felt false from the inside but must have looked all right to Lois, because she relaxed. A little, anyway. “Sorry,” he said. “For a few seconds there it all just sort of… you know, ganged up on me.”

“Don’t you scare me like that! The way you grabbed your chest, my God!”

“I’m fine,” Ralph said, and forced his false smile even wider. He felt like a kid pulling a wad of Silly Putty, seeing how far he could stretch it before it thinned enough to tear. “And if you’re still cookin, I’m still eatin.”

Three-six-nine, bon, the goose drank wine.

Lois took a close look at him and then relaxed. “Good. That would be fun. I haven’t cooked for anyone but Simone and Minathey’re my girlfriends, you know-in a long time.” Then she laughed. “Except that isn’t what I mean, That isn’t why it would t)e, you know, fun.”

“What do you mean?”

“That I haven’t cooked for a man in a long time. I hope I haven’t forgotten how.”

“Well, there was the day Bill and I came in to watch the DeNx,s with you-we had macaroni and cheese. It was good, too.”

She made a dismissive gesture. “Reheated. Not the same.”

The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. The line broke.

Smiling wider than ever. Waiting for the rips to start. “I’M sure you haven’t forgotten how, Lois.”

“Mr. Chasse had a very hearty appetite, All sorts of hearty appetites, in fact. But then he started having his liver trouble, and…”

She sighed, then reached for Ralph’s arm and took it with a mixture of timidity and resolution he found completely endearing, “Now is the mind. I’m tired of snivelling and moaning about the past. I’ll leave that to Bill. Let’s go.”

He stood up, linked his arm through hers, and walked her down the hill and toward the lower entrance to the park. Lois beamed blindingly at the young mothers in the playground as she and Ralph passed them.

Ralph was glad for the distraction. He could tell himself to withhold judgement, he could remind himself over and over again that he didn’t know enough about what was happening to him and Lois to even kid himself that he could think logically about it, but he kept jumping at that conclusion anyway. The conclusion felt right to his heart, and he had already come a long way toward believing that, in the world of ose to identical.

I don’t know about the other two, but #3 is one crazy medic… and he takes souvenirs. Takes them the way some of the crazies In Vietnam took ears.

That Lois’s daughter-in-law had given in to an evil impulse, scooping the diamond earrings from the china dish and putting them in the pocket of her jeans, he had no doubt. But Janet Chasse no longer had them; even now she was no doubt reproaching herself bitterly for having lost them and wondering why she had ever taken them in the first place.

Ralph knew the shrimp with the scalpel had McGovern’s hat even if Lois had failed to recognize it, and they had both seen him take Rosalie’s bandanna. What Ralph had realized as he started to get up from the bench was that those splinters of light he had seen reflected from the bald creature’s earlobes almost certainly meant that Doc #3 had Lois’s earrings, as well.

The late Mr. Chasse’s rocking chair stood on faded linoleum by the door to the back porch. Lois led Ralph to it and admonished him to “stay out from underfoot. Ralph thought this was an assignment he could handle. Strong light, mid-afternoon light, fell across his lap as he sat and rocked. Ralph wasn’t sure how it had gotten so late so fast, but somehow it had. Maybe I fell asleep, he thought. Maybe I’m asleep right now, and dreaming all this. He watched as Lois took down a wok (definitely hobbit-sized) from an overhead cupboard.

Five minutes later, savory smells began to fill the kitchen.

“I told you I’d cook for you someday,” Lois said, adding vegetables from the fridge crisper and spices from one of the overhead cabinets. “That was the same day I gave you and Bill the leftover macaroni and cheese. Do you remember?”

“I believe I do,” Ralph said, smiling.

“There’s a jug of fresh cider in the milk-box on the front porchcider always keeps best outside. Would you get it? You can pour out, too. My good glasses are in the cupboard over the sink, the one I can’t reach without dragging over a chair. You’re tall enough to do without the chair, I judge. What are you, Ralph, about six-two?”

“Six-three. At least I was; I guess maybe I’ve lost an inch or two in the last ten years. Your spine settles, or something. And you don’t have to go putting on the dog just for me. Honest.”

She looked at him levelly, hands on hips, the spoon with which she had been stirring the contents of the wok jutting from one of them.

Her severity was offset by a trace of a smile. “I said my good glasses, Ralph Roberts, not my best glasses.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, grinning, then added: “From the way that smells, I guess you still remember how to cook for a man.”

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” Lois replied, but Ralph thought she looked pleased as she turned back to the wok.

The food was good, and they didn’t talk about what had happened in the park as they applied themselves to it. Ralph’s appetite had become uncertain, out more often than in, since his insomnia had really begun to bite, but today he ate heartily and chased Lois’s spicy stir-fry with three glasses of apple cider (hoping uneasily as he finished the last one that the rest of the day’s activities wouldn’t take him too far from a toilet). When they had finished, Lois got up, went to the sink, and began to draw hot water for dishes. As she did, she resumed their earlier conversation as if it were a half-finished piece of knitting which had been temporarily laid aside for some other, more pressing, chore.

“What did you do to me?” she asked him. “What did you do to make the colors come back?”

“I don’t know.”

“It was as if I was on the edge of that world, and when you put your hands over my eyes, you pushed me into it.”

He nodded, remembering how she’d looked in the first few seconds after he’d removed his hands-as if she’d just taken off a pair of goggles which had been dipped in powdered sugar. “It was pure instinct. And you’re right, it is like a world. I keep thinking of it just that way, as the world of auras.”

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I mean, it’s scary, and when it first started to happen to me-back in late July or early August, this was-I was sure I was going crazy, but even then I liked it, too. I couldn’t help liking it.”

Ralph gazed at her, startled. Had he once upon a time thought of Lois as transparent? Gossipy? Unable to keep a secret?

No, I’m afraid it is a little more than that, old buddy.)’On thought she was shallow. You saw her pretty much through Bill’s eyes, as a matter of fact: as “Our Lois.” No less… but not much more.

“What?” she asked, a little uneasily. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’ve been seeing these auras since summer? That long?”

“Yes-brighter and brighter. Also more often. That’s why I finally went to see the tattletale. Did I really shoot that thing with my finger, Ralph? The more time goes by, the less I can believe that part of it.”

“You did. I did something like it myself shortly before I ran into you.”

He told her about his earlier confrontation with Doc #3, and about how he had banished the dwarf… temporarily, at least, He raised his hand to his shoulder and brought it swiftly down. “That’s all I did-like a kid pretending to be Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal.

But it sent this incredible bolt of blue light at him, and he scurried in a hurry. Which was probably for the best, because I couldn’t have done it again. I don’t know how I did that, either.

Could you have shot your finger again?”

Lois giggled, turned toward him, and cocked her finger in his general direction. “Want to find out? Kapow! Kablam!”

“Don’t point dat ding at me, lady,” Ralph told her. He smiled as he said it, but wasn’t entirely sure he was joking.

Lois lowered her finger and squirted joy into the sink. As she began to stir the water around with one hand, puffing up the suds, she asked what Ralph thought of as the Big Questions: “Where did this power come from, Ralph? And what’s it for?”

He shook his head as he got up and walked over to the dish drainer. “I don’t know and I don’t know.

How’s that for helpful?

Where do you keep your dish-wipers, Lois?”

“Never mind where I keep my dish-wipers. Go sit down. Please tell me you’re not one of these modern men, Ralph-the ones that are always hugging each other and bawling.”

Ralph laughed and shook his head. “Nope. I was just well trained, that’s all.”

“Okay. As long as you don’t start going on about how sensitive you are. There are some things a girl likes to find out for herself.”

She opened the cupboard under the sink and tossed him a faded but scrupulously clean dishtowel. ’Just dry them and put them on the counter. I’ll put them away myself. While you’re working, you can tell me your story. The unabridged version.”

“You got a deal.”

He was still wondering where to begin when his mouth opened, seemingly of its own accord, and began for him. “When I finally started to get it through my head that Carolyn was going to die, I went for a lot of walks. And one day, while I was out on the Extension.

He told her everything, beginning with his intervention between Ed and the fat man wearing the West Side Gardeners gimme-cap and ending with Bill telling him that he’d better go see his doctor, because at their age mental illness was common, at their age it was common as hell. He had to double back several times to pick up dropped stitches-the way Old Dor had showed up in the middle of his efforts to keep Ed from going at the man from West Side Gardeners, for instance-but he didn’t mind doing that, and Lois didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping his narrative straight, either.

The overall feeling Ralph was conscious of as he wound his way through his tale was a relief so deep it was nearly painful. it was as if someone. had stacked bricks on his heart and mind and he was now removing them, one by one.

By the time he was finished, the dishes were done and they had left the kitchen in favor of the living room with its dozens of framed photographs, presided over by Mr. Chasse from his place on the TV.

“So?” Ralph said. “How much of it do you believe?”

“All of it, of course,” she said, and either did not notice the expression of relief on Ralph’s face or chose to ignore it. “After what we saw this morning-not to mention what you knew about my wonderful daughter-in-law-I can’t very well not believe. That’s my advantage over Bill.”

Not your only one, Ralph thought but didn’t say.

“None of this stuff is coincidental, is it?” she asked him.

Ralph shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“When I was seventeen,” she said, “my mother hired this boy from down the road-Richard Henderson, his name was-to do chores around our place.

There were a lot of boys she could have hired, but she hired Richie because she liked him… and she liked him for me, if you understand what I mean.”

“Of course I do, She was matchmaking.”

“Uh-huh, but at least she wasn’t doing it in a big, gruesome, embarrassing way. Thank God, because I didn’t care a fig for Richie at least not like that. Still, Mother gave it her very best. If I was studying my books at the kitchen table, she’d have him loading the woodbox even though it was May and already hot. if I was feeding the chickens, she’d have Richie cutting side-bay next to the dooryard.

She wanted me to see him around… to get used to him… and if we got to like each other’s company and he asked me to a dance or the town fair, that would have been just fine with her. it was gentle, but it was there. A push. And that’s what this is like.”

“The pushes don’t feel all that gentle to me Ralph said. His hand went nvoluntarily to the place where Charlie Pickering had pricked him with the point of his knife.

“No, of course they don’t. Having a man stick a knife in your ribs like that must have been horrible. Thank God you had that spray can. Do you suppose Old Dor sees the auras, too? That something from that world told him to put the can in your pocket?”

Ralph gave a helpless shrug. What she was suggesting had crossed his mind, but once you got beyond it, the ground really started to slope away. Because if Dorrance had done that, it suggested that some (entity) force or being had known that Ralph would need help. Nor was that all. That force-or being-would also have had to know that (a) Ralph would be going out on Sunday afternoon, that (b) the weather, quite nice up until then, would turn nasty enough to require a jacket, and (c) which jacket he would wear. You were talking, in other words, about something that could foretell the future. The idea that he had been noticed by such a force frankly scared the hell out of him. He recognized that in the case of the aerosol can, at least, the intervention had probably saved his life, but it still scared the hell out of him.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe something did use Dorrance as an errand-boy. But why?”

“And what do we do now?” she added.

Ralph could only shake his head.

She glanced up at the clock squeezed in between the picture of the man in the raccoon coat and the young woman who looked ready to say Twenty-three skidoo any old time, then reached for the phone.

“Almost three-thirty! My goodness!”

Ralph touched her hand. “Who are you calling?”

“Simone Castonguay. I’d made plans to go over to Ludlow with her and Mina this afternoon -there’s a card-party at the Grangebut I can’t go after all this. I’d lose my shirt.” She laughed, then colored prettily. just a figure of speech.”

Ralph put his hand over hers before she could lift the receiver.

“Go on to your card-party, Lois.”

“Really?” She looked both doubtful and a little disappointed.

“Yes.” He was still unclear about what was going on here, but he sensed that was about to change. Lois had spoken of being pushed, but to Ralph it felt more as if he were being carried, the way a river carries a man in a small boat. But he couldn’t see where he was going; heavy mist shrouded the banks, and now, as the current began to grow swifter, he could hear the rumble of rapids somewhere up ahead.

Still, there are shapes, Ralph. Shapes in the mist.

Yes. Not very comforting ones, either. The), might be trees that only looked like clutching fingers… but on the other hand, they might be clutching fingers trying to look like trees. Until Ralph knew which was the case, he liked the idea of Lois’s being out of town just fine. He had a strong intuition-or perhaps it was only hope masquerading as intuition-that Doc #3 couldn’t follow her to Ludlow, that he might not even be able to follow her across the Barrens to the east side.

You can’t know any such thing, Ralph.

Maybe not, but itfelt right, and he was still convinced that in the world of the auras, feeling and knowing were pretty nearly the same thing. One thing he did know was that Doc #3 hadn’t cut Lois’s balloon-string yet; that Ralph had seen for himself, along with the joyously healthy gray glow of her aura. Yet Ralph could not escape a growing certainty that Doc #3-Crazy Doc-intended to Cut it, and that, no matter how lively Rosalie had looked when she went trotting away from Strawford Park, the severing of that cord was a mortal, murderous act.

Let’s say you’re right, Ralph,-let’s say he can’t get at her this afternoon if she’s playing nickel-in, dime-or-out in Ludlow.

What about tonight? Tomorrow? Next week?

What’s the solution? Does she call up her son and her bitch of a daughter-in-law, tell them she’s changed her mind about Riverview Estates and wants to go there after all?

He didn’t know. But he knew he needed time to think, and he also knew that constructive thinking would be hard to do until he was fairly sure that Lois was safe, at least for awhile.

“Ralph? You’re getting that moogy look again.”

“That what look?”

“Moogy.” She tossed her hair pertly. “That’s a word I made up to describe how Mr. Chasse looked when he was pretending to listen to me but was actually thinking about his coin collection. I know a moogy look when I see one, Ralph. What are you thinking about?”

“I was wondering what time you think you’ll get back from your card-game.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether or not we stop at Tubby’s for chocolate frappes.”

She spoke with the air of a woman revealing a secret vice. “Suppose you come straight back.”

“Seven o’clock. Maybe seven-thirty.”

“Call me as soon as you get home. Would you do that?”

“Yes. You want me out of town, don’t you? That’s what that moogy look really means.”

“Well…”

“You think that nasty bald thing means to hurt me, don’t you?”

“I think it’s a possibility.”

“Well, he might hurt you, too!”

“Yes, but…” But so far as I can tell, Lois, he’s not wearing any of my fashion accessories. “But what?”

“I’m going to be okay until you get back, that’s all.” He remembered her deprecating remark about modern men hugging each other and bawling and tried for a masterful frown. “Go play cards and leave this business to me, at least for the time being. That’s an order.”

Carolyn would have either laughed or gotten angry at such comicopera macho posturing. Lois, who belonged to an entirely different school of feminine thought, only nodded and looked grateful to have the decision taken out of her hands. “All right.” She tilted his chin down so she could look directly into his eyes. “Do you know what you’re doing, Ralph?”

“Nope. Not yet, anyway.”

“All right. just as long as you admit it.” She placed a hand on his forearm and a soft, open-mouthed kiss on the corner of his mouth. Ralph felt an entirely welcome prickle of heat in his groin. “I’ll go to Ludlow and win five dollars playing poker with those silly women who are always trying to fill their inside straights. Tonight we’ll talk about what to do next. Okay?”

“Yes.” Her small smile-a thing more in the eyes than of the mouthsuggested that they might do a little more than just talk, if Ralph was bold… and at that moment he felt quite bold, indeed. Not even Mr. Chasse’s stern gaze from his place atop the TV affected that feeling very much.

CHAPTER 14

It was quarter to four by the time Ralph crossed the street and walked the short distance back up the hill to his own building.

Weariness was stealing over him again; he felt as if he had been up for roughly three centuries. Yet at the same time he felt better than he had since Carolyn had died. More together. More himself Or is that maybejust what you want to believe? That a person can’t feel this miserable without some sort of positive payback? It’s a lovely idea, Ralph, but not very realistic.

All right, he thought, so maybe I’m a little confused right now.

Indeed he was. Also frightened, exhilarated, disoriented, and a touch horny. Yet one clear idea came through this mix of emotions, one thing he needed to do before he did anything else: he had to make up with Bill. If that meant apologizing, he could do that.

Maybe an apology was even in order. Bill, after all, hadn’t come to him saying, “Gee, old buddy, you look terrible, tell me all about it. “No, he had gone to Bill. He had done so with misgivings but that didn’t change the fact, and-Ah, Ralph, j’eez, what am I going to do with you? It was Carolyn’s amused voice, speaking to him as clearly as it had during the weeks following her death, when he’d handled the worst of his grief by discussing everything with her inside his head.

… and sometimes aloud, if he happened to be alone in the apartment.

Bill was the one who blew his top, sweetie, not you. I see you’re just as determined to be hard on yourself now as you were when I was alive.

I guess some things never change.

Ralph smiled a little. Yeah, okay, maybe some things never did change, and maybe the argument had been more Bill’s fault than his.

The question was whether or not he wanted to cut himself off from Bill’s companionship over a stupid quarrel and a lot of stiff-necked horseshit about who had been right and who had been wrong. Ralph didn’t think he did, and if that meant making an apology Bill didn’t really deserve, what was so awful about that? So far as he knew, there were no bones in the three little syllables that made up I’m sorry.

“wordless The Carolyn inside his head responded to this idea with incredulity.

Never mind, he told her as he started up the walk. I’m dolg ihi, for me, not for him. Or for you, as far as that goes.

He was amazed and amused to discover how guilty that last thought made him feel-almost as if he had committed an act of sacrilege. But that didn’t make the thought any less true.

He was feeling around in his pocket for his latchkey when he saw a note thumbtacked to the door. Ralph felt for his glasses, but he had left them upstairs on the kitchen table. He leaned back, squinting to read Bill’s scrawling hand: true, Dear Ralph/Lois/Fave/Whoever, I expect to be spending most of the day at Derry Home.

Bob Polburst’s niece called and told me that this time it’s almost certainly the real thing,-the poor man has almost finished his struggle. Room 313 in Derry Home I.C.U. I’s about the last place on earth I want to be on a beautiful day in October, but I guess I’d better see this through to the end.

Ralph, I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time this morning.

You came to me for help and I damned near clawed your face off instead. All I can say by way of apology is that this thing with Bob has completely wrecked my nerves. Okay? I think I owe you a dinner.

… if you still want to eat with the likes of me, that is.

Faye, please please PLEASE quit bugging me about your damned chess tournament. I promised I’d play, and I keep my promises.

Goodbye, cruel world, Ralph straightened up with a feeling of relief and gratitude. If only everything else that had been happening to him lately could straighten itself out as easily as this part had done!

He went upstairs, shook the teakettle, and was filling it at the sink when the telephone rang. It was John Leydecker. “Boy, I’m glad I finally got hold of you,” he said. “I was getting a little worried, old buddy.”

“Why?” Ralph asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe something. Charlie Pickering made bail after all.”

“You told me that wouldn’t happen.”

“I was wrong, okay?” Leydecker said, clearly irritated. “It wasn’t the only thing I was wrong about, either. I told you the ’judge’d probably set bail in the forty-thousand-dollar range, but I didn’t know Pickering was going to draw judge Steadman, who has been known to say that he doesn’t even believe in insanity.

Steadman set bail at eighty grand. Pickering’s court-appointed bellowed like a calf in the moonlight, but it didn’t make any difference.”

Ralph looked down and saw he was still holding the teakettle in one hand. He put it on the table. “And he still made bail?”

“Yep. Remember me telling you that Ed would throw him away like a paring knife with a broken blade?”

“Yes.”

“Well, score it as another strikeout for John Leydecker. Ed marched into the bailiff’s office at eleven o’clock this morning with a briefcase full of money.”

“Eight thousand dollars?” Ralph asked.

“I said briefcase, not envelope,” Leydecker replied. “Not eight but eighty. They’re still buzzing down at the courthouse. Hell, they’ll be buzzing about it even after the Christmas tinsel comes down.”

Ralph tried to imagine Ed Deepneau in one of his baggy old sweaters and a pair of worn corduroys-Ed’s mad-scientist outfits, Carolyn had called them-pulling banded stacks of twenties and fifties out of his briefcase, and couldn’t do it. “I thought you said ten percent was enough to get out.”

“It is, if you can also escrow something-a house or a piece of property, for instance-that stacks up somewhere near the total bail amount. Apparently Ed couldn’t do that, but he did have a little rainy-day cash under the mattress. Either that or he gave the toothfairy one hell of a blowjob.”

Ralph found himself remembering the letter he had gotten from, Helen about a week after she had left the hospital and moved out to High Ridge. She had mentioned a check she’d gotten from Ed-seven hundred and fifty dollars. It seems to indicate he understands his responsibilities, she had written. Ralph wondered if Helen would still feel that way if she knew that Ed had walked into the Derry County Courthouse with enough money to send his daughter sailing through the first fifteen years of her life… and pledged it to free a crazy guy who liked to play with knives and Molotov cocktails,”

“Where in God’s name did he get it?” he asked Leydecker.

“Don’t know.”

“And he isn’t required to say?”

“Nope. It’s a free country. I understand he said something about cashing in some stocks.”

Ralph thought back to the old days-the good old days before Carolyn had gotten sick and died and Ed had just gotten sick.

Thought back to meals the four of them had had together once every two weeks or so, take-out pizza at the Deepneaus, or maybe Carol’s chicken pot-pie in the Robertses’ kitchen, and remembered Ed saying on one occasion that he was going to treat them all to prime rib at the Red Lion in Bangor when his stock accounts matured. That’s right, Helen had replied, smiling at Ed fondly. She had been pregnant then, just beginning to show, and looking all of fourteen with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing a checkered smock that was still yards too big for her. Which do you think will mature first, Edward?

The two thousand shares of United Toejam or the six thousand of Amalgamated Sourballs? And he had growled at her, a growl that had made them all laugh because Ed Deepneau didn’t have a mean bone in his body, anyone who had known him more than two weeks knew that Ed wouldn’t hurt a fly. Except Helen might have known a little different-even back then Helen had almost surely known a little different, fond look or no fond look.

“Ralph?” Leydecker asked. “Are you still there?”

“Ed didn’t have any stocks,” Ralph said. “He was a research chemist, for Christ’s sake, and his father was foreman in a bottling plant in some crazy place like Plaster Rock, Pennsylvania. No dough there.”

“Well, he got it somewhere, and I’d be lying if I said I liked it.”

“From the other Friends of Life, do you think?”

“No, I don’t. First, we’re not talking rich folks here-most of the people who belong to The Friends are blue-collar types, working class heroes. They give what they can, but this much? No.

They could have gotten together enough property deeds among them to spring Pickering, I suppose, but they didn’t. Most of them wouldn’t, even if Ed had asked. Ed’s all but persona non grata with them now, and I imagine they wish they’d never heard of Charles Pickering.

Dan Dalton’s taken back the leadership of The Friends of Life, and to most of them, that’s a big relief. Ed and Charlie and two other people-a man named Frank Felton and a woman named Sandra McKay-seem to be operating very much on their own hook now.

Felton I don’t know anything about and there’s no jacket on him, but the McKay woman has toured some of the same fine institutions as Charlie. She’s unmissable, too-pasty complexion, lots of acne, glasses so thick they make her eyes look like poached eggs, goes about three hundred pounds.”

“You joking?”

“No. She favors stretch pants from K-mart and can usually be observed travelling in the company of assorted Ding-Dongs, Funny Bones, and Hostess Twinkies. She often wears a big sweatshirt with the words BABY FACTORY on the front. Claims to have given birth to fifteen children. She’s never actually had any, and probably can’t.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I want you to watch out for these people,” Leydecker said. He spoke patiently, as if to a child. “They may be dangerous.

Charlie is for sure, that you know without me telling you, and Charlie is out. Where Ed got the money to spring him is secondary-he got it, that’s what matters. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he came after you again. Him, or Ed, or the others.”

“What about Helen and Natalie-?”

“They’re with their friends-friends who are very hip to the dangers posed by screwloose hubbies, I filled Mike Hanlon in, and he’ll also keep an eye on her, The library is being watched very closely by our men. We don’t think Helen’s in any real danger at the present time-she’s still staying at High Ridge-but we’re doing what we can.”

“Thank you, John. I appreciate that, and I appreciate the call,”

“I appreciate that you appreciate it, but I’m not quite done yet.

You need to remember who Ed called and threatened, my friend-not Helen but you. She doesn’t seem to be much of a concern to him anymore, but you linger on his mind, Ralph. I asked Chief Johnson if I could assign a man-Chris Nell would be my pick-to keep an eye on you, at least until after WomanCare’s Rent-A-Bitch has come and gone. I was turned down. Too much going on this week, he said… but the way I was turned down suggests to me that if you asked, you’d get someone to watch your back. So what do you say?”

Police protection, Ralph thought. That’s what they call it on the TV cop-shows and that’s what He’s talking about-police protection.

He tried to consider the ideal but too many other things got in the way; they danced in his head like weird sugarplums. Hats, docs, smocks, spray-cans. Not to mention knives, scalpels, and a pair of scissors glimpsed in the dusty lenses of his old binoculars. Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else, Ralph thought, and on the heels of that: It’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff.

“No,” he said.

“What?”

Ralph closed his eyes and saw himself picking up this same phone and calling to cancel his appointment with the pin-sticker man. This was the same thing all over again, wasn’t it? Yes. He could get police protection from the Pickerings and the McKays and the Feltons, but that wasn’t the way this was supposed to go. He knew that, felt it in every beat of his heart and pulse of his blood.

“You heard me,” he said. “I don’t want police protection.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“I can take care of myself,” Ralph said, and grimaced a little at the pompous absurdity of this sentiment, which he had heard expressed in John Wayne Westerns without number.

