1
No one – least of all Dr Litchfield – came right out and told Ralph Roberts that his wife was going to die, but there came a time when Ralph understood without needing to be told. The months between March and June were a jangling, screaming time inside his head – a time of conferences with doctors, of evening runs to the hospital with Carolyn, of trips to other hospitals in other states for special tests (Ralph spent much of his travel time on these trips thanking God for Carolyn’s Blue Cross/Major Medical coverage), of personal research in the Derry Public Library, at first looking for answers the specialists might have overlooked, later on just looking for hope and grasping at straws.
Those four months were like being dragged drunk through some malign carnival where the people on the rides were really screaming, the people lost in the mirror maze were really lost, and the denizens of Freak Alley looked at you with false smiles on their lips and terror in their eyes. Ralph began to see these things by the middle of May, and as June set in, he began to understand that the pitchmen along the medical midway had only quack remedies to sell, and the cheery quickstep of the calliope could no longer quite hide the fact that the tune spilling out of the loudspeakers was ‘The Funeral March’. It was a carnival, all right; the carnival of lost souls.
Ralph continued to deny these terrible images – and the even more terrible idea lurking behind them – all through the early summer of 1992, but as June gave way to July, this finally became impossible. The worst midsummer heatwave since 1971 rolled over central Maine, and Derry simmered in a bath of hazy sun, humidity, and daily temperatures in the mid-nineties. The city – hardly a bustling metropolis at the best of times – fell into a complete stupor, and it was in this hot silence that Ralph Roberts first heard the ticking of the deathwatch and understood that in the passage from June’s cool damp greens to the baked stillness of July, Carolyn’s slim chances had become no chances at all. She was going to die. Not this summer, probably – the doctors claimed to have quite a few tricks up their sleeves yet, and Ralph was sure they did – but this fall or this winter. His longtime companion, the only woman he had ever loved, was going to die. He tried to deny the idea, scolding himself for being a morbid old fool, but in the gasping silences of those long hot days, Ralph heard that ticking everywhere – it even seemed to be in the walls.
Yet it was loudest from within Carolyn herself, and when she turned her calm white face toward him – perhaps to ask him to turn on the radio so she could listen while she shelled some beans for their supper, or to ask him if he would go across to the Red Apple and get her an ice-cream on a stick – he would see that she heard it, too. He would see it in her dark eyes, at first only when she was straight, but later even when her eyes were hazed by the pain medication she took. By then the ticking had grown very loud, and when Ralph lay in bed beside her on those hot summer nights when even a single sheet seemed to weigh ten pounds and he believed every dog in Derry was barking at the moon, he listened to it, to the deathwatch ticking inside Carolyn, and it seemed to him that his heart would break with sorrow and terror. How much would she be required to suffer before the end came? How much would he be required to suffer? And how could he possibly live without her?
It was during this strange, fraught period that Ralph began to go for increasingly long walks through the hot summer afternoons and slow, twilit evenings, returning on many occasions too exhausted to eat. He kept expecting Carolyn to scold him for these outings, to say, Why don’t you stop it, you stupid old man? You’ll kill yourself if you keep walking in this heat! But she never did, and he gradually realized she didn’t even know. That he went out, yes – she knew that. But not all the miles he went, or that when he came home he was often trembling with exhaustion and near sunstroke. Once upon a time it had seemed to Ralph she saw everything, even a change of half an inch in where he parted his hair. No more; the tumor in her brain had stolen her powers of observation, as it would soon steal her life.
So he walked, relishing the heat in spite of the way it sometimes made his head swim and his ears ring, relishing it mostly because of the way it made his ears ring; sometimes there were whole hours when they rang so loudly and his head pounded so fiercely that he couldn’t hear the tick of Carolyn’s deathwatch.
He walked over much of Derry that hot July, a narrow-shouldered old man with thinning white hair and big hands that still looked capable of hard work. He walked from Witcham Street to the Barrens, from Kansas Street to Neibolt Street, from Main Street to the Kissing Bridge, but his feet took him most frequently west along Harris Avenue, where the still beautiful and much beloved Carolyn Roberts was now spending her last year in a haze of headaches and morphine, to the Harris Avenue Extension and Derry County Airport. He would walk out the Extension – which was treeless and completely exposed to the pitiless sun – until he felt his legs threatening to cave in beneath him, and then double back.
He often paused to catch his second wind in a shady picnic area close to the airport’s service entrance. At night this place was a teenage drinking and makeout spot, alive with the sounds of rap coming from boombox radios, but during the days it was the more-or-less exclusive domain of a group Ralph’s friend Bill McGovern called the Harris Avenue Old Crocks. The Old Crocks gathered to play chess, to play gin, or just to shoot the shit. Ralph had known many of them for years (had, in fact, gone to grammar school with Stan Eberly), and was comfortable with them . . . as long as they didn’t get too nosy. Most didn’t. They were old-school Yankees, for the most part, raised to believe that what a man doesn’t choose to talk about is no one’s business but his own.
It was on one of these walks that he first became aware that something had gone very wrong with Ed Deepneau, his neighbor from up the street.
2
Ralph had walked much farther out the Harris Avenue Extension than usual that day, possibly because thunder-heads had blotted out the sun and a cool, if still sporadic, breeze had begun to blow. He had fallen into a kind of trance, not thinking of anything, not watching anything but the dusty toes of his sneakers, when the four forty-five United Airlines flight from Boston swooped low overhead, startling him back to where he was with the teeth-rattling whine of its jet engines.
He watched it cross above the old GS&WM railroad tracks and the Cyclone fence that marked the edge of the airport, watched it settle toward the runway, marked the blue puffs of smoke as its wheels touched down. Then he glanced at his watch, saw how late it was getting, and looked up with wide eyes at the orange roof of the Howard Johnson’s just up the road. He had been in a trance, all right; he had walked more than five miles without the slightest sense of time passing.
Carolyn’s time, a voice deep inside his head muttered.
Yes, yes; Carolyn’s time. She would be back in the apartment, counting the minutes until she could have another Darvon Complex, and he was out on the far side of the airport . . . halfway to Newport, in fact.
Ralph looked up at the sky and for the first time really saw the bruise-purple thunderheads which were stacking up over the airport. They did not mean rain, not for sure, not yet, but if it did rain, he was almost surely going to be caught in it; there was nowhere to shelter between here and the little picnic area back by Runway 3, and there was nothing there but a ratty little gazebo that always smelled faintly of beer.
He took another look at the orange roof, then reached into his right-hand pocket and felt the little sheaf of bills held by the silver money-clip Carolyn had given him for his sixty-fifth. There was nothing to prevent him walking up to HoJo’s and calling a cab . . . except maybe for the thought of how the driver might look at him. Stupid old man, the eyes in the rear-view mirror might say. Stupid old man, walked a lot further than you should on a hot day. If you’d been swimming, you woulda drownded.
Paranoid, Ralph, the voice in his head told him, and now its clucky, slightly patronizing tone reminded him of Bill McGovern.
Well, maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. Either way, he thought he would chance the rain and walk back.
What if it doesn’t just rain? Last summer it hailed so hard that one time in August it broke windows all over the west side.
‘Let it hail, then,’ he said. ‘I don’t bruise that easy.’
Ralph began to walk slowly back toward town along the shoulder of the Extension, his old high-tops raising small, parched puffs of dust as he went. He could hear the first rumbles of thunder in the west, where the clouds were stacking up. The sun, although blotted out, was refusing to quit without a fight; it edged the thunderheads with bands of brilliant gold and shone through occasional rifts in the clouds like the fragmented beam of some huge movie-projector. Ralph found himself feeling glad he had decided to walk, in spite of the ache in his legs and the steady nagging pain in the small of his back.
One thing, at least, he thought. I’ll sleep tonight. I’ll sleep like a damn rock.
The verge of the airport – acres of dead brown grass with the rusty railroad tracks sunk in them like the remains of some old wreck – was now on his left. Far in the distance beyond the Cyclone fence he could see the United 747, now the size of a child’s toy plane, taxiing toward the small terminal which United and Delta shared.
Ralph’s gaze was caught by another vehicle, this one a car, leaving the General Aviation terminal, which stood at this end of the airport. It was heading across the tarmac toward the small service entrance which gave on the Harris Avenue Extension. Ralph had watched a lot of vehicles come and go through that entrance just lately; it was only seventy yards or so from the picnic area where the Harris Avenue Old Crocks gathered. As the car approached the gate, Ralph recognized it as Ed and Helen Deepneau’s Datsun . . . and it was really moving.
Ralph stopped on the shoulder, unaware that his hands had curled into anxious fists as the small brown car bore down on the closed gate. You needed a key-card to open the gate from the outside; from the inside an electric-eye beam did the job. But the beam was set close to the gate, very close, and at the speed the Datsun was going . . .
At the last moment (or so it seemed to Ralph), the small brown car scrunched to a stop, the tires sending up puffs of blue smoke that made Ralph think of the 747 touching down, and the gate began to trundle slowly open on its track. Ralph’s fisted hands relaxed.
An arm emerged from the driver’s side window of the Datsun and began to wave up and down, apparently haranguing the gate, urging it to hurry it up. There was something so absurd about this that Ralph began to smile. The smile died before it had exposed even a gleam of teeth, however. The wind was still freshening from the west, where the thunderheads were, and it carried the screaming voice of the Datsun’s driver.
‘You son of a bitch fucker! You bastard! Eat my cock! Hurry up! Hurry up and lick shit, you fucking asshole cuntlapper! Fucking booger! Ratdick ringmeat! Suckhole!’
‘That can’t be Ed Deepneau,’ Ralph murmured. He began to walk again without realizing it. ‘Can’t be.’
Ed was a research chemist at the Hawking Laboratories research facility in Fresh Harbor, one of the kindest, most civil young men Ralph had ever met. Both he and Carolyn were very fond of Ed’s wife, Helen, and their new baby, Natalie, as well. A visit from Natalie was one of the few things with the power to lift Carolyn out of her own life these days, and, sensing this, Helen brought her over frequently. Ed never complained. There were men, he knew, who wouldn’t have cared to have the missus running to the old folks down the street every time the baby did some new and entrancing thing, especially when the granny-figure in the picture was ill. Ralph had an idea that Ed wouldn’t be able to tell someone to go to hell without suffering a sleepless night in consequence, but—
‘You fucking whoremaster! Move your sour shit-caked ass, you hear me? Butt-fucker! Cunt-rammer!’
But it sure sounded like Ed. Even from two or three hundred yards away, it certainly sounded like him.
Now the driver of the Datsun was revving his engine like a kid in a muscle-car waiting for the light to turn green. Clouds of exhaust smoke farted up from the tailpipe. As soon as the gate had retracted enough to allow the Datsun passage, the car leaped forward, squirting through the gap with its engine roaring, and when it did, Ralph got a clear look at the driver. He was close enough now for there to be no doubt: it was Ed, all right.
