Insomnia

CHAPTER 1

About a month after the death of his wife, Ralph Roberts began to suffer from insomnia for the first time in his life.

The problem was mild to begin with, but it grew steadily worse.

Six months after the first interruptions in his heretofore unremarkable sleep cycle, Ralph had reached a state of misery he could hardly credit, let alone accept. Toward the end of the summer of 1993 he began to wonder what it would be like to spend his remaining years on earth in a starey-eyed daze of wakefulness. Of course it wouldn’t come to that, he told himself, it never does.

But was that true? He didn’t really know, that was the devil of it, and the books on the subject Mike Hanlon steered him to down at the Derry Public Library weren’t much help. There were several on sleep disorders, but they seemed to contradict one another. Some called insomnia a symptom, others called it a disease, and at least one called it a myth. The problem went further than that, however; so far as Ralph could tell from the books, no one seemed exactly sure what sleep itself was, how it worked, or what it did.

He knew he should quit playing amateur researcher and go to the doctor, but he found that surprisingly hard to do. He supposed he still bore Dr. Litchfield a grudge. It was Litchfield, after all, who had originally diagnosed Carolyn’s brain tumor as tension headaches.”

(except Ralph had an idea that Litchfield, a lifelong bachelor, might actually have believed that Carolyn was suffering from nothing but a moderate case of the vapors), and Litchfield who had made himself as scarce as medically possible once Carolyn was diagnosed. Ralph was positive that if he had asked the man about that point-blank, Litchfield would have said he had handed the case off to Jamal, the specialist… all quite proper and aboveboard. Yes. Except Ralph had made it his business to get a good look into Litchfield’s eyes on the few occasions he had seen him between Carolyn’s first convulsions last July and her death this March, and Ralph thought that what he’d seen in those eyes was a mixture of unease and guilt. It was the look of a man trying very hard to forget he has fucked up.

Ralph believed the only reason he could still look at Litchfield without wanting to knock his block off was that Dr. jamal had told him that an earlier diagnosis probably would have made no difference; by the time

Carolyn’s headaches started, the tumor was already well entrenched, and no doubt sending out little bursts of bad cells to other areas of the brain like malignant CARE packages.

In late April Dr. jamal had left to establish a practice in southern Connecticut, and Ralph missed him. He thought that he could have talked about his sleeplessness to Dr. jamal, and he had an idea that Jamal would have listened in a way Litchfield wouldn’t… or couldn’t.

By late summer Ralph had read enough about insomnia to know that the type with which he was afflicted, while not rare, was a lot less common than the usual slow-sleep insomnia. People unaffected by insomnia are usually in first-stage sleep seven to twenty minutes after turning in. Slow-sleepers, on the other hand, sometimes take as long as three hours to slip below the surface, and while normal sleepers begin to ramp down into third-stage sleep (what some of the old books called theta sleep, Ralph had discovered) forty-five minutes or so after drifting off, slow-sleepers usually took an additional hour or two to get down there… and on many nights they did not get all the way down at all. They awoke unrefreshed, sometimes with unfocused memories of unpleasant, tangled dreams, more often with the mistaken impression that they had been awake all night.

Following Carolyn’s death, Ralph began to suffer from premature waking. He continued to go to bed most nights following the conclusion of the eleven o’clock news, and he continued to pop off to sleep almost at once, but instead of waking promptly at six-fifty-five, five minutes before the clock-radio alarm buzzed, he began to wake at six. At first he dismissed this as no more than the price of living with a slightly enlarged prostate and a seventy-year-old set of kidneys, but he never seemed to have to go that badly when he woke up, and he found it impossible to get back to sleep even after he’d emptied what had accumulated. He simply lay in the bed he’d shared with Carolyn for so many years, waiting for it to be five of seven (quarter till, anyway) so he could get up. Eventually he gave up even trying to drop off again; he simply lay there with his long-fingered, slightly swollen hands laced together on his chest and stared up at the shadowy ceiling with eyes that felt as big as doorknobs. Sometimes he thought of Dr. Jamal down there in Westport, talking in his soft and comforting Indian accent, building up his little piece of the American dream.

Sometimes he thought of places he and Carolyn had gone in the old days, and the one he kept coming back to was a hot afternoon at Sand Beach in Bar Harbor, the two of them sitting at a picnic table in their bathing suits, sitting under a big bright umbrella, eating sweet fried clams and drinking Bud from longneck bottles as they watched the sailboats scudding across the dark-blue ocean. When had that been?

1964? 1967?

Did it matter?

Probably not.

The alterations in his sleep schedule wouldn’t have mattered, either, if they had ended there; Ralph would have adapted to the changes not just with ease but with gratitude. All the books he hunted through that summer seemed to confirm one bit of folk wisdom he’d heard all his life-people slept less as they got older. If losing an hour or so a night was the only fee he had to pay for the dubious pleasure of being “seventy years young,” he would pay it gladly, and consider himself well off.

But it didn’t end there. By the first week of May, Ralph was waking up to birdsong at 5:15 a.m. He tried earplugs for a few nights, although he doubted from the outset that they would work. It wasn’t the newly returned birds that were waking him up, nor the occasional delivery-truck backfire out on Harris Avenue. He had always been the sort of guy who could sleep in the middle of a brass marching band, and he didn’t think that had changed. What had changed was inside his head. There was a switch in there, something was turning it on a little earlier every day, and Ralph hadn’t the slightest idea of how to keep it from happening.

By June he was popping out of sleep like jack out of his box at 4:30 a.m. 4:45 at the latest. And by the middle of July-not quite as hot as July of ’92, but bad enough, thanks very much-he was snapping to at around four o’clock. It was during those long hot nights, taking up too little of the bed where he and Carolyn had made love on so many hot nights (and cold ones), that he began to consider what a hell his life would become if sleep departed entirely.

In daylight he was still able to scoff at the notion, but he was discovering certain dismal truths about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, and the grand-prize winner was this: at 4:15 a.m anything seems possible. Anything.

During the days he was able to go on telling himself that he was simply experiencing a readjustment of his sleep-cycle, that his body was responding in perfectly normal fashion to a number of big changes in his life, retirement and the loss of his wife being the two biggest.

He sometimes used the word loneliness when he thought about his new life, but he shied away from The Dreaded D-Word, stuffing it back into the deep closet of his subconscious whenever it happened to glimmer for a moment in his thoughts. Loneliness was okay. Depression most certainly was not.

Maybe you need to get more exercise, he thought. Do some walking’ like you used to last summer. After all, you’ve been leading a pretty sedentary life-get up, eat a toast, read a book, watch some TV, get a sandwich across the street in the Red Apple for lunch, potter around in the garden a little, maybe go to the library or visit with Helen and the hah f hey happen to be sitting out, eat upper, maybe sit on the porch and visit with McGovern or Lois Chasse for awhile. Then what?

Read a little more, watch a little more TV, wash up, go to bed.

Sedentary.

Boring. No wonder you wake up early.

Except that was crap. His life sounded sedentary, yes, no doubt, but it really wasn’t. The garden was a good example. What he did out there was never going to win him any prizes, but it was a hell of a long way from “pottering around.” Most afternoons he weeded until sweat made a dark tree-shape down the back of his shirt and spread damp circles at his armpits, and he was often trembling with exhaustion by the time he let himself go back inside. “Punishment” probably would have been closer to the mark than “pottering,” but punishment for what?

Waking up before dawn?

Ralph didn’t know and didn’t care. Working in the garden filled up a large piece of the afternoon, it took his mind off things he didn’t really care to think of, and that was enough to justify the aching muscles and the occasional lights of black spots in front of his eyes.

He began his extended visits to the garden shortly after the Fourth of July and continued all through August, long after the early crops had been harvested and the later ones had been hopelessly stunted by the lack of rain.

“You ought to quit that,” Bill McGovern told him one night as they sat on the porch, drinking lemonade. This was in mid-August, and Ralph had begun to wake up around three-thirty each morning.

It’s got to be hazardous to your health. Worse, you look like a lunatic.”

“Maybe I am a lunatic,” Ralph responded shortly, and either his tone or the look in his eyes must have been convincing, because McGovern changed the subject.

He did begin walking again-nothing like the Marathons of ’92, but he managed two miles a day if it wasn’t raining. His usual route took him down the perversely named Up-Mile Hill, to the Derry Public Library, and then on to Back Pages, a used-book store and newsstand on the corner of Witcham and Main.

Back Pages stood next to a jumbled junkatorium called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, and as he passed this store one day during the August of his discontent, Ralph saw a new poster among the announcements of outdated bean suppers and ancient church socials, placed so it covered roughly half of a yellowing PAT BUCHANAN FOR PRESIDENT placard.

The woman in the two photographs at the top of the poster was a pretty blonde in her late thirties or early forties, but the style of the photos-unsmiling full face on the left, unsmiling profile on the right, plain white background in both-was unsettling enough to stop Ralph in his tracks. The photos made the woman look as if she belonged on a Post office wall or in a TV docudrama… and that, the poster’s printed matter made clear, was no accident.

The photos were what stopped him, but it was the woman’s name that held him.

WANTED FOR MURDER SUSAN EDWINA DAY was printed across the top in big black letters. And below the simulated mug-shots, in red: STAY OUT OF OUR CITY!

There was a small line of print at the very bottom of the poster.

Ralph’s close vision had deteriorated quite a bit since Carolyn’s death-gone to hell in a handbasket might actually have been a more accurate way of putting it-and he had to lean forward until his brow was pressed against the dirty show window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes before he could decipher it: Paid for by the Mane LifeWatch Committee Far down in his mind a voice whispered: Hey, hey, Susan Day.

Hou, many kids did you kill today?

Susan Day, Ralph recalled, was a Political activist from either New York or Washington, the sort of fast-speaking woman who regularly drove taxi-drivers, barbers, and hardhat construction workers into foaming frenzies. Why that particular little jangle of doggerel had come into his mind, however, he couldn’t say; it was tagged to some memory that wouldn’t quite come. Maybe his tired old brains were just cross-referencing that sixties Vietnam protest chant, the one which had gone “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”

No, that’s not it. he thought. Close, but no cigar. It was just before his mind could cough up Ed Deepneau’s name and face, a voice spoke from almost beside him. “Earth to Ralph, earth to Ralph, come in, Ralphie-baby!”

Roused out of his thoughts, Ralph turned toward the voice. He was both shocked and amused to find he had almost been asleep on his feet.

Christ, he thought, you never know how important sleep is until you miss a little. Then all the floors start to tilt and all the corners on things start to round off.

It was Hamilton Davenport, the proprietor of Back Pages, who had spoken to him. He was stocking the library cart he kept in front of his shop with brightly jacketed paperbacks. His old corncob pipe-to Ralph it always looked like the stack of a model steamship-jutted from the corner of his mouth, sending little puffs of blue smoke into the hot, bright air. Winston Smith, his old gray tomcat, sat in the open doorway of the shop with his tail curled around his paws. He looked at Ralph with yellow-eyed indifference, as if to say, You think you know old, my friend? I’m here to testify you don’t know dick about getting old.

“Sheesh, Ralph,” Davenport said. “I must have called your name at least three times.”

“I guess I was woolgathering,” Ralph said. He stepped past the library cart, leaned in the doorway (Winston Smith held his place with regal disinterest), and grabbed the two papers he bought every day: a Boston Globe and a USA Today. The Derry News came right to the house, courtesy of Pete the paperboy. Ralph sometimes told people that he was sure one of the three papers was comic relief, but he had never been able to make up his mind which one it was.

“I haven’t-” He broke off as Ed Deepneau’s face came into his mind. It was out by the airport last summer he’d heard that nasty little chant from, and it really wasn’t any wonder it had taken him a little while to retrieve the memory, Ed Deepneau was the last person in the world from whom you’d expect to hear something like that.

“Ralphie?” Davenport said. “You just shut down on me.”

Ralph blinked. “Oh, sorry. I haven’t been sleeping very well, that’s what I started to say.”

“Bummer… but there are worse problems. just drink a glass of warm milk and listen to some quiet music half an hour before bed.”

Ralph had begun to discover this summer that everyone in America apparently had a pet remedy for insomnia, some bit of bedtime magic that had been handed down through the generations like the family Bible.

“Bach’s good, also Beethoven, and William Ackerman ain’t bad. But the real trick”-Davenport raised one finger impressively to emphasize this-“is not to get up from your chair during that half hour.

Not for anything. Don’t answer the phone, don’t wind up the dog and put out the alarm-clock, don’t decide to brush your teeth… nothing. Then, when you do go to bed… barn! Out like a light!”

“What if you’re sitting there in your favorite easy chair and all at once you realize you have a call of nature?” Ralph asked. “These things can come on pretty suddenly when you get to be my age.”

“Do it in your pants,” Davenport said promptly, and burst out laughing. Ralph smiled, but it had a dutiful feel. His insomnia was rapidly losing whatever marginal humor value it might once have had.

“In your pants.” Ham chortled. He slapped the library cart and wagged his head back and forth.

Ralph happened to glance down at the cat. Winston Smith looked blandly back at him, and to Ralph his calm yellow gaze seemed to say, Yes, that’s right, He’s a fool, but he’s my fool.

“Not bad, huh? Hamilton Davenport, master of the snappy comeback.

Do it in your. He snorted laughter, shook his head, then took the two dollar bills Ralph was holding out. He slipped them into the pocket of his short red apron and came out with some change. “That about right?”

“You bet. Thanks, Ham.”

Uh-huh. And all joking aside, try the music. It really works.

Mellows out your brain-waves, or something.”

“I will.” And the devil of it was, he probably would, as he had already tried Mrs. Rapaport’s lemon-and-hot-water recipe, and Shawna McClure’s advice on how to clear his mind by slowing his respiration and concentrating on the word cool (except when Shawna said it, the word came out cuhhhh-ooooooooooool). When you were trying to deal with a slow but relentless erosion of your good sleeptime, any folk remedy started to look good.

Ralph began to turn away, then turned back. “What’s with that poster next door?”

Ham Davenport wrinkled his nose. “Dan Dalton’s place? I don’t look in there at all, if I can help it. Screws up my appetite. Has he got something new and disgusting in the window?”

“I guess it’s new-it’s not as yellow as the rest of them, and there’s a notable lack of flydirt on it. Looks like a wanted poster, only it’s Susan Day in the photos.”

“Susan Day on a-son of a bitch!” He cast a dark and humorless look at the shop next door.

“What is she, President of the National Organization of Women, or something?”

“Ex-President and co-founder of Sisters in Arms. Author of My Mother’s Shadow and Lilies of the Valley-that one’s a study of battered women and why so many of them refuse to blow the whistle on the men that batter them. She won a Pulitzer Prize for it. Susie Day’s one of the three or four most politically influential women in America right now, and she can really write as well as think. That clown knows I’ve got one of her petitions sitting right by my cash register.”

“What petitions?”

“We’re trying to get her up here to speak,” Davenport said. “You know the right-to-lifers tried to firebomb WomanCare last Christmas, right?”

Ralph cast his mind cautiously back into the black pit he’d been living in at the end of 1992 and said, “Well, I remember that the cops caught some guy in the hospital’s long-term parking lot with a can of gasoline, but I didn’t know-”

“That was Charlie Pickering. He’s a member of Daily Bread, one of the right-to-life groups that keep the pickets marching out there,” Davenport said. “They put him up to it, too-take my word. This year they’re not bothering with gasoline, though; they’re going to try to get the City Council to change the zoning regulations and squeeze WomanCare right out of existence. They just might do it, too. You know Derry, Ralph-it’s not exactly a hotbed of liberalism.”

“No,” Ralph said with a wan smile. “It’s never been that, and WomanCare is an abortion clinic, isn’t it?” Davenport gave him an out-of-patience look and jerked his head in the direction of Secondhand Rose. “That’s what assholes like him call it,” he said, “only they like to use the word mill instead of clinic.

They ignore all the other stuff WomanCare does.” To Ralph, Davenport had begun to sound a little like the TV announcer who hawked run-free pantyhose during the Sunday afternoon movie.

“They’re involved in family counselling, they deal with spouse and child abuse, and they run a shelter for abused women over by the Newport town line. They have a rape crisis center at the in-town building by the hospital, and a twenty-four-hour hotline for women who’ve been raped or beaten. In short, they stand for all the things that make Marlboro Men like Dalton shit bullets.”

“But they do perform abortions,” Ralph said. “That’s what the pickets are about, right?”

There had been sign-carrying demonstrators in front of the lowslung, unobtrusive brick building that housed WomanCare for years, it seemed to Ralph. They always looked too pale to him, too intense, too skinny or too fat, too utterly sure that God was on their side, The signs they carried said things like THE UNBORN HAVE RIGHTS, TOO and LIFE, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE and that old standby, ABORTION IS MURDER!

On several occasions women using the clinic-which was near Derry Home but not actually associated with it, Ralph thought-had been spat upon.

“Yeah, they perform abortions, Ham said. “You got a problem with that?”

Ralph thought of all the years he and Carolyn had tried to have a baby-years that had produced nothing but several false alarms and a single messy five-months miscarriage-and shrugged. Suddenly the day seemed too hot and his legs too tired. The thought of his return journey-the Up-Mile Hill leg of it in particular-hung in the back of his mind like something strung from a line of fishhooks. “Christ, I don’t know,” he said. “I just wish people didn’t have to get so… so shrill.”

Davenport grunted, walked over to his neighbor’s display window, and peered at the bogus wanted poster. While he was looking at it, a tall, pallid man with a goatee-the absolute antithesis of the Marlboro Man, Ralph would have said-materialized from the gloomy depths of Secondhand Rose like a vaudeville spook that has gotten a bit mouldy around the edges. He saw what Davenport was looking at, and a tiny disdainful smile dimpled the corners of his mouth.

Ralph thought it was the kind of smile that could cost a man a couple of teeth, or a broken nose. Especially on a dog-hot day like this one.

Davenport pointed to the poster and shook his head violently.

Dalton’s smile deepened, He flapped his hands at davenport Who gives a shit what you think? the gesture said-and then disappeared back into the depths of his store.

Davenport returned to Ralph, bright spots of color burning in his cheeks. “That man’s picture should be next to the word prick in the dictionary,” he said.

Exactly what he thinks about You, I imagine, Ralph thought, but of course did not say.

Davenport stood in front of the library cart full of paperbacks, hands stuffed into his pockets beneath his red change apron, brooding at the poster of (hey hey) Susan Day.

“Well,” Ralph said, “I suppose I better-”

Davenport shook himself out of his brown study. “Don’t go yet,” he said. “Sign my petition first, will you? put a little shine back on my morning.”

Ralph shifted his feet uncomfortably. “I usually don’t get involved in confrontational stuff like-”

“Come on, Ralph,” Davenport said in a let’s-be-reasonable voice.

“We’re not talking confrontation here; we’re talking about making sure that the fruits and nuts like the ones who run Daily Breadand Political Neanderthals like Dalton-don’t shut down a really useful women’s resource center. It’s not like I’m asking you to endorse testing chemical warfare weapons on dolphins,”

“No,” Ralph said. “I suppose not.), “We’re hoping to send five thousand signatures to Susan Day by the first of September. Probably won’t do any good-Derry’s really not much more than a wide place in the road, and she’s probably booked into the next century anyhow-but it can’t hurt to try.”

Ralph thought about telling Ham that the only petition he wanted to sign was one asking the gods of sleep to give him back the three hours or so of good rest a night they had stolen away, but then he took another look at the man’s face and decided against it.

Carolyn would have signed his damned petition, he thought. She was no fan of abortion, but she was also no fan Of men coming home after the bars close and mistaking their wives and kids for soccer balls.

True enough, but that wouldn’t have been her main reason for signing; she would have done it on the off-chance that she might get to hear an authentic firebrand like Susan Day up close and in person.

She would have done it out of the ingrained curiosity which had perhaps been her dominating characteristic-something so strong not even the brain tumor had been able to kill it. Two days before she died she had pulled the movie ticket he’d been using as a bookmark out of the paperback novel he’d left on her bedside table because she had wanted to know what he’d been to see. It had been A Few Good Men, as a matter of fact, and he was both surprised and dismayed to discover how much it hurt to remember that. Even now it hurt like hell.

“Sure,” he told Ham. “I’ll be happy to sign it.”

“My man!” Davenport exclaimed, and clapped him on the shoulder.

The broody look was replaced by a grin, but Ralph didn’t think the change much of an improvement. The grin was hard and not especially charming. “Step into my den of iniquity! “Ralph followed him into the tobacco-smelling shop, which did not seem particularly iniquitous at nine-thirty in the morning. Winston Smith fled before them, pausing just once to look back with his ancient yellow eyes. He’s a fool and you’re another, that parting stare might have said. Under the circumstances, it wasn’t a conclusion Ralph felt much inclined to dispute. He tucked his newspapers under his arm, leaned over the ruled sheet on the counter beside the cash register, and signed the petition asking Susan Day to come to Derry and speak in defense of WomanCare.

He did better climbing UP-Mile Hill then he had expected, and crossed the X-shaped intersection of Witchm and Jackson thinking, There, that wasn’t so bad, was He suddenly realized that his ears were ringing and his legs had begun to tremble beneath him. He stopped on the front side of Witcham and placed one hand against his shirt. He could feel his heart beating just beneath It, PumPing away with a ragged fierceness that was scary. He heard a papery rustle, and saw an advertising supplement slip out of the Boston Globe and go seesawing down into the gutter. He started to bend over and get it, then stopped.

Not a good idea, Ralph-if you bend over, You’re more than likely going to fall over. I suggest you leave that for the sweeper.

“Yeah, okay, good idea,” he muttered, and straightened up. Black dots surged across his vision like a surreal flock of crows, and for a moment Ralph was almost positive he was going to wind up lying on top of the ad supplement no matter what he did or didn’t do.

“Ralph? You all right?”

He looked up cautiously and saw Lois Chasse, who lived on the other side of Harris Avenue and half a block down from the house he shared with Bill McGovern. She was sitting on one of the benches just outside Strawford Park, probably waiting for the Canal Street bus to come along and take her downtown.

Sure, fine,” besides, and made his legs move. He felt as if he were walking through syrup, but he thought he got over to the bench without looking too bad. He could not, however, suppress a grateful little gasp as he sat down next to her.

Lois Chasse had large dark eyes-the kind that had been called Spanish eyes when Ralph was a kid-and he bet they had dancej through the minds of dozens of boys during Lois’s high-school years They were still her best feature, worry he saw in them now. It was… what? A little too neighborly but Ralph didn’t much care for the for comfort was the first thought to occur to him, but he wasn’t sure it was the right thought.

“Fine,” Lois echoed.

“You betcha.” He took his handkerchief from his back pocket, checked to make sure it was clean, and then wiped his brow with it.

“I hope you don’t mind me saying it, Ralph, but you don’t look fine.”

Ralph did mind her saying it, but didn’t know how to say so.

“You’re pale, you’re sweating, and you’re a litterbug.”

Ralph looked at her, startled.

“Something fell out of your paper. I think it was an ad circular.”

“Did it?”

“You know perfectly well it did. Excuse me a second.” She got up, crossed the sidewalk, bent (Ralph noticed that, while her. woman who had to be sixty-eight), and picked up the circular. She hips were fairly broad, her legs were still admirably trim for a came back to the bench with it and sat down. There,” she said. “Now you’re not a litterbug anymore.”

He smiled in spite of himself. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. I can use the Maxwell House coupon, also the Hamburger Helper and the Diet Coke. I’ve gotten so fat since Mr. Chasse died.”

“You’re not fat, Lois.”

“Thank you, Ralph, you’re a perfect gentleman, but let’s not change the subject. You had a dizzy spell, didn’t you? In fact, you almost passed out.”

“I was just catching my breath,” he said stiffly, and turned to watch a bunch of kids playing scrub baseball just inside the park. envied the efficiency of them They were going at it hard, laughing and grab-assing round. Ralph r air-conditioning systems. “Catching your breath, were you? “Yes.” ’Just catching your breath.”

“Lois, You’re starting to sound like a broken record.”

“Well, the broken record’s going to tell YOU something, okay? You’re nuts to be trying UP-Mile Hill in this heat. If You want to walk, why not go out the Extension, where it’s flat, like you used to?), “Because it makes me think Of Carolyn,” he said, not liking the stiff, almost rude way that sounded but unable to help it.

“Oh shit,” she said, and touched his hand briefly. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. I should have known better. But the way you looked just now, that’s not okay, either. You’re not twenty anymore, Ralph. Not even forty, I don’t mean you’re not in good shape-anyone can see you’re in great shape for a guy your age-but you ought to take better care of yourself. Carolyn would want YOU to take care of Yourself., “I know,” he said, “but I’m really-”

“All right,” he meant to finish, and then he looked up from his hands, looked into her dark eyes again, and what he saw there made it impossible to finish for a moment.

There was a weary sadness in her eyes… or was it loneliness?

Maybe both. In any case, those were not the only things he saw in them. He also saw himself.

You’re being silly, the eyes looking into his said. Maybe we both are. You’re seventy and a widower, Ralph. I’m Sixty-eight and a widow -How long are We going to sit on Your porch in the evenings with Bill McGovern as the world’s Oldest chaperone? Not too long, I hope, because neither of us is exactly fresh off the showroom lot.

“Ralph?” Lois asked, suddenly concerned. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” he said, looking down at his hands again. “Yes, sure.

“You had a look on your face like… well, I don’t know.”

Ralph wondered if maybe the combination of the heat and the walk up Up-Mile Hill had scrambled his brains a little. Because this was Lois, after all, whom McGovern always referred to (with a small, satiric lift of his left eyebrow) as “Our Lois.” And okay, yes, she was still in good shape-trim legs, nice bust, and those remarkable eyes-and maybe he wouldn’t mind taking her to bed, and maybe she wouldn’t mind being taken. But what would there be after that?

If she happened to see a ticket-stub poking out of the book he was reading, would she pull it out, too curious about what movie he’d been to see to think about how she was losing his place?

Ralph thought not. Lois’s eyes were remarkable, and he had found his own eyes wandering down the V of her blouse more than once as the three of them sat on the front porch, drinking iced tea in the cool of the evening, but he had an idea that your little head could get your big head in trouble even at seventy. Getting old was no excuse to get careless.

He got to his feet, aware of Lois looking at him and making an extra effort not to stoop. “Thanks for your concern,” he said. “Want to walk an old feller up the street?”

“Thanks, but I’m going downtown. They’ve got some beautiful rose-colored yarn in at The Sewing Circle, and I’m thinking afghan.

Meanwhile, I’ll just wait for the bus and gloat over my coupons.”

Ralph grinned. “You do that.” He glanced over at the kids on the scrub ballfield. As he watched, a boy with an extravagant mop of red hair broke from third, threw himself down in a headfirst slide… and fetched up against one of the catcher’s shinguards with an audible thonk. Ralph winced, envisioning ambulances with flashing lights and scream laughing.

“Missed the tag, you hoser!” he shouted.

“The hell I did!” the catcher responded indignantly, but then he began to laugh, too.

“Ever wish You were that age again, Ralph?” Lois asked.

He thought it over, “Sometimes,” he said.

“Sit with us awhile.”

Too strenuous. Came on over tonight, “Mostly it just looks “I might just do that,” she said, and Ralph started up Harris Avenue, feeling the weight of her remarkable eyes on him and trying hard to keep his back straight. He thought he managed fairly well, but it was hard work. He had never felt so tired in his life.

Hearing sirens, but the carrot-top bounced to his feet.

CHAPTER 2

Ralph made the appointment to see Dr. Litchfield less than an hour after his conversation with Lois on the park bench; the receptionist with the cool, sexy voice told him she could fit him in next Tuesday morning at ten, if that was okay, and Ralph told her that was fine as paint. Then he hung up, went into the living room sat in the wing-chair that overlooked Harris Avenue, and thought about how Dr. Litchfield had initially treated his wife’s brain tumor with Tylenol-3 and pamphlets explaining various relaxation techniques.

From there he moved on to the look he’d seen in Litchfield’s eyes after the magnetic resonance imaging tests had confirmed the CAT scan’s bad news… that look of guilt and unease.

Across the street, a bunch of kids who would soon be back in school came out of the Red Apple armed with candy bars and Slurpies.

As Ralph watched them mount their bikes and tear away into the bright eleven o’clock heat, he thought what he always did when the memory of Dr. Litchfield’s eyes surfaced: that it was most likely a false memory.

The thing is, old buddy, you wanted Litchfield to look uneasy, but even more than that, you wanted him to look guilty.

Quite possibly true, quite possibly Carl Litchfield was a peach of a guy and a helluva doctor, but Ralph still found himself calling Litchfield’s office again half an hour later. He told the receptionist with the sexy voice that he’d just rechecked his calendar and discovered next Tuesday at ten wasn’t so fine after all. He’d made an appointment with the podiatrist for that day and forgotten all about it.

“My memory’s not what it used to be,” Ralph told her.

The receptionist suggested next Thursday at two.

Ralph countered by promising to call back.

Liar, liar, pants on fire, he thought as he hung up the phone, walked slowly back to the wing-chair, and lowered himself into it.

You’re done with him, aren’t you?

He supposed he was. Not that Dr. Litchfield was apt to lose any sleep over it; if he thought about Ralph at all, it would be as one less old geezer to fart in his face during the prostate exam.

All right, so what are you going to do about the insomnia, Ralph; “Sit quiet for half an hour before bedtime and listen to classical music,” he said out loud. “Buy some Depends for those troublesome calls of nature.”

He startled himself by laughing at the image. The laughter had a hysterical edge he didn’t much care for-it was damned creepy, as a matter of fact-but it was still a little while before he could make himself stop.

Yet he supposed he would try Hamilton Davenport’s suggestion (although he would skip the diapers, thank You), as he had tried most of the folk remedies well-meaning people had passed on to him. This made him think of his first bona ride folk remedy, and that raised another grin.

It had been McGovern’s idea. He had been sitting on the porch one evening when Ralph came back from the Red Apple with some noodles and spaghetti sauce, had taken one look at his upstairs neighbor and made a tsk-tsk sound, shaking his head dolefully.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ralph asked, taking the seat next to him. A little farther down the street, a little girl in jeans and an oversized white tee-shirt had been skipping rope and chanting in the growing gloom.

“It means you’re looking folded, spindled, and mutilated,” McGovern said. He used one thumb to tilt the Panama back on his head and looked more closely at Ralph. “Still not sleeping?”

“Still not sleeping,” Ralph agreed.

McGovern was quiet for a few seconds. When he spoke again, he did so in a tone of absolute-almost apocalyptic, in fact-finality.

“Whiskey is the answer,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“To your insomnia, Ralph. I don’t mean you should take a bath in it-there’s no need of that. Just mix a tablespoon of honey with half a shot of whiskey and hook it down fifteen or twenty minutes before you hit the hay.”

“You think?” Ralph had asked hopefully.

“All I can say is it worked for me, and I had some real problems sleeping around the time I turned forty. Looking back on it, I guess that was my midlife crisis-six months of insomnia and a year-long depression over my bald spot.”

Although the books he’d been consulting all said that booze was a vastly overrated cure for sleeplessness-that it often made the problem worse instead of better, in fact-Ralph had tried it just the same. He had never been much of a drinker, so he began by adjusting McGovern’s recommended half-shot dosage down to a quarter of a shot, but after a week of no relief he had upped the ante to a full shot… then to two.

He woke up one morning at four-twenty-two with a nasty little headache to accompany the dull brown taste of Early Times on the roof of his mouth, and realized he was suffering his first hangover in fifteen years.

“Life’s too short for this shit,” he had announced to his empty apartment, and that had been the end of the great whiskey experiment.

Okay, Ralph thought now as he watched the desultory mid-morning flow Of customers in and out of the Red Apple across the street.

Here’s the situation McGovern says you look like shit, you almost fainted at Lois Chasse’s feet this moring, and you just called and canceled the appointment you made with Ye Olde Family Physician. So what next?

Just let it go? Accept the situation and let it go. The idea had a certain Oriental charm-fate, karma, and all that but he was going to need more than charm to get him through the long hours of early morning. The books said there were people in the world, quite a lot of them, who managed very well on no more than three or four hours of sleep a night. There were even some who got along on only two. They were an extremely small minority, but they did exist. Ralph Roberts, however, was not among their number.

How he looked wasn’t very important to him-he had a feeling that his matinee-idol days were well behind him-but how he felt was, and it was no longer just a matter of not feeling good; he felt horrible. The insomnia had begun to pervade every aspect of his life, the way the smell of frying garlic on the fifth floor will eventually pervade an entire apartment building. The color had started to drain out of things; the world had begun to take on the dull, grainy quality of a newspaper photograph.

Simple decisions-whether to heat up a frozen dinner for his evening meal or grab a sandwich at the Red Apple and go up to the picnic area by Runway 3, for example-had become difficult, almost agonizing. In the last couple of weeks he had found himself coming back to the apartment from Dave’s Video Stop empty-handed more and more often, not because there was nothing at Dave’s he wanted to watch but because there was too much-he couldn’t decide if he wanted one of the Dirty Harry movies or a Billy Crystal comedy or maybe a few old Star Trek episodes. After a couple of these unsuccessful trips, he had plopped himself down in this very wing-chair, almost crying with frustration… and, he supposed, fear.

That creeping sensory numbness and the erosion of his decision-making capabilities were not the only problems he had come to associate with the insomnia; his short-term memory had also begun to slip. It had been his practice to go to the movies at least once and sometimes twice a week ever since his retirement from the printshop, where he had finished his working life as the bookkeeper and general supervisor. He had taken Carolyn until last year, when she had gotten too sick to enjoy going out anywhere. After her death he had mostly gone alone, although Helen Deepneau had accompanied him once or twice when Ed was home to mind the baby (Ed himself almost never went, claiming he got headaches at the movies).

Ralph had gotten so used to calling the cinema center’s answering machine to check showtimes that he had the number by heart. As the summer went on, however, he found himself having to look it up in the Yellow Pages more and more often-he could no longer be sure if the last four digits were 1317 or 1713.

“It’s 1713,” he said now.

“I know it is.”

But did he know it?

Did he really?

Call Litchfield back. Go on, Ralph-stop sifting through the garbage.

Do something constructive.

And if Litchfield really sticks in your craw, call somebodi, else.

The phone book’s as full of doctors as it ever was.

Probably true, but seventy was maybe a little old to be picking a new sawbones by the eenie-meenie-mime-moe method. And he wasn’t going to call Litchfield back. Period.

Okay, so what’s next, you stubborn old goat? A few more folk remedies? I hope not, because at the rate you’re going you’ll be down to eye Of newt and tongue Of toad in no time.

The answer that came was like a cool breeze on a hot day… and it was an absurdly simple answer. All his book-research this summer had been aimed at understanding the problem rather than finding a solution. When it came to answers, he had relied almost solely on back-fence remedies like whiskey and honey, even when the books had already assured him they probably wouldn’t work or would only work for awhile. Although the books did offer some presumably reliable methods for coping with insomnia, the only one Ralph had actually tried was the simplest and most obvious: going to bed earlier in the evening. That solution hadn’t worked-he had simply lain awake until eleven-thirty or so, then dropped off to awaken at his new, earlier time-but something else might.

It was worth a try, anyway.

Instead of spending the afternoon in his usual frenzy of backyard pottering, Ralph went down to the library and skimmed through some of the books he had already looked at. The general consensus seemed to be that if going to bed earlier didn’t work, going later might.

Ralph went home (mindful of his previous adventures, he took the bus) filled with cautious hope. It might work. If it didn’t, he always had Bach, Beethoven, and William Ackerman to fall back on.

His first attempt at this technique, which one of the texts called “delayed sleep,” was comic. He awoke at his now-usual time (3:45 by the digital clock on the living-room mantel) with a sore back, an aching neck, no immediate idea of how he had gotten into the wingchair by the window, or why the TV was on, broadcasting nothing but snow and a soft, surflike roar of static.

It was only as he allowed his head to roll cautiously back, supporting the nape of his neck with a cupped palm, that he realized what had happened. He had intended to sit up until at least three o’clock and possibly four. He would then stroll off to bed and sleep the sleep of the just. That had been the plan, anyway. Instead, The Incredible Insomniac of Harris Avenue had dropped off during jay Leno’s opening monologue, like a kid who’s trying to stay up all night long just to see what it’s like. And then, of course, he had finished the adventure by waking up in the damned chair. The problem was the same, Joe Friday might have said; only the location had changed.

Ralph strolled off to bed anyway, hoping against hope, but the urge (if not the need) to sleep had passed. After an hour of lying awake, he had gone back to the wing-chair again, this time with a pillow propped behind his stiff neck and a rueful grin on his face.

There was nothing funny about his second try, which took place the following night. Sleepiness began to steal ever him at its usual time-eleven-twenty, just as Pete Cherney was giving the following day’s weather forecast. This time Ralph fought it successfully, making it all the way through Whooping (although he almost nodded off during Whoopis conversation with Roseanne Arnold, that evening’s guest) and the late-night movie that comes on after that. It was an old Audie Murphy flick in,which Audie appeared to be winning the war in the Pacific pretty much single-handed. It sometimes seemed to Ralph that there was an unspoken rule among local TV broadcasters which stated that movies telecast in the small hours of the morning could star only Audie Murphy or James Brolin.

After the last Japanese pillbox had been blown up, Channel 2 signed off. Ralph dialed around, looking for another movie, and found nothing but snow. He supposed he could have watched movies all night if he had the cable, like Bill downstairs or Lois down the street; he remembered having put that on his list of things to do in the new year. But then Carolyn had died and cable TV-with or without Home Box Office-had no longer seemed very important.

He found a copy of Sports Illustrated and began to slog through an article on women’s tennis he’d missed the first time through, glancing up at the clock every now and then as the hands began to close in on

3:00 a.m. He had become all but convinced that this was going to work.

His eyelids were so heavy they felt as if they had been dipped in concrete, and although he was reading the tennis article carefully, word for word, he had no idea of what the writer was driving at. Whole sentences zipped across his brain without sticking, like cosmic rays.

I’m going to sleep tonight-I really think I am. For the first time in months the sun is going to have to come up without my help, and that isn’t just good, friends and neighbors. that’s great.

Then, shortly after three o’clock, that pleasant drowsiness began to disappear, It did not go with a champagne-cork pop but rather seemed to ooze away, like sand through a fine sieve or water do-,x,n a partially clogged drain. When Ralph realized what was happening, it wasn’t panic he felt, but sick dismay, It was a feeling he had come to recognize as the true opposite of hope, and when he slipperscuffed his way into the bedroom at quarter past three, he couldn’t remember a depression as deep as the one which now enveloped him. He felt as if he were suffocating in it.

“Please, God, just forty winks,” he muttered as he turned off the light, but he strongly suspected that this was one prayer which was not going to be answered.

It wasn’t. Although he had been awake for twenty-four hours by then, every trace of sleepiness had left his mind and body by quarter of four. He was tired, yes-more deeply and fundamentally tired than he had ever been in his life-but being tired and being sleepy, he had discovered, were sometimes poles apart. Sleep, that undiscriminating friend, humankind’s best and most reliable nurse since the dawn of time, had abandoned him again.

By four o’clock Ralph’s bed had become hateful to him, as it always did when he realized he could put it to no good use. He swung his feet back onto the floor, scratching the mat of hairalmost entirely gray now-which curled through his mostly unbuttoned pajama top. He slid on his slippers again and scuffed back to the living room, where he dropped into the wing-back chair and looked down at Harris Avenue.

It was laid out like a stage set where the only actor currently on view wasn’t even human: it was a stray dog moving slowly down Harris Avenue in the direction of Strawford Park and Up-Mile Hill. It held its right rear leg up as much as possible, limping along as best it could on the other three.

“Hi there, Rosalie,” Ralph muttered, and rubbed a hand across his eyes.

It was a Thursday morning, garbage-pickup day on Harris Avenue, so he wasn’t surprised to see Rosalie, who’d been a wandering, here-and-there fixture in the neighborhood for the last year or so.

She made her way down the street in leisurely fashion, investigating a the rows and c usters of cans with the discrimination of a dead fie market shopper.

Now Rosalie-who was limping worse than ever this morning, and looked as tired as Ralph felt-found what looked like a good-sized beef bone and trotted away with it in her mouth. Ralph watched her out of sight, then simply sat with his hands folded in his lap, gazing out on the silent neighborhood, where the orange hi-intensity lamps added to the illusion that Harris Avenue was nothing but a stage set standing deserted after the evening performance had ended and the actors had gone home; they shone down like spotlights in a perfect diminishing perspective that was surreal and hallucinatory.

Ralph Roberts sat in the wing-chair where he had spent so many early-morning hours lately and waited for light and movement to 9 invest the lifeless world below him. Finally the first human actorPete the paperboy-entered stage right, riding his Raleigh. He biked his way up the street, tossing rolled newspapers from the bag slung over his shoulder and hitting the porches he aimed at with a fair degree of accuracy.

Ralph watched him awhile, then heaved a sigh which felt as if it had come all the way from the basement, and got up to make tea.

“I don’t remember ever reading about this shit in my horoscope,” he said hollowly, and then turned on the kitchen tap and began to fill the kettle.

That long Thursday morning and even longer Thursday afternoon taught Ralph ROberts a valuable lesson: not to sneer at three or four hours’ sleep a night simply because he had spent his entire life under the mistaken impression that he had a right t(o at least six and usually seven. It also served as a hideous preview: if things didn’t improve, he could look forward to feeling like this most of the time.

Hell, all of the time. He went into the bedroom at ten o’clock and again at one, hoping for a little nap-even a catnap would do, and half an hour would be a life-saver-but he could not so much as drowse.

He was miserably tired but not the least bit sleepy.

Around three o’clock he decided to make himself a Lipton Cup-A-Soup. He filled the teakettle with fresh water, put it on to boil, and opened the cupboard over the counter where he kept condiments, spices, and various envelopes containing foods which only astronauts and old men actually seem to eat-powders to which the consumer need only add hot water.

He pushed cans and bottles around in aimless fashion and then simply stared into the cupboard for awhile, as if expecting the box of soup packets to magically appear in the space he had made. When they didn’t, he repeated the process, only this time moving things back to their original positions before staring in again with the look of distant perplexity which was becoming (Ralph, mercifully, did not know this) his dominant expression.

When the teakettle shrieked, he put it on one of the rear burners and went back to staring into the cupboard. It dawned on him very, very slowly-that he must have drunk his last packet of CupA-Soup yesterday or the day before, although he could not for the life of him remember doing so.

“That’s a surprise?” he asked the boxes and bottles in the open cupboard. “I’m so tired I can’t remember my own name.”

Yes, I can, he thought. It’s Leon Redbone. So there It wasn’t much of a joke, but he felt a small smile-it felt as light as a feather-touch his lips. He stepped into the bathroom, combed his hair, and then went downstairs. Here’s Audie Murphy, heading out into enemy territory in search of supplies, he thought. Primary target: one box of Lipton Chicken and Rice Cup-A-Soup packets. If locating and securing this target should prove impossible, I’ll divert to my secondary: Noodles in Beef I know this is a risky mission, but-“but I work best alone,” he finished as he came out on the porch.

Old Mrs. Perrine happened to be passing, and she favored Ralph with a sharp look but said nothing. He waited for her to get a little way up the sidewalk-he did not feel capable of conversation with anyone this afternoon, least of all Mrs. Perrine, who at eighty-two could still have found stimulating and useful work among the Marines at Parris Island. He pretended to he examining the spider-plant which hung from the hook under the porch eave until she had reached what he deemed a safe distance, then crossed Harris Avenue to the Red Apple.

Which was where the day’s real troubles began.

He entered the convenience store once again mulling over the spectacular failure of the delayed-sleep experiment and wondering if the advice in the library texts was no more than an uptown version of the folk remedies his acquaintances seemed so eager to press upon him.

It was an unpleasant idea, but he, thought his mind (Or the force below his mind which was actually in charge of this slow torture) had sent him a message which was even more unpleasant: You have a sleep-window, Ralph. It’s not as big as it once was, and it seems to be getting smaller with every passing week, but you better be grateful for what you’ve get, because a small window is better than no windou) at all.

You see that now, don’t you?

“Yes,” Ralph mumbled as he walked down the center aisle to the bright red Cup-A-Soup boxes, “I see that very well.”

Sue, the afternoon counter-girl, laughed cheerfully. “You must have money in the bank, Ralph,” she said.

“Beg pardon?” Ralph didn’t turn; he was inventorying the red boxes. Here was onion… split pea… the beef-and-noodles combo… but where the hell was the Chicken and Rice?

“My mom always said people who talk to themselves have Oh my God.” For a moment Ralph thought she had simply made a statement a little too complex for his tired mind to immediately grasp, something about how people who talked to themselves had found God, and then she screamed. He had hunkered down to check the boxes on the bottom shelf, and the scream shot him to his feet so hard and fast that his knees popped. He wheeled toward the front of the store, bumping the top shelf of the soup display with his elbow and knocking half a dozen red boxes into the aisle.

“Sue? What’s wrong?”

Sue paid no attention. She was looking out through the door with her fisted hands pressed against her lips and her brown eyes huge above them. “God, look at the blood!” she cried in a choked voice.

Ralph turned farther, knocking a few more Lipton boxes into the aisle, and looked through the Red Apple’s dirty show window. What he saw drew a gasp from him, and it took him a space of seconds-five, maybe-to realize that the bloody, beaten woman staggering toward the Red Apple was Helen Deepneau. Ralph had always thought Helen the prettiest woman on the west side of town, but there was nothing pretty about her today. One of her eyes was puffed shut; there was a gash at her left temple that was soon going to he lost in the gaudy swelling of a fresh bruise; her puffy lips and her cheeks were covered with blood.

The blood had come from her nose, which was still leaking. She wove through the Red Apple’s little parking lot toward the door like a drunk, her one good eye seeming to see nothing; it simply stared.

More frightening than the way she looked was the way she was handling Natalie. She had the squalling, frightened baby slung casually on one hip, carrying her as she might have carried her books to high school ten or twelve years before.

“Oh Jesus she’s gonna drop the kid!” Sue screamed, but although she was ten steps closer to the door than he was, she made no move-simply stood where she was with her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes gobbling up her face.

Ralph didn’t feel tired anymore. He sprinted up the aisle, tore open the door, and ran outside. He was just in time to catch Helen by the shoulders as she banged a hip against the ice cabinet-mercifully not the hip with Natalie on it-and went veering off in a new direction.

“Helen!” he yelled. “Jesus, Helen, what happened?”

“Huh?” she asked, her voice duly curious, totally unlike the voice of the lively young woman who sometimes accompanied him to the movies and moaned over Mel Gibson. Her good eye rolled toward him and he saw that same dull curiosity in it, a look that said she didn’t know who she was, let alone where she was, Or what had happened, or when.

“Huh? Ralph? Who?”

The baby slipped. Ralph let go of Helen, grabbed for Natalie, and managed to snag one of her jumper straps. Nat screamed, waved her hands, and stared at him with huge dark-blue eyes. got his other hand between Nat’s legs an instant before the strap he was holding tore free. For a moment the howling baby balanced on his hand like a gymnast on a balance beam, and Ralph could feel the damp bulge of her diapers through the overall she was wearing. Then he slipped his other hand around her back and hoisted her up against his chest.

His heart was pounding hard, and even with the baby safe in his arms he kept seeing her slip away, kept seeing her head with its cap of fine hair slamming against the butt-littered pavement with a sickening crack.

“Hum? Ar? Ral?” Helen asked. She saw Natalie in Ralph’s arnls, and some of the dullness went out (of her good eye. She raised her hands toward the child, and in Ralph’s arms, Natalie mimicked the gesture with her own chubby hands. Then Helen staggered, struck the side of the building, and reeled backward a step. One foot tangled in the other (Ralph saw splatters of blood on her small white sneakers, and it was amazing how bright everything was all of a sudden; the color had come back into the world, at least temporarily), and she would have fallen if Sue hadn’t picked that moment to finally venture out.

Instead of going down, Helen landed against the opening door and just leaned there, like a drunk against a lamppost.

“Ral?” The expression in her eyes was a little sharper now, and Ralph saw it wasn’t so much curiosity as incredulity. She drew in a deep breath and made an effort to force intelligible words past her swelled lips. “Gih. Gih me my bay-ee. Bay-be. Gih me… Natalie.”

“Not just yet, Helen,” Ralph said. “You’re not too steady on your feet right now.”

Sue was still on the other side of the door, holding it so Helen wouldn’t fall. The girl’s cheeks and forehead were ashy-pale, her eyes filled with tears.

“Get out here,” Ralph told her. “Hold her up.”

“I can’t!” she blubbered. “She’s all bluh-bluh-bloody!”

“Oh for God’s sake, quit it! It’s Helen! Helen Deepneau from up the street!”

And although Sue must have known that, actually hearing the name seemed to turn the trick. She slipped around the open door, and when Helen staggered backward again, Sue curled an arm around her shoulders and braced her firmly. That expression of incredulous surprise remained on Helen’s face. Ralph found it harder and harder to look at.

It made him feel sick to his stomach.

“Ralph? What happened? Was it an accident?”

He turned his head and saw Bill McGovern standing at the edge of the parking lot. He was wearing one of his natty blue shirts with the iron’s creases still in the sleeves and holding (one of his longfingered, oddly delicate hands up to shade his eyes.

He looked strange, somehow naked that way, but Ralph had no time to think about why; too much was happening.

“It was no accident,” he said. “She’s been beaten up. Here, take the kid,” He held Natalie out to McGovern, who at first shrank back and then took the baby. Natalie immediately began to shriek again.

McGovern, looking like someone who has just been handed an over-filled airsick bag, held her out at arm’s length with her feet dangling.

Behind him a small crowd was beginning to gather, many of them teenage kids in baseball uniforms on their way home from an afternoon game at the field around the corner. They were staring at Helen’s puffed and bloody face with an unpleasant avidity, and Ralph found himself thinking of the Bible story about the time Noah had gotten drunk-the good sons who had looked away from the naked old man lying in his tent, the bad one who had looked…

Gently, he replaced Sue’s arm with his own. Helen’s good eye rolled back to him. She said his name more clearly this time, more positively, and the gratitude Ralph heard in her blurry voice made him feel like crying.

“Sue-take the baby. Bill doesn’t have a clue.”