“Ralph, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but you’re old. You got lucky on Sunday. You might not get lucky again.”

I didn’t,just get lucky, Ralph thought. I’ve got friends in high places.

Or maybe I should say entities in high places.

“I’ll be okay,” he said.

Leydecker sighed. “If you change your mind, will you call me?”

“Yes.”

“And if you see either Pickering or a large lady with thick glasses and stringy blonde hair hanging around-”

“I’ll call you.”

“Ralph, please think this over. just a guy parked down the street is all I’m talking about.”

“Done-bun-can’the-undone,” Ralph said, “Huh?”

“I said I appreciate it, but no. I’ll be talking to YOU.”

Ralph gently replaced the telephone in its cradle. Probably John was right, he thought, probably he was crazy, yet he had never felt so completely sane in his life.

“Tired,” he told his sunny, empty kitchen, “but sane.” He paused, then added: “Also halfway to being in love, maybe.”

That made him grin, and he was still grinning when he finally put the kettle on to heat.

He was on his second cup of tea when he remembered what Bill had said in his note about owing him a meal. He decided on the spur of the moment to ask Bill to meet him at Day Break, Sun Down for a little supper. They could start over.

I think we have to start over, he thought, because that little psycho has got his hat, and I’m pretty sure that means he’s in trouble.

Well, no time like the present. He picked up the phone and dialed a number he had no trouble remembering: 941-5000. The number of Derry Home Hospital.

The hospital receptionist connected him with Room 313. The clearly tired woman who answered the phone was Denise Polhurst, the dying man’s niece. Bill wasn’t there, she told him. Four other teachers from what she termed “Uncles glory days” had shown up around one, and Bill had proposed lunch. Ralph even knew how his downstairs tenant would have put it: better belated than never. It was one of his favorites. When Ralph asked her if she expected him back soon, Denise Polhurst said she did.

“He’s been so faithful. I don’t know what I would have done without him, Mr. Robbins.”

“Roberts,” he said. “Bill made Mr. Polhurst sound like a wonderful man.”

“Yes, they all feel that way. But of course the bills won’t be coming to his fan club, will they”

“No,” Ralph said uncomfortably. “I suppose not. Bill’s note said Your uncle is very low.”

“Yes. The doctor says he probably won’t last the day, let alone the night, but I’ve heard that song before. God forgive me, but sometimes it’s like Uncle Bob’s one of those ads from Publishers Clearing House-always promising, never delivering. I suppose that sounds awful, but I’m too tired to care. They turned off the life support stuff this morning-I couldn’t have taken the responsibility all by myself, but I called Bill and he said it was what Unc would have wanted. ’It’s time for Bob to explore the next world,” he said.

“He’s mapped this one to a nicety.” Isn’t that poetic, Mr. Robbins?”

“Yes. It’s Roberts, His. Polhurst. Will you tell Bill that Ralph Roberts called and would like him to call ha-”

“So we turned it off and I was all prepared-nerved up, I guess you’d say-and then he didn’t die.

I can’t understand it. He’s ready, I’m ready, his life’s work is done… so why won’t he die?

“I don’t know.”

“Death is very stupid,” she said, speaking in the nagging and unlovely voice which only the very tired and the deeply heartsick seem to employ. “An obstetrician this slow in cutting a baby’s umbilical cord would be fired for malpractice.”

Ralph’s mind had a tendency to drift these days, but this time it snapped back in a hurry. “What did you say?”

“Beg your pardon?” She sounded startled, as if her own mind had been drifting.

“You said something about cutting the cord.”

“I didn’t mean anything,” she said. That nagging tone had grown stronger… except it wasn’t nagging, Ralph realized; it was whining, and it was frightened. Something was wrong here. His heartbeat suddenly speeded up. “I didn’t mean anything at all,” she insisted, and suddenly the phone Ralph was holding turned a deep and sinister shade of blue in his hand.

She’s been thinking about killing him, an not just idly, either she’s been thinking about putting a pillow over his face and smothering him ’ with it. “It wouldn’t take long, “she thinks. “A mercy,” she thinks.

“Over at last,” she thinks.

Ralph pulled the phone away from his ear. Blue light, cold as a February sky, rose in pencil-thin rays from the holes in the earpiece.

Murder is blue, Ralph thought, holding the phone at arm’s length and staring with wide-eyed unbelief as the blue rays began to bend and drip toward the floor. He could hear, very faintly, the quacking, anxious voice of Denise Polhurst. It wasn’t anything I ever wanted to know, hut

I guess I know it anyway: murder is blue.

He brought the handset toward his mouth again, cocking it to keep the top half, with its freight of icicle aura, away from him. He was afraid that if that end of the handset got too close to his ear, it might deafen him with her cold and furious desperation.

“Tell Bill that Ralph called,” he said. “Roberts, not Robbins.”

He hung up without waiting for a reply. The blue rays shattered away from the phone’s earpiece and tumbled toward the floor. Ralph was again reminded of icicles; this time of how they fell in a neat row when you ran your gloved hand along the underside of an eave after a warm winter day. They disappeared before they hit the linoleum.

He glanced around. Nothing in the room glowed, shimmered, or vibrated. The auras were gone again. He began to let out a sigh of relief and then, from outside on Harris Avenue, a car backfired.

In the empty second-floor apartment, Ralph Roberts screamed.

He didn’t want any more tea, but he was still thirsty. He found half a Diet Pepsi-flat but wet-in the back of the fridge, poured it into a plastic cup with a faded Red Apple logo on it, and took it outside.

He could no longer stand to be in the apartment, which seemed to n smell of unhappy wakefulness. Especially not after what had happened with the phone.

The day had become even more beautiful, if that was possible; a strong, mild wind had developed, rolling bands of light and shadow, across the west side of Derry and combing the leaves from the trees.

These the wind sent hurrying along the sidewalks in rattling dervishes of orange and yellow and red.

Ralph turned left not because he had any conscious desire to revisit the picnic area up by the airport but only because he wanted the wind at his back. Nevertheless, he found himself entering the little clearing again some ten minutes later. This time it was empty, and he wasn’t surprised. There was no edge in the wind that ha’d sprung up, nothing to make old men and women scurry indoors, but it was hard work keeping cards on the table or chess-pieces on the board when the puckish wind kept trying to snatch them away.

As Ralph approached the small trestle table where Faye Chapin usually held court, he was not exactly surprised to see a note held down by a rock, and he had a good idea what the subject would be even before he put down his plastic Red Apple cup and picked it up.

Two walks,-two sightings of the bald doc with the scalpel,-two old people suffering insomnia and seeing brightly colored visions,-two notes. It’s like Noah leading the animals onto the ark, not one by one, but in pairs… and is another hard rain going to fall?

Well, what do you think, old man?

He didn’t know what he thought… but Bill’s note had been a kind of obituary-in-progress, and he had absolutely no doubt that Faye’s was the same thing. That sense of being carried forward, effortlessly and without hesitation, was simply too strong to doubt; it was like awakening on some alien stage to find oneself speaking lines (or stumbling through them, anyway) in a drama for which one could not remember having rehearsed, or seeing a coherent shape in -,,hat had up until then looked like complete nonsense, or discovering…

Discovering what?

“Another secret city, that’s what,” he murmured. “The Derry or Auras.” Then he bent over Faye’s note and read it while the wind played prankishly with his thinning hair.

Those of you who want to pay your final respects to jimmy Va dermeer are advised to do so by tomorrow at the very latest. Father Coughlin came by this noon and told me the poor old guy is sinking fast. He CAN have visitors, tho. He is in Derry Home I.C.U Room 315.

Fetu’p.

P.S. Remember that time is short.

Ralph read the note twice, put it back on the table with the rock on top to weight it down for the next Old Crock to happen along, then simply stood there with his hands in his pockets and his head down, gazing out at Runway 3 from beneath the bushy tangle of his brows, A crisp leaf, orange as one of the Halloween pumpkins which would soon decorate the street, came flipping down from the deep blue sky and landed in his sparse hair. Ralph brushed it away absently and thought of two hospital rooms on Home’s I.C.U. floor, two rooms side by side.

Bob Polhurst in one, jimmy V. in the other.

And the next room up the hall? That one was 317, the room in which his wife had died.” he said softly.

“This is not a coincidence, But what was it? Shapes in the mist?

A secret city? Evocative phrases, both of them, but they answered no questions.

Ralph sat on top of the picnic table next to the one upon which Faye had left his note, took off his shoes, and crossed his legs.

The wind gusted, ruffling his hair. He sat there amid the falling leaves with his head slightly bent and his brow furrowed in thought.

He looked like a Winslow Homer version of Buddha as he meditated with his hands cupping his kneecaps, carefully reviewing his impressions of Doc #1 and Doc #2… and then contrasting these impressions with those he’d gotten of Doc #3.

First impression: all three docs had reminded him of the aliens tabloids like Inside Viezv, and pictures which were always labelled artist’s conceptions.” Ralph knew that these bald-headed, dark-eyed images of mysterious visitors from space went back a good many years; people had been reporting contacts with short baldies-the so-called little doctors-for a long time, maybe for as long as people had been reporting UFOS. He was quite sure that he had read at least one such account way back in the sixties.

“Okay, so say there are quite a few of these fellows around,” Ralph told a sparrow which had just lit on the picnic area’s litter barrel.

“Not just three docs but three hundred. Or three thousand. Lois and I aren’t the only ones who’ve seen them. And.

And didn’t most of the people who gave accounts of such meetings also mention sharp objects?

Yes, but not scissors or scalpels-at least Ralph didn’t think So.

Most of the people who claimed to have been abducted by the little bald doctors talked about probes, didn’t they?

The sparrow flew off. Ralph didn’t notice. He was thinking about the little bald docs who had visited May Locher on the night of her death. What else did he know of them? What else had he seen. They had been dressed in white smocks, like the ones worn by TV show doctors in the fifties and sixties, like the ones pharmacists still wore. Only their smocks, unlike the one worn by Doc #3, had been clean. #3 had been toting a rusty scalpel; if there had been any rust on the scissors Doc #1 had been holding in his right hand, Ralph hadn’t noticed it.

Not even after he’d trained the binoculars on them.

Something else-probably not important, but at least you noticed it. Scissors-Toting Doc was right-handed, at least judging from the way he held his weapon. Scalpel-Wielding Doc is a southpaw.

No, probably not important, but something about it-another of those shapes in the mist, this a small one-tugged at him just the same.

Something about the dichotomy of left and right.

“Go to the left and you’ll be right,” Ralph muttered, repeating the punchline of some joke he no longer even remembered. “Go to the right and you’ll be left.”

Never mind. What else did he know about the docs?

Well, they had been surrounded by auras, of course-rather lovely greenish-gold ones-and they had left those (white-man tracks) Arthur Murray dance-diagrams behind them. And although their features had struck him as perfectly anonymous, their auras had conveyed feelings of power… and sobriety… and…And dignity, goddammit,” Ralph said.

The wind gusted again and more leaves blew down from the trees.

Some fifty yards from the picnic area, not far from the old train tracks, a twisted, halfuprooted tree seemed to reach in Ralph’s direction, stretching branches that actually did look a little like clutching hands.

It suddenly occurred to Ralph that he had seen quite a lot that night for an old guy who was supposed to be living on the edge of the last age of man, the one Shakespeare (and Bill McGovern) called “the slippered pantaloon.” And none of it-not one single thingsuggested danger or evil intent. That Ralph had inferred evil intent wasn’t very surprising. They were physically freakish strangers; he had observed them coming out of a sick woman’s house at a time of night when visitors seldom if ever called; he had seen them only minutes after waking from a nightmare of epic proportions.

Now, however, recollecting what he had seen, other things occurred. The way they had stood on Mrs. Locher’s stoop, for instance, as if they had every right to be there; the sense he had gotten of two old friends indulging themselves in a bit of conversation before going on their way. Two old buddies talking it over one more time before heading home after a long night’s work.

That was your impression, yes, but that doesn’t mean -you can trust it, Ralph.

But Ralph thought he could trust it. Old friends, long-time colleagues, done for the night, May Locher’s had been their last stop.

All right, so Docs #1 and #2 were as different from the third one as day is from night. They were clean while he was dirty, they were invested with auras while he had none (none that Ralph had seen, at least), they carried scissors while he carried a scalpel, they seemed as sane and sober as a couple of respected village elders V,while #3 seemed as crazy as a shithouse rat.

One thing is perfectly clear, though, isn’t it? Your playmates are supernatural beings, and other than Lois, the only person who seems to know they’re there is Ed Deepneau. Want to bet on how much sleep Ed is getting just lately?

“No,” Ralph said. He raised his hands from his knees and held them in front of his eyes. They were shaking a little. Ed had mentioned bald docs, and there were bald docs. Was it the docs he’d been talking about when he talked about Centurions? Ralph didn’t know.

He almost hoped so, because that word-Centurions-had begun to call up a much more terrible image in his mind each tillie it occurred to him: the Ringwraiths from Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy.

Hooded figures astride skeletal, red-eyed horses, bearing down on It small party of cowering hobbits outside the Prancing Pony Tavern in Bree.

Thinking of hobbits made him think of Lois, and the trembling in his hands grew worse.

Carolyn: it’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don’t siveat il-,e si;,i(.” l staff.

Lois: In my ramiio d),lying at eighty I’s ’sing young.

Joe Wyzer: The medical examiner usually ends up on the cause-of-death line rather than insomnia. Bill: His specialty was the Civil War, and now he doesn’t even know that a civil war was, let alone who won ours.

Denise Polhurst: Death is very stupid. An obstetrician this slow in cutting a baby’s umbilical cordIt was as if someone had suddenly clicked on a bright searchlight inside his head, and Ralph cried out into the sunny autumn afternoon. Not even the Delta 727 settling in for a landing on Runway 3 could entirely drown that cry.

He spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the porch of the house he shared with McGovern, waiting impatiently for Lois to come back from her card-game. He could have tried McGovern again at the hospital, but didn’t. The need to speak to McGovern had passed.

Ralph didn’t understand everything yet, but he thought he understood a great deal more than he had, and if his sudden flash of insight at the picnic area had any validity at all, telling McGovern what had happened to his Panama would serve absolutely no purpose even if Bill believed him.

I have to get the hat back, Ralph thought. And I have to get Lois’s earrings back, too.

It was an amazing late afternoon and early evening. On the one hand, nothing happened. On the other hand, everything happened.

The world of auras came and went around him like the stately progression of cloud-shadows across the west side. Ralph sat and noting suicide watched, rapt, breaking off only to eat and make trips to the bathroom. He saw old Mrs. Bennigan standing on her front porch in her bright red coat, clutching her walker and taking inventory of her fall flowers. He saw the aura surrounding her-the scrubbed and healthy pink of a freshly bathed infant-and hoped Mrs. B. didn’t have a lot of relatives waiting around for her to die.

He saw a young man of no more than twenty bopping along the other side of the street toward the Red Apple. He was the picture of health in his faded jeans and sleeveless Celtics jersey, but Ralph could see a deathbag clinging to him like an oil slick, and a balloon string rising from the crown of his head that looked like a decaying drape-pull in a haunted house.

He saw no little bald doctors, but shortly after five-thirty, he observed a startling shaft of purple light erupt from a manhole cover in the middle of Harris Avenue; it rose into the sky like a special effect in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic for perhaps three minutes, then simply winked out. He also saw a huge bird that looked like a prehistoric hawk go floating between the chimneys of the old dairy building around the corner on Howard Street, and alternating red and blue thermals twisting over S trawford Park in long, lazy ribbons, When soccer practice at Fairmount Grammar let out at quarter to six, a dozen or so kids came swarming into the parking lot of the Red Apple, where they would buy tons of pre-supper candy and bales of trading cards-football cards by this time of year, Ralph supposed. Two of them stopped to argue about something, and their auras, one green and the other a vibrant shade of burnt orange, intensified, drew in, and began to gleam with rising spirals of scarlet thread.

Look out! Ralph shouted mentally at the boy within the orange envelope of light, before Green Boy dropped his schoolbooks and socked the other in the mouth. The two of them made a trip to grappled, spun around in a clumsy, aggressive dance, then tumbled to the sidewalk. A little circle of yelling, cheering kids formed around them. A purplish-red dome like a thunderhead began to build up around and above the fight. Ralph found this shape, which was circulating in a slow counter-clockwise movement, both terrible and beautiful, and he wondered what the aura above a full-scale military battle would look like. He decided that was a question to which he didn’t really want an answer. just as Orange Boy climbed on top of Green Boy and began to pummel him in earnest, Sue came out of the store and hollered at them to quit fighting in the damned parking lot.

Orange Boy dismounted reluctantly. The combatants rose to their feet, looking at each other warily. Then Green Boy, trying to appear nonchalant, turned and went into the store. Only his quick glance back over his shoulder to make sure his opponent was not pursuing spoiled the effect.

The spectators were either following Green Boy into the store for their post-practice supplies or clustered around Orange Boy, congratulating him. Above them, unseen, that virulent red-purple toadstool was breaking up like a cloudbank before a strong wind.

Pieces of it tattered, unravelled, and disappeared.

The street is a carnival of energy, Ralph thought. The,juice thrown off by those two guys during the ninety seconds they were mixing it up looked like enough to light Derry for a week, and if a person could tap the energy the watchers generated-the energy inside that mushroom cloud-one could probably light the whole state of Maine for a month. Can you imagine what it would be like to enter the world of auras in Times Square at two minutes to midnight on New Year’s Eve?

He couldn’t and didn’t want to. He suspected he had glimpsed the leading edge of a force so huge and so vital that it made all the nuclear weapons created since 1945 seem about as powerful as a child’s cap-pistol fired into an empty peach can.

Enough force to destroy the universe, perhaps… or to create a new one.

Ralph went upstairs, dumped a can of beans into one pot and a couple of hotdogs into another, and walked impatiently back and forth through the flat, snapping his fingers and occasionally running his fingers through his hair, as he waited for this impromptu bachelor’s supper to cook. The bone-deep weariness which had hung on him like invisible weights ever since midsummer was, for the time being, at least, entirely gone; he felt filled with manic, antic energy, absolutely stuffed with it. He supposed this was why people liked Benzedrine and cocaine, only he had an idea that this was a much better high, that when it departed it would not leave him feeling plundered and mistreated, more used than user.

Ralph Roberts, unaware that the hair his fingers were combing through had grown thicker, and that threads of black were visible in it for the first time in five years, jive-toured his apartment, walking on the balls of his feet, first humming and then singing an old rockand-roll tune from the early sixties: “Hey, pretty bay-bee, you can’t sit down… you gotta slop, bop, slip, slop, flip top alll about…

The beans were bubbling in their pot, the hotdogs boiling in theirs-only it looked to Ralph almost as if they were dancing in there, doing the Bristol Stomp to the old Dovells tune. Still singing at the top of his lungs (“When you hear the hippie with the backbeat, you can’t sit down”), Ralph cut the hotdogs into the beans, dumped in half a pint of ketchup, added some chili sauce, then stirred everything vigorously together and headed for the door. He carried his supper, still in the pot, in one hand. He ran down the stairs as nimbly as a kid who’s running late on the first day of school.

He hooked a baggy old cardigan sweater-McGovern’s, but what the hell-out of the front hall closet, and then went back out on the porch.

The auras were gone, but Ralph wasn’t dismayed; for the time being he was more interested in the smell of food. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt as flat-out hungry as he did at that moment. He sat on the top step with his long thighs and bony knees sticking out on either side of him, looking decidedly Ichabod Craneish, and began to eat. The first few bites burned his lips and tongue, but instead of being deterred, Ralph ate faster, almost gobbling.

He paused with half the pot of beans and franks consumed. The animal in his stomach hadn’t gone back to sleep-not yet-but it had been pacified a bit. Ralph belched unselfconsciously and looked out at Harris Avenue with a feeling of contentment he hadn’t known in years.

Under the current circumstances, that feeling made no sense at all, but that didn’t change it in the slightest. When was the last time he had felt this good? Maybe not since the morning he’d awakened in that barn somewhere between Derry, Maine, and Poughkeepsie, New York, amazed by the conflicting rays of light-thousands of them, it had seemed-which crisscrossed the warm, sweet-smelling place where he lay.

Or maybe never.

Yes, or maybe never.

He spied Mrs. Perrine coming up the street, probably returning from A Safe Place, the combination soup-kitchen and homeless shelter down by the Canal. Ralph once again found himself fascinated by her strange, gliding walk, which she achieved without the aid of a cane and seemingly without any side-to-side movement of her hips.

Her hair, still more black than gray, was now held-or perhaps subdued was the word-by the hairnet she wore on the serving line.

Thick support hose the color of cotton candy rose from her spotless white nurse’s shoes… not that Ralph could see much of either them or the legs they covered; this evening Mrs. Perrine wore a man’s wool overcoat, and the hem came almost to her ankles. She seemed to depend almost entirely on her upper legs to move her along-a sign of some chronic back problem, Ralph guessed-and this mode of locomotion, coupled with the overcoat, gave Esther Perrine a somewhat surreal aspect as she approached. She looked like the black queen on a chessboard, a piece that was either being guided by an invisible hand or moving all by itself.

As she neared the place where Ralph sat-still wearing the ripped shirt and now eating his supper directly from the pot in the bargain-the auras began to steal back into the world again. The streetlights had already come on, and now Ralph saw delicate lavender arcs hung over each. He could also see a red haze hovering above some roofs, a yellow haze above others, a pale cerise abox,e still others. in the east, where night was now gathering itself, the horizon flocked with dim green speckles.

Closer to hand, he watched as Mrs. Perrine’s aura sprang to life around her-that firm gray that reminded him of a West Point cadet’s uniform. A few darker spots, like phantom buttons, shimmered above her bosom (Ralph assumed there was a bosom hidden somewhere beneath the overcoat). He was not sure, but thought these might be signs of impending ill health.

“Good evening, Mrs. Perrine,” he said politely, and watched(!

LIS the words rose in front of his eyes in snowflake shapes.

She gave him a penetrating glance, flicking her eyes up and down, seeming to simultaneously sum him up and dismiss him in a single look.

“I see you’re still wearing that same shirt, Roberts,” she said.

What she didn’t say-but what Ralph was sure she was thinking was I also see you sitting there an eating beans right out of the tin, like some ragged street-person who never learned any better…

“I have a habit of remembering what I see, Roberts.

“So I am,” Ralph said. “I guess I forgot to change it.”

“Hmmp,” said Mrs. Perrine, and now he thought it was his underwear she was considering. When was the last time it occurred to you to change that? I shudder to think, Roberts.

“Lovely evening, isn’t it, Mrs. Perrine?”

Another of those quick, birdlike glances, this time up at the sky.

Then back to Ralph. “It’s going to turn cold.”

“Do you think so?”

“Oh, yes-Indian summer’s over. My back isn’t good for much besides weather forecasting these days, but at that it does very well.”

She paused. “I believe that’s Bill McGovern’s sweater.”

“I guess it is,” Ralph agreed, wondering if she would ask him next if Bill knew he had it. He wouldn’t have put it past her.

Instead, she told him. to button it up. “You don’t want to be a candidate for pneumonia, do you?” she asked, and the tucked set of her mouth added, As well as for the nuthouse?

“Absolutely not,” Ralph said. He set the pot aside, reached for the sweater-buttons, then stopped. He was still wearing a quilted stove-glove on his left hand. He hadn’t noticed it until now.

“It will be easier if you take that off,” Mrs. Perrine said.

There might have been the faintest gleam in her eyes.

“I suppose so,” Ralph said humbly. He shook off the glove and buttoned McGovern’s sweater.

“My offer holds good, Roberts.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“My offer to mend your shirt. If you can bring yourself to part with it for a day or so, that is.” She paused. “You do have another shirt, I assume? One you could wear while I mend the one you have on?”

“Oh, yes,” Ralph said. “You bet. Quite a few of them.”

“Choosing among them each day must be challenging for you.

There’s bean-juice on your chin, Roberts.” With this pronouncement, Mrs. Perrine’s eyes flicked forward and she began to march once more.

What Ralph did then he did with no forethought or understanding; it was as instinctive as the chopping gesture he had made earlier to scare Doc #3 away from Rosalie. He raised the hand which ad been wearing the thermal glove and curled it into a tube around his mouth.

Then he inhaled sharply, producing a faint, whispery whistle.

The results were amazing. A pencil of gray light poked out of Mrs. Perrine’s aura like the quill of a porcupine. It lengthened rapidly, angling backward as the lady herself moved forward, until it had crossed the leaf-littered lawn and darted into the tube formed by Ralph’s curled fingers. He felt it enter him as he inhaled and it was like swallowing pure energy. He suddenly felt lit up, like a neon sign or the marquee of a big-city movie theater. An explosive sense of force-a feeling of power-ran through his chest and stomach, then raced down his legs all the way to the tips of his toes, At the same time it rocketed upward into his head, threatening to blow off the top of his skull as if it were the thin concrete roof of a missile silo, He could see rays of light, as gray as electrified fog, smoking out from between his fingers. A terrible, joyous sense of power lit up his thoughts, but only for a moment. It was followed by shame and amazed horror.

What are you doing, Ralph? Whatever that stuff is, it doesn’t belong to YOU. Would you reach into her purse and take some of her money ibhile she wasn’t looking?

He felt his face flush. He lowered his cupped hand and shut his mouth. As his lips and teeth came together, he clearly heard-and actually felt something crunch crisply inside. It was the sound you heard when you were chomping off a bite of fresh rhubarb, Mrs. Perrine stopped, and Ralph watched apprehensively as she made a half-turn and looked out at Harris Avenue. I didn’t mean to, he thought at her.