The Datsun bounced along the short unpaved stretch of lane between the gate and the Harris Street Extension. A horn blared suddenly, and Ralph saw a blue Ford Ranger, heading west on the Extension, swerve to avoid the oncoming Datsun. The driver of the pickup saw the danger too late, and Ed apparently never saw it at all (it was only later that Ralph came to consider Ed might have rammed the Ranger on purpose). There was a brief scream of tires followed by the hollow bang of the Datsun’s fender driving into the Ford’s sidewall. The pickup was driven halfway across the yellow line. The Datsun’s hood crumpled, came unlatched, and popped up a little; headlight glass tinkled into the street. A moment later both vehicles were dead in the middle of the road, tangled together like some weird sculpture.
Ralph stood where he was for the time being, watching as oil spread beneath the Datsun’s front end. He had seen several road accidents in his almost-seventy years, most of them minor, one or two serious, and he was always stunned by how quickly they happened and how little drama there was. It wasn’t like in the movies, where the camera could slow things down, or on a videotape, where you could watch the car go off the cliff again and again if you so chose; there was usually just a series of converging blurs, followed by that quick and toneless combination of sounds: the cry of the tires, the hollow bang of metal crimping metal, the tinkle of glass. Then, voilà – tout finis.
There was even a kind of protocol for this sort of thing: How One Should Behave When Involved in a Low-Speed Collision. Of course there was, Ralph mused. There were probably a dozen two-bit collisions in Derry every day, and maybe twice that number in the wintertime, when there was snow and the roads got slippery. You got out, you met your opposite number at the point where the two vehicles had come together (and where, quite often, they were still entwined), you looked, you shook your heads. Sometimes – often, actually – this phase of the encounter was marked with angry words: fault was assigned (often rashly), driving skills impugned, legal action threatened. Ralph supposed what the drivers were really trying to say without coming right out and saying it was, Listen, fool, you scared the living hell out of me!
The final step in this unhappy little dance was the Exchange of the Sacred Insurance Screeds, and it was at this point that the drivers usually began to get control of their galloping emotions . . . always assuming that no one had been hurt, as appeared to be the case here. Sometimes the drivers involved even finished up by shaking hands.
Ralph prepared to watch all this from his vantage point less than a hundred and fifty yards away, but as soon as the driver’s door of the Datsun opened he understood that things were going to go differently here – that the accident was maybe not over but still happening. It certainly did not seem that anyone was going to shake at the end of these festivities.
The door did not swing open; it flew open. Ed Deepneau leaped out, then simply stood stock-still beside his car, his slim shoulders squared against a background of deepening clouds. He was wearing faded jeans and a tee-shirt, and Ralph realized he had never seen Ed in a shirt that didn’t button up the front. And there was something around his neck: a long white something. A scarf? It looked like a scarf, but why would anyone be wearing a scarf on a day as hot as this one had been?
Ed stood beside his wounded car for a moment, seeming to look in every direction but the right one. The fierce little pokes of his narrow head reminded Ralph of the way roosters studied their barnyard turf, looking for invaders and interlopers. Something about that similarity made Ralph feel uneasy. He had never seen Ed look that way before, and he supposed that was part of it, but it wasn’t all of it. The truth of the matter was simply this: he had never seen anyone look exactly like that.
Thunder rumbled in the west, louder now. And closer.
The man getting out of the Ranger would have made two of Ed Deepneau, possibly three. His vast, deep belly hung over the rolled waistband of his green chino work-pants; there were sweatstains the size of dinner-plates under the arms of his open-throated white shirt. He tipped back the bill of the West Side Gardeners gimme-cap he was wearing to get a better look at the man who had broadsided him. His heavy-jowled face was dead pale except for bright patches of color like rouge high on his cheekbones, and Ralph thought: There’s a man who’s a prime candidate for a heart attack. If I was closer I bet I’d be able to see the creases in his earlobes.
‘Hey!’ the heavyset guy yelled at Ed. The voice coming out of that broad chest and deep gut was absurdly thin, almost reedy. ‘Where’d you get your license? Fuckin Sears n Roebuck?’
Ed’s wandering, jabbing head swung immediately toward the sound of the big man’s voice – seemed almost to home in, like a jet guided by radar – and Ralph got his first good look at Ed’s eyes. He felt a bolt of alarm light up in his chest and suddenly began to run toward the accident. Ed, meanwhile, had started toward the man in the sweat-soaked white shirt and gimme-cap. He was walking in a stiff-legged, high-shouldered strut that was nothing at all like his usual easygoing amble.
‘Ed!’ Ralph shouted, but the freshening breeze – cold now with the promise of rain – seemed to snatch the words away before they could even get out of his mouth. Certainly Ed never turned. Ralph made himself run faster, the ache in his legs and the throbbing in the small of his back forgotten. It was murder he had seen in Ed Deepneau’s wide, unblinking eyes. He had absolutely no previous experience upon which to base such an assessment, but he didn’t think you could mistake such a naked glare; it was the look fighting cocks must wear when they launch themselves at each other, spurs up and slashing. ‘Ed! Hey, Ed, hold up! It’s Ralph!’
Not so much as a glance around, although Ralph was now so close that Ed must have heard, wind or no wind. Certainly the heavyset man glanced around, and Ralph could see both fear and uncertainty in his look. Then Heavyset turned back to Ed and raised his hands placatingly.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘We can talk—’
That was as far as he got. Ed took another quick step forward, reached up with one slim hand – it was very white in the rapidly darkening day – and slapped Heavyset across his far from inconsiderable jowls. The sound was like the report of a kid’s air rifle.
‘How many have you killed?’ Ed asked.
Heavyset pressed back against the side of his pickup, his mouth open, his eyes wide. Ed’s queer, stiff strut never faltered. He walked into the other man and stood belly to belly with him, seemingly oblivious of the fact that the pickup’s driver was four inches taller and outweighed him by a hundred pounds or more. Ed reached up and slapped him again. ‘Come on! Fess up, brave boy – how many have you killed?’ His voice rose to a shriek that was lost in the coming storm’s first really authoritative clap of thunder.
Heavyset pushed him away – a gesture not of aggression but of simple fright – and Ed went reeling backward against the crumpled nose of his Datsun. He bounced back at once, fists clenched, gathering himself to leap at Heavyset, who was cringing against the side of his truck with his gimme-cap now askew and his shirt untucked in the back and at the sides. A memory flashed across Ralph’s mind – a Three Stooges short he’d seen years ago, Larry, Curly, and Moe playing painters without a clue – and he felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Heavyset, who looked absurd as well as scared to death.
Ed Deepneau did not look absurd. With his yanked-back lips and wide, unblinking eyes, Ed looked more like a fighting cock than ever. ‘I know what you’ve been doing,’ he whispered to Heavyset. ‘What kind of comedy did you think this was? Did you think you and your butcher friends could get away with it forev—’
At that moment Ralph arrived, puffing and gasping like an old carthorse, and put an arm around Ed’s shoulders. The heat beneath the thin tee-shirt was unnerving; it was like putting an arm around an oven, and when Ed turned to look at him, Ralph had the momentary (but unforgettable) impression that that was exactly what he was looking into. He had never seen such utter, unreasoning fury in a pair of human eyes; had never even suspected such fury might exist.
Ralph’s immediate impulse was to recoil, but he suppressed it and stood firm. He had an idea that if he pulled back, Ed would fall on him like a rogue dog, biting and clawing. It was absurd, of course; Ed was a research chemist, Ed was a member of the Book of the Month Club (the kind who took the twenty-pound histories of the Crimean War they always seemed to offer as alternates to the main selection), Ed was Helen’s husband and Natalie’s dad. Hell, Ed was a friend.
. . . except this wasn’t that Ed, and Ralph knew it.
Instead of pulling back, Ralph leaned forward, grasped Ed’s shoulders (so hot under the tee-shirt, so incredibly, throbbingly hot), and moved his face until it blocked Heavyset from Ed’s creepy fixed gaze.
‘Ed, quit it!’ Ralph said. He used the loud but steadily firm voice he assumed one used with people who were having hysterics. ‘You’re all right! Just quit it!’
For a moment Ed’s fixed gaze didn’t waver, and then his eyes moved over Ralph’s face. It wasn’t much, but Ralph felt a small surge of relief just the same.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ Heavyset asked from behind Ralph. ‘He crazy, do you think?’
‘He’s fine, I’m sure,’ Ralph said, although he was sure of no such thing. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth, and didn’t take his eyes from Ed. He didn’t dare take his eyes from Ed – that contact felt like the only hold he had over the man, and tenuous at best. ‘Just shaken up from the crash. He needs a few seconds to calm d—’
‘Ask him what he’s got under that tarp!’ Ed yelled suddenly, and pointed over Ralph’s shoulder. Lightning flashed, and for a moment the pitted scars of Ed’s adolescent acne were thrown into sharp relief, like some strange organic treasure map. Thunder rolled. ‘Hey, hey, Susan Day!’ he chanted in a high, childlike voice that made Ralph’s forearms break out in goosebumps. ‘How many kids did you kill today?’
‘He ain’t shook up,’ Heavyset said. ‘He’s crazy. And when the cops get here, I’m gonna see he gets tooken in.’
Ralph glanced around and saw a blue tarpaulin stretched across the bed of the pickup. It had been tied down with bright yellow hanks of rope. Round shapes bulked beneath it.
‘Ralph?’ a timid voice asked.
He glanced to his left and saw Dorrance Marstellar – at ninety-something easily the oldest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks – standing just beyond Heavyset’s pickup truck. There was a paperback book in his waxy, liver-spotted hands, and Dorrance was bending it anxiously back and forth, giving the spine a real workout. Ralph supposed it was a book of poetry, which was all he had ever seen old Dorrance read. Or maybe he didn’t really read at all; maybe he just liked to hold the books and look at the artfully stacked words.
‘Ralph, what’s wrong? What’s happening?’
More lightning flashed overhead, a purple-white snarl of electricity. Dorrance looked up at it as if unsure of where he was, who he was, or what he was seeing. Ralph groaned inside.
‘Dorrance –’ he began, and then Ed lunged beneath him, like some wild animal which has only lain quiet to regain its strength. Ralph staggered, then pushed Ed back against the crumpled hood of his Datsun. He felt panicky – unsure of what to do next or how to do it. There were too many things going on at once. He could feel the muscles in Ed’s arms humming fiercely just below his grip; it was almost as if the man had somehow swallowed a bolt of the lightning now loose in the sky.
‘Ralph?’ Dorrance asked in that same calm but worried voice. ‘I wouldn’t touch him anymore, if I were you. I can’t see your hands.’