She did, folding Nat gently and expertly into her arms. McGovern gave her a grateful smile, and Ralph suddenly realized what was wrong with the way he looked. McGovern wasn’t wearing the Panama hat which seemed as much a part of him (in the summertime, at least) as the well on the bridge of his nose.

“Hey, mister, what happened?” one of the baseball kids asked.

“Nothing that’s any of your business,” Ralph said.

“Looks like she went a few rounds with Riddick Bowe.”

“Nah, Tyson,” one of the other baseball kids said, and incredibly, there was laughter.

“Get out of here!” Ralph shouted at them, suddenly furious.

“Go peddle your papers! Mind your business!”

They shuffled back a few steps, but no one left. It was blood they were looking at, and not on a movie screen.

“Helen, can you walk?”

“Yell,” she said. “Fink… Think so.”

He led her carefully around the open door and into the Red Apple.

She moved slowly, shuffling from foot to foot like an old woman.

The smell of sweat and spent adrenaline was baking e)ut of her pores in a sour reek, and Ralph felt his stomach turn over again. It wasn’t the smell, not really; it was the effort to reconcile this Helen with the pert and pleasantly sexy woman he. had spoken to yesterday while she worked in her flower-beds.

Ralph suddenly remembered something else about yesterdayHelen had been wearing blue shorts, cut quite high, and he had noticed a couple of bruises on her legs-a large yellow blotch far up on the left thigh, a fresher, darker smudge on the right calf.

He walked Helen toward the little office area behind the cash register. He glanced up into the convex anti-theft mirror mounted in the corner and saw McGovern herding the door for Sue.

“Lock the door,” he said over his shoulder.

“Gee, Ralph, I’m not supposed to-”

“Just for a couple of minutes,” Ralph said. “Please.”

“Well… okay. I guess.”

Ralph heard the snick of the bolt being turned as he eased Helen into the hard plastic contour chair behind the littery desk. He picked up the telephone and punched the button marked 911. Before the phone could ring on the other end, a blood-streaked hand reached out and pushed down the gray disconnect button.

“Dough… Ral.” She swallowed with an obvious effort, and tried again. “Don’t, “Yes,” Ralph said. “I’m going to.”

Now it was fear he saw in her one good eye, and nothing dull about it.

“No,” she said, “Please, Ralph. Don’t.” She looked past him and held out her hands again. The bumble, pleading look on her beaten face made Ralph wince with dismay.

“Ralph?” Sue asked. “She wants the baby.”

“I know. Go ahead.”

Sue handed Natalie to Helen, and Ralph watched as the baby-a little over a year old now, he was pretty sure-put her arms around her mother’s neck and her face against her mother’s shoulder. Helen kissed the top of Nat’s head It clearly hurt her to do this, but she did it again. And then again. Looking down at her, Ralph could see blood grimed into the faint creases on the nape of Helen’s neck like dirt.

As he looked at this, he felt the anger begin to pulse again.

“It was Ed, wasn’t it?” he asked. Of course it was-you didn’t hit the cutoff button on the phone when someone tried to call 911 if you had been beaten up by a total stranger-but he had to ask.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was no more than a whisper, the answer a secret imparted into the fine cloud of her baby daughter’s hair.

“Yes, it was Ed. But you can’t call the police.” She looked up now, the good eye full of fear and misery. “Please don’t call the police, Ralph. I can’t bear to think of Natalie’s dad in jail for… for Helen burst into tears. Natalie goggled at her mother for a moment in comic surprise, and then joined her.

“Ralph?” McGovern asked hesitantly. “DO you want me to get her some Tylenol or something?”

“Better not,” he said. “We don’t know what’s wrong with her, how bad she might be hurt.” His eyes shifted to the show window, not wanting to see what was out there, hoping not to, and seeing it anyway.

A beer cooler cut off the view. Some of them were cupping their hands v: avid faces lined up all the way down to the place where the to the sides of their faces to cut the glare.

“What should we do, you guys?” Sue asked. She was looking at the gawkers and picking nervously at the hem of the Red Apple duster employees had to wear. “If the company finds out I locked the door during business hours, I’m apt to lose my job.”

Helen tugged at his hand. “Please, Ralph,” she repeated, only it came out Peese, Raff through her swollen lips. “Don’t call anybody.”

Ralph looked at her uncertainly. He had seen a lot of women wearing a lot of bruises over the course of his life, and a couple (although not many, in all honesty) who had been beaten much more severely than Helen. It hadn’t always seemed this grim, though. His mind and morals had been formed at a time when people believed that what went on between a husband and wife behind the closed doors of their marriage was their business, and that included the man who hit with his fists and the woman who cut with her tongue.

You couldn’t make people behave, and meddling in their affairs-even with the best of intentions-all too often turned friends into enemies.

But then he thought of the way she had been carrying Natalie as she staggered across the parking lot: held casually on one hip like a textbook. If she had dropped the baby in the lot, or crossing Harris Avenue, she probably wouldn’t have known it; Ralph guessed that it was nothing but instinct that had caused Helen to take the baby in the first place. She hadn’t wanted to leave Nat in the care of the man who had beaten her so badly she could only see out of one eye and talk in mushy, rounded syllables.

He thought of something else, as well, something that had to do with the days following Carolyn’s death earlier in the year. He had been surprised at the depth of his grief-it had been an expected death, after all; he had believed he had taken care Of most of his grieving while Carolyn was still alive-and it had rendered him awkward and ineffective about the final arrangements which needed to be made. He had managed the call to the Brookings-Senith funeral home, but it was Helen who had gotten the obit form from the Derry News and helped him to fill it out, Helen who had gone with him to pick out a coffin (McGovern, who hated death and the trappings which surrounded it had made himself scarce), and beloved Helen who had helped him choose a floral centerpiece-the one which said Wife.

And it had been Helen, of course, who had orchestrated the little party afterward, providing sandwiches from Frank’s Catering and soft drinks and beer from the Red Apple.

These were things Helen had done for him when he could not do them for himself. Did he not have an ohbligation to repay her kindness, even if Helen might not see it as kindness right now?

“Bill?” he asked. “What do you think?”

McGovern looked from Ralph to Helen, sitting in the red plastic chair with her battered face lowered, and then back to Ralph again.

He produced a handkerchief and wiped his lips nervously. “I don’t know. I like Helen a lot, and I want to do the right thing-you know I do-but something like this… who knows what the right thing is” Ralph suddenly remembered what Carolyn used to say whenever he started moaning and bitching about some chore he didn’t want to do, some errand he didn’t want to run, Or some duty call he didn’t want to make: It’s a long walk back to Ed", sweetheart, so don’t sweat the small stuff He reached for the phone again, and this time when Helen reached for his wrist, he pushed it away.

“You have reached the Derry Police Department,” a recorded voice told him. “Push one for emergency services. Push two for Police services. Push three for information.”

Ralph, who suddenly understood he needed all three, hesitated for a second and then pushed two. The telephone buzzed and a woman’s voice said, “This is Police 911, how may I help you?”

He took a deep breath and said, “This is Ralph Roberts. I’m at the Red Apple Store on Harris Avenue, with my neighbor from up the street. Her name is Helen Deepneau. She’s been beaten up pretty badly.” He put his hand gently on the side of Helen’s face and she pressed her forehead against his side. He could feel the heat of her skin through his shirt. “Please come as fast as you can.”

He hung up the telephone, then squatted down next to Helen.

Natalie saw him, crowed with delight, and reached out to give his nose a friendly honk. Ralph sanded, kissed her tiny palm, then looked into Helen’s face.

“I’m sorry, Helen,” he said but I had to. I couldn’t not do it.

“Do you understand that? I couldn’t not do it.”

“I don’t understand anything,” she said. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but when she reached up to swipe at it, she winced back from the touch of her own fingers.

“Helen, why did he do it? Why would Ed beat you up like this?”

He found himself remembering the other bruises-a pattern of them, perhaps. If there had been a pattern, he had missed it until now.

Because of Carolyn’s death. And because of the insomnia which had come afterward. In any case, he did not believe this was the first time Ed had put his hands on his wife. Today might have been a drastic escalation, but it hadn’t been the first time. He could grasp that idea and admit its logic, but he discovered he still couldn’t see Ed doing it. He could see Ed’s quick grin, his lively eyes, the way his hands moved restlessly when he talked… but he couldn’t see Ed using those hands to beat the crap out of his wife, no matter how hard he tried.

Then a memory resurfaced, a memory of Ed walking stiff-legged toward the man who had been driving the blue pickup-it had been images from that day last July. The thunderhejds wasn’t an avalanche of old stored seris building over the airport. Ed’s arm popping out of the Datsun’s window and waving up and down, as if he could make the gate slide open faster that way. The scarf with the Chinese symbols Hey hey, Susan Day, how many kids did you kill today, Ralph it was Ed’s voice he heard, and he pretty well knew what Helen was going to say before she even opened her mouth.

“So stupid,” she said dully. “He hit me because I signed the petition they’re circulating over to town-that’s all it was and someone Pushed it into my face when I was going’ into the supermarket day before Yesterday. He said something about a benefit for WomanCare, and that seemed all right. Besides, the baby was fussing just…”

“You just signed it,” Ralph finished softly.

She nodded and began to cry again.

“What petition,” McGovern asked.

“To bring Susan Day to Derry,” Ralph told him-“She’s a femini…”

“I know who Susan Day is!” McGovern said irritably.

“Anyway, a bunch of people are try On behalf of WomanCare.”

“When Ed came home today he was n a great mood,” Helen said through her tears. “He almost always is on Thursdays, because it’s his half day. He was talking about how he was going to spend the afternoon pretending to read a book and actually he is just watching the sprinkler go around…

You know how he is… just watching the “Yes,” Ralph said, remembering how Ed had Plunged his arm into one of the heavyset man’s barrels, and the crafty grin that came falling of vivian’s m a across the heavyset man’s t Of his hand ow s. Remembering that was like opening the door of Fibber McGee’s closet in that old radio show onlyjunk but a ing, so Ing to get her here to speak.

(I know a trick or two of that) on his face. “Yes, I know how he is,”

“I sent him out to get some baby-food. becoming fretful and frightened. “I didn’t know he’d be upset.

I’d all but forgotten about signing the damned thing, to tell the truth… and I still don’t know exactly why he was so upset… but… but when he came back She hugged Natalie to her, trembling.

“Shhh, Helen, take it easy, everything’s okay.”

“No, it’s not!” She looked up at him, tears streaming from one eye and seeping out from beneath the swelled lid of the other. “It’s nub-nub-not. Why didn’t he stop this time? And what’s going to happen to me and the baby? Where will we go? I don’t have any money except for what’s in the joint checking account… I don’t have a job… oh Ralph, why did you call the police? You shouldn’t have done that!

“And she hit his forearm with a strengthless little fist. “You’re going to get through this just fine,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of friends in the neighborhood.”

But he barely heard what he was saying and hadn’t felt her small punch at all. The anger was thudding away in his chest and at his temples like a second heartbeat.

Not Why didn’t he stop,-that wasn’t what she had said. What she had said was Why didn’t he stop this time? This time. “Helen, where’s Ed now?”

“Home, I guess,” she said dully. Ralph patted her an the shoulder, then turned and started for the d(!)or.

“Ralph?” Bill McGovern asked. He sounded alarmed. “Where you going?” Her voice was rising. “Lock the door after me,” Ralph told Sue. “Jeer, I don’t know if I can do that.” Sue looked doubtfully at the line of gawkers peering in through the dirty window. There were more of them now. “You can,” he said, then cocked his head, catching the first faint wail of an approaching siren. “Hear that?”

“Yes, but-”

“The cops will tell you what to do, and your boss won’t be mad at You, either-he’ll probably give you a medal for handling everything just right.”

“If he does, I’ll split it with you,” she said, then glanced at Heleil again. A little color had come back into Sue’s cheeks, but not much.

“Jeepers, Ralph, look at her! Did he really beat her up because she signed some stupid patition?”

“I guess so,” Ralph said. The conversation made perfect sense to him, but it was coming in long distance. His rage was closer; it had its hot arms locked around his neck, it seemed. He wished he were forty again, even fifty, so he could give Ed a taste of his own medicine. And he had an idea he might try doing that anyway.

He was turning the thumb-bolt of the door when McGovern grabbed his shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Going to see Ed.”

“Are you kidding? He’ll take you apart if you get in his face.

Didn’t you see what he did to her.

“You bet I did,” Ralph replied. The words weren’t quite a snarl, but close enough to make McGovern drop his hand.

“You’re seventy fucking years old, Ralph, in case you forgot. And Helen needs a friend right now, not some busted-up antique she cat visit because her hospital room is three doors down from hers.”

Bill was right, of course, but that only made Ralph angrier, He supposed the insomnia was at work in this, too, stoking his anger that made no difference. In a way, and blurring his judgment, buly, than drifting through the anger was a relief. It was better, certain of dark gray. A world where everything had turned shade some Demerol “if he beats me up bad enough, they’ll give me the kid. “Now leave me alone, and I can get a decent night’s sleep,” he said Bill.” parking lot at a brisk walk. A police He crossed the Red Apple Questionshing with its blue grille flashers pulsing. car was approaching. She okay?-were thrown at him, but Ralph ignored What happened? He waited for the police car to swing them. He paused on the side venue at that same brisk into the parking lot, then crossed Harris Avenue at a prudent walk, with McGovern trailing anxiously after him in the distance.

CHAPTER 3

Ed and Helen Deepneau lived in a small Cape Cod-chocolatebrown, whipped-cream trim, the kind of house which older women often call “darling”-four houses up from the one Ralph and Bill McGovern shared.

Carolyn had liked to say the Deepneaus belonged to “the Church of the Latter-Day Yuppies,” although her genuine liking for them had robbed the phrase of any real bite. They were laissez-faire vegetarians who considered both fish and dairy products okay, they had worked for Clinton in the last election, and the car in the driveway-not a Datsun now but one of the new mini-vanswas wearing bumper stickers which said SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS and FUR ON ANIMALS, NOT PEOPLE.

The Deepneaus had also apparently kept every album they had ever purchased during the sixties-Carolyn had found this one of their most endearing characteristics-and now, as Ralph approached the Cape Cod with his hands curled into fists at his sides, he heard Grace Slick wailing one of those old San Francisco anthems:

“One pill makes you bigger,

One pill makes you small,

And the others that Mother give, you

Don’t do anything at all,

Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall”.

The music was coming from a boombox on the Cape Cod’s postage stamp sized porch. A sprinkler twirled on the lawn, making a shisha-bisha-hisha sound as it cast rainbows in the air and deposited a shiny wet patch on the sidewalk. Ed Deepneau, shirtless, was sitting in a lawn-chair to the left of the concrete walk with his legs crossed, looking up at the sky with the bemused expression of a man trying to decide if the cloud passing overhead looks more like a horse or a unicorn. One bare foot bopped up and down in time to the music. The book lying open and face-down in his lap went perfectly with the music pouring from the boombox. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins.

An all but perfect summer vignette; a scene of small-town serenity Norman Rockwell might have painted and then titled Afternoon Off.

All you had to overlook was the blood on Ed’s knuckles and the drop on the left lens of his round John Lennon specs.

“Ralph, for God’s sake don’t get into a fight with him!” McGovern hissed as Ralph left the sidewalk and cut across the lawn. He walked through the lawn sprinkler’s fine cold spray almost without feeling it.

Ed turned, saw him, and broke into a sunny grin. “Hey, Ralph!” he said. “Good to see you, man!”

In his mind’s eye, Ralph saw himself reaching out and shoving Ed’s chair, pushing him over and spilling him onto his lawn. He saw Ed’s eyes widen with shock and surprise behind the lenses of his glasses.

This vision was so real he even saw the way the sun reflected on the face of Ed’s watch as he tried to sit up.

“Grab yourself a beer and drag up a rock,” Ed, was saying. “if you feel like a game of chess-”

“Beer? A game of chess? Christ Jesus, Ed, what’s wrong with you?”

Ed didn’t answer immediately, only looked at Ralph with an expression that was both frightening and infuriating. It was a mixture of amusement and shame, the look of a man who’s getting ready to say Aw, shit, honey-did I forget to put out the trash again?

Ralph pointed down the hill, past McGovern, who was standing-he would have been lurking if there had been something to lurk behind-near the wet patch the sprinkler had put on the sidewalk, watching them nervously. The first police car had been joined by a second, and Ralph could faintly hear the crackle of radio calls through the open windows.

The crowd had gotten quite a bit bigger.

“The police are there because of Helen.” he said, telling himself not to shout, it would do no good to shout, and shouting an as, “They’re there because you beat up your wife, is that getting through to youp”

“Oh,” Ed said, and rubbed his cheek ruefully. “That.”

“Yes, that,” Ralph said. He now felt almost stupefied with rage.

Ed peered past him at the police cars, at the crowd standing around the Red Apple… and then he saw McGovern.

“Bill!” he cried. McGovern recoiled. Ed either didn’t notice or pretended not to. “Hey, man! Drag up a rock! Want a beer.

That was when Ralph knew he was going to hit Ed, break his stupid little round-lensed spectacles, drive a splinter of glass into his eye, maybe. He was going to do it, nothing on earth could stop him from doing it, except at the last moment something did. It was carolyn’s voice he heard inside his head most frequently these days When he wasn’t just muttering along to himself, that was-but this wasn’t Carolyn’s voice; this one, as unlikely as it seemed, belonged to Trigger Vachon, whom he’d seen only once or twice since the day Trig had saved him from the thunderstorm, the day Carolyn had had her first seizure.

A-11, Ralph.” Be damn careful, you.” Div one crazy like a fox.

Maybe he wanted you to hit him.

Yes, he decided. Maybe that was just what Ed wanted. Why? Who knew? Maybe to muddy the waters up a little bit, maybe just because he was crazy.

“Cut the shit,” he said, dropping his voice almost to a whisper.

He was gratified to see Ed’s attention snap back to him in a hurry, and even more pleased to see Ed’s pleasantly vague expression of rueful amusement disappear. It was replaced by a narrow, watchful expression.

It was, Ralph thought, the look of a dangerous animal with its wind up.

Ralph hunkered down so he could look directly at Ed, “Vlas it Susan Day?” he asked in the same soft voice. “Susan Day and the abortion business? Something about dead babies? Is that why you unloaded on Helen?”

There was another question on his mind-who are you really, Ed?-but before he could ask it, Ed reached out, placed a hand in the center of Ralph’s chest, and pushed. Ralph fell backward onto the damp grass, catching himself on his elbows and shoulders. He lay there with his feet flat on the ground and his knees up, watching as Ed suddenly sprang out of his lawn-chair.

“Ralph, don’t mess with him!” McGovern called from his place of relative safety on the sidewalk.

Ralph paid no attention. He simply remained where he was, propped on his elbows and looking attentively up at Ed. He was still angry and afraid, but these emotions had begun to be overshadowed by a strange, chilly fascination. This was madness he was looking at-the genuine article-no comichook super-villain here, no Norman Bates, no Captain Ahab. It was just Ed Deepneau who worked down the coast at Hawking Labs-one of those eggheads, the old guys who played chess at the picnic area out on the extension would have said, but still a nice enough fella for a Democrat.

Now the nice enough fella had gone totally bonkers, and it hadn’t just happened this afternoon, when Ed had seen his wife’s name on a petition hanging from the Community Bulletin Board in the Shop) n Save. Ralph now understood that Ed’s madness was at least a year old, and that made him wonder what secrets Helen had been keep and what is behind her normal cheery demeanor and sunny sen’e, small, desperate signals-besides the bruises, that was-he might have missed.

And then there’s Natalie, he thought. What’s she seen? What’s she experienced? Besides, of course, being carried across Harris Avenue and the Red Apple parking lot on her staggering, bleeding mother’s hip?

Ralph’s arms broke out in goosebumps.

Ed had begun to pace, meanwhile, crossing and recrossing the cement path, trampling the zinnias Helen had planted along it as a border. He had returned to the Ed Ralph had encountered out by the airport the year before, right down to the fierce little pokes of the head and the sharp, jabbing glances at nothing, This is what the gee-whiz act was supposed to hide, Ralph thought.

He looks the same now as he did when he took after the guy driving that pick up truck. Like a barnyard, rooster protecting his little piece of the flock.

“None of this is strictly her fault, I admit that.” Ed spoke rapidly, pounding his right fist into his open left palm as he walked through the cloud of spray thrown by the sprinkler. Ralph realized he could see every rib in Ed’s chest; the man looked as if he hadn’t had a decent meal in months.

“Still, once stupidity reaches a certain level, it becomes hard to live with,” Ed went on. “She’s like the Magi, actually coming to King Herod for information. I mean, how dumb can you get? Where is he that is born King of the Jews?” To Herod they say this. I mean, Wise Men my ass! Right, Ralph?”

Ralph nodded. Sure, Ed. Whatever you say, Ed.

Ed returned the nod and went on tramping back and forth through the spray and the ghostly interlocking rainbows, smacking his fist into his palm. “It’s like that Rolling Stones song-’Look at that, look at that, look at that stupid girl.” You probably don’t remember that one, do you?” Ed laughed, a jagged little sound that made Ralph think of rats dancing on broken glass.

McGovern knelt beside him. “Let’s get out of here, he muttered.

Ralph shook his head, and when Ed swung back in their direction, McGovern quickly got up and retreated to the sidewalk again.

“She thought she could fool you, is that it?” Ralph asked. He was still lying on the lawn, propped up on his elbows. “She thought you wouldn’t find out she signed the petition.”

Ed leaped over the walk, bent over Ralph, and shook his clenched fists over his head like the bad guy in a silent movie. “No-No-Noo!”

he cried.

The Jefferson Airplane had been replaced by the Animals, Eric Burdon growling out the gospel according to John Lee Hooker: Boom-boom-boom-boom, gonna shoot ya right down. McGovern uttered a thin cry, apparently thinking Ed meant to attack Ralph, but instead Ed sank down with the knuckles of his left hand pressed into the grass, assuming the position of a sprinter who waits for the starter’s gun to explode him out of the blocks. His face was covered with beads of what Ralph at first took for sweat before remembering the way Ed had paced back and forth through the spray from the sprinkler. Ralph kept looking at the spot of blood on the left lens of Ed’s glasses. it had smeared a little, and now the pupil of his left eye looked as if it had filled up with blood.

“Finding out that she signed the petition was fate! Simple fate!

Do you mean to tell me you don’t see that? Don’t insult my intelligence, Ralph! You may be getting on in years, but you’re far from stupid. The thing is, I go down to the supermarket to buy baby-food, how’s that for irony, and find out she’s signed on with the babvkillers.” The Centurions! With the Crimson King himself! And do you know what? I… just… saw… red…

“The Crimson King, Ed? Who’s he?”

“Oh, please.” Ed gave Ralph a cunning look.” ’Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.” It’s in the Bible, Ralph.

Matthew, chapter 2, verse 16. Do you doubt it-? Do you have any fucking question that it says that?”

“No. If you say so, I believe it,” Ed nodded. His eyes, a deep and startling shade of green, darted here and there. Then he slowly leaned forward over Ralph, planting one hand on either side of Ralph’s arms. It was as if he meant to kiss him. Ralph could smell sweat, and some sort of aftershave that had almost completely faded away now, and something else-something that smelled like old curdled milk. He wondered if it might be the smell of Ed’s madness.

An ambulance was coming up Harris Avenue, running its flashers but not its siren. It turned into the Red Apple’s parking lot.

“You better,” Ed breathed into his face. “You just better believe it.”

His eyes stopped wandering and centered on Ralph’s.

“They are killing the babies wholesale,” he said in a low voice which was not quite steady. “Ripping them from the wombs of their mothers and carrying them out of town in covered trucks. Flatbeds for the most part. Ask yourself this, Ralph: how many times a week do you see one of those big flatbeds tooling down the road? A flatbed with a tarp stretched across the back? Ever ask yourself what those trucks were carrying? Ever wonder what was under most of those tarps?”

Ed grinned. His eyes rolled.

“They burn most of the fetuses over in Newport. The sign says landfill, but it’s really a crematorium. They send some of them out of state, though. In trucks, in light planes. Because fetal tissue is extremely valuable. I tell you that not just as a concerned citizen, but as an em Ralph, ployee of Hawking Laboratories. Fetal tissue is… more… valuable… than gold.”

He turned his head suddenly and stared at Bill McGovern, who had crept a little closer again in order to hear what Ed was saying.

“YEA, MORE VALUABLE THAN GOLD AND MOPE PRECIOUS THAN RUBIES!” he screamed, and McGovern leaped back, eyes widening in fear and dismay.

“DO YOU KNOW THAT, YOU OLD FAGGOT?”

“Yes,” McGovern said. “I… I guess I did.” He shot a quick glance down the street, where one of the police cars was now backing out of the Red Apple lot and turning in their direction. “I might have read it somewhere. In Scientific American, perhaps.”

“Scientific American!” Ed laughed with gentle contempt and rolled his eyes at Ralph again, as if to say You see what I have to deal with.

Then his face grew sober again. “Wholesale murder,” he said, “just as in the time of Christ. Only now it’s the murder of the unborn. Not just here, but all over the world. They’ve been slaughtering them by their thousands, Ralph, by their Millions, and do you know why? Do you know why we’vere-entered the Court of the Crimson King in this new age of darkness?”

Ralph knew. It wasn’t that hard to Put together, if you had enough pieces to work with. If you had seen Ed with his arm buried in a barrel of chemical fertilizer, fishing around for the dead babies he had been sure he would find.

“King Herod got a little advance word this time around,” Ralph said. “That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it? It’s the old Messiah thing, right?”

He sat up, half-expecting Ed to shove him down again, almost hoping he would. His anger was coming back. It was surely wrong to critique a madman’s delusional fantasies the way you might a play or a movie-maybe even blasphemous-but Ralph found the idea that Helen had been beaten because of such hackneyed old shit as this infuriating.

Ed didn’t touch him, merely got to his feet and dusted his hands,all in businesslike fashion. He seemed to be cooling down again.

Radio calls crackled louder as the Police cruiser which had backed out of the Red Apple’s lot now glided up to the curb. Ed looked at the cruiser, then back at Ralph, why was getting up himself.

“You can mock, but it’s true,” he said quietly. “It’s not King Herod, though-it’s the Crimson King. Herod was merely one of his incarnations. The Crimson King jumps from body to body and generation to generation like a kid using stepping-stones to cross a brook, Ralph, always looking for the Messiah. He’s always missed him, but this time it could be different. Because Derry’s different.

All lines of force have begun to converge here. I know how difficult that is to believe, but it’s true.”

The Crimson King, Ralph thought. Oh Helen, I’m so sorry. What a sad thing this is.

Two men-one in uniform, one in streetclothes, both presumably cops-got out of the Police car and approached McGovern. Behind them, down at the store, Ralph spotted two more men, these dressed in white pants and white short-sleeved shirts, coming out of the Red Apple. One had his arm around Helen, who was walking with the fragile care of a post-op patient. The other was holding Natalie.

The paramedics helped Helen into the back of the ambulance.

The one with the baby cot in after her while the other moved toward the driver’s seat. What Ralph sensed in their movements was competency rather than urgency, and he thought that was good news for Helen. Maybe Ed hadn’t hurt her too badly… this time, at least.

The plain-clothes cop-burly, broad-shouldered, and wearing his blond mustache and sideburns in a style Ralph thought of as Early American Singles Bar-had approached McGovern, whom he seemed to recognize. There was a big grin on the plain-clothes cop’s face.

Ed put an arm over Ralph’s shoulders and pulled him a few steps away from the men on the sidewalk. He also dropped his voice to a bare murmur. “Don’t want them to hear us,” he said.

“I’m sure you don’t.”

“These creatures… Centurions… servants of the Crimson King… will stop at nothing. They are relentless.”

“I’ll bet.” Ralph glanced over his shoulder in time to see McGovern point at Ed. The burly man nodded calmly. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his chinos. He was still wearing a small, benign smile.

I don’t get that idea! Not anymore.

“This isn’t just about abortion, They’re taking the unborn from all kinds of mothers, not just the junkies and the whores-eight days, eight weeks, eight months, it’s all the same to the Centurions. The harvest goes on day and night.

The slaughter. I’ve seen the corpses of infants on roofs, Ralph.

“… under hedges… they’re in the sewers… floating in the sewers and in the Kenduskeag down in the Barrens…”

His eyes, huge and green, as bright as trumpery emeralds, stared off into the distance.

“Ralph,” he whispered, “sometimes the world is full of colors. I’ve seen them since he came and told me. But now all the colors are turning black.”

“Since who came and told you, Ed?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Ed. replied, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a con in a prison movie. Under other circumstances it would have been funny.

A big game-show host grin dawned on his face, banishing the madness as convincingly as sunrise banishes night. The change was almost tropical in its suddenness, and creepy as hell, but Ralph found something comforting about it, just the same. Perhaps they-he, McGovern, Lois, all the others on this little stretch of Harris Avenue who knew Ed-would not have to blame themselves too much for not seeing his madness sooner, after all. Because Ed was good; Ed really had his act down. That grin was an Academy Award winner, Even in a bizarre situation like this, it practically demanded that you respond to it.

“Hey, hi,” he told the two cops. The burly one had finished his conversation with McGovern, and both of them were advancing across the lawn, “Drag up a rock, you guys!” Ed stepped around Ralph with his hand held out.

The burly plain-clothes cop shook it, still smiling his small, benign smile. “Edward Deepneau?” he asked.

“Right.” Ed shook hands with the uniformed cop, who looked a trifle bemused, and then returned his attention to the burly man.

“I’m Detective Sergeant John Leydecker,” the burly man said.

“This is Officer Chris Nell. Understand you had a little trouble here, sir.”

“Well, yes. I guess that’s right. A little trouble. Or, if you want to call a spade a spade, I behaved like a horse’s ass.” Ed’s embarrassed little chuckle was alarmingly normal. Ralph thought of all the charming psychopaths he’d seen in the movies-George Sanders had always been particularly good at that sort of role-and wondered if it was possible for a smart research chemist to snow a small-city detective who looked as if he had never completely outgrown saturday Night Fever phase. Ralph was terribly afraid. n his Saut might be.

“Helen and I got into an argument about a petition she’d signed,” Ed was saying, “and one thing just led to another. Man, I Just can’t believe I hit her.”

He flapped his arms, as if to convey how flustered he was-not to mention confused and ashamed. Leydecker smiled in return.

Ralph’s mind returned to the confrontation last summer between Ed and the man in the blue pickup. Ed had called the heavyset man a murderer, had even stroked him one across the face, and still the guy had ended up looking at Ed almost with respect. It had been like a kind of hypnosis, and Ralph thought he was seeing the same force at work here.

“Things just kinda got out of hand a little, is that what you’re telling me?” Leydecker asked sympathetically.

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.” Ed had to be at least thirty-two but his wide eyes and innocent expression made him look barely old enough to buy beer.

“Wait a minute,” Ralph blurted. “You can’t believe him, he’s nuts. And dangerous. He just told me-”

“This is Mr. Roberts, right?” Leydecker asked McGovern, ignoring Ralph completely.

“Yes,” McGovern said, and to Ralph he sounded insufferably pompous. “That is Ralph Roberts.”

“Uh-huh.” Leydecker at last looked at Ralph. “I’ll want to speak to you in a couple of minutes, Mr. Roberts, but for the time being I’d like you to stand over there beside your friend and keep quiet.

Okay?”

“But"Okay?”

Angrier than ever, Ralph stalked over to where McGovern was ecker in the least. HC standing-This did not seem to upset Leyd turned to Officer Ne. “You want to turn off the music, Chris, so we can hear ourselves think?”

“Yo.” The uniformed cop went to the boombox, inspected the various then killed The Who halfway through the song about the blind pinball wizard.

Ed looked sheepish. “I guess I did have it cranked a little. Wonder the neighbors didn’t complain.”

“Oh, well, life goes on,” Leydecker said. He tilted his small, serene smile up toward the clouds drifting across the blue summer sky.

Wonderful, Ralph thought. This guy is a regular Will Rogers.

Ed, however, was nodding as if the detective had produced not just a single pearl of wisdom but a whole string of them, Leydecker rummaged in his pocket and came out with a little tube of toothpicks. He offered them to Ed, who declined, then shook one out and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “So,” he said. “Little family argument. Is that what I’m hearing?”

Ed nodded eagerly. He was still smiling his sincere, slightly puzzled smile. “More of a discussion, actually. A political-”

“Uh-huh, uh-huh,” Leydecker said, nodding and smiling, “but before you go any further, Mr. Deepneau-”

“Ed. Please.”

“Before we go any further, Mr. Deepneau, I just kind of want to tell you that anything you say could be used against You-you know, in a court of law. Also that you have a right to an attorney.

Ed’s friendly but puzzled smile faltered for a moment. The narrow appraising replaced it. “Gosh, what did I do? Can you help me figure it out?”

Ralph glanced at McGovern, and the relief he saw in Bill’s eyes mirrored what he was feeling himself. Leydecker was maybe not such a hick after all.

“What in God’s name would I want an attorney for?” Ed asked.

He made a half-turn and tried the puzzled smile out on Chris Nell, who was still standing beside the boombox on the porch.

“I don’t know, and maybe you don’t,” Leydecker said, still smiling. “I’m just telling you that you can have one. And that if you can’t afford one, the City of Derry will provide you with one.”

“But I don’t-” Leydecker was nodding and smiling. “That’s okay, sure, whatever.

But those are your rights. Do you understand your rights as I’ve explained them to you, Mr. Deepneau?”

Ed stood stock-still for a moment, his eyes suddenly wide and blank again. To Ralph he looked like a human computer trying to process a huge and complicated wad of input. Then the fact that the snow-job wasn’t working seemed to get through to him. His shoulders sagged. The blankness was replaced by a look of unhappiness too real to doubt… but Ralph doubted it, anyway. He had to doubt it; he had seen the madness on Ed’s face before Leydecker and Nell arrived. So had Bill McGovern. Yet doubt was not quite the same as disbelief, and Ralph had an idea that on some level Ed honestly regretted beating Helen up.

Yes, he thought, just as on some level he honestly believes that these Centurions of his are driving truckloads of fetuses out to the Newport landfill And that the forces of good and evil are gathering in Derry to play out some drama that’s going on in his mind. Call it Omen V: In the Court of the Crimson King.

Still, he could not help feeling a reluctant sympathy for Ed Deepneau, who had visited Carolyn faithfully three times a week during her final confinement at Derry Home, who always brought flowers, and always kissed her on the cheek when he left. He had continued giving her that kiss even when the smell of death had begun to surround her, and Carolyn had never failed to clasp his hand and give him a smile of gratitude. Thank you for remembering that I’m still a human being, that smile had said. And thank you for treating me like one. That was the Ed Ralph had thought of as his friend, and he thought-or maybe only hoped-that that Ed was still in there.

“I’m in trouble here, aren’t I?” he asked Leydecker softly.

“Well, let’s see,” Leydecker said, still smiling. “You knocked out two of your wife’s teeth. Looks like you fractured her cheekbone. I’d bet you my grandfather’s watch she’s got a concussion. Plus selected short subjects-cuts bruises, and this funny bare patch over her right temple. What’d you try to do? Snatch her bald-headed?”

Ed was silent, his green eyes fixed on Leydecker’s face.

“She’s going to spend the night in the hospital under observation because some asshole pounded the hell out of her, and everybody seems in agreement that the asshole was you, Mr. Deepneau. I look at the blood on your hands and the blood on your glasses, and I got to say I also think it was probably you. So what do you think? You look like a bright guy. Do you think you’re in trouble?”

“I’m very sorry I hit her,” Ed said. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Uh-huh, and if I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard that, I’d never have to buy another drink out of my paycheck. I’m arresting you on a charge of second-degree assault, Mr. Deepneau, also known as domestic assault. This charge falls under Maine’s Domestic violence law. I’d like you to confirm once more that I’ve informed you of your rights.”

“Yes.” Ed spoke in a small, unhappy voice. The smile-puzzled or otherwise-was gone. “Yes, you did.”

“We’re going to take you down to the Police station and book you,” Leydecker said. “Following that, you can make a telephone call and arrange bail. Chris, put him in the car, would you?”

Nell approached Ed. “Are you going to be a problem, Mr. Deepneau?”

“No,” Ed said in that same small voice, and Ralph saw a tear slip from Ed’s right eye. He wiped it away absently with the heel of his hand. “No problem.”

“Great!” Nell said heartily, and walked with him to the cruiser.

Ed glanced at Ralph as he crossed the sidewalk. “I’m sorry, old boy,” he said, then got into the back of the car. Before (officer Nell closed the door, Ralph saw there was no handle on the inside of it.

“Okay,” Leydecker said, turning to Ralph and holding out his hand.

“I’m sorry if I seemed a little brusque, Mr. Roberts, but sometimes these guys can be volatile. I especially worry about the ones who look sober, because you can never tell what they’ll do. John Leydecker.”

“I had Johnny as a student when I was teaching at the Community College,” McGovern said. Now that Ed Deepneau was safely tucked away in the back of the cruiser, he sounded almost giddy with relief.

“Good student. Did an excellent term paper on the Children’s Crusade.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ralph said, shaking Leydecker’s hand. “And don’t worry. No offense taken.”

“You were insane to come up here and confront him, you know,” Leydecker said cheerfully.

“I was pissed off. I’m still pissed off.”

“I can understand that. And you got away with it-that’s the important thing.”

“No. Helen’s the important thing. Helen and the baby.”

“I can ride with that. Tell me what you and Mr. Deepneau talked about before we got up here, Mr. Roberts… or can I call you Ralph?”

“Ralph, please.” He ran through his conversation with Ed, trying to keep it brief. McGovern, who had heard some of it but not all Of it, listened in round-eyed silence. Every time Ralph looked at him, he found himself wishing Bill had worn his Panama. He looked older without it. Almost ancient.

“Well, that certainly sounds pretty weird, doesn’t it?” Leydecker remarked when Ralph had finished.

“What will happen? Will he go to jail? He shouldn’t go to jail; he should be committed.”

“Probably should be,” Leydecker agreed, “but there’s a lot of distance between should be and will be. He won’t go to jail, and he isn’t going to be carted off to Sunnyvale Sanitarium, either-that sort of thing only happens in old movies. The best we can hope for is some court-ordered therapy.”

“But didn’t Helen tell you"The lady didn’t tell us anything, and we didn’t try to question her in the store. She was in a lot of pain, both physical and emotional.

“Yes, Of course she was,” Ralph said. “Stupid of me.”

“She might corroborate your stuff later on… but she might not.

“You know.

Domestic-abuse victims have a way of turning hot to heel raumns, der the new Luckily, it doesn’t really matter one way or the law. We got him nailed to the wall. You and the lady in the little store down the street can testify to Mrs. Deepneau’s condition, and to who she said put her in that condition. I can testify to the fact that the victim’s husband had blood on his hands. Best of all, he said the magic words: “Man, I just can’t believe I hit her.” I’d like You to come in-probably tomorrow morning, if that works for you-so I can take a complete statement from you, Ralph, but that’s just filling in the blanks. Basically, this one’s a done deal.”

Leydecker took the toothpick out of his mouth, broke it, tossed it in the gutter, and produced his tube again. “Pick?”

“No thanks,” Ralph said, smiling faintly trying to quit smoking, “Don’t blame you. Lousy habit, but the thing about guys “which is an even worse that they’re too goddam smart for their own good. If you get high side, hurt someone… and then they pull back. Like you did, Ralph-you can there soon enough after the blo almost see them standing there with their heads cocked, listening to the music and trying to get back on the beat.”

“What was,” Ralph said. “Exactly how it was.”

“That’s just how ite awhile-they appear “It’s a trick the bright ones manage for qu to make remorseful, appalled by their own actions, determined amends. They’re persuasive, they’re charming, and it’s often all but ath the sugar coating they’re as nutty impossible to see that underneath is like Ted Bundy some. fruittcakes-Even extreme case as Christmas fru, look normal for years.

The good news is that there times manage it, In spite of all the psycholike Ted Bundy out there, there aren’t many guys killer books and movies.”

Ralph sighed deeply. “What a mess. ok on the bright side: we’re gonna be able to keep “Yeah. But 10 her, at least for awhile, He’ll be out by suppertime him away from on twenty-five dollars bail, but-” d. He sounded simultane"Twenty-five dollars?” McGovern asked sly shocked and cynical, “That’s all?”

“you Iyup,” Leydecker said. “I gave Deepneau the second-degree assault stuff because it do sound fearsome, but in the state of Maine, lumping up Your wife is only a misdemeanor. 1) inkle in the law,” Chris Nell said, “Still, there’s a nifty new law joining them-“If Deepneau wants bail, he has to agree that he’ll have absolutely no contact with his wife until the case is settled in the street, or court-he can’t come to the house, approach her on even call her on the phone. if he doesn’t agree, he sits in jail.”

“suppose he agrees and then comes back, anyway?” Ralph asked.

“Then we slam-dunk him,” Nell said, “because that one is a felony… or can be, if the district attorney wants to play hardball.

In any case, violators of the Domestic Violence bail agreement usually spend a lot more than just the afternoon in jail.”

“And hopefully the spouse he breaks the agreement to visit will still be alive when he comes to trial,” McGovern said.

“Yeah,” Leydecker said heavily. “Sometimes that’s a problem.”

Ralph went home and sat staring not at the TV but through it for an hour or so. He got up during a commercial to see if there was a cold Coke in the refrigerator, staggered on his feet, and had to put a hand on the wall to steady himself. He was trembling all over and felt unpleasantly close to vomiting. He understood that this was nothing but delayed reaction, but the weakness and nausea still frightened him.

He sat down again, took a minute’s worth of deep breaths with his head down and his eyes closed, then got up and walked slowly into the bathroom. He filled the tub with warm water and soaked until he heard Night Court, the first of the afternoon sitcoms, starting up on the TV in the living room. By then the water in the tub had become almost chilly, and Ralph was glad to get out. He dried off, dressed in fresh clothes, and decided that a light supper was at least in the realm of possibility. He called downstairs, thinking McGovern might like to join him for a bite to eat, but there was no answer, Ralph put on water in which to boil a couple of eggs and called Derry Home Hospital from the phone by the stove. His call was shunted to a woman in Patient Services who checked her computer and told him yes, he was correct, Helen Deepneau had been admitted to the hospital. Her condition was listed as fair. No, she had no idea who) was taking care of Mrs. Deepneau’s baby; all she knew was that she did not have a Natalie Deepneau on her admissions list. No, Ralph could not visit Mrs. Deepneau that evening, but not because her doctor had established a no-visitors policy; Mrs. Deepneau had left that order herself.

Why would she do that? Ralph started to ask, then didn’t bother.

The woman in Patient Services would probably tell him she was sorry, she didn’t have that information in her computer, but Ralph decided he had it in his computer, the one between his giant economy-size ears. Helen didn’t want visitors because she was ashamed.

None of what had happened was her fault, but Ralph doubted if that changed the way she felt. She had been seen by half of Harris Avenue staggering around like a badly beaten boxer after the ref has stopped the fight, she had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and her husband-the father of her daughter-was responsible. Ralph hoped they would give her something that would help her sleep through the night; he had an idea things might look a little better to her in the morning.

God knew they couldn’t look much worse.

Hell, I wish someone would give me something to help me sleep through the night, he thought.

Then go see Dr. Litchfield, you idiot, another part of his mind responded immediately.

The woman in Patient Services was asking Ralph if she could do anything else for him. Ralph said no and was starting to thank her when the line clicked in his ear. “Nice,” Ralph said. “Very nice.” He hung up himself, got a tablespoon, and gently lowered his eggs into the water. Ten minutes later, as he was sitting down with the boiled eggs sliding around on a plate and looking like the world’s biggest pearls, the phone rang. He put his supper on the table and grabbed it off the wall. “Hello?” Silence, broken only by breathing. “Hello?” Ralph repeated. There was one more breath, this one almost loud enough to be an aspirated sob, and then another click in his ear. Ralph hung up the telephone and stood looking at it for a moment, his frown putting three ascending wave-lines on his brow.

“Come on, Helen,” he said. “Call me back, Please.” Then he returned to the table, sat down, and began to eat his small bachelor’s supper. He was washing up his few dishes fifteen minutes later when the phone rang again. That won’t be her, he thought, wiping his hands on a dishtowel and then flipping it over his shoulder as he went to the phone. No way it’ll be her. It’s probably Lois or Bill. But another part of him knew differently.

“Hi, Ralph.”

“Hello, Helen.”

“That was me a few minutes ago.” Her voice was husky, as if she had been drinking or crying, and Ralph didn’t think they allowed booze in the hospital. “I kind of figured that.”

“I heard your voice and I. I couldn’t… “That’s okay. I understand.”

“Do you?” She gave a long, watery sniff, “I think so, yes.”

“The nurse came by and gave me a pain-pill. I can use it, too my face really hurts. But I wouldn’t let myself take it until I called you again and said what I had to say. Pain sucks, but it’s a hell of an incentive.”

“Helen, you don’t have to say anything.” But he was afraid that she did, and he was afraid of what it might be… afraid of finding out that she had decided to be angry at him because she couldn’t be angry with Ed.

“Yes I do. I have to say thank you.”

Ralph leaned against the side of the door and closed his eyes for a moment. He was relieved but unsure how to reply. He had been ready to say I’m Sorry you feel that way, Helen in the calmest voice he could manage, that was how sure he’d been that she was going to start off by asking him why he couldn’t mind his own business.

And, as if she had read his mind and wanted to let him know he. wasn’t entirely off the hook, Helen said, “I spent most of the ride here, and the check-in, and the first hour or so in the room, being terribly angry at you. I called Candy Shoemaker, my friend from over on Kansas Street, and she came and got Nat. She’s keeping her for the night. She wanted to know what had happened, but I wouldn’t tell her. I just wanted to lie here and be mad that you called 911 even though I told you not to.”

“Helen-”

“Let me finish so I can take my pill and go to sleep.

Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Just after Candy left with the baby-Nat didn’t cry, thank God, I don’t know if I could have handled that-a woman came in. At first I thought she must have gotten the wrong room because I didn’t know her from Eve, and when I got it through my head that she was here to see me, I told her I didn’t want any visitors. She didn’t pay any attention. She closed the door and lifted her skirt up so I could see her left thigh. There was a deep scar running down it, almost all the way from her hip to her knee.

“She said her name was Gretchen Tillbury, that she was a familyabuse counsellor at WomanCare, and that her husband had cut her leg open with a kitchen knife in 1978. She said if the man in the downstairs apartment hadn’t gotten a tourniquet on it, she would have bled to death. I said I was very sorry to hear that, but I didn’t have a chance to think I want to talk about my own situation until I’d had it over.” Helen paused and then said, “But that was a lie, you know.

I’ve had plenty of time to think it over, because Ed first hit Me two years ago, just before I got pregnant with Nat. I just kept… pushing it away.”

“I can see how a person would do that,” Ralph said.

“This lady… well, they must give people like her lessons on how to get through people’s defenses.”

Ralph smiled. “I believe that’s about half their training.”

“She said I couldn’t put it off, that I had a bad situation on my hands and I had to start dealing with it right away. I said that whatever I did, I didn’t have to consult her before I did it, or I listen to her line lof bullshit just biecause her husband had cut her once. almost said he probably did it because she wouldn’t shut up and go away and give him some peace, can you believe that? But I was really pissed, Ralph. Hurting… confused… ashamed… but mostly just P.O."d.”

“I think that’s probably a pretty normal reaction.”

“She asked me how I’d feel about myself-not about Ed but about myself-if I went back into the relationship and Ed beat me up again.

Then she asked how I’d feel if I went back in and Ed did it to Nat.

That made me furious-It still makes me furious. Ed has never laid so much as a finger on her, and I said so. She nodded and said, ’That doesn’t mean he won’t, Helen. I know you don’t want to think about that, but you have to. Still, suppose you’re right?

Suppose he never so much as slaps her on the wrist? Do you want her to grow up watching him hit -you? Do you want her to grow up seeing the things she saw today?” And that stopped me. Stopped me cold. I remembered how Ed looked when he came back in… how I knew as soon as I saw how white his face was… the way his head was moving…”

“Like a rooster,” Ralph murmured.

“What?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“I don’t know what set him off… I never do anymore, but I knew he was going to start in on me. There’s nothing you can do or say to stop it once he gets to a certain point. I ran for the bedroom, but he grabbed me by the hair… pulled out a great big bunch of it… I screamed… and Natalie was sitting there in her highchair… sitting there watching us… and when I screamed, she screamed…”

Helen broke down then, crying hard. Ralph waited with his forehead leaning against the side of the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He used the end of the dishtowel he’d slung over his shoulder to wipe away his own tears almost without thinking about it.

“Anyway,” Helen said when she was capable of speaking again, “I ended up talking to this woman for almost an hour. It’s called Victim Counselling and she does it for a living, can you believe it?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. “I can. It’s a good thing, Helen.”

“I’m going to see her again tomorrow, at WomanCare. It’s ironic, you know, that I should be going there. I mean, if I hadn’t signed that petition.

“If it hadn’t been the petition, it would have been something else.”

She sighed. “Yes, I guess that might be true. Is true. Anyway, Gretchen says I can’t solve Ed’s problems, but I can start solving some of my own.” Helen started to cry again and then took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry-I’ve cried so much today I never want to cry again. I told her I loved him. I felt ashamed to say it, and I’m not even sure it’s true, but it feels true. I said I wanted to give him another chance.

She said that meant I was committing Natalie to give him another chance, too, and that made me think of how she looked sitting there in the kitchen, with pureed spinach all over her face, screaming her head off while Ed hit me.

God, I hate the way people like her drive you into a corner and won’t let you Out.”

“She’s trying to help, that’s all.”

“I hate that, too. I’m very confused, Ralph. Probably you didn’t know that, but I am.” A wan chuckle drifted down the telephone line.

“That’s okay, Helen. It’s natural for you to be confused.”

“Just before she left, she told me about High Ridge. Right now that sounds like just the place for me.”

“What is it?”

“A kind of halfway house-she kept explaining that it was a house’ not a shelter-for battered women. Which is what I guess I now officially am.” This time the wan chuckle sounded perilously close to a sob. “I can have Nat with me if I go, and that’s a major part of the attraction.”

“Where is this place?”

“In the country. Out toward Newport, I think.”

“Yeah, I guess I knew that.”