Honest I didn’t, Mrs. P.-I’m still learning my way around this thing.

“Roberts?”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear something? It sounded almost like a gunshot.”

Ralph. could feel his ears throbbing with hot blood as he shook his head. “No… but my ears aren’t what they-”

“Probably just a backfire over on Kansas Street,” she said, dismissing his weak-sister excuses out of hand. “It made my heart miss a beat, though, I can tell YOU.”

She started off again in her odd, gliding, chess-queen walk, then stopped once more and looked back at him. Her aura had begun to fade out of Ralph’s view, but he had no trouble seeing her eyesthey were as sharp as a kestrel’s.

“You look different, Roberts, she said. “Younger, somehow.”

Ralph, who had expected something else (Give me back what you stole, Roberts, and right this minute, for instance), could only flounder. “Do you think… that’s very… I mean to say thank y-” She flapped an impatient oh-shut-up hand at him. “Probably the light.

I advise you not to dribble on that sweater, Roberts. My impression of Mr. McGovern is that he is a man who takes care of his things.”

“He should have taken better care of his hat,” Ralph said.

Those bright eyes, which had begun once more to shift away from him, shifted back. “I beg your pardon?”

“His Panama,” Ralph said. “He lost it somewhere.”

Mrs. Perrine held this up to the light of her intellect for a moment, then cast it aside with another Hmmp. “Go inside, Roberts. If you stay out here much longer, you’ll catch your death of cold.” And then she slid upon her way, not visibly the worse for wear as a result of Ralph’s thoughtless act of thievery.

Thieve? I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong word, Ralph. What you did-is just it was a lot closer to"Vampirism,” Ralph said bleakly.

He put the pot of beans aside and began to slowly rub his hands together. He felt ashamed… guilty… and all but exploding with energy.

You stole some of her life-force instead of her blood, but a vampire is a vampire, Ralph.

Yes indeed. And it suddenly occurred to Ralph that this must not have been the first time he had done such a thing.

You look different, Roberts. Younger, somehow. That was what Mrs. Perrine had said tonight, but people had been making similar comments to him ever since the end of the summer, hadn’t they?

The main reason his friends hadn’t hectored him into going to the doctor was because he didn’t look like anything was wrong with bin-i.

He complained of insomnia, but he apparently looked like the picture of health. I guess that honeycomb must have really turned the trick, Johnny Leydecker had said just before the two of them had left the library on Sunday-back in the Iron Age, that felt like no"N.

And when Ralph had asked him what he was talking about, Leydecker had said he was talking about Ralph’s insomnia. You look a gajillion times better than on the day I first met you.

And Leydecker hadn’t been the only one. Ralph had been more or less dragging himself through the days, feeling folded, spindled, and mutilated… but people kept telling him how good he looked, how refreshed he looked, how young he looked. Helen… McGovern… even Faye Chapin had said something a week or two ago, although Ralph couldn’t remember exactly what"Sure I do,” he said in a low, dismayed voice. “He asked me if I was using wrinkle cream. Wrinkle cream, for God’s sake!”

Had he been stealing from the life-force of others even back then-stealing without even knowing it?

“Dear Jesus, I’m a vampire.”

“I must have been,” he said in that same low voice. But was that the right word? he wondered suddenly.

Wasn’t it at least possible that, in the world of auras, a life-stealer was called a Centurion?

Ed’s pallid, frantic face rose before him like a ghost which returns to accuse its murderer, and Ralph, suddenly terrified, wrapped his arms around his knees and lowered his head to rest upon them.

CHAPTER 15

At twenty minutes past seven, a perfectly maintained Lincoln Town Car of late seventies vintage drew up to the curb in front of Lots’s house.

Ralph-who had spent the last hour showering, shaving, and trying to get himself calmed down-stood on the porch and watched Lois get out of the back seat. Goodbyes were said and girlish, sprightly laughter drifted across to him on the breeze.

The Lincoln pulled away and Lois started up her walk. Half"way along it, she stopped and turned. For a long moment the two of them regarded each other from their opposite sides of Harris Avenue, seeing perfectly well in spite of the deepening darkness and the two hundred yards which separated them. They burned for each other in that darkness like secret torches.

Lois pointed a finger at him. It was very close to the hand-gesture she’d made before shooting at Doc #3, but this didn’t upset Ralph in the least. Intent, he thought. Eve -thing lies in intent. There are few mistakes in this world… and once you get to know your way around, maybe there are no mistakes at all.

A narrow, gray-glistening beam of force appeared at the end of Lois’s finger and began to extend itself across the deepening shadows of Harris Avenue. A passing car drove blithely through it. The car’s windows flashed a momentary bright, blind gray and its headlights seemed to flicker briefly, but that was all.

Ralph raised his own finger, and a blue beam grew from it. These two narrowcasts of light met in the center of Harris Avenue and twined together like woodbine, Higher and higher the interwoven pigtail rose, paling slightly as it went. Then Ralph curled his finger, and his half of the love-knot in the middle of Harris Avenue winked out of existence. A moment later, Lois’s half also disappeared. Ralph slowly descended the porch steps and began to cross his lawn. Lois came toward him. They met in the middle of the street… where, in a very real sense, they had met already.

Ralph put his arms around her waist and kissed her.

You look different, Roberts. Younger, somehow.

Those words kept running through his head-recycling themselves like an endless tape-loop-as Ralph sat in Lois’s kitchen, drinking coffee. He was unable to take his eyes off her. She looked easily ten years younger and ten pounds lighter than the Lois he’d gotten used to seeing over the last few years. Had she looked this young and pretty in the park this morning? Ralph didn’t think so, but of course she had been upset this morning, upset and crying, and he supposed that made a difference.

Still…

Yes, still. The tiny networks of wrinkles around the corners of her mouth were gone. So were the incipient turkey-wattles beneath her neck and the sag of flesh which had begun to hang from her upper arms.

She had been crying this morning and was radiantly happy tonight, but Ralph knew that couldn’t account for all the changes he saw.

“I know what you’re looking at,” Lois said. “It’s spooky, isn’t it?

I mean, it solves the question of whether or not all this has just been in our minds, but it’s still spooky. We’ve found the Fountain of Youth.

Forget Florida; it was right here in Derry, all along.”

“We’ve found it?”

For a moment she only looked surprised… and a little wary, as if she suspected he was teasing her, having her on. Of treating her as “Our Lois.” Then she reached across the table and squeezed his hand.

“Go in the bathroom. Take a look at yourself.”

“I know what I look like. Hell, I just finished shaving. Took my time over it, too.”

She nodded. “You did a fine job, Ralph… but this isn’t about your five o’clock shadow. Just look at yourself.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes,” she said firmly. “I am.”

He had almost gotten to the door when she said, “You didn’t just shave; you changed your shirt, too. That’s good. I didn’t like to say anything, but that plaid one was ripped.”

“Was it?” Ralph asked. His back was to her, so she couldn’t see his smile. “I didn’t notice.”

He stood with his hands braced on the bathroom sink, looking into his own face, for a good two minutes. It took him that long to admit to himself that he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

The streaks of black, lustrous as crow feathers, which had returned to his hair were amazing, and so was the disappearance of the ugly pouches beneath his eyes, but the thing he could not seem to take his eyes away from was the way the lines and deep cracks had disappeared from his lips. It was a small thing… but it was also an enormous thing. It was the mouth of a young man. And…

Abruptly, Ralph ran a finger into his mouth, along the right-hand line of his lower teeth. He couldn’t be entirely positive, but it seemed to him that they were longer, as if some of the wear had been rolled back.

“Holy shit,” Ralph murmured, and his mind returned to that sweltering day last summer when he had confronted Ed Deepneau on his lawn. Ed had first told him to drag up a rock and then confided in him that Derry had been invaded by sinister, baby-killing creatures.

Life-stealing creatures. All lines afforce have begun to converge here, Ed had told him. I know how difficult that is to believe, but it’s true.

Ralph was finding it less difficult to believe all the time. What was getting harder to believe was the idea that Ed was mad.

“If this doesn’t stop,” Lois said from the doorway, startling him, we’re going to have to get married and leave town, Ralph. Simone and Mina could not-literally could not-take their eyes off me. I made a lot of glib talk about some new makeup I’d gotten out at the mall, but they didn’t swallow it. A man would, but a woman knows what makeup can do. And what it can’t.”

They walked back to the kitchen, and although the auras were gone again for the time being, Ralph discovered he could see one anyway: a blush rising out of the collar of Lois’s white silk blouse.

“Finally I told them the only thing they would believe.”

“What was that?” Ralph asked.

“I said I’d met a man.” She hesitated, and then, as the rising blood reached her cheeks and stained them pink, she plunged. “And had fallen in love with him.”

He touched her arm and turned her toward him. He looked at the small, clean crease in the bend of her elbow and thought how much he would like to touch it with his mouth. Or the tip of his tongue, perhaps. Then he raised his eyes to look at her. “And was it true?”

She looked back with eyes that were all hope and candor. “I think so,” she said in a small, clear voice, “but everything’s so strange now.

All I know for sure is that I want it to be true. I want a friend. I’ve been frightened and unhappy and lonely for quite awhile now. The loneliness is the worst part of getting old, I think-not the aches and pains, not the cranky bowels or the way you lose your breath after climbing a flight of stairs you could have just about flown up when you were twenty-but being lonely.”

“Yes,” Ralph said. “That is the worst.”

“No one talks to you anymore-oh, they talk at you, sometimes, but that’s not the same-and mostly it’s like people don’t even see you.

Have you ever felt that way?”

Ralph thought of the Derry of the Old Crocks, a city mostly ignored by the hurry-to-work, hurry-to-play world which surrounded it, and nodded.

“Ralph, would you hug me?”

“My pleasure,” he said, and pulled her gently into the circle of his arms.

Some time later, rumpled and dazed but happy, Ralph and Lois sat together on the living-room couch, a piece of furniture so stringently hobbit-sized it was really not much more than a love-seat. Neither of them minded. Ralph’s arm was around Lois’s shoulders. She had let her hair down and he twined a lock of it in his fingers, musing upon how easy it was to forget the feel of a woman’s hair, so marvelously different from the feel of a man’s. She had told him about her card-game and Ralph had listened closely, amazed but not, he discovered, much surprised.

There were a dozen or so of them who played every week or so at the

Ludlow Grange for small stakes. It was possible to go home a five-buck loser or a ten-buck winner, but the most likely result was finishing a dollar ahead or a handful of change behind. Although there were a couple of good players and a couple of shlumps (Lois counted herself among the former), it was mostly just a fun way to spend an afternoon-the Lady Old Crock version of chess tournaments and marathon gin-rummy games.

“Only this afternoon I just couldn’t lose. I should have come home completely broke, what with all of them asking what kind of vitamins I was taking and where I’d gotten my last facial and all the rest of it. Who can concentrate on a silly game like Deuces and jacks, Man with the Axe, Natural Sevens Take All when you have to keep telling new lies and trying not to trip over the ones you’ve already told?”

“Must have been hard, Ralph said, trying not to grin.

“It was. Very hard! But instead of losing, I just kept raking it in.

And do you know why, Ralph?”

He did, but shook his head so she would tell him. He liked listening to her.

“It was their auras. I didn’t always know the exact cards they were holding, but a lot of times I did. Even when I didn’t, I could get a pretty clear idea of how good their hands were. The auras weren’t always there, you know how they come and go, but even when they were gone I played better than I ever have in my life. During the last hour, I began to lose on purpose just so they wouldn’t all hate me.

And do you know something? Even losing on purpose was hard.”

She looked down at her hands, which had begun to twine together nervously in her lap. “And on the way back, I did something I’m ashamed of.”

Ralph began to glimpse her aura again, a dim gray ghost in which unformed blobs of dark blue swirled. “Before you tell me,” he said, “listen to this and see if it sounds familiar.”

He related how Mrs. Perrine had approached while he was sitting on the porch, eating and waiting for Lois to get back. As he told her what he had done to the old lady, he dropped his eyes and felt his ears heating up again.

“Yes,” she said when he was finished. “It’s the same thing I did… but I didn’t mean to, Ralph… at least, I don’t think I meant 1111 to. I was sitting in the back seat with M-na, and she was starting to go on and on again about how different I looked, how young I looked, and I thought-I’m embarrassed to say it right out loud, but I guess I better-I thought, shut you up, you snoopy, envious old thing.”

Because it was envy, Ralph. I could see it in her aura. Big, jagged spikes the exact color of a cat’s eyes. No wonder they call jealousy the green-eyed monster! Anyway, I pointed out the window and said ’Oooh, Mina, isn’t that the dearest little house?” And when she turned to look, I… I did what you did, Ralph. Only I didn’t curl up my hand. I just kind of puckered my lips… like this She demonstrated, looking so kissable that Ralph felt moved (almost compelled, in fact) to take advantage of the expression-and I breathed in a big cloud of her stuff.”

“What happened?” Ralph asked, fascinated and afraid.

Lois laughed ruefully. “To me or her?”

“Both of you.”

“Mina jumped and slapped the back of her neck. ’There’s a bug on me!” she said. ’It bit me! Get it off, Lo! Please get it off!” Of course there was no bug on her-I was the bug-but I brushed at her neck just the same, then opened the window and told her it was gone, it flew away. She was lucky I didn’t knock her brains out instead of just brushing her neck-that’s how full of pep I was. I felt like I could have opened the car door and run all the way home.”

Ralph nodded.

“It was wonderful… too wonderful. It’s like the stories about drugs you see on TV, how they take you to heaven at first and then lock you in hell. What if we start doing this and can’t stop?”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “And what if it hurts people? I keep thinking about vampires.”

“Do you know what I keep thinking about?” Lois’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “Those things you said Ed Deepneau talked about.

Those Centurions. What if they’re us, Ralph? What if they’re us?”

He hugged her and kissed the top of her head. Hearing his worst fear coming from her mouth made it less heavy on his own heart, and that made him think of what Lois had said about loneliness being the worst part of getting old.

“I know,” he said. “And what I did to Mrs. Perrine was totally spur-of-the-moment-I don’t remember thinking about it at all, just doing it. Was it that way with you?”

“Yes. Just like that.” She laid her head against his shoulder.

“We can’t do it anymore,” he said. “Because it really might be addictive. Anything that feels that good just about has to be addictive, don’t you think? We’ve got to try and build up some safeguards against doing it unconsciously, too. Because I think I have been.

That could be why-” A scream of brakes and sliding, wailing tires cut him off. They stared at each other, wide-eyed, as outside on the street that sound went on and on, grief seeming to search for a point of impact.

There was a muffled thud from the street as the scream of the brakes and tires silenced. it was followed by a brief cry uttered by n either a woman or a child, Ralph could not tell which.

Someone else shouted, “What happened?” and then, “Oh, cripe There was a rattle of running footsteps on pavement.

“Stay on the couch,” Ralph said, and hurried to the living-room window. When he ran up the shade Lois was standing right beside him, and Ralph felt a flash of approval. It was what Carolyn would have done under similar circumstances.

They looked out on a nighttime world that pulsed with strange color and fabulous motion. Ralph knew it was Bill they were going to see, knew it-Bill hit by a car and lying dead in the street, his Panama with the crescent bitten out of the brim lying near one outstretched hand. He slipped an arm around Lois and she gripped his hand.

But it wasn’t McGovern in the fan of headlights thrown by the Ford which was slued around in the middle of Harris Avenue; it was Rosalie.

Her early-morning shopping expeditions were at an end.

She lay on her side in a spreading pool of blood, her back bunched and twisted in several places. As the driver of the car which had struck her knelt beside the old stray, the pitiless glare of the nearest streetlamp illuminated his face. It was Joe Wyzer, the Rite Aid druggist, his orange-yellow aura now swirling with confused eddies of red and blue. He stroked the old dog’s side, and each time his hand slipped into the vile black aura which clung to Rosalie, it disappeared.

Dreamy of terror washed through Ralph, dropping his temperature and shrivelling his testicles until they felt like hard little peachpits. Suddenly it was July of 1992 again, Carolyn dying, the deathwatch ticking, and something weird had happened to Ed Deepneau.

Ed had freaked out, and Ralph had found himself trying to keep fielen’s normally good-natured husband from springing at the man in the West Side Gardeners cap and attempting to rip his throat out.

Then-the cherry on the Charlotte russe, Carol would have said-Dorrance Marstellar had arrived. Old Dor.

And what had he said?

I wouldn’t touch him anymore… I can’t see -your hands.

I can’t see your hands.

“Oh my God,” Ralph whispered.

He was brought back to the here and now by the feeling of Lois swaying against him, as if she were on the edge of a faint.

“Lois!” he said sharply, gripping her arm. “Lois, are you okay?”

“I think so… but Ralph… do you see.

“Yes, it’s Rosalie. I guess she-”

“I don’t mean her,-I mean him!” She pointed to the right.

Doc #3 was leaning against the trunk of Joe Wyzer’s Ford, McGovern’s Panama tipped jauntily back on his bald skull. He looked toward Ralph and Lois, grinned insolently, then slowly raised his thumb to his nose and waggled his small fingers at them.

“You bastard!” Ralph bellowed, and slammed his fist against the wall beside the window in frustration.

Half a dozen people were running toward the scene of the accident, but there was nothing they could do; Rosalie would be dead before even the closest of them arrived at the place where she lay in the glare of the car’s headlights. The black aura was solidifying, becoming something which looked almost like soot-darkened brick. It encased her like a form-fitting shroud, and Wyzer’s hand disappeared up to the wrist every time it slipped through that terrible garment.

Now Doc #3 raised his hand with the forefinger sticking up and cocked his head-a teacherly pantomime so good that it almost said attention, please.” right out loud. He tiptoed forward-an unnecessary, as he couldn’t be seen by the people out there, but good theater-and reached toward Joe Wyzer’s back pocket. He glanced around at Ralph and Lois, as if to ask them if they were still paying attention. Then he began to tiptoe forward again, reaching out with his left hand.

“Stop him, Ralph,” Lois moaned. “Oh please stop him.”

Slowly, like a man who has been drugged, Ralph raised his hand and then chopped it down. A blue wedge of light flew from his fingertips, but it diffused as it passed through the windowglass. A pastel fog spread out a little distance from Lois’s house and then disappeared.

The bald doctor shook his finger in an infuriating pantomime-Oh, you naughty boy, it said.

Doc #3 reached out again, and plucked something from Wyzer’s back pocket as he knelt in the street, mourning the dog. Ralph couldn’t tell for sure what it was until the creature in the dirty smock swept McGovern’s hat from his head and pretended to use it on his own nonexistent hair. He had taken a black pocket-comb, the kind you could buy in any convenience store for a buck twenty-nine. Then he leaped into the air, clicking his heels like a malignant elf.

Rosalie had raised her head at the bald doctor’s approach. Now she lowered it back to the pavement and died. The aura surrounding her disappeared at once, not fading but simply winking out of existence like a soapbubble. Wyzer got to his feet, turned to a man standing on the curb, and began to tell him what had happened, gesturing with his hands to indicate how the dog had run out ill front of his car. Ralph found he could actually read a string of six words as they came off Wyzer’s lips: seemed to come out of nowhere.

And when Ralph shifted his gaze back down to the side of Wyzer’s car, he saw that was the place to which the little bald doctor had returned.

CHAPTER 16

Ralph was able to get his rustbucket Oldsmobile started, but it still took him twenty minutes to get them across town to Derry Home on the east side. Carolyn had understood his increasing worries about his driving and had tried to be sympathetic, but she’d had an impatient, hurry-up streak in her nature, and the years had not mellowed it much.

On trips longer than half a mile or so, she was almost always unable to keep from lapsing into reproof. She would stew in silence for awhile, thinking, then begin her critique. If she was particularly exasperated with their progress-or lack of it-she might ask him if he thought an enema would help him get the lead out of his ass. She was a sweetheart, but there had always been an edge to her tongue.

Following such remarks, Ralph would always offer-and always without rancor-to pull over and let her drive. Such offers Carol had always declined. Her belief was that, on short hops, at least, it was the husband’s job to drive and the wife’s to offer constructive criticism.

He kept waiting for Lois to comment on either his speed or his sloppy driving habits (he didn’t think he would be able to remember his blinkers with any consistency these days even if someone put a gun to his head), but she said nothing-only sat where Carolyn had sat on five thousand rides or more, holding her purse on her lap exactly as Carolyn had always held hers. Wedges of light-store neon, traffic signals, streetlights-ran like rainbows across Lois’s cheeks and brows. Her dark eyes were distant and thoughtful. She had cried after Rosalie died, cried hard, and made Ralph pull down the shade again.

Ralph almost hadn’t done that. His first impulse had been to bolt out into the street before Joe Wyzer could get away. To tell Joe he had to be very careful. To tell him that when he emptied his pants pockets tonight, he was going to be missing a cheap comb, no big deal, people were always losing combs, except this time it was a big deal, and next time it might be Rite Aid pharmacist Joe Wyzer lying at the end of the skid. Listen to me, Joe, and listen closely. You have to be very careful, because there’s all sorts of news from the HyperReality Zone, and in your case all of it comes inside black borders.

There were problems with that, however. The biggest was that Joe Wyzer, sympathetic as he had been on the day he had gotten Ralph an appointment with the acupuncturist, would think Ralph was crazy.

Besides, how did one defend oneself against a creature one couldn’t even see?

So he had pulled the shade… but before he did, he took one last hard look at the man who had told him he used to be Joe Wyze but was now older and Wyzer. The auras were still there, and he could see Wyzer’s balloon-string, a bright orange-yellow, rising intact from the top of his head. So he was still all right.

For now, at least.

Ralph had led Lois into the kitchen and poured her another cup of coffee-black, with lots of sugar.

“He killed her, didn’t he?” she asked as she raised the cup to her lips with both hands. “The little beast killed her.”

“Yes, But I don’t think he did it tonight. I think he really did it this morning.”

“Why? Why.”

“Because he could,” Ralph said grimly. “I think that’s the only reason he needs. just because he could.”

Lois had given him a long, appraising look, and an expression of relief had slowly crept into her eyes. “You’ve figured it out, haven’t you? I should have known it the minute I saw you this evening. I would have known, if I hadn’t had so many other things rolling around in what passes for my mind.”

“Figured it out? I’m miles from that, but I have had some ideas.

Lois, do you feel up to a trip to Derry Home with me?”

“I suppose so. Do you want to see Bill?”

“I’m not sure exactly who I want to see. It might be Bill, but it might be Bill’s friend, Bob Polhurst. Maybe even jimmy Vandermeer-do you know him?”

“Jimmy V.? Of course I know him! I knew his wife even better.

In fact, she used to play poker with us until she died. It was a heart attack, and so sudden-” She broke off suddenly, looking at Ralph with her dark Spanish eyes. “Jimmy’s in the hospital? Oh God, it’s the cancer, isn’t it? The cancer came back.”

“Yes. He’s in the room right next to Bill’s friend.” Ralph told her about the conversation he’d had with Faye that morning and the note he’d found on the picnic table that afternoon. He pointed out the odd conjunction of rooms and residents-Polhurst, jimmy V Carolyn-and asked Lois if she thought it was just a coincidence.

“No. I’m sure it isn’t.” She had glanced at the clock. “Come on-regular visiting hours over there finish at nine-thirty, I think.

If we’re going to get there before then, we’d better turn it on Now, as he turned onto Hospital Drive (Forgot your damned blinker again, sweetheart, Carolyn commented), he glanced at LoisLois sitting there with her hands clasped on her purse and her aura invisible for the time being-and asked if she was all right.

She nodded. “Yes. Not great, but okay. Don’t worry about me.”

But I do worry, Lois, Ralph thought. A lot. And by the way, did you see Doc #3 take the comb out of Joe Wyzer’s pocket?

That was a stupid question. Of course she’d seen. The bald midaet had wanted her to see. Had wanted both of them to see. The real question was how much significance she had attached to it.

How much do you really know, Lois? How many connections have you made? I have to wonder, because they’re not really that hard to see.

I wonder… but I’m afraid to ask.

There was a low brick building about a quarter of a mile farther down the feeder road-WomanCare. A number of spotlights (new additions, he was quite sure) threw fans of illumination across its lawn, and Ralph could see two men walking back and forth at the end of grotesquely elongated shadows… rent-a-cops, he supposed.

Another new wrinkle; another straw flying in an evil wind.

He turned left (this time remembering the blinker, at least) and eased the Olds carefully up the chute which led into the multi-level hospital parking garage. At the top, an orange barrier-arm blocked the way. PLEASE STOP amp; TAKE TICKET, read the sign next to it. Ralph could recall a time when there used to be actual people in places like this, rendering them a little less eerie. Those were the dais, my friend, we thought they’d never end, he thought as he unrolled his window and took a ticket from the automated dispenser.

“Ralph?”

“Hmmm?” He was concentrating on avoiding the back bumpers of the cars slant-parked on both sides of the ascending aisles. He knew that the aisles were much too wide for the bumpers of those other cars to be an actual impediment to his progress-intellectually he knew it-but what his guts knew was something else. How Carolyn would bitch and moan about the way I’m driving, he thought with a certain distracted fondness.

“Do you know what we’re doing here, or are we just winging it?”

“Just another minute-let me get this damned thing parked.”

He passed several slots big enough for the Olds on the first level, but none with enough buffer-zone to make him feel comfortable.