Oh, good. Another lunatic to deal with. Just what he needed.
Ralph glanced down at his hands, then looked at the old man. ‘What are you talking about, Dorrance?’
‘Your hands,’ Dorrance said patiently. ‘I can’t see your—’
‘This is no place for you, Dor – why don’t you get lost?’
The old man brightened a little at that. ‘Yes!’ he said in the tone of one who has just stumbled over a great truth. ‘That’s just what I oughtta do!’ He began to back up, and when the thunder cracked again, he cringed and put his book on top of his head. Ralph was able to read the bright red letters of the title: Buckdancer’s Choice. ‘It’s what you ought to do, too, Ralph. You don’t want to mess in with long-time business. It’s a good way to get hurt.’
‘What are you—’
But before Ralph could finish, Dorrance turned his back and went lumbering off in the direction of the picnic area with his fringe of white hair – as gossamer as the hair on a new baby’s head – rippling in the breeze of the oncoming storm.
One problem solved, but Ralph’s relief was short-lived. Ed had been temporarily distracted by Dorrance, but now he was looking daggers at Heavyset again. ‘Cuntlicker!’ he spat. ‘Fucked your mother and licked her cunt!’
Heavyset’s enormous brow drew down. ‘What?’
Ed’s eyes shifted back to Ralph, whom he now seemed to recognize. ‘Ask him what’s under that tarp!’ he cried. ‘Better yet, get the murdering cocksucker to show you!’
Ralph looked at the heavyset man. ‘What have you got under there?’
‘What’s it to you?’ Heavyset asked, perhaps trying to sound truculent. He sampled the look in Ed Deepneau’s eyes and took two more sidling steps away.
‘Nothing to me, something to him,’ Ralph said, lifting his chin in Ed’s direction. ‘Just help me cool him out, okay?’
‘You know him?’
‘Murderer!’ Ed repeated, and this time he lunged hard enough under Ralph’s hands to drive him back a step. Yet something was happening, wasn’t it? Ralph thought the scary, vacant look was seeping out of Ed’s eyes. There seemed to be a little more Ed in there than there had been before . . . or perhaps that was only wishful thinking. ‘Murderer, baby murderer!’
‘Jesus, what a loony tune,’ Heavyset said, but he went to the rear of the truckbed, yanked one of the ropes free, and peeled back a corner of the tarpaulin. Beneath it were four pressboard barrels, each marked WEED-GO. ‘Organic fertilizer,’ Heavyset said, his eyes flicking from Ed to Ralph and then back to Ed again. He touched the bill of his West Side Gardeners cap. ‘I spent the day workin on a set of new flower-beds outside the Derry Psych Wing . . . where you could stand a short vacation, friend.’
‘Fertilizer?’ Ed asked. It was himself he seemed to be speaking to. His left hand rose slowly to his temple and began to rub there. ‘Fertilizer?’ He sounded like a man questioning some simple yet staggering scientific development.
‘Fertilizer,’ Heavyset agreed. He glanced back at Ralph and said, ‘This guy is sick in the head. You know it?’
‘He’s confused, that’s all,’ Ralph answered uneasily. He leaned over the side of the truck and rapped a barrel-top. Then he turned back to Ed. ‘Barrels of fertilizer,’ he said. ‘Okay?’
No response. Ed’s right hand rose and began to rub at his other temple. He looked like a man sinking into a terrible migraine.
‘Okay?’ Ralph repeated gently.
Ed closed his eyes for a moment, and when they opened again, Ralph observed a sheen in them he thought was probably tears. Ed’s tongue slipped out and dabbed delicately first at one corner of his mouth and then the other. He took the end of his silk scarf and wiped his forehead, and as he did, Ralph saw there were Chinese figures embroidered on it in red, just above the fringe.
‘I guess maybe –’ he began, and then broke off. His eyes widened again in that look Ralph didn’t like. ‘Babies!’ he rasped. ‘You hear me? Babies!’
Ralph shoved him back against his car for the third or fourth time – he’d lost count. ‘What are you talking about, Ed?’ An idea suddenly occurred to him. ‘Is it Natalie? Are you worried about Natalie?’
A small, crafty smile touched Ed’s lips. He looked past Ralph at the heavyset man. ‘Fertilizer, huh? Well, if that’s all it is, you won’t mind opening one of them, will you?’
Heavyset looked at Ralph uneasily. ‘Man needs a doctor,’ he said.
‘Maybe he does. But he was calming down, I thought . . . could you open one of those barrels? It might make him feel better.’
‘Yeah, sure, what the heck. In for a penny, in for a pound.’
There was another flash of lightning, another heavy blast of thunder – one that seemed to go rolling all the way across the sky this time – and a cold spackle of rain struck the back of Ralph’s sweaty neck. He glanced to his left and saw Dorrance Marstellar standing at the entrance to the picnic area, book in hand, watching the three of them anxiously.
‘It’s gonna rain a pretty bitch, looks like,’ Heavyset said, ‘and I can’t let this stuff get wet. It starts a chemical reaction. So look fast.’ He felt around between one of the barrels and the sidewall of his truck for a moment, then came up with a crowbar. ‘I must be as nutty as he is, doin this,’ he said to Ralph. ‘I mean, I was just goin along home, mindin my business. He hit me.’
‘Go on,’ Ralph said. ‘It’ll only take a second.’
‘Yeah,’ Heavyset replied sourly, turning and setting the flat end of the crowbar under the lid of the nearest barrel, ‘but the memories will last a lifetime.’
Another thunderclap rocked the day just then, and Heavyset did not hear what Ed Deepneau said next. Ralph did, however, and it chilled the pit of his stomach.
‘Those barrels are full of dead babies,’ Ed said. ‘You’ll see.’
Heavyset popped the lid on the end barrel, and such was the conviction in Ed’s voice that Ralph almost expected to see tangles of arms and legs and bundles of small hairless heads. Instead, he saw a mixture of fine blue crystals and brown stuff. The smell which rose from the barrel was rich and peaty, with a thin chemical undertone.
‘See? Satisfied?’ Heavyset asked, speaking directly to Ed again. ‘I ain’t Ray Joubert or that guy Dahmer after all. How ’bout that!’
The look of confusion was back on Ed’s face, and when the thunder cracked overhead again, he cringed a little. He leaned over, reached a hand toward the barrel, then looked a question at Heavyset.
The big man nodded to him, almost sympathetically, Ralph thought. ‘Sure, touch it, fine by me. But if it rains while you’re holdin a fistful, you’ll dance like John Travolta. It burns.’
Ed reached into the barrel, grabbed some of the mix, and let it run through his fingers. He shot Ralph a perplexed look (there was an element of embarrassment in that look as well, Ralph thought), and then sank his arm into the barrel all the way to the elbow.
‘Hey!’ Heavyset cried, startled. ‘That ain’t a box of Cracker Jack!’
For a moment the crafty grin resurfaced on Ed’s face – a look that said I know a trick worth two of that – and then it subsided into puzzlement again as he found nothing further down but more fertilizer. When he drew his arm out of the barrel, it was dusty and aromatic with the mix. Another flash of lightning exploded above the airport. The thunder which followed was almost deafening.
‘Get that off your skin before it rains, I’m warning you,’ Heavyset said. He reached through the Ranger’s open passenger window and produced a McDonald’s take-out sack. He rummaged in it, came out with a couple of napkins, and handed them to Ed, who began to wipe the fertilizer dust from his forearm like a man in a dream. While he did this, Heavyset replaced the lid on the barrel, tamping it into place with one large, freckled fist and taking quick glances up at the darkening sky. When Ed touched the shoulder of his white shirt, the man stiffened and pulled away, looking at Ed warily.
‘I think I owe you an apology,’ Ed said, and to Ralph his voice sounded completely clear and sane for the first time.
‘You’re damn tooting,’ Heavyset said, but he sounded relieved. He stretched the plastic-coated tarpaulin back into place and tied it in a series of quick, efficient gestures. Watching him, Ralph was struck by what a sly thief time was. Once he could have tied that same sheetbend with that same dextrous ease. Today he could still tie it, but it would take him at least two minutes and maybe three of his best curse-words.
Heavyset patted the tarp and then turned to them, folding his arms across the substantial expanse of his chest. ‘Did you see the accident?’ he asked Ralph.
‘No,’ Ralph said at once. He had no idea why he was lying, but the decision to do it was instantaneous. ‘I was watching the plane land. The United.’
To his complete surprise, the flushed patches on Heavyset’s cheeks began to spread. You were watching it, too! Ralph thought suddenly. And not just watching it land, either, or you wouldn’t be blushing like that . . . you were watching it taxi!
This thought was followed by a complete revelation: Heavyset thought the accident had been his fault, or that the cop or cops who showed up to investigate might read it that way. He had been watching the plane and hadn’t seen Ed’s reckless charge through the service gate and out to the Extension.
‘Look, I’m really sorry,’ Ed was saying earnestly, but he actually looked more than sorry; he looked dismayed. Ralph suddenly found himself wondering how much he trusted that expression, and if he really had even the slightest idea of
(Hey, hey, Susan Day)
what had just happened here . . . and who the hell was Susan Day, anyhow?
‘I bumped my head on the steering wheel,’ Ed was saying,‘and I guess it . . . you know, it rattled my cage pretty good.’
‘Yeah, I guess it did,’ Heavyset said. He scratched his head, looked up at the dark and convoluted sky, then looked back at Ed again. ‘Want to make you a deal, friend.’
‘Oh? What deal is that?’
‘Let’s just exchange names and phone numbers instead of going through all that insurance shit. Then you go your way and I go mine.’
Ed looked uncertainly at Ralph, who shrugged, and then back at the man in the West Side Gardeners cap.
‘If we get into it with the cops,’ Heavyset went on, ‘I’m in for a ration of shit. First thing they’re going to find out when they call it in is I had an Operating Under the Influence last winter, and I’m drivin on a provisional license. They’re apt to make problems for me even though I was on the main drag and had the right-of-way. See what I mean?’
‘Yes,’ Ed said,‘I guess so, but the accident was entirely my fault. I was going much too fast—’
‘The accident part is maybe not so important,’ Heavyset said, then looked mistrustfully around at an approaching panel truck that was pulling over onto the shoulder. He looked back at Ed again and spoke with some urgency. ‘You lost some oil, but it’s stopped leakin now. I bet you could drive her home . . . if you live here in town. You live here in town?’
‘Yes,’ Ed said.
‘And I’d stand you good on repairs, up to fifty bucks or so.’