Of course he did; Ham Davenport had told him during his WomanCare spiel. They’re involved in family counselling… spouse and child abuse… they run a shelterfor abused women over by the Newport town line. All at once WomanCare seemed to be everywhere in his life. Ed would undoubtedly have seen sinister implications in this.

“That Gretchen Tillbury is one hard sugarbun,” Helen was saying, “Just before she left she told me it was all right for me to love Ed’It has to be all right,” she said, ’because love doesn’t come out of a faucet you can turn on and off whenever you want to’-but that I had to remember my love couldn’t fix him, that not even Ed’s love for Natalie could fix him, and that no amount of love changed my responsibility to take care of my child.

I’ve been lying in bed, thinking about that. I think I liked lying in bed and being mad better. It was certainly easier.”

“Yes,” he said, “I can see how it might be. Helen, why don’t you just take your pill and let it all go for awhile?”

“I will, but first I wanted to say thanks.”

“You know you don’t have to do that.”

“I don’t think I know any such thing,” she said, and Ralph was glad to hear the flash of emotion in her voice. It meant the essential Helen Deepneau was still there. “I haven’t quit being mad at you, Ralph, but I’m glad you didn’t listen when I told you not to call the police. It’s just that I was afraid, you know? Afraid.”

“Helen, I-” His voice was thick, close to cracking. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I just didn’t want to see you hurt any more than you already were. When I saw you coming across the parking lot with blood all over your face, I was so afraid…”

“Don’t talk about that part. Please. I’ll cry if you do, and I can’t stand to cry anymore.”

“Okay.” He had a thousand questions about Ed, but this was clearly not the time to ask them. “Can I come see you tomorrow?”

There was a short hesitation and then Helen said, “I don’t think so. Not for a little while. I have a lot of thinking to do, a lot of things to sort out, and it’s going to be hard. I’ll be in touch, Ralph.

Okay?”

“Of course. That’s fine. What are you doing about the house?”

“Candy’s husband is going to go over and lock it up. I gave him my keys. Gretchen Tillbury said that Ed isn’t supposed to go back for anything, not even his checkbook or a change of undemear. If there’s stuff he needs, he gives a list and his housekey to a policeman, and the policeman goes to get it. I suppose he’ll go to Fresh Harbor.

There’s plenty of housing there for lab employees. These little cottages. They’re actually sort of cute The brief flash of fire he’d heard in her voce was long gone. Helen now sounded depressed, forlorn, and very, very tired.

“Helen, I’m delighted that you called. And relieved, I won’t kid you ah(put that. Now get some sleep.”

“What about you, Ralph?” she asked unexpectedly. “Are you getting any sleep these days?”

The switch in focus startled him into an honesty he might not otherwise have managed. “Some… but maybe not as much as I need.

Probably not as much as I need.”

“Well, take care of yourself. You were very brave today, like a knight in a story about King Arthur, but I think even Sir Lancelot had to fall out every now and then.”

He was touched by this, and also amused. A momentary picture, very vi ’d, arose in his mind: Ralph Roberts dressed in armor and vi mounted on a snow-white steed while Bill McGovern, his faithful squire, rode behind him on his pony, dressed. in a leather jerkin and his snappy Panama hat.

“Thank you, dear,” he said. “I think that’s the sweetest thing anyone’s said to me since Lyndon Johnson was President. Have the best night you can, okay?”

“Okay. You too She hung up. Ralph stood looking at the phone thoughtfully for a moment or two, then put it back in its cradle.

Perhaps he Would have a good night. After everything that had happened today, he certainly deserved one. For the time being e thought he might go downstairs, sit on the porch, watch the sun go down, and let later take care of itself.

McGovern was back, slouched in his favorite chair on the porch.

He was looking at something up the street and didn’t immediately turn when his upstairs neighbor stepped outside. Ralph followed his gaze and saw a blue step-van parked at the curb half a block up Harris Avenue, on the Red Apple side of the street. DERRY MEDICAL SERVICES was printed across the rear doers in large white letters.

“Hi, Bill,” Ralph said, and dropped into his own chair. The rocker where Lois Chasse always sat when she came over stood between them. A little twilight breeze had sprung up, delightfully cool after the heat of the afternoon, and the empty rocker moved lazily back and forth at its whim.

“Hi,” McGovern said, glancing over at Ralph. He started to look away, then did a double take. “Man, you better start pinning up the bags under your eyes. You’re going to be stepping on them pretty soon if you don’t.” Ralph thought this was supposed to come out sounding like one of the caustic little bons mots for which McGovern was famous along the street, but the look in his eyes was one of genuine concern.

“It’s been a bitch of a day,” he said. He told McGovern about Helen’s call, editing out the things he thought she might be uncomfortable with McGovern’s knowing. Bill had never been one of her favorite people.

“Glad she’s okay,” McGovern said. “I’ll tell you something, Ralph-you impressed me today, marching up the street that way, like Gary Cooper in High Noon. Maybe it was insane, but it was also pretty cool.” He paused. “To tell the truth, I was a little in awe of YOU.”

This was the second time in fifteen minutes that someone had come Close to calling Ralph a hero. It made him uncomfortable.

“I was too mad at him to realize how dumb I was being until later.

Where you been, Bill? I tried to call you a little while ago.”

“I took a walk out to the Extension,” McGovern said. “Trying to cool my engine off a little, I guess. I’ve felt headachey and sick to my stomach ever since Johnny Leydecker and that other one took Ed away-” Ralph nodded. “Me, too.”

“Really?” McGOvern looked surprised, and a little skeptical.

“Really,” Ralph said with a faint smile.

“Anyway, Faye Chapin was at the picnic area where those old lags usually hang out during the hot weather, and he coaxed me ’Into a game of chess. What a piece of work that guy is, Ralph-he thinks he’s the reincarnation of Ruy Loper, but he plays chess more like Soupy Sales… and he never shuts up.”

“Faye’s all right, though,” Ralph said quietly.

McGovern seemed not to have heard him. “And that creepy Dorrance Marstellar was out there,” he went on. “If we’re old, he’s a fossil.

He just stands there by the fence between the picnic area and the airport with a book of poetry in his hands, watching the planes take off and land. Does he really read those books he carries around, do you think, or are they just props?”

“Good question,” Ralph said, but he was thinking about the word McGovern had employed to describe Dorrance-creepy. It wasn’t one he would have used himself, but there could be no doubt that old Dor was one of life’s originals. He wasn’t senile (at least Ralph didn’t think he was); it was more as if the few things he said were the product of a mind that was slightly skewed and perceptions that were slightly bent.

He remembered that Dorrance had been there that day last summer when Ed ran into the guy in the pickup truck. At the time he’,] thought that Dorrance’s arrival had added the final screwy touch to the festivities. And Dorrance had said something funny. Ralph tried to recall what it was and couldn’t.

McGovern was gazing back up the street, where a whistling young man in a gray coverall had just come out of the house in front of which the Medical Services step-van was parked. This young man, looking all of twenty-four and as if he hadn’t needed a single medical service in his entire life, was rolling a dolly with a long green tank strapped to it, “That’s the empty,” McGovern said. “You missed them taking in the full one.”

A second young man, also dressed in a coverall, stepped out through the front door of the small house, which combined yellow paint and deep pink trim in an unfortunate manner. He stood on the stoop for a moment, hand on the doorknob, apparently speaking to someone inside.

Then he pulled the door shut and ran lithely down the walk. He was in time to help his colleague lift the dolly, with the tank still strapped to it, into the back of the van.

“Oxygen?” Ralph asked, McGovern nodded.

“For Mrs. Locher?”

McGovern nodded again, watching as the Medical Services workers slammed the doors of the step-van and then stood behind them talking quietly in the fading light. “I went to grammar school and junior high with May Locher. Way out in Carriville, home of the brave and land of the cows. There were only five of us in our graduating class. Back in those days she was known as a hot ticket and fellows like me were known as “a wee bit lavender.” In that amusingly antique era, gay was how you described your Christmas tree after it was decorated.”

Ralph looked down at his hands uncomfortable and tongue-tied.

Of course he knew that McGovern was a homosexual, had known rungRalph wished he could you until this evening have saved preferably one when Ralph himself it for another day brains had been replaced with wasn’t feeling as goosedown if most of his “That was about a thousand years ago. down.

“Who’d’ve thought we’d both wash up ago,” McGovern said.

Avenue. P on the shores of Harris “It’s emphysema she has, isn’t that right? I think that’s what I heard.”

“Yep. One of those diseases that keep on giving-Getting old certainly no job for sissies, is it’, is “No, it’s not,” Ralph said, and then his mind brought the truth of it home with sudden force. It was Carolyn he thought of, and the terror he had felt when he came squelching into the apartment his soaked sneakers and had seen her lying half in and half out of the kitchen-exactly where he had stood during most of his conversation with Helen, in fact. Facing Ed Deepneau had been nothing compared to the terror he had felt at that moment, when he had been sure Carolyn was dead. two weeks or so", McGovern said. “Now they come every Monday can remember when they just brought May oxygen once ever, and Thursday evening, like clockwork. I go over and see her when I can. Sometimes I read to her-the most boring women’s magazine bullshit You can imagine me-and sometimes we just sit and talk.

She says it feels as if her lungs are filling up with seaweed. It won’t be long now. They’ll come one day, and instead of loading an empty oxy tank into the back of that wagon, they’ll load May in.

They’ll take her Off to Derry Home, and that’ll be ’ “Was it cigarettes?” Ralph asked.

McGovern favored him with a look so alien to that lean, mild face that it took Ralph several moments to realize it was contempt. “May Locher never smoked a Cigarette in her whole life. What she’s paying off is twenty years in the dyehouse at a mill in Corinna and another twenty working the picker at a mill in Newport. It’s cotton, wool, and nylon she’s trying to breathe through, not seaweed.”

The two young men from Derry Medical Services got into their van and drove away.

“Maine’s the northeastern anchor of Appalachia, Ralph-a lot of people don’t realize that, but it’s true-and May’s dying of an Appalachian disease. The doctors call it Textile Lung.”

“That’s a shame. I guess she means a lot to you.”

McGovern laughed ruefully. “Nah. I visit her because she happens to be the last visible piece of my misspent youth. Sometimes I read to her and I always manage to get down one or two of her dry old oatmeal cookies, but that’s about as far as it goes. My concern is safely selfish, I assure you.”

Safely selfish, Ralph thought. What a really odd phrase. What a really McGovern phrase.

“Never mind May,” McGovern said. “The question on the lips of Americans everywhere is what we’re going to do about you, Ralph.

The whiskey didn’t work, did it?”

“No,” Ralph said. “I’m afraid it didn’t.”

“To make a particularly apropos pun, did you give it a fair shot?”

Ralph nodded.

“Well, you have to do something about the bags under your eyes or you’ll never land the lovely Lois.” McGovern studied Ralph’s facial response to this and sighed. “Not that funny, huh?”

“Nope. It’s been a long day.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

They sat in companionable silence for awhile, watching the comings and goings on their part of Harris Avenue. Three little girls were playing hopscotch in the Red Apple’s parking lot across the street.

Mrs. Perrine stood nearby, straight as a sentry, watching them.

A boy with his Red Sox cap turned around backward went past, bopping to the beat of his Walkman headset, Two kids were tossing a Frisbee back and forth in front of Lois’s house. A dog barked.

Somewhere a woman was yelling for Sam to get his sister and come inside. It was just the usual streetlife serenade, no more and no less, but to Ralph it all seemed strangely false. He supposed it was because he had gotten so used to seeing Harris Avenue empty lately.

He turned to McGovern and said, “You know what was just about the first thing I thought of when I saw you in the Red Apple parking lot this afternoon? In spite of everything else that was going on?”

McGovern shook his head.

“I wondered where the hell your hat was. The Panama. You looked very strange to me without it. Naked, almost. So come clean-where’d you stash the lid, son?”

McGovern touched the top Of his head, where the remaining strands of his baby-fine white hair were combed carefully left to right across his pink skull. “I don’t know,” he said. “I missed it this morning.

I almost always remember to drop it on the table by the front door when I come in, but it’s not there. I suppose I put it down somewhere else this time and the exact locale has slipped my mind for the nonce.

Give me another few years and I’ll be wandering around in my underwear because I can’t remember where I left my pants. All part of the wonderful aging experience, right, Ralph?”

Ralph nodded and smiled, thinking to himself that of all the elderly people he knew-and he knew at least three dozen on a casual walk-in-the-park, hi-how-ya-doing basis-Bill McGovern bitched the most about getting on in years. He seemed to regard his vanished youth and recently departed middle age as a general would regard a couple of soldiers who desert on the eve of a big battle. He wasn’t about to say such a thing, however. Everyone had their little eccentricities; being theatrically morbid about growing old was simply one of McGovern’s"Did I say something funny?” McGovern asked.

“Pardon?”

“You were smiling, so I thought I must have said something funny.”

He sounded a bit touchy, especially for a man so fond of ribbing his upstairs neighbor about the pretty widow down the street, but Ralph reminded himself it had been a long day for McGovern, too.

“I wasn’t thinking about you at all,” Ralph said. “I was thinking about how Carolyn used to say practically the same thing-that getting old was like getting a bad dessert at the end of a really fine meal.”

This was at least half a lie. Carolyn had made the simile, but she had used it to describe the brain tumor that was killing her, not her life as a senior citizen. She hadn’t been all that senior, anyway, just sixty-four when she died, and until the last six or eight weeks of her life, she had claimed to feel only half of that on most days.

Across from them, the three girls who had been playing hopscotch approached the curb, looked both ways for traffic, then joined hands and ran across the street, laughing. For just a moment they looked to him as if they were surrounded by a gray glow-a nimbus that illuminated their cheeks and brows and laughing eyes like some strange, clarifying Saint Elmo’s fire. A little frightened, Ralph squeezed his eyes shut and then popped them open again. The gray envelope he’d imagined around the trio of girls was gone, which was a relief, but he had to get some sleep soon. He had to.

“Ralph?” McGovern’s voice seemed to be coming from the far end of the porch, although he hadn’t moved. “You all right?”

“Sure,” Ralph said. “Thinking about Ed and Helen, that’s all.

Did you have any idea how screwy he was getting, Bill?”

McGovern shook his head decisively. “None whatsoever,” he said.

I “And although I saw bruises on Helen from time to time, I always believed her stories about them. I don’t like to consider myself a tremendously gullible person, but I may have to reassess my thinking on that score.”

“What do you think will happen with them? Any predictions?”

McGovern sighed and touched the top of his head with his fingertips, feeling for the missing Panama without realizing it. “You know me, Ralph-I’m a cynic from a long line of them. I think it’s very rare for ordinary human conflicts to resolve themselves the way they do on TV. In reality they just keep coming back, turning in diminishing circles until they finally disappear. Except disaPPearing isn’t really what they do; they dry up, like mudpuddles in the sun.”

McGovern paused and then added: “And most of them leave the same scummy residue behind.”

“Jesus,” Ralph said. “That is cynical.”

McGovern shrugged. “Most retired teachers are cynical, Ralph.

We see them come in, so young and so strong, SO convinced that it’s going to be different for them, and we see them make their messes and then paddle around in them, just as their parents and grandparents did.

What I think is that Helen will go back to him, and Ed will do okay for awhile, and then he’ll beat her up again and she’ll leave again. It’s like one of those sappy country-western songs they have on the juke out at Nicky’s Lunch, and some people have to listen to that song a long, long time before they decide they don’t want to hear it anymore. Helen’s a bright young woman, though. I think one more verse is all she’ll need.”

“One more verse might be all she’ll ever get,” Ralph said quietly.

“We’re not talking about some drunk husband coming home on Friday night and beating his wife up because he lost his paycheck in a poker game and she dared to bitch about it.”

“I know,” McGovern said, “but you asked for my opinion and I gave it to you. I think Helen’s going to need one more go-round before she can bring herself to call it off.

And even then they’re apt to keep on bumping up against each other.

It’s still a pretty small town.” He paused, squinting down the street.

“Oh, look", he said, hoisting his left brow. “Our Lois. She walks in beauty, like the night.

Ralph gave him an impatient look, which McGovern ether did not see or pretended not to. He got up, once again touching the tips of his fingers to the place where the Panama wasn’t, and then went down the steps to meet her on the walk.

“Lois!” McGovern cried, dropping to one knee before her and extending his hands theatrically. “Would that our lives might be united by the starry bonds of love! Wed your fate to mine and let me whirl you away to climes various in the golden car of my affections!”

“Gee, are you talking about a honeymoon or a one-night stand?”

Lois asked, smiling uncertainly.

Ralph poked McGovern in the back. “Get up, fool,” he said, and took the small bag Lois was carrying. He looked inside and saw three cans of beer.

McGovern got to his feet. “Sorry, Lois,” he said. “It was a combination of summer twilight and your beauty. I plead temporary insanity, in other words.”

Lois smiled at him, then turned to Ralph. “I just heard what happened,” she said, “and I hurried over as fast as I could. I was in Ludlow all afternoon, playing nickel-dime poker with the girls.”

Ralph didn’t have to look at McGovern to know his left eyebrow-the one that said Poker with the girls! How wonderfully, perfectIT Our Lois.” would be hoisted to its maximum altitude. “Is Helen all right?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. “Well, maybe not exactly all right-they’re keeping her in the hospital overnight-but she’s not in any danger.”

“And the baby?”

“Fine. Staying with a friend of Helen’s.”

“Well, come on up on the porch, you two, and tell me all about it.” She linked one arm through McGovern’s, the other through Ralph’s, and led them back up the walk. They mounted the porch steps that way, like two elderly musketeers with the woman whose affections they had vied for in the days of their youth held safe v between them, and as Lois sat down in her rocking chair, the streetlights went on along Harris Avenue, glimmering in the dusk like a double rope of pearls.

Ralph fell asleep that night bare instants after his head hit the pillow, and came wide awake again at 3:30 a.m. an Friday morning, The knew immediately there was no question of going back to sleep; he might as well proceed directly to the wing-chair in the living room.

He lay there a moment longer anyway, looking up into the dark and trying to catch the tail of the dream he’d been having. but couldn’t do it. He could only remember that Ed had been in it… and Helen… and Rosalie, the dog he sometimes saw limping up or down Harris Avenue before Pete the paperboy showed up.

Dorrance was in it, too. Don’t forget him.

Yes, right. And as if a key had turned in a lock, Ralph suddenly remembered the strange thing Dorrance had said during the confrontation between Ed and the heavyset man last year… the thing Ralph hadn’t been able to remember earlier this evening. He, Ralph, had been holding Ed back, trying to keep him pinned against the bent hood of his car long enough for reason to reassert itself, and Dorrance had said “I wouldn’t) that Ralph ought to stop touching him.

“He said he couldn’t see my hands anymore,” Ralph muttered, swinging his feet out of bed. “That was it.”

He sat where he was for a little while, head down, hair frizzed up wildly in back, his fingers laced loosely together between his thighs.

At last he stepped into his slippers and shuffled into the living room.

It was time to start waiting for the sun to come up.

CHAPTER 4

Although cynics always sounded more plausible than the cockeyed optimists of the world, Ralph’s experience had been that they were wrong at least as much of the time, if not more, and he was delighted to find that McGovern was wrong about Helen Deepneau-in her case, a single verse of “The Beaten-Up, Broken-Hearted Blues” seemed to have been enough.

On Wednesday of the following week, just as Ralph was deciding he’d better track down the woman Helen had spoken with in the hospital (Tillbury, her name had been-Gretchen Tillbury) and try to make sure Helen was okay, he received a letter from her. The return address was simple-)just Helen and Nat, High Ridge-but it,A,as enough to relieve Ralph’s mind considerably. He sat down in his chair on the porch, tore the end off the envelope, and shook out two sheets of lined paper crammed with Helen’s back-slanted handwriting.

Dear Ralph [the letter began], I suppose by now you must be thinking I decided to be mad at you after all, but I really didn’t.

It’s just that we’re supposed to stay out of contact with everyone-by phone and letter-for the first few days. Rules of the house. I like this place very much, and so does Nat. Of course she does; there are at least six kids her age to crawl around with. As for me, I am finding more women who know what I’ve been through than I ever would have believed. I mean, you see the TV showsOprah Talks with Women Who Love Men Who Use Them for Punching Bags-but when it happens to you, you can’t help feeling that it’s happening in a way it’s never happened to anyone else, in a way that’s brand new to the world. The relief of knowing that’s not true is the best thing that’s happened to me in a long, long time…

She talked about the chores to which she had been assignedworking in the garden, helping to repaint an equipment shed, washing the storm windows with vinegar and water-and about Nat’s adventures in learning to walk.

The rest of the letter was about what had happened and what she intended to do about it, and it was here that Ralph for the first time really sensed the emotional turmoil Helen must be feeling, her worries about the future, and, counterbalancing these things, a formidable determination to do what was right for Nat… and for herself, too. Helen seemed to be just discovering that she also had a right to the right thing. Ralph was happy she had found out, but sad when he thought of all the dark times she must have trudged through in order to reach that simple insight.

I’m going to divorce him [she wrote]. Part of my mind (it sounds like my mother when it talks) just about howls when I put it that bluntly, but I’m tired of fooling myself about My situation, There’s a lot of therapy out here, the kind of thing where people sit around in a circle and use up about four boxes of Kleenex an hour, but it all seems to come back to seeing things plain. in my case, the plain fact is that the man I married has been replaced by a dangerous paranoid. That he can sometimes be loving and sweet isn’t the point but a distraction.

I need to remember that the man who used to bring me hand-picked flowers now sometimes sits on the porch and talks to someone who isn’t there, a man he calls “the little bald doctor.” Isn’t that a beaut? I think I have an idea of how all this started, Ralph, and when I see you I’ll tell You, if you really want to hear.

I should be back at the house on Harris Avenue (for awhile, anyway) by mid-September, if only to look for a job… but no more about that now, the whole subject scares me to death! I had a note from Ed-just a paragraph, but a great relief just the same-saying that he was staying at one of the cottages at the Hawking Labs compound in Fresh Harbor, and that he would honor the noncontact clause in the bail agreement. He said he was sorry for everything, but I didn’t get any real sense of it, if he was. It’s not that I was expecting tear-stains on the letter or a package with his ear in it, but… I don’t know.

It was as if he wasn’t really apologizing at all, but Just getting on the record. Does that make sense? He also included a $750 check, which seems to indicate he understands his responsibilities. That’s good, but I think I’d have been happier to hear he was getting help with his mental problems.

That should be his sentence, you know: eighteen months at hard therapy. I said that in group and several people laughed as if they thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

Sometimes I get these scary pictures in my head when I try to think of the future. I see us standing in line at Manna for a free meal, or me walking into the Third Street homeless shelter with Nat in my arms, wrapped in a blanket.

When I think of that stuff I start to shake, and sometimes I cry.

I know it’s stupid; I’ve got a graduate degree in Library Science, for God’s sake, but I can’t help it. And do you know what I hold on to when those bad pictures come? What you said after you took me behind the counter in the Red Apple and sat me down. You told me that I had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, and I was going to get through this. I

know I have one friend, at least. One very true friend.

The letter was signed Love, Helen.

Ralph wiped tears from the corners of his eyes-he cried at the drop of a hat just lately, it seemed, it probably came from being so goddam tired-and read the P.S. she had crammed in at the bottom in: of the sheet and up the right-hand marg’ I’d love to have you come and visit, but men are off limits” out here for reasons I’m sure you will understand.

They even want us to be quiet about the exact location! H.

Ralph sat for a minute or two with Helen’s letter in his lap, looking out over Harris Avenue. It was the tag end of August now, still summer but the leaves of the poplars had begun to gleam silver when the wind stroked them and there was the first touch of coolness in the air. The sign in the window of the Red Apple said SCHOOL SUPPLIES OF ALL TYPES! CHECK HERE FIRST! And, out by the Newport town line, in some big old farmhouse where battered women went to try and start putting their lives back together, Helen Deepneau was washing storm windows, getting them ready for another long winter.

He slid the letter carefully back into its envelope, trying to remember how long Ed and Helen had been married. Six or seven years, he thought. Carolyn would have known for sure. Ho much courage does it take to fire UP your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? he asked himself. How much courage to go on and do that after you’ve spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, “I have to quit these peas-, peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans,”

“A lo)t,” he said, wiping at the corners of his eyes again. “A damn let, that’s what I think.”

Suddenly he wanted very badly to see Helen, to repeat what she so well remembered hearing and what he could barely remember saying: You’ll be okay, you’ll get through this, you have a lot of friends in the neighborhood.

“Take it to the bank,” Ralph said. Hearing from Helen seemed to have taken a great weight off his shoulders. He got up, put her letter in his back pocket, and started up Harris Avenue toward the picnic area on the Extension. If he was lucky, he could find Faye Chapin or Don Veazie and play a little chess.

His relief at hearing from Helen did nothing to alleviate Ralph’s insomnia; the premature waking continued, and by Labor Day he was opening his eyes around 2:45 a.m. By the tenth of September rrested again, this time along with the day when Ed Deepneau was a fifteen others-Ralph’s average night’s sleep had shrunk to roughly ad begun to feel quite a little bit like something three hours and he had just a lonely little protozoa, that’s me, on a slide under a microscope. J g-back chair, staring out at Harris he thought as he sat in the win Avenue, and wished he could laugh. es continued to grow, His list of sure-fire, never-miss folk remedies.

It had occurred to him more than once that he could write an and if, that was, he ever got enough amusing little book on the subjec g possible again.

This late summer sleep to make organized thinking matching socks each day, and his he was doing well to slide into mind kept returning to his purgatorial efforts to find a Cup-A-Soup and Helen had been beaten.

There had in the kitchen cabinet on the d e had managed at least been no return to that level since, because hight, but Ralph was terribly afraid he would arrive some sleep every n didn’t ’ there again-and perhaps places beyond there-if things improve. There were times (usually sitting in the wing-back chair at morning) when he swore he could actually feel his four-thirty in the brains draining. from the sublime to the ridiculous. The best The remedies ranged from full-color brochure advertising the wonexample of the former was a Studies in St. Paul. A fair ders of The Minnesota Institute for Sleep amulet sold example of the latter was the Magic Eye, an all-purpose and Inside through supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer no el these ewSue, the counter-girl at the Red Apple, bought o vi a presented it to him one afternoon. Ralph looked down at the an. g up at him from the medallion (which badly painted blue eye starin rted life as a poker-chip) and felt wild he believed had probably sta how managed to suppress laughter bubbling up inside him.

He some regained the safety of his own upstairs apartment it until he had y grateful. The gravity with across the street, and for that he was ver c)oking gold which Sue had given it to him-and the expensive chain she had threaded through the eyelet on top-suggested it had cost her a fair amount of money. She had regarded Ralph with something close to awe since the day the two of them had rescued Helen.

This made Ralph uncomfortable, but he had no idea what to do about it. In the meantime, he supposed it didn’t hurt to wear the medallion so she could see the shape of it under his shirt. It didn’t help him sleep, though.

After taking his statement on Ralph’s part in the Deepneaus’ domestic problems, Detective John Leydecker had pushed back his desk chair, laced his fingers together behind his not inconsiderable breadth of neck, and said that McGovern had told him Ralph suffered from insomnia.

Ralph allowed that he did. Leydecker nodded, rolled his chair forward again, clasped his hands atop the litter of paperwork beneath which the surface of his desk was mostly buried, and looked at Ralph seriously.

“Honeycomb, he said. His tone of voice reminded Ralph of McGovern’s tone when he had suggested that whiskey was the answer, and his reply now was exactly the same.

“I beg your pardon?”

“My grandfather swore by it,” Leydecker said. “Little piece of honeycomb just before bedtime. Suck the honey out of the comb, chew the wax a little-like you would a wad of gum-then spit it out. Bees secrete some sort of natural sedative when they make honey. Put you right out.”

“No kidding,” Ralph said, simultaneously believing it was utter crap and believing every word. “Where would a person get honeycomb, do you think”

“Nutra-the health food store out at the mall. Try it. By next week this time, your troubles are going to be over.”

Ralph enjoyed the experiment-the comb honey was so sweetly powerful it seemed to surprise his whole being-but he still woke at 3:10 a.m. after the first dosage, at 3:08 after the second, and at 3:07 after the third. By then the small piece of honeycomb he’d purchased was gone, and he went out to Nutra right away for another one. Its value as a sedative might be nil, but it made a wonderful snack; he He tried putting his feet in warm water. Lois bought him someonly wished he had discovered it earlier. thing called an All-Purpose Gel Wrap from a catalogue-you put it is around your neck and it was supposed to take care of your arthrit’ as well as help you sleep (it did neither for Ralph, but he had only the mildest case of arthritis to begin with). Following a chance meeting with Trigger Vachon at the counter of Nicky’s Lunch, he tried chamomile tea. “That cammy’s a beaut,” Trig told him. “You gonna sleep great, Ralphie.” And Ralph did… right up until 2:58 a.m that was.

Those were the folk cures and homeopathic remedies he tried.

Ones he didn’t included mega-vitamin packages which cost much more than Ralph could afford to spend on his fixed income, a yoga position called The Dreamer (as described by the postman, The Dreamer sounded to Ralph like a fine way to get a look at your own hemorrhoids), and marijuana. Ralph considered this last one very carefully before deciding it would very likely turn out to be an illegal version of the whiskey and the honeycomb and the chamomile tea.

Besides, if McGovern found out Ralph was smoking pot, he would never hear the end of it.

And through all these experiments a voice in his brain kept asking him if he really was going to have to get down to eye of newt and tongue of toad before he gave up and went to the doctor. That voice was not so much critical as genuinely curious. Ralph had become fairly curious himself.

On September 10th, the day of the first Friends of Life demonstration at WomanCare, Ralph decided that he would try something from the drugstore… but not the Rexall downtown where he’d gotten Carol’s prescriptions filled. They knew him down there, knew him well, and he didn’t want Paul Durgin, the Rexall druggist, to see him buying sleeping-pills. It was probably stupid-like going across town to buy rubbers-but that didn’t change the way he felt.

He had never traded at the Rite Aid across from Strawford Park, so that was where he meant to go. And if the drugstore version of ewt’s eye and toad’s tongue didn’t work, he really would go to the doctor.

Is that true, Ralph? Do you really mean it?

“I do,” he said out loud as he walked slowly down Harris Avenue in the bright September sunshine. “Be damned if I’ll put up with this much longer.”

Big talk, Ralph, the voice replied skeptically.

Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse were standing outside the park, having what looked like an animated discussion. Bill looked Up, saw him, and motioned for him to come over. Ralph went, not liking the combination of their expressions: bright-eyed interest on McGovern’s face, distress and worry on Lois’s.

“Have you heard about the thing out at the hospital?” she asked as Ralph joined them.

“It wasn’t at the hospital, and it wasn’t a ’thing,”

“McGovern said testily. “It was a demonstration-that’s what they called it, anyway and it was at WomanCare, which is actually behind the hospital.

They took a bunch of people to ’all-somewhere between six and two dozen, nobody really seems to know yet.”

“One of them was Ed Deepneau!” Lois said breathlessly, and McGovern shot her a disgusted glance. He clearly believed that handling this piece of news had been his job.

“Ed!” Ralph said, startled. “Ed’s in Fresh Harbor!”

“Wrong,” McGovern said. The battered brown fedora he was wearing today gave him a slightly rakish look, like a newspaperman S the pondered if the Panama was still in a forties crime drama. Ralph was lost or had merely been retired for the fall. “Today he’s once more j cooling his heels in our picturesque city all.”

“What exactly happened?” as little But neither of them really knew. At that point the story was more than a rumor which had spread through the park like a cont in this tagious headcold, a rumor which was of particular interest part of town because Ed Deepneau’s name was attached to it. Marie Callan had told Lois that there had been rock-throwing involved, I and that was why the demonstrators had been arrested. According to Stan Eberly, who had passed the story on to McGovern shortly before McGovern ran into Lois, someone-it might have been Ed, but it might well have been one of the others-had Maced a couple of doctors as they used the walkway between WomanCare and the back entrance to the hospital. This walkway was technically public property, and had become a favorite haunt of anti-abortion demrs that WomanCare had been protors during the seven yea onstra ’ding abortions on demand. vi The two versions of the story were so vague and conflicting that Ralph felt he could reasonably hope neither was true, that perhaps just a case of a few overenthusiastic people who’d been ant was In places like Derry, that kind rested for trespassing, or something of thing happened; stories had a way of inflating like beachballs as they were passed from mouth to mouth.

Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that this time it would turn out to be more serious, mostly because both the Bill version and the Lois version included Ed Deepneau, and Ed was not your average anti-abortion protestor. This was, after all, the guy who had pulled a clump of his wife’s hair right out of her scalp, rearranged her dental work, and fractured her cheekbone simply because he had seen her name on a petition which mentioned WomanCare. This was the guy who seemed honestly convinced that someone calling himself the Crimson King-it would be a great name for a pro wrestler, Ralph thought-was running around Derry, and that his minions were hauling their unborn victims out of town on flatbed trucks (plus a few pickups with the fetuses stuffed into barrels marked WEED-(;()).

No, he had an idea that if Ed had been there, it had probably not been just a case of someone accidentally honked on the head with a protest sign.

“Let’s go up to my house,” Lois proposed suddenly. “I’ll call Simone Castonguay. Her niece is the day receptionist at WomanCare. If anyone knows exactly what happened up there this morning, it’ll be Simone-she’ll have called Barbara.”

“I was just on my way down to the supermarket,” Ralph said. It was a lie, of course, but surely a very small one; the market stood next to the Rite Aid in the strip-mall half a block down from the park.

“Why don’t I stop in on my way back)”

“All right,” Lois said, smiling at him. “We’ll expect you in a few minutes, won’t we, Bill?”

“Yes,” McGovern said, and suddenly swept her into his arms. It was a bit of a reach, but he managed. “In the meantime, I’ll have you all to myself. Oh, Lois, how those sweet minutes will fly!”

Just inside the park, a group of young women with babies in strollers (a gossip of mothers, Ralph thought) had been watching them, probably attracted by Lois’s gestures, which had a tendency to become grandiose when she was excited. Now, as McGovern bent Lois backward, looking down at her with the counterfeit ardor of a bad actor at the end of a stage tango, one of the mothers spoke to another and both laughed. It was a shrill, unkind sound that made Ralph think of chalk squealing on blackboards and forks dragged across porcelain sinks.

Look at the funny old people, the laughter said. Look at the funny old people, pretending to be young again.

“Stop that, Bill” Lois said. She was blushing, and maybe not just because Bill was up to his usual tricks. She’d also heard the laughter from the park. McGovern undoubtedly had, too, but McGovern would believe they were laughing with him, not at him.

Sometimes, Ralph thought wearay, a slightly inflated ego could be a protection.

McGovern let her go, then removed his fedora and swept it across his waist as he made an exaggerated bow. Lois was too busy making sure that her silk blouse was still tucked into the waistband of her skirt all the way around to pay him much notice. Her blush was already fading, and Ralph saw she looked rather pale and not particularly well.

He hoped she wasn’t coming down with something.

“Come by, if you can,” she told Ralph quietly.

“I Will, Lois.”

McGovern slipped an arm around her waist, the gesture of affection both friendly and sincere this time, and they started up the street together. Watching them, Ralph was suddenly gripped by a strong sense of deja vu, as if he had seen them like that in some other place.

Or some other life. Then, just as McGovern dropped his arm, breaking the illusion, it came to him: Fred Astaire leading a dark-haired and rather plump Ginger Rogers out onto a small-town movie set, where they would dance together to some tune by Jerome Kern or maybe Irving Berlin.

That’s weird, he thought, turning back toward the little strip-mall halfway down Up-Mile Hill. That’s very weird, Ralph. Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse are about as far from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as you can get. “Ralph?” Lois called, and he turned back.

There was one intersection and about a block’s worth of distance between them now.

Cars zipped back and forth on Elizabeth Street, turning Ralph’s view of them into a moderate stutter.

“What?” he called back.

“You look better! More rested! Are you finally getting some sleep?”

“Yes!” he returned, thinking Just another small lie, in another good cause.

“Didn’t I say you’d feel better once the seasons changed? See you in a little while!”

Lois wiggled her fingers at him, and Ralph was amazed to see bright blue diagonal lines stream back from the short but carefully shaped nails. They looked like contrails.

What the fuck-?

He shut ’ his eyes tight, then popped them open again. Nothing.

Only Bill and Lois once again walking up the street toward Lois’s house, their backs to him. No bright blue diagonals in the air, nothing like thatRalph’s eyes dropped to the sidewalk and he saw that Lois and Bill were leaving tracks behind them on the concrete, tracks that looked exactly like the footprints in the old Arthur Murray learn-todance instructions you used to be able to get by mail-order.

Lois’s were gray. McGovern’s-larger but still oddly delicate-were a dark shade of olive green, They glowed on the sidewalk, and Ralph, who was standing on the far side of Elizabeth Street with his jaw hanging almost down to his breastbone, suddenly realized he could see little ribbands of colored smoke rising from them. Or perhaps it was steam.

A city bus bound for Old Cape snored by, momentarily blocking his view, and when it passed the tracks were gone. There was nothing on the sidewalk but a message chalked inside a fading pink heart: SAM + DEANIE 4-EVER.

Those tracks are not gone, Ralph. they were never there in the first Place. You know that, don’t you?

Yes, he knew. The idea that Bill and Lois looked like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had gotten into his head; progressing from that idea to a hallucination of phantom footprints leading up the sidewalk like tracks in an Arthur Murray dance-diagram had a certain bizarre log,c. Still, it was scary. His heart was beating too fast, and when he own, he saw those marks trailing up from Lois’s waving fingers like bright blue jet contrails. don’t, I’ve got to get more sleep, Ralph thought. I’ve got to. If I I’m apt to start seeing anything.

“That’s right,” he muttered under his breath as he turned toward the drugstore again. “Anything at all.”

Ten minutes later, Ralph was standing at the front of the Rite Aid Pharmacy and looking at a sign which hung on chains from the ceiling.

FEEL BETTER AT RITE AID! it said, seeming to suggest that feeling better was a goal attainable by any reasonable, hard-working consumer.

Ralph had his doubts about that.

This, Ralph decided, was retail drug-dealing on a grand scale-it made the Rexall where he usually traded look like a tenement apartment by comparison. The fluorescent-lit aisles seemed as long as bowling alleys and displayed everything from toaster ovens to jigsaw puzzles.

After a little study, Ralph decided Aisle 3 contained most of the patent medicines and was probably his best bet. He made his way slowly through the area marked STOMACH REMEDIES, sojourned briefly in the kingdom of ANALGESICS, and quickly crossed the land of LAXATIVES. And there, between LAXATIVES and DECONGESTANTS, he stopped.

This is it, folks-my last shot. After this there’s only Dr. Litchfield, and if he suggests chewing honeycomb or drinking chamomile tea, I’ll probably snap and it’ll take both the nurses and the receptionist to pull me off him. closed his eyes for a moment to try and calm down.

SLEEPING AIDS, the sign over this section of Aisle 3 read.

Ralph, never much of a patent-medicine user (he would otherwise have arrived here much sooner, no doubt), didn’t know exactly what he’d expected, but it surely had not been this wild, almost indecent profusion of products. His eye slipped across the boxes (the majority were a soothing blue), reading the names. Most seemed strange and slightly ominous: Compoz, Nytol, Sleepinal, Z-Power, Sominex, Sleepinex, Drow-Zee. There was even a generic brand.

You have to be kidding, he thought. None of these things are going to work for you. It’s time to quit fucking around, don’t you know that? When you start to see colored footprints on the sidewalk, it is time to quit fucking around and go to the doctor, But on the other hand he heard Dr. Litchfield, heard him so clearly it was as if a tape recorder had turned on in the middle of his head: Your wife is suffering from tension headaches, Ralph-unpleasant and painful, but not life-threatening. I think we can take care of the problem, Unpleasant and painful, but not life-threatening-yes, right, that was what the man had said. And then he had reached for his prescription pad and written out the order for the first bunch of useless pills while the tiny clump of alien cells in Carolyn’s head continued to send out its microbursts of destruction, and maybe Dr. Jamal had been right, maybe it was too late even then, but maybe jamal was full of shit, maybe jamal was just a stranger in a strange land, trying to get along, trying not to make waves. Maybe this and maybe that; Ralph didn’t know for sure and never would. All he really knew was that Litchfield hadn’t been around when the final two tasks of their marriage had been set before them: her job to die, his job to watch her do it.

Is that what I want to do? Go to Litchfield and watch him reach for his prescription pad again?

Maybe this time it would work, he argued to-with-himself. At ’me his hand stole out, seemingly Of its own volition, and the same time took a box of Sleepinex from the shelf. He turned it over, held it the slightly away from his eyes so he could read the small print on its side panel, and ran his eye slowly down the list of active ingredients.

He had no idea of how to pronounce most of the jawbreaking words, and even less of what they were or how they were supposed to help you sleep.

Yes, he answered the voice. Maybe this time it would work. But maybe the real answer would be just to find another doc “Help you?” a voice asked from directly behind Ralph’s shoulder.

He was in the act of returning the box of Sleepinex to its place, meaning to take something that sounded a little less like a sinister drug in a Robin Cook novel, when the voice spoke. Ralph jumped and knocked a dozen assorted boxes of synthetic sleep onto the floor.

“oh, sorry-clumsy!” Ralph said, and looked over his shoulder.

“Not at all. My fault entirely.” And before Ralph could do more than pick up two boxes of Sleepinex and one box of Drow-Zee gel capsules, the man in the white smock who had spoken to him had swept up the rest and was redistributing them with the speed of a riverboat gambler dealing a hand of poker. According to the gold ID bar pinned to his breast, this was JOE WYZER, RITE AID PHARMACIST. with a friendly grin, “let’s start over. Can I help you? You look a “Now,” Wyzer said, dusting off his hands and turning to Ralph little lost.”

Ralph’s initial response-annoyance at being disturbed while having a deep and meaningful conversation with himself-was being replaced with guarded interest. “Well, I don’t know,” he said, and gestured to the array of sleeping potions. “Do any of these actually work?”

Wyzer’s grin widened. He was a tall, middle-aged man with fair skin and thinning brown hair which he parted in the middle. He stuck out his hand, and Ralph had barely begun the polite reciprocatory gesture when his own hand was swallowed. “I’m Joe,” the pharmacist said, and tapped the gold tunic-pin with his free hand.

“I used to be Joe Wyze, but now I’m older and Wyzer.”

This was almost certainly an ancient joke, but it had lost none of its savor for Joe Wyzer, who laughed uproariously. Ralph smiled a polite little smile with just the smallest touch of anxiety around its edges. The hand which had enfolded his was clearly a strong one, and he was afraid if the pharmacist squeezed hard, his hand might finish the day in a cast. He found himself wishing, at least momentarily, that he’d taken his problem to Paul Durgin downtown after all. Then Wyzer gave his hand two energetic pumps and let go.

“I’m Ralph Roberts. Nice to meet you, Mr. Wyzer.”

“Mutual. Now, concerning the efficacy of these fine products.

Let me answer your question with one of my own, to wit, does a bear shit in a telephone booth?”

Ralph burst out laughing. “Rarely, I’d think,” he said when he could Say anything again.

“Correct. And I rest my case.” Wyzer glanced at the sleeping aids, a wall done in shades of blue. “Thank God I’m a pharmacist and not a salesman, Mr. Roberts; I’d starve trying to peddle stuff door to door.

Are you an insomniac? I’m asking partly because you’re investigating the sleeping aids, but mostly because you have an hollow-eyed look.”

Ralph said, “Mr. Wyzer, I’d be the happiest man on earth if I could get five hours’ sleep some night, and I’d settle for four.”

“How long’s it been going on, Mr. Roberts? Or do you prefer Ralph?”

“Ralph’s fine,”

“Good. And I’m Joe.”

“It started in April, I think. A month or six weeks after my wife died, anyway.”

“Gee, I’m sorry to hear you lost your wife. My sympathies.”

“Thank you,” Ralph said, then repeated the old formula. “I miss her a lot, but I was glad when her suffering was over.”

“Except now you’re suffering. For… let’s see.” Wyzer counted quickly on his big fingers. “Going on half a year now.”

Ralph suddenly found himself fascinated by those fingers. No jet contrails this time, but the tip of each one appeared to be wrapped in a bright silvery haze, like tinfoil you could somehow look right through. He suddenly found himself thinking of Carolyn again, and remembering the phantom smells she had sometimes complained of last fall-cloves, sewage, burning ham. Maybe this was the male equivalent, and the onset of his own brain tumor had been signaled not by headaches but by insomnia.

Self-diagnosis is a fool’s game, Ralph, so why don’t you Just quit it?

He moved his eyes resolutely back to Wyzer’s big, pleasant face.

No silvery haze there; not so much as a hint of a haze. He was almost sure of it.

“Going on half a year. It seems that’s right,” he said. “Going longer. A lot longer, actually.”

Any noticeable pattern? There usually is. I mean, do you toss and turn before you go to sleep, or 11

“I’m a premature waker.”

Wyzer’s eyebrows went up. “And read a book or three about the problem too, I deduce.” If Litchfield had made a remark of this sort, Ralph would have read condescension into it. From Joe Wyzer he sensed not condescension but genuine admiration.

“I read what the library had, but there wasn’t much, and none of it has helped much.” Ralph paused, then added: “The truth is, none of it has helped at all.”

“Well, let me tell you what I know on the subject, and you just kind of flop your hand when I start heading into territory you’ve already explored. Who’s your doctor, by the way?”

“Litchfield.

“Uh-huh. And you usually trade at… where? The People’s Drug out at the mall? The Rexall downtown?”

“The Rexall.”

“You’re incognito today, I take it.”

Ralph blushed… then grinned. “Yeah, something like that.”

“Uh-huh. And I don’t need to ask if you’ve been to see Litchfield about your problem, do lo If you had, you wouldn’t be exploring the wonderful world of patent medicines.”

“Is that what these are? Patent medicines?”

“Put it this way-I’d feel a helluva lot more comfortable selling I wagon with fancy yellow most of this crap off the back of a big red wheels,”

Ralph laughed, and the bright silvery cloud which had been gathering in front of Joe Wyzer’s tunic blew away when he did.

“That kind of salesmanship I might be able to get into,” Wyzer said with a misty little grin. “I’d get a sweet little honeybun to do call her Little Egypt, like in that old Coasters song… she’d be my warm-up act. Plus I’d have a banjo-picker. In my experience, there’s nothing like a good dose of banjo music to put people in a buying mood.”

Wyzer looked off past the laxatives and analgesics, enjoying this gaudy daydream. Then he looked back at Ralph again.

“For a premature waker like you, Ralph, this stuff is entirely useless. You’d be better off with a shot of booze or one of those wave machines they sell through the catalogues, and looking at you, I’d guess you probably tried em both.”

“Yes.”

in a sequined a dance’ d bra and a Pair of harem pants “Along with about two dozen other oldtimer-tested home remedies.”

Ralph laughed again. He was coming to like this guy a lot. “Try four dozen and you’ll be in the ballpark.”

,well, you’re an industrious bugger, I’ll give you that,” Wyzer said, and waved a hand at the blue boxes. “These things are nothing but antihistamines. Essentially they’re trading on a side-effect antihistamines make people sleepy. Check out a box of Comtrex or Benadryl down there in Decongestants and it’ll say you shouldn’t take it if you’re going to be driving or operating heavy machinery.

For people who suffer from occasional sleeplessness, a Sominex every now and then may work. It gives them a nudge. But they wouldn’t work for you in any case, because your problem isn’t getting to sleep, it’s staying asleep. correct?”

“Correct.”

“Can I ask you a delicate question?”

“Sure. I guess so.

“Do you have a problem with Dr. Litchfield regarding this Maybe have some doubts about his ability to understand how really pissy your insomnia is making you feel?”

“Yes,” Ralph said gratefully. “Do you think I should go see him?

Try to explain that to him so he’ll understand?” To this question Wyzer would of course respond in the affirmative, and Ralph would finally make the call. And it would bel should be Litchfield-he saw that now. It was madness to think of hooking up with a new doctor at his age.

Can you tell Dr. Litchfield you’re seeing things? Can you tell him about the blue marks you saw shooting up from the tips of Lois Chasse’s fingers? The footprints on the sidewalk, like the footprints in an Arthur Murray dance-diagram? The silvery stuff around the tips of Joe Wyzer’s fingers? Are you really going to tell Litchfield that stuff?

And if you’re of, If you can’t, by are you going to see hill, in first Place, no matter what this guy recommends?

Wyzer, however, surprised him by going in an entirely different direction. “Are you still dreaming?”

“Yes. Quite a lot, in fact, considering that I’m down to about three hours’ sleep a night.”

“Are they coherent dreams-dreams that consist of perceivable events and have some kind of narrative flow, no matter how kookoo-or are they just jumbled images?”

Ralph remembered a dream he’d had the night before. He and Helen Deepneau and Bill McGovern had been having a three-sided game of Frisbee in the middle of Harris Avenue. Helen had a pair of huge, clunky saddle shoes on her feet; McGovern was wearing a sweatshirt with a vodka bottle on it. ABSOLUTELY THE BEST, the sweatshirt proclaimed.

The Frisbee had been bright red with fluorescent green stripes.

Then Rosalie the dog had shown up, The faded blue bandanna someone had hung around her neck was flapping as she limped toward them, All at once she had leaped into the air, snatched the Frisbee, and gone running off with it in her mouth, Ralph wanted to give chase, but McGovern said, Really, Ralph, we’re getting a hole case of them for Christmas. Ralph turned to him, intending to point out that Christmas was over three months away and to ask what the hell they were going to do if they wanted to play Frisbee between then and now, but before he could, the dream had either ended or gone on to some other, less vivid, mind-movie.

“If I understand what you’re saying,” Ralph replied, “my dreams are coherent.”

“Good, I also want to know if they’re lucid dreams. Lucid dreaills fulfill two requirements. First, you know you’re dreaming.

Second, you can often influence the course the dream takes-you’re more than just a Passive observer.”

Ralph nodded. “Sure, I have those, too.

In fact, I seem to have a lot of them lately. I was just thinking of one I had last night. In it this stray dog I see on the street from time to time ran off with a Frisbee some friends of mine and I were playing with. I was mad that she broke up the game, and I tried to make her drop the Frisbee just by sending her the thought. Sort of a telepathic command, you know?”

He uttered a small, embarrassed chuckle, but Wyzer only nodded matter-of-factly. “Did it work?”