On the third level he found three spaces side by side (together they were big enough to hold a Sherman tank comfortably) and babied the Olds into the one in the middle. He killed the motor and turned to face Lois. Other engines idled above and below them, their locations impossible to pinpoint because of the echo. Orange lightthat persistent, penetrating tone-glow now common to all such facilities as this, it seemed-lay upon their skins like thin toxic paint.

Lois looked back at him steadily. He could see traces of the tears she had cried for Rosalie in her puffy, swollen lids, but the eyes themselves were calm and sure. He was struck by how much she had changed just since that morning, when he had found her sitting slump-shouldered on a park bench and weeping. Lois, he thought, if your son and daughter-in-law could see you tonight, I think they might run away screaming at the top of their lungs. Not because you look scary, but because the woman they came to bulldoze into moving to Rivervie

Estates is gone.

“Well?” she asked with just a hint of a smile. “Are you going to talk to me or just look at me?”

Ralph, ordinarily a cautious sort of man, recklessly said the first thing to come into his head. “What I’d like to do, I think, is eat you like ice cream.”

Her smile deepened enough to make dimples at the corners of her mouth. “Maybe later we’ll see how much of an appetite for ice cream you really have, Ralph. For now, just tell me why you brought me here.

And don’t tell me you don’t know, because I think you do.” Ralph closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and opened them again. “I guess we’re here to find the other two bald guys. The ones I saw coming out of May Locher’s. If anyone can explain what’s going on, it’ll be them.”

“What makes you think you’ll find them here?”

“I think they’ve got work to do… two men, jimmy V. and Bill’s friend, dying side by side. I should have known what the bald doctors are-what they do-from the minute I saw the ambulance guys bring Mrs. Locher out strapped to a stretcher and with a sheet over her face.

I would have known, if I hadn’t been so damned tired. The scissors should have been enough. Instead, it took me until this afternoon, and I only got it then because of something Mr. Polhurst’s niece said.”

“What was it?”

“That death was stupid. That if an obstetrician took as much time cutting the umbilical cord, he’d be sued for malpractice. It made me think of a myth I read when I was in grade-school and couldn’t get enough of gods and goddesses and Trojan Horses. The story was about three sisters-the Greek Sisters, maybe, or maybe it was the Weird Sisters. Shit, don’t ask me; I can’t even remember to use my damned turnblinkers half the time. Anyway, these sisters were responsible for the course of all human life. One of them spun the thread, one of them decided how long it would be… is any of this ringing a bell, Lois?”

“Of course it is!” she nearly shouted. “The balloon-strings!

Ralph nodded. “Yes. The balloon-strings. I don’t remember the names of the first two sisters, but I never forgot the name of the last one-Atropos. And according to the story, her job is to cut the thread the first one spins and the second one measures. You could argue with her, you could beg, but it never made any difference.

When she decided it was time to cut, she cut.”

Lois was nodding. “Yes, I remember that story. I don’t know if I read it or someone told it to me when I was a kid. You believe it’s actually true, Ralph, don’t you? Only it turns out to be the Bald Brothers instead of the Weird Sisters.”

“Yes and no. As I remember the story, the sisters were all on the same side-a team. And that’s the feeling I got about the two men who came out of Mrs. Locher’s house, that they were long-time partners with immense respect for each other, But the other guy, the one we saw again tonight, isn’t like them. I think Doc #3’s a rogue.”

Lois shivered, a theatrical gesture that became real at the last moment. “He’s awful, Ralph. I hate him.”

“I don’t blame you.”

He reached for the doorhandle, but Lois stopped him with a touch.

“I saw him do something.”

Ralph turned and looked at her. The tendons in his neck creaked rustily. He had a pretty good idea what she was going to say.

“He picked the pocket of the man who hit Rosalie,” she said.

“While he was kneeling beside her in the street, the bald man picked his pocket. Except all he took was a comb. And the hat that bald man was wearing… I’m pretty sure I recognized it.”

Ralph went on looking at her, fervently hoping that Lois’s memory of Doc #3’s apparel did not extend any further.

“It was Bill’s, wasn’t it? Bill’s Panama.”

Ralph nodded. “Sure it was.”

Lois closed her eyes. “Oh, Lord.”

“What do you say, Lois? Are you still game?”

“Yes.” She opened her door and swung her legs out. “But let’s get going right away, before I lose my nerve.”

“Tell me about it,” said Ralph Roberts.

As they approached the main doors of Derry Home, Ralph leaned toward Lois’s ear and murmured, “is it happening to you?”

“Yes.” Her eyes were very wide. “God, yes. It’s strong this time, isn’t it?”

As they broke the electric-eye beam and the doors to the hospital lobby swung open before them, the surface of the world suddenly peeled back, disclosing another world, one that simmered with unseen colors and shifted with unseen shapes. Overhead, on the wallto-wall mural depicting Derry as it had been during its halcyon lumbering days at the turn of the century, dark brown arrow-shapes chased each other, growing closer and closer together until they touched. When that happened, they flashed a momentary dark green and changed direction. A bright silver funnel that looked like either a waterspout or a toy cyclone was descending the curved staircase which led up to the second-floor meeting rooms, cafeteria, and auditorium. Its wide top end nodded back and forth as it moved from step to step, and to Ralph it felt distinctly friendly, like an anthropomorphic character in a Disney cartoon. As Ralph watched, t\-“o men with briefcases hurried up the stairs, and one of them passed directly through the silver funnel. He never paused in what he was saying to his companion, but when he emerged on the other side, Ralph saw he was absently using his free hand to smooth back his hair… although not a strand was out of place.

The funnel reached the bottom of the stairs, raced around the center of the lobby in a tight, exuberant figure-eight, and then popped out of existence, leaving only a faint, rosy mist behind. This quickly dissipated.

Lois dug her elbow into Ralph’s side, started to point toward an area beyond the Central Information booth, realized there were people all around them, and settled for lifting her chin in that direction instead. Earlier, Ralph had seen a shape in the sky which had looked like a prehistoric bird. Now he saw something which looked like a long translucent snake. It was essing its way across the ceiling above a sign which read PLEASE WAIT HERE FOR BLOOD-TESTING.

“Is it alive?” Lois whispered with some alarm.

Ralph looked more closely and realized the thing had no head… no discernible tail, either. It was all body. He supposed it was alive-he had an idea all the auras were alive in some fashion-but he didn’t think it was really a snake, and he doubted that it was dangerous, at least to the likes of them.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff, sweetheart, he whispered back to her as they joined the short line at Central Information, and as he said it, the snake-thing seemed to melt into the ceiling and disappear.

Ralph didn’t know how important such things as the bird and the cyclone were in the secret world’s scheme of things, but he was positive that people were still the main show. The lobby of Derry Home Hospital was like a gorgeous Fourth of July fireworks display, a display in which the parts of the Roman candles and Chinese Fountains were being played by human beings.

Lois hooked a finger into his collar to make him bend his head toward her. “You’ll have to do the talking, Ralph,” she said in a strengthless, amazed little voice. “I’m having all I can do not to wee in my pants.”

The man ahead of them left the booth and Ralph stepped forward.

As he did, a clear, sweetly nostalgic memory of jimmy V. surfaced in his mind. They’d been on the road someplace in Rhode IslandKingston, maybe-and had decided on the spur of the moment that they wanted to attend the tent revival going on in a nearby hayfield.

They had both been drunk as fleas in a gin-bottle, of course. A pair of well-scrubbed young ladies had been standing outside the turnedback flaps of the tent, handing out tracts, and as he and jimmy neared them, they began to admonish each other in aromatic whispers to act sober, dammit, to just act sober. Had they gotten in that day?

Or"Help you?” the woman in the Central Information booth asked, her tone saying she was doing Ralph a real favor just by speaking to him.

He looked through the glass at her and saw a woman buried inside a troubled orange aura that looked like a burning bramblebush. Here’s a lady who loves the fine print and stands on all the ceremony she can, he thought, and on the heels of that, Ralph remembered that the two young women flanking the entrance to the tent had gotten one whiff of him and jimmy V. and turned them politely but firmly away. They had ended up spending the evening in a Central Falls juke-joint, as he recalled, and had probably been lucky not to get rolled when they staggered out after last call.

“Sir?” the woman in the glass booth asked impatiently. “Can I help you?”

Ralph came back to the present with a thud he could almost feel.

“Yes, ma’am. My wife and I would like to visit jimmy Vandermeer on the third floor, if-”

“That’s I.C.U,!” she snapped. “Can’t go up to I.C.U. without a special pass.” Orange hooks began to poke their way out of the glow around her head, and her aura began to look like barbed wire strung across some ghostly no-man’s-land.

“I know,” Ralph said, more humbly than ever, “but my frienj, Lafayette Chapin, he said-”

“Gosh!” the woman in the booth interrupted. “It’s wonderful, the way everyone’s got a friend. Really wonderful.” She rolled a satiric eye toward the ceiling.

“Faye said jimmy could have visitors, though. You see, he has cancer and he’s not expected to live much l-”

“Well, I’ll check the files, the woman in the booth said with the grudging air of one who knows she is being sent upon a fool’s errand, “but the computer is very slow tonight, so it’s going to take awhile. Give me your name, then you and your wife go sit over there.

I’ll page you as soon as-” Ralph decided that he had eaten enough humble pie in front of this bureaucratic guard dog. It wasn’t as if he wanted an exit-visa from Albania, after all; just a goddam I.C.U. pass would do.

There was a slot in the base of the glass booth. Ralph reached through it and grasped the woman’s wrist before she could pull it away.

There was a sensation, painless but very clear, of those orange hooks passing directly through his flesh without finding anything to catch on. Ralph squeezed gently and felt a small burst of force-something that would have been no bigger than a pellet if it had been seen-pass from him to the woman. Suddenly the officious orange aura around her left arm and side turned the faded turquoise of Ralph’s aura. She gasped and jerked forward on her chair, as if someone had just dumped a paper cup filled with ice-cubes down the back of her uniform.

[“Never mind the computer. just give me a couple of passes, please.

Right away.”

“Yes, sir,” she said at once, and Ralph let go of her wrist so she could reach beneath her desk. The turquoise glow around her arm was turning orange again, the change in color creeping down from her shoulder toward her wrist.

But I could have turned her all blue, Ralph thought. Take her offer.

Run her around the room like a wind-up toy.

He suddenly remembered Ed quoting Matthew’s Gospel-to Herod, When he said that he was mocked, was exceeding through a mixture of fright and shame filled him. Thoughts of vampirism recurred as well, and a snatch from a famous old Pogo comic strip: We have met the enemy and he is us.

Yes, he could probably do almost anything he wanted with this orange-haloed grump; his batteries were fully charged.

The only problem was that the juice in those batteries-and in Lois’s, as well-was stolen goods.

When the information-lady’s hand emerged from beneath the desk, it was holding two laminated pink badges marked INTENSIVE CARE/VISITOR.

“Here you are, sir,” she said in a courteous voice utterly unlike the tone in which she had first addressed him. “Enljoy your visit and thank you for waiting.”

“Thank you,” Ralph said. He took the badges and grasped Lois’s hand.

“Come on, dear. We ought to [“Ralph, what did yoU DO to her?”] [“Nothing, I guess-I think she’s all right.”] get upstairs and make our visit before it gets too late.”

Lois glanced back at the woman in the information booth. She was dealing with her next customer, but slowly, as if she’d just been granted some moderately amazing revelation and had to think it over.

The blue glow was now visible only at the very tips of her fingers, and as Lois watched, that disappeared as well.

Lois looked up at Ralph again and smiled.

I “Yes… she is all right. So stop beating up on yourself [“Was that what I was doing?” [“I think so, yes… we’re talking that way again, Ralph.”] I “I know,”] [“Ralph?”] [“Yes?”] I “This is all pretty wonderful, isn’t it?”] [“Yes.” Ralph tried to hide the rest of what he was thinking from her: that when the price for something which felt this wonderful came due, they were apt to discover it was very high.

[“Stop staring at that baby, Ralph. You’re making its mother nervous.”]

Ralph glanced at the woman in whose arms the baby slept and saw that Lois was right… but it was hard not to look. The baby, no more than three months old, lay within a capsule of violently shifting yellow-gray aura. This powerful but disquieting thunder light circled the tiny body with the idiot speed of the atmosphere surrounding a gas giant-Jupiter, say, or Saturn.

[“Jesus, Lois, that’s brain-damage, isn’t it?”] [“Yes. The woman says there was a car accident.”] [“Says? Have you been talking to her?”] [“No. It’s -.” [“I don’t understand.”] [“Join the club.”] The oversized hospital elevator labored slowly upward. Those inside-the lame, the halt, the guilty few in good health-didn’t speak but either turned their eyes up to the floor-indicator over the doors or down to inspect their own shoes. The only exception to this was the woman with the thunderstruck baby. She was watching Ralph with distrust and alarm, as if she expected him to leap forward at any moment and try to rip her infant from her arms.

It’s not just that I was looking, Ralph thought. At least I don’t think so. She felt me thinking about her hah-. Felt me… sensed me… heard me… some damned thing, anyway.

The elevator stopped on the second floor and the doors wheezed open. The woman with the baby turned to Ralph.

The blanket shifted slightly as she did and Ralph got a look at the crown of its head.

There was a deep crease in the tiny skull. A red scar ran the length of it. To Ralph it looked like a rill of tainted water standing at the bottom of a ditch. The ugly and confused yellow-gray aura which surrounded the baby was emerging from this scar like steam from a crack in the earth. The baby’s balloon-string was the same color as its aura, and it was unlike any other balloon-string Ralph had seen so far-not unhealthy in appearance but short, ugly, and no more than a stub.

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you any manners?” the baby’s mother asked Ralph, and what cut him wasn’t so much the admonotion as the way she made it. He had scared her badly, “Madam, I assure you-”

“Yeah, go on and assure my fanny,” she said, and stepped out of the car. The elevator doors started to slide closed. Ralph glanced at Lois and the two of them exchanged a moment of brief but total understanding. Lois shook her finger at the doors as if scolding them, and a gray, meshlike substance fanned out from its tip. The doors struck this and then slid back into their slots, as they were programmed to do upon encountering any barrier to their progress.

[“Madam!ill The woman stopped and turned around, clearly confused. She shot suspicious glances about her, trying to identify who had spoken.

Her aura was a dark, buttery yellow with faint tints of orange spoking out from its inner edges. Ralph fixed her eyes with his.

[“I’m sorry if I offended you. This is all very new to my friend and me. We’re like children at a formal dinner. I apologize.

He didn’t know just what she was trying to communicate-it was like watching someone talk inside a soundproof booth-but he sensed relief and deep unease… the sort Of unease people feel when they think they may have been observed doing something they shouldn’t. Her doubtful eyes remained on his face a moment or two longer, then she turned and began to walk rapidly down the corridor in the direction of a sign reading NEUROLOGICAL SURVEY.

The gray mesh Lois had cast at the door was thinning, and when the doors tried to close again, they cut neatly through it. The car continued its slow upward journey.

[“Ralph… Ralph, I think I know what happened to that baby.”] She reached toward his face with her right hand and slipped it between his nose and mouth with her palm down. She pressed the pad of her thumb lightly against one of his cheekbones and the pad of her index finger lightly against the other. It was done so quickly and confidently that no one else in the elevator noticed. If one of the three other riders had noticed, he or she would have seen something that looked like a neatness-minded wife smoothing away a blot of skin-lotion or a dollop of leftover shaving cream.

Ralph felt as if someone had pulled a high-voltage switch inside his brain, one that turned on whole banks of blazing stadium lights.

In their raw, momentary glow, he saw a terrible image: hands clad in a violent brownish-purple aura reaching into a crib and snatching up the baby they had just seen. He was shaken back and forth, head snapping and rolling on the thin stalk of neck like the head of a Raggedy Andy doll -and thrown The lights in his head went black then, and Ralph let out a harsh, shuddery sigh of relief. He thought of the pro-life protestors he’d seen on the evening news just last night, men and women waving signs with Susan Day’s picture and WANTED FOR MURDER on them, men and women in Grim Reaper robes, men and women carrying a banner which read LIFE, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE.

He wondered if the thunderstruck baby might have a differing opinion on that last one. He met Lois’s amazed, agonized eyes with his own, and groped out to take her hands.

[“Father did it, right? Threw the kid against the [”)’es. The hah. Couldn’t stop coming.” [“And she knows. She knows, but she hasn’t told anyone.

[“No… but she might, Ralph. She’s the knowing about it.”] [“She might also wait until he does it again. An next time he might finish the job.” A terrible thought occurred to Ralph then; it shot across his mind like a meteor scratching momentary fire across a midnight summer sky: it might be better if he did finish the job. The thunderstruck baby’s balloon-string had only been a stump, but it had been a healthy stump. The child might live for years, not knowing who he was or where he was, let alone why he was, watching people come and go like trees in the mist…

Lois was standing with her shoulders slumped, looking at the floor of the elevator car and radiating a sadness that squeezed Ralph’s heart. He reached out, put a finger under her chin, and watched a delicate blue rose spin itself out of the place where his aura touched hers. He tilted her head up and was not surprised to see tears in her eyes.

“Do you still think it’s all pretty wonderful, Lois?” he asked softly, and to this he received no answer, either with his ears or in his mind.

They were the only two to get out on the third floor, where the silence was as thick as the dust under library shelves. A pair of nurses stood halfway up the hall, clipboards held to white-clad bosoms, talking in low whispers. Anyone else standing by the elevators might have looked at them and surmised a conversation dealing with life, death, and heroic measures; Ralph and Lois, however, took one look at their overlapping auras and knew that the subject currently under discussion was where to go for a drink when their shift ended.

Ralph saw this and at the same time he didn’t, the way a deeply preoccupied man sees and obeys traffic signals without really seeing them. Most of his mind was occupied with a deadly sense of deja vu which had washed over him the moment he and Lois stepped out of the ’ elevator and into this world where the faint squeak of the nurses shoes on the linoleum sounded almost exactly like the faint beep of the life-support equipment.

Even-numbered rooms on your left,-odd-numbered rooms on your right, he thought, and 317, where Carolyn died, is up by the nurses’ station. It was 317, all right-I remember. Now that I’m here I remember everything. How someone was always sticking her chart in the little pocket on the back of the door upside down. How the light from the window fell across the bed in a kind of crooked rectangle on sunny days. How you could sit in the visitor’s chair and look out at the desk-nurse, whose job it is to monitor vital signs, incoming telephone calls, and outgoing pizza orders.

The same. All the same. It was early March again, the gloomy end of a leaden, overcast day, sleet beginning to spick-spack off the one window of Room 317, and he had been sitting in the visitor’s chair with an unopened copy of Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in his lap since early morning. Sitting there, not wanting to get up even long enough to use the bathroom because the deathwatch had almost run down by then, each tick was a lurch and the gap between each tick and the next was a lifetime; his long-time companion had a train to catch and he wanted to be on the platform to see her off.

There would only be one chance to do it right.

It was very easy to hear the sleet as it picked up speed and velocity, because the life-support equipment had been turned off.

Ralph had given up during the last week of February; it had taken Carolyn, I who had never g yen up in her I’fe, a little longer to get the message.

And what, exactly, was that message? Why that, in a hard-fought ten-round match pitting Carolyn Roberts against Cancer, the winner was Cancer, that all-time heavyweight champeen, by a TKO.

He had sat in the visitor’s chair, watching and waiting as her respiration long, sighing exhale, grew more and more pronounced-the the flat, moveless chest, the growing certainty that the last breath had indeed been the last breath, that the watch had run down, the train arrived in the station to take on its single passenger… and then another huge, unconscious gasp would come as she tore the next lungful out of the unfriendly air, no longer breathing in any normal sense but only lunging reflexively along from one gasp to the next like a drunk lurching down a long dark corridor in a cheap hotel.

Spickle-spickle-spackle-spackle: the sleet had gone on rapping invisible fingernails against the window as the dirty March day drew down to dirty March dark and Carolyn went on fighting the last half of her last round. By then she had been running completely on autopilot, of course; the brain which had once existed within that finely made skull was gone. It had been replaced by a mutant-a stupid gray-black delinquent that could not think or feel but only eat and eat and eat until it had gorged itself to death.

SPickle-,vpickle-spackle-spackle, and he had seen that the T-shaped breathing apparatus in her nose had come askew. He waited for her to tear one of her awful, labored breaths out of the air and then, as she exhaled, he had leaned forward and replaced the small plastic nosepiece. He had gotten a little mucus on his fingers, he remembered, and had wiped it off on a tissue from the box on the bedside table.

He had sat back, waiting for the next breath, wanting to make sure the nosepiece didn’t come askew again, but there Ivasn’t aiiv next breath, and he realized that the ticking sound he had heard coming from everywhere since the previous summer seemed to have stopped. He remembered waiting as the minutes passed-one, then three, then six-unable to believe that all the good years and good times (not to mention the few bad ones) had ended in this flat and toneless fashion.

Her radio, tuned to the local easy-listening station, was playing ing softly in the corner and he listened to Simon and Garfunkel s’ “Scarborough Fair.” They sang it all the way to the end.

Wayne Newton came on next, and began to sing “Danke Schoen.” He sang it all the way to the end. The weather report came next, but before the disc jockey could finish telling about how the weather was to be on Ralph Roberts’s first full day as a widower, all that stuff about clearing and colder and winds shifting around to the northeast, Ralph finally got it through his head. The watch had stopped ticking, the train had come, the boxing match was over. All the metaphors had fallen down, leaving only the woman in the room, silent at last. Ralph began to cry. Still crying, he had blundered over into the corner and turned off the radio. He remembered the summer they had taken a fingerpaint class, and the night they had ended up fingerpainting each other’s naked bodies. This memory made him cry harder. He went to the window and leaned his head against the cold glass and cried. In that first terrible minute of understanding, he had wanted only one thing: to be dead himself. A nurse heard him crying and came in. She tried to take Carolyn’s pulse. Ralph told her to stop being a goddam fool.

She came over to Ralph and for a moment he thought she was going to try to take his pulse.

Instead, she had put her arms around him. She[“Ralph? Ralph, are you all right?”

He looked around at Lois, started to say he was fine, and then remembered there was precious little he could hide from her while they were in this state.

[“Feeling sad. Too many memories in here. Not good others.”] [“I understand… but look on, Look on the floor,, Ralph He did, and his eyes widened. The floor was covered with an overlay of multicolored tracks, some fresh, most fading to invisibi Its.

Two sets stood out clearly from the rest, as brilliant as diamonds ill a litter of paste imitations. They were a deep green-gold in which ai few tiny reddish flecks still swam.

[“Do they belong to the ones we’re looking for, Ralph?”] [“Yes-the docs are here.”] Ralph took Lois’s hand-it felt very cold-and began to lead her slowly up the hall.

CHAPTER 17

They hadn’t gone far when something very strange and rather frightening happened. For a moment the world bled white in front of them. The doors to the rooms ranged along the hall, barely visible in this bright white haze, expanded to the size of warehouse loading bays.

The corridor itself seemed to simultaneously elongate and grow taller.

Ralph felt the bottom go out of his stomach the way it often had back when he was a teenager, and a frequent customer on the Dust Devil roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach. He heard Lois moan, and she squeezed his hand with panicky tightness.

The whiteout lasted only a second, and when the colors swarmed back into the world, they were brighter and crisper than they had been a moment before. Normal perspective returned, but objects looked thicker, somehow. The auras were still there, but they appeared both thinner and paler-pastel coronas instead of spraypainted primary colors. At the same time Ralph realized he could see every crack and pore in the Sheetrocked wall to his left… and then he realized he could see the pipes, wires, and insulation behind the walls, if he wanted to; all he had to do was look.

Oh my God, he thought. Is this really happening? Can this really, be happening?

Sounds were everywhere: hushed bells, a toilet being flushed, muted laughter. Sounds a person normally took for granted, as part of everyday life, but not now. Not here. Like the visible reality of things, the sounds seemed to have an extraordinarily sensuous texture, like thin overlapping scallops of silk and steel.

Nor were all the sounds ordinary; there were a great many exotic ones weaving their way through the mix. He heard a fly buzzing deep in a heating duct. The fine-grain sandpaper sound of a nurse adjusting her pantyhose in the staff bathroom. Beating hearts. Circulating blood. The soft tidal flow of respiration. Each sound was perfect on its own; fitted into the others, they made a beautiful and complicated auditory ballet-a hidden Swan Lake of gurgling stomachs, humming power outlets, hurricane hairdryers, whispering wheels on hospital gurneys.

Ralph could hear a TV at the end of the hall beyond the nurses’ station. It was coming from Room 340, where Mr. Thomas Wren, a kidney patient, was watching Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner in The Bad and the Beautiful. “If you team up with me, baby, we’ll turn this town on its ear,” Kirk was saying, and Ralph knew from the aura which surrounded the words that Mr. Douglas had been suffering a toothache on the day that particular scene was filmed. Nor was that all; he knew he could go (higher? deeper? wider?) if he wanted. Ralph most definitely did not want. This was the forest of Arden, and a man could get lost in its thickets.

Or eaten by tigers.

[“Jesus It’s another level-it must be, Lois A whole other level [“I know.

[“Are you okay with this?” [“I think I am, Ralph… are you?”] [“I guess so, for now… but if the bottom drops out again, I don’t know. Come on.”] But before they could begin following the green-gold tracks again, Bill McGovern and a man Ralph didn’t know came out of Room 313. They were in deep conversation.

Lois turned a horror-struck face toward Ralph.