Another revelation struck Ralph; it was the only thing he could think of to explain the man’s sudden change from truculence to something close to wheedling. An OUI last winter? Yes, probably. But Ralph had never heard of such a thing as a provisional license, and thought it was almost certainly bullshit. Old Mr West Side Gardeners had been driving without a license. What complicated the situation was this: Ed was telling the truth – the accident had been entirely his fault.
‘If we just drive away and call it good,’ Heavyset was going on, ‘I don’t have to explain all over again about my OUI and you don’t have to explain why you jumped out of your car and started slapping me and yelling about how I had a truckload of dead bodies.’
‘Did I actually say that?’ Ed asked, sounding bewildered.
‘You know you did,’ Heavyset told him grimly.
A voice with a wispy French-Canadian accent asked, ‘Everyt’ing okay here, fellers? Nobody urt? . . . Eyyy, Ralph! Dat you?’
The truck which had pulled over had Derry Dry Cleaners printed on the side, and Ralph recognized the driver as one of the Vachon brothers from Old Cape. Probably Trigger, the youngest.
‘That’s me,’ Ralph said, and without knowing or asking himself why – he was operating purely on instinct at this point – he went to Trigger, put an arm around his shoulders, and led him back in the direction of the laundry truck.
‘Dem guys okay?’
‘Fine, fine,’ Ralph said. He glanced back and saw that Ed and Heavyset were standing by the truckbed with their heads together. Another cold spatter of rain fell, drumming on the blue tarpaulin like impatient fingers. ‘A little fender-bender, that’s all. They’re working it out.’
‘Beauty, beauty,’ Trigger Vachon said complacently. ‘Howdat pretty little wife of yours, Ralph?’
Ralph twitched, suddenly feeling like a man who remembers at lunch that he has forgotten to turn off the stove before leaving for work. ‘Jesus!’ he said, and looked at his watch, hoping for five-fifteen, five-thirty at the latest. Instead he saw it was ten minutes of six. Already twenty minutes past the time Carolyn expected him to bring her a bowl of soup and half a sandwich. She would be worried. In fact, with the lightning and the thunder booming through the empty apartment, she might be downright scared. And if it did rain, she would not be able to close the windows; she had almost no strength left in her hands.
‘Ralph?’ Trigger asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I got walking and lost all track of time. Then this accident happened, and . . . could you give me a ride home, Trig? I’ll pay you.’
‘No need to pay nuttin,’ Trigger said. ‘It’s on my way. Hop in, Ralph. You t’ink dose guys gonna be all right? Ain’t gonna take after each udder or nuttin?’
‘No,’ Ralph said. ‘I don’t think so. Just one second.’
‘Sure.’
Ralph walked over to Ed. ‘Are you okay with this? Are you getting it worked out?’
‘Yes,’ Ed replied. ‘We’re going to settle it privately. Why not? A little broken glass is all it really comes down to.’
He sounded completely like his old self now, and the big man in the white shirt was looking at him with something that was almost respect. Ralph still felt perplexed and uneasy about what had happened here, but he decided he was going to let it go. He liked Ed Deepneau a lot, but Ed was not his business this July; Carolyn was. Carolyn and the thing which had started ticking in the walls of their bedroom – and inside her – late at night.
‘Great,’ he told Ed. ‘I’m headed home. I make Carolyn her supper these days, and I’m running way late.’
He started to turn away. The heavyset man stopped him with an outstretched hand. ‘John Tandy,’ he said.
He shook it. ‘Ralph Roberts. Pleased to meet you.’
Tandy smiled. ‘Under the circumstances, I kinda doubt that . . . but I’m real glad you showed up when you did. For a few seconds there I really thought him and me was gonna tango.’
So did I, Ralph thought but didn’t say. He looked at Ed, his troubled eye taking in the unfamiliar tee-shirt clinging to Ed’s stalk-thin midriff and the white silk scarf with the Chinese-red figures embroidered on it. He didn’t entirely like the look in Ed’s eyes when they met his; Ed was perhaps not all the way back after all.
‘Sure you’re okay?’ Ralph asked him. He wanted to go, wanted to get back to Carolyn, and yet he was somehow reluctant. The feeling that this situation was about nine miles from right persisted.
‘Yes, fine,’ Ed said quickly, and gave him a big smile which did not reach his dark green eyes. They studied Ralph carefully, as if asking how much he had seen . . . and how much
(hey hey Susan Day)
he would remember later on.
3
The interior of Trigger Vachon’s truck smelled of clean, freshly pressed clothes, an aroma which for some reason always reminded Ralph of fresh bread. There was no passenger seat, so he stood with one hand wrapped around the doorhandle and the other gripping the edge of a Dandux laundry basket.
‘Man, dat look like some strange go-on back dere,’ Trigger said, glancing into his outside mirror.
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ Ralph replied.
‘I know the guy drivin the rice-burner – Deepneau, his name is. He got a pretty little wife, send stuff out sometime. Seem like a nice fella, mos usually.’
‘He sure wasn’t himself today,’ Ralph said.
‘Had a bug up his ass, did he?’
‘Had a whole damn ant-farm up there, I think.’
Trigger laughed hard at that, pounding the worn black plastic of the big steering wheel. ‘Whole damn ant-farm! Beauty! Beauty! I’m savin dat one, me!’ Trigger wiped his streaming eyes with a handkerchief almost the size of a tablecloth. ‘Look to me like Mr Deepneau come out dat airport service gate, him.’
‘That’s right, he did.’
‘You need a pass to use dat way,’ Trigger said. ‘How Mr D get a pass, you tink?’
Ralph thought it over, frowning, then shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It never even occurred to me. I’ll have to ask him next time I see him.’
‘You do dat,’ Trigger said. ‘And ask him how dem ants doin.’ This stimulated a fresh throe of laughter, which in turn occasioned more flourishes of the comic-opera handkerchief.
As they turned off the Extension and onto Harris Avenue proper, the storm finally broke. There was no hail, but the rain came in an extravagant summer flood, so heavy at first that Trigger had to slow the panel truck to a crawl. ‘Wow!’ he said respectfully. ‘Dis remine me of the big storm back in ’85, when haffa downtown fell inna damn Canal! Member dat, Ralph?’
‘Yes,’ Ralph said. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.’
‘Nah,’ Trigger said, grinning and peering past his extravagantly flapping windshield wipers, ‘dey got the drainage system all fixed up now. Beauty!’
The combination of the cold rain and the warm cab caused the bottom half of the windshield to steam up. Without thinking, Ralph reached out a finger and drew a figure in the steam:
Imag 1
‘What’s dat?’ Trigger asked.
‘I don’t really know. Looks Chinese, doesn’t it? It was on the scarf Ed Deepneau was wearing.’
‘Look a little familiar to me,’ Trigger said, glancing at it again. Then he snorted and flapped a hand. ‘Listen to me, wouldja? On’y t’ing I can say in Chinese is moo-goo-gai-pan!’
Ralph smiled, but didn’t seem to have a laugh in him. It was Carolyn. Now that he had remembered her, he couldn’t stop thinking about her – couldn’t stop imagining the windows open, and the curtains streaming like Edward Gorey ghost arms as the rain poured in.
‘You still live in dat two-storey across from the Red Apple?’
‘Yes.’
Trigger pulled in to the curb, the wheels of the truck spraying up big fans of water. The rain was still pouring down in sheets. Lightning raced across the sky; thunder cracked.
‘You better stay right here wit me for a little bit,’ Trigger said. ‘She let up in a minute or two.’
‘I’ll be all right.’ Ralph didn’t think anything could keep him in the truck a second longer, not even handcuffs. ‘Thanks, Trig.’
‘Wait a sec! Let me give you a piece of plastic – you can puddit over your head like a rainhat!’
‘No, that’s okay, no problem, thanks, I’ll just—’
There seemed to be no way of finishing whatever it was he was trying to say, and now what he felt was close to panic. He shoved the truck’s passenger door back on its track and jumped out, landing ankle-deep in the cold water racing down the gutter. He gave Trigger a final wave without looking back, then hurried up the walk to the house he and Carolyn shared with Bill McGovern, feeling in his pocket for his latchkey as he went. When he reached the porch steps he saw he wouldn’t need it – the door was standing ajar. Bill, who lived downstairs, often forgot to lock it, and Ralph would rather think it had been him than think that Carolyn had wandered out to look for him and been caught in the storm. That was a possibility Ralph did not even want to consider.
He hurried into the shadowy foyer, wincing as thunder banged deafeningly overhead, and crossed to the foot of the stairs. He paused there a moment, hand on the newel post of the banister, listening to rainwater drip from his soaked pants and shirt onto the hardwood floor. Then he started up, wanting to run but no longer able to find the next gear up from a fast walk. His heart was beating hard and fast in his chest, his soaked sneakers were clammy anchors dragging at his feet, and for some reason he kept seeing the way Ed Deepneau’s head had moved when he got out of his Datsun – those stiff, quick jabs that made him look like a rooster spoiling for a fight.
The third riser creaked loudly, as it always did, and the sound provoked hurried footsteps from above. They were no relief because they weren’t Carolyn’s, he knew that at once, and when Bill McGovern leaned over the rail, his face pale and worried beneath his Panama hat, Ralph wasn’t really surprised. All the way back from the Extension he had felt that something was wrong, hadn’t he? Yes. But under the circumstances, that hardly qualified as precognition. When things reached a certain degree of wrongness, he was discovering, they could no longer be redeemed or turned around; they just kept going wronger and wronger. He supposed that on some level or other he’d always known that. What he had never suspected was how long that wrong road could be.
‘Ralph!’ Bill called down. ‘Thank God! Carolyn’s having . . . well, I guess it’s some sort of seizure. I just dialed 911, asked them to send an ambulance.’
Ralph discovered he could run up the rest of the stairs, after all.
4
She was lying half in and half out of the kitchen with her hair in her face. Ralph thought there was something particularly horrible about that; it looked sloppy, and if there was one thing Carolyn refused to be, it was sloppy. He knelt beside her and brushed the hair away from her eyes and forehead. The skin beneath his fingers felt as chilly as his feet inside his soaked sneakers.
‘I wanted to put her on the couch, but she’s too heavy for me,’ Bill said nervously. He had taken off his Panama and was fiddling nervously with the band. ‘My back, you know—’
‘I know, Bill, it’s okay,’ Ralph said. He slid his arms under Carolyn and picked her up. She did not feel heavy to him at all, but light – almost as light as a milkweed pod which is ready to burst open and disgorge its filaments into the wind. ‘Thank God you were here.’
‘I almost wasn’t,’ Bill replied, following Ralph into the living room and still fiddling with his hat. He made Ralph think of old Dorrance Marstellar with his book of poems. I wouldn’t touch him anymore, if I were you, old Dorrance had said. I can’t see your hands. ‘I was on my way out when I heard a hell of a thud . . . it must have been her falling . . .’ Bill looked around the storm-darkened living room, his face somehow distraught and avid at the same time, his eyes seeming to search for something that wasn’t there. Then they brightened. ‘The door!’ he said. ‘I’ll bet it’s still open! It’ll be raining in! I’ll be right back, Ralph.’