“Not this time,” Ralph said, “but I think I have made that sort of thing work in other dreams. Only I can’t be sure, because most of the dreams I have seem to fade away almost as soon as I wake up.”

“That’s the case with everyone,” Wyzer said. “The brain treats most dreams as disposable matter, storing them in extreme shortterm memory.”

“You know a lot about this, don’t you?”

“Insomnia interests me very much. I did two research papers on the link between dreams and sleep disorders when I was in college.”

Wyzer glanced at his watch. “It’s my break-time. Would you like to have a cup of coffee and a piece of apple pie with me? There’s a place ’just two doors down, and the pie is fantastic.”

“Sounds good, but maybe I’ll settle for a n orange soda. I’ve been trying to cut down on my coffee intake.”

“Understandable but completely useless,” Wyzer said cheerfully.

“Caffeine is not your problem, Ralph.”

“No, I suppose not… but what is?” To this point Ralph had been quite successful at keeping the misery out of his voice, but now it crept back in.

Wyzer clapped him on the shoulder and looked at him kindly. “That,” he said, “is what we’re going to talk about. Come on.”

CHAPTER 5

“Think of it this way,” Wyzer recommenced five minutes later. They Sun Down. were in a New Age-y sort of diner called DawyhBorebaekli,eyed in oldThe place was a little too ferny for Ralph, fashioned diners that gleamed with chrome and smelled of grease, but the pie was good, and while the coffee was not up to Lois Chasse’s standards-Lois made the best cup he had ever tasted-it was hat and strong.

“Which way is that?” Ralph asked. “There are certain things mankind-womankind, too-keel)s striving for. Not the stuff that gets written up in the history and civics books, either, at least for the most part; I’m talking fundlmentals here. A roof to keep the rain out. Three hots and a cot. A decent sex-life. Healthy bowels. But maybe the most fundamental my friend.

Because there’s something of all is what you’ve been missing, really nothing in the world that can measure up to a good night’s sleep, is there?”

“Boy, you got that right,” Ralph said.

Wyzer nodded. “Sleep is the overlooked hero and the poor man’s physician. Shakespeare said it’s the thread that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, Napoleon called it the blessed end of night, and Winston Churchill-one of the great insomniacs of the twentieth century-said it was the only relief he ever got from his deep depressions. I put all that stuff in my papers, but what all the quotes come down to is what I just said: nothing in the whole wide world can measure up to a good night’s sleep.”

“You’ve had the problem yourself, haven) t you?” Ralph asked suddenly. “Is that why you… well… why you’re taking me under your wing?”

Joe Wyzer grinned. “Is that what I’m doing?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Hey, I can live with that. The answer is yes. I’ve suffered from slow-sleep insomnia ever since I was thirteen. It’s why I ended up doing not just one research paper on the subject but two.”

“How are you doing with it these days?”

Wyzer shrugged. “So far it’s been a pretty good year. Not the best, but I’ll take it. For a couple of years in my early twenties, the problem was acute-I’d go to bed at ten, fall asleep around four, get up at seven, and drag myself through the day feeling like a bit player in someone else’s nightmare.”

This was so familiar to Ralph that his back and upper arms broke out in goosebumps.

“Here comes the most important thing I can tell you, Ralph, so listen up.”

“I am.”

“The thing you have to h"ing onto is that you’re still basically okay, even though you feel like shit a lot of the time. All sleep is not created equal, you see-there’s good sleep and bad sleep. If you’re still having coherent dreams, and, maybe even nightmare important, luc,

–dreams, you’re still having good sleep. And because of that, a scrip 0 lo for sleeping pills could be about the worst thing in the world. for you right now. And I know Litchfield.

He’s a nice enough guy, but he loves that prescription pad.”

“Say it twice,” Ralph told him, thinking of Carolyn.

“If you tell Litchfield what you told me while we were walking down here, he’s going to prescribe a benzodiazepine-probably Dalmane or Restoril, maybe Halcion or even Valium. You’ll sleep, but YOu’ll pay a price. Benzodiazepines are habit-forming, they’re respiratory depressants, and worst of all, for guys like you and me, they significantly reduce REM sleep. Dreaming sleep, in other words.

“How’s your pie? I only ask because you’ve hardly touched it.”

Ralph took a big bite and swallowed it without tasting, “Good,” he said. “Now tell me why you have to have dreams to make your sleep good sleep.”

“If I could answer that, I’d retire from the Pill-pushing business and go into business as a sleep guru.” Wyzer had finished his pie and was now using the pad of his index finger to pick up the larger crumbs left on his plate. “REM stands for rapid eye movement, of course, and the terms REM sleep and dreaming sleep have become synonymous in the public mind, but nobody really knows just how the eye movements of sleepers relate to the dreams they are having.

It seems unlikely that the eye movements indicate ’watching’ or I tracking,” because sleep researchers see a lot of it even in dreams test subjects later describe as fairly static-dreams of conversations, for instance, like the one we’re having now. Similarly, no one really knows why there seems to be a clear relationship between lucid, coherent dreams and overall mental health: the more dreams of thit sort a person has, the better off he seems to be, the less he has, the worse.

There’s a real scale there.”

“Mental health’s a pretty general phrase", Ralph said skeptically.

“Yeah,” Wyzer grinned. “Makes me think of a bumper sticker I saw a few years back-SupPORT MENTAL HEALTH OR I’ll KILL YOU.

Anyway, we’re talking about some basic, measurable components: cognitive ability, problem-solving ability, by both inductive and deductive methods, ability to grasp relationships, memory-I, “My memory is lousy these days,” Ralph said. He was thinking of his inability to remember the number of the cinema complex and his long hunt through the kitchen cabinet for the last Cup-A-Soup envelope.

“Yeah, you’re probably suffering some short-term memory loss, but your fly is zipped, your shirt is on right-side out, and I bet if I asked you what your middle name is, you could tell me. I’m not belittling your problem-I’d be the last person in the world to do that-but I am asking you to change your point of view for a minute or two. To think of all the areas in your life where you’re still perfectly functional.”

how well you’re functioning, like a gas gauge in a car, or do they “All right. These lucid and coherent dreams-do they just indicate actually help you function?”

“No one knows for sure, but the most likely answer is a little of both. In the late fifties, around the time the doctors were phasing out the barbiturates-the last really popular one was a fun drug called Thalidomide-a few scientists even tried to suggest that the good steep we’ve been beating our gums about and dreams aren’t related.”

“And?”

“The tests don’t support the hypothesis. People who stop dreaming e)r suffer from constant dream interruptions have all sorts of problems, including loss of cognitive ability and emotional stability.

They also start to suffer perceptual problems like hyper-reality.”

Beyond Wyzer, at the far end of the counter, sat a fellow reading a copy of the Derry News. Only his hands and the top of his head were visible. He was wearing a rather ostentatious pinky-ring on his left hand. The headline at the top of the front page read ABORTION RIGHTS ADVOCATE AGREESTO SPEAK IN DERRY NEXT MONTH. Below it, in slightly smaller type, was a subhead: Pro-Life Groups Promise Organized Protests.

In the center of the page was a color picture of Susan Day, one that did her much more justice than the flat photographs on the poster he had seen in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. In those she had looked ordinary, perhaps even a bit sinister; in this one she was radiant. Her long, honey-blonde hair had been pulled back from her face. Her eyes were dark, intelligent, arresting. Hamilton Davenport’s pessimism had been misplaced, it seemed. Susan Day was coming after all.

Then Ralph saw something which made him forget all about Ham Davenport and Susan Day.

A gray-blue aura had begun to gather around the hands of the man reading the newspaper, and around the Just-visible crown of his head.

It seemed particularly bright around the onyx pinky-ring he wore.

It did not obscure but seemed to clarify, turning the ringstone into something that looked like an asteroid in a really realistic science-fiction movie “What did you say, Ralph?”

“Hmm?” Ralph drew his gaze away from the newspaper reader’s pinky-ring

???? with an effort. "I don’t know was talking? I guess I asked you what

???? hyper-reality is.”

???? "Heightened sensory awareness,” Wyzer said. "Like taking an LSD trip

???? without having to ingest any chemicals.”

“Oh,” Ralph said, watching as the bright gray-blue aura began to form complicated runic patterns on the nail of the finger Wyzer was using to mash up crumbs. At first they looked like letters written in frost… then sentences written in fog… then odd, gasping faces.

He blinked and they were gone.

“Ralph? You still there?” remedies don’t work “Sure, you bet.

But listen, Joe-if the folk drugs and the stuff in Aisle 3 doesn’t work and the prescription could actually make things worse instead of better, what does that leave? Nothing, right?”

“You going to eat the rest of that?” Wyzer said, pointing at Ralph’s plate, Chilly gray-blue light drifted off the tip of his finger like Arabic letters written in dry-ice vapor.

“Nope. I’m full. Be my guest.”

Wyzer pulled Ralph’s plate to him. “Don’t give up so fast,” he said.

“I want you to come back to the pharm with me so I can give you a couple of business cards. My advice, as your friendly neighborhood drug-pusher, is that you give these guys a try.”

“What guys?” Ralph watched, fascinated, as Wyzer opened his mouth to receive the last bite of pie. Each of his teeth was lit with a fierce gray glow. The fillings in his molars glowed like tiny suns.

The fragments of crust and apple filling on his tongue crawled with

(lucid Ralph lucid)

light. Then Wyzer closed his mouth to chew, and the glow was gone.

(I James Roy Hong and Anthony Forbes. Hong is an acupuncturist with offices on Kansas Street. Forbes is a hypnotist with a place over on the east side-Hesser Street, I think. And before you yell quack-” I’m not going to yell quack,” Ralph said quietly. His hand rose to touch the Magic Eye, which he was still wearing under his shirt.

“Believe me, I’m not.”

“Okay, good. My advice is that you try Hong first. The needles look scary, but they only hurt a little, and he’s got something going there.

I don’t know what the hell it is or how it works, but I do know that when I went through a bad patch two winters ago, he helped me a lot. Forbes is also good-so I’ve heard-but Hong’s my pick. He’s busy as hell, but I might be able to help you them.

What do you say?”

Ralph saw a bright gray glow, no thicker than a thread, slip from the corner of Wyzer’s eye and slide down his cheek like a supernatural tear. It decided him. “I say let’s go.”

Wyzer clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man! Let’s pay LIP and get out of here.” He produced a quarter. “Flip you for the check?”

Halfway back to the pharmacy, Wyzer stopped to look at a poster which had been put up in the window of an empty storefront between the Rite Aid and the diner. Ralph only glanced at it. He had seen it before, in the window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes.

“Wanted for murder,” Wyzer marvelled. “People have lost all goddam sense of perspective, do you know it?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. “If we had tails, I think most of us would spend all day chasing them and trying to bite them off.”

“The poster’s bad enough,” Wyzer said this!” He was pointing at something beside the poster, something which had been written in the dirt which coated the outside of the empty display window. Ralph leaned close to read the short message. KILL THIS CUNT, it said.

Below the words was an arrow pointing at the left hand photo of Susan Day.

“Jesus,” Ralph said quietly.

“Yeah,” Wyzer agreed. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped away the message, leaving in Place of the words a bright silvery fan-shape which Ralph knew only he could see.

“but look at He followed Wyzer to the rear of the pharmacy and stood in the doorway of an office not much bigger than a public-toilet cubicle while Wyzer sat on the only piece of furniture-a high stool that would have looked at home in Ebenezer Scrooge’s counting-house and phoned the office of James Roy Heng, acupuncturist. Wyzer pushed the phone’s speaker button so Ralph could follow the conversation.

Hong’s receptionist (someone named Audra, who seemed to know Wyzer on a basis a good deal warmer than a merely professional one) at first said Dr. Hong could not possibly see a new patient until after Thanksgiving. Ralph’s shoulders slumped. Wyzer raised an open palm in his direction-wait a minute, Ralph-and then proceeded to talk Audra into finding (mr perhaps creating) an opening for Ralph in early october. That was almost a month away, but a lot better than Thanksgiving.

“Thanks, Audra,” Wyzer said. “We still on for dinner tonight?”

“Yes,” she said. “Now turn off the damned speaker, Joe-I have something that’s for your ears only.”

Wyzer did it, listened, laughed until tears-to Ralph they looked like gorgeous liquid pearls-stood in his eyes. Then he smooched twice into the phone and hung up.

“You’re all set,” he said, handing Ralph a small white card with the time and date of the appointment written on the back. “October fourth, not great, but really the best she could do. Audra’s good people,”

“It’s fine.”

“Here’s Anthony Forbes’s card, in case you want to call him in the interim.”

“Thanks,” Ralph said, taking the second card. “I owe you.”

“The only thing you owe Me is a return visit SO I can find out how it went. I’m concerned, There are doctors who won’t prescribe anything for insomnia, you know. They like to say that no one ever died from lack of sleep, but I’m here to tell you that’s crap.”

Ralph supposed this news should have frightened him, but he felt pretty steady, at least for the time being. The auras had gone away-the bright gray gleams in Wyzer’s eyes as he’d laughed at whatever Hong’s receptionist had said had been the last. He was starting to think they had just been a mental fugue brought on by a combination of extreme tiredness and Wyzer’s mention of hyper-reality. There was another reason for feeling good-he now had an appointment with a man who had helped this man through a similar bad patch.

Ralph thought he’d let Hong stick needles into him until he looked like a porcupine if the treatment allowed him to sleep until the sun came up.

And there was a third thing: the gray auras hadn’t actually been scary. They had been sort of… interesting.

“"People die from lack of sleep all the time,” Wyzer was saying, although the medical examiner usually ends up writing suicide on the cause-of-death line, rather than insomnia. Insomnia and alcoholism have a lot in common, but the major thing is this: they’re both diseases of the heart and mind, and when they’re allowed to run their course they usually gut the spirit long before they’re able to destroy the body. So yeah-people do die from lack of sleep. This is a dangerous time for you, and you have to take care of yourself.

If you start to feel really wonky, call Litchfield Do you hear me?

Don’t stand on ceremony. Ralph grimaced. “I think I’d be more apt to call you.”

Wyzer nodded as if he had absolutely expected this. “The number under Hong’s is mine,” he said.

Surprised, Ralph looked down at the card again. There was a second number there, marked J.W.

Wyzer said. “Really. You won’t disturb my wife; we’ve been divorced since 1983.”

Ralph tried to speak and found he couldn’t. All that came out was a choked, meaningless little sound. He swallowed hard, trying to clear the obstruction in his throat.

Wyzer saw he was struggling and clapped him on the back. “No bawling in the store, Ralph-it scares away the big spenders. You want a Kleenex?”

“No, I’m okay.” His voice was slightly watery, but audible and mostly under control.

Wyzer cast a critical eye on him. “Not yet, but you will be.”

Wyzer’s big hand swallowed Ralph’s once more, and this time Ralph didn’t worry about it. “For the time being, try to relax. And remember to be grateful for the sleep you do get.”

“Okay. Thanks again.”

Wyzer nodded and walked back to the prescription counter.

Ralph walked back down Aisle 3, turned left at the formidable condom display, and went out through a door with THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT RITE AID decaled above the push-bar. At first he thought there was nothing unusual about the fierce brightness that made him squint his eyes almost shut-it was midday, after all, and perhaps the drugstore had been a little darker than he had realized.

Then he opened his eyes wide again, and his breath came to a dead stop in his throat.

A look of thunderstruck amazement spread over his face. It was the expression an explorer might wear when, after pushing his way through just one more nondescript tangle of bushes, he finds himself looking at some fabulous lost city or brain-busting geological feature-a cliff of diamonds, perhaps, or a spiral waterfall, Ralph shrank back against the blue mailbox standing to one side of the drugstore’s entrance, still not breathing, his eyes shuttling jerkily from left to right as the brain behind them tried to understand the wonderful and terrible news it was receiving.

The auras were back, but that was a little like saying Hawaii was a place where you didn’t have to wear your overcoat. This time the light was everywhere, fierce and flowing, strange and beautiful.

Ralph had had only one experience in his entire life which was remotely similar to this. During the summer of 1941, the year he’d turned eighteen, he’d been riding his thumb from Derry to his uncle’s place in Poughkeepsie, New York, a distance of about four hundred miles. An early-evening thunderstorm at the end of his second day on the road had sent him scurrying for the nearest available shelter-a decrepit barn swaying drunkenly at the end of a long hayfield. He had spent more of that day walking than riding, and had fallen soundly asleep in one of the barn’s long-abandoned horse stalls even before the thunder had stopped blasting the sky overhead.

He’d awakened at mid-morning the next day after a solid fourteen hours of sleep and had looked around in utter wonder, not even sure, in those first few moments, where he was. He only knew it was some dark, sweet-smelling place, and that the world above and on all sides of him had been split open with brilliant seams of light.

Then he had remembered taking shelter in the barn, and it came to him that this strange vision had been caused by the cracks in the barn’s walls and roof combined with the bright summer sunlight… only that, and nothing more. Yet he’d sat there in mute wonder for at least five minutes just the same, a wide-eyed teenage boy with hay in his hair and his arms dusted with chaff; he sat there looking up at the tidal gold of dust-motes spinning lazily in the slanting, cross hatching rays of the sun. He remembered thinking it had been like being in church.

This was that experience to the tenth power. And the hell of it was simply this: he could not describe exactly what had happened, and how the world had changed, to make it so wonderful. Things and people, particularly the people, had auras, yes, but that was only where this amazing phenomenon began. Things had never been so brilliant, so utterly and completely there. The cars, the telephone poles, the shopping carts in the Kart Korral in front of the supermarket, the frame apartment buildings across the street-all these things seemed to pop out at him like 3-D images in an old film. All at once this dingy little strip-mall on Witcham Street had become wonderland, and although Ralph was looking right at it, he was not sure what he was looking at, only that it was rich and gorgeous and fabulously strange.

The only things he could isolate were the auras surrounding the people going in and out of stores, stowing packages in their trunks, or getting in their cars and driving away. Some of these auras were brighter than others, but even the dimmest were a hundred times brighter than his first glimpses of the phenomenon.

But it’s what Wyzer was talking about, no doubt of that. It’s hyperreality, and what you’re looking at is no more there than the hallucinations of people who are under the influence of LSD. What you’re seeing is just another symptom of your insomnia, no more and no less.

Look at it, Ralph, and marvel over it as much as you want-it I’s marvelous-just don’t believe it.

He didn’t need to tell himself to marvel, however-there were marvels everywhere. A bakery truck was backing out of a slot in front of Day Break, Sun Down, and a bright maroon substance-it was almost the color of dried blood-came from its tailpipe. It was neither smoke nor vapor but had some of the characteristics of each.

This brightness rose in gradually attenuating spikes, like the lines of an EEG readout. Ralph looked down at the pavement and saw the tread of the van’s tires printed on the concrete in that same maroon shade. The van speeded up as it left the parking lot, and the ghostly I graph-trail emerging with its exhaust turned the bright red of arterial blood as it did.

There were similar oddities everywhere, phenomena which intersected in slanting paths and made Ralph think again of how the light had come slanting through the cracks in the roof and walls of that long-ago barn. But the real wonder was the people, and it was around them that the auras seemed most clearly defined and real, A bagboy came out of the supermarket, pushing a cartload of groceries and walking in a nimbus of such brilliant white that it was like a travelling spotlight.

The aura of the woman beside him was dingy by comparison, the gray-green of cheese which has begun to mould.

A young girl called to the bagboy from the open window of a Subaru and waved; her left hand left bright contrails, as pink as cotton candy, in the air as it moved. They began to fade almost as soon as they appeared. The bagboy grinned and waved back; his hand left a fantail of yellowish-white behind. To Ralph it looked like the fill of a tropical fish. This also began to fade, but more slowly.

Ralph’s fear at this confused, shining vision was considerable, but for the time being, at least, fear had taken a back seat to wonder, awe, and simple amazement. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen in his life. But it’s not real he cautioned himself.

Remember that, Ralph. He promised himself he would try, but for the time being that cautioning voice seemed very far away.

Now he noticed something else: there was a line of that lucid brightness emerging from the head of every person he could see. it trailed upward like a ribbon of bunting or brightly colored crepe paper until it attenuated and disappeared. For some people the point of disappearance was five feet above the head; for others it was ten or fifteen. In most cases the color of the bright, ascending line matched the rest of the aura-bright white for the bagboy, gray-green in the case of the female customer beside him, for instance but there were some striking exceptions. Ralph saw a rust-red line rising from a middle-aged man who was striding along in the middle of a dark blue aura, and a woman with a light gray aura whose ascending line was an amazing (and slightly alarming) shade of magenta. In some cases-two or three, not a lot-the rising lines were almost black.

Ralph didn’t like those, and he noticed that the people to whom these “balloon-strings” (they were named just that simply and quickly in his mind) belonged invariably looked unwell.

Of course they do. The balloon-strings are an indicator of health… and ill-health, in some cases. Like the Kirlian auras people were so fascinated with back in the late sixties and early seventies.

Ralph, another voice warned, you are not really seeing these things, okay? I mean, I hate to be a b*re, butBut wasn’t it at least possible that the phenomenon was real? That his persistent insomnia, coupled with the stabilizing influence of his lucid, coherent dreams, had afforded him a glimpse of a fabulous dimension just beyond the reach of ordinary perception?

Quit it, galpb, and right now. You have to do better than that, or you’ll end up in the same boat as poor old Ed Deepneau.

Thinking of Ed kicked off some association-something he’d said on the day he’d been arrested for beating his wife-but before Ralph could isolate it, a voice spoke almost at his left elbow.

“Mom? Mommy? Can we get the Honey Nut Cheerios again?”

“We’ll see once we get inside, lion.”

A young woman and a little boy passed in front of him, walking hand-in-hand. It was the boy, who looked to be four or five, who had spoken. His mother was walking in an envelope of almost blinding white. The “balloon-string” rising out of her blonde hair was also white and very wide-more like the ribbon on a fancy gift box than a string. It rose to a height of at least twenty feet and floated out slightly behind her as she walked. It made Ralph think of things bridal-trains, veils, gauzy billows of skirt.

Her son’s aura was a healthy dark blue verging on violet, and as the two of them walked past, Ralph saw a fascinating thing. Tendrils of aura were also rising from their clasped hands: white from the woman, dark blue from the boy. They twined in a pigtail as they rose, faded, and disappeared.

Mother-and-son, mother-and-son, Ralph thought. There was something perfectly, simply symbolic about those hands, which were wrapped around each other like woodbine climbing a garden stake.

Looking at them made his heart rejoice-corny, but it was exactly how he felt. Mother-and-son, white-and-blue, mother-and"Mom, what’s that man looking at?”

The blonde woman’s glance at Ralph was brief, but he saw the way her lips thinned down and pressed together before she turned away.

More important, he saw the brilliant aura which surrounded her suddenly darken, close in, and pick up spiraling tints of dark red.

That’s the color of fright, Ralph thought. Or maybe anger.

“I don’t know, Tim. Come on, stop dawdling.” She began to move him along faster, her ponytailed hair flipping back and forth and leaving small fans of gray-tinged-with-red in the air. To Ralph they looked like the arcs that wipers sometimes left on dirty windshields.

“Hey, Mom, get a life! Quit pulling! “The little boy had to trot in order to keep up.

That’s my fault, ralph thought, and an image of how he must have looked to the young mother flashed into his mind: old guy, tired face, big purplish pouches under his eyes. He’s standinghunching-by the mailbox outside the Rite Aid Pharmacy, staring at her and her little boy as if they were the most remarkable things in the world.

Which you just about are, ma’am, if you but knew it.

To her he must have looked like the biggest pervo of all time. He had to get rid of this. Real or hallucination, it didn’t matter-he had to make it quit. If he didn’t, somebody was going to call either the cops or the men with the butterfly nets. For all he knew, the pretty mother could be making the bank of pay-phones just inside the market’s main doors her first stop.

He was just asking himself how one thought away something which was all in one’s mind to begin with when he realized it had already happened. Psychic phenomenon or sensory hallucination, it had simply disappeared while he’d been thinking about how awful he must have looked to the pretty young mother. The day had gone back to its previous Indian summery brilliance, which was wonderful but still a long way from that pellucid, all-pervading glow. The people crisscrossing the parking lot of the strip-mall were just people again: no auras, no balloon-strings, no fireworks. just people on their way to buy groceries in the Shop in Save, or to pick up their last batch of summer pictures at Photo-Mat, or to grab a take-out coffee from Day Break, Sun Down. Some of them might even be ducking into the Rite Aid for a box of Trojans or, God bless us and keep us, a SLEEPING AID. just your ordinary, everyday citizens of Derry going about their ordinary, everyday business.

Ralph released pent-up breath in a gusty sigh and braced himself for a wave of relief. Relief did come, but not in the tidal wave he had expected. There was no sense of having drawn back from the brink of madness in the nick of time; no sense of having been close to any sort of brink. Yet he understood perfectly well that he couldn’t live for long in a world that bright and wonderful without endangering his sanity; it would be like having an orgasm which lasted for hours. That might be how geniuses and great artists experienced things, but it was not for him; so much juice would blow his fuses in short order, and when the men with the butterfly nets rolled up to give him a shot and take him away, he would probably be happy to go.

The most readily identifiable emotion he was feeling just now wasn’t relief but a species of pleasant melancholy which he remembered sometimes experiencing after sex when he was a very young man. This melancholy was not deep but it was wide, seeming to fill the empty places of his body and mind the way a receding flood leaves a scrim of loose, rich topsoil. He wondered if he would ever have such an alarming, exhilarating moment of epiphany again. He thought the chances were fairly good… at least until next month, when James Roy Hong got his needles into him, or perhaps until Anthony Forbes started swinging his gold pocket watch in front of his eyes and telling him he was getting… very… sleepy. It was possible that neither Hong nor Forbes would have any success in curing his insomnia, but if one of them did, Ralph guessed he would stop seeing auras and balloon-strings after his first good night’s sleep.

And, after a month or so of restful nights, he would probably forget this had ever happened. As far as he was concerned, that was a perfectly good reason to feel a touch of melancholy.

You better get moving, buddy-if your new friend happens to look out the drugstore window and sees you still standing here like a dope, he’ll probably send for the men with the nets himself “Call Dr. Litchfield, more like it,” Ralph muttered, and cut across the parking lot toward Harris Avenue.

He poked his head through Lois’s front door and called, “Yo!

Anybody home?”

“Come on in, Ralph!” Lois called back. “We’re in the living room! “Ralph had always imagined a hobbit-hole would be a lot like Lois Chasse’s little house half a block or so down the hill from the Red Apple-neat and crowded, a little too dark, perhaps, but scrupulously clean. And he guessed a hobbit like Bilbo Baggins, whose interest in his ancestors was eclipsed only by his interest in what might be for dinner, would have been enchanted by the tiny living room, where relatives looked down from every wall. The place of honor, on top of the television, was held by a tinted studio photograph of the man Lois always referred to as “Mr. Chasse.”

McGovern was sitting hunched forward on the couch with a plate of macaroni and cheese balanced on his bony knees. The television was on and a game-show was clattering through the bonus round.

“What does she mean, we’re in the living room?” Ralph asked, but before McGovern could answer, Lois came in with a steaming plate in her hands.

“Here,” she said. “Sit down, eat. I talked with Simone, and she said it’ll probably be on News at Noon.”

“Gee, Lois, you didn’t have to do this,” he said, taking the plate, but his stomach demurred strongly when he got his first smell of onions and mellow cheddar. He glanced at the clock on the walljust visible between photos of a man in a raccoon coat and a woman who looked as if so-do-dee-oh-do might have been in her vocabulary-and was astounded to see it was five minutes of twelve.

“I didn’t do anything but stick some leftovers into the microwave,” she said. “Someday, Ralph, I’ll cook for you. Now sit down.”

“Not on my hat, though,” McGovern said, without taking his eyes from the bonus round. He picked the fedora up off the couch, dropped it on the floor beside him, and went back to his own portion of the casserole, which was disappearing rapidly. “This is very tasty, Lois.”

“Thank you.” She paused long enough to watch one of the contestants bag a trip to Barbados and a new car, then hurried back into the kitchen. The screaming winner faded out and was replaced by a man in wrinkled pajamas, tossing and turning in bed. He sat up and looked at the clock on the nightstand. It said 3:18 a.m a time of day with which Ralph had become very familiar.

“Can’t sleep?” an announcer asked sympathetically. “Tired of lying awake night after night?” A small glowing pill came gliding in through the insomniac’s bedroom window. To Ralph it looked like the world’s smallest flying saucer, and he wasn’t surprised to see that it was blue.

Ralph sat down beside McGovern-Although both men were quite slim (scrawny might actually have described Bill better), between them they used up most of the couch.

Lois came in with her own plate and sat down in the rocker by the window. Over the canned music and studio applause that marked the end of the game-show, a woman’s voice said, “This is Lisette Benson.

Topping our News at Noon, a well-known women’s rights advocate agrees to speak in Derry, sparking a protest-and six arrests-at a local clinic. We’ll also have Chris Altoberg’s weather and Bob McClanahan on sports. Stay tuned.”

Ralph forked a bite of macaroni and cheese into his mouth, looked up, and saw Lois watching him. “All right?” she asked.

“Delicious,” he said, and it was, but he thought that right now a big helping of Franco-American spaghetti served cold right out of the can would have tasted just as good. He wasn’t just hungry; he was ravenous. Seeing auras apparently burned a lot of calories.

“What happened, very briefly, was this,” McGovern said, swallowing the last of his own lunch and putting the plate down next to his hat.

“About eighteen people showed up outside WomanCare at eight-thirty this morning, while people were arriving for work, Lois’s friend Simone says they’re calling themselves The Friends of Life, but the core group are the assorted fruits and nuts that used to go by the name of Daily Bread. She said one of them was Charles Pickering, the guy the cops caught apparently getting ready to firebomb the joint late last year.

Simone’s niece said the police only arrested four people. It looks like she was a little low.”

“Was Ed really with them?” Ralph asked.

“Yes,” Lois said, “and he got arrested, too. At least no one got Maced. That was just a rumor. No one got hurt at all.”

“This time,” McGovern added darkly.

The News at Noon logo appeared on Lois’s hobbit-sized color TV, then dissolved into Lisette Benson. “Good afternoon,” she said.

“Topping our news on this beautiful late-summer day, prominent writer and controversial women’s rights advocate Susan Day agrees to speak at Derry’s Civic Center next month, and the announcement of her speech sparks a demonstration at WomanCare, the Derry women’s resource center and abortion clinic which has so polarized-”

“There they go with that abortion clinic stuff again!” McGovern exclaimed. “Jesus!”

“Hush!” Lois said in a peremptory tone not much like her usual tentative murmur. McGovern gave her a surprised look and hushed.

“-John Kirkland at WomanCare, with the first of two reports,” Lisette Benson was finishing, and the picture switched to a reporter doing a stand-up outside a low brick building. A super at the bottom of the screen informed viewers that this was a LIVE-EYE REPORT.

A strip of windows ran along one side of WomanCare. Two of them were broken, and several others were smeared with red stuff that looked like blood. Yellow police-line tape had been strung between the reporter and the building; three uniformed Derry cops and one plainclothesman stood in a little group on the far side of it.

Ralph was not very surprised to recognize the detective as John Leydecker.

“They call themselves The Friends of Life, Lisette, and they claim their demonstration this morning was a spontaneous outpouring of indignation prompted by the news that Susan Day-the woman radical pro-life groups nationwide call ’America’s Number One BabyKiller is coming to Derry next month to speak at the Civic Center.

At least one Derry police officer believes that’s not quite the way it was, however.”

Kirkland’s report went to tape, beginning with a close-up of Leydecker, who seemed resigned to the microphone in his face.

“There was no spontaneity about this,” he said. “Clearly a lot of preparation went into it. They’ve probably been sitting on advance word of Susan Day’s decision to come here and speak for most of the week, just getting ready and waiting for the news to break in the paper, which it did this morning.”

The camera went to a two-shot. Kirkland was giving Leydecker his most penetrating Geraldo look. “What do you mean ’a lot of preparation’?” he asked.

“Most of the signs they were carrying had His. Day’s name on them.

Also, there were over a dozen of these.”

A surprisingly human emotion slipped through Leydecker’s policeman-being-interviewed mask; Ralph thought it was distaste. He raised a large plastic evidence bag, and for one horrified instant Ralph was positive that there was a mangled and bloody baby inside.

Then he realized that, whatever the red stuff might be, the body in the evidence bag was a doll’s body.

“They didn’t buy these at K-mart,” Leydecker told the TV reporter.

“I guarantee you that.”

The next shot was a long-lens close-up of the smeared and broken windows. The camera panned them slowly. The stuff on the smeared ones looked more like blood than ever, and Ralph decided he didn’t want the last two or three bites of his macaroni and cheese.

“The demonstrators came with baby-dolls whose soft bodies had been with what police believe to be a mixture of Karo syrup and red food-coloring,” Kirkland said in voice-over. “They flung the dolls at the side of the building as they chanted anti-Susan Day slogans. Two windows were broken, but there was no major damage.”

The camera stopped, centering on a gruesomely smeared pane of glass.

“Most of the dolls split open,” Kirkland was saying, “splattering a substance that looked enough like blood to badly frighten the employees who witnessed the bombardment.”

The shot of the red-smeared window was replaced by one of a lovely dark-haired woman in slacks and a pullover.

“Oooh, look, it’s Barbie!” Lois cried. “Golly, I hope Simone’s watching! Maybe I ought to-”

It was McGovern’s turn to say hush.

“I was terrified,” Barbara Richards told Kirkland. “At first I thought they were really throwing dead babies, or maybe fetuses they’d gotten hold of somehow. Even after Dr. Harper ran through, yelling they were only dolls, I still wasn’t sure.”

“You said they were chanting?” Kirkland asked.

“Yes. What I heard most clearly was ’Keep the Angel of Death out of

Derry.”

“The report now reverted to Kirkland in his live stand-up mode.

“The demonstrators were ferried from WomanCare to Derry Police Headquarters on Main Street around nine o’clock this morning, Lisette.

I understand that twelve were questioned and released; six others were arrested on charges of malicious mischief, a misdemeanor. So it seems that another shot in Derry’s continuing war over abortion has been fired. This is John Kirkland, Channel Four news.”

“Another shot in-’ “McGovern began, and threw up his hands.

Lisette Benson was back on the screen. “We now go to Anne Rivers, who talked less than an hour ago to two of the so-called Friends of Life who were arrested in this morning’s demonstration.”

Anne Rivers was standing on the steps of the Main Street copshop with Ed Deepneau on one side and a tall, sallow, goateed individual on the other. Ed was looking natty and downright handsome in a gray tweed jacket and navy slacks. The tall man with the goatee was dressed as only a liberal with daydreams of what he might think of as “the Maine proletariat” could dress: faded jeans, faded blue workshirt, wide red fireman’s suspenders. It took Ralph only a second to place him. It was Dan Dalton, owner of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes. The last time Ralph had seen him, he had been standing behind the hanging guitars and bird-cages in his shop window, flapping his hands at Ham Davenport in a gesture that said Who gives a shit what you think.p But it was Ed his eyes were drawn back to, of course, Ed who looked natty and put together in more ways than one.

McGovern apparently felt the same. “My God, I can’t believe it’s the same man,” he murmured.

“Lisette,” the good-looking blonde was saying, “with me I have Edward Deepneau and Daniel Dalton, both of Derry, two of those arrested in this morning’s demonstration. That’s correct, gentlemen?

You were arrested?”

They nodded, Ed with the barest twinkle of humor, Dalton with dour, jut-jawed determination. The gaze the latter fixed on Anne overs made him look-to Ralph, at least-as if he were trying to remember which abortion clinic he had seen her hurrying into, head down and shoulders hunched.

“Have you been released on bail?”

“We were released on our own recognizance,” Ed answered. “The charges were minor. It was not our intention to hurt anyone, and no one was hurt.”

“We were arrested only because the Godless entrenched powerstructure in this town wants to make an example of us,” Dalton said, and Ralph thought he saw a minute wince momentarily tighten Ed’s face. A there-he-goes-again expression.

Anne Rivers swung the mike back to Ed.

“The major issue here isn’t philosophical but practical,” he said.

“Although the people who run WomanCare like to concentrate on their counselling services, therapy services, free mammograms, and other such admirable functions, there’s another side to the place.

Rivers of blood run out of WomanCare-”

“Innocent blood!” Dalton cried. His eyes glowed in his long, lean face, and Ralph had a disturbing insight: all over eastern Maine, people were watching this and deciding that the man in the red suspenders was crazy, while his partner seemed like a pretty reasonable fellow. It was almost funny.

Ed treated Dalton’s interjection as the pro-life equivalent of Hallelujah, giving it a single respectful beat before speaking again.

“The slaughter at WomanCare has been going on for nearly eight years now,” Ed told her. “Many people-especially radical feminists like Dr. Roberta Harper, WomanCare’s chief administrator-like to gild the lily with phrases like ’early termination,” but what she’s talking about is abortion, the ultimate act of abuse against women by a sexist society.”

“But is lobbing dolls loaded with fake blood against the windows of a private clinic the way to put your views before the public, Mr. Deepneau?”

For a moment-just a moment, there and gone-the twinkle of good humor in Ed’s eyes was replaced by a flash of something much harder and colder. For that one moment Ralph was again looking at the Ed Deepneau who had been ready to take on a truck-driver who outweighed him by a hundred pounds. Ralph forgot that what he was watching had been taped an hour ago and was afraid for the slim blonde, who was almost as pretty as the woman to whom her interview subject was still married.

Be careful, young lady, Ralph said You’re standing next to a very dangerous man.

Then the flash was gone and the man in the tweed jacket was once more just an earnest young fellow who had followed his conscience to hell. Once more it was Dalton, now nervously snapping his suspenders like big red rubber bands, who looked a few sandwiches shy of a picnic.

“What we’re doing is what the so-called good Germans failed to do in the thirties,” Ed was saying. He spoke in the patient, lecturely tones of a man who has been forced to point this out over and over…

. mostly to those who should already know it. “They were silent and six million Jews died. In this country a similar holocaust-”

“Over a thousand babies every day,” Dalton said. His former shrillness had departed. He sounded horrified and desperately tired.

“Many of them are ripped from the wombs of their mothers in pieces, with their little arms waving in protest even as they die.”

“Oh good God,” McGovern said. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever-”

“Hush, Bill,” Lois said. -purpose of this protest” Rivers was asking Dalton.

“As you probably know,” Dalton said, “the City Council has agreed to re-examine the zoning regulations that allow WomanCare to operate where it does and how it does. They could vote on the issue as early as November. The abortion rights people are afraid the Council might throw sand in the gears of their death-machine, so they’ve summoned Susan Day, this country’s most notorious proabortion advocate, to try and keep the machine running. We are marshalling our forces-” The pendulum of the microphone swung back to Ed. “Will there be more protests, Mr. Deepneau?” Rivers asked, and Ralph suddenly had an idea she might be interested in him in a way which was not strictly professional. Hey, why not? Ed was a good-looking guy, and His. Rivers could hardly know that he believed the Crimson King and his Centurions were in Derry, joining forces with the baby-killers at WomanCare.

“Until the legal aberration which opened the door to this slaughter has been corrected, the protests will continue,” Ed replied.

“And we’ll go on hoping that the histories of the next century will record that not all Americans were good Nazis during this dark period of our history.”

“Violent protests?”

“It’s violence we oppose.” The two of them were now maintaining strong eye contact, and Ralph thought Anne Rivers had what Carolyn would have called a case of hot thighs. Dan Dalton was standing off to one side of the screen, all but forgotten.

“And when Susan Day comes to Derry next month, can you guarantee her safety?”

Ed smiled, and in his mind’s eye Ralph saw him as he had been on that hot August afternoon less than a month ago-kneeling with one hand planted on either side of Ralph’s shoulders and breathing They burn the fetuses over in Newport into his face. Ralph shivered.

“In a country where thousands of children are sucked from the wombs of their mothers by the medical equivalent of industrial vacuum cleaners, I don’t believe anyone can guarantee anything,” Ed replied.

Anne Rivers looked at him uncertainly for a moment, as if deciding whether or not she wanted to ask another question (maybe for his telephone number), and then turned back to face the camera.

“This is Anne Rivers, at Derry Police Headquarters,” she said.

Lisette Benson reappeared, and something in the bemused cast of her mouth made Ralph think that perhaps he hadn’t been the only one to sense the attraction between interviewer and interviewee.

“We’ll be following this story all day,” she said. “Be sure to tune in at six for further updates. In Augusta, Governor Greta Powers responded to charges that she may have-” Lois got up and pushed the Off button on the TV. She simply stared at the darkening screen for a moment, then sighed heavily and sat down. “I have blueberry compote,” she said, “but after that, do either of you want any?”

Both men shook their heads. McGovern looked at Ralph and said, “That was scary.”

Ralph nodded. He kept thinking of how Ed had gone striding back and forth through the spray thrown by the lawn-sprinkler, breaking the rainbows with his body, pounding his fist into his open palm.

“How could they let him Out On bail and then interview him on the news as if he was a normal human being?” Lois asked indignantly.

“After what he did to poor Helen? My God, that Anne Rivers looked ready to invite him home to dinner!”

“Or to eat crackers in bed with her,” Ralph said dryly.

“The assault charge and this stuff today are entirely different matters,” McGovern said, “and you can bet your boots the lawyer or lawyers these yo-yos have got on retainer will be sure to keep it that way.”

“And even the assault charge was only a misdemeanor,” Ralph reminded her.

“How can assault be a misdemeanor?” Lois asked. “I’m sorry, but I never did understand that part.”

“It’s a misdemeanor when you only do it to your wife,” McGovern said, hoisting his satiric eyebrow. “It’s the American way, Lo.”

She twisted her hands together restlessly, took Mr. Chasse down from the television, looked at him for a moment, then put him back and resumed twisting her hands, “Well, the law’s one thing,” she said, “and I’d be the first to admit that I don’t understand it all. But somebody ought to tell them he’s crazy.

That he’s a wife-beater and he’s crazy.”

“You don’t know how crazy,” Ralph said, and for the first time he told them the story of what had happened the previous summer, out by the airport. It took about ten minutes. When he finished, neither of them said anything-they only looked at him with wide eyes.

“What?” Ralph asked uneasily. “You don’t believe me? You think I imagined it?”

“Of course I believe it,” Lois said. “I was just… well… stunned.

And frightened.”

“Ralph, I think maybe you ought to pass that story on to John Leydecker,” McGovern said. “I don’t think he can do a goddam thing with it, but considering Ed’s new playmates, I think it’s information he should have.”

Ralph thought it over carefully, then nodded and pushed himself to his feet. “No time like the present,” he said. “Want to come, Lois?

“She thought it over, then shook her head. “I’m tired out,” she said.

“And a little-what do the kids call it these days?-a little freaked.

I think I’ll put my feet up for a bit. Take a nap.”

“You do that,” Ralph said. “You do look a little tuckered. And thanks for feeding us.” Impulsively, he bent over her and kissed the corner of her mouth. Lois looked up at him with startled gratitude.

Ralph turned off his own television a little over six hours later, as Lisette Benson finished the evening news and handed off to the sports guy. The demonstration at WomanCare had been bumped to the number-two slot-the evening’s big story was the continuing a allegation that Governor Greta Powers had used cocaine as a grad student-and there was nothing new, except that Dan Dalton was now being identified as the head of The Friends of Life.

Ralph thought figurehead was probably a better word. Was Ed actually in charge yet? If he wasn’t, Ralph guessed he would be before longChristmas at the latest. A potentially more interesting question was what Ed’s employers thought about Ed’s legal adventures up the road in Derry. Ralph had an idea they would be a lot less comfortable with what had gone on today than with last month’s domesticabuse charge; he had read only recently that Hawking Labs would soon become the fifth such research center in the Northeast to be working with fetal tissue.

They probably wouldn’t applaud the information that one of their research chemists had been arrested for chucking dolls filled with fake blood at the side of a clinic that did abortions. And if they knew how crazy he really wasWho’s going to tell them, Ralph? You?

No. That was a step further than he was willing to go, at least for the time being. Unlike going down to the police station with McGovern to talk to John Leydecker about the incident last summer, it felt like persecution. Like writing KILL THIS CUNT beside a picture of a woman with whose views you didn’t agree.

That’s bullshit, and you know it, “I don’t know anything,” he said, getting up and going to the window. “I’m too tired to know anything.” But as he stood there, looking across the street at two men coming out of the Red Apple with a six-pack apiece, he suddenly did know something, remembered something that drew a cold line up his back.

This morning, when he had come out of the Rite Aid and been overwhelmed by the auras-and a sense of having stepped up to some new level of awareness-he had reminded himself again and again to enjoy but not to believe; that if he failed to make that crucial distinction, he was apt to end up in the same boat as Ed deep Neal!.

That thought had almost opened the door on some associative memory, but the shifting auras in the parking lot had pulled him away from it before it had been able to kick all the way in.

Now it came to him: Ed had said something about seeing auras, hadn’t he?

No-he might have meant auras, but the word he actually used was colors. I’m almost positive of that. It was right after he talked about seeing the corpses of baht’es everyplace, even on the roofs. He saidRalph watched the two men get into a beat-up old van and thought that he would never be able to remember Ed’s words exactly; he was just too tired. Then, as the van drove off trailing a cloud of exhaust that reminded him of the bright maroon stuff he’d seen coming from the tailpipe of the bakery truck that noon, another door opened and the memory did c(gene.

“He said that sometimes the world is full of colors,” Ralph told his empty apartment, “but that at some point they all started turning black. I think that was it.”

It was close, but was it everything? Ralph thought there had been at least a little more to Ed’s spiel, but he couldn’t remember what.

And did it matter, anyway? His nerves suggested strongly that it did-the cold line up his back had both widened and deepened.

Behind him, the telephone rang. Ralph turned and saw it sitting in a bath of baleful red light, dark red, the color of nosebleeds and (cocks fighting cocks)

rooster-combs.

No, part of his mind moaned. Oh no, Ralph, don’t get going on this again-Each time the phone rang, the envelope of light got brighter.

During the intervals of silence, it darkened. It was like looking at a ghostly heart with a telephone inside it.

Ralph closed his eyes tightly, and when he opened them again, the red aura around the telephone was gone.

No, you just can’t see it right now. I’m not sure, but I think -you might have willed it away. Like something in a lucid dream.

As he crossed the room to the telephone, he told himself-and in no uncertain terms-that that idea was as crazy as seeing the auras in the first place. Except it wasn’t, and he knew it wasn’t. Because if it was crazy, how come it had taken only one look at that roosterred halo of light to make him sure that it was Ed Deepneau calling?

. That’s crap, Ralph. You think it’s Ed because Ed’s on your mind… and because you’re so tired your head’s getting funny. Go on, pick it UP, you’ll see. It’s not the tell-tale heart, not even the tell-tale phone.

It’s probably some guy wanting to sell you subscriptions or the lady at the blood-bank, wondering why you haven’t been in lately.

Except he knew better.

Ralph picked up the phone and said hello.

No answer. But someone was there; Ralph could hear breathing.

“Hello?” he asked again.

There was still no immediate answer, and he was about to say I’m hanging up now when Ed Deepneau said, “I called about your mouth, Ralph. It’s trying to get you in trouble.”

The line of cold between his shoulderblades was no longer a line; now it was a thin plate of ice covering him from the nape of his neck to the small of his back.

“Hello, Ed. I saw you on the news today.” It was the only thing he could think of to say. His hand did not seem to be holding the phone so much as to be cramped around it.

“Never mind that, old boy. just pay attention. I’ve had a visit from that wide detective who arrested me last month-Leydecker.

He just left, in fact.”

Ralph’s heart sank, but not as far as he might have feared. After all, Leydecker’s going to see Ed wasn’t that surprising, was it? He had been very interested in Ralph’s story of the airport confrontation in the summer of ’92. Very interested indeed.

“Did he?” Ralph asked evenly.

“Detective Leydecker has the idea that I think people-or possibly supernatural beings of some sort-are trucking fetuses out of town in flatbeds and pickup trucks. What a scream, huh?”

Ralph stood beside the sofa, pulling the telephone cord restlessly through his fingers and realizing that he could see dull red light creeping out of the wire like sweat. The light pulsed with the rhythms of Ed’s speech.

“You’ve been telling tales out of school, old boy.”

Ralph was silent.

“Calling the police after I gave that bitch the lesson she so richly deserved didn’t bother me,” Ed told him. “I put it down to…

. well, grandfatherly concern. Or maybe you thought that if she was grateful enough, she might actually spare you a mercy-fuck. After all, you’re old but not exactly ready for Jurassic Park yet. You might have thought she’d let you get a finger into her at the very least.”

Ralph said nothing.

“Right, old boy?”

Ralph said nothing.

“You think you’re going to rattle me with the silent treatment?

Forget it.” But Ed did sound rattled, thrown off his stride. It was as if he had made the call with a certain script in his head and Ralph was refusing to read his lines. “You can’t… you better not…

“My calling the police after you beat Helen didn’t upset you, but your conversation with Leydecker today obviously did, Why’s that, Ed?

Are you finally starting to have some questions about your behavior?

And your thinking, maybe?”

It was Ed’s turn to be silent. At last he whispered harshly, “If you don’t take this seriously, Ralph, it would be the worst mistake-”

“Oh, I take it seriously,” Ralph said. “I saw what you did today, I saw what you did to your wife last month… and I saw what you did out by the airport a year ago. Now the police know. I’ve listened to you, Ed, now you listen to me. You’re ill. You’ve had some sort of mental breakdown, you’re having delusions-”

“I don’t have to listen to your crap!” Ed nearly screamed.

“No, you don’t. You can hang up. It’s your dime, after all. But until you do, I’m going to keep hammering away. Because I liked you, Ed, and I want to like you again. You’re a bright guy, delusions or no delusions, and I think you can understand me: Leydecker knows, and Leydecker is going to be watching y-”

“Are you seeing the colors yet?”

Ed asked. His voice had become calm again. At the same instant, the red glow around the telephone wire popped out of existence.

“What colors?” Ralph asked at last.

Ed ignored the question. “You said you liked me. Well, I like you, too. I’ve always liked you. So I’m going to give you some very valuable advice. You’re drifting into deep water, and there are things swimming around in the undertow you can’t even conceive of. You think I’m crazy, but I want to tell you that you don’t know what madness is.