[“Oh, o.” Oh God, no! Do you see, Ralph? Do you see?”] Ralph gripped her hand more tightly. He saw, all right. McGovern’s friend was surrounded by a plum-colored aura. It didn’t look especially healthy, but Ralph didn’t think the man was seriously ill, either; it was just a lot of chronic stuff like rheumatism and kidney gravel. A balloon-string of the same mottled purple shade rose from the top of the man’s aura, wavering hesitantly back and forth like a diver’s air-hose in a mild current.

McGovern’s aura, however, was totally black. The stump of what had once been a balloon-string jutted stiffly up from it. The thunderstruck baby’s balloon-string had been short but healthy; what they were looking at now was the decaying remnant of a crude amputation. Ralph had a momentary image, so strong it was almost a hallucination, of McGovern’s eyes first bulging and then popping out of their sockets, knocked loose by a flood of black bugs. He had to close his own eyes for a moment to keep from screaming, and when he opened them again, Lois was no longer at his side.

McGovern and his friend were walking in the direction of the nurses’ station, probably bound for the water-fountain. Lois was in hot pusuit, trotting up the corridor, bosom heaving, Her aura flashed with twizzling pinkish sparks that looked like neon-flavored asterisks.

Ralph bolted after her. He didn’t know what would happen if she caught McGovern’s attention, and didn’t really want to find out. He thought he was probably going to, however.

[“Lois.” Lois, don’t do that.” She ignored him.

[“Bill, stop! You have to listen to me.” Something’s wrong with you./’,] McGovern paid no attention to her; he was talking about Bob Polhurst’s manuscript, Later That Summer. “Best damned book on the Civil War I ever read,” he told the man inside the plum-colored aura, “but when I suggested that he publish, he told me that was out of the question. Can you believe it? A possible Pulitzer Prize winner, but-” [“Lois, come back! Don’t go near him."’] [“Bill.” Bill! B-“I Lois reached McGovern just before Ralph was able to reach her.

She put out her hand to grab his shoulder. Ralph saw her fingers plunge into the murk which surrounded him… and then slide into him.

Her aura changed at once, from a gray-blue shot with those pinkish sparks to a red as bright as the side of a fire engine. jagged flocks of black shot through it like clouds of tiny swarming insects. Lois screamed and pulled her hand back. The expression on her face was a mixture of terror and loathing. She held her hand up in front of her eyes and screamed again, although Ralph could see nothing on it.

Narrow black stripes were now whirring giddily around the outer edges of her aura; to Ralph they looked like planetary orbits marked on a map of the solar system. She turned to flee. Ralph grabbed her by the upper arms and she beat at him blindly.

McGovern and his friend, meanwhile, continued their placid amble up the hall to the drinking fountain, completely unaware of the shrieking, struggling woman not ten feet behind them. “When I asked Bob why he wouldn’t publish the book,” McGovern was continuing, “he said that I of all people should understand his reasons.

I told him…”

Lois drowned him out, shrieking like a firebell.

[“Quit it, Lois.” Quit it right now!!

Whatever happened to you is over now.” It’s over and you’re all right.” But Lois continued to struggle, dinning those inarticulate screams into his head, trying to tell him how awful it had been, how he’d been rotting, that there were things inside him, eating him alive, and that was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst. Those things were around, she said, they were bad, and they had known she was there.

[“Lois, you’re with me You’re with me and it’s all right.” One of her flying fists clipped the side of his jaw and Ralph saw stars. He understood that they had passed to a plane of reality where physical contact with others was impossible-hadn’t he seen Lois’s hand pass directly into McGovern, like the hand of a ghost?-but they were obviously still real enough to each other; he had the bruised jaw to prove it.

He slipped his arms around her and hugged her against him, imprisoning her fists between her breasts and his chest. Her cries however, continued to rant and blast in his head, He locked his hands together between her shoulderblades and squeezed.

He felt the power leap out of him again, as it had that morning, only this time it felt entirely different. Blue light spilled through Lois’s turbulent red-black aura, soothing it. Her struggles slowed and then ceased. they felt her draw a shuddering breath. Above and around her, the blue glow was expanding and fading. The black bands disappeared from her aura, one after the other, from the bottom to top, and then that alarming shade of infected red also began to fade. She put her head against his arm. sorry, Ralph-I went nuclear again, didn’t I?”] That’s The trouble.”

“I suppose so, but ever mind. You’re okay now, that’s the important thing.”] [“If ’ you knew how horrible that was-… touching the thing “You put it across very well, Lois.

She glanced down the corridor, where McGovern’s friend was now getting a drink. McGovern lounged against the wall next to him, talking about how the Exalted amp; Revered Bob Polhurst had always done the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in ink.

“He used to tell me that wasn’t pride but optimism,” McGovern said, and the deathbag swirled sluggishly around him as he spoke, flowing in and out of his mouth and between the fingers of his gesturing, eloquent hand.

[“We can’t help him, can we, Ralph? There’s not a thing in the world we can do.”] Ralph gave her a brief, strong hug. Her aura, he saw, had entirely returned to normal.

McGovern and his friend were walking back down the corridor toward them. Acting on impulse, Ralph disengaged himself from Lois and stepped directly in front of Mr. Plum, who was listening to McGovern hold forth on the tragedy of old age and nodding in the right places.

[“Ralph, don’t do that.”] [“It’s okay, don’t worry.”

But all at once he wasn’t so sure it was okay. He might have stepped back, given another second. Before he could, however, Mr. Plum glanced unseeingly into his face and walked right through him.

The sensation that swept through Ralph’s body at his passage was Perfectly familiar; it was the pins-and-needles feeling one gets when a sleeping limb starts to wake up. For one moment his aura and Mr. Plum’s mingled, and Ralph knew everything about the man that there was to know, including the dreams he’d had in his mother’s womb.

Mr. Plum stopped short.

“Something wrong?” McGovern asked.

“I guess not, but… did you hear a bang someplace? Like a firecracker, or a car backfire?”

“Can’t say I did, but my hearing isn’t what it used to be.”

McGovern chuckled. “If something did blow up, I certainly hope it wasn’t in one of the radiation labs.”

“I don’t hear anything now. Probably just my imagination.” They turned into Bob Polhurst’s room.

Ralph thought, Mrs. Perrine said it sounded like a gunshot.

Lois’s friend thought there was a bug on her, maybe biting her. just a difference in touch, maybe, the way different piano-players have different touches. Either way, they feel it when we mess with them.

They may not know what it is, but they sure do feel it.

Lois took his hand and led him to the door of Room 313. They stood in the hall, looking in as McGovern seated himself in a plastic contour chair at the foot of the bed. There were at least eight people crammed into the room and Ralph couldn’t see Bob Polhurst clearly, but he could see one thing: although he was deep within his own deathbag, Polhurst’s balloon-string was still intact. It was as filthy as a rusty exhaust pipe, peeling in some places and cracked in others… but it was still intact. He turned to Lois.

[“These people may have longer to wait than they think.

Lois nodded, then pointed down at the greeny-gold footprintsthe white-man tracks. They bypassed 313, Ralph saw, but turned in at the next doorway-315, jimmy V."s room.

He and Lois walked up together and stood looking in. jimmy V. had three visitors, and the one sitting beside the bed thought he was all alone. That one was Faye Chapin, idly looking through the dOLiblc stack of get-well cards on jimmy’s bedside table.

The other two were the little bald doctors Ralph had seen for the first time on May Locher’s stoop. They stood at the foot of Jimmy V."s bed, solemn in their clean white tunics, and now that he stood close to them, Ralph could see that there were worlds of character in those unlined, almost identical faces; it just wasn’t the sort of thing one could see through a pair of binoculars-or maybe not until you slid up the ladder of perception a little way. Most of it was in the eyes, which were dark, pupilless, and flecked with deep golden glints. Those eyes shone with intelligence and lively awareness. Their auras gleamed and flashed around them like the robes of emperors…

… or perhaps of Centurions on a visit of state.

They looked over at Ralph and Lois, who stood holding hands in the doorway like children who have lost their way in a fairy-tale wood, and smiled at them.

[Hello, woman.] That was Doc #1. He was holding the scissors in his right hand.

The blades were very long, and the points looked very sharp.

Doc #2 took a step toward them and made a funny little half-bow.

[Hello, man. We’ve bee waiting for you.] Ralph felt Lois’s hand tighten on his own, then loosen as she decided they were in no immediate danger. She took a small step forward, looking from Doc #1 to Doc #2 and then back to #1 again, [“Who are you?”] Doc #1 crossed his arms over his small chest. The long blades of’ his scissors lay the entire length of his white-clad left forearm.

[We don’t have names, not the same as Short-Timers do-but you call us after the fates in the story this man has already told you. That these names originally belonged to women means little to us, since we are creatures with no sexual dimension. I will be Clotho, although I spin no thread, and my colleague and old friend will be Lachesis, although he shakes no rods and has never thrown the coins.

Come in, both of you-please!] They came in and stood warily between the visitor’s chair and the bed. Ralph didn’t think the docs meant them any harm-for now, at least-but he still didn’t want to get too close. Their auras, so bright and fabulous compared to those of ordinary people, intimidated him, and he could see from Lois’s wide eyes and half-open mouth that she felt the same. She sensed him looking at her, turned toward him, and tried to smile. My Lois, Ralph thought. He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her briefly.

Lachesis: [We’ve given you our names-names you may use, at any rate,-won’t you give us yours?] Lois: [“You mean you don’t already know? Pardon me, but I find that hard to believe.”] Lachesis: [We could know, but choose not to. We like to observe the rules of common Short-Time politeness wherever we can. We find them lovely, for they are passed on by your kind from large hand to small and create the illusion of long lives.] [“I don’t understand.”] Ralph didn’t, either, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He found something faintly patronizing in the tone of the one who called himself Lachesis, something that reminded him of McGovern when he was in a mood to lecture or pontificate.

Lachesis: [It doesn’t matter. We felt sure you would come. We know that -you were watching us on Monday morning, man, at the borne of I At this point there was a queer overlapping in Lachesis’s speech.

He seemed to say two things at exactly the same time, the terms rolling together like a snake with its own tail in its mouth: [May Locher. [the finished woman.] Lois took a hesitant step forward.

[“My name is Lois Chasse. My friend I’s Ralph Roberts. And now that we’ve all been properly introduced, maybe you two fellows will tell us what’s going on around here.”] Lachesis: [There is another to be named!

Clotho: [Ralph Roberts has already named him.] Lois looked at Ralph, who was nodding his head.

[“They’re talking about Doc #3. Right, guys?”] Clotho and Lachesis nodded. They were wearing identical approving smiles. Ralph supposed he should have been flattered, but he wasn’t. Instead he was afraid, and very angry-they had been neatly manipulated, every step down the line. This was no chance meeting; it had been a setup from the word go. Clotho and Lachesis, just a couple of little bald doctors with time on their hands, standing around in Jimmy V."s room waiting for the Short-Timers to arrive, ho-hum.

Ralph glanced over at Faye and saw he had taken a book called 50 Classic Chess Problems out of his back pocket. He was reading and picking his nose in ruminative fashion as he did so. After a few preliminary explorations, Faye dove deep and hooked a big one. He examined it, then parked it on the underside of the bedside table.

Ralph looked away, embarrassed, and a saying of his grandmother’s Popped into his mind: Peek not through a keyhole, lest ye be vexed.

He had lived to be seventy without fully understanding that; at last he thought he did. Meanwhile, another question had occurred to him.

[“Why doesn’t Faye see us? Why didn’t Bill and his friend see us, for that matter? And how could that man walk right through me? Or did I just imagine that?”] Clotho smiled.

[You didn’t imagine it. Try to think of life as a kind of building Ralph-what you would call a skyscraper.] Except that wasn’t quite what Clotho was thinking of, Ralph discovered. For one flickering moment he seemed to catch an ’ image from the mind of the other one he found both exciting and disturbing: an enormous tower constructed of dark and sooty stone, standing in a field of red roses.

Slit windows twisted up its sides in a brooding spiral.

Then it was gone.

[You and Lois and all the other Short-Time creatures live on the first two floors of this structure. Of course there are elevators-no, Ralph thought. Not in the tower I saw in your mind, my little friend.

In that building-if such a building actually exists-there are no elevators, only a narrow staircase festooned with cobwebs and doorways leading to God knows what.

Lachesis was looking at him with a strange, almost suspicious curiosity, and Ralph decided he didn’t much care for that look. He turned back to Clotho and motioned for him to go on.

Clotho: [As I was saying, there are elevators, but Short-Timers are not allowed to use them under ordinary circumstances. You are not

[ready] [prepared] --I The last explanation was clearly the best, but it danced away from Ralph just before he could grasp it. He looked at Lois, who shook her head, and then back at Clotho and Lachesis again. He was beginning to feel angrier than ever. All the long, endless nights sitting in the wing-chair and waiting for dawn; all the days he’d spent feeling like a ghost inside his own skin; the inability to remember a sentence unless he read it three times; the phone numbers, once carried in his head, which he now had to look up A memory came then, one which simultaneously summed up and justified the anger he felt as he looked at these bald creatures with Iding, their darkly golden eyes and almost blinding auras. He saw himself peering into the cupboard over his kitchen counter, looking for the powdered soup his tired, overstrained mind insisted must be in there someplace -He saw himself poking, pausing, then poking some more.

He saw the expression on his face-a look of distant perplexity that could easily have been mistaken for mild mental retardation but which was really simple exhaustion. Then he saw himself drop his hands and simply stand there, as if he expected the packet to jump out on its own.

Not until now, at this moment and at this memory, did he realize how totally horrible the last few months had been. Looking back at them was like looking into a wasteland painted in desolate maroons and grays.

[“So you took us onto the elevator… or maybe that wasn’t good enough for the likes of us and you just trotted us up the fire stairs.

Got us acclimated a little at a time so we wouldn’t strip our gears completely, I imagine. And it was easy. All you had to do was rob us of our sleep until we were half-crazy. Lois’s son and daughter-in-law want to put her in a theme-park for geriatrics, did you know that?

And my friend Bill McGovern thinks I’m ready for juniper Hill.

Meanwhile, you little angels-”] Clotho offered just a trace of his former wide smile.

[We’re no angels, Ralph.] [“Ralph, please don’t shout at them.”] Yes, he had been shouting, and at least some of it seemed to have gotten through to Faye; he had closed his chess book, stopped picking his nose, and was now sitting bolt-upright in his chair, looking uneasily about the room.

Ralph looked from Clotho (who took a step backward, losing what was left of his smile) to Lachesis.

“Your friend says you’re not angels. So here are they -?

Playing poker six or eight floors farther up? And I suppose God’s in the penthouse and the devil’s stoking coal in the boiler-room. “I No reply. Clotho and Lachesis glanced doubtfully at each other.

Lois plucked at Ralph’s sleeve, but he ignored her.

[“So what are we supposed to do, guys? Track down your little bald version of Hannibal Lecter and take his scalpel away? Well, fuck you.”

] Ralph would have turned on his heel and walked out then (he had seen a lot of movies, and he knew a good exit-line when he heard one), but Lois burst into shocked, frightened tears, and that held him where he was. The look of bewildered reproach in her eyes made him regret his outburst at least a little. He slipped his arm back around Lois’s shoulders, and looked at the two bald men defiantly.

They exchanged another glance and something-some communication just above his and Lois’s ability to hear or understandpassed between them. When Lachesis turned to them again, he was smiling… but his eyes were grave.

[I hear your anger, Ralph, but it is not justified. You do not believe that now, but perhaps you may. For the time being, we must set your questions and our answers-such answers as we may give-aside.] [“Why?” I [Because the time of severing has come for this man, Watch closely, that you may learn and know.] Clotho stepped to the left side of the bed. Lachesis approached from the right, walking through Faye Chapin as he went. Faye bent over, afflicted with a sudden coughing-fit, and then opened his book of chess problems again as it eased.

[“Ralph, I can’t watch this I can’t watch them do it.f"I But Ralph thought she would. He thought they both would. He held her tighter as Clotho and Lachesis bent over Jimmy V.

Their faces were lit with love and caring and gentleness; they made Ralph think of the faces he had once seen in a Rembrandt painting-the Night Watch, he thought it had been called. Their auras mingled and overlapped above jimmy’s chest, and suddenly the man in the bed opened his eyes. He looked through the two little bald doctors at the ceiling for a moment, his expression vague and puzzled, and then his gaze shifted toward the door and he smiled.

“Hey! Look who’s here!” Jimmy V. exclaimed. His voice was rusty and choked, but Ralph could still hear his South Boston wiseguy accent, where here came out heah. Faye jumped. The hook of chess problems tumbled out of his lap and fell on the floor. He leaned over and took jimmy’s hand, but jimmy ignored him and kept looking across the room at Ralph and Lois. “It’s Ralph Roberts!

And Paul Chasse’s wife widdim! Say, Ralphie, do you remember the day we tried to get into that tent revival so we could hear em sing ’Amazing Grace’?”

[“I remember, jimmy,”] Jimmy appeared to smile, and then his eyes slipped closed again.

Lachesis placed his hands against the dying man’s cheeks and moved his head a bit, like a barber getting ready to shave a customer. At the same moment Clotho leaned even closer, opened his scissors, and slid them forward so that the long blades held jimmy V."s black balloon-string. As Clotho closed the scissors, Lachesis leaned forward and kissed jimmy’s forehead.

[Go in peace, friend.] There was a small, unimportant snick!

sound. The segment of the balloon-string above the scissors drifted up toward the ceiling and disappeared. The deathbag in which Jimmy V. lay turned a momciitary bright white, then winked out of existence just as Rosalie’s had done earlier that evening. jimmy opened his eyes again and looked at Faye. fie started to smile, Ralph thought, and then his gaze turned fixed and distant. The dimples which had begun to form at the corners of his mouth smoothed out.

“Jimmy?” Faye shook jimmy V."s shoulder, running his hand through

Lachesis’s side to do it. “You all right, jimmy?… Oh shit.”

Faye got up and left the room, not quite running.

Clotho: [Do you see and understand that what we do, we do with love an respect? That we are, in fact, the physicians of last resort?

It is vital to our dealings with you, Ralph and Lois, that you understand that”]. [“Yes.”] [“Yes.”] Ralph hadn’t intended to agree with anything either one of them said, but that phrase-the physicians of last resort-sliced cleanly and effortlessly through his anger. It felt true. They had freed jimmy V. from a world where there was nothing left for him but pain.

Yes, they had undoubtedly stood in Room 317 with Ralph on a sleety afternoon some seven months ago and given Carolyn the same release.

And yes, they went about their work with love and respect-any doubts he might have had on that score had been laid to rest when Lachesis kissed jimmy V."s forehead. But did love and respect give them the right to put him-and Lois, too-through hell and then send them after a supernatural being that had gone off the rails Did it give them the right to even dream that two ordinary people, neither of them young anymore, could deal with such a creature?

Lachesis: [Let us move on from this place. It’s going to fill up with people, and we need to talk.]

[“Do we have any choice?”]

[There is always a choice.”] came back quickly, colored with overtones Of surprise.

Their answers [)’es, of colirve.”

Clotho and Lachesis walked toward the door; Ralph and Lois shrank back to let them pass. The auras of the little bald doctors swept over them for a moment, however, and Ralph registered the taste and texture: the taste of sweet apples, the texture of light bark.

As they left, side by side, speaking gravely and respectfully to each other, Faye came back in, now accompanied by a pair of nurses.

These newcomers passed through Lachesis and Clotho, then through Ralph and Lois, without slowing or seeming to notice anything untoward.

In the hall outside, life went on at its usual muted pace. No buzzers went off, no lights flashed, no orderlies came sprinting down the hallway, pushing the crash-wagon ahead of them, No one cried “Stat!” over the loudspeaker. Death was too common a visitor here for such things. Ralph guessed that it was not welcome, even under such circumstances as these, but it was familiar and accepted. He also guessed that jimmy V. would have been happy enough with his exit from the third floor of Derry Home-he had done it with no fuss or bother, and he hadn’t had to show anyone either his driver’s license or his Blue Cross Major Medical card. He had died with the dignity that simple, expected things often hold. One or two moments of consciousness, accompanied by a slightly wider perception of what was going on around him, and then poof. Pack up all my care and woe, blackbird, bye-bye.

They joined the bald docs in the hallway outside Bob Polhurst’s room.

Through the open door, they could see the deathwatch continuing around the old teacher’s bed.

Lois: [“The man closest to the bed is Bill McGover, a friciil o. ours. There’s something wrong withe him. Something awful. If we do what you want, could you-?”] But Lachesis and Clotho were shaking their heads in unison.

Clotho: [Nothing can be changed.] Yes, Ralph thought. Dorrance knew: done-bun-can’the-undone.

Lois: [“When will it happen?”] Clotho: [your friend belongs to the other, to the third. To the one Ralph has already named Atropos. But Atropos could tell you the exact hour of the man’s death no more than we could. He cannot even tell whom he will take next. Atropos is an agent of the Random.] This phrase sent a chill through Ralph’s heart.

Lachesis: [But this is no place for us to talk. Come.] Lachesis took one of Clotho’s hands, then held out his free hand to Ralph. At the same time, Clotho reached toward Lois. She hesitated, then looked at Ralph.

Ralph, in his turn, looked grimly at Lachesis.

[“You better not hurt her.”] [Neither of you will be hurt, Ralph.

Take my hand.] I’m a stranger in paradise, Ralph’s mind finished.

Then he sighed through his teeth, nodded to Lois, and gripped Lachesis’s outstretched hand. That shock of recognition, as deep and pleasant as an unexpected encounter with an old and valued friend, washed over him again, Apples and bark; memories of orchards he had walked through as a kid. He was somehow aware, without actually seeing it, that his aura had changed color and become-at least for a little while-the gold-flecked green of Clotho and Lachesis.

Lois took Clotho’s hand, inhaled a sharp little gasp over her teeth, then smiled hesitantly.

Clotho: [Complete the circle, Ralph and Lois. Don’t be afraid.

All is well. Boy, do I ever disagree with that, Ralph thought, but when Lois reached for his hand, he grasped her fingers. The taste of apples and the texture of dry bark was joined by some dark and unknown spice. Ralph inhaled its aroma deeply and then smiled at Lois.

She smiled back-no hesitation in that smile-and Ralph felt a dim, far off confusion. How could you be afraid? How could you even hesitate when what they brought felt this good and seemed this right-, I empathize, Ralph, but hesitate am,way, a voice counselled.

[“Ralph? Ralph."’] She sounded alarmed and giddy at the same time. Ralph looked around just in time to see the top of the door of Room 315 descending past her shoulders… except it wasn’t the door going down; it was Lois going up. All of them going up, still holding hands in a circle.

Ralph had just gotten this through his head when momentary darkness, sharp as a knife-edge, crossed his vision like a shadow thrown by the slat of a venetian blind. He had a brief glimpse of narrow pipes that were probably part of the hospital’s sprinkler system, surrounded by tufted pink pads of insulation. Then he was looking down a long tiled corridor. A gurney cart was rolling straight at his head… which, he suddenly realized, had surfaced like a periscope in one of the fourth-floor corridors.

He heard Lois cry out and felt her grip on his hand tighten.

Ralph closed his eyes instinctively and waited for the approaching gurney to flatten his skull.

Clotho: [Be calm! Please, be calm.” Remember that these things exist on a different level of reality from the one where you are now.”

Ralph opened his eyes. The gurney was gone, although he could hear its receding wheels. The sound was coming from behind him now.

The gurney, like McGovern’s friend, had passed right through him.

The four of them were now levitating slowly into the corridor of what had to be the pediatrics wing-fairy-tale creatures pranced and gambolled up and down the walls, and characters from Disney’s Aladdin and The Little mermaid were decaled onto the windows of a large, brightly lighted play area. A doctor and a nurse strolled to ward them, discussing a case. I “-further tests seem but only if we can make at least ninety percent sure that-” The doctor walked through Ralph and as he did Ralph understood that he had started smoking again on the sly after five years off the weed and was feeling guilty as hell about it. Then they were gone.

Ralph looked down just in time to see his feet emerge from the tiled floor. He turned to Lois, smiling tentatively.

[“It sure beats the elevator, doesn’t it?”] She nodded. Her grip on his hand was still very tight.

They rose through the fifth floor, surfaced in a doctor’s lounge on the sixth (two doctors-the full-sized kind-present, one watching an old F Troop rerun and the other snoring on the hia’eous Swedish Modern sofa), and then they were on the roof.

The night was clear, moonless, gorgeous. Stars glittered across the arc of the sky in an extravagant, misty sprawl of light. The wind was blowing hard, and he thought of Mrs. Perrine saying Indian summer was over, he could mark her words, Ralph could hear the wind but not feel it… although he had an idea he could feel it, if he wanted to.

It was just a matter of concentrating in the right way…

Even as this thought came, he sensed some minor, momentary change in his body, something that felt like a blink. Suddenly his hair was blowing back from his forehead, and he could hear his pants cuffs flapping around his shins. He shivered. Mrs. Perrine’s back had been right about the weather changing. Ralph gave another interior blink and the push of the wind was gone. He looked over at Lachesis.

[“Can I let go of your hand now?” Lachesis nodded and dropped his own grip. Clotho released Lois’s hand. Ralph looked across town to the west and saw the pulsing blue runway lights of the airport. Beyond them was the gridwork of orange arc sodiums that marked Cape Green, one of the new housing developments on the far side of the Barrens.

And someplace, in the sprinkle of lights just east of the airport, was Harris Avenue.

[“It’s beautiful, isn’t it, Ralph?”] He nodded and thought that standing there and seeing the city spread out in the dark like this was worth everything he had been through since the insomnia had started.

Everything and then some, But that wasn’t a thought he entirely trusted.