He hurried out. Ralph barely noticed; the day had taken on the surreal aspects of a nightmare. The ticking was the worst. He could hear it in the walls, so loud now that even the thunder could not blot it out.
He put Carolyn on the couch and knelt beside her. Her respiration was fast and shallow, and her breath was terrible. Ralph did not turn away from it, however. ‘Hang in there, sweetheart,’ he said. He picked up one of her hands – it was almost as clammy as her brow had been – and kissed it gently. ‘You just hang in there. It’s fine, everything’s fine.’
But it wasn’t fine, the ticking sound meant that nothing was fine. It wasn’t in the walls, either – it had never been in the walls, but only in his wife. In Carolyn. It was in his dear one, she was slipping away from him, and what would he ever do without her?
‘You just hang on,’ he said. ‘Hang on, you hear me?’ He kissed her hand again, and held it against his cheek, and when he heard the warble of the approaching ambulance, he began to cry.
5
She came around in the ambulance as it sped across Derry (the sun was already out again, the wet streets steaming), and at first she talked such gibberish that Ralph was sure she had suffered a stroke. Then, just as she began to clear up and speak coherently, a second convulsion struck, and it took both Ralph and one of the paramedics who had answered the call to hold her down.
It wasn’t Dr Litchfield who came to see Ralph in the third-floor waiting room early that evening but Dr Jamal, the neurologist. Jamal talked to him in a low, soothing voice, telling him that Carolyn was now stabilized, that they were going to keep her overnight, just to be safe, but that she would be able to go home in the morning. There were going to be some new medications – drugs that were expensive, yes, but also quite wonderful.
‘We must not be losing the hope, Mr Roberts,’ Dr Jamal said.
‘No,’ Ralph said, ‘I suppose not. Will there be more of these, Dr Jamal?’
Dr Jamal smiled. He spoke in a quiet voice that was rendered somehow even more comforting by his soft Indian accent. And although Dr Jamal did not come right out and tell him that Carolyn was going to die, he came as close as anyone ever did during that long year in which she battled to stay alive. The new medications, Jamal said, would probably prevent any further seizures, but things had reached a stage where all predictions had to be taken ‘with the grains of salt’. The tumor was spreading in spite of everything they had tried, unfortunately.
‘The motor-control problems may show up next,’ Dr Jamal said in his comforting voice. ‘And I am seeing some deterioration in the eyesight, I am afraid.’
‘Can I spend the night with her?’ Ralph asked quietly. ‘She’ll sleep better if I do.’ He paused, then added: ‘So will I.’
‘Of gorse!’ Dr Jamal said, brightening. ‘That is a fine idea!’
‘Yes,’ Ralph said heavily. ‘I think so, too.’
6
So he sat beside his sleeping wife, and he listened to the ticking that was not in the walls, and he thought: Some day soon – maybe this fall, maybe this winter – I will be back in this room with her. It had the feel not of speculation but of prophecy, and he leaned over and put his head on the white sheet that covered his wife’s breast. He didn’t want to cry again, but did a little anyway.
That ticking. So loud and so steady.
I’d like to get hold of what’s making that sound, he thought. I’d stamp it until it was so many pieces scattered across the floor. With God as my witness I would.
He fell asleep in his chair a little after midnight, and when he woke the next morning the air was cooler than it had been in weeks, and Carolyn was wide awake, coherent, and bright-eyed. She seemed, in fact, hardly to be sick at all. Ralph took her home and began the not-inconsiderable job of making her last months as comfortable as possible. It was a long while before he thought of Ed Deepneau again; even after he began to see the bruises on Helen Deepneau’s face, it was a long time before he thought of Ed again.
As that summer became fall, and as that fall darkened down toward Carolyn’s final winter, Ralph’s thoughts were occupied more and more by the deathwatch, which seemed to tick louder and louder even as it slowed down.
But he had no trouble sleeping.
That came later.
CHAPTER TWO
1
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 fide 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.
2
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 morning, and you just cancelled 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 wreckage. Do something constructive. And if Litchfield really sticks in your craw, call somebody 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-minie-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 a while. 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 wake at his new, earlier time – but something else might.
It was worth a try, anyway.
3
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 wing-chair 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.
4
There was nothing funny about his second try, which took place the following night. Sleepiness began to steal over 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 Whoopi (although he almost nodded off during Whoopi’s conversation with Roseanne Arnold, that evening’s guest) and the late-night movie that came 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 only star 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 is 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 down 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 slipper-scuffed 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 hair – almost 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 the rows and clusters of cans with the discrimination of a jaded flea-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 invest the lifeless world below him. Finally the first human actor – Pete 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.
5
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 to 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 in 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 Cup-A-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 ’n 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 be 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.
6
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 got, because a small window is better than no window 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 further, 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 be 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?’
‘Hun?’ she asked, her voice dully 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. ‘Hun? Ral? Wha?’
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. He 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 arms, 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 . . . Nah-lie.’
‘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 long-fingered, 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 overfilled 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 wen 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?’
‘Yeff,’ 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 out 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 yesterday. Helen 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 holding 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 humble, 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.
7
‘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: avid faces lined up all the way down to the place where the beer cooler cut off the view. Some of them were cupping their hands 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 into 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-Smith 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 Helen who had helped him choose a floral centerpiece – the one which said Beloved 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 obligation 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 Eden, 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 smiled, 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 anyfing!’ 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 a Ford Ranger, hadn’t it? – and then flicking the flat of his hand across the heavyset man’s jowls. Remembering that was like opening the door of Fibber McGee’s closet in that old radio show – only what came falling out wasn’t an avalanche of old stored junk but a series of vivid images from that day last July. The thunderheads 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 on it.
Hey, hey, Susan Day, how many kids did you kill today? Ralph thought, only 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 a petition – that’s all it was. They’re circulating all over town. 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, so I 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 feminist—’
‘I know who Susan Day is,’ McGovern said irritably.
‘Anyway, a bunch of people are trying to get her here to speak. On behalf of WomanCare.’
‘When Ed came home today he was in 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 just watching the sprinkler go around . . . you know how he is . . .’
‘Yes,’ Ralph said, remembering how Ed had plunged his arm into one of the heavyset man’s barrels, and the crafty grin
(I know a trick worth two of that)
on his face. ‘Yes, I know how he is.’
‘I sent him out to get some baby food . . .’ Her voice was rising, 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 nuh-nuh-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 on the shoulder, then turned and started for the door.
‘Ralph?’ Bill McGovern asked. He sounded alarmed. ‘Where you going?’
‘Lock the door after me,’ Ralph told Sue.
‘Jeez, 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 Helen 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 paper in the S and S?’
‘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 can visit because his 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 and blurring his judgement, but that made no difference. In a way, the anger was a relief. It was better, certainly, than drifting through a world where everything had turned shades of dark gray.
‘If he beats me up bad enough, they’ll give me some Demerol and I can get a decent night’s sleep,’ he said. ‘Now leave me alone, Bill.’
He crossed the Red Apple parking lot at a brisk walk. A police car was approaching with its blue grille flashers pulsing. Questions – What happened? She okay? – were thrown at him, but Ralph ignored them. He paused on the sidewalk, waited for the police car to swing into the parking lot, then crossed Harris Avenue at that same brisk walk with McGovern trailing anxiously after him at a prudent distance.
CHAPTER THREE
1
Ed and Helen Deepneau lived in a small Cape Cod – chocolate brown, 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-vans – was 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 ones that Mother gives 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 hisha-hisha-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 anyway. ‘They’re there because you beat up your wife, is that getting through to you?’
‘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.
Ayy, Ralph! Be damn careful, you! Dis one crazy like a fox! Maybe he want you to hit im!
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. ‘Was 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 comicbook 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 keeping behind her normal cheery demeanor and sunny smile, and what 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 pickup truck. Like a rooster protecting his little piece of the barnyard.
‘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-no-no!’ 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 baby-killers! 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, Ralph, but as an employee of Hawking Laboratories. Fetal tissue is . . . more . . . valu-able . . . 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 MORE 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’ve re-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 off 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, who 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 got 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 plainclothes 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 plainclothes 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.
‘This isn’t just about abortion, don’t get that idea! Not anymore. 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 plainclothes 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 grow a small-city detective who looked as if he had never completely outgrown his Saturday Night Fever phase. Ralph was terribly afraid it 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 standing. This did not seem to upset Leydecker in the least. He turned to Officer Nell. ‘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 knobs and switches, then killed The Who halfway through the song about the blind pinball wizard.
‘I guess I did have it cranked a little.’ Ed looked sheepish. ‘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 – Gosh, what did I do? Can you help me figure it out? – faltered for a moment. The narrow, appraising look replaced it. 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.
2
‘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. Domestic abuse victims have a way of turning into clams, you know. Luckily, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other under the new 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.
‘Don’t blame you. Lousy habit, but I’m trying to quit smoking, which is an even worse one. The thing about guys like Deepneau is that they’re too goddam smart for their own good. They go over the high side, hurt someone . . . and then they pull back. If you get there soon enough after the blow-up – like you did, Ralph – you can almost see them standing there with their heads cocked, listening to the music and trying to get back on the beat.’
‘That’s just how it was,’ Ralph said. ‘Exactly how it was.’
‘It’s a trick the bright ones manage for quite awhile – they appear remorseful, appalled by their own actions, determined to make amends. They’re persuasive, they’re charming, and it’s often all but impossible to see that underneath the sugar coating they’re as nutty as Christmas fruitcakes. Even extreme cases like Ted Bundy sometimes manage to look normal for years. The good news is that there aren’t many guys like Ted Bundy out there, in spite of all the psycho-killer books and movies.’
Ralph sighed deeply. ‘What a mess.’
‘Yeah. But look on the bright side: we’re gonna be able to keep him away from her, at least for a while. He’ll be out by suppertime on twenty-five dollars bail, but—’
‘Twenty-five dollars?’ McGovern asked. He sounded simultaneously shocked and cynical. ‘That’s all?’
‘Yup,’ 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.’
‘Still, there’s a nifty new wrinkle in the law,’ Chris Nell said, 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 court – he can’t come to the house, approach her on the street, or 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.’
3
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.
4
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 family-abuse 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 want to talk about my own situation until I’d had a chance to think 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 listen to her line of bullshit just because her husband had cut her once. I 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 PO’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 . . . he 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 shelter for 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 underwear. 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 voice 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 about 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 vivid, arose in his mind: Ralph Roberts dressed in armor and 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 he thought he might go downstairs, sit on the porch, watch the sun go down, and let later take care of itself.