You don’t have the slightest idea. You will, though, if you keep on meddling in things that don’t concern you. Take my word for it.”

“What things?” Ralph asked. He tried to keep his voice light, but he was still squeezing the telephone receiver tight enough to make his fingers throb.

“Forces,” Ed replied. “There are forces at work in Derry that you don’t want to know about. There are… well, let’s just say there are entities. They haven’t really noticed you yet, but if you keep fooling with me, they will. And you don’t want that. Believe me, you don’t,”

Forces. Entities.

“You asked me how I found out about all this stuff. Who brought me into the picture. Do you remember that, Ralph?”

“Yes.” He did, too. Now. That had been the last thing Ed had said to him before turning on the big game-show grin and going over to greet the cops. I’ve seen the colors since he came and told me…

We’ll talk about it later.

“The doctor told me. The little bald doctor. I think it’s him you’ll have to answer to if you try to mind my business again. And then God help you.”

“The little bald doctor, uh-huh, Ralph said. “Yes, I see. First the Crimson King and the Centurions, now the little bald doctor. I suppose next it’ll be-”

“Spare me your sarcasm, Ralph. just stay away from me and my interests, do you hear? Stay away.”

There was a click and Ed was gone. Ralph looked at the telephone in his hand for a long time, then slowly hung it up. just stay away from me and my interests.

Yes, and why not? He had plenty of his own fish to fry.

Ralph walked slowly into the kitchen, stuck a TV dinner (filet of haddock, as a matter of fact) into the oven, and tried to put abortion protests, auras, Ed Deepneau, and the Crimson King out of his mind.

It was easier than he would have expected.

CHAPTER 6

Summer slipped away as it does in Maine, almost unnoticed.

Ralph’s premature waking continued, and by the time the fall colors had begun to burn in the trees along Harris Avenue, he was opening his eyes around two-fifteen each morning. That was lousy, but he had his appointment with James Roy Hong to look forward to and there had been no repeat of the weird fireworks show he had been treated to after his first meeting with Joe Wyzer. There were occasional flickers around the edges of things, but Ralph found that if he squeezed his eyes shilt and counted to five, the flickers were gone when he opened them again.

Well… usually gone.

Susan Day’s speech was scheduled for Friday, the eighth of October, and as September drew toward its conclusion, the protests and the public abortion-on-demand debate sharpened and began to focus more and more on her appearance. Ralph saw Ed on the TV news many times, sometimes in the company of Dan Dalton but more and more frequently on his own, speaking swiftly, cogently, and often with that little gleam of humor not only in his eyes but in his voice.

People liked him, and The Friends of Life was apparently attracting the large membership to which Daily Bread, its political progenitor, had only been able to aspire. There were no more doll-throwing parties or other violent demonstrations, but there were plenty of marches and counter-marches, plenty of name-calling and fistshaking and angry letters to the editor. Preachers promised damnation; teachers urged moderation and education; half a dozen young women calling themselves The Gay Lesbo Babes for Jesus were arrested for parading in front of The First Baptist Church of Derry with signs which read GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY BODY. A nameless policeman was quoted in the Derry News as saying that he hoped Susan Day would come down with the flu or something and have to cancel her appearance.

Ralph received no further communications from Ed, but on September twenty-first he received a postcard from Helen with fourteen jubilant words scrawled across the back: “Hooray, aj’oh.f Derry Public Library.”

I start next month! See you soon-Helen.”

Feeling more cheered than he had since the night Helen had called him from the hospital, Ralph went downstairs to show the card to McGovern, but the door of the downstairs apartment was shut and locked.

Lois, then… except that Lois was also gone, probably off to one of her card-parties or maybe downtown shopping for yarn and plotting another afghan.

Mildly chagrined and musing on how the people you most wanted to share good news with were hardly ever around when you were all but bursting with it, Ralph wandered down to Strawford Park.

And it was there that he found Bill McGovern, sitting on a bench near the softball field and crying.

Crying was perhaps too strong a word; leaking might have been better.

McGovern sat with a handkerchief sticking out of one gnarled fist, watching a mother and her young son play roll-toss along the first-base line of the diamond where the last big softball event of the season-the Intramural City Tournament-had concluded just two days before.

Every now and then he would raise the fist with the handkerchief in it to his face and swipe at his eyes. Ralph, who had never seen McGovern weep-not even at Carolyn’s funeral-loitered near the playground for a few moments, wondering if he should approach McGovern or just go back the way he had come.

At last he gathered up his courage and walked over to the park bench.”

“Lo, Bill,” he said.

McGovern looked up with eyes that were red, watery, and a trifle embarrassed. He wiped them again and tried a smile. “Hi, Ralph. You caught me snivelling. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Ralph said, sitting down. “I’ve done my share of it. What’s wrong?” McGovern shrugged, then dabbed at his eyes again. “Nothing much. I’m suffering the effects of a paradox, that’s all.”

“What paradox is that?”

“Something good is happening to one of my oldest friends-the man who hired me for my first teaching position, in fact. He’s dying.” Ralph raised his eyebrows but said nothing. “He’s got pneumonia. His niece will probably haul him off to the hospital today or tomorrow, and they’ll put him on a ventilator, at least for awhile, but he’s almost certainly dying. I’ll celebrate his death when it comes, and I suppose it’s that more than anything else that’s depressing the shit out of me.”

McGovern paused. “You don’t understand a thing I’m saying, do you?”

“Nope,” Ralph said. “But that’s all right.” McGovern looked into his face, did a doubletake, then snorted. The sound was harsh and thick with his tears, but Ralph thought it was a real laugh just the same, and risked a small return smile. “Did I say something funny?”

“No,” McGovern said, and clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “I was just looking at your face, so earnest and sincere-you’re really an open book, Ralph-and thinking how much I like you. Sometimes I wish I could be you.”

“Not at three in the morning, you wouldn’t,” Ralph said quietly. McGovern sighed and nodded. “The insomnia.”

“That’s right. The insomnia.”

“I’m sorry I laughed, but-”

“No apology necessary, Bill.”

“-but please believe me when I say it was an admz’riing laugh.”

“Who’s your friend, and why’s it a good thing that he’s dying?”

Ralph asked. He already had a guess as to what lay at the root of McGovern’s paradox; he was not quite as goodheartedly dense as Bill sometimes seemed to think.

“His name’s Bob Polhurst, and his pneumonia is good news because he’s suffered from Alzheimer’s since the summer of ’88.”

It was what Ralph had thought… although AIDS had crossed his mind, as well. He wondered if that would shock McGovern, and felt a small ripple of amusement at the idea. Then he looked at the man and felt ashamed of his amusement. He knew that when it came to gloom McGovern was at least a semi-pro, but he didn’t believe that made his obvious grief over his old friend any less genuine.

“Bob was head of the History Department at Derry High from 1948, when he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, until 1981 or ’82. He was a great teacher, one of those fiercely bright people you sometimes find out in the sticks, hiding their lights under bushels. They usually end up heading their departments and running half a dozen extra-curricular activities on the side because they simply don’t know how to say no. Bob sure didn’t.”

The mother was now leading her little boy past them and toward the little snackbar that would be closing up for the season very soon now.

The kid’s face had an extraordinary translucence, a beauty that was enhanced by the rose-colored aura Ralph saw revolving about his head and moving across his small, lively face in calm waves.

“Can we go home, Mommy?” he asked. “I want to use my PlayDoh now. I want to make the Clay Family.”

“Let’s get something to eat first, big boy-’kay? Mommy’s hungry.

“

“Okay.”

There was a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of the boy’s nose, and here the rosy glow of his aura deepened to scarlet.

Fell out of his crib when he was eight months old, Ralph thought.

Reaching for the butterflies on the mobile his Mom hung from the ceiling. It scared her to death when she ran in and saw all the blood,she thought the poor kid was dying. Patrick, that’s his name.

She calls him Pat. He’s named after his grandfather, and-he closed his eyes tightly for a moment. His stomach was fluttering lightly just below his Adam’s apple and he was suddenly sure he was going to vomit.

“Ralph?” McGovern asked. “Are you all right?”

He opened his eyes. No aura, rose-colored or otherwise; just a mother and son heading over to the snackbar for a cold drink, and there was no way, absolutely no way that he could tell she didn’t want to take Pat home because Pat’s father was drinking again after almost six months on the wagon, and when he drank he got meanStop it, for God’s sake stop it.

“I’m okay,” he told McGovern. “Got a speck in my eye is all. Go on.

Finish telling me about your friend.”

“Not much to tell. He was a genius, but over the years I’ve become convinced that genius is a vastly overrated commodity. I think this country is full of geniuses, guys and gals so bright they make your average card-carrying MENSA member look like Fucko the Clown. And I think that most of them are teachers, living and working in small-town obscurity because that’s the way they like it. It was certainly the way Bob Polhurst liked it.

“He saw into people in a way that seemed scary to me… at first, anyway. After awhile you found out you didn’t have to be scared, because Bob was kind, but at first he inspired a sense of dread. You sometimes wondered if it was an ordinary pair of eyes he was using to look at you, or some kind of X-ray machine.”

At the snackbar, the woman was bending down with a small paper cup of soda. The kid reached up for it with both hands, grinning, and took it. He drank thirstily. The rosy glow pulsed briefly into existence around him again as he did, and Ralph knew he had been right: the kid’s name was Patrick, and his mother didn’t want to take him home. There was no way he could know such things, but he did just the same.

“In those days,” McGovern said, “if you were from central Maine and not one hundred percent heterosexual, you tried like hell to pass for it. That was the only choice there was, outside of moving to Greenwich Village and wearing a beret and spending Saturday nights in the kind of jazz clubs where they used to applaud by snapping their fingers. Back then, the idea of ’coming out of the closet’ was ridiculous. For most of us the closet was all there was. Unless you wanted a pack of liquored-up fraternity boys sitting on you in an alley and trying to pull your face off, the world was your closet.”

Pat finished his drink and tossed his paper cup on the ground.

His mother told him to pick it up and put it in the litter basket, a task he performed with immense good cheer. Then she took his hand and they began to walk slowly out of the park.

Ralph watched them go with a feeling of trepidation, hoping the woman’s fears and worries would turn out to be unjustified, fearing that they wouldn’t be.

“When I applied for a job in the Derry High History Department-this was in 1951 -I was fresh from two years teaching in the sticks, way to hell and gone in Lubec, and I figured if I could get along up there with no questions being asked, I could get along anywhere. But Bob took one look at me-hell, inside me-with those X-ray eyes of his and just knew. And he wasn’t shy, either.

“If I decide to offer you this job and you decide to take it, Mr.

McGovern, may I be assured that there will never be so much as an iota of trouble over the matter of your sexual preference?”

“Sexual preference, Ralph! Man oh man! I’d never even dreai ed of such a phrase before that day, but it came sliding out of his month slicker than a ball-bearing coated with Crisco. I started to get up on my high horse, tell him I didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about but I resented the hell out of it just the same-on general principles, you might say-and then I took another look at him and decided to save my energy. I might have fooled some people up in Lubec, but I wasn’t fooling Bob Polhurst. He wasn’t thirty himself yet, probably hadn’t been south of Kittery more than a dozen times in his whole life, but he knew everything that mattered about me, and all it had taken him to find it out was one twenty-minute interview.

“’No, sir, not an iota,” I said, just as meek as Mary’s little lamb.”

McGovern dabbed at his eyes with the handkerchief again, but Ralph had an idea that this time the gesture was mostly theatrical.

“In the twenty-three years before I went off to teach at Derry Community College, Bob taught me everything I know about teaching history and playing chess. He was a brilliant player… he certainly would have given that windbag Faye Chapin some hard bark to chew on, I can tell you that. I only beat him once, and that was after the Alzheimer’s started to take hold.

I never played him again after that.

“And there were other things. He never forgot a joke. He never forgot the birthdays or anniversaries of the people who were close to him-he didn’t send cards or give gifts, but he always offered congratulations and good wishes, and no one ever doubted his sincerity.

He published over sixty articles on teaching history and on the Civil War, which was his specialty. In 1967 and 1968 he wrote a book called Later That Summer, about what happened in the months following Gettysburg. He let me read the manuscript ten years ago, and I think it’s the best book on the Civil War I’ve ever read-the only one that even comes close is a novel called The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. Bob wouldn’t hear of publishing it, though. When I asked him why, he said that I of all people should understand his reasons.”

McGovern paused briefly, looking out across the park, which was filled with green-gold light and black interlacings of shadow which moved and shifted with each breath of wind.

“He said he had a fear of exposure.”

“Okay,” Ralph said. “I get it.”

“Maybe this sums him up best of all: he used to do the big Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. I poked him about that once-accused him of hubris. He gave me a grin and said, ’There’s a big difference between pride and optimism, Bill-I’m an optimist, that’s all.”

“Anyway, you get the picture. A kind man, a good teacher, a brilliant mind. His specialty was the Civil War, and now he doesn’t even know what a civil war is, let alone who won ours. Hell, he doesn’t even know his own name, and at some point soon-the sooner the better, actually-he’s going to die without any idea that he ever lived.”

A middle-aged man in a University of Maine tee-shirt and a pair of ragged bluejeans came shuffling through the playground, carrying a crumpled paper shopping bag under one arm. He stopped beside the snackbar to examine the contents of the waste-barrel, hoping for a returnable or two. As he bent over, Ralph saw the dark green envelope which surrounded him and the lighter green balloon-string which rose, wavering, from the crown of his head. And suddenly he was too tired to close his eyes, too tired to wish it away.

He turned to McGovern and said, “Ever since last month I’ve been seeing stuff that-”

“I ness I’m in mourning,” McGovern said, giving his eyes another theatrical wipe, “although I don’t know if it’s for Bob or for me. Isn’t that a hoot? But if you could have seen how bright he was in those days… how goddam scary-bright…”

“Bill? You see that guy over there by the snackbar? The one rooting through the trash barrel? I see-”

“Yeah, those guys are all over the place now,” McGovern said, giving the wino (who had found two empty Budweiser cans and tucked them into his bag) a cursory glance before turning to Ralph again. “I hate being old-I guess maybe that’s all it really comes down to. I mean big-time.”

The wino approached their bench in a bent-kneed shuffle, the breeze heralding his arrival with a smell which was not English Leather. His aura-a sprightly and energetic green that made Ralph think of Saint Patrick’s Day decorations-went oddly with his subservient posture and sickly grin.

“Say, you guys! How you doon?”

“We’ve been better,” McGovern said, hoisting the satiric eyebrow, “and I expect we’ll be better again once you shove off.”

The wino looked at McGovern uncertainly, seemed to decide he was a lost cause, and shifted his gaze to Ralph. “You got a bittl spare change, mister? I gotta get to Dexter. My uncle call me out dere at the Shelter on Neibolt Street, say I can have my old job back at the mill, but only if I-”

“Get lost, chum,” McGovern said.

The wino gave him a brief, anxious glance, and then his bloodshot brown eyes rolled back to Ralph again. “Dass a good job, you know?

I could have it back, but only if I get dere today. Dere’s a bus-” Ralph reached into his pocket, found a quarter and a dime, and dropped them into the outstretched hand. The wino grinned. The aura surrounding him brightened, then suddenly disappeared. Ralph found that a great relief.

“Hey, great! Thank you, mister!”

“Don’t mention it,” Ralph said.

The wino lurched off in the direction of the Shop in Save, where such brands as Night Train, Old Duke, and Silver Satin were always on sale.

Oh shit, Ralph, would it hurt you to be a little charitable in your head, as well? he asked himself. Go another half a mile in that directt’on, you come to the bus station.

True, but Ralph had lived long enough to know there was a world of difference between charitable thinking and illusions. If the wino with the dark-green aura was going to the bus station, then Ralph was going to Washington to be Secretary of State.

“You shouldn’t do that, Ralph,” McGovern said reprovingly. “It just encourages them.”

“I suppose,” Ralph said wearily.

“What were you saying when we were so rudely interrupted?”

The idea of telling McGovern about the auras now seemed an incredibly bad one, and he could not for the life of him imagine how he had gotten so close to doing it. The insomnia, of course-that was the only answer. It had done a number on his judgement as well as on his short-term memory and sense of perception.

“That I got something in the mail this morning,” Ralph said. “I thought it might cheer you up.” He passed Helen’s postcard over to McGovern, who read it and then reread it. The second time through, his long, horsey face broke into a broad grin. The combination of relief and honest pleasure in that expression made Ralph forgive McGovern his self-indulgent bathos at once. It was easy to forget that Bill could be generous as well as pompous.

“Say, this is great, isn’t it? A job!”

“It sure is. Want to celebrate with some lunch? There’s a nice little diner two doors down from the Rite Aid-Day Break, Sun Down, it’s called. Maybe a little ferny, but-”

“Thanks, but I promised Bob’s niece I’d go over and sit with him awhile. Of course he doesn’t have the slightest idea of who I am, but that doesn’t matter, because I know who he is. You can see?”

“Yep,” Ralph said. “A raincheck, then?”

“You got it.” McGovern scanned the message on the postcard again, still grinning. “This is the berries-the absolute berries!”

Ralph laughed at this winsome old expression. “I thought so, too.”

“I would have bet you five bucks she was going to walk right back into her marriage to that weirdo, and pushing the baby in front of her in its damn stroller… but I would have been glad to lose the money.

I suppose that sounds crazy.”

“A little,” Ralph said, but only because he knew it was what McGovern expected to hear. What he really thought was that Bill McGovern had just summed up his own character and world-view more succinctly than Ralph ever could have done himself.

“Nice to know someone’s getting better instead of worse, huh?”

“You bet.”

“Has Lois seen that yet?”

Ralph shook his head. “She’s not home. I’ll show it to her when I see her, though.”

“You do that. Are you sleeping any better, Ralph?”

“I’m doing okay, I guess.”

“Good. You look a little better. A little stronger. We can’t give in, Ralph, that’s the important thing.

Am I right?”

“I guess you are,” Ralph said, and sighed. “I guess you are, at that.”

Two days later Ralph sat at his kitchen table, slowly eating a bowl of bran flakes he didn’t really want (but supposed in some vague way to be good for him) and looking at the front page of the Derry News. He had skimmed the lead story quickly, but it was the photo that kept drawing his eye back; it seemed to express all the bad feelings he had been living with ever the last month without really explaining any of them.

Ralph thought the headline over the photograph-WOMANCARE DEMONSTRATION SPARKS VIOLENCE-didn’t reflect the story which followed, but that didn’t surprise him; he had been reading the News for years and had gotten used to its biases, which included a firm anti-abortion stance. Still, the paper had been careful to distance itself from The Friends of Life in that day’s tut-tut, now-you-boysjust-stop-it editorial, and Ralph wasn’t surprised. The Friends had gathered in the parking lot adjacent to both WomanCare and Derry Home Hospital, waiting for a group of about two hundred pro-choice marchers who were walking across town from the Civic Center. Most of the marchers were carrying signs with pictures of Susan Day and the slogan CHOICE, NOT FEAR on them.

The marchers’ idea was to gather supporters as they went, like a snowball rolling downhill. At WomanCare there would be a short rally-intended to pump people up for the coming Susan Day speech-followed by refreshments, The rally never happened. As the pro-choice marchers approached the parking lot, the Friends of Life people rushed out and blocked the road, holding their own signs (MURDER IS MURDER, SUSAN DAY STAY AWAY, STEP THE SLAU(,1

“1’1-:R OF THE INNOCENTS) in front of them like shields.

The marchers had been escorted by police, but no one had been prepared for the speed with which the heckling and angry words escalated into kicks and punches. It had begun with One Of The Friends of Life recognizing her own daughter among the pro-choice people. The older woman had dropped her sign and charged the younger. The daughter’s boyfriend had caught the older woman and tried to restrain her. When Mom opened his face with her fingernails, the young man had thrown her to the ground. That had ignited a ten-minute melee and provoked more than thirty arrests, split roughly half and half between the two groups.

The picture on the front page of this morning’s News featured Hamilton Davenport and Dan Dalton. The photographer had caught Davenport in a snarl which was entirely unlike his usual look of calm self-satisfaction. one fist was raised over his head in a primitive gesture of triumph. Facing him-and wearing Ham’s CHOICE, NOT FEAR sign around the top of his head like a surreal cardboard halo was The Friends of Life’s grandfromage. Dalton’s eyes were dazed, his mouth slack. The high-contrast black-and-white photo made the blood flowing from his nostrils look like chocolate sauce.

Ralph would look away from this for awhile, try to concentrate on finishing his cereal, and then he would remember the day last summer when he had first seen one of the pseudo-“wanted” posters that were now pasted up all over Derry-the day he had nearly fainted outside Strawford Park. Mostly it was their faces his mind fixed on: Davenport’s full of angry intensity as he peered into the dusty show window of Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, Dalton’s wearing a small, disdainful smile that seemed to suggest that an ape like Hamilton Davenport could not be expected to understand the higher morality of the abortion issue, and they both knew it.

Ralph would think of those two expressions and the distance between the men who wore them, and after awhile his dismayed eyes would wander back to the news photo. Two men stood close behind Dalton, both carrying pro-life signs and watching the confrontation intently. Ralph didn’t recognize the skinny man with the hornrimmed glasses and the cloud of receding gray hair, but he knew the man beside him. It was Ed Deepneau. Yet in this context, Ed seemed almost not to matter. What drew Ralph-and frightened him-were the faces of the two men who had done business next door to each other on Lower Witcham Street for years-Davenport with his cavernan’s snarl and clenched fist, Dalton with his dazed eyes and bloody nose.

He thought, If you’re not careful with your passions, this is where they get you. But this is where things had better stop, because"Because if those two had had guns, they’d’ve shot each other,” he muttered, and at that moment the doorbell rang-the one down on the front porch. Ralph got up, looked at the picture again, and felt a kind of vertigo sweep through him. With it came an odd, dismal surety: it was Ed down there, and God knew what he might want.

Don’t answer it then, Ralph!

He stood by the kitchen table for a long undecided moment, wishing bitterly that he could cut through the fog that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in his head this year. Then the doorbell chimed again and he found he had decided. It didn’t matter if that was Saddam Hussein down there; this was his place, and he wasn’t going to cower in it like a whipped cur.

Ralph crossed the living room, opened the door to the hall, and went down the shadowy front stairs.

Halfway down he relaxed a little. The top half of the door which gave on the front porch was composed of heavy glass panes. They distorted the view, but not so much that Ralph could not see that his two visitors were both women. He guessed at once who one of them must be and hurried the rest of the way down, running one hand lightly over the bannister. He threw the door open and there was Helen Deepneau with a tote-bag (BABY FIRST-AID STATION was printed on the side) slung over one shoulder and Natalie peering over the other, her eyes as bright as the eyes of a cartoon mouse.

Helen was smiling hopefully and a little nervously.

Natalie’s face suddenly lit up and she began to bounce up and down in the Papoose carrier Helen was wearing, waving her arms excitedly in Ralph’s direction.

She remembers me, Ralph thought. How about that. And as he reached out and let one of the waving hands grasp his right index finger, his eyes flooded with tears.

“Ralph?” Helen asked. “Are you okay?”

He smiled, nodded, stepped forward, and hugged her. He felt Helen lock her own arms around his neck. For a moment he was dizzy with the smell of her perfume, mingled with the milky smell of healthy baby, and then she gave his ear a dazzling smack and let him go.

“You are okay, aren’t you?” she asked. There were tears in her eyes, too, but Ralph barely noticed them; he was too busy taking inventory, wanting to make sure that no signs of the beating remained.

So far as he could see, none did. She looked flawless.

“Better right now than in weeks,” he said. “You are such a sight for sore eyes. You too, Nat.” He kissed the small, chubby hand that was still wrapped around his finger, and was not entirely surprised to see the ghostly gray-blue lip-print his mouth left behind. It faded almost as soon as he had noted it and he hugged Helen again, mostly to make sure that she was really there.

“Dear Ralph,” she murmured in his ear. “Dear, sweet Ralph.”

He felt a stirring in his groin, apparently brought on by the combination of her light perfume and the gentle puffs her words made against the cup of his ear… and then he remembered another voice in his ear. Ed’s voice. I called about your mouth, Ralph. It’s trying to get you in trouble.

Ralph let her go and held her at arm’s length, still smiling.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Helen. I’ll be damned if you’re not.”

“You are, too. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Ralph Roberts, Gretchen Tillbury. Gretchen, Ralph.”

Ralph turned toward the other woman and took his first good look at her as he carefully folded his large, gnarled hand over her slim white one. She was the kind of woman that made a man (even one who had left his sixties behind) want to stand up straight and suck in his gut.

She was very tall, perhaps six feet, and she was blonde, but that wasn’t it. There was something else-something that was like a smell, or a vibration, or (an aura) yes, all right, like an aura. She was, quite simply, a woman you couldn’t not look at, couldn’t not think about, couldn’t not speculate about.

Ralph remembered Helen’s telling him that Gretchen’s husband had cut her leg open with a kitchen knife and left her to bleed to death.

He wondered how any man could do such a thing; how any man could touch a creature such as this with anything but awe.

Also a little lust, maybe, once he got beyond the “She walks in beauty like the night” stage. And just by the way, Ralph, this might be a really good time to reel your eyes back into their sockets.

“Very pleased to meet you,” he said, letting go of her hand.

“Helen told me about how you came to see her in the hospital.

Thank you for helping her.”

“Helen was a pleasure to help,” Gretchen said, and gave him a dazzling smile. “She’s the kind of woman that makes it all worthwhile, actually… but I have an idea you already know that.”

“I guess I might at that,” Ralph said. “Have you got time for a cup of coffee? Please say yes.”

Gretchen glanced at Helen, who nodded.

“That would be fine,” Helen said. “Because… well.

“This isn’t entirely a social call, is it?” Ralph asked, looking from Helen to Gretchen Tillbury and then back to Helen again.

“No,” Helen said. “There’s something we need to talk to you about, Ralph.”

As soon as they had reached the top of the gloomy front stairs, Natalie began to wriggle impatiently around in the Papoose carrier and to talk in that imperious baby pig Latin that would all too soon be replaced by actual words.

“Can I hold her?” Ralph asked.

“All right,” Helen said. “If she cries, I’ll take her right back.

Promise.”

“Deal.”

But the Exalted amp; Revered Baby didn’t cry. As soon as Ralph had hoisted her out of the Papoose, she slung an arm companionably around his neck and cozied her bottom into the crook of his right arm as if it were her own private easy-chair.

“Wow,” Gretchen said. “I’m impressed.”

“Bug!” Natalie said, seizing Ralph’s lower lip and pulling it out like a windowshade. “Ganna-wig! Andoo-sis!”

“I think she just said something about the Andrews Sisters,” Ralph said. Helen threw her head back and laughed her hearty laugh, the one that seemed to come all the way up from her heels. Ralph didn’t realize how much he had missed it until he heard it.

Natalie let Ralph’s lower lip snap back as he led them into the kitchen, the sunniest room of the house at this time of day. He saw Helen looking around curiously as he turned on the Bunn, and realized she hadn’t been here for a long time. Too long. She picked up the picture of Carolyn that stood on the kitchen table and looked at it closely, a little smile playing about the corners of her lips. The sun lit the tips of her hair, which had been cropped short, making a kind of corona around her head, and Ralph had a sudden revelation: he loved Helen in large part because Carolyn had loved herthey had both been allowed into the deeper ranges of Carolyn’s heart and mind.

“She was so pretty,” Helen murmured. “Wasn’t she, Ralph?”

“Yes,” he said, putting out cups (and being careful to set them beyond the reach of Natalie’s restless, interested hands). “That was taken just a month or two before the headaches started. I suppose it’s eccentric to keep a framed studio portrait on the kitchen table in front of the sugar-bowl, but this is the room where I seem to spend most of my time lately, so…”

“I think it’s a lovely place for it,” Gretchen said. Her voice was low, sweetly husky. Ralph thought, If she’d been the one to whisper in my ear, I bet the old trouser-mouse would have done a little more than Just turn over in its sleep.

“I do, too,” Helen said. She gave him a fragile, not-quite-eyecontact smile, then slipped the pink tote-bag off her shoulder and set it on the counter. Natalie began to gabble impatiently and hold her hands out again as soon as she saw the plastic shell of the Playtex Nurser. Ralph had a vivid but mercifully brief flash of memory: Helen staggering toward the Red Apple, one eye puffed shut, her cheek lashed with beads of blood, carrying Nat on one hip, the way a teenager might carry a textbook.

“Want to give it a try, old fella?” Helen asked. Her smile had strengthened a little and she was meeting his eye again.

“Sure, why not? But the coffee-”

“I’ll take care of the coffee, Daddy-O,” Gretchen said. “Made a million cups in my time. Is there half-and-half?”

“In the fridge.” Ralph sat down at the table, letting Natalie rest the back of her head in the hollow of his shoulder and grasp the bottle with her tiny, fascinating hands. This she did with complete assurance, guiding the nipple into her mouth and beginning to suck at once. Ralph grinned up at Helen and pretended not to see that she had begun to cry a little again. “They learn fast, don’t they?”

“Yes,” she said, and pulled a paper towel off the roll mounted on the wall by the sink. She wiped her eyes with it. “I can’t get over how easy she is with you, Ralph-she wasn’t that way before, was she?”

“I don’t really remember,” he lied. She hadn’t been. Not standoffish, no, but a long way from this comfortable.

“Keep pushing up on the plastic liner inside the bottle, okay?

Otherwise she’ll swallow a lot of air and get all gassy.”

“Roger.” He glanced over at Gretchen. “Doing okay?”

“Fine. How do you take it, Ralph?”

“Just in a cup’s fine.”

She laughed and put the cup on the table out of Natalie’s reach.

When she sat down and crossed her legs, Ralph checked-he was helpless not to. When he looked up again, Gretchen was wearing a small, ironic smile.

What the hell, Ralph thought. No goat like an old goat, I guess.

Even an old goat that can’t manage much more than two or two and a half hours’ worth of sleep a night.

“Tell me about your job,” he said as Helen sat down and sipped her coffee.

“Well, I think they ought to make Mike Hanlon’s birthday a national holiday-does that tell you anything?”

“A little, yes,” Ralph said, smiling.

“I was all but positive I’d have to leave Derry. I sent away for applications to libraries as far south as Portsmouth, but I felt sick doing it. I’m going on thirty-one and I’ve only lived here for six of those years, but Derry feels like home-I can’t explain it, but it’s the truth.”

“You don’t have to explain it, Helen. I think home’s just one of those things that happens to a person, like their complexion or the color of their eyes.”

Gretchen was nodding. “Yes,” she said. “Just like that.”

“Mike called Monday and told me the assistant’s position in the Children’s Library had opened up. I could hardly believe it. I mean, I’ve been walking around all week just pinching myself. Haven’t I, Gretchen?”

“Well, you’ve been very happy,” Gretchen said, and that’s been very good to see.”

She smiled at Helen, and for Ralph that smile was a revelation.

He suddenly understood that he could look at Gretchen Tillbury all he wanted, and it wouldn’t make any difference. If the only man in this room had been Tom Cruise, it still would have made no difference.

He wondered if Helen knew, and then scolded himself for his foolishness. Helen was many things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

“When do you start?” he asked her.

“Columbus Day week,” she said. “The twelfth. Afternoons and evenings. The salary’s not exactly a king’s ransom, but it’ll be enough to keep us through the winter no matter how the… the rest of my situation works out. Isn’t it great, Ralph?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very great.”

The baby had drunk half the bottle and now showed signs of losing interest. The nipple popped halfway out of her mouth, and a little rill of milk ran down from the corner of her lips toward her chin.

Ralph reached to wipe it away, and his fingers left a series of delicate gray-blue lines in the air.

Baby Natalie snatched at them, then laughed as they dissolved in her fist. Ralph’s breath caught in his throat.

She sees. The baby sees what I see, That’s nuts, Ralph. That’s nuts and you know it.

Except he knew no such thing. He had just seen it-had seen Nat try to grab the aural contrails his fingers left behind.

“Ralph?” Helen asked. “Are you all right?”

“Sure.” He looked up and saw that Helen was now surrounded by a luxurious ivory-colored aura. It had the satiny look of an expensive slip. The balloon-string floating up from it was an identical shade of ivory, and as broad and flat as the ribbon on a wedding present. The aura surrounding Gretchen Tillbury was a dark orange shading to yellow at the edges. “Will you be moving back into the house?”

Helen and Gretchen exchanged another of those glances, but Ralph barely noticed. He didn’t need to observe their faces or gestures or body language to read their feelings, he discovered; he only had to look at their auras. The lemony tints at the edges of Gretchen’s now darkened, so that the whole was a uniform orange.

Helen’s, meanwhile, simultaneously pulled in and brightened until it was hard to look at. Helen was afraid to go back. Gretchen knew it, and was infuriated by it.

And her own helplessness, Ralph thought. That infuriates her even more.

“I’m going to stay at High Ridge awhile longer,” Helen was saying.

“Maybe until winter. Nat and I will move back into town eventually, I imagine, but the house is going up for sale. If someone actuilly buys it-and with the real estate market the way it is that looks like a pretty big question mark-the money goes into an escrow account.

That account will be divided according to the decree. You know-the divorce decree.”

Her lower lip was trembling. Her aura had grown still tighter; it now fit her body almost like a second skin, and Ralph could see minute red flashes skimming through it. They looked like sparks dancing over an incinerator. He reached out across the table, took her hand, squeezed it. She smiled at him gratefully.

“You’re telling me two things,” he said. “That you’re going ahead with the divorce and that you’re still scared of him.”

“She’s been regularly battered and abused for the last two years of her marriage,” Gretchen said. “Of course she’s still scared of him.”

She spoke quietly, calmly, reasonably, but looking at her aura now was like looking through the small isinglass window you used to find in the doors of coal-furnaces.

He looked down at the baby and saw her now surrounded in her own gauzy, brilliant cloud of wedding-satin. It was smaller than her mother’s, but otherwise identical… like her blue eyes and auburn hair. Natalie’s balloon-string rose from the top of her head in a pure white ribbon that floated all the way to the ceiling and then actually coiled there in an ethereal heap beside the light-fixture. When a breath of breeze puffed in through the open window by the stove, he saw the wide white band belly and ripple. He glanced up and saw Helen’s and Gretchen’s balloon-strings were also rippling.

And if I could see my own, it would be doing the same thing, he thought. It’s real-whatever that two-and-two-make-four part of my mind may think, the auras are real. They’re real and I’m seeing them.

He waited for the inevitable demurral, but this time none came.

“I feel like I’m spending most of my time in an emotional washingmachine these days,” Helen said. “My mom’s mad at me… she’s done everything but call me a quitter outright. and sometimes I feel like a quitter… ashamed…”

“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Ralph said. He glanced up at Natalie’s balloon-string again, wavering in the breeze. It was beautiful, but he felt no urge to touch it; some deep instinct told him that might be dangerous for both of them.

“I guess I know that,” Helen said, “but girls go through a lot of indoctrination. It’s like, ’Here’s your Barbie, here’s your Ken, here’s your Hostess Play Kitchen. Learn well, because when the real stuff comes along it’ll be your job to take care of it, and if any of it gets broken, you’ll get the blame.” And I think I could have gone down the line with that-I really do. Except no one told me that in some marriages Ken goes nuts. Does that sound self-indulgent?”

“No. That’s pretty much what happened, so far as I can see.”

Helen laughed-a jagged, bitter, guilty sound. “Don’t try to tell my mother that. She refuses to believe Ed ever did anything more than give me a husbandly swat on the fanny once in awhile… just to get me moving in the right direction again if I happened to slip off-course.

She thinks I imagined the rest. She doesn’t come right out and say it, but I hear it in her voice every time we talk on the phone.”

“I don’t think you imagined it,” Ralph said, “I saw you, remember?

And I was there when you begged me not to call the police.”

He felt his thigh squeezed beneath the table and looked up, startled.

Gretchen Tillbury gave him a very slight nod and another squeeze-this one more emphatic, “Yes,” Helen said. “You were there, weren’t you?” She smiled a little, which was good, but what was happening to her aura was better-those tiny red flickers were fading, and the aura itself was spreading out again.

No, he thought. Not spreading out. Loosening. Relaxing.

Helen got up and came around the table.

“Nat’s bailing out on you-better let me take her.”

Ralph looked down and saw Nat looking across the room with heavy, fascinated eyes. He followed her gaze and saw the little vase standing on the windowsill beside the sink. He had filled it with fall flowers less than two hours ago and now a low green mist was sizzling off the stems and surrounding the blooms with a faint, misty glow.

I’m watching them breathe their last, Ralph thought. Oh my God, I’m never going to pick another flower in my life. I promise.

Helen took the baby gently from his arms. Nat went tractably enough, although her eyes never left the sizzling flowers as her mother went back around the table, sat down, and nestled her in the crook of her arm.

Gretchen tapped the face of her watch lightly. “If we’re going to make that meeting at noon-”

“Yes, of course,” Helen said, a little apologetically. “We’re on the official Susan Day Welcoming Committee,” she told Ralph, “and in this case that’s not quite as junior League as it sounds. Our main job really isn’t to welcome her but to help protect her.”

“Is that going to be a problem, do you think?”

“It’ll be tense, let’s put it that way,” Gretchen said. “She’s got half a dozen of her own security people, and they’ve been sending us turn-around faxes of all the Derry-related threats she’s received.

It’s standard operating procedure with them-she’s been in a lot of people’s faces for a lot of years. They’re keeping us in the picture, but they’re also making sure we understand that, because we’re the inviting group, her safety is WomanCare’s responsibility as well as theirs.” Ralph opened his mouth to ask if there had been many threats, but he supposed he already knew the answer to that question.

He’d lived in Derry for seventy years, off and on, and he knew it was a dangerous machine-there were a lot of sharp points and cutting edges just below the surface. That was true of a lot of cities, of course, but in Derry there had always seemed to be an extra dimension to the ugliness. Helen had called it home, and it was his home, tool butHe found himself remembering something which had happened almost ten years ago, shortly after the annual Canal Days Festival had ended.

Three boys had thrown an unassuming and inoffensive young gay man named Adrian Mellon into the Kenduskeag after repeatedly biting and stabbing him; it was rumored they had stood there on the bridge behind the Falcon Tavern and watched him die.

They’d told the police they hadn’t liked the hat he was wearing.

That was also Derry, and only a fool would ignore the fact.

As if this memory had led him to it (perhaps it had), Ralph looked at the photo on the front page of today’s paper again-Ham Davenport with his upraised fist, Dan Dalton with his bloody nose and dazed eyes, wearing Ham’s sign on his head.

“How many threats?” he asked. “Over a dozen?”

“Ah(out thirty,” Gretchen said. “Of those, her security people take half a dozen seriously. Two are threats to blow up the Civic Center if she doesn’t cancel. Hey-this is a real honey-it’s from someone who says he’s got a Big Squirt water-gun filled with battery acid. ’If I make a direct hit, not even your dyke friends will be able to look at you without throwing up,” that one says.”

“Nice,” Ralph said, ’It brings us to the point, anyway,” Gretchen said. She rummaged in her bag, brought out a small can with a red top, and put it on the table. “A little present from all your grateful friends at WomanCare.”

Ralph picked the can up. On one side was a picture of a woman spraying a cloud of gas at a man wearing a slouch hat and a Beagle Boys-type eye-mask. On the other was a single word in bright red capital letters:

“What is this?” he asked, shocked in spite of himself. “Mace?”

“No,” Gretchen said. “Mace is a risky proposition in Maine, legally speaking. This stuff is much milder… but if you give somebody a faceful, they won’t even think of hassling you for at least a couple of minutes. It numbs the skin, irritates the eyes, and causes nausea.”

Ralph took the cap off the can, looked at the red aerosol nozzle beneath, then replaced the cap. “Good Christ, woman, why would I want to lug around a can of this stuff?”

“Because you’ve been officially designated a Centurion,” Gretchen said.

“A what?” Ralph asked.

“A Centurion,” Helen repeated. Nat was fast asleep in her arms, and Ralph realized the auras were gone again. “It’s what The Friends of Life call their major enemies-the ringleaders of the opposition.”

“Okay,” Ralph said, “I’ve got it now. Ed talked about people he called Centurions on the day he… assaulted you. He talked about a lot of things that day, though, and all of them were crazy-”

“Yes, Ed’s at the bottom of it, and he is crazy,” Helen said. “We don’t think he’s mentioned this Centurion business except to a small inner circle-people who are almost as gonzo as he is. The rest of The Friends of Life… I don’t think they have any idea. I mean, did you? Until last month, did you have any idea that he was crazy?”

Ralph shook his head.

“Hawking Labs finally fired him,” Helen said. “Yesterday. They held onto him as long as they could-he’s great at what he does, and they had a lot invested in him-but in the end they had to let him go.

Three months’ severance pay in lieu of notice… not bad for a guy who beats up his wife and throws dolls loaded with fake blood at the windows of the local women’s clinic.” She tapped the newspaper.

“This last demonstration was the final straw. It’s the third or fourth time he’s been arrested since he got involved with The Friends of Life.”

“You have someone inside, don’t you?” Ralph said. “That’s how you know all this.”

Gretchen smiled. “We’re not the only ones who’ve got someone at least partway inside; we have a running joke that there really are no Friends of Life, just a bunch of double agents. Derry P.D."s got someone; the State Police do, too. And those are just the ones our… our person… knows about. Hell, the FBI could be monitoring them, as well. The Friends of Life are eminently infiltratable, Ralph, because they’re convinced that, deep down, everyone is on their side.

But we believe that our person is the only one who’s gotten in toward the middle, and this person says that Dan Dalton is just the tail Ed Deepneau wags.”

“I guessed that the first time I saw them together on the TV news,” Ralph said, Gretchen got up, gathered the coffee cups, took them over to the sink, and began to rinse them. “I’ve been active in the women’s movement for thirteen years now, and I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit, but I’ve never seen anything like this. He’s got these dopes believing that women in Derry are undergoing involuntary abortions, that half of them haven’t even realized they’re pregnant before the Centurions come in the night and take their babies.”

“Has he told them about the incinerator over in Newport?” Ralph asked. “The one that’s really a baby crematorium?”

Gretchen turned from the sink, her eyes wide. “How did -I,o I know about that?”

“Oh, I got the lowdown from Ed himself, up close and in person.

Starting in July of ’92.” He hesitated for just a moment, then gave them an account of the day he had met Ed out by the airport, and how Ed had accused the man in the pickup of hauling dead babies in the barrels marked WEED-co. Helen listened silently, her eyes growing steadily wider and rounder. “He was going on about the same stuff on the day he beat you up,” Ralph finished, “but he’d embellished it considerably by then.”

“That probably explains why he’s fixated on you,” Gretchen said, “but in a very real sense, the why doesn’t matter. The fact is, he’s given his nuttier friends a list of these so-called Centurions. We don’t know everyone who’s on it, but I am, and Helen is, and Susan Day, of course… and you.” Why me? Ralph almost asked, then recognized it as another pointless question. Maybe Ed had targeted him because he had called the cops after Ed had beaten Helen; more likely it had happened for no understandable reason at all. Ralph remembered reading somewhere that David Berkowitz-also known as the Son of Sam-claimed to have killed on some occasions under instructions from his dog.

“What do you expect them to try?” Ralph asked. “Armed assault, like in a Chuck Norris movie?”

He smiled, but Gretchen did not answer it. “The thing is, we don’t know what they might try,” she said. “The most likely answer is nothing at all. Then again, Ed or one of the others might take it into his head to try and push you out your own kitchen window. The spray is basically nothing but watered-down teargas. A little insurance policy, that’s all.”

“Insurance,” he said thoughtfully.

“You’re in very select company,” Helen said with a wan smile.

“The only other male Centurion on their list-that we know about, anyway-is Mayor Cohen.”

“Did you give him one of these?” Ralph asked, picking up the aerosol can. It looked no more dangerous than the free samples of shaving cream he got in the mail from time to time.

“We didn’t need to,” Gretchen said. She looked at her watch again. Helen saw the gesture and stood up with the sleeping baby in her armg-.

“He’s got a license to carry a concealed weapon.”

“How would you know a thing like that?” Ralph asked.

“We checked the files at City Hall,” she said, and grinned. “Gun permits are a matter of public record.”

“Oh.” A thought occurred to him. “What about Ed? Did you check on him? Does he have one?”

“Nope,” she said. “But guys like Ed don’t necessarily apply for weapons permits once they get past a certain point… you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Ralph replied, also getting up. “I suppose I do. What about you guys? Are you watching out?”

“You bet, Daddy-o. You bet we are.”

He nodded, but wasn’t entirely satisfied. There was a faintly patronizing tone in her voice that he didn’t like, as if the very question were a silly one. But it wasn’t silly, and if she didn’t know that, she and her friends could be in trouble down the line. Bad trouble.

“I hope so,” he said. “I really do. Can I carry Nat downstairs for you, Helen?”

“Better not-you’d wake her.” She looked at him gravely.

“Would you carry that spray for me, Ralph? I can’t stand the thought of you being hurt just because you tried to help me and he’s got some crazy bee in his bonnet.”

“I’ll think about it very seriously. Will that do?”

“I guess it will have to.” She looked at him closely, her eyes searching his face. “You look much better than the last time I saw you-you’re sleeping again, aren’t you?”

He grinned. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m still having my problems, but I must be getting better, because people keep telling me that.”

She stood on tiptoe and kissed the corner of his mouth. “We’ll be in touch, won’t we? I mean, we’ll stay in touch.”

“I’ll do my part if you’ll do yours, sweetie.”

She smiled. “You can count on that, Ralph-you’re the nicest male

Centurion I know.”

They all laughed at that, so hard that Natalie woke up and looked around at them in sleepy surprise.

After he had seen the women off (I’M PREJUDICED, AND I VOTE!

read the sticker on the rear bumper of Gretchen Tillbury’s Accord fastback), Ralph climbed slowly up to the second floor again.

Weariness dragged at his heels like invisible weights. once in the kitchen he looked first at the vase of flowers, trying to see that strange and gorgeous green mist rising from the stems. Nothing. Then he picked up the aerosol and re-examined the cartoon on the side of the can.

One Menaced Woman, heroically warding off her attacker; one Bad Man, complete with eye-mask and slouch hat. No shades of gray here; just a case of go ahead, punk, make my day.

It occurred to Ralph that Ed’s madness was catching. There were women all over Derry-Gretchen Tillbury and his own sweet Helen among them-walking around with these little spray-cans in their purses, and all the cans really said the same thing: I’m afraid. The bad men in the masks and the slouch hats have arrived in Derry and I’m arra id.

Ralph wanted no part of it. Standing on tiptoe, he put the can of Bodyguard on top of the kitchen cabinet beside the sink, then shrugged into his old gray leather jacket. He would go up to the picnic area near the airport and see if he could find a game of chess.

Lacking that, maybe a few rounds of cribbage.

He paused in the kitchen doorway, looking fixedly at the flowers, trying to make that sizzling green mist come. Nothing happened.

But it was there. You saw it,-Natalie did, too.

But had she? Had she really? Babies were always goggling at stuff, everything amazed them, so how could he know for sure?

“I just do,” he said to the empty apartment. Correct. The green mist rising from the stems of the flowers had been there, all the auras had been there, and…

“And they’re still there,” he said, and did not know if he should be relieved or appalled by the firmness he heard in his own voice, For right now, why don’t you try being neither, sweetheart.p His thought, Carolyn’s voice, good advice.

Ralph locked up his apartment and went out into the Derry of the Old Crocks, looking for a game of chess.

CHAPTER 7

When Ralph came walking up Harris Avenue to his apartment on October 2nd, with a c(puple of recycled Elmer Kelton Westerns from Back Pages in one hand, he saw that someone was sitting on the perch steps with his own book. The visitor wasn’t reading, however; he was watching with dreamy intensity as the warm wind which had been blowing all day harvested the yellow and gold leaves from the oaks and the three surviving elms across the street.

Ralph came closer, observing the thin white hair flying around the skull of the man on the porch, and the way all his bulk seemed to have run into his belly, hips, and bottom. That wide center section, coupled with the scrawny neck, narrow chest, and spindly legs clad in old green flannel pants, gave him the look of a man wearing an inner tube beneath his clothes. Even from a hundred and fifty yards away, there was really no question about who the visitor was: Dorrance Marstellar.

Sighing, Ralph walked the rest of the way up to his building.

Dorrance, seemingly hypnotized by the bright falling leaves, did not look around until Ralph’s shadow dropped across him. Then he turned, craned his neck, and smiled his sweet, strangely vulnerable smile.

Faye Chapin, Don Veazie, and some of the other old-timers who hung out at the picnic area up by Runway 3 (they would retire to the Jackson Street Billiard Emporium once Indian summer broke and the weather turned cold) saw that smile as just another indicator that Old Dor, poetry books or no poetry books, was essentially brainless. Don Veazie, nobody’s idea of Mr. Sensitivity, had fallen into the habit of calling Dorrance Old Chief Dumbhead, and Faye had once told Ralph that he, Faye, wasn’t in the least surprised that Old Dor had lived to the age of half-past ninety. “People who don’t have any furniture on their upper storey always live the longest,” he had explained to Ralph earlier that year. “They don’t have anything to worry about. That keeps their blood-pressure down and they ain’t so likely to blow a valve or throw a rod.”

Ralph, however, was not so sure. The sweetness in Dorrance’s smile did not make the old man look empty-headed to him; it made him look somehow ethereal and knowing at the same time… sort of like a small-town Merlin. Nonetheless, he could have done without a visit from Dor today; this morning he had set a new record, waking at 1:58 a.m and he was exhausted. He only wanted to sit in his own living room, drink coffee, and try to read one of the Westerns he had picked up downtown. Maybe later on he would take another stab at napping.

“Hullo,” Dorrance said. The book he was holding was a paperback-Cemetery Nights, by a man named Stephen Dobyns.

“Hello, Dor,” he said. “Good book?”

Dorrance looked down at the book as if he’d forgotten he had one, then smiled and nodded. “Yes, very good. He writes poems that are like stories. I don’t always like that, but sometimes I do.”

“That’s good. Listen, Dor, it’s great to see you, but the walk up the hill kind of tired me out, so maybe we could visit another t-”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Dorrance said, standing up. There was a faint cinnamony smell about him that always made Ralph think of Egyptian mummies kept behind red velvet ropes in shadowy museums. His face was almost without lines except for the tiny sprays of crow’s-feet around his eyes, but his age was unmistakable (and a little scary): his blue eyes were faded to the watery gray of an April sky and his skin had a translucent clarity that reminded Ralph of Nat’s skin. His lips were loose and almost lavender in color. They made little smacking sounds when he spoke. “That’s all right, I didn’t come to visit; I came to give you a message.”