He turned to Lachesis and Clotho.

[“All right, explain. Who are you, who is he, and what do you want us to do?”] The two bald docs were standing between two rapidly turning heat ventilators which were spraying brownish-purple fans of effluent into the air. They glanced nervously at each other, and Lachesis gave Clotho an almost imperceptible nod. Clotho stepped forward, looked from Ralph to Lois, and seemed to gather his thoughts.

[Very well. First, you must understand that the things which are happening, while unexpected and distressing, are not precisely unnatural.

My colleague and I do what we were made to do,-Atropos does what he was made to do,-and you, my Short-Time friends, will do what you were made to do.] Ralph favored him with a bright, bitter smile, [“There goes.freedom of choice, I guess.”] Lachesis: [You mustn’t think so! It’s simply that what you call freedom of choice is part of what we call ka, the great heel of believing.

Lois: [“We see as through a glass darkly… is that what ’You mean?”] Clotho, smiling his somehow youthful smile: [The Bible, I belier,l(.

And a very good lea-of putting it.] Ralph: [“Also pretty convenient for guys like you, bul I(,is puss 0/1 that for otv. We have a saying that isn’t from the Bible, gentlemen, but it’s a pretty good one, just the same.-Don’t gild the lilly. I hope you’ll keep it in mind.”] Ralph had an idea, however, that that might be a little too much to ask.

Clotho began to speak then, and he went on for a fair length of time.

Ralph had no idea how long, exactly, because time was different on this level-compressed, somehow. At times there were no words at all in what he said; verbal terms were replaced with simple bright images like those in a child’s rebus puzzle. Ralph supposed this was telepathy, and thus pretty amazing, but while it was happening it felt as natural as breath.

Sometimes both words and images were lost, interrupted by puzzling breaks -in communication. Yet even then Ralph was usually able to get some idea of what Clotho was trying to convey, and he had an idea Lois was understanding what was hidden in those lapses even more clearly than he was himself.

[First know that there are only four constants in that area of existence where your lives and ours, the lives of the -[overlap.

These four constants are Life, Death, the Purpose, and the Random. All these words have meaning for you, but you now have a slightly different concept of Life and Death, do you not?

Ralph and Lois nodded hesitantly.

[Lachesis and I are agents of Death. This makes us figures of dread to most Short-Timers,-even those who pretend to accept its lid oar fiction are usually afraid-I pictures the are sometimes shott,n (is i e skeleton or a hooded figure ttihose face ca of be see Clotho put his tiny hands on his white-clad shoulders and pretended to shudder. The burlesque was good enough to make Ralph grin.

[But we are not only agents of death, Ralph and Lois, we are also agents of the Purpose. And now you must listen closely, for I would not be misunderstood. There are those of your kind who feel that everything happens by design, and there are those who feel all events are simply a matter of luck or chance. The truth is that life is both random and on purpose, although not in equal measure. Life is like] Here Clotho formed a circle with his arms, like a small child trying to show the shape of the earth, and within it Ralph saw a brilliant and evocative image: thousands (or perhaps it was millions) of playing cards fanned out in a flickering rainbow of hearts and spades and clubs and diamonds. He also saw a great many jokers in this huge pack; not so many as to make up a suit of their own, but clearly a lot more, proportionally speaking, than the two or three found in the usual deck.

Every one of them was grinning, and every one was wearing a battered Panama with a crescent bitten out of the brim.

Every one carried a rusty scalpel, Ralph looked at Clotho with widening eyes. Clotho nodded.

Lois. I don’t know exactly what you saw, but I know you saw what it was trying to convey. Lois? What about you?] Lois, who loved playing cards, nodded palely.

“Atropos is the joker in the deck-that’s what you mean, [He is n get of the Ra dom. We, Lachesis and I, serve that other force, the one zebich accounts for most events in both individual lives and in life’s wider stream. On the lour level of the building, Ralph and Lois over-the creature is a Short-time creature, and has an appointment with death the same say that a child pops out of its / other’s womb with a sign around its neck reading (:[T (:ORD ( amp; 84 I’L"IIR,, I I MONT’/ 1,, 46 3 D,A I-SIR,";, 4 MINUTES, AND 21 SECONDS";. That idea is ridiculous.

Yet time passages are usually set, and as both of you have seen, one of the many functions the Short-Time aura serves is as a clock.] Lois stirred, and as Ralph turned to look at her, he saw an amazing thing: the sky overhead was growing pale. He guessed it must be one in the morning. They had arrived at the hospital at around nine o’clock on Tuesday evening, and now all at once it was Wednesday, October 6th.

Ralph had heard of time flying, but this was ridiculous.

Lois: [“Your]job is what we call natural death, isn’t it?”]

Her aura flickered with confused, incomplete images. A man (the late Mr. Chasse, Ralph was quite sure) lying in an oxygen tent. jimmy V. opening his eyes to look at Ralph and Lois in the instant before Clotho cut his balloon-string. The obituary page from the Derry News, peppered with photographs, most not much bigger than postage stamps, of the weekly harvest from the local hospitals and nursing homes.

Both Clotho and Lachesis shook their heads.

Lachesis: [There is no such thing as natural death, not really.

Our,lob is purposeful death. We take the old and the sick, but we take other… as well. just yesterday, for instance, we took a young man of twenty-eight. A carpenter. Two Short-Time weeks ago, befell from a scaffold and fractured his skull. During those two weeks his aura was] Ralph got a fractured image of a thunderstruck aura like the one which had surrounded the baby in the elevator.

Clotho: [At last the change came-the turning of the aura. We knew it would come, but not when it would come. When it did, tte ivent to him and sent him on.]

[“Sent him on to where?”

It was Lois who asked the question, broaching the touchy subject of the afterlife almost by accident. Ralph grabbed for his mental safety belt, almost hoping for one of those peculiar blanks, but when their overlapped answers came, they were perfectly clear.

Clotho: [To everywhere Lachesis: to other worlds than these, Ralph felt a mixture of relief and disappointment.

[“That sounds very poetic, but I think that it means-correct me if I’m wrong-Is that the afterlife is as much a mystery to you guys as it is to us.”] Lachesis, sounding a bit stiff: [On another occasion we might have time to discuss such things, but not now-as you have no doubt already noticed, time passes faster on this level of the building. Ralph looked around and saw the morning had already brightened considerably.

“Sorry.

Clotho, smiling: [Not at all-we enljoy your questions, and find them refreshing. Curiosity exists everywhere along life’s continuum, but nowhere is it as abundant as here. But what you call the afterlife has no place in the four constants-Life an Death, the Random and the Purpose-which concern us now.

[The approach of almost every death which serves the Purpose takes a course with which we are very familiar. The auras of those who will die Purposeful deaths turn gray as the time of nishling approaches.

This gray deepens steadily to black. We are called when the aura [and we come exactly as you saw last night.

We give release to those who suffer, peace to those in terror, rest to those who cannot find rest.

Most Purposeful deaths are expected, even welcomed, but not all.

We are sometimes called to take men, women, an children who are in the best of health… yet their auras turn suddenly and their time of ri ishing has come.] Ralph remembered the young man in the sleeveless Celtics jersey!

he’d seen bopping into the Red Apple yesterday afternoon. they had been the picture of health and vitality… except for the slick-the slick surrounding him, that was. of Ralph opened his mouth, perhaps to mention the (or to ask about his fate), then closed it again. The sun was directly overhead now, and a bizarre certainty suddenly came to him: that he and Lois had become the subject of lecherous discussion in the secret city of the Old Crocks.

Anybody seen em?… No?… Think they run off together?.

Eloped, maybe?… Naw, not at their age, but they might be shacked up… I dunno if Ralphie’s got any live rounds left in the old ammo dump, but she’s always looked like a hot ticket to me…

Yeah, walks like she knows what to do with it, don’t she?

The image of his oversized rustbucket waiting patiently behind one of the ivy-covered units of the Derry Cabins while the springs boinged and sproinged salaciously inside came to Ralph, and he grinned. He couldn’t help it. A moment later the alarming idea that he might be broadcasting his thoughts on his aura came to him, and he slammed the door on the picture at once. Yet wasn’t Lois looking at him with a certain amused speculation?

Ralph turned his attention hastily back to Clotho.

[Atropos serves the Random. Not all deaths of the sort Short-Timers call “senseless” and “unnecessary” and “tragic” are his work, but most are. When a dozen old men and women die in a fire at a retirement hotel, the chances are good that Atropos has been there, taking souvenirs and cutting cords. When an infant dies in his crib for no apparent reason, the cause, more often than not, is Atropos and his rusty scalpel. When a dog-yes, even a dog, for the destinies of almost all living things in the Short-Time world fall among either the Random or the Purpose-I’s run over in the road because the driver of the car that hit him picked the wrong moment to glance at him watch-” Lois: [“Is that what happened to Rosalie?”] Clotho: [Atropos is what happened to Rosalie. Ralph’s friend Joe Wyzer was only what we call “fulfilling circumstance.”] is young man Lachesis: And Atropos is also what happened to lollrer, Cl, late Mr. McGovern.] Lois looked the way Ralph felt: dismayed but not really surprised. it was now late afternoon, perhaps as many as eighteen Short-Time hours had passed since they had last seen Bill, and Ralph had known the man’s time was extremely short even last night, Lois, who had inadvertently put her hand inside him, probably knew it even better.

Ralph: [“When did it happen? How long after we saw him?”] Lachesis: [Not long. While he was leaving the hospital. I’m sorry for your loss, and for giving you the news in such clumsy fashion.

We speak to Short-Timers so infrequently that we forget how, I didn’t mean to hurt you, Ralph and Lois.] Lois told him it was all right, that she quite understood, but tears were trickling down her cheeks, and Ralph felt them burning in his own eyes. The idea that Bill could be gone-that the little shithead in the dirty smock had gotten him-was hard to grasp. Was he to believe McGovern would never hoist that satiric, bristly eyebrow of his again? Never bitch about how cruddy it was to get old again-?

Impossible, He turned suddenly to Clotho.

[“Show us.”] Clotho, surprised, almost dithering: [I… I don’t think-] Ralph: [“Seeing is believing to us Short-Time schmoes. Didn’t you guys ever hear that one?”] Lois spoke up unexpectedly.

[“Yes-show us. But only enough so we can know it and accept it.

Try not to make us feel any worse than we already do.”] Clotho and Lachesis looked at each other, then seemed to shrug without actually moving their narrow shoulders. Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating a blue-green peacock’s fan of light.

In it Ralph saw a small, eerily perfect representation of the I.C.U. corridor. A nurse pushing a pharmacy cart came into this arc and crossed it. At the far side of the viewing area, she actually seemed to curve for a moment before passing out of view.

Lois, delighted in spite of the circumstances: [“It’s like watching a movie in a soapbubble!” Now McGovern and Mr. Plum stepped out of Bob Polhurst’s room. McGovern had put on. an old Derry High letter sweater and his friend was zipping up a jacket; they were clearly giving up the deathwatch for another night. McGovern was walking slowly, lagging behind Mr. Plum. Ralph could see that his downstairs neighbor and sometime friend didn’t look good at all.

He felt Lois’s hand slip onto his upper arm and grip hard. He put his hand over hers.

Halfway to the elevator, McGovern stopped, braced himself against the wall with one hand, and lowered his head. He looked like a totally blown runner at the end of a marathon. For a moment Mr. Plum went on walking. Ralph could see his mouth moving and thought, He doesn’t know he’s talking to thin air-not yet, at least.

Suddenly Ralph didn’t want to see any more.

Inside the blue-green arc, McGovern put one hand to his chest.

The other went to his throat and began to rub, as if he were checking for wattles. Ralph couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought his downstairs neighbor’s eyes looked frightened. He remembered the grimace of hate on Doc #3’s face when he realized a Short-Timer had presumed to step into his business with one of the local strays. What had he said?

[I’ll fuck you over, Shorts. I’ll fuck you over big-time. And I’ll fuck your friends over. Do you get me?] A terrible idea, almost a certainty, dawned in Ralph’s mind as he watched Bill McGovern crumple slowly to the floor.

Lois: [“Make it go away-please make it go away!” She buried her face against Ralph’s shoulder. Clotho and Lachesis exchanged uneasy looks, and Ralph realized he had already begun to revise his mental picture of them as omniscient and all-poNN,erfLil.

They might be supernatural creatures, but Dr. Joyce Brothers then, were not. He had an idea they weren’t much shakes at predicting the future, either; fellows with really efficient crystal balls probably wouldn’t have a look like that in their entire repertoire. they’re feeling their way along, just like the rest of us, Ralph thought, and he felt a certain reluctant sympathy for Mr. C. and Mr. L.

The blue-green arc of light floating in front of Lachesis-and the images trapped inside it-suddenly disappeared, Clotho, sounding defensive: [Please remember that it was your choice to see, Ralph and Lois. We did not show you that milli gli.] Ralph barely heard this.

His terrible idea was still developing, like a photograph one does not wish to see but cannot turn away from.

He was thinking of Bill’s hat… Rosalie’s faded blue bandanna. and Lois’s missing diamond earrings.

[I’ll fuck your friends over, Shorts-do you get me? I hope so.

I most certainly do.] He looked from Clotho to Lachesis, his sympathy for them disappearing. What replaced it was a dull pulse of anger.

Lachesis had said there was no such thing as accidental death, and that included McGovern’s. Ralph had no doubt that Atropos had taken McGovern when he had for one simple reason: he’d wanted to hurt Ralph, to punish Ralph for messing into… what had Dorrance called it.Long-time business.

Old Dor had suggested he not do that-a good policy, no doubt, but he, Ralph, had really had no choice… because these two bald half-pints had messed in with him. They had, in a very real sense, gotten Bill McGovern killed.

Clotho and Lachesis saw his anger and took a step backward although they seemed to do it without actually moving their feet), their faces becoming more uneasy than ever.

[“You two are the reason Bill McGovern’s dead. That’s the truth of it, isn’t it?”] Clotho: [Please… if you’ll just let us finish explaiming-I Lois was staring at Ralph, worried and scared.

[“Ralph? What’s wrong? Why are you angry?”] [“Don’t you get it?

This little setup of theirs cost Bill McGovern his life. We’re here because Atropos has either done something these guys don’t like or is getting ready to-“] Lachesis: [You’re jumping to conclusions, Ralph-” [“-but there’s one very basic problem: he knows we see him!

Atropos KNOWS we see him!” Lois’s eyes widened with terror… and with understanding.

CHAPTER 18

A small white hand fell on Ralph’s shoulder and lay there like smoke.

[Please… if you’ll only let us explain-] He felt that change-that blink-happen in his body even before he was fully aware he had willed it. He could feel the wind again, coming out of the dark like the blade of a cold knife, and shivered.

The touch of Clotho’s hand was now no more than a phantom vibration just below the surface of his skin. He could see all three of them, but now they were milky and faint. Now they were ghosts.

I’ve stepped down. Not all the way back down to where we started, but at least down to a level where they can have almost no physical contact with me. My aura, my balloon-string… yes, I’m sure they could get at those things, but the physical part of me that lives my real life in the Short-Time world? No way, jose.

Lois’s voice, as distant as a fading echo: [“Ralph What are you He looked at the ghostly images of Clotho and Lachesis, Now they looked not just uneasy or slightly guilty but downright scared.

Their faces were distorted and hard to see, but their fear was nonetheless unmistakable.

Clotho, his voice distant but audible: [Come back, Ralph.”

Please come back.”

“If I do, will you quit playing games and be straight with us?”

Lachesis, fading, disappearing: [Yes! Yes.”

Ralph made that interior blink happen again. The three of them came back into focus. At the same time, color once more filled up the spaces of the world and time resumed its former sprint-he observed the waning moon sliding down the far side of the sky like a dollop of glowing mercury. Lois threw her arms around his neck, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if she was hugging him or trying to strangle him.

[“Thank God! I thought you were going to leave me.”] Ralph kissed her and for a moment his head was filled with a pleasant jumble of sensory input: the taste of fresh honey, a texture like combed wool, and the smell of apples. A thought blipped across his mind (what would it be like to make love up here?) and he banished it at once. He needed to think and speak very carefully in the next few (minutes?

hours? days?) and thinking about stuff like that would only make it that much harder. He turned to the little bald doctors and measured them with his eyes.

[“I hope you mean it. Because if you don’t, I think we’d better call this horse race off ’ right now and go our separate ways.” Clotho and Lachesis didn’t bother with the exchanged glance this time; they both nodded eagerly. Lachesis spoke, and he did so in a defensive tone of voice. These fellows, Ralph suspected, were a lot more pleasant to deal with than Atropos, but no more used to being questioned-to being put on their mettle, Ralph’s mother would have said-than he was.

[Everything we told you was true, Ralph and Lois. We may have left out the possibility that Atropos has a slightly greater understanding of the situation than we would really like, but-Ralph: [“What if we refuse to listen to any more of this nonsense?

What if we just turn and walk away?”] Neither replied, but Ralph thought he saw a dismaying thing in their eyes: they knew that Atropos had Lois’s earrings, and they knew he knew. The only one who didn’t know-he hoped-was Lois herself.

She was now tugging his arm.

[“Don’t do that, Ralph-Please don’t. We need to hear them out.

He turned back to them and made a curt motion for them to go on.

Lachesis: [Under ordinary circumstances, we don’t interfere with Atropos, nor he with us. We couldn’t interfere with him even if we wanted to,-the Random and the Purpose are like the red and blac squares on a checkerboard, defining each other by contrast. But Atropos does want to interfere with the way things operate-interferring is, in a very real sense, what he was made to do-and on rare occasions the opportunity to do so in a really big way Presents itself Efforts to stop his meddling are rare.”

Clotho: [The truth is actually a little stronger, Ralph and Lois,never in our experience has an effort been made to check or bar him.” Lachesis: [-and are made only if the situation into which he intends to meddle is a very delicate one, where many serious matters there is balanced and counterbalanced. This is one of those situations.

Atropos has severed a life-cord he would have done well to leave alone.

This will cause terrible problems on all levels, of to mention a serious imbalance between the Random and the Purpose, unless the situation is rectified. We cannot deal with what’s happening; the situation has passed far beyond our skills. We can no longer see clearly, let alone act. Yet in this case our inability to see hardly matters, because in the end, only Short-Timers can oppose the will of Atropos. That is why you two are here.] Ralph: [“Are you sayting that Atropos cut the cord of someone who was supposed to die a natural death… or a Purposeful death?”] Clotho: [Not exactly. Some lives-a very few-bear no clear designation. When Atropos touches such lives, trouble is always likely.

“All bets are off,” you say. Such undest’gnated lives are like-” Clotho drew his hands apart and an image-playing cards againflashed between them. A row of seven cards that were swiftly turned over, one after another, by an unseen hand. An ace; a deuce; a joker; a trey; a seven; a queen. The last card the invisible hand flipped over was blank.

Clotho: [Does this picture help?] Ralph’s brow furrowed. He didn’t know if it did or not. Somewhere out there was a person who was neither a regular playing card nor a joker in the deck. A person who was perfectly blank, up for grabs by either side, Atropos had slashed this guy’s metaphysical airhose, and now somebody-or something-had called a time-out.

Lois: [“It’s Ed you’re talking about, isn’t it?” Ralph wheeled around and stared at her sharply, but she was looking at Lachesis.

[“Ed Deepneau is the blank card.”] Lachesis was nodding.

[“How did you know that, Lois?”] [“Who else could it be?”] She wasn’t smiling at him, precisely, but Ralph felt the sense of a smile.

He turned back to Clotho and Lachesis.

[“Okay, at last we’re getting somewhere. So who flashed the red light on this deal? I don’t think it was you guys-I have an idea that on this one, at least, you two aren’t much more than the hired help.

They put their heads together for a moment and murmured, but Ralph saw a faint ocher tinge appear like a seam at the place where their green-gold auras overlapped and knew he was right. At last the two of them faced Ralph and Lois again.

Lachesis: [Yes, that is basically the case. You have a way of putting things in perspective, Ralph. We haven’t had a conversation like this in a thousand years-] Clotho: [If ever.] Ralph: [“All you have to do is tell the truth boys.”] Lachesis, as plaintively as a child: [We have been!] Ralph: [“The whole truth.” Lachesis: [All right,-the whole truth. Yes, it is Ed Deepneau’s cord Atropos cut.

We don’t know this because we have seen it-we’ve passed beyond our ability to see clearly as I said-but because it is the only logical conclusion. Deepneau is undesignated, neither of the Random nor of the

Purpose, that we do know, and his must have been some sort Of master-cord to have caused all this uproar and concern.

The very fact that he has lived so long after his life-cord was severed indicates his power and importance. When Atropos severed this cord, he set a terrible chain of events in motion.] Lois shivered and stepped closer to Ralph.

Lachesis: [You called us hired help. You were more right than you knew. We are, in this case, simply messengers. Our job is to make you and Lois aware of what has happened and what is expected of you, and that job is now almost done. As to zvbo “flashed the red light, “we can’t answer that question because we don’t really know.] E “I don’t believe you.”] But he heard the lack of conviction in his own voice (if it was a voice).

Clotho: [Don’t be silly-of course you do Would you expect thee, directors of a large automobile company to invite a lowly worker up to the boardroom so they could explain the reasons behind all the company’s policies? Or perhaps give him the details on why they decided to close one plant and leave another one open?] Lachesis: [We’re a little more highly placed than the men who work on automobile assembly lines, but we’re still what you would call “workingjoes,” Ralph-no more and no less.] Clotho: [Be content with this: beyond the Short-Time levels of exIstence and the Long-Time levels on which Lachesis, Atropos, and I exist, there are yet other levels. These are inhabited by creatures we could call All-Timers, beings which are either eternal or so close to it as to make no difference.

Short-Timers and Long-Timers live in overlapping spheres of existence-on connected floors of the same building, if you like-ruled by the Random and the Purpose. Above these floors, inaccessible to us but very much a part of the same tower Of existence, live other beings.

Some of them are marvelous and wonderful,-others are hideous beyond our ability to comprehend, let alone yours. These beings might be called the Higher Purpose and the Higher Random… or perhaps there is no Random beyond a certain level,we suspect that may be the case, but we have no real way of telling.

We do know that it is something from one of these higher levels that has interested itself in Ed, and that something else from up there made a countermove. That countermove is you, Ralph and Lois.] Lois gave Ralph a dismayed look that he hardly noticed. The idea that something was moving them around like chess-pieces in Faye Chapin’s beloved Runway 3 Classic-an idea that would have infuriated him under other circumstances-went right by him for the time being. He was remembering the night Ed had called him on the telephone. You’re drifting into deep water, he’d said, and there are things swimming around in the undertow you can’t even conceive of Entities, in other words.

Beings too hideous to comprehend, according to Mr. C and Mr. C. was a gentleman who dealt death for a living.

They haven’t really noticed you yet, Ed had told him that night, but if you keep fooling with me, they will. And you don’t want that.

Believe me, you don’t, Lois: [“How did you get us up to this level in the first place? It was the insomnia, wasn’t it?”] Lachesis, cautiously: [Essentially, yes. We’re able to make certain small changes in Short-Time auras. These adjustments caused a rather special form of insomnia that altered the way you dream and the way you perceive the waking world. Adjusting Short-Term auras is delicate, frightening work. Madness is always a danger.] Clotho: [At times you may have felt that you were going mad, but neither of you was ever even close. You’re much tougher, both of you, than you give yourself credit for.] These assholes actually think they’re being comforting, Ralph marvelled, and then pushed his anger away again. He simply had no time to be angry now. Later, maybe, he could make up for that. He hoped so. For now he simply patted Lois’s hands, then turned to Clotho and Lachesis again.

[“Last summer, after he beat his wife up, Ed spoke to me of a being he called the Crimson King. Does that mean anything to you fellows?”] Clotho and Lachesis exchanged another look, one which Ralph at first mistook for solemnity.

Clotho: [Ralph, you must remember that Ed is insane, existing in a delusional state-” [“Yeah, tell me about it.”] “but we believe that his “Crimson King” does exist in one form or another, and that when Atropos cut his life-cord, Ed Deepneau falls directly under this being’s influence.] The two little bald doctors looked at each other again, and this time Ralph saw the shared expression for what it really was: not solemnity but terror.

A new day had dawned-Thursday-and was now brightening its way toward noon. Ralph couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought the speed with which the hours were passing down there on the Short-Time level was increasing; if they didn’t wrap this thing up soon, Bill McGovern wouldn’t be the only one of their friends they outlived.

Clotho: [Atropos knew that the Higher Purpose would send someone to try to change what he has set in motion, and now he knows who. But you must not allow yourselves to be sidetracked by Atropos,you must remember that he is little more than a pawn on this board.

It is not Atropos who really opposes you.] He paused and looked doubtfully at his colleague. Lachesis nodded for him to go on, and he did so confidently enough, but Ralph felt his heart sink a little, just the same. He was sure the two bald doctors had the best of intentions, but they were pretty clearly flying on instruments, just the same.

Clotho: [You must not approach Atropos directly, either. I cannot emphasize that enough. He has been surrounded by forces much greater than himself, forces that are malignant and powerful, forces that are conscious and will stop at nothing to stop you. Yet we think that, if you stay away from Atropos, you may be able to block the terrible thing which is about to happen… which is, in a very real sense, happening already.] Ralph didn’t much care for the unspoken assumption that he and Lois were going to do whatever it was these two happy gauchos wanted, but this didn’t seem like exactly the right time to say so.

Lois: [“What is about to happen? What is it you wantfrom us?