5
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 doors 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 doubletake. ‘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 López, 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’d 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 Cardville, 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 it for years, but Bill had never spoken of it out loud until this evening. Ralph wished he could have saved it for another day . . . preferably one when Ralph himself wasn’t feeling as if most of his brains had been replaced with goosedown.
‘That was about a thousand years ago,’ McGovern said. ‘Who’d’ve thought we’d both wash up on the shores of Harris Avenue.’
‘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 is certainly no job for sissies, is it?’
‘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 in 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.
‘I can remember when they just brought May oxygen once every two weeks or so,’ McGovern said. ‘Now they come every Monday and Thursday evening, like clock-work. I go over and see her when I can. Sometimes I read to her – the most boring women’s magazine bullshit you can imagine – 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 the end.’
‘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 Perrault 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 north-eastern 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 a while, 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-doin 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. ‘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 either 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, perfectly 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 safely 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.
6
Ralph fell asleep that night bare instants after his head hit the pillow, and came wide awake again at 3:30 a.m. on Friday morning. He 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. He 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 FOUR
1
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 was 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 shows – Oprah 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 assigned – working 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 he 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 non-contact 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 onto 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 PS she had crammed in at the bottom of the sheet and up the right-hand margin:
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. How 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 lot,’ he said, wiping at the corners of his eyes again. ‘A damn lot, 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.
2
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 – the day when Ed Deepneau was arrested again, this time along with fifteen others – Ralph’s average night’s sleep had shrunk to roughly three hours and he had begun to feel quite a little bit like something on a slide under a microscope. Just a lonely l’il protozoa, that’s me, he thought as he sat in the wing-back chair, staring out at Harris Avenue, and wished he could laugh.
His list of sure-fire, never-miss folk remedies continued to grow, and it had occurred to him more than once that he could write an amusing little book on the subject . . . if, that was, he ever got enough sleep to make organized thinking possible again. This late summer he was doing well to slide into matching socks each day, and his mind kept returning to his purgatorial efforts to find a Cup-A-Soup in the kitchen cabinet on the day Helen had been beaten. There had been no return to that level since, because he had managed at least some sleep every night, but Ralph was terribly afraid he would arrive there again – and perhaps places beyond there – if things didn’t improve. There were times (usually sitting in the wing-back chair at four-thirty in the morning) when he swore he could actually feel his brains draining.
The remedies ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. The best example of the former was a full-color brochure advertising the wonders of the Minnesota Institute for Sleep Studies in St Paul. A fair example of the latter was the Magic Eye, an all-purpose amulet sold through supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer and Inside View. Sue, the counter-girl at the Red Apple, bought one of these and presented it to him one afternoon. Ralph looked down at the badly painted blue eye staring up at him from the medallion (which he believed had probably started life as a poker-chip) and felt wild laughter bubbling up inside him. He somehow managed to suppress it until he had regained the safety of his own upstairs apartment across the street, and for that he was very grateful. The gravity with which Sue had given it to him – and the expensive-looking gold 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 suffuse 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 only wished he had discovered it earlier.
He tried putting his feet in warm water. Lois bought him something called an All-Purpose Gel Wrap from a catalogue – you put it around your neck and it was supposed to take care of your arthritis 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 camomile 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 honeycomb and the camomile 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 Carolyn’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 newt’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 jail – 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 in a forties crime drama. Ralph wondered if the Panama was still lost or had merely been retired for the fall. ‘Today he’s once more cooling his heels in our picturesque city jail.’
‘What exactly happened?’
But neither of them really knew. At that point the story was little more than a rumor which had spread through the park like a contagious headcold, a rumor which was of particular interest in this part of town because Ed Deepneau’s name was attached to it. Marie Callan had told Lois that there had been rock-throwing involved, 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 demonstrators during the seven years that WomanCare had been providing abortions on demand.
The two versions of the story were so vague and conflicting that Ralph felt he could reasonably hope neither was true, that perhaps it was just a case of a few overenthusiastic people who’d been arrested for trespassing, or something. In places like Derry, that kind 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-GO). No, he had an idea that if Ed had been there, it had probably not been just a case of someone accidentally bonked 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 wearily, 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 déjà 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 g—
‘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 that—
Ralph’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-to-dance 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 logic. Still, it was scary. His heart was beating too fast, and when he closed his eyes for a moment to try and calm down, he saw those marks trailing up from Lois’s waving fingers like bright blue jet contrails.
I’ve got to get more sleep, Ralph thought. I’ve got to. If I don’t, 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.’
3
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 camomile tea, I’ll probably snap and it’ll take both nurses and the receptionist to pull me off him.
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’s time to quit fucking around and go to the doctor.
But on the heels of this 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 the same time his hand stole out, seemingly of its own volition, and took a box of Sleepinex from the shelf. He turned it over, held it slightly away from his eyes so he could read the small print on the 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.
‘Now,’ Wyzer said, dusting off his hands and turning to Ralph with a friendly grin, ‘let’s start over. Can I help you? You look a 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 that lean and 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.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Going on half a year. It seems longer. A lot longer, actually.’
‘Any noticeable pattern? There usually is. I mean, do you toss and turn before you go to sleep, or—’
‘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 I? 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 most of this crap off the back of a big red wagon with fancy yellow 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 a dance in a sequined bra and a pair of harem pants . . . 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.’
‘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 be, 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 not, if you can’t, why are you going to see him in the 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 kooky – 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. ABSOLUT-LY 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, Relax, Ralph, we’re getting a whole 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 dreams 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 short-term 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 an 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 FIVE
1
‘Think of it this way,’ Wyzer recommenced five minutes later. They were in a New Age-y sort of diner called Day Break, Sun Down. The place was a little too ferny for Ralph, who believed in old-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 hot and strong.
‘Which way is that?’ Ralph asked.
‘There are certain things mankind – womankind, too – keeps 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 fundamentals here. A roof to keep the rain out. Three hots and a cot. A decent sex-life. Healthy bowels. But maybe the most fundamental thing of all is what you’ve been missing, my friend. Because there’s 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 hang 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 more importantly, lucid dreams, you’re still having good sleep. And because of that, a scrip 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 movements, 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 “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 that 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—’
‘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.’
‘All right. These lucid and coherent dreams – do they just indicate how well you’re functioning, like a gas gauge in a car, or do they 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 sleep we’ve been beating our gums about and dreams aren’t related.’
‘And?’
‘The tests don’t support the hypothesis. People who stop dreaming or 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 AGREES TO 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 I 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?’
‘Sure, you bet. But listen, Joe – if the folk remedies don’t work and the stuff in Aisle 3 doesn’t work and the prescription drugs 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.
‘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 there. 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 up and get out of here.’ He produced a quarter. ‘Flip you for the check?’
2
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 indignantly,‘but look at 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.
3
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 Hong, 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 (or 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 Friday night?’
‘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.
‘Day or night,’ 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.
4
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 declared 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, crosshatching 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 hyper-reality, 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 is marvellous – 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 read-out. 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 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 fin 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 bore, but—
But 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, Ralph, 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, hon.’
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 bands, 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 importantly, 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 pull-ing!’ 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 standing – hunching – 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 ’n 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.
5
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 wall – just visible between photos of a man in a raccoon coat and a woman who looked as if vo-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 the 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 long, 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 Baby-Killer” – 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 Ms 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 Kmart,’ 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 injected 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 Warper 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 cop-shop 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?
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 Rivers 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 power-structure 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 Warper, 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 thought. Be careful and be afraid. You’re standing next to a very dangerous man.
Then the flash was gone and the man in the tweed coat was once more just an earnest young fellow who had followed his conscience to jail. 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 pro-abortion 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?’ she 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 Ms 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.
6
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 allegations 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 long – Christmas 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 domestic abuse 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 was—
Who’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 Deepneau. 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 babies everyplace, even on the roofs. He said—
Ralph 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 come.
‘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 rooster-red 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.
7
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 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 SIX
1
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 shut 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 fist-shaking 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, a job! 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.
2
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 admiring 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 Play-Doh 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 mean—
Stop 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 per cent 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 dreamed of such a phrase before that day, but it came sliding out of his mouth 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 blue jeans 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 guess 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 bitta 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 on’y 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 ’n 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 direction, 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 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’s doesn’t have the slightest idea of who I am, but that doesn’t matter, because I know who he is. You capisce?’
‘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.’
3
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 over 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-boys-just-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, STOP THE SLAUGHTER 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 mêlée 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 grand fromage. 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 caveman’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.
4
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 banister. 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.’
5
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 & 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.’
‘Blig!’ 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 her – they 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-eye-contact 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 actually 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 bell 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 washing-machine 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, too, but—
He 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?’
‘About 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. One – this is a real honey – is 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:
BODYGUARD
‘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 PD’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 you 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-GO. 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 arms. ‘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.
6
After he had seen the women off (I’M PRO-CHOICE, 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 afraid.
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?
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 SEVEN
1
When Ralph came walking up Harris Avenue to his apartment on October 2nd, with a couple of recycled Elmer Kelton Westerns from Back Pages in one hand, he saw that someone was sitting on the porch 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 oldtimers 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. None the less, 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.
‘Hello,’ 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 longtime 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 & 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,“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’t-be-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 waved 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.
2
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 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 pin-sticker 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. Anyway, it’s too late now.
‘Done-bun-can’t-be-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 he going 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’t-be-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. Dorrance 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 pass –
a 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,
jokes 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.
3
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 Old 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 he 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, MD. 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 deprivation . . . causes disorganization of the waking personality . . .
Boy, you got that right, my friend, Ralph thought. Can’t even find a fucking Cup-A-Soup packet when you want one.
. . . early dream-deprivation studies also raised the exciting speculation that schizophrenia might be 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 Pavilion (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. Younger subjects show an earlier onset of disturbance and more physical reactions, while older subjects—
A 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.’
4
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 breath – the 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 Dalton 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 sign-waving, 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 righthand 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. What’s under the point of the blade right now? he wondered. Liver? Gall bladder? What’s under there on the lefthand 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 knife – a 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 just talk. He’s not quite ready to do it yet, he hasn’t quite worked himself up 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 knifepoint gouging into him was maddening – like the stinger of a gigantic bee.
Or a pin, Ralph 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. ‘Jeepers, 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 air-freshener 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 low-top 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!’ 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 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.’
5
‘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 Hanlon’s office. A strip of yellow tape, marked EVIDENCE Aerosol can DATE 3 October 93 and SITE 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 semi-deadly 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 EMT 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 those,’ Leydecker said. ‘Those 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 feel 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 over-qualified 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.’
6
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.
7
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 hobbyhorse is abortion. Back in the late sixties he had a bug up his ass about Margaret Chase Smith. He wrote letters to everyone – Derry PD, 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 eyes – how 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 wife-beating buddy has got about a ton of deniability.’