“What message? From who?”

“I don’t know who it’s from,” Dorrance said, giving Ralph a look that suggested he thought Ralph was either being foolish or playing dumb. “I don’t mess in with long-time business. I told you not to, either, don’t you remember?”

Ralph did remember something, but he was damned if he knew exactly what. Nor did he care. He was tired, and he had already had to listen to a fair amount of tiresome proselytizing on the subject of Susan Day from Ham Davenport. He had no urge to go round and round with Dorrance Marstellar on top of that, no matter how beautiful this Saturday morning was. “Well then, just give me the message,” he said, “and I’ll toddle along upstairs. How would that be?”

“Oh, sure, good, fine.” But then Dorrance stopped, looking across the street as a fresh gust of wind sent a funnel of leaves storming into the bright October sky. His faded eyes were wide, and something in them made Ralph think of the Exalted amp; Revered Baby again-of the way she had snatched at the gray-blue marks left by his fingers, and the way she had looked at the flowers sizzling in the vase by the sink.

Ralph had seen Dor stand watching airplanes take off and land on Runway 3 with that same slack-jawed expression, sometimes for an hour or more.

“Dor?” he prompted.

Dorrance’s sparse eyelashes fluttered. “Oh! Right! The message!

The message is…” He frowned slightly and looked down at the-book which he was now bending back and forth in his hands. Then his face cleared and he looked up at Ralph again. “The message is, “I ’Cancel the appointment.

It was Ralph’s turn to frown. “What appointment?”

“You shouldn’t have messed in,” Dorrance repeated, then heaved a big sigh. “But it’s too late now. Done-bun-can’the-undone. just cancel the appointment. Don’t let that fellow stick any pins in you.”

Ralph had been turning to the porch steps; now he turned back to Dorrance. “Hong? Are you talking about Hong?”

“How would I know?” Dorrance asked in an irritated tone of voice.

“I don’t mess in, I told you that. Every now and then I carry a message, is all, like now. I was supposed to tell you to cancel the appointment with the pin-sticker man, and I done it. The rest is up to

YOU.”

Dorrance was looking up at the trees across the street again, his odd, lineless face wearing an expression of mild exaltation. The strong fall wind rippled his hair like seaweed. When Ralph touched his shoulder the old man turned to him willingly enough, and Ralph suddenly realized that what Faye Chapin and the others saw as foolishness might actually be joy. If so, the mistake probably said more about them than it did about Old Dor.

“Dorrance?”

“What, Ralph?”

“This message-who gave it to you?”

Dorrance thought it over-or perhaps only appeared to think it over-and then held out his copy of Cemetery Nights. “Take it.”

“No, I’ll pass,” Ralph said. “I’m not much on poetry, Dor.”

“You’ll like these. They’re like stories-” Ralph restrained a strong urge to reach out and shake the old man until his bones rattled like castanets. “I just picked up a couple oat operas downtown, at Back Pages. What I want to know is who gave you the message about-” Dorrance thrust the book of poems into Ralph’s right hand-the one not holding the Westerns-with surprising force. “One of them starts, ’Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else.”

“And before Ralph could say another word, Old Dor cut across the lawn to the sidewalk. He turned left and started toward the Extension with his face turned dreamily up to the blue sky where the leaves flew wildly, as if to some rendezvous over the horizon.

“Dorrance! “Ralph shouted, suddenly infuriated. Across the street at the Red Apple, Sue was sweeping fallen leaves off the hot-top in front of the door. At the sound of Ralph’s voice she stopped and looked curiously over at him. Feeling stupid-feeling old-Ralph manufactured what he hoped looked like a big, cheerful grin and m,aved to her. Sue waved back and resumed her sweeping. Dorrance, meanwhile, had continued serenely on his way. He was now almost half a block up the street.

Ralph decided to let him go.

He climbed the steps to the porch, switching the book Dorrance had given him to his left hand so he could grope for his key-ring, and then saw he didn’t have to bother-the door was not only unlocked but standing ajar. Ralph had scolded McGovern repeatedly for his carelessness about locking the front door, and had thought he was finally having some success in getting the message through his downstairs tenant’s thick skull. Now, however, it seemed that McGovern had backslid.

“Dammit, Bill,” he said under his breath, pushing his way into the shadowy lower hall and looking nervously up the stairs. It was all too easy to imagine Ed Deepneau lurking up there, broad daylight or not.

Still, he could not stay here in the foyer all day. ’ He turned the thumb-bolt on the front door and started up the stairs.

There was nothing to worry about, of course. He had one bad moment when he thought -he saw someone standing in the far corner of the living room, but it was only his own old gray jacket. He had actually hung it on the coat-tree for a change instead of just slinging it onto a chair or draping it over the arm of the sofa; no wonder it had given him a turn.

He went into the kitchen and, with his hands poked into his back pockets, stood l(looking at the calendar. Monday was circled, and within the circle he had scrawled HONG-10:00.

I was supposed to tell you to cancel the appointment with the pinsticker man, and I done it. The rest is up to you.

For a moment Ralph felt himself step back from his life, so he was able to look at the latest section of the mural it made instead of just the detail which was this day. What he saw frightened him: an unknown road heading into a lightless tunnel where anything might be waiting.

Anything at all.

Then turn back, Ralph!

But he had an idea he couldn’t do that. He-had an idea he was for the tunnel, whether he wanted to go in there or not. The feeling was not one of being led so much as it was one of being shoved forward by powerful, invisible hands.

“Never mind,” he muttered, rubbing his temples nervously with the tips of his fingers and still looking at the circled date-two days from now-on the calendar. “It’s the insomnia. That’s when things really started to-”

Really started to what?

“To get weird,” he told the empty apartment. “That’s when things started to get really weird.”

Yes, weird. Lots of weird things, but the auras he was seeing were clearly the weirdest of them all. Cold gray light-it had looked like living frost-creeping over the man reading the paper in Day Break, Sun Down. The mother and son walking toward the supermarket, their entwined auras rising from their clasped hands like a pigtail.

Helen and Nat buried in gorgeous clouds of ivory light; Natalie snatching at the marks left by his moving fingers, ghostly contrails which only she and Ralph had been able to see.

And now Old Dor, turning up on his doorstep like some peculiar Old Testament prophet… only instead of telling him to repent, Dor had told him to cancel his appointment with the acupuncturist Joe Wyzer had recommended. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

The mouth of that tunnel. Looming closer every day. Was there really a tunnel? And if so, where did it lead?

I’m more interested in what might be waiting for me in there, Ralph thought. Waiting in the dark.

You shouldn’t have messed in, Dorrance had said. But it’s too late now.

“Done-bun-can’the-undone,” Ralph murmured, and suddenly decided he didn’t want to take the wide view anymore; it was unsettling.

Better to move in close again and consider things a detail at a time, beginning with his appointment for acupuncture treatment. Was hegoing to keep it, or follow the advice of Old Dor, alias the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father?

It really wasn’t a question that needed much thought, Ralph decided. Joe Wyzer had sweet-talked Hong’s secretary into finding him an appointment in early October, and Ralph intended to keep it. If there was a path out of this thicket, starting to sleep through the night was probably it. And that made Hong the next logical step.

“Done-bun-can’the-undone,” he repeated, and went into the living room to read one of his Westerns.

Instead he found himself paging through the book of poetry Dorrance had given him-Cemetery Nights, by Stephen Dobyns. Dorance had been right on both counts: the majority of the poems Were like stories, and Ralph discovered that he, liked them just fine. The poem from which Old Dor had quoted was called “Pursuit,” and it began: Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days passa blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral.

Through the windows of my speeding car, I see all that I love falling away: books unread,. okes untold, landscapes unvisited…

Ralph read the poem twice, completely absorbed, thinking he would have to read it to Carolyn. Carolyn would like it, which was good, and she would like him (who usually stuck to Westerns and historical novels) even more for finding it and bringing it to her like a bouquet of flowers. He was actually getting up to find a scrap of paper he could mark the page with when he-remembered that Carolyn had been dead for half a year now and burst into tears. He sat in the wing-chair for almost fifteen minutes, holding Cemetery Nights in his lap and wiping at his eyes with the heel of his left hand. At last he went into the bedroom, lay down, and tried to sleep, After an hour of staring at the ceiling, he got up, made himself a cup of coffee, and found a college football game on TV.

The Public Library was open on Sunday afternoons from one until six, and on the day after Dorrance’s visit, Ralph went down there, mostly because he had nothing better to do. The high-ceilinged reading room would ordinarily have contained a scattering of other old men like himself, most of them leafing through the various Sunday papers they now had time to read, but when Ralph emerged from the stacks where he had spent forty minutes browsing, he discovered he had the whole room to himself. Yesterday’s gorgeous blue skies had been replaced by driving rain that pasted the new-fallen leaves to the sidewalks or sent them flooding down the gutters and into Derry’s peculiar and unpleasantly tangled system of storm-drains.

The wind was still blowing, but it had shifted into the north and now had a nasty cutting edge. Old folks with any sense (or any luck) were at home where it was warm, possibly watching the last game of another dismal Red Sox season, possibly playing (Did Maid or Candyland with the grandkids, possibly napping off a big chicken dinner.

Ralph, on the other hand, did not care for the Red Sox, had no children or grandchildren, and seemed to have completely lost any capacity for napping he might once have had. So had taken the one o’clock Green Route bus down to the library, and here he was, wishing he had worn something heavier than his old scuffed gray jacket-the reading room was chilly. Gloomy, as well. The fireplace was empty, and the clankless radiators strongly suggested that the furnace had yet to be fired up. The Sunday librarian hadn’t bothered flipping the switches that turned on the hanging overhead globes, either. The light which did manage to find its way in here seemed to fall dead on the floor, and the corners were full of shadows. The loggers and soldiers and drummers and Indians in the old paintings on the walls looked like malevolent ghosts. Cold rain sighed and gusted against the windows.

I should have stayed home, Ralph thought, but didn’t really believe it; these days the apartment was even worse. Besides, he had found an interesting new book in what he had come to think of as the Mr. Sandman Section of the stacks: Patterns of Dreaming, by James A.

Hall, M.D. He turned on the overheads, rendering the room marginally less gruesome, sat down at one of the four long, empty tables, and was soon absorbed in his reading.

Prior to the realization that REM sleep and NREM sleep were distinct states [Hall wrote], studies concerned with total deprivation of a particular stage of sleep led to Dement’s suggestion (1960) that deprivatt’on… causes disorganization of the waking personality…

Boy, you got that right, my friend, Ralph thought. Can’t eve find a fucking Cup-A-Soup packet tvhen you want one.

… early dream-deprivation studies also raised the exciting speculation that schizophrenia might he a disorder in Which deprivation of dreaming at night led to a breakthrough of the dream process into everyday waking life.

Ralph hunched over the book, elbows on the table, fisted hands pressed against his temples, forehead lined and eyebrows drawn together in a clench of concentration, He wondered if Hall could be talking about the auras, maybe without even knowing it. Except he was still having dreams, dammit-very vivid ones, for the most part. just last night he’d had one in which he was dancing at the old Derry Pavillion (gone now; destroyed in the big storm which had wiped out most of the downtown area eight years before) with Lois Chasse.

He seemed to have taken her out with the intention of proposing to her, but Trigger Vachon, of all people, had kept trying to cut in.

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, tried to focus his attention, and began to read again. He did not see the man in the baggy gray sweatshirt materialize in the doorway of the,reading room and stand there, silently watching him. After about three minutes of this, the man reached beneath the, sweatshirt (Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy was on the front, wearing his Joe Cool glasses) and produced a hunting knife from the scabbard on his belt. The hanging overhead globes threw a thread of light along the knife’s serrated blade as the man turned it this way and that, admiring the edge. Then he moved forward toward the table where Ralph was sitting with his head propped on his hands. He sat down beside Ralph, who noticed that someone was there only in the faintest, most distant way.

Tolerance to sleep loss varies somewhat with the age of the subject. Ywunger subjects show an earlier onset of disturbance and more physical reactions, while older subjectsA hand closed lightly on Ralph’s shoulder, startling him out of the book.

“I wonder what they’ll look like?” an ecstatic voice whispered in his ear, the words flowing on a tide of what smelled like spoiled bacon cooking slowly in a bath of garlic and rancid butter. “Your guts, I mean. I wonder what they’ll look like when I let them out all over the floor. What do you think, you Godless baby-killing Centurion? Do you think they’ll be yellow or black or red or what?”

Something hard and sharp pressed into Ralph’s left side and then slowly traced its way down along his ribs.

“I can’t wait to find out,” the ecstatic voice whispered. “I can’t wait.

Ralph turned his head very slowly, hearing the tendons in his neck creak. He didn’t know the name of the man with the bad breaththe man who was sticking something that felt too much like a knife not to be one into his side-but he recognized him at once. The hornrimmed glasses helped, but the zany gray hair, standing up in clumps that reminded Ralph simultaneously of Don King and Albert Einstein, was the clincher. It was the man who had been standing with Ed Deepneau in the background of the newspaper photo that had showed Ham Davenport with his fist raised and Dan Da ton wearing Davenport’s CHOICE, NOT FEAR sign for a hat. Ralph thought he had seen this same guy in some of the TV news stories about the continuing abortion demonstrations. just another signwaving, chanting face in the crowd; just another spear-carrier. Except it now seemed that this particular spear-carrier intended to kill him.

“What do you think?” the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt asked, still in that ecstatic whisper. The sound of his voice frightened Ralph more than the blade as it slid slowly up and then back down his leather jacket, seeming to map the vulnerable organs on the left side of his body: lung, heart, kidney, intestines. “What color?”

His breath was nauseating, but Ralph was afraid to pull back or turn his head, afraid that any gesture might cause the knife to stop tracking and plunge. Now it was moving back up his side again.

Behind the thick lenses of his hornrims, the man’s brown eyes floated like strange fish, The expression in them was disconnected and oddly frightened, Ralph thought. The eyes of a man who would see signs in the sky and perhaps hear voices whispering from deep in the closet late at night.

“I don’t know,” Ralph said. “I don’t know why you’d want to hurt me in the first place.” He shot his eyes quickly around, still not moving his head, hoping to see someone, anyone, but the reading room remained empty. Outside, the wind gusted and rain racketed against the windows.

“Because you’re a fucking Centurion!” the gray-haired man spat.

“A fucking baby-killer! Stealing the fetal unborn.” Selling them to the highest bidder! I know all about you!”

Ralph dropped his right hand slowly from the side of his head.

He was right-handed, and all the stuff he happened to pick up in the course of the day generally went into the handiest right hand pocket of whatever he was wearing. The old gray jacket had big flap pockets, but he was afraid that even if he could sneak his hand in there unnoticed, the most lethal thing he would find was apt to be a crumpled-up Dentyne wrapper. He doubted that he even had a nail-clipper.

“Ed Deepneau told you that, didn’t he?” Ralph asked, then grunted as the knife poked painfully into his side just below the place where his ribs stopped.

“Don’t speak his name,” the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt whispered. “Don’t you even speak his name! Stealer of infants!

Cowardly murderer! Centurion!” He thrust forward with the blade again, and this time there was real pain as the tip punched through the leather jacket. Ralph didn’t think he was cut-yet, anyway-but he was quite sure the nut had already applied enough pressure to leave a nasty bruise. That was okay, though; if he got out of this with no more than a bruise, he would count himself lucky.

“All right,” he said. “I won’t mention his name.”

“Say you’re sorry! “the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt hissed, prodding with the knife again. This time it went through Ralph’s shirt,and he felt the first warm trickle of blood down his side. Which is under the point of the blade right now? he wondered.

Liver?

bladder? What’s under there on the left hand side?

He either couldn’t remember or didn’t want to. A picture had come into his mind, and it was trying to get in the way of any organized thought-a deer hung head-down from a set of scales outside some country store during hunting season. Glazed eyes, lolling tongue, and a dark slit up the belly where a man with a knifea knife just like this one-had opened it up and yanked its works out, leaving just head, meat, and hide.

“I’m sorry,” Ralph said in a voice which was no longer steady. “I am, really.”

“Yeah, right! You ought to be, but you aren’t! You aren’t.” Another prod. A bright lance of pain. More wet heat trickling down his side. And suddenly the room was brighter, as if two or three of the camera crews which had been wandering around Derry since the abortion protests began had crowded in here and turned on the floods they mounted over their videocams. There were no cameras, of course; the lights had gone on inside of him.

He turned toward the man with the knife-the man who was actually pressing the blade into him now-and saw he was surrounded by a shifting green and black aura that made Ralph think of

(swampfire)

the dim phosphorescence he had sometimes seen in marshy woods after dark. Twisting through it were spiky brambles of purest black.

He looked at his assailant’s aura with mounting dismay, hardly feeling the tip of the knife sink a sixteenth of an inch deeper into him.

He was distantly aware that blood was puddling at the bottom of his shirt, along the line of his belt, but that was all.

He’s crazy, and he really does mean to kill me-it isn’t I’ll bet He’s not quite ready to do it yet, he hasn’t quite worked himself itp to it, but he’s almost there. And if I try to run-if I try to move even an inch away from the knife He’s got in me-he’ll do it right away.

I think He’s hoping I will decide to move… then he can tell himself I brought it on myself, that it was my own fault.

“You and your kind, oh boy,” the man with the zany shock of gray hair was saying. “We know all about you.”

Ralph’s hand had reached the right pocket… and felt a largish something inside he didn’t recognize or remember putting there. Not that that meant much; when you could no longer remember if the last four digits of the cinema center phone number were 1317 or 1713, anything was possible.

“You guys, oh boy!” the man with the zany hair said. “Ohboy ohboy ohBOY!” This time Ralph had no trouble feeling the pain when the man pushed with the knife; the tip spread a thin red net all the way across the curve of his chest wall and up the nape of his neck. He uttered a low moan, and his right hand clamped tight on the gray jacket’s right hand pocket, moulding the leather to the curved side of the object inside.

“Don’t scream,” the man with the zany hair said in that low, ecstatic whisper. “Oh jeepers jeezly crow, you don’t want to do that.” His brown eyes peered at Ralph’s face, and the lenses of his glasses so magnified them that the tiny flakes of dandruff caught in his lashes looked almost as big as pebbles. Ralph could see the man’s aura even in his eyes-it went sliding across his pupils like green smoke across black water. The snakelike twists running through the green light were thicker now, twining together, and Ralph understood that when the knife sank all the way in, the part of this man’s personality which was

???? generating those black swirls would be what pushed it. The green was

???? confusion and paranoia; the black was something else. Something (from

???? outside) much worse.

???? "No,” he gasped. "I won’t. I won’t scream.”

????

“Good. I can feel your heart, you know. It’s coming right up the blade of the knife and into the palm of my hand. It must be beating really hard.” The man’s mouth pulled up in a jerky, humorless smile.

Flecks of spittle clung to the corners of his lips. “Maybe you’ll just keel over and die of a heart-attack, save me the trouble of killing you.” Another gust of that sickening breath washed over Ralph’s face. “You’re awful old.”

Blood was now running down his side in what felt like two streams, maybe even three. The pain of the knife-point gouging into him was maddening-like the stinger of a gigantic bee.

Or a pin, aIPb, thought, and discovered that this idea was funny in spite of the fix he was in… or perhaps because of it. This was the real pin-sticker man; James Roy Hong could be only a pale imitation.

And I never had a chance to cancel this appointment, Ralph thought. But then again, he had an idea that nuts like the guy in the Snoopy sweatshirt didn’t take cancellations. Nuts like this had their own agenda and they stuck to it, come hell or high water.

Whatever else might happen, Ralph knew he couldn’t stand that knife-tip boring into him much longer. He used his thumb to lift the flap of his coat pocket and slipped his hand inside. He knew what the object was the minute his fingertips touched it: the aerosol can Gretchen had taken out of her purse and put on his kitchen table. A little present from all your grateful friends at WomanCare, she had said.

Ralph had no idea how it had gotten from the top of the kitchen cabinet where he had put it into the pocket of his battered old fall jacket, and he didn’t care. His hand closed around it, and he used his thumb again, this time to pop off the can’s plastic top. He never took his eyes away from the twitching, frightened, exhilarated face of the man with the zany hair as he did this.

“I know something,” Ralph said. “If you promise not to kill me, I’ll tell you.”

“What?” the man with the zany hair asked. “,Teepers, what could a scum like you know?”

What could a scum like me know? Ralph asked himself, and the answer came at once, popping into his mind like Jackpot bars in the windows of a slot machine. He forced himself to lean into the green aura swirling around the man, into the terrible cloud of stink coming from his disturbed guts. At the same time he eased the small can from his pocket, held it against his thigh, and settled his index finger on the button which triggered the spray.

“I know who the Crimson King is,” he murmured.

The eyes widened behind the dirty hornrims-not just in surprise but in shock-and the man with the zany hair recoiled a little. For a moment the terrible pressure high on Ralph’s left side eased. It was his chance, the only one he was apt to have, and he took it, throwing himself to the right, falling off his chair and tumbling to the floor.

The back of his head smacked the tiles, but the pain seemed distant and unimportant compared to the relief at the removal of the knife-point.

The man with the zany hair squawked-a sound of mingled rage and resignation, as if he had become used to such setbacks over his long and difficult life. He leaned over Ralph’s now-empty chair, his twitching face thrust forward, his eyes looking like the sort of fantastic, glowing creatures which live in the ocean’s deepest trenches.

Ralph raised the spray-can and had just a moment to realize he hadn’t had time to check which direction the pinhole in the nozzle was pointing-he might very well succeed only in giving himself a faceful of Bodyguard.

No time to worry about that now.

He pressed the nozzle as the man with the zany hair thrust his knife forward. The man’s face was enveloped in a thin haze of droplets that looked like the stuff that came out of the pine-scented airfreshener Ralph kept on the bathroom toilet tank. The lenses of his glasses fogged over.

The result was immediate and all Ralph could have wished for.

The man with the zany hair screamed in pain, dropped his knife (it landed on Ralph’s left knee and came to rest between his legs), and clutched at his face, pulling his glasses off. They landed on the table.

At the same time the thin, somehow greasy aura around him flashed a brilliant red and then winked out-out of Ralph’s view, at least.

“I’m blind!” the man with the zany hair cried in a high, shrieky voice. “I’m blind, I’m blind!”

“No, you’re not,” Ralph said, getting shakily to his feet.

“You’re just-” The man with the zany hair screamed again and fell to the floor.

He rolled back and forth on the black and white tiles with his hands over his face, howling like a child who has gotten his hand caught in a door. Ralph could see little pie-wedges of cheeks between his splayed fingers. The skin there was turning an alarming shade of red.

Ralph told himself to leave the guy alone, that he was crazy as a loon and dangerous as a rattlesnake, but he found himself too horrified and ashamed of what he had done to take this no doubt excellent advice.

The idea that it had been a matter of survival, of disabling his assailant or dying, had already begun to seem unreal.

He bent down and put a tentative hand on the man’s arm. The nut rolled away from him and began to drum his dirty lowtop sneakers on the floor like a child having a tantrum. “oh you son of a bitch” he was screaming. “You shot me with something!” And then, incredibly: “I’ll sue the pants off you.”

“You’ll have to explain about the knife before you’re able to progress much with your lawsuit, I think,” Ralph said.

He saw the knife lying on the floor, reached for it, then thought again. It would be better if his fingerprints weren’t on it. As he straightened, a wave of dizziness rushed through his head and for a moment the rain beating against the window sounded hollow and distant.

He kicked the knife away, then tottered on his feet and had to grab the back of the chair he’d been sitting in to keep from falling over.

Things steadied again.

He heard approaching footsteps from the main lobby and murmuring, questioning voices.

Now you come, Ralph thought wearily. Where were you three minutes ago, when this guy was on the verge of popping my left lung like a balloon?

Mike Hanlon, looking slim and no more than thirty despite his tight cap of gray hair, appeared in the doorway. Behind him was the teenage boy Ralph recognized as the weekend desk assistant, and behind the teenager were four or five gawkers, probably from the periodicals room.

“Mr. Roberts!” Mike exclaimed. “Christ, how bad are you hurt?”

“I’m fine, it’s him that’s hurt,” Ralph said. But he happened to look down at himself as he pointed at the man on the floor and saw he wasn’t fine. His coat had pulled up when he pointed, and the left side of the plaid shirt beneath had gone a deep, sodden red in a teardrop shape that started just below the armpit and spread out from there.

“Shit,” he said faintly, and sat down in his chair again.

He bumped the hornrimmed glasses with his elbow and they skittered almost all the way across the table. The mist of droplets on their lenses made them look like eyes which had been blinded by cataracts.

“He shot me with acid!” the man on the floor screamed. “I can’t see and my skin is melting. I can feel it melting.l” To Ralph -, he sounded like an almost conscious parody of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Mike tossed a quick glance at the man on the floor, then sat down in the chair next to to Ralph. “What happened?”

“Well, it sure wasn’t acid,” Ralph said, and held up the can of Bodyguard. He set it on the table beside Patterns of Dreaming. “The lady who gave it to me said it’s not as strong as Mace, it Just irritates your eyes and makes you sick to your-”

“It’s not what’s wrong with him that I’m worried about,” Mike said impatiently.

“Anyone who can yell that loud probably isn’t going to die in the next three minutes, It’s you I’m worried about, Mr. Roberts-any idea how bad he stabbed you?”

“He didn’t actually stab me at all,” Ralph said. “He… sort of poked me. With that.” He pointed at the knife lying on the tile floor.

At the sight of the red tip, he felt another wave of faintness track through his head. It felt like an express train made of feather-pillows.

That was stupid, of course, made no sense at all, but he wasn’t in a very sensible frame of mind.

The assistant was looking cautiously down at the man on the floor.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “We know this guy, Mike-it’s Charlie Pickering.”

“Goodness-gracious, great balls of fire,” Mike said. “Now why aren’t I surprised?” He looked at the teenage assistant and sighed.

“Better call the cops, Justin. It looks like we’ve got us a situation here.”

“Am I in trouble for using that?” Ralph asked an hour later, and pointed to one of the two sealed plastic bags sitting on the cluttered surface of the desk in Mike Hanlin’s office. A strip of yellow tape, marked EVIDENCE amp;/ DATE 101,31 and SITE r of the DERRY PUBLIC LIBRARY ran across the front.

“Not as much as our old pal Charlie’s going to be in for using this,” John Leydecker said, and pointed to the other sealed bag, The hunting knife was inside, the blood on the tip now dried to a tacky maroon. Leydecker was wearing a University of Maine football sweater today. It made him look approximately the size of a dairy barn. “We still pretty much believe in the concept of self-defense out here in the sticks. We don’t talk it up much, though-it’s sort of like admitting you believe the world is flat.”

Mike Hanlon, who was leaning in the doorway, laughed.

Ralph hoped his face didn’t show how deeply relieved he felt. As a paramedic (one of the guys who had run Helen Deepneau to the hospital back in August, for all he knew) worked on him-first photographing, then disinfecting, finally butterfly-clamping and bandaging-he had sat with his teeth gritted, imagining a judge sentencing him to six months in the county clink for assault with a semideadly weapon. Hopefully, Mr. Roberts, this will serve as an example and a warning to any other old farts in this vicinity who may feel justified in carrying around spray-cans of disabling nerve-gas…

Leydecker looked once more at the six Polaroid photographs lined up along the side of Hanlon’s computer terminal. The fresh-faced emergency medical technician had taken the first three before patching Ralph up. These showed a small dark circle-it looked like the sort of oversized period made by children just learning to print low down on Ralph’s side. The E.M.T had taken the second set of three after applying the butterfly clamp and getting Ralph’s signature on a form attesting to the fact that he had been offered hospital service and had refused it. In this latter group of photographs, the beginnings of what was going to be an absolutely spectacular bruise could be seen.

“God bless Edwin Land and Richard Polaroid, Leydecker said, putting the photographs into another EVIDENCE Baggie.

“I don’t think there ever was a Richard Polaroid,” Mike Hanlon said from his spot in the doorway.

“Probably not, but God bless him just the same. No jury who got a look at these photos would do anything but give you a medal, Ralph, and not even Clarence Darrow could keep em out of evidence.” He looked back at Mike, “Charlie Pickering.”

Mike nodded. “Charlie Pickering.”

“Fuckhead.”

Mike nodded again. “Fuckhead deluxe.”

The two of them looked at each other solemnly, then burst into gales of laughter at the same moment. Ralph understood exactly how they felt-it was funny because it was awful and awful because it was funny-and he had to bite his lips savagely to keep from joining them.

The last thing in the world he wanted to do right now was get laughing; it would hurt like a bastard.

Leydecker took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, mopped his streaming eyes with it, and began to get himself under control.

“Pickering’s one of the right-to-lifers, isn’t he?” Ralph asked.

He was remembering how Pickering had looked when Hanlon’s teenage assistant had helped him sit up. Without his glasses, the man had looked about as dangerous as a bunny in a petshop window.

“You could say that,” Mike agreed dryly. “He’s the one they caught last year in the parking garage that services the hospital and WomanCare. He had a can of gasoline in his hand and a knapsack filled with empty bottles on his back.”

“Also strips of sheeting, don’t forget these,” Leydecker said.

“These were going to be his fuses. That was back when Charlie was a member in good standing of Daily Bread.”

“How close did he come to lighting the place up?” Ralph asked curiously.

Leydecker shrugged. “Not very. Someone in the group apparently decided firebombing the local women’s clinic might be a little closer to terrorism than politics and made an anonymous phone-call to Your local police authority,”

“Good deal,” Mike said. He snorted another little chuckle, then crossed his arms as if to hold any further outburst inside.

“Yeah,” Leydecker said. He laced his fingers together, stretched out his arms, and popped his knuckles. “Instead of prison, a thoughtful, caring ’judge sent Charlie to juniper Hill for six months’ worth of treatment and therapy, and they must have decided he was okay, because he’s been back in town since July or so.”

“Yep,” Mike agreed. “He’s down here just about every day. Kind of improving the tone of the place. Buttonholes everyone who comes in, practically, and gives them his little peptalk on how any woman who has an abortion is going to perish in brimstone, and how the real baddies like Susan Day are going to burn forever in a lake of fire. But I can’t figure out why he’d take after you, Mr. Roberts.”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“Are you okay, Ralph?” Leydecker asked. “You look pale.”

“I’m fine,” Ralph said, although he did not feel fine; in fact, he had begun to feel very queasy.

“I don’t know about fine, but you’re sure lucky. Lucky those women gave you that can of pepper-gas, lucky you had it with you, and luckiest of all that Pickering didn’t just walk up behind you and stick that knife of his into the nape of your neck. Do you feet like coming down to the station and making a formal statement now, or-” Ralph abruptly lunged out of Mike Hanlon’s ancient swivel chair, bolted across the room with his left hand over his mouth, and clawed open the door in the rear right corner of the office, praying it wasn’t a closet. If it was, he was probably going to fill up Mike’s galoshes with a partially processed grilled-cheese sandwich and some slightly used tomato soup.

It turned out to be the room he needed. Ralph dropped to his knees in front of the toilet and vomited with his eyes closed and his left arm clamped tightly against the hole Pickering had made in his side. The pain as his muscles first locked and then pushed was still enormous.

“I take it that’s a no,” Mike Hanlon said from behind him, and then put a comforting hand on the back of Ralph’s neck.

“Are you okay?

Did you get that thing bleeding again?”

“I don’t think so,” Ralph said, He started to unbutton his shirt, then paused and clamped his arm tight against his side again as his stomach gave another lurch before quieting once more. He raised his arm and looked at the dressing. It was pristine. “I appear to be okay.”

“Good,” Leydecker said, He was standing just behind the librarian. “You done?”

“I think so, yes.” Ralph looked at Mike shamefacedly. “I apologize for that.”

“Don’t be a goof.” Mike helped Ralph to his feet.

“Come on,” Leydecker said, “I’ll give you a ride home. Tomorrow will be time enough for the statement. What you need is to put your feet up the rest of today, and a good night’s sleep tonight.”

“Nothing like a good night’s sleep,” Ralph agreed. They had reached the office door. “You want to let go of my arm now, Detective Leydecker? We’re not going steady just yet, are we?”

Leydecker looked startled, then dropped Ralph’s arm. Mike started to laugh again.” ’Not going-’ That’s pretty good, Mr. Roberts.”

Leydecker was smiling. “I guess we’re not, but you can call me Jack, if you want. Or John. just not Johnny. Since my mother died, the only one who calls me Johnny is old Prof McGovern.”

Old Prof McGovern, Ralph thought. How strange that sounds.

“Okay-John it is. And both of you guys can call me Ralph. As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Roberts is always going to be a Broadway play starring Henry Fonda.”

“You got it,” Mike Hanlon said. “And take care of yourself.”

“I’ll try,” he said, then stopped in his tracks. “Listen, I have something to thank you for, quite apart from your help today.”

Mike raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“Yes. You hired Helen Deepneau. She’s one of my favorite people, and she desperately needed the job. So thanks.”

Mike smiled and nodded. “I’ll be happy to accept the bouquets, but she’s the one who did me the favor, really. She’s actually overqualified for the job, but I think she wants to stay in town.”

“So do I, and you’ve helped make it possible. So thanks again.”

Mike grinned, “My pleasure.”

As Ralph and Leydecker stepped out behind the circulation desk, Leydecker said: “I guess that honeycomb must have really turned the trick, huh?”

Ralph at first had absolutely no idea what the big detective was talking about-he might as well have asked a question in Esperanto.

“Your insomnia,” Leydecker said patiently. “You got past it, right? Must have-you look a gajillion times better than on the day I first met you.”

“I was a little stressed that day,” Ralph said. He found himself remembering the old Billy Crystal routine about Fernando-the one that went Listen, dahling, don’t be a schnook,-it’s not how you feel, it’s how you look! And you… look… MAHVELLOUS!

“And you’re not today? C’mon, Ralph, this is me. So give-was it the honeycomb?”

Ralph appeared to think this over, then nodded. “Yes, I guess that must have been what did it.”

“Fantastic! Didn’t I tell you?” Leydecker said cheerfully as they pushed their way out into the rainy afternoon.

They were waiting for the light at the top of Up-Mile Hill when Ralph turned to Leydecker and asked what the chances were of nailing Ed as Charlie Pickering’s accomplice. “Because Ed put him up to it,” he said. “I know that as well as I know that’s Strawford Park over there.”

“You’re probably right,” Leydecker replied, “but don’t kid yourself-the chances of nailing him as an accomplice are shitty.

They wouldn’t be very good even if the County Prosecutor wasn’t as conservative as Dale Cox.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, I doubt if we’ll be able to show any deep connection between the two men. Second, guys like Pickering tend to be fiercely loyal to the people they identify as ’friends,” because they have so few of them-their worlds are mostly made up of enemies. Under interrogation I don’t think Pickering will repeat much or any of what he told you while he was tickling your ribs with his hunting knife.

Third, Ed Deepneau is no fool. Crazy, yes-maybe crazier than Pickering, when you get right down to it-but not a fool. He won’t admit anything.”

Ralph nodded. It was exactly his opinion of Ed.

“If Pickering did say that Deepneau ordered him to find you and waste you-on the grounds that you were one of these baby-killing, fetus-snatching Centurions-Ed would just smile at us and nod and say he was sure that poor Charlie had told us that, that poor Charlie might even believe that, but that didn’t make it true.”

The light turned green. Leydecker drove through the intersection, then bent left onto Harris Avenue. The windshield wipers thumped and flapped. Strawford Park, on Ralph’s right, looked like a wavery mirage through the rain streaming down the passenger window, “And what could we say to that?” Leydecker asked. “The fact is, Charlie Pickering has got a long history of mental instability-when it comes to nuthatches, he’s made the grand tour: juniper Hill, Acadia Hospital, Bangor Mental Health Institute… if it’s a place where they have free electrical treatments and jackets that button up the back, Charlie’s most likely been there.

These days his hobby-horse is abortion. Back in the late sixties he had a bug up his ass about Margaret Chase Smith. He wrote letters to everyone-Derry P.D the State Police, the FBI-claiming she was a Russian spy. He had the evidence, he said.”

“Good God, that’s incredible.”

“Nope; that’s Charlie Pickering, and I bet there’s a dozen like him in every city this size in the United States. Hell, all over the world.”

Ralph’s hand crept to his left side and touched the square of bandage there. His fingers traced the butterfly shape beneath the gauze.

What he kept remembering was Pickering’s magnified brown eyeshow they had looked terrified and ecstatic at the same time. He was already having trouble believing the man to whom those eyes belonged had almost killed him, and he was afraid that by tomorrow the whole thing would seem like one of the so-called breakthrough dreams James A.

Hall’s book talked about.

“The bitch of it is, Ralph, a nut like Charlie Pickering makes the perfect tool for a guy like Deepneau. Right now our little wifebeating buddy has got about a t(on of deniability.”

Leydecker turned into the driveway next to Ralph’s building and parked behind a large Oldsmobile with blotches of rust on the trunklid and a very old sticker-DUKAKIS ’88-on the bumper.

“Who’s that brontosaurus belong to? The Prof?”

“No,” Ralph said. “That’s my brontosaurus.”

Leydecker gave him an unbelieving look as he shoved the gearshift lever of his stripped-to-the-bone Police Department Chevy into Park.

“If you own a car, how come you’re out standing around the bus stop in the pouring rain? Doesn’t it run?”

“It runs,” Ralph said a little stiffly, not wanting to add that he could be wrong about that; he hadn’t had the Olds on the road in over two months. “And I wasn’t standing around in the pouring rain; it’s a bus shelter, not a bus stop. It has a roof. Even a bench inside. No cable TV, true, but wait till next year.”

“Still…” Leydecker said, gazing doubtfully at the Olds.

“I spent the last fifteen years of my working life driving a desk, but before that I was a salesman. For twenty-five years or so I averaged eight hundred miles a week. By the time I settled in at the printshop, I didn’t care if I ever sat behind the wheel of a car again.

And since my wife died, there hardly ever seems to be any reason to drive. The bus does me just fine for most things.”

All true enough; Ralph saw no need to add that he had increasingly come to mistrust both his reflexes and his short vision. A year ago, a kid of about seven had chased his football out into Harris Avenue as Ralph was coming back from the movies, and although he had been going only twenty miles an hour, Ralph had thought for two endless, horrifying seconds that he was going to run the little boy down. He hadn’t, of course-it hadn’t even been close, not really-but since then he thought he could count the number of times he’d driven the Olds on both hands.

He saw no need to tell John that, either.

“Well, whatever does it for you,” Leydecker said, giving the Olds a vague wave. “How does one o’clock tomorrow afternoon sound for that statement, Ralph? I come on at noon, so I could kind of look over your shoulder. Bring you a coffee, if you wanted one.”

“That sounds fine. And thanks for the ride home.”

“No problem. One other thing…”

Ralph had started to open the car door. Now he closed it again and turned back to Leydecker, eyebrows raised.

Leydecker looked down at his hands, shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel, cleared his throat, then looked up again. “I just wanted to say that I think you’re a class act,” Leydecker said. “Lots of guys forty years younger than you would have finished today’s little adventure in the hospital. Or the morgue.”

“My guardian angel was looking out for me, I guess,” Ralph said, thinking of how surprised he had been when he realized what the round shape in his jacket pocket was.

“Well, maybe that was it, but you still want to be sure to lock your door tonight. You hear what I’m saying?”

Ralph smiled and nodded. Warranted or not, Leydecker’s praise had made a warm spot in his chest. “I will, and if I can just get McGovern to cooperate, everything will be hunky-dory.”

Also, he thought, I can always go down and double-check the lock myself when I wake up. That should be just about two and a half hours after I fall asleep, the way things are going.

“Everything is going to be hunky-dory,” Leydecker said. “No one down where I work was very pleased when Deepneau more or less co-opted The Friends of Life, but I can’t say we were surprised-Ed’s an attractive, charismatic guy. If, that is, you happen to catch him on a day when he hasn’t been using his wife for a punchingbag.”

Ralph nodded.

“On the other hand, we’ve seen guys like him before, and they have a way of self-destructing. That process has already started with Deepneau. He’s lost his wife, he’s lost his job… did you know that?”

“Uh-huh. Helen told me.”

“Now he’s losing his more moderate followers. They’re peeling off like jet fighters heading back to base because they’re running out of fuel.

Not Ed, though-he’s going on come hell or high water. I imagine he’ll keep at least some of them with him until the Susan Day speech, but after that I think it’s gonna be a case of the cheese stands alone.”

???? "Has it occurred to you that he might try something Friday? That he

???? might try to hurt Susan Day?”

???? "Oh yes,” Leydecker said. "It’s occurred to us, all right. It

???? certainly has.”

????

Ralph was extremely happy to find the perch door locked this time.

He unlocked it just long enough to let himself in, then trudged up the front stairs, which seemed longer and gloomier than ever this afternoon.

The apartment seemed too silent in spite of the steady beat of the rain on the roof, and the air seemed to smell of too many sleepless nights. Ralph took one of the chairs from the kitchen table over to the counter, stood on it, and looked at the top of the cabinet closest to the sink. It was as if he expected to find another can of Bodyguard-the original can, the one he’d put up here after seeing Helen and her friend Gretchen off-on top of that cabinet, and part of him actually did expect that. There was nothing up there, however, but a toothpick, an old Buss fuse, and a lot of dust.

He got carefully down off the chair, saw he had left muddy footprints on the seat, and used a swatch of paper towels to wipe them away. Then he replaced the chair at the table and went into the living room. He stood there, letting his eyes run from the couch with its dingy floral coverlet to the wing-chair to the old television sitting on its oak table between the two windows looking out on Harris Avenue.

From the TV his gaze moved into the far corner. When he had come into the apartment yesterday, still a little on edge from finding the porch door unlatched, Ralph had briefly mistaken his jacket hanging on the coat-tree in that corner for an intruder. Well, 2 33 no need to be coy; he had thought for a moment that Ed had decided to pay him a visit.

I never hang my coat up, though. It was one of the things about me-one of the few, I think-that used to genuinely irritate Carolyn.

And if I never managed to get in the habit of hanging it up when she was alive, I sure as shit haven’t since she died. No, I’m not the one who hung thisjacket up.

Ralph crossed the r(Rom, rummaging in the pockets of the gray leather jacket and putting the stuff he found on top of the television.

Nothing in the left but an old roll of Life Savers with lint clinging to the top one, but the right hand pocket was a treasure-trove even with the aerosol can gone. There was a lemon Tootsie Pop, still in its wrapper; a crumpled advertising circular from the Derry House of Pizza; a double-a battery; a small empty carton that had once contained an apple pie from McDonald’s; his discount card from Dave’s Video Stop, just four punches away from a free rental (the card had been MIA for ever two weeks and Ralph had been sure it was lost); a book of matches; various scraps of tinfoil… and a folded piece of lined blue paper.

Ralph unfolded it and read a single sentence, written in a scrawling, slightly unsteady old man’s script: Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else.

That was all there was, but it was enough to confirm for his brain what his heart already knew: Dorrance Marstellar had been on the porch steps when Ralph had returned from Back Pages with his paperbacks, but he’d had other stuff to do before sitting down to wait. He had gone up to Ralph’s apartment, taken the aerosol can from the top of the kitchen shelf, and put it in the right hand pocket of Ralph’s old gray jacket.

He had even left his calling-card: a bit of poetry scrawled on a piece of paper probably torn from the battered notebook in which he sometimes recorded arrivals and departures along Runway 3. Then, instead of returning the jacket to wherever Ralph had left it, Old Dor had hung it neatly on the coat-tree. With that accomplished (done-bun-can’the-undone) he had returned to the porch to wait.

Last night Ralph had given McGovern a scolding for leaving the front door unlocked again, and McGovern had borne it as patiently as Ralph himself had borne Carolyn’s scoldings about tossing his jacket onto the nearest chair when he came in instead of hanging it up, but now Ralph found himself wondering if he hadn’t accused Bill unjustly.

Perhaps Old Dor had picked the lock… or witched it. Under the circumstances, witchery seemed the more likely choice. Because…

“Because look,” Ralph said in a low voice, mechanically scooping his pocket-litter up from the top of the TV and dumping it back into his pockets. “It isn’t just like he knew I’d need the Stuff; he knew where to find it, and he knew where to put it.”

A chill zigzagged up his back at that, and his mind tried to gavel the whole idea down-to label it mad, illogical, just the sort of thing a man with a grade-a case of insomnia would think up. Maybe so.

But that didn’t explain the scrap of paper, did it?

He looked at the scrawled words on the blue-lined sheet again-Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. That wasn’t his handwriting any more than Cemetery Nights was his book.

“Except it is now; Dor gave it to me,” Ralph said, and the chill raced up his back again, jagged as a crack in a windshield.

And what other explanation comes to mind? That can didn’t just fly into your pocket. The sheet of notepaper, either.

That sense of being pushed by invisible hands toward the maw of some dark tunnel had returned. Feeling like a man in a dream, Ralph walked back toward the kitchen. On the way he slipped out of the gray jacket and tossed it over the arm of the couch without even thinking about it.

He stood in the doorway for some time, looking fixedly at the calendar with its picture of two laughing boys carving a jack-o’-lantern. Looking at tomorrow’s date, which was circled.

Cancel the appointment with the pin-sticker man, Dorrance had said; that was the message, and today the knife-sticker man had more or less underlined it. Hell, lit it in neon.

Ralph hunted out a number in the Yellow Pages and dialed it.

“You have reached the office of Dr. James Roy Hong,” a pleasant female voice informed him. “There is no one available to take your call right now, so please leave a message at the sound of the tone.

We will get back to you just as soon as possible.”

The answering machine beeped. In a voice which surprised him with its steadiness, Ralph said: “This is Ralph Roberts. I’m scheduled to come in tomorrow at ten o’clock. I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to make it. Something has come up. Thank you.” He paused, then added: “I’ll pay for the appointment, of course.”

He shut his eyes and groped the phone back into the cradle. Then he leaned his forehead against the wall.

What are you doing, Ralph? What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?

“It’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart.”

You can’t seriously think whatever you’re thinking… can you?

“… a long walk, so don’t sweat the small stuff What exactly are you thinking, Ralph?

He didn’t know; he didn’t have the slightest idea. Something about fate, he supposed, and appointments in Samarra. He only knew for sure that rings of pain were spreading out from the little hole in his left side, the hole the knife-sticker man had made. The E.M.T had given him half a dozen pain-pills and he supposed he should take one, but just now he felt too tired to go to the sink and draw a glass of water… and if he was too tired to cross one shitty little room, how the hell would he ever make the long walk back to Eden?

Ralph didn’t know, and for the time being he didn’t care. He only wanted to stand where he was, with his forehead against the wall and his eyes shut so he wouldn’t have to look at anything.

CHAPTER 8

The beach was a long white edging, like a flirt Of silk slip at the hem of the bright blue sea, and it was totally empty except for a round object about seventy yards away. This round object was about the size of a basketball, and it filled Ralph with a fear that was both deep and-for the moment, at least-groundless.

Don’t go near it, he told himself. There’s something bad about it.

Something really bad. It’s a black dog barking at a blue moon, blood in the sink, a raven perched on a bust of Pallasiust inside my chamber door. You don’t want to go near it, Ralph, and you don’t need to go near it, because this is one of Joe Wyzer’s lucid dreams. You ca light turn and cruise away, if you want.

Except his feet began to carry him forward anyway, so maybe this wasn’t a lucid dream. Not pleasant, either, not at all. Because the closer he got to that object on the beach, the less it looked like a basketball.

It was by far the most realistic dream Ralph had ever experienced, and the fact that he knew he was dreaming actually seemed to heighten that sense of realism. Of lucidity. He could feel the fine, loose sand under his bare feet, warm but not hot; he could hear the grinding, rock-throated roar of the incoming waves as they lost their balance and sprawled their way up the lower beach, where the sand glistened like wet tanned skin; could smell salt and drying seaweed, a strong and tearful smell that reminded him of summer vacations spent at Old Orchard Beach when he was a child.

Hey, old buddy, if you can’t change this dream, I think maybe you ought to hit the ejection switch and bail out of it-wake yourself up, in other words, and right away.

He had closed half the distance to the object on the beach and there was no longer any question about what it was-not a basketball but a head. Someone had buried a human being up to the chin in the sand.

… and, Ralph suddenly realized, the tide was coming in.

He didn’t bail out; he began to run. As he did, the frothy edge of a wave touched the head. It opened its mouth and began to scream.

Even raised in a shriek, Ralph knew that voice at once. It was Carolyn’s voice.

The froth of another wave ran up the beach and backwashed the hair which had been clinging to the head’s wet cheeks. Ralph began to run faster, knowing he was almost certainly going to be too late.

The tide was coming in fast. It would drown her long before he could free her buried body from the sand.

You don’t have to save her, Ralph. Carolyn’s already dead, and it didn’t happen on some deserted beach. It happened in Room 317 of Derry Home Hospital You were with her at the end, and the sound you heard wasn’t surf but sleet betting the window. Remember?

He remembered, but he ran faster nevertheless, sending puffs of sugary sand out behind him.

You won’t ever get to her, though,-you know how it is in dreams, don’t you? Each thing you rush toward turns into something else.

No, that wasn’t how the poem went… or was it? Ralph couldn’t be sure. All he clearly remembered now was that it had ended with the narrator running blindly from something deadly (Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape) which was hunting him through the woods. closing in.

Yet he was getting closer to the dark shape on the sand. it wasn’t changing into anything else, either, and when he felon his knees before Carolyn, he understood at once why he had not been able to recognize his wife of forty-five years, even from a distance: something was terribly wrong with her aura. It clung to her skin like a filthy dry-cleaning bag. When Ralph’s shadow fell on her, Carolyn’s eyes rolled up like the eyes of a horse that has shattered its leg going over a high fence. She was breathing in rapid, frightened gasps, and each expulsion of air sent jets of gray-black aura from her nostrils.

The tattered balloon-string straggling up from the crown of her head was the purple-black of a festering wound. When she opened her mouth to scream again, an unpleasant glowing substance flew from her lips in gummy strings which disappeared almtdst as soon as his eyes had registered their existence.