Are we supposed to find Ed and talk him out of doing something bad?”] Clotho and Lachesis looked at her with identical expressions of shocked horror.

[Haven’t you been listening to-] I-you mustn’t even think of-] They stopped, and Clotho motioned Lachesis to go ahead.

[If You didn’t hear us before, Lois, hear us now.-stay away from Ed Deepneau! Like Atropos, this unusual situation has temporarily invested him with great power. To even go near him would be to risk a visit from the entity he thinks of as the Crimson King… and besides, he is no longer in Derry.] Lachesis glanced out over the roof, where lights were coming on in the dusk of Thursday evening, then looked back at Ralph and Lois again.

[He has left for I ____________________No words, but Ralph caught a clear sensory impression which was part smell (oil, grease, exhaust, sea-salt), part feel and sound (the wind snapping at something-perhaps a flag), and part sight (a large rusty building with a huge door standing open on a steel track).

[“He’s on the coast, isn’t he? Or going there.”] Clotho and Lachesis nodded, and their faces suggested that the coast, eighty miles from Derry, was a very good place for Ed Deepneau.

Lois tugged his hand again, and Ralph glanced at her, [“Did you see the building, Ralph?”] He nodded.

Lois: [“It’s of Hawking Labs, but it’s near there. I think it might even be a place I know-“] Lachesis, speaking rapidly, as if to change the subject: [Where he isor what he might be planning really doesn’t matter. Your task lies elsewhere, in safer waters, but you still may need to use all of your considerable Short-Time powers to accomplish it, and there still may be great danger.] Lois looked nervously at Ralph.

[“Tell them we won’t hurt anybody, Ralph-we might agree to help them if we can, but we won’t hurt anybody, no matter what.”] Ralph, however, told them no such thing. He was thinking of how the diamond chips had glittered at Atropos’s earlobes, and meditating on how perfectly he had been trapped-and Lois along with him, of course. Yes, he would hurt someone to get the earrings back.

That wasn’t even a question. But just how far would he go? Would he perhaps kill to get them back?

Not wanting to tackle that issue-not wanting to even look at Lois, at least for the time being-Ralph turned back to Clotho and Lachesis.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she got there first, [“There’s one other thing I want to know before we go any further. “I It was Clotho who replied, sounding slightly amused-sounding, in fact, remarkably like Bill McGovern. Ralph didn’t care for it much.

[What is that, Lois?] [“Is Ralph in danger, too? Does Atropos have something of Ralph’s we need to take back later on? Something like

Bill’s hat?”] Lachesis and Clotho exchanged a quick, apprehensive glance.

Ralph didn’t think Lois caught it, but he did. She’s getting too close for comfort, that look said. Then it was gone. Their faces were smooth again as they turned their attention back to Lois.

Lachesis: [No. Atropos has taken nothing from Ralph because, up until now, doing so would not help him in any way.] Ralph: [“What do -you mean, ’up until now’?”] Clotho: [You have spent your life as part of the Purpose, Ralph, but that has changed.] Lois: [“When did it change? It happened when we started seeing the auras, didn’t it?”] They looked at each other, then at Lois, then-nervously-at Ralph.

They said nothing, and an interesting idea occurred to Ralph: like the boy George Washington of the cherry tree myth, Clotho and Lachesis could not tell a lie… and at moments like this they probably regretted it. The only alternative was the one they were employing: keeping their lips zipped and hoping the conversation would move on to safer areas. Ralph decided he didn’t want it to move on-at least not yet-even though they were dangerously close to allowing Lois to find out where her earrings had gone… always assuming she didn’t know that already, a possibility that did not strike him as at all remote.

An old carny pitchman’s line occurred to him: Step right up, gentlemen… but if you want to play, you have to pay.

[“Oh no, Lois-the change didn’t happen when I started to see the auras. I think a lot of people catch a glimpse ’ into the Long-Time world If in of auras every now and again, and nothing bad happens to them. I don’t think I got knocked out of my nice safe place in the PurPose until we started to talk to these two fine fellows. What do you say, fine fellows? You did everything but leave a trail of breadcrumbs, even though you knew perfectly well what was going to happen. Isn’t that about the size of it?”] They looked down at their feet, then slowly, reluctantly, back up at Ralph. It was Lachesis who answered.

[Yes, Ralph. We drew you to us even though we knew it would alter your ka. It’s unfortunate, but the situation demands it.] Now Lois will ask about herself, Ralph thought. Now she must ask.

But she didn’t. She only looked at the two little bald doctors with an inscrutable expression completely unlike any of her usual Our Lois looks. Ralph wondered again how much she knew or guessed, marvelled again that he didn’t have the slightest clue… and then these speculations were swallowed in a fresh wave of anger.

[“You guys… man oh man, you guys… “He didn’t finish, although he might have, if Lois hadn’t been standing beside him: You guys have done quite a bit more than just mess with our sleep, haven’t you? I don’t know about Lois, but I had a nice little niche in the Purpose… which means that you deliberately made me an exception to the very rules you’ve spent your whole lives upholding. In a way, I’ve become as much a blank as this guy we’re supposed to find. How did Clotho put it? “All bets are off “How very fucking true.

Lois: [“You talked about using our powers. What powers?”] Lachesis turned to her, clearly delighted at the change of subject.

He pressed his hands together, palm to palm, then opened them in a curiously Oriental gesture. What appeared between them were two swift images: Ralph’s hand producing a bolt of cold blue fire as it cut the air in a karate chop, and Lois’s forefinger producing bright blue-gray pellets of light that looked like nuclear cough-drops.

Ralph: [“Yes, all right, we have something, but it isn’t reliable.

It’s like-”] He concentrated and created an image of his own: hands opening the back of a radio and removing a pair of AA batteries encrusted with blue-gray crud. Clotho and Lachesis frowned at him, not getting it.

Lois: [“He’s trying to say we can’t always do that, and when we can, we can’t do it for long. Our batteries go flat, you see.”] Understanding mixed with amused incredulity broke over their features.

Ralph: [“What’s so damned funny?”

Clotho: [Nothing… everything. you have no concept of both strange you and Lois seem to us-incredible, wise and perceptive at one moment, incredibly naie at the next, Your batteries, as you call them, need never go flat, because the two of you are standing next to a bottomless reservoir of power. We assumed that, since you have both already drunk from it, you must surely know about it.] Ralph: [“What in the world are you talking about?”] Lachesis made that curiously Oriental hand-opening gesture again.

This time Ralph saw Mrs. Perrine, walking stiffly upright within an aura the color of a West Pointer’s dress uniform. Saw a shaft of gray brilliance, as thin and straight as the quill of a porcupine, poke out of this aura.

This image was overlaid by one of a skinny woman encased in a smoggy brown aura. She was looking out a car window. A voiceLois’s-spoke: Oooh, Mina, isn’t that the dearest little house? A moment later there was a soft, indrawn whistle and a narrow ray of the woman’s aura poked out from behind her neck.

This was followed by a third image, brief but strong: Ralph reaching through the slot in the bottom of the information booth and gripping the wrist of the woman with the brambly orange aura… except that all at once the aura around her left arm no longer was orange. All at once it was the faded turquoise he now thought of as Ralph Roberts Blue.

The image faded. Lachesis and Clotho stared at Ralph and Lois; they stared back, shocked.

Lois: [“Oh, no! We can’t do that! it’s like-”]

Image: Two men in striped prison suits and little black masks tiptoeing out of a bank vault, carrying bulging sacks with the $ symbol printed on the sides.

Ralph: [“No, even worse. It’s like-”] Image: A bat flies in through an open casement window, makes two swooping circles in a silvery shaft of moonlight, then turns into Ralph Lugosi in a cape and old-fashioned tuxedo. He approaches t sleeping woman-not a young, rosy virgin but old Mrs. Perrine in a sensible flannel nightgown-and bends over to suck her aura.

When Ralph looked back at Clotho and Lachesis, both of them were shaking their heads vehemently.

Lachesis: [No No, no, no! You couldn’t be more wrong! Have you not wondered why you are Short-Timers, marking the spans of your lives in decades rather than in centuries? Your lives are short because you burn like bonfires! When you draw energy from yourfellow Short-Timers, it’s like-” Image: A child at the seashore, a lovely little girl with golden ringlets bouncing on her shoulders, runs down the beach to where the waves break. In one hand she carries a red plastic bucket. She kneels and fills it from the vast gray-blue Atlantic.

Clotho: [You are like that child, Ralph and Lois-your fellow Short-Timers are like the sea. Do you understand now?] Ralph: [“There’s really that much of this aural energy in the human race?”] Lachesis: [You still don’t understand. That’s how much there is-I Lois broke in. Her voice was trembling, although whether with fear or ecstasy, Ralph could not tell.

[“That’s how much there is in each one of us, Ralph. That’s how much there is in every human being on the face of the earth!”] Ralph whistled softly and looked from Lachesis to Clotho. They were nodding confirmation.

[“You’re saying we can stock up on this energy from whoever happens to be handy? That it’s safe for the people we take it from?”] Clotho: [Yes. You could no more hurt them than you could empty the Atlantic with a child’s beach-pat’ll Ralph hoped that was so, because he had an idea that he and Lois had been unconsciously borrowing energy like mad-it was the only explanation he could think of for all the compliments he had been getting. People telling him that he looked great.

People telling him that he must be over his insomnia, had to be, because he looked so rested and healthy. That he looked younger.

Hell, he thought, I am younger.

The moon had set again, and Ralph realized with a start that the sun would soon be coming up on Friday morning. It was high time they got back to the central issue of this discussion.

[“Let’s cut to the chase here, fellows. Why have you gone to all this trouble? What is it we’re supposed to stop?”] And then, before either of them could reply, he was struck by a flash of insight too strong and bright to be questioned or denied.

[“It’s Susan Day, isn’t it? He means to kill Susan Day. To assassinate her.”] Clotho: [Yes, but-I Lachesis: [-but that isn’t what matters-”

Ralph: [“Come on, you guys-don’t you think the time has come to lay the rest of your cards on the table?”] Lachesis: [Yes, Ralph, That time has come.] There had been little or no touching among them since they had formed the circle and risen through the intervening hospital floors to the roof, but now Lachesis put a gentle, feather-light arm around Ralph’s shoulders and Clotho took Lois by the arm, as a gentleman of a bygone age might have led a lady onto a dance-floor.

Scent of apples, taste of honey, texture of wool… but this time Ralph’s delight in that mingled sensory input could not mask the deep disquiet he felt as Lachesis turned him to the left and then walked with him toward the edge of the flat hospital roof.

Like many larger and more important cities, Derry seemed to have been built in the most geographically unsuitable place the original settlers could find. The downtown area existed on the steep sides of a valley; the Kenduskeag River flowed sluggishly through the overgrown tangle of the Barrens at this valley’s lowest level. From their vantage point atop the hospital, Derry looked like a town whose heart had been pierced by a narrow green dagger… except in the darkness, the dagger was black.

One side of the valley was Old Cape, site of a seedy postwar housing development and a glossy, flossy new mall. The other side contained most of what people meant when they talked about “downtown.”

Derry’s downtown centered around Up-Mile Hill.

Witcham Street took the most direct course up this hill, rising steeply before branching off into the tangle of streets (Harris Avenue was one of them) that made up the west side. Main Street diverged from Witcham halfway up the hill and headed southwest along the valley’s shallower side. This area of town was known both as Main Street Hill and as Bassey Park. And, near the very top of Main Street’s rise Lois, almost moaning: [“Dear God, what is it?”] Ralph tried to say something comforting and produced nothing but a feeble croak. Near the top of Main Street Hill, a huge black umbrella-shape floated above the ground, blotting out stars which had begun to pale toward morning. Ralph tried to tell himself at first that it was only smoke, that one of the warehouses out that way had caught on fire… perhaps even the abandoned railroad depot at the end of Neibolt Street. But the warehouses were farther south, the old depot was farther west, and if that evil-looking toadstool had really been smoke, the prevailing wind would be driving it across the sky in plumes and banners. That wasn’t happening. Instead of dissipating, the silent blotch in the sky simply hung there, darker than the darkness.

And no one sees it, Ralph thought. No one but me and Lois… and the little bald doctors. The goddam little bald doctors.

He squinted to make out the shape within the giant deathbag, although he didn’t really need to; he had lived in Derry most of his life, and could almost have navigated its streets with his eyes closed (as long as he did not have to do so behind the wheel of his car, that was). Nevertheless, he could make out the building inside the deathbag, especially now that daylight was beginning to seep over the horizon. The flat circular roof which sat atop the curving glassand-brick facade was a dead giveaway. This throwback to the 1950s, designed very much tongue-in-cheek by the famous architect (and one-time Derry resident) Benjamin Hanscom, was the new Derry Civic Center, a replacement for the one destroyed in the flood of ’85.

Clotho turned Ralph to look at him.

[You see, Ralph, you were right-he does mean to assassinate Susan Day… but not just Susan Day.] He paused, glanced at Lois, then turned his grave face back to Ralph.

[That cloud-what you two quite correctly call a deathbag-means that in a sense he has already done what Atropos has set him on to do.

There will be more than two thousand people there tonight… and Ed Deepneau means to kill them all. If the course of events is not changed, he will kill them all.] Lachesis stepped forward to join his colleague.

[you, Ralph and Lois, are the only ones who can stop that from happening.] In his mind’s eye Ralph saw the poster of Susan Day which had been propped in the empty storefront between the Rite Aid Pharmacy and Day Break, Sun Down. He remembered the words written in the dust on the outside of the window: KILL THIS CUNT. And something like that might well happen in Derry, that was the thing. Derry was not precisely like other places. It seemed to Ralph that the city’s atmosphere had improved a great deal since the big flood eight years before, but it was still not precisely like other places. There was a mean streak in Derry, and when its residents got wrought up, they had been known to do some exceedingly ugly things.

He wiped at his lips and was momentarily distracted by the silky, distant feel of his hand on his mouth. He kept being reminded in different ways that his state of being had changed radically.

Lois, horrified: [“How are we supposed to do it? If we can’t go near Atropos or Ed, how are we supposed to stop it from happening?”

Ralph realized he could see her face quite clearly now; the day was brightening with the speed of stop-motion photography in an old Disney nature film.

[“We’ll phone in a bomb-threat, Lois. That should work.”] Clotho looked dismayed at this; Lachesis actually smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand before glancing nervously at the brightening sky.

When he looked back at Ralph, his small face was full of something that might have been carefully muzzled panic.

[That won’t work, Ralph. Now listen to me, both of you, and listen carefully: whatever you do in the next fourteen hours or so, you must not underestimate the power of the forces Atropos unleashed when he first discovered Ed and then slashed his life-cord.] Ralph: [“Why won’t it work?”] Lachesis, sounding both angry and frightened: [We can’t just go on and on answering your questions, Ralph-from here on -you’re going to have to take things on trust. You know how fast time passes on this level. if we stay up here much longer, your chance to stop what is going to happen tonight at the Civic Center will be lost.

You and’ Lois initst step down again. You must!] Clotho held up a hand to his colleague, then turned back to Ralph and Lois. is 10 I’m sure that with a [I’ll answer the one last quest’ n, although little thought you could answer it yourself There have already been twenty-three bomb-threats regarding Susan Day’s speech tonight.

The police have explosives-sniffing dogs at the Civic Center, for the last forty-eight hours they have been X-raying all packages and deliveries which have come into the building, and they have been conducting spot searches, as well. They expected bomb-threats, and they take them seriously, but their assumption in this case is that they are being made by pro-life advocates who are tryiing to keep His. Day from speaking.] Lois, dully: [“Oh God-the little boy who cried wolf Clotho: [Correct, Lois.] Ralph: [“Has he planted a bomb? He has, hasn’t he?”] Bright light washed across the roof, stretching the shadows of the twirling heat-ventilators like taffy. Clotho and Lachesis looked at these shadows and then to the east, where the sun’s top arc had broken over the horizon, with identical expressions of dismay, Lachesis: [We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. You must stop the speech from happening, and there is only one way to do that: you must convince the women in charge to cancel Susan Day’s appearance.

Do you understand? She must not appear in the Civic Center tonight!

You can’t stop Ed, and you daren’t try to approach Atropos, so you Must STOP Susan Day.] Ralph: [“But-“] It wasn’t the strengthening sunlight that shut his mouth, or the growing look of harried fear on the faces of the little bald docs. It was Lois. She put a hand on his cheek and gave a small but decisive shake of the head.

[“No more. We have to go down, Ralph. Now.”] Questions were circling in his mind like mosquitoes, but if she said there was no more time, there was no more time. He glanced at the sun, saw it had entirely cleared the horizon, and nodded. He slipped his arm around her waist.

Clotho, anxiously: [Do not fail us, Ralph and Lois.]

Ralph: [“Save the pep-talk, short stuff This isn’t a football game. “I Before either of them could reply, Ralph closed his eyes and concentrated on dropping back down to the Short-Time world.

CHAPTER 19

There was that sensation of blink. and a chill morning breeze struck his face. Ralph opened his eyes and looked at the woman beside him. For just a moment he could see her aura wisping away behind her like the gauzy overskirt of a lady’s ball-gown and then it was just Lois, looking twenty years younger than she had the week before… and also looking extremely out of place, in her light fall coat and good visiting-the-sick dress, here on the tar-and-gravel hospital roof.

Ralph hugged her tighter as she began to shiver. Of Lachesis and Clotho there was no sign.

Although they could be standing right beside us, Ralph thought.

Probably are, as a matter of fact.

He suddenly thought of that old carny pitchman’s line again, the one about how you had to pay if you wanted to play, so step right up, gentlemen, and lay your money down. But more often than not you were played instead of playing.

Played for what? A sucker, of course. And why did he have that feeling now?

Because there were a lot of things you never found out, Carolyn said from inside his head. They led you down a lot of interesting sidetracks and kept you away from the main point until it was too late for you to ask the questions they might not have wanted to answer…

. and I don’t think something like that happens by accident, do you?

No. He didn’t.

That feeling of being pushed by invisible hands into some dark tunnel where anything might be waiting was stronger now. That sense of being manipulated. He felt small… and vulnerable… and pissed off.

“W-Well, we’re b-b-back,” Lois said through her briskly chattering teeth. “What time is it, do you think?”

It felt like about six o’clock, but when Ralph glanced down at his watch, he wasn’t surprised to see it had stopped. He couldn’t remember when he had last wound it. Tuesday morning, probably.

He followed Lois’s gaze to the southwest and saw the Civic Center standing like an island in the middle of a parking-lot ocean. With the early-morning sunlight kicking bright sheets of reflection from its curved banks of windows, it looked like an oversized version of the office building George jetson worked in. The vast deathbag which had surrounded it only moments before was gone.

Oh, no us not. Don’t kid yourself, buddy. You may not be able to see it right now, but it’s there, all right.

“Early,” he said, pulling her more tightly against him as the wind gusted, blowing his hair-hair that now had almost as much black in it as white-back from his forehead. “But it’s going to get late fast, I think.”

She took his meaning and nodded. “Where are L-Lachesis and C-C-”

“On a level where the wind doesn’t freeze your ass off, I imagine.

Come on. Let’s find a door and get the hell off this roof.”

She stayed where she was a moment longer, though, shivering and looking across town. “What has he done?” she asked in a small voice.

“If he hasn’t planted a bomb in there, what can he have done?”

“Maybe he has planted a bomb and the dogs with the educated noses just haven’t found it yet. Or maybe it’s something the dogs aren’t trained to find. A canister stuck up in the rafters, say-a little something nasty Ed whipped up in the bathtub. Chemistry is what he did for a living, after all… at least until he gave up his job to become a full-time psycho. He could be planning to gas them like rats.

“

“Oh Jesus, Ralph!” She put her hand to her chest just above the swell of her bosom and looked at him with wide, dismayed eyes.

“Come on, Lois. Let’s get off this damned roof.”

This time she came willingly enough. Ralph led her toward the roof door… which, he fervently hoped, they would find unlocked, “Two thousand people,” she almost moaned as they reached the door. Ralph was relieved when the knob turned under his hand, but Lois seized his wrist with chilly fingers before he could pull the door open. Her uptilted face was full of frantic hope. “Maybe those little men were lying, Ralph-maybe they’ve got their own axe to grind, something we couldn’t even hope to understand, and they were lying.”

“I don’t think they can lie,” he said slowly. “That’s the hell of it, Lois-I don’t think they can. And then there’s that.” He pointed at the Civic Center, at the dirty membrane they couldn’t see but which both knew was still there. Lois would not turn to look at it. She put her cold hand over his instead, pulled the roof door open, and started down the stairs, Ralph opened the door at the foot of the stairs, peeped into the sixth-floor corridor, saw that it was empty, and drew Lois out of the stairwell. They headed for the elevators, then stopped together outside an open door with DOCTORS’ LOUNGE printed on the wall beside it in bright red letters. Inside was the room they had seen on their way up to the roof with Clotho and Lachesis-Winslow Homer prints hanging crooked on the walls, a Silex standing on a hotplate, hideous Swedish Modern furniture. No one was in the room right now, but the TV bolted to the wall was playing nevertheless, and their old friend Lisette Benson was reading the morning news. Ralph remembered the day he and Lois and Bill had sat in Lois’s living room, eating macaroni and cheese as they watched Lisette Benson report on the doll-throwing incident at WomanCare. Less than a month ago that had been. He suddenly remembered that Bill McGovern would never watch Lisette Benson again, or forget to lock the front door, and a sense of loss as fierce as a November gale swept through him. He could not completely believe it, at least not yet. How could Bill have died so quickly and so unceremoniously?

He would have hated it, Ralph thought, and not just because he would have considered dying of a heart-attack in a hospital corridor in bad taste. He would’ve considered it bad theater, as well.

But he had seen it happen, and Lois had actually felt it eating away at Bill’s insides. That made Ralph think of the deathbag surrounding the

Civic Center, and what was going to happen there if they didn’t stop the speech. He started toward the elevator again, but Lois pulled him back. She was looking at the TV, fascinated. -will feel a lot of relief when tonight’s speech by feminist abortion-rights advocate Susan Day is history,” Lisette Benson was saying, “but the police aren’t the only ones who will feel that way.

Apparently both pro-life and pro-choice advocates are beginning to feel the strain of living on the edge of confrontation, John Kirkland is live at the Derry Civic Center this morning, and he has more.

John?”

The pallid, unsmiling man standing next to Kirkland was Dan Dalton. The button on his shirt showed a scalpel descending toward an infant with its knees drawn up in the fetal position. This was In a cross surrounded by a red circle with a diagonal red line slashed it.

Ralph could see half a dozen police cars and two news trucks, one with the NBC logo on its side, in the background of the shot.

A uniformed cop strolled across the lawn leading two dogs-a bloodhound and a German shepherd-on leashes.

“That’s right, Lisette, I’m here at the Civic Center, where the mood could be termed one of worry and quiet determination. With me is Dan Dalton, President of The Friends of Life organization, which has been so vehemently opposed to His. Day’s speech. Mr. Dalton, would you agree with that assessment of the situation?”

“That there’s a lot of worry and determination in the air?”

Dalton asked. To Ralph his smile looked both nervous and disdainful.

“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way. We’re worried that Susan Day, one of this country’s greatest unindicted criminals, will succeed in her efforts to confuse the central issue here in Derry: the murder of twelve to fourteen helpless unborn children each and every day.”

“But Mr. Dalton-”

“And”-Dalton overrode him-“we are determined to show a watching nation that we are not willing to be good Nazis, that we are not all cowed by the religion of political correctness-the dreaded pee-cee.”

“Mr. Dalton-”

“We are also determined to show a watching nation that some of us are still capable of standing up for our beliefs, and to fulfill the sacred responsibility which a loving God has-”

“Mr. Dalton, are The Friends of Life planning any sort of violent protest here?”

That shut him up for a moment and at least temporarily drained all the canned vitality from his face. With it gone, Ralph saw a dismaying thing: underneath his bluster, Dalton was scared to death.

“Violence?” he said at last. He brought the word out carefully, like something that could give his mouth a bad cut if mishandled.

“Good Lord, no. The Friends of Life reject the idea that two wrongs can ever make a right. We intend to mount a massive demonstration-we are being joined in this fight by pro-life advocates from Augusta, Portland, Portsmouth, and even Boston-but there will be no violence.”

“What about Ed Deepneau? Can you speak for him?”

Dalton’s lips, already thinned down to little more than a seam, now seemed to disappear altogether. “Mr. Deepneau is no longer associated with The Friends of Life,” he said. Ralph thought he detected both fear and anger in Dalton’s tone. “Neither are Frank Felton, Sandra McKay, and Charles Pickering, in case you intended to ask.”

John Kirkland’s glance at the camera was brief but telling. It said that he thought Dan Dalton was as nutty as a bag of trail-mix.

“Are you saying that Ed Deepneau and these other individualsI’m sorry, I don’t know who they are-have formed their own anti-abortion group? A kind of offshoot?”

“We are not anti-abortion, we are pro-life” Dalton cried.

“There’s a big difference, but you reporters seem to keep missing it!”

“So you don’t know Ed Deepneau’s whereabouts, or what-if anything-he might be planning?”

“I don’t know where he is, I don’t care where he is, and I don’t care about his… offshoots, either.”

You’re afraid, though, Ralph thought. And if a Self-righteous little prick like you is afraid, I think I’m terrified.

Dalton started off. Kirkland, apparently deciding he wasn’t wrung completely dry yet, walked after him, shaking out his microphone cord as he went.