Leydecker turned into the driveway next to Ralph’s building and parked behind a large Oldsmobile with blotches of rust on the trunk lid 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. Buy 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 – he’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 punching-bag.’
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.’
8
Ralph was extremely happy to find the porch 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, 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 this jacket up.
Ralph crossed the room, 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 righthand 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 over 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 righthand 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’t-be-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 zig-zagged 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 EMT 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 EIGHT
1
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 Pallas just 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 can just 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 back-washed 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 hitting 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 . . . hunting him and 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 fell on 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 almost 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 the 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 Panama 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 turned 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! The—
A 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 were 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 check 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! Car—
2
‘– olyn! 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 dream – surely 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? White-man 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 EMT 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 Sleepytime – 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 doc-operas – 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 pain-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 behaviour – 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 wingback 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. Sleepytime slopped onto the TV Guide there. ‘Fuck you, this is no dream!’
3
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 out hot 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 stood on 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&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 Look 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&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 heel-less evening pump to the floor in the process), and saw what he wanted in the far lefthand 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. He 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 face-first 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 chez 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 was—
Ed 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-past-midnight 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 blue-collar 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 have 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 he 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 #1’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.
4
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 ice-cream 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.
5
‘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 a while. 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-and-pink 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. It—
No, 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, sleep-starved 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 #1’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 hyperreality – 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 righthand 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 tail-lights 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. Knoll? 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 bedpan—
Chris 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 with a clear plastic oxygen mask over her mouth and nose lying in bed. 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 lying 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 Cardville 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-or-Jess 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 conflicting 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.
6
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 waists, 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 network along this little stretch of Harris Avenue was already beginning to operate. Most of the people Ralph saw were old (‘We golden-agers’, 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’d fit 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 sound – some 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 was 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 make up for one moment of that terrible dream in which he had 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 NINE
1
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 day 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 DA’s office and saying nothing. His promise to buy Ralph a cup of coffee turned out to be mostly a figure of speech – the evil-looking brew had come from the Silex in the corner of the cluttered second-floor Police Department 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 eye 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 may 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. ‘“. . . to maintain a strong presence and high visibility”.’
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 St 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 war-chest to combat the pro-life grinches. The only problem is, the grinches never had a chance 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-choicers – one 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-Sacred-Twat-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 grassroots 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 ADA who questioned you – and Pickering’s 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 anyone’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 per cent if the rest can be secured in event of flight, but Charlie Pickering doesn’t have a house, a car, or even a Timex 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 a while 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 righthand 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, well-spoken, 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 trenchcoat. 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 PD. 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 went 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 death – especially 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 you 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 off-kilter on the street, why would you make the call anonymously?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said, and thought, But suppose it was 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 OIC – officer in charge. He’s a good man.’
The guy in 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 save 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.
2
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, damn it, 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 why 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 walk back to Eden, sweetheart . . . and watch out for 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 TEN
1
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 if 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 US 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.
2
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, none the less 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 or jealousy.
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 ‘seeing’ these things came mostly from his lifelong acceptance of 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-and-pepper eyebrows. The aura which surrounded her was the firm, no-nonsense 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. Lollygagging 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 old-man 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 eight-thirty. 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.
3
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 just 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. Ralph assumed 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 stepping-stones 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-baby, 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,’ 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 Cardville. She’ll be buried in Cardville, I imagine.’ 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.’
‘Nope.’ 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 Cardville 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-old-Bill 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 impugned your discretion.’
McGovern smiled, 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 pavement 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, hon, 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 tall. 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 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 jump-rope 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.
4
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 were 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 God’s name can they be sure she wasn’t scared into a heart attack?’
‘I don’t know if they can be a hundred per cent 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 coming out 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 walk.’ A 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!’
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! I 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 playing; picking it out in nursery-school plinks 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 head – was 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 see the old children marching around the chairs, trying not to see 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.
PART 2
THE SECRET CITY
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1
The Derry of the Old Crocks was not the only secret city existing quietly within the place Ralph Roberts had always thought of as home; as a boy growing up in Mary Mead, where the various Old Cape housing developments stood today, Ralph had discovered there was, in addition to the Derry that belonged to the grownups, one that belonged strictly to the children. There were the abandoned hobo jungles near the railroad depot on Neibolt Street, where one could sometimes find tomato soup cans half-full of mulligatawny stew and bottles with a swallow or two of beer left in them; there was the alley behind the Aladdin Theater, where Bull Durham cigarettes were smoked and Black Cat firecrackers sometimes set off; there was the big old elm which overhung the river, where scores of boys and girls had learned to dive; there were the hundred (or perhaps it was closer to two hundred) tangled trails winding through the Barrens, an overgrown valley which slashed through the center of town like a badly healed scar.
These secret streets and highways in hiding were all below the adult plane of vision and were consequently overlooked by them . . . although there had been exceptions. One of them had been a cop named Aloysius Nell – Mr Nell to generations of Derry children – and it was only now, as he walked up toward the picnic area near the place where Harris Avenue became the Harris Avenue Extension, that it occurred to Ralph that Chris Nell was probably old Mr Nell’s son . . . except that couldn’t be quite right, because the cop Ralph had first seen in the company of John Leydecker wasn’t old enough to be old Mr Nell’s son. Grandson, more like it.
Ralph had become aware of a second secret city – one that belonged to the old folks – around the time he retired, but he hadn’t fully realized that he himself was a citizen of it until after Carol’s death. What he had discovered then was a submerged geography eerily similar to the one he had known as a child, a place largely ignored by the hurry-to-work, hurry-to-play world which thumped and hustled all around it. The Derry of the Old Crocks overlapped yet a third secret city: the Derry of the Damned, a terrible place inhabited mostly by winos, runaways, and lunatics who could not be kept locked up.
It was in the picnic area that Lafayette Chapin had introduced Ralph to one of life’s most important considerations . . . once you’d become a bona fide Old Crock, that was. This consideration had to do with one’s ‘real life’. The subject had come up while the two men were just getting to know one another. Ralph had asked Faye what he had done before he started coming out to the picnic area.
‘Well, in my real life I was a carpenter n fancy cabinetmaker,’ Chapin had replied, exposing his remaining teeth in a wide grin, ‘but all that ended almost ten year ago.’ As if, Ralph remembered thinking, retirement was something like a vampire’s kiss, pulling those who survived it into the world of the undead. And when you got right down to cases, was that really so far off the mark?
2
Now, with McGovern safely behind him (at least he hoped so), Ralph stepped through the screen of mixed oak and maple which shielded the picnic area from the Extension. He saw that eight or nine people had drifted in since his earlier walk, most with bag lunches or Coffee Pot sand-wiches. The Eberlys and Zells were playing hearts with the greasy deck of Top Hole cards which was kept stashed in a knothole of a nearby oak; Faye and Doc Mulhare, a retired vet, were playing chess; a couple of kibbitzers wandered back and forth between the two games.
Games were what the picnic area was about – what most of the places in the Derry of the Old Crocks were about – but Ralph thought the games were really just framework. What people actually came here for was to touch base, to report in, to confirm (if only to themselves) that they were still living some kind of life, real or otherwise.
Ralph sat on an empty bench near the Cyclone fence and traced one finger absently over the engraved carvings – names, initials, lots of FUCKS YOUS – as he watched planes land at orderly two-minute intervals: a Cessna, a Piper, an Apache, a Twin Bonanza, the eleven forty-five Air Express out of Boston. He kept one ear cocked to the ebb and flow of conversation behind him. May Locher’s name was mentioned more than once. She had been known by several of these people, and the general opinion seemed to be Mrs Perrine’s – that God had finally shown mercy and ended her suffering. Most of the talk today, however, concerned the impending visit of Susan Day. As a rule, politics wasn’t much of a conversational draw with the Old Crocks, who preferred a good bowel cancer or stroke any day, but even out here the abortion issue exercised its singular ability to engage, inflame, and divide.
‘She picked a bad town to come to, and the hell of it is, I doubt she knows it,’ Doc Mulhare said, watching the chessboard with glum concentration as Faye Chapin blitzkrieged his king’s remaining defenders. ‘Things have a way of happening here. Remember the fire at the Black Spot, Faye?’
Faye grunted and captured the doc’s remaining bishop.
‘What I don’t understand is these cootie-bugs,’ Lisa Zell said, picking up the front section of the News from the picnic table and slapping the photograph of the hooded figures marching in front of WomanCare. ‘It’s like they want to go back to the days when women gave themselves abortions with coathangers.’
‘That’s what they do want,’ Georgina Eberly said. ‘They figure if a woman’s scared enough of dying, she’ll have the baby. It never seems to cross their minds that a woman can be more scared of having a kid than using a coathanger to get rid of it.’
‘What does bein afraid have to do with it?’ one of the kibbitzers – a shovel-faced oldster named Pedersen – asked truculently. ‘Murder is murder whether the baby’s inside or outside, that’s the way I look at it. Even when they’re so small you need a microscope to see em, it’s still murder. Because they’d be kids if you let em alone.’
‘I guess that just about makes you Adolf Eichmann every time you jerk off,’ Faye said, and moved his queen. ‘Check.’
‘La-fay-ette Cha-pin!’ Lisa Zell cried.
‘Playin with yourself ain’t the same at all,’ Pedersen said, glowering.
‘Oh no? Wasn’t there some guy in the Bible got cursed by God for hammerin the old haddock?’ the other kibbitzer asked.
‘You’re probably thinking of Onan,’ said a voice from behind Ralph. He turned, startled, and saw Old Dor standing there. In one hand he held a paperback with a large number 5 on the cover. Where the hell did you come from? Ralph wondered. He could almost have sworn there had been no one standing behind him a minute or so before.
‘Onan, Shmonan,’ Pedersen said. ‘Those sperms aren’t the same as a baby—’
‘No?’ Faye asked. ‘Then why ain’t the Catholic Church sellin rubbers at Bingo games? Tell me that.’
‘That’s just ignorant,’ Pedersen said. ‘And if you don’t see—’
‘But it wasn’t masturbation Onan was punished for,’ Dorrance said in his high, penetrating old man’s voice. ‘He was punished for refusing to impregnate his brother’s widow, so his brother’s line could continue. There’s a poem, by Allen Ginsberg, I think—’
‘Shut up, you old fool!’ Pedersen yelled, and then glowered at Faye Chapin. ‘And if you don’t see that there’s a big difference between a man beating his meat and a woman flushing the baby God put in her belly down the toilet, you’re as big a fool as he is.’