I’ll save you, Carol! he shouted. He fell on his knees and began digging at sand around her like a dog digging up a bone… and as the thought occurred to him, he realized that Rosalie, the early-morning scavenger of Harris Avenue, was sitting tiredly behind his screaming wife. It was as if the dog had been summoned by the thought. Rosalie, he saw, was also surrounded by one of those filthy black auras. She had Bill McGovern’s missing Panima hat between her paws, and it looked as though she had enjoyed many a good chew on it since it had come into her possession.

So that’s where the, damn hat went, Ralph thought, then tlirneci hunting him and back to Carolyn and began to dig even faster. So far he hadn’t managed to uncover so much as a single shoulder.

Never mind me.” Carolyn screamed at him. I’m already dead, remember? Watch for the white-man tracks, Ralph TheA wave, glassy green on the bottom and the curdled white of soapsuds on top, broke less than ten feet from the beach. It ran up the sand toward them, freezing Ralph’s balls with cold water and burying Carolyn’s head momentarily in a grit-filled surge of foam.

When the wave retreated, Ralph raised his own horror-filled shriek to the indifferent blue sky. The retreating wave had done in seconds what it had taken the radiation treatments almost a month to do; took her hair, washed her bald. And the crown of her head had begun to bulge at the spot where the blackish balloon-string was attached.

Carolyn, no! he howled, digging even faster. The sand was now dank and unpleasantly heavy.

Never mind, she said. Gray-black puffs came from her mouth with each word, like dirty vapor from an industrial smokestack. It’s just the tumor, and it’s inoperable, so don’t lose any sleep over that part of the show. What the hell, it’s a long walk back to Eden, so don’t sweat the small stuff, right? But you have to keep an eye out for those tracks…

Carolyn, I don’t know what you’re talking about!

Another wave came, wetting Ralph to the waist and inundating Carolyn again. When it withdrew, the swelling on the crown of her head was beginning to split open.

You’ll find out soon enough, Carolyn replied, and then the swelling on her head popped with a sound like a hammer striking a slab of meat.

A haze of blood flew into the clear, salt-smelling air, and a horde of black bugs the size of cockroaches came pouring out of her.

Ralph had never seen anything like them before-not even in a dream-and they filled him with an almost hysterical loathing. He would have fled, Carolyn or not, but he was frozen in place, too stunned to move a single finger, let alone get up and run.

Some of the black bugs ran back into Carolyn by way of her screaming mouth, but most of them hurried down her cheek and shoulder to the wet sand. Their accusing, alien eyes never left Ralph as they went. All this is your fault, the eyes seemed to say. You could have saved her, Ralph, and a better man would have saved her.

Carolyn! he screamed. He put his hands out to her, then pulled them back, terrified of the-black bugs, which were still spewing out of her head. Behind her, Rosalie sat in her own small pocket of darkness, looking gravely at him and now holding McGovern’s misplaced chapeau in her mouth.

One of Carolyn’s eyes popped out and lay on the wet sand like a blob of blueberry jelly. Bugs vomited from the now-empty socket.

Carolyn.” he screamed. Carolyn.” Carolyn! Carolyn! Carolyn!

Car-” Suddenly, in the same instant that he knew the dream was over, Ralph was falling. He barely registered the fact before he thumped to the bedroom floor. He managed to break his fall with one outstretched hand, probably saving himself a nasty rap on the head but provoking a howl of pain from beneath the butterfly bandage taped high up on his left side. For the moment, at least, he barely registered the pain.

What he felt was fear, revulsion, a horrible, aching grief… and most of all an overwhelming sense of gratitude. The bad dreamsurely the worst dream he’d ever had-was over, and he was in the world of real things again.

He pulled back his mostly unbuttoned pajama top, checked the bandage for bleeding, saw none, and then sat up. just doing that much seemed to exhaust him; the thought of getting up, even long enough to fall back into bed, seemed out of the question for the time being.

Maybe after his panicky, racing heart slowed down a little.

Can people die of bad dreams? he wondered, and in answer he heard Joe Wyzer’s voice: You bet they can, Ralph, although the medical examiner usually ends up writing suicide on the cause-of-death line.

In the shaky aftermath of his nightmare, sitting on the floor and hugging his knees with his right arm, Ralph had no real doubt that some dreams were powerful enough to kill. The details of this one were fading out now, but he could still remember the climax all too well: that thudding sound, like a hammer hitting a thick cut of beef, and the vile spew of bugs from Carolyn’s head. Plump they had been, plump and lively, and why not? They had been feasting on his dead wife’s brain.

Ralph uttered a low, watery moan and swiped at his face with his left hand, provoking another jolt from beneath the bandage. His palm came away slick with sweat.

What, exactly, had she been telling him to watch out for?

Whiteman traps? No-tracks, not traps. White-man tracks, whatever they were. Had there been more? Maybe, maybe not. He couldn’t remember for sure, and so what? It had been a dream, for Christ’s sake, just a dream, and outside of the fantasy-world described in the tabloid newspapers, dreams meant nothing and proved nothing.

When a person went to sleep, his mind seemed to turn into a kind of rathouse bargain hunter, sifting through the discount bins of mostly worthless short-term memories, looking not for items which were valuable or even useful but only for things that were still bright and shiny. These it put together in freakshow collages which were often striking but had, for the most part, all the sense of Natalie Deepneau’s conversation. Rosalie the dog had turned up, even Bill’s missing Panama had made a cameo appearance, but it all meant nothing.

… except tomorrow night he would not take one of the pain-pills the

E.M.T had given him even if his arm felt like it was falling off.

Not only had the one he’d taken during the late news failed to keep him under, as he had hoped and half-expected; it had probably played its own part in causing the nightmare.

Ralph managed to get up off the floor and sit on the edge of the bed.

A wave of faintness floated through his head like parachute silk, and he shut his eyes until the feeling passed. While he was sitting there with his head down and his eyes closed, he groped for the lamp on the bedside table and turned it on. When he opened his eyes, the area of the bedroom lit by its warm yellow glow looked very bright and very real.

He looked at the clock beside the lamp. 1:48 a.m and he felt totally awake and totally alert, pain-pill or no pain-pill. He got up, walked slowly into the kitchen, and put on the teakettle. Then he leaned against the counter, absently massaging the bandage beneath his left armpit, trying to quiet the throbbing his most recent adventures had awakened there. When the kettle steamed, he poured hot water over a bag of Sleepy time-there was a joke for you-and then took the cup into the living room. He plopped into the wing-back chair without bothering to turn on a light; the streetlamps and the dim glow coming from the bedroom provided all he needed.

Well, he thought, here I am again, front row center. Let the play begin.

Time passed, just how much he could not have said, but the throbbing beneath his arm had eased and the tea had gone from hot to barely lukewarm when he registered movement at the corner of his eye.

Ralph turned his head, expecting to see Rosalie, but it wasn’t Rosalie.

It was two men stepping out onto the stoop of a house on the other side of Harris Avenue. Ralph couldn’t make out the colors of the house-the orange arc-sodiums the city had installed several years ago provided great visibility but made any perception of true colors almost impossible-yet he could see that the color of the trim was radically different from the color of the rest. That, coupled with its location, made Ralph almost positive it was May Locher’s house.

The two men on May Locher’s stoop were very short, probably no more than four feet tall. They appeared to be surrounded by greenish auras.

They were dressed in identical white smocks, which looked to Ralph like the ones worn by actors in those old TV docoperas-black-and-white melodramas like Ben Casey and Dr. Kildare.

One of them had something in his hand. Ralph squinted. He couldn’t make it out, but it had a sharp and hungry look. He could not have sworn under oath that it was a knife, but he thought it might be.

Yes, it might very well be a knife.

His first clear evaluative thought about this experience was that the men over there looked like aliens in a movie about UFO abductions-Communion, perhaps, or Fire in the Sky. His second was that he had fallen asleep again, right here in his wing-chair, without even noticing.

That’s right, Ralph-it’s Just a little more rummage-sale action, probably brought on by the stress of being stabbed and helped along by that frigging pal-n-pill.

He sensed nothing frightening about the two figures on May Locher’s stoop other than the long, sharp-looking thing one of them was holding.

Ralph supposed that not even your dreaming mind could do much with a couple of short bald guys wearing white tunics which looked left over from Central Casting. Also, there was nothing frightening about their behavior-nothing furtive, nothing menacing. They stood on the stoop as if they had every right to be there in the darkest, stillest hour of the morning. They were facing each other, the attitudes of their bodies and large bald heads suggesting two old friends having a sober, civilized conversation. They looked thoughtful and intelligent-the kind of space-travellers who would be more apt to say “We come in peace” than kidnap you, stick a probe up your ass, and then take notes on your reaction.

All right, so maybe this new dream’s not an out-and-out nightmare.

After the last one, are you complaining?

No, of course he wasn’t. Winding up on the floor once a night was plenty, thanks. Yet there was something very disquieting about this dream, just the same; it felt real in a way that his dream of Carolyn had not. This was his own living room, after all, not some weird, deserted beach he had never seen before. He was sitting in the same wing-back chair where he sat every morning, holding a cup of tea which was now almost cold in his left hand, and when he raised the fingers of his right hand to his nose, as he was doing now, he could still smell a faint whiff of soap beneath the nails… the Irish Spring he liked to use in the shower…

Ralph suddenly reached beneath his left armpit and pressed his fingers to the bandage there. The pain was immediate and intense… but the two small bald men in the white tunics stayed right where they were, on May Locher’s doorstep.

It doesn’t matter what you think you feel, Ralph. It can’t matter, because"Fuck you!” Ralph said in a hoarse, low voice. He rose from the wing-chair, putting his cup down on the little table beside it as he did. Sleepy time slopped onto the TV Guide there. “Fuck you, this Is no dream!”

He hurried across the living room to the kitchen, pajamas flapping, old worn slippers scuffing and thumping, the place where Charlie Pickering had stuck him sending O)ut he)t little bursts of pain. He grabbed a chair and took it into the apartment’s small foyer.

There was a closet here. Ralph opened its door, snapped on the light just inside, positioned the chair so he would be able to reach the closet’s top shelf, and then stared an it.

The shelf was a clutter of lost or forgotten items, most of which had belonged to Carolyn. These were small things, little more than scraps, but looking at them drove away the last lingering conviction that this had to be a dream. There was an ancient bag of M amp;M’s-her secret snack-food, her comfort-food. There was a lace heart, a single discarded white satin pump with a broken heel, a photo album. These things hurt a lot more than the knife-prick under his arm, but he had no time to hurt just now.

Ralph leaned forward, placing his left hand on the high, dusty shelf to balance his weight, then began to shuffle through the junk with his right hand, all the while praying that the kitchen chair wouldn’t take a notion to scoot out from under him. The wound below his armpit was now throbbing outrageously, and he knew he.was going to get it bleeding again if he didn’t stop the athletics soon, but…

I’m sure they’re up here somewhere… well… almost sure…

He pushed aside his old fly-box and his wicker creel. There was a stack of magazines behind the creel. The one on top was an issue of Ligok with Andy Williams on the cover. Ralph shoved them aside with the heel of his hand, sending up a flurry of dust. The old bag of M amp;M’s fell to the floor and split open, spraying brightly colored bits of candy in every direction. Ralph leaned even farther forward, now almost on his toes. He supposed it was his imagination, but he thought he could sense the kitchen chair he was on getting ready to be evil.

The thought had no more than crossed his mind when the chair squawked and began to slide slowly backward on the hardwood floor.

Ralph ignored that, ignored his throbbing side, and ignored the voice telling him he ought to stop this, he really ought to, because he was dreaming awake, just as the Hall book said many insomniacs eventually did, and although those little fellows across the street didn’t really exist, he could really be standing here on this slowly sliding chair, and he, could really break his hip when it went out from under him, and just how the hell was he going to explain what had happened when some smartass doctor in the Emergency Room of Derry Home asked him?

Grunting, he reached all the way back, pushed aside a carton from which half a Christmas tree star protruded like a strange spiky periscope (knocking the heelless evening pump to the floor in the process), and saw what he wanted in the far left hand corner of the shelf: the case which contained his old Zeiss-ikon binoculars.

Ralph stepped off the chair just before it could slide all the way out from under him, moved it closer in, then got up on it again. He couldn’t reach all the way into the corner where the binocular case stood, so he grabbed the trout-net which had been lying up here next to his creel and fly-box for lo these many years and succeeded in bagging the case on his second try. then dragged it forward until he could grab the strap, stepped off the chair, and came down on the fallen evening pump. His ankle twisted painfully. Ralph staggered, flailed his arms for balance, and managed to avoid going facefirst into the wall. As -he started back into the living room, however, he felt liquid warmth beneath the bandage on his side. He had managed to open the knife-wound again after all. Wonderful. just a wonderful night cher Roberts… and how long had he been away from the window? ’ He, didn’t know, but it felt like a long time, and he was sure the little bald doctors would be gone when he got back there. The street would be empty, and-he stopped dead, the binocular case dangling at the end of its strap and tracking a long slow trapezoidal shadow back and forth across the floor where the orange glow of the streetlights lay like an ugly coat of paint.

Little bald doctors? Was that how he had just thought of them?

Yes, of course, because that was what they called them-the folks who claimed to have been abducted by them… examined by them… operated on by them in some cases. They were physicians from space, proctologists from the great beyond. But that wasn’t the big deal.

The big deal wasEd used the phrase, Ralph thought. He used it the night he called me and warned me to stay away from him and his interests. He said it was the doctor who told him about the Crimson King and the Centurions and all the rest.

“Yes,” Ralph whispered. His back was prickling madly with gooseflesh. “Yes, that’s what he said. ’The doctor told me. The little bald doctor.”

“When he reached the window, he saw that the strangers were still out there, although they had moved from May Locher’s stoop to the sidewalk while he had been fishing for the binoculars. They were standing directly beneath one of those damned orange streetlights, in fact. Ralph’s feeling that Harris Avenue looked like a deserted stage set after the evening performance returned with weird, declamatory force… but with a different significance.

For one thing, the set was no longer deserted, was it? Some ominous, long-pastmidnight play had commenced in what the two odd creatures below no doubt assumed was a totally empty theater.

What would they do if they knew they had an audience? Ralph wondered, What would they do to me?

The bald doctors now had the shared demeanor of men who have nearly reached agreement. In that instant they did not look like doctors at all to Ralph, in spite of their smocks-they looked like bluecollar workers coming offshift at some plant or factory. These two guys, clearly buddies, have stopped outside the main gate for a moment or two to finish off some subject that can’t wait even long enough for them to walk down the block to the nearest bar, knowing it will only take a minute or so in any case; total agreement is only a conversational exchange or two away.

Ralph uncased the binoculars, raised them to his eyes, and wasted a moment or two in puzzled fiddling with the focus-knob before realizing he had forgotten to take off the lens caps. He did so, then raised the glasses again. This time the two figures standing under the streetlamp jumped into his field of vision at once, large and perfectly lit, but fuzzed out. He turned the little knob between the barrels again, and the two men popped into focus almost immediately.

Ralph’s breath stopped in his throat, The look he got was extremely brief; no more than three seconds passed before one of the men (if they were men) nodded and clapped a hand on his companion’s shoulder. Then they both turned away, leaving Ralph with nothing to look at but their bald heads and smooth, white-clad backs. Only three seconds at most, but Ralph saw enough in that brief space of time to make him profoundly uneasy.

He had run to get the binoculars for two reasons, both predicated on his inability to go on believing that this was a dream. First, he wanted to be sure he could identify the two men if he was ever called upon to do so. Second (this one was less admissible to his conscious mind but every bit as urgent), he had wanted to dispel the unsettling notion that he was having his own close encounter of the third kind.

Instead of dispelling it, his brief look through the binoculars intensified it, The little bald doctors did not actually seem to hast, features. They had faces, yes-eyes, noses, mouths-but they seemed as interchangeable as the chrome trim on the same make and model of a car.

They could have been identical twins, but that wasn’t the impression Ralph got, either. To him they looked more like department store mannequins with their Arnel wigs whisked off for the night, their eerie resemblance not the result of genetics but of mass production.

The only peculiar quality he could isolate and name was the preternaturally smooth quality of their skin-neither of them had so much as a single visible line or wrinkle. No moles, blotches, or scars, either, although Ralph supposed those were things you might miss with even a great pair of binoculars. Beyond the smooth and strangely line-free quality of their skin, everything became subjective.

And his only look had been so goddam brief! If he had been able to get to the binoculars more quickly, without the rigmarole of the chair and the fishing net, and if he had realized that the lens caps were on right away instead of wasting more time fiddling with the focusing knob, he might have saved himself some or all of the unease be-was now feeling.

They look sketched, he thought in the instant before they turned their backs on him. That’s what’s really bothering me, I think. Not the identical bald heads, the identical white smocks, or even the lack Of wrinkles. It’s how they look sketched-the eyes just circles, the small pink ears just squiggles made with a felt-tip pen, the mouths a pair of quick, almost careless strokes of pale pink watercolor. They don’t really look like either people or aliens,-they look like hasty representations Of… well, of I don’t know what.

He was sure of one thing: Docs #1 and #2 were both immersed in bright auras which in the binoculars appeared to be green-gold and filled with deep reddish-orange flecks that looked like sparks swirling up from a campfire. These auras conveyed a feeling of power and vitality to Ralph that their featureless, uninteresting faces did not.

The faces? I’m not sure I could pick them out again even if someone held a gun to my head. It’s as if they were made to be forgotten. If they were still bald, sure-no problem. But if they were wearing wigs and maybe sitting down, so I couldn’t see how short they are?

Maybe… the lack of lines might do the trick but then again, maybe not. The auras, though… those green-gold auras with the red flecks swirling through them… I’d know them anywhere. But there’s something wrong with them, isn’t there? What is it?

The answer popped into Ralph’s mind as suddenly and easily as the two creatures had popped into view when he had finally remembered to remove the lens caps from the binoculars. Both of the little doctors were swaddled in brilliant auras… but neither had a balloon-string floating up from his hairless head. Not even a sign of one.

They went strolling down Harris Avenue in the direction of Strawford Park, moving with the ease of two friends out for a Sunday stroll. just before they left the bright circle of light thrown by the streetlamp in front of May Locher’s house, Ralph dropped the angle of the binoculars so they picked up the item in Doc #2’s right hand.

It wasn’t a knife, as he had surmised, but it still wasn’t the sort of object you felt comfortable seeing in the hand of a departing stranger in the wee hours of the morning.

It was a pair of long-bladed, stainless-steel scissors.

That sense of being pushed relentlessly toward the mouth of a tunnel where all sorts of unpleasant things were waiting was with him again, only now it was accompanied by a feeling of panic, because it seemed that the latest big shove had taken place while he had been asleep and dreaming of his dead wife. Something inside him wanted to shriek with terror, and Ralph understood that if he didn’t do something to soothe it immediately, he would soon be shrieking out loud.

He closed his eyes and began to take deep breaths, trying to picture a different item of food with each one: a tomato, a potato, an icecream sandwich, a Brussels sprout. Dr. jamal had taught Carolyn this simple relaxation technique, and it had frequently staved off her headaches before they could get up a full head of steam-even in the last six weeks, when the tumor had been out of control, the technique had sometimes worked, and it controlled Ralph’s panic now. His heartbeat began to slow, and that feeling that he needed to scream began to pass.

Continuing to take deep breaths and to think

(apple pear slice of lemon pie)

of food, Ralph carefully snapped the,lens caps back on the binoculars. His hands were still trembling, but not so badly he couldn’t use them. Once the binoculars were capped and returned to their case, Ralph gingerly raised his left arm and looked at the bandage.

There was a red spot in the center of it the size of an aspirin tablet, but it did not appear to be spreading. Good.

There isn’t anything good about this, Ralph.

Fair enough, but that wasn’t going to help him decide exactly what had happened, or what he was going to do about it. Step one was to push his dreadful dream of Carolyn to one side for the time being and decide what had actually happened.

“I’ve been awake ever since I hit the floor,” Ralph told the empty room. “I know that, and I know I saw those men.”

Yes. He had really seen them, and the green-gold auras around them. He wasn’t alone, either; Ed Deepneau had seen at least one of them, too. Ralph would have bet the farm on it, if he’d had a farm to bet. It didn’t ease his mind much, however, to know that he and the wife-beating paranoid from up the street were seeing the same little bald guys.

And the auras, Ralph-didn’t he say something about those, too?

Well, he hadn’t used that exact word, but Ralph was quite sure he had spoken of the auras at least twice, just the same. Ralph, sometimes the world is full of colors. That had been August, shortly before John Leydecker had arrested Ed on a charge of domestic abuse, a misdemeanor.

Then, almost a month later, when he had called Ralph on the phone: Are you seeing the colors yet?

First the colors, now the little bald doctors; surely the Crimson King himself would be along any time. And all that aside, what was he supposed to do about what he had just seen?

The answer came in an unexpected but welcome burst (of clarity.

The issue, he saw, was not his own sanity, not the auras, not the little bald doctors, but May Locher. He had just seen two strangers step out of Mrs. Locher’s house in the dead of night… and one of them had been carrying a potentially lethal weapon, Ralph reached past the cased binoculars, took the telephone, and dialed 911.

“This is Officer Hagen.” A woman’s voice. “How may I help you?”

“By listening carefully and acting fast,” Ralph said crisply. The look of dazed indecision which he had worn so frequently since midsummer was gone now; sitting erect in the wing-back chair with the phone in his lap he looked not seventy but a healthy and capable fifty-five. “You may be able to save a woman’s life.”

“Sir, would you please give me your name and-”

“Don’t interrupt me, please, Officer Hagen,” said the man who could no longer remember the last four digits of the Derry Cinema Center. “I woke up a short time ago, couldn’t go back to sleep, and decided to sit up for awhile. My living room looks out on upper Harris Avenue. I just saw-” Here Ralph paused for the barest moment, thinking not about what he had seen but what he wanted to tell Officer Hagen he had seen. The answer came as quickly and effortlessly as the decision to call 911 in the first place.

“I saw two men coming out of a house up the street from the Red Apple Store. The house belongs to a woman named May Locher.

That’s L-O-C-H-E-R, first letter L as in Lexington. Mrs. Locher is severely ill. I’ve never seen these two men before.” He paused again, but this time consciously, wanting to achieve maximum effect.

“One of them had a pair of scissors in his hand.”

“Site address?” Officer Hagen asked. She was calm enough, but Ralph sensed he had turned on a lot of her lights.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Get it out of the phone book, Officer Hagen, or just tell the responding officers to look for the yellow house with the pink trim half a block or so up from the Red Apple.

They’ll probably have to use a flashlight to pick it out because of the damned orange streetlights, but they’ll find it.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure they will, but I still need your name and telephone number for our rec-” Ralph replaced the phone gently in its cradle. He sat looking at it for almost a full minute, expecting it to ring. When it didn’t, he decided they either didn’t have the fancy traceback equipment he saw on the TV true-crime shows, or it hadn’t been turned on. That was good. It didn’t solve the problem of what he was going to do or say if they hauled May Locher out of her hideous yellow-andpink house in pieces, but it did buy a little more thinking time.

Below, Harris Avenue remained still and silent, lit only by the hi-intensity lamps which marched off in both directions like some surrealist dream of perspective. The play-short, but full of drama appeared to be over. The stage was empty again. ItNo, not quite empty after all. Rosalie came limping out of the alley between the Red Apple and the True Value Hardware next door. The faded bandanna flapped around her neck. This wasn’t a Thursday, there were no garbage cans set out for Rosalie to investigate, and she moved briskly up the sidewalk until she got to May Locher’s house. There she stopped and lowered her nose, (looking at that long and rather pretty nose, Ralph had thought on occasion that there must be a collie somewhere in Rosalie’s woodpile).

Something was glimmering there, Ralph realized, He got the binoculars out of their case once more and trained them on Rosalie. As he did, he found his mind returning to September 10th again-this time to his meeting with Bill and Lois just outside the entrance to Strawford Park.

He remembered how Bill had put his arm around Lois’s waist and led her up the street; how the two of them together had made Ralph think of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Most of all he remembered the spectral tracks the two of them had left behind. Lois’s had been gray; Bill’s olive green.

Hallucinations, he had thought them at the time, back in the good old days before he’d started attracting the attention of nuts like Charlie Pickering and seeing little bald doctors in the middle of the night.

Rosalie was sniffing at a similar track. It was the same green-gold as the auras which had surrounded Bald Doc #1 and Bald Doc #2.

Ralph panned the binoculars slowly away from the dog and saw more tracks, two sets of them, leading down the sidewalk in the direction of the park. They were fading-he could almost see them fading as he looked at them-but they were there.

Ralph panned the binoculars back to Rosalie, suddenly feeling an enormous wave of affection for the mangy old stray… and why not?

If he had needed final, absolute proof that he had actually seen the things he thought he had seen, Rosalie was it.

If baby Natalie was here, she’d see them too, Ralph thought… and then all his doubts tried to crowd back in. Would she? Would she really? He thought he had seen the baby grab at the faint auras left by his fingers, and he had been sure she was gawking at the spectral green smoke sizzling off the flowers in the kitchen, but how could he be sure? How could anyone be sure what a baby was looking at or reaching for?

But Rosalie… look, right down there, see her?

The only trouble with that, Ralph realized, was that he hadn’t seen the tracks until Rosalie had begun to sniff the sidewalk. Maybe she was sniffing at an entrancing remnant of leftover postman, and what he was seeing had been created by nothing more than his tired, sleepstarved mind… like the little bald doctors themselves.

In the magnified field of the binoculars, Rosalie now began to make her way down Harris Avenue with her nose to the sidewalk and her ragged tail waving slowly back and forth. She was moving from the green-gold tracks left by Doc #1 to those left by Doc #2, and then back to Doc #2’s trail again.

So now why don’t you tell me what that stray bitch is following, Ralph? Do you think it’s possible for a dog to track a fucking hallucination? It’s not a hallucination,-“. it’s tracks. Real tracks. The white man tracks that Carolyn told you to watch out for.

You know that.

You see that.

“It’s crazy, though,” he told himself. “Crazy!”

But was it? Was it really? The dream might have been more than a dream. If there was such a thing as hyper-reality-and he could now testify that there was-then maybe there was such a thing as precognition, too. Or ghosts which came in dreams and foretold the future. Who knew? It was as if a door in the wall of reality had come ajar… and now all sorts of unwelcome things were flying through.

Of one thing he was sure: the tracks were really there. He saw them, Rosalie smelled them, and that was all there was to it. Ralph had discovered a number of strange and interesting things during his six months of premature waking, and one of them was that a human being’s capacity for self-deception seemed to be at its lowest ebb between three and six in the morning, and it was now…

Ralph leaned forward so he could see the clock on the kitchen wall. just past three-thirty. Uh-huh.

He raised the binoculars again and saw Rosalie still moving up the bald docs’ backtrail-If someone came strolling along Harris Avenue right now-unlikely, given the hour, but not impossible-they would see nothing but a stray mutt with a dirty coat, sniffing at the sidewalk in the aimless fashion of untrained, unowned dogs everywhere. But Ralph could see what Rosalie was sniffing at, and had finally given himself permission to believe his eyes. It was a permission he might revoke once the sun was up, but for now he knew exactly what he was seeing.

Rosalie’s head came up suddenly. Her ears cocked forward. For one moment she was almost beautiful, the way a hunting dog on point is beautiful. Then, moments before the headlights of a car approaching the Harris Avenue-Witcham Street intersection splashed the street, she was gone back the way she had come, running in a corkscrewing, limping gait that made Ralph feel sorry for her. When you came right down to it, what was Rosalie but another Harris Avenue Old Crock, one that didn’t even have the comfort of the occasional game of gin rummy or penny-ante poker with others of her kind? She darted back into the alley between the Red Apple and the hardware store an instant before a Derry police cruiser turned the corner and floated slowly up the street. Its siren was off, but the revolving flashers were on. They painted the sleeping houses and small businesses ranged along this part of Harris Avenue with alternating pulses of red and blue light.

Ralph put the binoculars back in his lap and leaned forward in the wing-chair, forearms on his thighs, watching intently. His heart was beating hard enough for him to be able to feel it in his temples.

The cruiser slowed to a crawl as it passed the Red Apple. The spotlight mounted on its right hand side snapped on, and the beam began to slide across the fronts of the sleeping houses on the far side of the street. In most cases it also slid across the street-numbers mounted beside doors or on porch columns. When it lit on the number of May Locher’s house (86, Ralph saw, and he didn’t need the binoculars to read it, either), the cruiser’s taillights flashed and the car came to a stop.

Two uniformed policemen got out and approached the walk leading up to the house, oblivious of both the man watching from a darkened second-floor window across the street and the fading green-gold footprints over which they were walking. They conferred, and Ralph raised the binoculars again to get a closer look. He was almost positive that the younger of the two men was the uniformed cop who had shown up with Leydecker at Ed’s house on the day Ed had been arrested.

KnoB? Had that been his name?

“No,” Ralph murmured. “Nell. Chris Nell. Or maybe it was Jess.”

Nell and his partner seemed to be having a serious discussion about something-much more serious than the one the little bald doctors had been having before they strolled away. This one ended with the cops drawing their sidearms and then climbing the narrow steps to Mrs. Locher’s stoop in single file, with Nell in front. He pressed the doorbell, waited, then pressed it again. This time he leaned on the button for a good five seconds. They waited a little more, and then the second cop brushed past Nell and had a go at the button himself.

Maybe that one knows The Secret Art of Doorbell-Ringing, Ralph thought. Probably learned it by answering a Rosicrucians ad.

If so, the technique failed him this time. There was still no response, and Ralph wasn’t surprised. Strange bald men with scissors notwithstanding, he doubted May Locher could even get out of bed.

But if she’s bedridden, she might have a companion, someone to get her her meals, help her to the toilet or give her the bedpanChris Nell-or maybe it was Jess-stepped up to the plate again.

This time he forwent the doorbell in favor of the old wham-wham wham, open-in-the-name-of-the-law technique. He used his left fist to do this. He was still holding his gun in his right, the barrel pressed against the leg of his uniform pants.

A terrible image, every bit as clear and persuasive as the auras he had been seeing, suddenly filled Ralph’s mind. He saw a woman lying in bed, with a clear plastic oxygen. mask over her mouth and nose.

Above the mask, her glazed eyes bulged sightlessly from their sockets.

Below it, her throat had been opened in a wide, ragged smile. The bedclothes and the bosom of the woman’s nightgown were drenched with blood. Not far away, lying on the floor, was the facedown corpse of another woman-the companion. Marching up the back of this second woman’s pink flannel nightgown were half a dozen stab-wounds, made by the points of Doc #1’s scissors. And, Ralph knew, if you raised the nightgown for a closer look, each would look a lot like the wound under his own arm… like the sort of oversized period made by children just learning to print.

Ralph tried to blink the grisly vision away. It wouldn’t go. He felt dull pain in his hands and saw he had closed them into tight fists; the nails were digging into his palms. He forced his hands open and clamped them on his thighs. Now the eye in his mind saw the woman in the pink nightgown twitching slightly-she was still alive. But maybe not for long. Almost certainly not for long unless these two oafs decided to try something a little more productive than just standing on the stoop and taking turns knocking or Jazzing the doorbell.

“Come on, you guys Ralph said, squeezing at his thighs. “Come on, come on, let’s get with it, what do you say?”

You know the things you’re seeing are all in your head, don’t -you?

he asked himself uneasily. I mean, there might be a couple of women living dead over there, sure, there might be, but you don’t know that, right? It’s not like the auras, or the tracks…

No, it wasn’t like the auras or the tracks, and yes, he did know that. He also knew that no one was answering the door over there at 86 Harris Avenue, and that did not bode well for Bill McGovern’s old Carriville schoolmate. He hadn’t seen any blood on the scissors in Doc #1’s hand, but given the iffy quality of the old Zeiss-ikon binocs, that didn’t prove much. Also, the guy could have wiped them clean before leaving the house. The thought had no more than crossed Ralph’s mind before his imagination added a bloody handtowel lying beside the dead companion in the pink nightgown.

“Come on, you two!” Ralph cried in a low voice. “Jesus Christ, you gonna stand there all night?” More headlights splashed up Harris Avenue. The new arrival was an unmarked Ford sedan with a flashing red dashboard bubble. The man who got out was wearing plain clothes-gray poplin windbreaker and blue knitted watchcap. Ralph had maintained momentary hopes that the newcomer would turn out to be John Leydecker, even though Leydecker had told him he wouldn’t be coming on until noon, but he didn’t have to check with the binoculars to make sure it wasn’t.

This man was much slimmer, and wearing a dark mustache.

Cop #2 went down the walk to meet him while Chris-orjess Nell went around the corner of Mrs. Locher’s house.

One of those pauses which the movies so conveniently edit out then ensued. Cop #2 reholstered his gun. He and the newly arrived detective stood at the foot of Mrs. Locher’s stoop, apparently talking and glancing at the closed door every now and then. Once the uniformed cop took a step or two in the direction Nell had gone. The detective reached out, grasped his arm, detained him. They talked some more.

Ralph clutched his upper thighs tighter and made a small, frustrated noise in his throat.

A few minutes crawled by, and then everything happened at once in that confusing, overlapping, inconclusive way with which emergency situations seem to develop. Another police car arrived (Mrs. Locher’s house and those neighboring it on the right and left were now bathed in streaks of comforting red and yellow light). Two more uniformed cops got out of it, opened the trunk, and removed a bulky contraption that looked to Ralph like a portable torture device.

He believed this gadget was known as the Jaws of Life. Following the huge storm in the spring of 1985, a storm which had resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred people-many of whom had been trapped and drowned in their cars-Derry’s schoolchildren had mounted a penny-drive to buy one.

As the two new cops were carrying the Jaws of Life across the sidewalk, the front door of the house on the uphill side of Mrs, Locher’s opened and the Eberlys, Stan and Georgina, stepped out onto their stoop. They wore matching his n hers bathrobes, and Stan’s gray hair was standing up in wild tufts that made Ralph think of Charlie Pickering. He raised the binoculars, scanned their curious, excited faces briefly, then put them back in his lap again.

The next vehicle to appear was an ambulance from Derry Home Hospital.

Like the police cars which had already arrived, its howler was off in deference to the hour, but it had a full roofrack of red lights, and they were strobing wildly. To Ralph, the developments across the street looked like a scene from one of his beloved Dirty Harry movies, only with the sound turned off.

The two cops got the jaws of Life halfway across the lawn and then dropped it. The detective in the windbreaker and the watchcap turned to them and raised his hands to shoulder-level, palms out, as if to say What did you think you were going to do with that thing?

Break down the goddam door with it? At the same second, Officer Nell came back around the house. He was shaking his head.

The detective in the watchcap abruptly turned, brushed past Nell and his partner, mounted the steps, raised one foot, and kicked in May Locher’s front door. He paused to unzip his jacket, probably to free access to his gun, and then walked in without looking back.

Ralph felt like applauding.

Nell and his partner looked at each other uncertainly, then followed the detective up the steps and through the door. Ralph leaned forward even farther in his chair, now close enough to the window for his nostrils to make little fog-roses on the glass.

Three men, their white hospital pants looking orange in the glare of the hi-intensity streetlamps, got out of the ambulance. One of them opened the rear doors and then all three of them simply stood there, hands in jacket pockets, waiting to see if they would be needed. The two cops who had carried the jaws of Life halfway across Mrs. Locher’s lawn looked at each other, shrugged, picked it up, and began carrying it back toward their cruiser again. There were several large divots in the lawn where they had dropped it. just let her be okay, that’s all, Ralph thought. just let her-and anyone who was in the house with her-be okay.

The detective appeared in the doorway again, and Ralph’s heart sank as he motioned to the men standing at the rear of the ambulance.

Two of them removed a stretcher with a collapsible undercarriage; the third remained where he was. The men with the stretcher went up the walk and into the house at a smart pace, but they did not run, and when the orderly who had remained behind produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one, Ralph knew-suddenly, completely, and with no doubts-that May Locher was dead.

Stan and Georgina Eberly walked to the low line of hedge which separated their front yard from Mrs. Locher’s. They had put their arms around each other’s waist, and to Ralph they looked like the Bobbsey Twins grown old and fat and frightened.

Other neighbors were also coming out, either awakened by the silent convergence of emergency lights or because the telephone net work along this little stretch of Harris Avenue was already beginning to operate. Most of the people Ralph saw were old (“We. goldenagers,” Bill McGovern liked to call them… always with that small satirical lift of the eyebrow, of course), men and women whose rest was fragile and easily broken at the best of times. He suddenly realized that Ed, Helen, and Baby Natalie had been the youngest people between here and the Extension… and now the Deepneaus were gone.

I could go down there, he thought. I’dfit right in. Just another one of Bill’s golden-agers.

Except he couldn’t. His legs felt like bunches of teabags held together by weak twists of string, and he was quite sure that if he tried to get up, he would go flopping bonelessly to the floor. So he sat and watched from his window, watched the play develop below him on the stage which had always been empty at this hour before… except for the occasional walk-through by Rosalie, that was. It was a play he had produced himself, with a single anonymous telephone call. He watched the orderlies re-emerge with the stretcher, this time moving more slowly because of the sheeted figure which had been strapped to it. Warring streaks of blue and red light flickered over that sheet, and the shapes of legs, hips, arms, neck, and head beneath it.

Ralph was suddenly plunged back into his dream. He saw his wife under the sheet-not May Locher but Carolyn Roberts, and at any moment her head would split open and the black bugs, the ones which had grown fat on the meat of her diseased brain, would begin to boil out.

Ralph raised the heels of his palms to his eyes. Some soundsome inarticulate sound of grief and rage, horror and weariness escaped him.

He sat that way for a long time, wishing he had never seen any of this and hoping blindly that if there really as a tunnel, he would not be required to enter it after all. The auras were strange and beautiful, but there was not enough beauty in all of them to ’able dream in which he had make up for one moment of that tern discovered his wife buried below the high-tide line, not enough beauty to make up for the dreary horror of his lost, wakeful nights, or the sight of that sheeted figure being rolled out of the house across the street.

It was a lot more than just wishing that the play was over; as he sat there with the heels of his palms pressing against the lids of his closed eyes, he wanted all of it to be over-all of it. For the first time in his twenty-five thousand days of life, Ralph Roberts found himself wishing he were dead.

CHAPTER 9

There was a movie poster, probably picked up at one of the local video stores for a buck or three, on the wall of the cubbyhole which served Detective John Leydecker as an office. It showed Dumbo the elephant cruising along with his magical ears outstretched. A headshot of Susan Day had been pasted over Dumbo’s face, carefully cut to allow for the trunk. On the cartoon landscape below, someone had drawn a signpost which read DERRY 250.

“Oh, charming,” Ralph said.

Leydecker laughed. “Not very politically correct, is it?”

“I think that’s an understatement,” Ralph said, wondering what Carolyn would have made of the poster-wondering what Helen would make of it, for that matter. It was quarter of two on an overcast, chilly Monday afternoon, and he and Leydecker had just come across from the Derry County Courthouse, where Ralph had given his statement about his encounter with Charlie Pickering the div before. He had been questioned by an assistant district attorney who looked to Ralph as if he might be ready to start shaving in another year or two.

Leydecker had accompanied him as promised, sitting in the corner of the assistant d.a."s office and saying nothing. His promise to buy Ralph a cup of coffee turned out to be mostly a figure of speechthe evil-looking brew had come from the Silex in the corner of the cluttered second-floor Police Headquarters dayroom, Ralph sipped cautiously at his and was relieved to find it tasted a little better than it looked.

“Sugar? Cream?” Leydecker asked. “Gun to shoot it with?”

Ralph smiled and shook his head. “Tastes fine… although it’d probably be a mistake to trust my judgement. I cut back to two cups a day last summer, and now it all tastes pretty good to me,”

“Like me with cigarettes-the less I smoke, the better they taste.

Sin’s a bitch.” Leydecker took out his little tube of toothpicks, shook one out, and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. Then he put his own cup on top of his computer terminal, went over to the Dumbo poster, and began to lever out the thumbtacks which held the corners.

“Don’t do it on my account,” Ralph said. “It’s your office.”

“Wrong.” Leydecker pulled the carefully scissored photo of Susan Day off the poster, balled it up, tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he began to roll the poster itself into a tight little cylinder.

“Oh? Then how come your name’s on the door?”

“It’s my name, but the office belongs to you and your fellow taxpayers, Ralph. Also to any news vidiot with a Minicam who happens to wander in here, and if this poster happened to show up on News at Noon, I’d be in a world of hurt. I forgot to take it down when I left Friday night, and I had most of the weekend off-a rare occurrence around here, let me tell you.”

“You didn’t put it up, I take it.” Ralph moved some papers off the tiny office’s one extra chair and sat down.

“Nope. Some of the fellows had a party for me Friday afternoon.

Complete with cake, ice cream, and presents.” Leydecker rummaged in his desk and came up with a rubber band. He slipped it around the poster so it wouldn’t spring open again, peeked one amused eve through it at Ralph, then tossed it into the wastebasket. “I got a set of those days-of-the-week panties with the crotches snipped out, a can of strawberry-scented vaginal douche, a packet of Friends of Life anti-abortion literature-said literature including a comic-book called Denise’s Unwanted Pregnancy-and that poster.”

“I guess it wasn’t a birthday party, huh?”

“Nope.” Leydecker cracked his knuckles and sighed at the ceiling.

“The boys were celebrating my appointment to a special detail.”

Ralph could see faint flickers of blue aura around Leydecker’s face and shoulders, but in this case he didn’t have to try and read them.

“It’s Susan Day, isn’t it? You got the job of protecting her while she’s in town.”

“Hole in one. Of course the State Police will be around, but they stick pretty much to traffic control in situations like this. There mlly be some FBI, too, but what they do mostly is hang back, take pictures, and give each other the secret Club Sign.”

“She’s got her own security people, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, but I don’t know how many Or how good. I talked to the head guy this morning and he’s at least coherent, but we have to put in our own guys. Five of them, according to the orders I got on Friday.

That’s me plus four guys who’ll volunteer as soon as I tell em to.

The object is… wait a minute… you’ll like this…

.” Leydecker shuffled through the papers on his desk, found the one he was looking for, and held it up… presence and high visibility.” to maintain a strolig He dropped the paper again and grinned at Ralph. The grin did not have a lot of humor in it.

“In other words, if someone tries to shoot the bitch or give her an acid shampoo, we want Lisette Benson and the other vidiots to at least record the fact that we were there.” Leydecker looked at the rolled-up poster leaning in his wastebasket and flipped it the bird.

“How can you dislike someone so much when you’ve never even met her?”

“I don’t just dislike her, Ralph; I fucking hate her. Listen-I’m a Catholic, my lovin mother was a Catholic my kids-if I ever have any-are all gonna be altarboys at Saint Joe’s. Great. Being a Catholic’s great. They even let you eat meat on Fridays now. But if you think being Catholic means I’m in favor of making abortions illegal again, you got the wrong puppy. See, I’m the Catholic who gets to question the guys who beat their kids with rubber hoses or push them downstairs after a night of drinking good Irish whiskey and getting all sentimental about their mothers.”

Leydecker fished inside his shirt and brought out a small gold medallion. He placed it on his fingers and tilted it toward Ralph.

“Mary, Mother of Jesus. I’ve worn this since I was thirteen.

Five years ago I arrested a man wearing one just like it. He had just boiled his two-year-old stepson. This is a true thing I’m telling you.

Guy put on a great big pot of water, and when it was boiling, he picked the kid up by the ankles and dropped him into the pot like he was a lobster. Why? Because the kid wouldn’t stop wetting the bed, he told us. I saw the body, and I’ll tell you what, after you’ve seen something like that, the photos the right-to-life assholes like to show of vacuum abortions don’t look so bad.”

Leydecker’s voice had picked up a slight tremor.

“What I remember most of all is how the guy was crying, and how he kept holding onto that Mary medallion around his neck and saying he wanted to go to confession. Made me proud to be a Catholic, Ralph, let me tell You… and as far as the Pope goes, I don’t think he should be allowed to have an opinion until he’s had a kid himself, or at least spent a year or so taking care of crack-babies.”

“Okay,” Ralph said. “What’s your problem with Susan Day-?”

“She’s stirring the motherfucking pot!” Leydecker cried. “She comes into my town and I have to protect her. Fine. I’ve got good men, and with just a pinch of luck, I think we can probably see her out of town with her head still on and her tits pointing the right way, but what about what happens before? And what happens after?

Do you think she cares about any of that? Do you think the people who run WomanCare give much of a shit about the side-effects, as far as that goes?”

“I don’t know.”

“The WomanCare advocates are a little less prone to violence than The Friends of Life, but in terms of the all-important ass-ache quotient, they’re not much different. Do you know what this was all about when it started?”

Ralph cast his memory back to his first conversation about Susan Day, the one he’d had with Ham Davenport. For a moment he almost had it, but then it squiggled away. The insomnia had won again.

He shook his head, “Zoning,” Leydecker said, and laughed with disgusted amazement. “Plain old garden-variety zoning regulations.

Great, huh-?

Early this summer, two of our more conservative City Councillors, George Tandy and Emma Wheaton petitioned the Zoning Committee to reconsider the zone with WomanCare in it, the idea being to kind of gerrymander the place out of existence. I doubt if that’s exactly the right word, but you get the gist, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Uh-huh, So the pro-choicers ask Susan Day to come to town and make a speech, help them to raise a warchest to combat the pro-life grinches. The only problem is, the grinches never had a chince of rezoning District 7, and the WomanCare people knew it Hell, one of their directors, June Halliday, is on the City Council. She and the Wheaton bitch just about spit at each other when they pass in the hall.

“Rezoning District 7 was a pipe-dream from the start, because WomanCare is technically a hospital, just like Derry Home, which is only a stone’s throw away. If you change the zoning laws to make WomanCare illegal, you do the same to one of only three hospitals in Derry County-the third-largest county in the state of Maine. So it was never going to happen, but that’s okay, because it was never about that in the first place. It was about being pissy and in-your face. About being an ass-ache. And for most of the pro-choicersone of the guys I work with calls em the Whale People-it’s about being right,”

“Right? I don’t get you.”

“It isn’t enough that a woman can walk in there and get rid of the troublesome little fishie growing inside her any time she wants; the pro-choicers want the argument to end. What they want, down deep, is for people like Dan Dalton to admit they’re right, and that’ll never happen. It’s more likely that the Arabs and the Jews will decide it was all a mistake and throw down their weapons. I support the right of a woman to have an abortion if she really needs to have one, but the pro-choicers’ holier-than-thou attitude makes me want to puke. They’re the new Puritans, as far as I’m concerned, people who believe that if you don’t think the way they do, you’re going to hell… only their version is a place where all you get on the radio is hillbilly music and all you can find to eat is chicken-fried steak.”

“You sound pretty bitter.”

“Try sitting on a powderkeg for three months and see how it makes you feel. Tell me this-do you think Pickering would have stuck a knife in your armpit yesterday if it hadn’t been for WomanCare, The Friends of Life, and Susan Leave-My-SacredTwat-Alone Day?”

Ralph appeared to give the question serious thought, but what he was really doing was watching John Leydecker’s aura. it was a healthy dark blue, but the edges were tinged with rapidly shifting greenish light. It was this edging which interested Ralph; he had an idea he knew what it meant.

Finally he said, “No. I guess not.”

“Me either. You got wounded in a war that’s already been decided, Ralph, and you won’t be the last. But if you went to the Whale People-or to Susan Day-and opened your shirt and pointed at the bandage and said ’This is partly your fault, so own the part that’s yours,” they’d raise their hands and say ’Oh no, goodness no, we’re sorry you got hurt, Ralph, we Whale Watchers abhor violence, but it wasn’t our fault, we have to keep WomanCare open, we have to man and woman the barricades, and if a little spilled blood is what it takes to do that, then so be it.” But it’s not about WomanCare, and that’s what drives me absolutely bugfuck. It’s about-”

“-abortion.”

“Shit, no! Abortion rights are safe in Maine and in Derry, no matter what Susan Day says at the Civic Center Friday night. This is about whose team is the best team. About whose side God’s on.

It’s about who’s right. I wish they’d all just sing ’We Are the Champions’ and go get drunk.”

Ralph threw back his head and laughed. Leydecker laughed with him.

“So they’re assholes,” he finished with a shrug. “But they’re our assholes. Does that sounds like I’m joking? I’m not. WomanCare, Friends of Life, Body Watch, Daily Bread… they’re our assholes, Derry assholes, and I really don’t mind watching out for our own.

That’s why I took this job, and why I stay with it. But you’ll have to forgive me if I’m less than crazy about being tapped to watch out for some long-stemmed American Beauty from New York who’s going to fly in here and give an incendiary speech and then fly out with a few more press-clippings and enough material for chapter five of her new book.

“To our faces she’ll talk about what a wonderful little grass-roots community we are, and when she gets back to her duplex on Park Avenue, she’ll tell her friends about how she hasn’t managed to shampoo the stink of our paper mills out of her hair yet. She is woman, hear her roar… and if we’re lucky, the whole thing will quiet down with no one dead or disabled.”

Ralph had become sure of what those greenish flickers meant.

“But you’re scared, aren’t you?” he asked.

Leydecker looked at him, surprised. “Shows, does it?”

“Only a little,” Ralph said, and thought: just in your aura, John, that’s all. just in your aura.

“Yeah, I’m scared. On a personal level I’m scared of fucking up the assignment, which has absolutely no upside to compensate for all the things that can go wrong. On a professional level I’m scared of something happening to her on my watch. On a community level I’m fucking terrified of what happens if there’s some sort of confrontation and the genie comes out of the bottle… more coffee, Ralph?”

“I’ll pass. I ought to be going soon, anyway. What’s going to happen to Pickering?”

He didn’t actually care much about Charlie Pickering’s fate, but the big cop would probably think it strange if he asked about May Locher before he asked about Pickering. Suspicious, maybe.

“Steve Anderson-the a.d.a. who questioned you-and Pickerings court-appointed attorney are probably horse-trading even as we speak.

Pickering’s guy will be saying he might be able to get his client-the thought of Charlie Pickering being an’Vone’s client, for anything, sort of blows my mind, by the way-to plead out to second-degree assault. Anderson will say the time has come to put Pickering away for good and he’s going for attempted murder.

Pickering’s lawyer will pretend to be shocked, and tomorrow your buddy is going to be charged with first-degree assault with a deadly weapon and bound over for trial. Then, possibly in December but more likely early next year, you’ll be called as the star witness.”