“But isn’t it true, Mr. Dalton, that while he was a member of The several violence-oriented Friends of Life, Ed Deepneau instigated protests, including one last month where dolls soaked with artificial blood were thrown-”

“You’re all the same, aren’t you?” Dan Dalton asked. “I’ll pray for you, my friend.” He stalked off.

Kirkland looked after him for a moment, bemused, then turned back to the camera. “We tried to get hold of Mr. Dalton’s opposite number-Gretchen Tillbury, who has taken on the formidable job of coordinating this event for WomanCare-but she was unavailable for comment. We’ve heard that His. Tillbury is at High Ridge, a women’s shelter and halfway house which is owned and operated by WomanCare.

Presumably, she and her associates are out there putting the finishing touches on plans for what they hope will be a safe, violence-free rally and speech at the Civic Center tonight.”

Ralph glanced at Lois and said, “Okay-now we know where we’re going, at least,” The TV picture switched to Lisette Benson, in the studio. “John, are there any real signs of possible violence at the Civic Center?”

Back to Kirkland, who had returned to his original location in front of the cop-cars. He was holding up a small white rectangle with some printing on it in front of his tie. “Well, the private security police on duty here found hundreds of these file-cards scattered on the Civic Center’s front lawn this morning just after first light. One of the guards claims to have seen the vehicle they were dumped from. He says it was a Cadillac from the late sixties, either brown or black.

He didn’t get the license number, but says there was a sticker on the back bumper reading ABORTION is MURDER, NOT CHOICE.

Back to the studio, where Lisette Benson was looking mighty interested. “What’s on those cards, John?”

Back to Kirkland.

“I guess you’d have to say it’s sort of a riddle.” He glanced down at the card.” ’If you have a gun loaded with only two bullets and you’re in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and an abortionist, what do you do?”

“Kirkland looked back up into the camera and said, “The answer printed on the other side, Lisette, is ’shoot the abortionist twice.”

“This is John Kirkland, reporting live from the Derry Civic Center.”

“I’m starving,” Lois said as Ralph carefully guided the Oldsmobile down the series of parking-garage ramps which would presumably set them free… if Ralph didn’t miss any of the exit signs, that was.

“And if I’m exaggerating, I’m not doing it by much.”

“Me too,” Ralph said. “And considering that we haven’t eaten since Tuesday, I guess that’s to be expected. We’ll grab a good sitdown breakfast on the way out to High Ridge.”

“Do we have time?”

“We’ll make time. After all, an army fights on its stomach.”

“I suppose so, although I don’t feel very army-ish. Do you know where-”

“Hush a second, Lois.”

He stopped the Oldsmobile short, put the gearshift lever in Park, and listened. There was a clacking sound from under the hood that he didn’t like very much. Of course the concrete walls of places like this tended to magnify sounds, but still…

“Ralph?” she asked nervously, “Don’t tell me something’s wrong with the car. just don’t tell me that, okay?”

“I think it’s fine,” he said, and began creeping toward daylight again. “I’ve just kind of fallen out of touch with old Nellie here since Carol died. Forgotten what kinds of sounds she makes. You were going to ask me something, weren’t you?”

,if you know where that shelter is. High Ridge.”

Ralph shook his head. “Somewhere out near the Newport town line is all I know. I don’t think they’re supposed to tell men where it is. I was kind of hoping you might have heard.” Lois shook her head. “I never had to use a place like that, thank God.

We’ll have to call her. The Tillbury woman. You’ve met her with Helen, so you can talk to her. She’ll listen to YOU.” She gave him a brief glance, one that warmed his heart-anyone with any sense would listen to you, Ralph, it said-but Ralph shook his head.

“I bet the only calls she’s taking today are ones that come from the Civic Center or from wherever Susan Day is.” He shot her a glance. “You know, that woman’s got a lot of guts, coming here.

Either that or she’s donkey-dumb.”

“Probably a little of both. If Gretchen Tillbury won’t take a call, how will we get in touch with her?”

“Well, I tell you what. I was a salesman for a lot of what Faye Chapin would call my real life, and I bet I can still be inventive when I need to be.” He thought of the information-lady with the orange aura and grinned. “Persuasive, too, maybe.”

“Ralph?” Her voice was small. “What, Lois?”

“This feels like real life to me.” He patted her hand. “I know what you mean.” A familiar skinny face poked out of the pay-booth of the hospital parking garage; a familiar grin-one from which at least half a dozen teeth had gone AWOL-brightened it. “Eyyyy, Ralph, dat you? Goddam if it ain’t! Beauty! Beauty!”

“Trigger?” Ralph asked slowly. “Trigger Vachon?”

“None udder! “Trigger flipped his lank brown hair out of his eyes so he could get a better look at Lois. “And who’s dis marigold here?

I know her from somewhere, goddam if I don’t!”

“Lois Chasse,” Ralph said, taking his parking ticket from its place over the sun-visor. “You might have known her husband, Paul-”

“Goddam right I did!” Trigger cried. “We was weekend warriors togedder, back in nineteen-seb’ny, maybe seb’ny-one! Closed down Nan’s Tavern more’n once! My suds n body! How is Paul dese days, ma’am?”

“Mr. Chasse passed on a little over two years ago,” Lois said.

“Oh, damn! I’m sorry to hear it. He was a champ of a guy, Paul Chasse. Just an all-around champ of a guy. Everybody liked him.”

Trigger looked as distressed as he might have done if she had told him it had happened only that morning.

“Thank you, Mr. Vachon.” Lois glanced at her watch, then looked up at Ralph. Her stomach rumbled, as if to add one final point to the argument.

Ralph handed his parking ticket through the open window of the car, and as Trigger took it, Ralph suddenly realized the stamp would show that he and Lois had been here since Tuesday night. Almost sixty hours.

“What happened to the dry-cleaning business, Trig?” he asked hastily.

“Ahhh, dey laid me off,” Trigger said. “Didn’t I tell you?

Laid almost everybody off. I was downhearted at first, but I caught on here last April, and… eyyy! I like dis all kindsa better. I,of iiiv little TV for when it’s slow, and there ain’t nobody beepin their horns at me if I don’t go the firs second a traffic-light turns green, or cutting me off out dere on the Extension.

Everyone in a hurry to get to the nex place, dey are, just why I dunno.

Also, I tell you what, Ralph: dat damn van was colder’n a witch’s tit in the winter. Pardon me, ma I am.”

Lois did not reply. She seemed to be studying the backs of her hands with great interest. Ralph, meanwhile, watched with relief as Trigger crumpled up the parking ticket and tossed it into his wastebasket without so much as a glance at the time-and-date stamp. He punched one of the buttons on his cash-register, and $0.00 popped up on the screen in the booth’s window.

“Jeer, Trig, that’s really nice of you,” Ralph said.

“Eyyy, don’t mention it,” Trigger said, and grandly punched another button. This one raised the barrier in front of the booth.

“Good to see you. Say, you member dat time out by the airport-?

Gosh! Hotter’n hell, it was, and dose two fella almost got in a punchup? Den it rained like a bugger. Hailed some, too. You was walkin and I give you a ride home. Only seen you once or twice since den.” He took a closer look at Ralph. “You look a hell of a lot better today than you did den, Ralphie, I’ll tell you dat. still, you don’t look a day over fifty-five. Beauty!”

Beside him, Lois’s stomach rumbled again, louder this time. She went on studying the backs of her hands.

“I feel a little older than that, though,” Ralph said. “Listen, Trig, it was good to see you, but we ought to-”

“Damn,” Trigger said, and his eyes had gone distant. “I had sumpin to tell you, Ralph. At least I tink I did. Bout dat day. C;osil, ain’t I got a dumb old head!

Ralph waited a moment longer, uncomfortably poised between impatience and curiosity. “Well, don’t feel bad about it, Trig. That was a long time ago.”

“What the hell…?” Trigger asked himself. He gazed up at the ceiling of his little booth, as if the answer might be written there.

“Ralph, we ought to go,” Lois said. “It’s not just wanting breakfast, either.”

“Yes. You’re right.” He got the Oldsmobile rolling slowly again.

“If you think of it, Trig, give me a call. I’m in the book. It was good to see you.”

Trigger Vachon ignored this completely; he no longer seemed aware of Ralph at all, in fact. “Was it sumpin we saw?” he enquired of the ceiling. “Or sumpin we did? Gosh!”

He was still looking up there and scratching the frizz of hair on the nape of his neck when Ralph turned left and, with a final wave, guided his Oldsmobile down Hospital Drive toward the low brick building which housed WomanCare.

Now that the sun was up, there was only a single security guard, and no demonstrators at all. Their absence made Ralph remember all the jungle epics he’d seen as a young man, especially the part where the native drums would stop and the hero-Jon Hall or Frank Buck-would turn to his head bearer and say he didn’t like it, it was too quiet. The guard took a clipboard from under his arm, squinted at Ralph’s Olds, and wrote something down-the plate number, Ralph supposed. Then he came ambling toward them along the leaf-strewn walk.

At this hour of the morning, Ralph had his pick of the ten-minute spaces across from the building. He parked, got out, then came around to open Lois’s door, as he had been trained.

“How do you want to handle this?” she asked as he took her hand and helped er out.

“We’ll probably have to be a little cute, but let’s not get carried away. Right?”

“Right.” She ran a nervous, patting hand down the front of her coat as they crossed, then flashed a megawatt smile at the security guard. “Good morning, officer.”

“Morning.” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t think there’s anyone in there just yet but the receptionist and the cleaning woman.”

“The receptionist is who we want to see,” Lois said cheerfully.

It was news to Ralph. “Barbae Richards. Her aunt Simone has a message for her to pass along. Very important. just say it’s Lois Chasse.”

The security guard thought this over, then nodded toward the door.

“That won’t be necessary. You go on right ahead, ma’am.”

Lois said, smiling more brilliantly than ever, “We won’t be two shakes, will we, Norton?”

“Shake and a half, more like it,” Ralph agreed. As they approached the building and left the security man behind, he leaned toward her and murmured: “Norton? Good God, Lois, Norton?”

“It was the first name that came into my head,” she replied. “I guess I was thinking of The Honeymooners-Ralph and Norton, remember?”

“Yes,” he said. “One of these days, Alice… pow! Right to da moon!

Two of the three doors were locked, but the one on the far left opened and they went in. Ralph squeezed Lois’s hand and felt her answering squeeze. He sensed a strong focusing of his concentration at the same moment, a narrowing and brightening of will and awareness.

All around him the eye of the world seemed to first blink and then open wide. All around them both.

The reception area was almost ostentatiously plain. The posters on the walls were mostly the sort foreign tourist agencies send out for the price of postage. The only exception was to the right of the receptionist’s desk: a large black-and-white photo of a young woman in a maternity smock. She was sitting on a barstool with a martini glass in one hand. WHEN YOU’re PREGNANT, YOU NEVER DRINK ALONE, the copy beneath the photo read. There was no indication that in a room or rooms behind this pleasant, unremarkable business space, abortions were done on demand.

Well, Ralph thought, what did you expect? An advertisement? A poster of aborted fetuses in a galvanized garbage pail between the one showing the Isle of Capriand the one of the Italian Alps? Get real, Ralph.

To their left, a heavyset woman in her late forties or early fifties was washing the top of a glass coffee-table; there was a little cart filled with various cleaning implements parked beside her. She was buried in a dark blue aura speckled with unhealthy-looking black dots which swarmed like queer insects over the places where her heart and lungs were, and she was looking at the newcomers with undisguised suspicion.

Straight ahead, another woman was watching them carefully, although without the janitor’s suspicion. Ralph recognized her from the TV news report on the day of the doll-throwing incident. Simone Castonguay’s niece was dark-haired, about thirty-five, and close to gorgeous even at this hour of the morning. She sat behind a severe gray metal desk that perfectly complemented her looks and within a forest-green aura which looked much healthier than the cleaning woman’s. A cut-glass vase filled with fall flowers stood on one corner of her desk.

She smiled tentatively at them, showing no immediate recognition of Lois, then wiggled the tip of one finger at the clock on the wall.

“We don’t open until eight,” she said, “and I don’t think we could help you today in any case. The doctors are all off-I mean, Dr. Hamilton is technically covering, but I’m not even sure I could get to her. There’s a lot going on-this is a big day for us,”

“I know,” Lois said, and gave Ralph’s hand another squeeze before letting it go. He heard her voice in his mind for a moment, very faint-like a bad overseas telephone conversation-but audible: [“Stay where you are, Ralph. She’s got-“] Lois sent him a picture which was even fainter than the thought, and gone almost as soon as Ralph glimpsed it. This sort of communication was a lot easier on the upper levels, but what he got was enough. The hand with which Barbara Richards had pointed at the clock was now resting easily on top of the desk, but the other was underneath it, where a small white button was mounted on one side of the kneehole. If either of them showed the slightest sign of odd behavior, she would push the button, summoning first their friend with the clipboard who was posted outside, and then most of the private security cops in Derry.

And I’m the one she’s watchting most carefully, because I’m the man, Ralph thought.

As Lois approached the reception desk, Ralph had an unsettling thought: given the current atmosphere in Derry, that sort of sexdiscrimination-unconscious but very real-could get this pretty black-haired woman hurt… maybe even killed. He remembered Leydecker telling him that one of Ed’s small cadre of co-crazies was a woman. Pasty complexion, he’d said, lots Of acne, glasses so thick they make her eyes look like poached eggs. Sandra something, her name was. And if Sandra Something had approached His. Richards’s desk as Lois was approaching it now, first opening her purse and then reaching into it, would the woman dressed in the forest-green aura have pushed the hidden alarm button?

“You probably don’t remember me, Barbara,” Lois was saying, “because I haven’t seen you much since you were in college, when you were going with the Sparkmeyer boy-”

“Oh my God, Lennie Sparkmeyer, I haven’t thought of him in years,” Barbara Richards said, and gave an embarrassed little laugh.

“But I remember you. Lois Delancey. Aunt Simone’s poker-buddy.

Do you guys still play?”

“It’s Chasse, not Delancey, and we still do.” Lois sounded delighted that Barbara had remembered her, and Ralph hoped she wouldn’t lose track of what they were supposed to be doing here.

He needn’t have worried. “Anyway, Simone sent me with a message for Gretchen Tillbury.” She brought a piece of paper out of her purse.

“I wonder if you could give it to her?”

“I doubt very much if I’ll even talk to Gretchen on the phone today,” Richards said. “She’s as busy as the rest of us. Busier.”

“I’ll bet.” Lois tinkled an amazingly genuine little laugh. “I guess there’s no real hurry about this, though. Gretchen has got a niece who’s been granted a full scholarship at the University of New Hampshire. Have you ever noticed how much harder people try to get in touch when it’s bad news they have to pass on? Strange, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.” Pichards said, reaching for the folded slip of paper. “Anyway, I’ll be happy to put this in Gretchen’s-” Lois seized her wrist, and a flash of gray light-so bright Ralph had to squint his eyes against it to keep from being dazzled-leaped up the woman’s arm, shoulder, and neck. It spun around her head in a brief halo, then disappeared.

No, it didn’t, Ralph thought. It didn’t disappear, it sank in.

“What was that?” the cleaning woman asked suspiciously. “What was that bang?”

“A car backfired,” Ralph said. “That’s all.”

“Huh,” she said. “Goshdarn men think they know everything. Did you hear that, Barbie?”

“Yes,” Richards said. She sounded entirely normal to Ralph, and he knew that the cleaning woman would not be able to see the pearl gray mist which had now filled her eyes. “I think he’s right, but would you check with Peter outside? We can’t be too careful.”

“You goshdarn bet,” the cleaning woman said. She set her Windex bottle down, crossed to the doors (sparing Ralph a final dark look which said You’re old but I just goshdarn bet you still have a penis down there somewhere), and went out.

As soon as she was gone, Lois leaned over the desk. “Barbara, my friend and I have to talk to Gretchen this morning,” she said.

“Face-to-face.”

“She’s not here. She’s at High Ridge.”

“Tell us how to get there.”

Richards’s gaze drifted to Ralph. He found her gray, pupilless eyesockets profoundly unsettling. It was like looking at a piece of classic statuary which had somehow come to life. Her dark-green aura had paled considerably as well. ht. It’s been temporarily overlaid by Lois’s gray, that’s all.

Lois glanced briefly around, followed Barbara Richards’s gaze to Ralph, then turned back to her again. “Yes, he’s a man, but this time it’s okay. I promise you that. Neither one of us means any harm to Gretchen Tillbury or any of the women at High Ridge, but we have to talk to her, so tell us how to get there.” She touched Richards’s hand again, and more gray flashed up Richards’s arm.

“Don’t hurt her,” Ralph said.

“I won’t, but she’s going to talk.” She bent closer to Richards.

“Where is it? Come on, Barbara.”

“You take Route 33 out of Derry,” she said. “The old Newport Road. After you’ve gone about ten miles, there’ll be a big red fart-nhouse on your left. There are two barns behind it. You take your first left after that-” The cleaning woman came back in. “Peter didn’t hear-” She stopped abruptly, perhaps not liking the way Lois was bent over her friend’s desk, perhaps not liking the blank look in her friend’s eyes.

“Barbara? Are you all ri-”

“Be quiet,” Ralph said in a low, friendly voice. “They’re talking.”

He took the cleaning woman’s arm just above the elbow, feeling a brief but powerful pulse of energy as he did so. For a moment all the colors in the world brightened further. The cleaning woman’s name was Rachel Anderson. She’d been married once, to a man who’d beaten her hard and often until he disappeared eight years ago. Now she had a dog and her friends at WomanCare, and that was enough.

“Oh sure,” Rachel Anderson said in a dreamy, thoughtful voice.

“They’re talking, and Peter says everything’s okay, so I guess I better just be quiet.”

“What a good idea,” Ralph said, still holding her upper arm lightly, Lois took a quick look around to confirm Ralph had the situation under control, then turned back to Barbara Richards once again.

“Take a left after the red farmhouse with the two barns. Okay, I’ve got that. What then?”

“You’ll be on a dirt road. It goes up a long hill-about a mile and a half-and then ends at a white farmhouse. That’s High Ridge.

It’s got the most lovely view-”

“I’ll bet,” Lois said. “Barbara, it was great to see you again. Now my friend and I-”

“Great to see you, too, Lois,” Richards said in a distant, uninterested voice.

“Now my friend and I are going to leave. Everything is all right.”

“Good.”

“You won’t need to remember any of this,” Lois said.

“Absolutely not.”

Lois started to turn away, then turned back and plucked up the piece of paper she had taken from her purse. It had fallen to the desk when Lois grabbed the woman’s wrist.

“Why don’t you go back to work, Rachel?” Ralph asked the cleaning lady. He let go of her arm carefully, ready to grab it again at once if she showed signs of needing reinforcement.

“Yes, I better go back to work,” she said, sounding much more friendly. “I want to be done here by noon, so I can go out to High Ridge and help make signs.”

Lois joined Ralph as Rachel Anderson drifted back to her cart of cleaning supplies. Lois looked both amazed and a little shaky.

“They’ll be okay, won’t they, Ralph?”

“Yes, I’m sure they will be. Are you all right? Not going to faint or anything like that?”

“I’m okay. Can you remember the directions?”

“Of course-she’s talking about the place that used to be Barrett’s Orchards. Carolyn and I used to go out there every fall to pick apples and buy cider until they sold out in the early eighties. To think that’s High Ridge.”

“Be amazed later, Ralph-I really am starving to death.”

“All right. What was the note, by the way? The note about the niece with the full scholarship at UNH?”

She flashed him a little smile and handed it to him. it was her light-bill for the month of September.

“Were you able to leave your message?” the security guard asked as they came out and started down the walk.

“Yes, thanks,” Lois said, turning on the megawatt smile again.

She kept moving, though, and her hand was gripping Ralph’s very tightly. He knew how she felt; he hadn’t the slightest idea how long the suggestions they had given the two women would hold.

“Good,” the guard said, following them to the end of the walk, “This is gonna be a long, long day. I’ll be glad when it’s over.

You know how many security people we’re gonna have here from noon until midnight? A dozen. And that’s just here. They’re gonna have over forty at the Civic Center-that’s in addition to the local COPS.”

And it won’t do a damned bit of good, Ralph thought.

“And what for? So one blonde with an attitude can run her mouth.”

He looked at Lois as if he expected her to accuse him of being a male sexist oinker, but Lois only renewed her smile.

“I hope everything goes well for you, Officer,” Ralph said, and then led Lois back across the street to the Oldsmobile. He started it up and turned laboriously around in the WomanCare driveway, expecting either Barbara Richards, Rachel Anderson, or maybe both of them to come rushing out through the front door, eyes wild and fingers pointing. He finally got the Olds headed in the right direction and let out a long sigh of relief. Lois looked over at him and nodded in sympathy.

“I thought I was the salesman,” Ralph said, “but man, I’ve never seen a selling job like that.”

Lois smiled demurely and clasped her hands in her lap.

They were approaching the hospital parking-garage when Trigger came rushing out of his little booth, waving his arms. Ralph’s first thought was that they weren’t going to make a clean getaway after all-the security guard with the clipboard had tipped to something suspicious and phoned or radioed Trigger to stop them. Then he saw the look-out of breath but happy-and what Trigger had in his right hand.

It was a very old and very battered black wallet. It flapped open and closed like a toothless mouth with each wave of his right arm.

“Don’t worry,” Ralph said, slowing the Olds down.

“I don’t know what he wants, but I’m pretty sure it’s not trouble.

At least not yet.”

“I don’t care what he wants. All I want is to get out of here and eat some food. If he starts to show you his fishing pictures, Ralph, I’ll step on the gas pedal myself,”

“Amen,” Ralph said, knowing perfectly well that it wasn’t fishing pictures Trigger Vachon had in mind. He still wasn’t clear on everything, but one thing he knew for sure: nothing was happening by chance. Not anymore. This was the Purpose with a vengeance. He pulled up beside Trigger and pushed the button that lowered his window. It went down with an ill-tempered whine.

“Eyyy, Ralph!” Trigger cried. “I t’ought I missed you!”

“What is it, Trig? We’re in kind of a hurry-”

“Yeah, yeah, dis won’t take but a second. I got it right here in my wallet, Ralph.

Man, I keep all my paperwork in here, and I never lose a ting out of it.”

He spread the old billfold’s limp jaws, revealing a few crumpled bills, a celluloid accordion of pictures (and damned if Ralph didn’t catch a glimpse of Trigger holding up a big bass in one of them), and what looked like at least forty business cards, most of them creased and limber with age. Trigger began to go through these with the speed of a veteran bank-teller counting currency.

“I never t’row dese tings out, me,” Trigger said. “They’re great to write stuff on, better’n a notebook, and free. Now just a second… just a second, oh you damn ting, where you be?”

Lois gave Ralph an impatient, worried look and pointed up the road. Ralph ignored both the look and the gesture. He had begun to feel a strange tingling in his chest. In his mind’s eye he saw himself reaching out with his index finger and drawing something in the foggy condensate that had appeared on the windshield of Trigger’s van as a result of a summer storm fifteen months ago-cold rain on a hot day.

“Ralph, you ’member the scarf Deepneau was wearin dat day?

White, wit some kind of red marks on it?”

“Yes, I remember,” Ralph said. Cuntlicker, Ed had told the heavyset guy. Fucked your mother and licked her cunt. And yes, he remembered the scarf-of course he did. But the red thing hadn’t been just marks or a splotch or a meaningless bit of pattern; it had been an ideogram or ideograms. The sudden sinking in the pit of his stomach told Ralph that Trigger could quit rummaging through his old business cards right now. He knew what this was about. He knew.

“Was you in da war, Ralph?” Trigger asked. “The big one? Number Two?”

“In a way, I guess,” Ralph said. “I fought most of it in Texas.

I went overseas in early ’45, but I was rear-echelon all the way.”

Trigger nodded. “Dat means Europe,” he said. “Wasn’t no rearechelon in the Pacific, not by the end.”

“England,” Ralph said. “Then Germany.”

Trigger was still nodding, pleased. “If you’d been in the Pacific, you woulda known the stuff on that scarf wasn’t Chinese.”

“It was Japanese, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it, Trig?”

Trigger nodded. In one hand he held a business card plucked from among many. On the blank side, Ralph saw a rough approximation of the double symbol they had seen on Ed’s scarf, the double symbol he himself had drawn in the windshield mist.

“What are you talking about?” Lois asked, now sounding not impatient but just plain scared.

“I should have known,” Ralph heard himself say in a faint, horrified voice. “I still should have known.”

“Known what?” She grabbed his shoulder and shook it. “Known what?”

He didn’t answer. Feeling like a man in a dream, he reached out and took the card. Trigger Vachon was no longer smiling, and his dark eyes studied Ralph’s face with grave consideration. “I copied it before it could melt off a da windshield,” Trigger said, “cause I knew I seen it before, and by the time I got home dat night, I knew where.

My big brother, Marcel, fought da las year of the war in the Pacific.

One of the tings he brought back was a scarf with dat same two marks on it, in dat same red. I ast him, ’us to be sure, and he wrote it on dat card.” Trigger pointed to the card Ralph was holding between his fingers. “I meant to tell you as soon as I saw you again, only I forgot until today. I was glad I finally remembered, but looking at you now, I guess it woulda been better if I’d stayed forgetful.”

“No, it’s okay.”

Lois took the card from him. “What is it? What does it mean?”

“Tell you later.” Ralph reached for the gearshift. His heart felt like a stone in his chest. Lois was looking at the symbols on the blank side of the card, allowing Ralph to see the printed side.

R. H. FOSTER, WELLS amp; DRY-WALLS, it said. Below this, Trigger’s big brother had printed a single word in black capital letters.