“Bail?”

“It’ll probably be set in the forty-thousand-dollar range. You can get out on ten percent if the rest can be secured in event of flight, but Charlie Pickering doesn’t have a house, a car, or even a Timer watch. In the end, he’s liable to go back to Juniper Hill, but that’s really not the object of the game. We’re going to be able to keep him off the street for quite awhile this time, and with people like Charlie, that’s the object of the game.”

“Any chance The Friends of Life might go his bail?”

“Nah. Ed Deepneau spent a lot of last week with him, the two of them drinking coffee in the Bagel Shop. I imagine Ed was giving Charlie the lowdown on the Centurions and the King of Diamonds-”

“Crimson King is what Ed-”

“Whatever,” Leydecker agreed, waving a hand. “But most of all I imagine he spent the time explaining how you were the devil’s right hand man and how only a smart, brave, and dedicated fellow like Charlie Pickering could take you out of the picture.”

“You make him sound like such a calculating shit,” Ralph said.

He was remembering the Ed Deepneau he’d played chess with before Carolyn had fallen ill. That Ed had been an intelligent, wellspoken, civilized man with a deep capacity for kindness. Ralph still found it all but impossible to reconcile that Ed with the one he’d first glimpsed in July of 1992. He had come to think of the more recent arrival as “rooster Ed.”

“Not just a calculating shit, a dangerous calculating shit,” Leydecker said. “For him Charlie was just a tool, like a paring knife you’d use to peel an apple with. If the blade snaps off a paring knife, you don’t run to the knife-grinder’s to get a new one put on; that’s too much trouble. You toss it in the wastebasket and get a new paring knife instead. That’s the way guys like Ed treat guys like Charlie, and since Ed is The Friends of Life-for the time being, at least-I don’t think you have to worry about Charlie making bail.

In the next few days, he’s going to be lonelier than a Maytag repairman. Okay?”

“Okay,” Ralph said. He was a little appalled to realize he felt sorry for Pickering. “I want to thank you for keeping my name out of the paper, too… if you were the one who did it, that is.”

There had been a brief mention of the incident in the Derry News’s Police Beat column, but it said only that Charles H. Pickering had been arrested on “a weapons charge” at the Derry Public Library.

“Sometimes we ask them for a favor, sometimes they ask us for “one,” Leydecker said, standing up. “It’s how things work in the real world. If the nuts in The Friends of Life and the prigs in The Friends of WomanCare ever discover that, my job is going to get a lot easier.”

Ralph plucked the rolled-up Dumbo poster from the wastebasket, then stood up on his side of Leydecker’s desk. “Could I have this?

I know a little girl who might really like it, in a year or so.”

Leydecker held out his hands expansively. “Be my guest-think of it as a little premium for being a good citizen. just don’t ask for my crotchless panties.”

Ralph laughed. “Wouldn’t think of it.”

“Seriously, I appreciate you coming in. Thanks, Ralph.”

“No problem.” He reached across the desk, shook Leydecker’s hand, then headed for the door. He felt absurdly like Lieutenant Columbo on TV-all he needed was the cigar and the ratty trench coat. He put his hand on the knob, then paused and turned back.

“Can I ask you about something totally unrelated to Charlie Pickering?”

“Fire away.”

“This morning in the Red Apple Store I heard that Mrs. Locher, my neighbor up the street, died in the night. Nothing so surprising about that; she had emphysema, But there are police-line tapes up between the sidewalk and her front yard, plus a sign on the door saying the site has been sealed by the Derry P,D. Do you know what it’s about?”

Leydecker looked at him so long and hard that Ralph would have felt acutely uncomfortable… if not for the man’s aura. There was nothing in it which communicated suspicion.

God, Ralph, you’re taking these things a little too seriously aren’t you?

Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Either way he was glad that the green flickers at the edges of Leydecker’s aura had not reappeared, “Why are you looking at me that way?” Ralph asked. “If I presumed or spoke out of turn, I’m sorry.”

“Not at all,” Leydecker said. “It’s a little weird, that’s all.

If I tell you about it, can you keep it quiet?”

“Yes.”

“It’s your downstairs tenant I’m chiefly worried about.

When the word discretion is mentioned, it’s not the Prof I think of.”

Ralph laughed heartily. “I won’t say a word to him-SCOut’s Honor-but it’s interesting you’d mention him; Bill vent to school with Mrs. Locher, way back when. Grammar school.”

“Man, I can’t imagine the Prof in grammar school,” Leydecker said.

“Can you?”

“Sort of,” Ralph said, but the picture which rose in his mind was an exceedingly peculiar one: Bill McGovern looking like a cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and Tom Sawyer in a pair of knickers, long white socks… and a Panama hat.

“We’re not sure what happened to Mrs. Locher,” Leydecker said.

“What we do know is that shortly after three a.m 911 logged an anonymous call from someone-a male-who claimed to have just seen two men, one carrying a pair of scissors, come out of Mrs. Locher’s house.”

“She was killed?” Ralph exclaimed, realizing two things simultaneously: that he sounded more believable than he ever would have expected, and that he had just crossed a bridge. He hadn’t burned it behind him-not yet, anyway-but he would not be able to go back to the other side without a lot of explanations.

Leydecker turned his hands palms-up and shrugged. “If she was, it wasn’t with a pair of scissors or any other sharp object. There wasn’t a mark on her.”

That, at least, was something of a relief.

“On the other hand, it’s possible to scare someone to deathespecially someone who’s old and sick-during the commission of a crime,” Leydecker said. “Anyway, this’ll be easier to explain if you let me just tell you what I know. It won’t take long, believe me.”

“Of course. Sorry.”

“Want to hear something funny? The first person I thought of when I looked over the 911 call-sheet was you.”

“Because of the insomnia, right?” Ralph asked. His voice was steady.

“That and the fact that the caller claimed to have seen these men from his living room. Your living room looks out on the Avenue, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-huh. I even thought of listening to the tape, then I remembered that you were coming in today… and that you’re sleeping through again. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Without an instant of pause or consideration, Ralph set fire to the bridge he had just crossed. “Well, I’m not sleeping like I did when I was sixteen and working two after-school jobs, I won’t kid \’OLI about that, but if I was the guy who called 911 last night, I did it in my sleep.”

“Exactly what I figured. Besides, if you saw something a little offkilter on the street, why would you make the call anonymously?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said, and thought, But suppose it tta.v a little more than off-kilter, John? Suppose it was completely unbelievable?

“Me, neither,” Leydecker said. “Your place has a view of Harris Avenue, yes, but so do about three dozen others… and just because the guy who made the call said he was inside, that doesn’t mean he really was, does it?”

“I guess not. There’s a pay-phone outside the Red Apple he could have called from, plus one outside the liquor store. A couple in Strawford Park, too, if they work.”

“Actually there are four in the park, and they all work. We checked.”

“Why would he lie about where he was calling from?”

“The most likely reason is because he was lying about the rest of what he had to say, too, Anyway, Donna Hagen said the guy sounded very young and sure of himself.” The words were barely out of his mouth before Leydecker winced and put a hand on top of his head. “That didn’t come out just the way I meant it, Ralph.

Sorry.”

“It’s okay-the idea that I sound like an old fart on a pension is not exactly a new concept to me. I am an old fart on a pension.

Go on.”

“Chris Nell was the responding officer-first on the scene, Do you remember him from the day we arrested Ed?”

“I remember the name.”

“Uh-huh. Steve Utterback was the responding detective and the O.I.C-officer in charge. He’s a good man.”

The guy ’ the watchcap, Ralph thought.

“The lady was dead in bed, but there was no sign of violence.

Nothing obvious taken, either, although old ladies like May Locher aren’t usually into a lot of real hockable stuff-no VCR, no big fancy stereo, nothing like that. She did have one of those Bose Waves, though, and two or three pretty nice pieces of jewelry. This is not to say that there wasn’t other jewelry as nice or nicer, but-”

“But why would a burglar take some and not all?”

“Exactly. What’s more interesting in this case is that the front door-the one the 911 caller said he saw the two men coming out of-was locked from the inside. Not just a spring-lock, either; there was a thumb-bolt and a chain. Same with the back door, by the way.

So if the 911 caller was on the up-and-up, and if May Locher was dead when the two guys left, who locked the doors?”

Maybe it was the Crimson King, Ralph thought… and to his horror, almost said aloud.

“I don’t know. What about the windows?”

“Locked. Thumb-latches turned. And, just in case that’s not Agatha Christie enough for you, Steve says the storms were on. One of the neighbors told him Mrs. Locher hired a kid to put them on just last week.”

“Sure she did,” Ralph said. “Pete Sullivan, the same kid who delivers the newspaper. Now that I think of it, I saw him doing it.”

Mystery-novel bullshit,” Leydecker said, but Ralph thought Leydecker would have swapped Susan Day for May Locher in about three seconds. “The prelim medical came in just before I left for the courthouse to meet you. I had a glance at it. Myocardial this, thrombosis that… heart-failure’s what it comes down to. Right now we’re treating the 911 call as a crank-we get em all the time, all cities do-and the lady’s death as a heart-attack brought on by her emphysema.”

“Just a coincidence, in other words.” That conclusion might see him a lot of trouble-if it flew, that was-but Ralph could hear the disbelief in his own voice.

“Yeah, I don’t like it, either. Neither does Steve, which is why the house has been sealed. State Forensics will give it a complete top-to-bottom, probably starting tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, Mrs. Locher has taken a little ride down to Augusta for a more comprehensive postmortem. Who knows what it’ll show? Sometimes they do show things. You’d be surprised.”

“I suppose I would,” Ralph said.

Leydecker tossed his toothpick into the trash, appeared to brood for a moment, then brightened up. “Hey, here’s an idea-maybe I’ll get someone in clerical to make a dupe of that 911 call. I could bring it over and play it for you. Maybe you’ll recognize the voice. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.”

“I suppose they have,” Ralph said, smiling uneasily.

“Anyway, it’s Utterback’s case. Come on, I’ll see you out,” In the hall, Leydecker gave Ralph another searching look. This one made Ralph feel a good deal more uncomfortable, because he had no idea what it meant. The auras had disappeared again.

He tried on a smile that felt lame. “Something hanging out of my nose that shouldn’t be?”

“Nope. I’m just amazed at how good you look for someone who went through what you did yesterday. And compared to how you looked last summer… if that’s what honeycomb can do, I’m going to buy myself a beehive.”

Ralph laughed as though this were the funniest thing he had ever heard.

1:42 a.m Tuesday morning.

Ralph sat in the wing-chair, watching wheels of fine mist revolve around the streetlights. Up the street, the police-line tapes hung dispiritedly in front of May Locher’s house.

Barely two hours’ sleep tonight, and he found himself again thinking that dead might be better. No more insomnia then. No more long waits for dawn in this hateful chair. No more days when he seemed to be looking at the world through the Gardol Invisible Shield they used to prattle about on the toothpaste commercials. Back when TV had been almost brand-new, that had been, in the days when he had yet to find the first strands of gray in his hair and he was always asleep five minutes after he and Carol had finished making love.

And people keep talking about how good I look. That’s the weirdest part of it.

Except it wasn’t. Considering some of the things he’d seen just lately, a few people saying he looked like a new man was far, far down on his list of oddities.

Ralph’s eyes returned to May Locher’s house. The place had been locked up, according to Leydecker, but Ralph had seen the two little bald doctors come out the front door, he had seen them, goddammit But had he?

Had he really?

Ralph cast his mind back to the previous morning, Sitting down in this same chair with a cup of tea and thinking Let the play begin.

And then he had seen those two little bald bastards come out, dammit, he had seen them come out of May Locher’s house.”

Except maybe that was wrong, because he hadn’t really been looking at Mrs. Locher’s house; he had been pointed more in the direction of the Red Apple. He’d thought the flicker of movement in the corner of his eye was probably Rosalie, and had turned his head to check. That was when he’d seen the little bald doctors on the stoop of May Locher’s house. He was no longer entirely sure he had seen the front door open; maybe he had just assumed that part, and by not? They sure as hell hadn’t come up Mrs. Locher’s walk.

You can’t be sure of that, Ralph.

Except he could. At three in the morning, Harris Avenue was as still as the mountains of the moon-the slightest movement anywhere within the range of his vision registered.

Had Doc #1 and Doc #2 come out the front door? The longer Ralph thought about it, the more he doubted it.

Then what happened, Ralph? Did they maybe step out from behind the Gardol Invisible Shield? Or-how’s this?-maybe they walked through the door, like those ghosts that used to haunt Cosmo Topper in that old TV show And the craziest thing of all was that felt just about right.

What? That they walked through the fucking DOOR? Oh, Ralph, you need help. You need to talk to someone about what’s happening to you.

Yes. That was the one thing of which he was sure: he needed to spill all this to someone before it drove him crazy. But who? Carolyn would have been best, but she was dead. Leydecker? The problem there was that Ralph had already lied to him about the 911 call.

Why? Because the truth would have sounded insane. It would have sounded, in fact, as if he had caught Ed Deepneau’s paranoia like a cold. And wasn’t that really the most likely explanation, when you looked at the situation dead-on?

“But that’s not it,” he whispered. “They were real. The auras, too.” It’s a long ivalk hack to Eden, sweetheart… and watch out lo)r those green-gold white-man tracks while you’re on the way.

Tell someone. Lay it all out. Yes. And he ought to do it before John Leydecker listened to that 911 tape and showed up asking for an explanation. Wanting to know, basically, why Ralph had lied, and what Ralph actually knew about the death of May Locher.

Tell someone. Lay it all out.

But Carolyn was dead, Leydecker was still too new, Helen was lying low at the WomanCare shelter somewhere out in the willywags, and Lois Chasse might gossip to her girlfriends. Who did that leave?

The answer became clear once he put it to himself that way, but Ralph still felt a surprising reluctance to talk to McGovern about the things which had been happening to him. He remembered the day he had found Bill sitting on a bench by the softball field, crying over his old friend and mentor, Bob Polhurst. Ralph had tried to tell Bill about the auras, and it had been as if McGovern couldn’t hear him; he had been too busy running through his well-thumbed script on the subject of how shitty it was to grow old.

Ralph thought of the satiric raised eyebrow. The unfailing cynicism.

The long face, always so gloomy. The literary allusions, which usually made Ralph smile but often left him feeling a tad inferior, as well. And then there was McGovern’s attitude toward Lois: condescending, even a touch cruel.

Yet this was a long way from being fair, and Ralph knew it. Bill McGovern was capable of kindness, and-perhaps far more important in this case-understanding. He and Ralph had known each other for over twenty years; for the last ten of those years they had lived in the same building. He had been one of Carolyn’s pallbearers, and if Ralph couldn’t talk to Bill about what had been happening to him, who could he talk to?

The answer seemed to be no one.

CHAPTER 10

The misty rings around the streetlamps were gone by the time daylight began to brighten the sky in the east, and by nine o’clock the day was clear and warm-the beginning of Indian summer’s final brief passage, perhaps. Ralph went downstairs as soon as Good Morning America was over, determined to tell McGovern what had been happening to him (or as much as he dared, anyway) before he could lose his nerve.

Standing outside the door of the downstairs apartment, however, he could hear the shower running and the mercifully distant sound of William D. McGovern singing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Ralph went out to the porch, stuck his hands in his back pockets, and read the day like a catalogue. There was nothing, he reflected, really nothing in the world like October sunshine; he could almost feel his night-miseries draining away. They would undoubtedly be back, but for now he felt all right-tired and muzzy-headed, yes, but still pretty much all right. The day was more than pretty; it was downright gorgeous, and Ralph doubted that there would be another as good before next May. He decided he would be a fool not to take advantage of it.

A walk up to the Harris Avenue Extension and back again would take half an hour, forty-five minutes if there happened to be someone up there worth batting a little breeze with, and by then Bill would be showered, shaved, combed, and dressed.

Also ready to lend a sympathetic ear, if Ralph was lucky.

He walked as far as the picnic area outside the County Airport fence without quite admitting to himself that he was hoping to come across Old Dor. If he did, perhaps the two of them could talk a little poetry-Stephen Dobyns, for instance-or maybe even a bit of philosophy.

They might start that part of their conversation with Dorrance explaining what “long-time business” was, and why he believed Ralph shouldn’t “mess in” with it.

Except Dorrance wasn’t at the picnic area; no one was there but Don Veazie, who wanted to explain to Ralph why Bill Clinton was doing such a horrible job as President, and why it would have been better for the good old U.S. of A. if the American people had elected that fiscal genius Ross Perot. Ralph (who had voted for Clinton and actually thought the man was doing a pretty good job) listened long enough to be polite, then said he had an appointment to have his hair cut. It was the only thing he could think of on short notice.

“Something else, too!” Don blared after him. “That uppity wife of his! Woman’s a lesbian! I can always tell! You know how? I look at their shoes! Shoes is like a secret code with em! They always wear those ones with the square toes and-”

“See you, Don!” Ralph called back, and beat a hasty retreat.

He had gone about a quarter of a mile back down the hill when the day exploded silently all around him.

He was opposite May Locher’s house when it happened. He stopped dead in his tracks, staring down Harris Avenue with wide, unbelieving eyes. His right hand was pressed against the base of his throat and his mouth hung open. He looked like a man having a heart attack, and while his heart seemed all right-for the time being, anyway-he certainly felt as if he were having some kind of an attack.

Nothing he had seen this fall had prepared him for this. Ralph didn’t think anything could have prepared him for this.

That other world-the secret world of auras-had come into view again, and this time there was more of it than Ralph had ever dreamed… so much that he wondered fleetingly if it was possible for a person to die of perceptual overload. Upper Harris Avenue was a fiercely glowing wonderland filled with overlapping spheres and cones and crescents of color. The trees, which were still a week or more away from the climax of their fall transformation, nonetheless burned like torches in Ralph’s eyes and mind. The sky had gone past color; it was a vast blue sonic boom.

The telephone lines on Derry’s west side were still above ground, and Ralph stared fixedly at them, vaguely aware that he had stopped breathing and should probably start again soon if he didn’t want to pass out. jagged yellow spirals were running briskly up and down the black wires, reminding Ralph of how barber-poles had looked when he was a kid. Every now and then this bumblebee pattern was broken by a spiky red vertical stroke or a green flash that seemed to spread both ways at once, obliterating the yellow rings for a moment before fading out.

You’re watching people talk, he thought numbly. Do you know, that, Ralph? Aunt Sadie in Dallas is chatting with her favorite nephew who lives in Derry,-a farmer in Haven is jawing with the dealer he buys his tractor parts from,-a minister is trying to help a troubled parishioner. Those are voices, and I think the bright strokes and flashes are coming from people in the grip of some strong emotion-love or hate, happiness orjealousy.

And Ralph sensed that all he was seeing and all he was feeling was not all; that there was a whole world still waiting just beyond the current reach of his senses. Enough, perhaps, to make even what he was seeing now seem faint and faded. And if there was more, how could he possibly bear it without going mad? Not even putting his eyes out would help; he understood somehow that his sense of ’ “these things came mostly from his lifelong acceptance of seeing sight as his primary sense. But there was, in fact, a lot more than seeing going on here.

In order to prove this to himself he closed his eyes… and went right on seeing Harris Avenue. It was as if his eyelids had turned to glass. The only difference was that all the usual colors had reversed themselves, creating a world that looked like the negative of a color photograph. The trees were no longer orange and yellow but the bright, unnatural green of lime Gatorade. The surface of Harris Avenue, repaved with fresh asphalt in June, had become a great white way, and the sky was an amazing red lake. He opened his eyes again, almost positive that the auras would be gone, but they weren’t; the world still boomed and rolled with color and movement and deep, resonating sound.

When do I start seeing them? Ralph wondered as he began to walk slowly down the hill again. When do the little bald doctors start coming out of the woodwork?

There were no doctors in evidence, however, bald or otherwise; no angels in the architecture; no devils peering up from the sewer gratings. There was only"Look out, Roberts, watch where you’re going, can’t you?”

The words, harsh and a little alarmed, seemed to have actual physical texture; it was like running a hand over oak panelling in some ancient abbey or ancestral hall. Ralph stopped short and saw Mrs. Perrine from down the street. She had stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter to keep from being bowled over like a tenpin, and now she stood ankle-deep in fallen leaves, holding her net shopping bag in one hand and glaring at Ralph from beneath her thick salt-andpepper eyebrows. The aura which surrounded her was the firm, nononsense gray of a West Point uniform.

“Are you drunk, Roberts?” she asked in a clipped voice, and suddenly the riot of color and sensation fell out of the world and it was just Harris Avenue again, drowsing its way through a lovely weekday morning in mid-autumn.

“Drunk? Me? Not at all. Sober as a judge, honest.”

He held out his hand to her. Mrs. Perrine, over eighty but not giving in to it so much as a single inch, looked at it as if she believed Ralph might have a joy-buzzer hidden in his palm. Wouldn’t put it past you, Roberts, her cool gray eyes said. Wouldn’t put it past you at all. She stepped back onto the sidewalk without Ralph’s aid.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Perrine. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

“No, you certainly weren’t. Loflygagging along with your mouth hanging open is what you were doing. You looked like the village idiot.”

“Sorry,” he repeated, and then had to bite his tongue to stifle a bray of laughter.

“Hmmp.” Mrs. Perrine looked him slowly up and down, like a Marine drill-sergeant inspecting a raw recruit. “There’s a rip under the arm of that shirt, Roberts.”

Ralph raised his left arm and looked. There was indeed a large rip in his favorite plaid shirt. He could look through it and see the bandage with its dried spot of blood; also an unsightly tangle of oldman armpit hair. He lowered his arm hurriedly, feeling a blush rising in his cheeks.

“Hmmp,” Mrs. Perrine said again, expressing everything she needed to express on the subject of Ralph Roberts without recourse to a single vowel. “Drop it off at the house, if you like. Any other mending you might have, as well. I can still run a needle, you know.”

“Oh yes, I’ll bet you can, Mrs. Perrine.”

Mrs. Perrine now gave him a look which said You’re a dried-up old asskisser, Ralph Roberts, but I suppose you can’t help it.

“Not in the afternoon,” she said. “I help make dinner at the homeless shelter in the afternoons, and help serve it out at five.

It’s God’s work.”

“Yes, I’m sure it-”

“There’ll be no homeless in heaven, Roberts.

You can count on that. No ripped shirts, either, I’m sure. But while we’re here, we have to get along and make do. It’s our job.”

And I, for one, am doing spectacularly well at it, Mrs. Perrine’s face proclaimed. “Bring your mending in the morning or in the evening, Roberts. Don’t stand on ceremony, but don’t you show up on my doorstep after eightthirty. I go to bed at nine.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Perrine,” Ralph said, and had to bite his tongue again. He was aware that very soon this trick would cease to work; soon it was going to be a case of laugh or die, “Not at all. Christian duty. Also, Carolyn was a friend of mine.”

“Thank you,” Ralph said. “Terrible about May Locher, wasn’t it?”

“No,” Mrs. Perrine said. “God’s mercy.” And she glided upon her way before Ralph could say another word. Her spine was so excruciatingly straight that it hurt him to look at it.

He walked on a dozen steps, then could hold it no longer. He leaned a forearm against a telephone pole, pressed his mouth to his arm, and laughed as quietly as he could-laughed until tears poured down his cheeks. When the fit (and that was what it really felt like; a kind of hysterical seizure) had passed, Ralph raised his head and looked around with attentive, curious, slightly teary eyes. He saw nothing that anyone else couldn’t see as well, and that was a relief.

But it will come back, Ralph. You know it will. All of it.

Yes, he supposed he did know it, but that was for later. Right now he had some talking to do.

When Ralph finally arrived back from his amazing journey up the street, McGovern was sitting in his chair on the porch and idling through the morning paper. As Ralph turned up the walk, he came to a sudden decision. He would tell Bill a lot, but not everything.

One of the things he would definitely leave out was how much the two guys he’d seen coming out of Mrs. Locher’s house had looked like the aliens in the tabloids for sale at the Red Apple.

McGovern looked up as he climbed the steps. “Hello, Ralph.”

“Hi, Bill. Can I talk to you about something?”

“Of course.” He closed the paper and folded it carefully. “They finally took my old friend Bob Polhurst to the hospital yesterday.”

“Oh? I thought you expected that to happen sooner.”

“I did. Everybody did. He fooled us. In fact, he seemed to be getting better-of the pneumonia, at least-and then he relapsed, He had a breathing arrest yesterday around noon, and his niece thought he was going to die before the ambulance got there. He didn’t, though, and now he seems to have stabilized again.” McGovern looked up the street and sighed. “May Locher pops off in the middle of the night and Bob keeps chugging along. What a world, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“What did you want to talk about? Have you finally decided to pop the question to Lois? Want a little fatherly advice on how to handle it?”

“I need advice, all right, but not about my love-life.”

“Spill it,” McGovern said tersely.

Ralph did, gratified and more than a little relieved by McGovern’s silent attentiveness. He began by sketching in things Bill already knew about-the incident between Ed and the truck-driver in the summer of ’92, and how similar Ed’s rantings on that occasion had been to the things he had said on the day he had beaten Helen for signing the petition. As Ralph spoke, he began to feel more strongly than ever that there were connections between all the odd things which had been happening to him, connections he could almost see.

He told McGovern about the auras, although not about the silent cataclysm he had experienced less than half an hour before-that was also further than he was willing to go, at least for the time being.

McGovern knew about Charlie Pickering’s attack on Ralph, of course, and that Ralph had averted a much more serious injury by using the spray Helen and her friend had given him, but now Ralph told him something he had held back on Sunday night, when he’d told McGovern about the attack over a scratch dinner: how the spray-can had magically appeared in his jacket pocket. Except, he said, he suspected that the magician had been Old Dor.

“Holy shit!” McGovern exclaimed. “You’ve been living dangerously, Ralph!”

“I guess so.”

“How much of this have you told Johnny Leydecker?”

Very little, Ralph started to say, then realized that even that would be an exaggeration. “Almost none of it. And there’s something else I haven’t told him. Something a lot more… well, a lot more substantive, I guess. To do with what happened up there.” He pointed toward May Locher’s house, where a couple of blue-and-white vans had just pulled up. MAINE STATE POLICE was written on the sides. d they were the forensics people Leydecker had mentioned.

“May?” McGovern leaned a little further forward in his chair.

“You know something about what happened to May?”

“I think I do.” Speaking carefully, moving from word to word like a man using steppingstones to cross a treacherous brook, Ralph told McGovern about waking up, going into the living room, and seeing two men come out of Mrs. Locher’s house. He recounted his successful rummage for the binoculars, and told McGovern about the scissors he had seen one of the men carrying. He did not mention his nightmare of Carolyn or the glowing tracks, and he most certainly did not mention his belated impression that the two men might have come right through the door; that would have finished off any remaining tatters of credibility he might still possess. He ended with his anonymous call to 911 and then sat in his chair, looking at McGovern anxiously.

McGovern shook his head as if to clear it. “Auras, oracles, mysterious housebreakers with scissors… you have been living dangerously.”

“What do you think, Bill?”

McGovern sat quietly for several moments. He had rolled his newspaper up while Ralph was talking, and now he began to tap it absently against his leg. Ralph felt an urge to phrase his question even more bluntly-Do you think I’m crazy, Bill?-and quashed it.

Did he really believe that was the sort of question to which people gave honest answers… at least without a healthy shot of sodium pentothal first? That Bill might say Oh yes, I think you’re just as crazy as a bedbug, Ralphie-bak’V, so why don’t we call juniper Hill right away and see if they have a bed for you? Not very likely.

… and since any answer Bill gave would mean nothing, it was better to forgo the question.

“I don’t exactly know what I think,” Bill said at last. “Not yet, at least. What did they look like?”

“Their faces were hard to make out, even with the binoculars, 2 Ralph said. His voice was as steady as it had been yesterday, when he had denied making the 911 call.

“You probably don’t have any idea of how old they were, either?”

“No.”

“Could either of them have been our old pal from up the street?”

“Ed Deepneau?” Ralph looked at McGovern in surprise. “No, neither one was Ed.”

“What about Pickering?”

“No. Not Ed, not Charlie Pickering. I would have known either of them. What are you driving at? That my mind just sort of buckled and put the two guys who’ve caused me the most stress in the last few months on May Locher’s front stoop?”

“Of course not,” McGovern replied, but the steady tap-tap-tap of the newspaper against his leg paused and his eyes flickered. Ralph felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach. Yes; that was in fact exactly what McGovern had been driving at, and it wasn’t really so surprising, was it?

Maybe not, but it didn’t change that sinking feeling.

“And Johnny said all the doors were locked.”

“Yes.”

“From the inside.”

“Uh-huh, but-”

McGovern got up from his chair so suddenly that for one crazy moment Ralph had the idea that he was going to run away, perhaps screaming Watch out for Roberts! He’s gone crazy! as he went. But instead of bolting down the steps, he turned toward the door leading back into the house. In some ways Ralph found this even more alarming.

“What are you going to do?”

“Call Larry Perrault,” McGovern said. “May’s younger brother.

He still lives out in Carriville. She’ll be buried in Carriville, I imagine me.” McGovern gave Ralph a strange, speculative look. “What did you think I was going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said uneasily. “For a second there I thought you were going to run away like the Gingerbread Man.”

“Mope.” McGovern reached out and patted him on the shoulder, but to Ralph the gesture felt cold and comfortless. Perfunctory, “What does Mrs. Locher’s brother have to do with any of this?”

“Johnny said they sent May’s body down to Augusta for a more comprehensive autopsy, right?”

“Well, I think the word he actually used was postmortem-” McGovern waved this away. “Same difference, believe me. If anything odd does crop up-anything suggesting that she was murdered-Larry would have to be informed. He’s her only close living relative.”

“Yes, but won’t he wonder what your interest is?”

“Oh, I don’t think we have to worry about that,” McGovern said, speaking in a soothing tone Ralph didn’t care for at all. “I’ll say the police have sealed off the house and that the old Harris Avenue rumor mill is turning briskly. He knows May and I were school chums, and that I visited her regularly over the last couple of years.

Larry and I aren’t crazy about each other, but we get along reasonably well. He’ll tell me what I want to know if for no other reason than that we’re both Carriville survivors. Get it?”

“I guess so, but-”

“I hope so,” McGovern said, and suddenly he looked like a very old and very ugly reptile-a gila monster, or perhaps a basilisk lizard. He pointed a finger at Ralph. “I’m not a stupid man, and I do know how to respect a confidence. Your face just now said you weren’t sure about that, and I resent it. I resent the hell out of it.”

“I’m sorry,” Ralph said. He was stunned by McGovern’s outburst.

McGovern looked at him a moment longer with his leathery lips pulled back against his too-large dentures, then nodded. “Yeah, okay, apology accepted. You’ve been sleeping like shit, I have to factor that into the equation, and as for me, I can’t seem to get Bob Polhurst off my mind.” He heaved one of his weightiest poor-oldBill sighs.

“Listen-if you’d prefer me not to try calling May’s brother “No, no,” Ralph said, thinking that what he’d like to do was roll the clock back ten minutes or so and cancel this entire conversation.

And then a sentiment he was sure Bill McGovern would appreciate floated into his mind, fully constructed and ready for use. “I’m sorry if I impuned your discretion.”

McGovern sanded, reluctantly at first and then with his whole face.

“Now I know what keeps you awake-thinking up crap like that.

Sit still, Ralph, and think good thoughts about a hippopotamus, as my mother used to say. I’ll be right back. Probably won’t even catch him in, you know; funeral arrangements and all that. Want to look at the paper while you wait?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

McGovern handed him the paper, which still retained the tube shape into which it had been rolled, then went inside. Ralph glanced at the front page. The headline read PRO-CHOICE, PRO-LIFE ADVOCATES READY FOR ACTIVIST’s ARRIVAL. The story was flanked by two news photographs.

One showed half a dozen young women making signs which said things like OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICE and IT’s A BRAND-NEW DAY IN DERRY! The other showed picketers marching in front of WomanCare. They carried no signs and needed none; the hooded black robes they wore and the scythes they carried said it all.

Ralph heaved a sigh of his own, dropped the paper onto the seat of the rocking chair beside him, and watched Tuesday morning unfold along Harris Avenue. It occurred to him that McGovern might well be on the phone with John Leydecker rather than Larry Perrault, and that the two of them might at this very moment be having a little student-teacher conference about that nutty old insomniac Ralph Roberts.

Just thought you’d like to know who really made that 911 call, Johnny.

Thanks, Prof We were pretty sure, anyway, but it’s good to get confirmation. I imagine he’s harmless. I actually sort of like him.

Ralph pushed away his speculations about who Bill might or might not be calling. It was easier just to sit here and not think at all, not even good thoughts about a hippopotamus. Easier to watch the Budweiser truck lumber into the Red Apple parking lot, pausing to give courtesy to the Magazines Incorporated van which had dropped off this week’s ration of tabloids, magazines, and paperbacks and was now leaving. Easier to watch old Harriet Bennigan, who made Mrs. Perrine look like a spring chicken, bent over her walker in her bright red fall coat, out for her morning lurch. Easier to watch the young girl, who was wearing jeans, an oversized white tee-shirt, and a man’s hat about four sizes too big for her, jumping rope in the weedy vacant lot between Frank’s Bakery and Vicky Moon’s Tanning Saloon (Body Wraps Our Specialty). Easier to watch the girl’s small hands penduluming up and down. Easier to listen as she chanted her endless, shuttling rhyme.

Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine…

Some distant part of Ralph’s mind realized, with great astonishment, that he was on the verge of going to sleep as he sat here on the porch steps. At the same time this was happening, the auras were creeping into the world again, filling it with fabulous colors and motions. It was wonderful, but…

… but something was wrong with it. Something. What?

The girl jumping rope in the vacant lot. She was wrong. Her denim-clad legs pumped up and down like the bobbin of a sewing machine.

Her shadow jumped next to her on the jumbled pavemciit of an ancient alley overgrown with weeds and sunflowers. The rope whirled up and down… all around… up and down and all around…

Not an oversized tee-shirt, though, he’d been wrong about that.

The figure was wearing a smock. A white smock, like the kind worn by actors in the old TV doc-operas.

Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine, The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line…

A cloud blocked the sun and a grim green light sailed across the day, driving it underwater. Ralph’s skin first chilled, then broke out in goosebumps. The girl’s pumping shadow disappeared. She looked up at Ralph and he saw she wasn’t a little girl at all. The creature looking at him was a man about four feet tan, Ralph had first taken the hat-shadowed face for that of a child because it was utterly smooth, unmarked by so much as a single line. And yet despite that, it conveyed a clear feeling to Ralph-a sense of evil, of malignity beyond the comprehension of a sane mind.

That’s it, Ralph thought numbly, staring at the skipping creature.

That’s exactly it. Whatever the thing over there is, it’s insane.

Totally gone.

The creature might have read Ralph’s thought, for at that moment its lips skinned back in a grin that was both coy and nasty, as if the two of them shared some unpleasant secret. And he was sure-yes, quite sure, almost positive-that it was somehow chanting through its grin, doing it without moving its lips in the slightest: [The line “The line broke. The monkey got choked. And they all died together in a little row-BOAT!”

It was neither of the two little bald doctors Ralph had seen coming out of Mrs. Locher’s, he was almost positive of that. Related to them, maybe, but not the same. It was The creature threw its jumprope away. The rope turned first yellow and then red, seeming to give off sparks as it flew through the air. The small figure-Doc # 3-stared at Ralph, grinning, and Ralph suddenly realized something else, something which filled him with horror. He finally recognized the hat the creature was wearing.

It was Bill McGovern’s missing Panama.

Again it was as if the creature had read his mind. It dragged the hat from its head, revealing the round, hairless skull beneath, and waved McGovern’s Panama in the air as if it were a cowpoke astride a bucking bronco, It continued to grin its unspeakable grin as it waved the hat.

Suddenly it pointed at Ralph, as if marking him. Then it clapped the hat back on its head and darted into the narrow, weed-choked opening between the tanning salon and the bakery. The sun sailed free of the cloud which had covered it, and the shifting brightness of the auras began to fade once more. A moment or two after the creature had disappeared it was just Harris Avenue in front of him again-boring old Harris Avenue, the same as always.

Ralph pulled a shuddering breath, remembering the madness in that small, grinning face. Remembering the way it had pointed (the monkey got CHOKED) at him, as if (they all died together in a little row-BOAT!) marking him.

“Tell me I fell asleep,” he whispered hoarsely. “Tell me I fell asleep and dreamed that little bugger.”

The door opened behind him. “Oh my, talking to yourself,” McGovern said, “Must have money in the bank, Ralphie.”

“Yeah, about enough to cover my burial expenses,” Ralph said.

To himself he sounded like a man who has Just suffered a terrible shock and is still trying to cope with the residual fright; he half expected Bill to dart forward, face filling with concern (or maybe just suspicion), to ask what was wrong.

McGovern did nothing of the sort. He plumped into the rocking chair, crossed his arms over his narrow chest in a brooding X, and looked out at Harris Avenue, the stage upon which he and Ralph and Lois and Dorrance Marstellar and so many other old folks-we golden-agers, in McGovern-ese-were destined to play out their often boring and sometimes painful last acts.

Suppose I told him about his hat? Ralph thought. Suppose I just opened the conversation by saying, “Bill, I also know what happened to your Panama. Some badass relation to the guys I saw last night has got it. He wears it when he jumps rope between the bakery and the tanning salon.”

If Bill had any lingering doubts about his sanity, that little newsflash would certainly set them to rest. Yep.

Ralph kept his mouth shut.

“Sorry I was gone so long,” McGovern said. “Larry claimed I just caught him going out the door to the funeral parlor, but before I could ask my questions and get away he’d rehashed half of May’s life and damned near all of his own. Talked nonstop for forty-five minutes.”

Positive this was an exaggeration-McGovern had surely been gone five minutes, tops-Ralph glanced at his watch and was astounded to see it was eleven-fifteen. He looked up the street and saw that Mrs. Bennigan had disappeared. So had the Budweiser truck. Had he been asleep? It seemed that he must have been but he could not for the life of him find the break in his conscious perceptions.

Oh, come on, don’t be dense. You’re sleeping when -you saw the little bald guy. Dreamed the little bald guy.

That made perfect sense. Even the fact that it had been wearing Bill’s Panama made sense. The same hat had shown up in his nightmare about Carolyn. It had been between Rosalie’s paws in that one.

Except this time he hadn’t been dreaming. He was sure of it.

Well… almost sure.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what May’s brother said?” McGovern sounded slightly piqued.

“Sorry,” Ralph said. “I was woolgathering, I guess.”

“Forgiven, my son… provided you listen closely from here on out, that is. The detective in charge of the case, Funderburke-”

“I’m pretty sure it’s Utterback. Steve Utterback.”

McGovern waved his hand airily, his most common response to being corrected on some point. “Whatever. Anyway, he called Larry and said the autopsy showed nothing but natural causes. The thing they were most concerned about, in light of your call, was that May had been scared into a heart-attack-literally frightened to death ’ by housebreakers. The doors being locked from the inside and the lack of missing valuables militated against that, of course, but they took your call seriously enough to investigate the possibility.”

His half-reproachful tone-as if Ralph had wantonly poured glue into the gears of some usually smooth-running machine-made Ralph feel impatient. “Of course they took it seriously. I saw two guys leaving her house and reported it to the authorities. When they got there, they found the lady dead. How could they not take it seriously?”

“Why didn’t you give your name when you made the call?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make? And how in Gods name can they be sure she wasn’t scared into a heart-attack-“”

“I don’t know if they can be a hundred percent sure,” McGovern said, now sounding a bit testy himself, “but I guess it must be close to that if they’re turning May’s body over to her brother for burial.

It’s probably a blood-test of some kind. All I know is that this guy Funderburke-”

“Utterback-” -told Larry that May probably died in her sleep.”

McGovern crossed his legs, fiddled with the creases in his blue slacks, then gave Ralph a clear and piercing look.

“I’m going to give you some advice, so listen up. Go to the doctor.

Now. Today. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, go directly to Litchfield. This is getting heavy.”

The ones I saw coming out of Mrs. Locher’s didn’t see me, but this one did, Ralph thought. It saw me and it pointed at me. For all I know, it might actually have been looking for me.

Now there was a nice paranoid thought.

“Ralph? Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes. I take it you don’t believe I actually saw anyone coming out of Mrs. Locher’s house.”

“You take it right. I saw the look on your face just now when I told you I’d been gone forty-five minutes, and I also saw the way you looked at your watch. You didn’t believe so much time had passed, did you? And the reason you didn’t believe it is because you dozed off without even being aware of it. Had yourself a little pocket nap.

That’s probably what happened to you the other night, Ralph.

Only the other night you dreamed up those two guys, and the dream was so real you called 911 when you woke up. Doesn’t that make sense?”

Three-six-nine, Ralph thought. The goose drank wine.

“What about the binoculars?” he asked. “They’re still sitting on the table beside my chair in the living room. Don’t they prove I was awake?

“I don’t see how. Maybe you were sleepwalking, have you thought of that? You say you saw these intruders, but you can’t really describe them.”

“Those orange hi-intensity lights-”

“All the doors locked from the inside-“, “Just the same I-”

“And these auras you talked about. The insomnia is causing them-I’m almost sure of it. Still, it could be more serious than that.” Ralph got up, walked down the porch steps, and stood at the head of the walk with his back to McGovern. There was a throbbing at his temples and his heart was beating hard. Too hard.

He didn’t just point. I was right the first time, the little sonofabitch marked me. And he was no dream. Neither Were the ones I saw comingout of Mrs. Locher’s. I’m sure of it, Of course you are, Ralph, another voice replied. Crazy people are always sure of the crazy things they see and hear. That’s what makes them crazy, not the hallucinations themselves. If you really saw what you saw, what happened to Mrs. Bennigan? What happened to the Budweiser truck? How did you lose the forty-five minutes McGovern spent on the phone with Larry Perrault?

“You’re experiencing very serious symptoms,” McGovern said from behind him, and Ralph thought he heard something terrible in the man’s voice. Satisfaction? Could it possibly be satisfaction?

“One of them had a pair of scissors,” Ralph said without turning around. “I saw them.”

“Oh, come on, Ralph! Think! Use that brain of yours and think.”

On Sunday afternoon, less than twenty-four hours before you’re due to have acupuncture treatment, a lunatic nearly sticks a knife into YOu-Is it any wonder that your mind serves up a nightmare featuring a sharp object that night? Hong’s pins and Pickering’s hunting knife become scissors, that’s all. Don’t you see that this hypothesis covers all the bases while what you claim to have seen covers none of them?”

“And I was sleepwalking when I got the binoculars? That’s what you think?”

“It’s possible. Even likely.”

“Same thing with the spray-can in my jacket pocket, right? Old Dor didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

“I don’t care about the spray-can or Old Dor!” McGovern cried.

“I care about you! You’ve been suffering from insomnia since April or May, you’ve been depressed and disturbed ever since Carolyn died-”

“I have not been depressed!” Ralph shouted. Across the street, the mailman paused and looked in their direction before going on down the block toward the park.

“Have it your own way,” McGovern said. “You haven’t been depressed. You also haven’t been sleeping, you’re seeing auras, guys creeping out of locked houses in the middle of the night…” And then, in a deceptively light voice, McGovern said the thing Ralph had been dreading all along: “You want to watch out, old son.

You’re starting to sound too much like Ed Deepneau for comfort.”

Ralph turned around. Dull hot blood pounded behind his face.

“Why are you being this way? Why are you taking after me this way?”

“I’m not taking after you, Ralph, I’m trying to help you. To be your friend.”

“That’s not how it feels.”

“Well, sometimes the truth hurts a little,” McGovern said calmly.

“You need to at least consider the idea that your mind and body are trying to tell you something. Let me ask you a question-is this the only disturbing dream you’ve had lately?”

Ralph thought fleetingly of Carol, buried up to her neck in the sand and screaming about white-man tracks. Thought of the bugs which had flooded out of her head. “I haven’t had any bad dreams lately,” he said stiffly. “I suppose you don’t believe that because it doesn’t fit into the little scenario you’ve created.”

“Ralph-”

“Let me ask you something. Do you really believe that my seeing those two men and May Locher turning up dead was just a coincidence?”

“Maybe not. Maybe your physical and emotional upset created conditions favorable to a brief but perfectly genuine psychic event.”

Ralph was silenced.

“I believe such things do happen from time to time,” McGovern said, standing up. “Probably sounds funny, coming from a rational old bird like me, but I do. I’m not out-and-out saying that is what happened here, but it could have been. What I am sure of is that the two men you think you saw did not in fact exist in the real world.”

Ralph stood looking up at McGovern with his hands jammed deep into his pockets and clenched into fists so hard and tight they felt like rocks.

He could feel the muscles in his arms thrumming.

McGovern came down the porch steps and took him by the arm, gently, just above the elbow. “I only think-” Ralph pulled his arm away so sharply that McGovern grunted with surprise and stumbled a little on his feet. “I know what you think.”

“You’re not hearing what I-”

“Oh, I’ve heard plenty. More than enough. Believe me. And excuse me-I think I’m going for another walk.

I need to clear my head.” He could feel dull hot blood pounding away in his cheeks and brow. He tried to throw his brain into some forward gear that would allow it to leave this senseless, impotent rage behind, and couldn’t do it. He felt a lot as he had when he had awakened from the dream of Carolyn; his thoughts roared with terror and confusion, and as he started his legs moving, the sense he got was not one of walking but of falling, as he had fallen out of bed yesterday morning.

Still, he kept going. Sometimes that was all you could do.

“Ralph, you need to see a doctor!” McGovern called after him, and Ralph could no longer tell himself that he didn’t hear a weird, shrewish pleasure in McGovern’s voice. The concern which overlaid it was probably genuine enough but it was like sweet icing on a sour cake.

“Not a pharmacist, not a hypnotist, not an acupuncturist! You need to see your own family doctor!”

Yeah, the guy who buried my wife below the high-tide line he thought in a kind of mental scream. The guy who stuck her in sand up to her neck and then told her she didn’t have to worry about drowning as long as she kept taking her Valium and Tylenol-3.

Aloud he said, “I need to take a walk! That’s what I need and that’s all I need.” His heartbeat was now slamming into his temples like the short, hard blows of a sledgehammer, and it occurred to him that this was how strokes must happen; if he didn’t control himself soon, he was apt to fall down with what his father had called a bad-temper apoplexy.”

He could hear McGovern coming down the walk after him. Don’t touch me, Bill, Ralph thought. Don’t even put your hand on my shoulder, because I’m probably going to turn around and slug you if you do.

“I’m trying to help you, don’t you see that?” McGovern shouted.

The mailman on the other side of the street had stopped again to watch them, and outside the Red Apple, Karl, the guy who worked mornings, and Sue, the young woman who worked afternoons, were gawking frankly across the street at them. Karl, he saw, had a bag of hamburger buns in one hand. It was really sort of amazing, the things you saw at a time like this… although not as amazing as some of the things he had already seen that morning.

The things -you thought you saw, Ralph, a traitor voice whispered softly from deep inside his head.

“Walk,” Ralph muttered desperately. “Just a damn alkA mind-movie had begun to play in his head. It was an unpleasant one, the sort of film he rarely went to see even if he had seen everything else that was playing at the Cinema Center. The soundtrack to this mental horror flick seemed to be “Pop Goes the Weasel,” of all things.

“Let me tell you something, Ralph-at our age, mental illness is common! At our age it’s common as hell, So GO SEE YOUR DOCTOR.I” Mrs. Bennigan was now standing on her stoop, her walker abandoned at the foot of the front steps. She was still wearing her bright red fall coat, and her mouth appeared to be hanging open as she stared down the street at them.

“Do you hear me, Ralph? I hope you do l just hope you do.” Ralph walked faster, hunching his shoulders as if against a cold wind.

Suppose he just keeps on yelling, louder and louder? Suppose he follows me right up the street?

if he does that, people will think he’s the one who’s gone crazy, he told himself, but this idea had no power to soothe him. In his mind he continued to hear a piano playing a children’s tune-no, not really playiing,-picking it out in nursery-school punks and plonks: All around the mulberry bush The monkey chased the weasel, The monkey thought ’twas all in fun, POP. Goes the weasel!

And now Ralph began to see the old people of Harris Avenue, the ones who bought their insurance from companies that advertised on cable TV, the ones with the gallstones and the skin tumors, the ones whose memories were diminishing even as their prostates enlarged, the ones who were living on Social Security and peering at the world through thickening cataracts instead of rose-colored glasses. These were the people who now read all the mail which came addressed to Occupant and scanned the supermarket advertising circulars for specials on canned goods and generic frozen dinners. He saw them dressed in grotesque short pants and fluffy short skirts, saw them wearing beanies and tee-shirts which showcased such characters as Beavis and Butt-head and Rude Dog. He saw them, in short, as the world’s oldest pre-schoolers.

They were marching around a double row of chairs as a small bald man in a white smock played “Pop Goes the Weasel” on the piano.

Another baldy filched the chairs one by one, and when the music stopped and everyone sat down, one person-this time it had been May Locher, next time it would probably be McGovern’s old department headwas left standing.

That person would have to leave the room, of course. And Ralph heard McGovern laughing. Laughing because he’d found a seat again.

Maybe May Locher was dead, Bob Polhurst dying, Ralph Roberts losing his marbles, but he was still all right, William D.

McGovern, Esq was still fine, still dandy, still vertical and taking nourishment, still able to find a chair when the music stopped.

Ralph walked faster still, shoulders hunched even higher, anticipating another fusillade of advice and admonition. He thought it unlikely that McGovern would actually follow him up the street, but not entirely out of the question. If McGovern was angry enough he might do just that-remonstrating, telling Ralph to stop fooling around and go to the doctor, reminding him that the piano could stop anytime, any old time at all, and if he didn’t find a chair while the finding was good, he might be out of luck forever.

No more shouts came, however. He thought of looking back to see where McGovern was, then thought better of it. If he saw Ralph looking back, it might set him off all over again. Best to just keep going, So Ralph lengthened his stride, heading back in the direction of the airport again without even thinking about it, walking with his head down, trying not to hear the relentless piano, trying not to seeing not to see the old children marching around the chars, try’ the terrified eyes above their make-believe smiles.

It came to him as he walked that his hopes had been denied. He had been pushed into the tunnel after all, and the dark was all around him.