‘This is a disgusting conversation,’ Lisa Zell said, sounding more fascinated than disgusted. Ralph looked over her shoulder and saw a section of chainlink fencing had been torn loose from its post and bent backward, probably by the kids who took this place over at night. That solved one mystery, anyway. He hadn’t noticed Dorrance because the old man hadn’t been in the picnic area at all; he’d been wandering around the airport grounds.
It occurred to Ralph that this was his chance to grab Dorrance and maybe get some answers out of him . . . except that Ralph would likely end up more confused than ever. Old Dor was too much like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland – more smile than substance.
‘Big difference, huh?’ Faye was asking Pedersen.
‘Yeah!’ Red patches glowered in Pedersen’s chapped cheeks.
Doc Mulhare shifted uneasily on his seat. ‘Look, let’s just forget it and finish the game, Faye, all right?’
Faye took no notice; his attention was still fixed on Pedersen. ‘Maybe you ought to think again about all the little spermies that died in the palm of your hand every time you sat on the toilet seat thinkin about how nice it’d be to have Marilyn Monroe cop your—’
Pedersen reached out and slapped the remaining chess-pieces off the board. Doc Mulhare winced backward, mouth trembling, eyes wide and frightened behind pink-rimmed glasses which had been mended in two places with electrical tape.
‘Yeah, good!’ Faye shouted. ‘That’s a very reasonable fuckin argument, you geek!’
Pedersen raised his fists in an exaggerated John L. Sullivan pose. ‘Want to do somethin about it?’ he asked. ‘Come on, let’s go!’
Faye got slowly to his feet. He stood easily a foot taller than the shovel-faced Pedersen and outweighed him by at least sixty pounds.
Ralph could hardly believe what he was seeing. And if the poison had seeped this far, what about the rest of the city? It seemed to him that Doc Mulhare was right; Susan Day must not have the slightest idea of how bad an idea bringing her act to Derry really was. In some ways – in a lot of ways, actually – Derry wasn’t like other places.
He was moving before he was consciously aware of what he meant to do, and he was relieved to see Stan Eberly doing the same thing. They exchanged a glance as they approached the two men standing nose to nose, and Stan nodded slightly. Ralph slipped an arm around Faye’s shoulders a bare second before Stan gripped Pedersen’s upper left arm.
‘You ain’t doing none of that,’ Stan said, speaking directly into one of Pedersen’s tufted ears. ‘We’ll end up taking the both of you over to Derry Home with heart attacks, and you don’t need another one of those, Harley – you had two already. Or is it three?’
‘I ain’t letting him make jokes about wimmin murderin babies!’ Pedersen said, and Ralph saw there were tears rolling down the man’s cheeks. ‘My wife died havin our second daughter! Sepsis carried her off back in ’46! So I ain’t havin that talk about murderin babies!’
‘Christ,’ Faye said in a different voice. ‘I didn’t know that, Harley. I’m sorry—’
‘Ah, frig your sorry!’ Pedersen cried, and ripped his arm out of Stan Eberly’s grip. He lunged toward Faye, who raised his fists and then lowered them again as Pedersen went blundering past without looking at him. He took the path through the trees which led back out to the Extension and was gone. What followed his departure was thirty seconds of pure shocked silence, broken only by the wasp-whine of an incoming Piper Cub.
3
‘Jesus,’ Faye said at last. ‘You see a guy every few days over five, ten years, and you start to think you know everything. Christ, Ralphie, I didn’t know how his wife died. I feel like a fool.’
‘Don’t let it get you down,’ Stan said. ‘He’s prob’ly just havin his monthlies.’
‘Shut up,’ Georgina said. ‘We’ve had enough dirty talk for one morning.’
‘I’ll be glad when that Day woman comes n goes n things can get back to normal,’ Fred Zell said.
Doc Mulhare was down on his hands and knees, collecting chess-pieces. ‘Do you want to finish, Faye?’ he asked. ‘I think I remember where they all were.’
‘No,’ Faye said. His voice, which had remained steady during the confrontation with Pedersen, now sounded trembly. ‘Think I’ve had enough for awhile. Maybe Ralph’ll give you a little tourney prelim.’
‘Think I’m going to pass,’ Ralph said. He was looking around for Dorrance, and at last spotted him. He had gone back through the hole in the fence. He was standing in knee-high grass at the edge of the service road over there, bending his book back and forth in his hands as he watched the Piper Cub taxi toward the General Aviation terminal. Ralph found himself remembering how Ed had come tearing along that service road in his old brown Datsun, and how he had sworn
(Hurry up! Hurry up and lick shit! )
at the slowness of the gate. For the first time in over a year he found himself wondering what Ed had been doing in there to begin with.
‘– than you did.’
‘Huh?’ He made an effort and focused on Faye again.
‘I said you must be sleepin again, because you look a hell of a lot better than you did. But now your hearin’s goin to hell, I guess.’
‘I guess so,’ Ralph said, and tried a little smile. ‘Think I’ll go grab myself a little lunch. You want to come, Faye? My treat.’
‘Nah, I already had a Coffee Pot,’ Faye said. ‘It’s sittin in my gut like a piece of lead right now, to tell you the truth. Cheez, Ralph, the old fart was crying, did you see that?’
‘Yes, but I wouldn’t make it into a big deal if I were you,’ Ralph said. He started walking toward the Extension, and Faye ambled along beside him. With his broad shoulders slumped and his head lowered, Faye looked quite a lot like a trained bear in a man-suit. ‘Guys our age cry over just about anything. You know that.’
‘I spose.’ He gave Ralph a grateful smile. ‘Anyway, thanks for stoppin me before I could make it worse. You know how I am, sometimes.’
I only wish someone had been there when Bill and I got into it, Ralph thought. Out loud he said, ‘No problem. It’s me that should be thanking you, actually. It’s something else to put on my résumé when I apply for that high-paying job at the UN.’
Faye laughed, delighted, and clapped Ralph on the shoulder. ‘Yeah, Secretary-General! Peacemaker Number One! You could do it, Ralph, no shit!’
‘No question about it. Take care of yourself, Faye.’
He started to turn away and Faye touched his arm. ‘You’re still up for the tournament next week, aren’t you? The Runway 3 Classic?’
It took a moment for Ralph to figure out what he was talking about, although it had been the retired carpenter’s main topic of conversation ever since the leaves had begun to show color. Faye had been putting on the chess tournament he called The Runway 3 Classic ever since the end of his ‘real life’ in 1984. The trophy was an oversized chrome hubcap with a fancy crown and scepter engraved on it. Faye, easily the best player among the Old Crocks (on the west side of town, at least), had awarded the trophy to himself on six of the nine occasions it had been given out, and Ralph had a suspicion that he had gone in the tank the other three times, just to keep the rest of the tourney participants interested. Ralph hadn’t thought much about chess this fall; he’d had other things on his mind.
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I guess I’ll be playing.’
Faye grinned. ‘Good. We should have had it last weekend – that was the schedule – but I was hopin that if I put it off, Jimmy V would be able to play. He’s still in the hospital, though, and if I put it off much longer it’ll be too cold to play outdoor and we’ll end up in the back of Duffy Sprague’s barber shop, like we did in ’90.’
‘What’s wrong with Jimmy V?’
‘Cancer come back on him again,’ Faye said, then added in a lower tone: ‘I don’t think he’s got a snowball’s chance in hell of beatin it this time.’
Ralph felt a sudden and surprisingly sharp pang of sorrow at this news. He and Jimmy Vandermeer had known each other well during their own ‘real lives’. Both had been on the road back then, Jimmy in candy and greeting cards, Ralph in printing supplies and paper products, and the two of them had gotten on well enough to team up on several New England tours, splitting the driving and sharing rather more luxurious accommodations than either could have afforded alone.
They had also shared the lonely, unremarkable secrets of travelling men. Jimmy told Ralph about the whore who’d stolen his wallet in 1958, and how he’d lied to his wife about it, telling her that a hitchhiker had robbed him. Ralph told Jimmy about his realization, at the age of forty-three, that he had become a terpin hydrate junkie, and about his painful, ultimately successful struggle to kick the habit. He had no more told Carolyn about his bizarre cough-syrup addiction than Jimmy V had told his wife about his last B-girl.
A lot of trips; a lot of changed tires; a lot of jokes about the travelling salesman and the farmer’s beautiful daughter; a lot of late-night talks which had gone on until the small hours of the morning. Sometimes it was God they had talked about, sometimes the IRS. All in all, Jimmy Vandermeer had been a damned good pal. Then Ralph had gotten his desk-job with the printing company and fallen out of touch with Jimmy. He’d only begun to reconnect out here, and at a few of the other dim landmarks which dotted the Derry of the Old Crocks – the library, the pool-hall, the back room of Duffy Sprague’s barber shop, four or five others. When Jimmy told him shortly after Carolyn’s death that he had come through a bout with cancer a lung shy but otherwise okay, what Ralph had remembered was the man talking baseball or fishing as he fed smoldering Camel stubs into the slipstream rushing by the wing-window of the car, one after another.
I got lucky was what he had said. Me and the Duke, we both got lucky. Except neither of them had stayed lucky, it seemed. Not that anyone did, in the end.
‘Oh, man,’ Ralph said. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘He’s been in Derry Home almost three weeks now,’ Faye said. ‘Havin those radiation treatments and gettin injects of poison that’s supposed to kill the cancer while it’s half killing you. I’m surprised you didn’t know, Ralph.’
I suppose you are, but I’m not. The insomnia keeps swallowing stuff, you see. One day it’s the last Cup-A-Soup envelope you lose track of; next day it’s your sense of time; the day after that it’s your old friends.
Faye shook his head. ‘Fucking cancer. It’s spooky, how it waits.’
Ralph nodded, now thinking of Carolyn. ‘What room’s Jimmy in, do you know? Maybe I’ll go visit him.’
‘Just so happens I do. 315. Think you can remember it?’
Ralph grinned. ‘For awhile, anyway.’
‘Go see him if you can, sure – they got him pretty doped up, but he still knows who comes in, and I bet he’d love to see you. Him and you had a lot of high old times together, he told me once.’
‘Well, you know,’ Ralph said. ‘Couple of guys on the road, that’s all. If we flipped for the check in some diner, Jimmy V always called tails.’ Suddenly he felt like crying.
‘Lousy, isn’t it?’ Faye said quietly.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you go see him. He’ll be glad, and you’ll feel better. That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. And don’t you go and forget the damn chess tournament!’ Faye finished, straightening up and making a heroic effort to look and sound cheerful. ‘If you step out now you’ll fuck up the seedings.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Yeah, I know you will.’ He made a fist and punched Ralph’s upper arm lightly. ‘And thanks again for stopping me before I could do something I’d, you know, feel bad about later.’
‘Sure. Peacemaker Number One, that’s me.’ Ralph started down the path which led to the Extension, then turned back. ‘You see that service road over there? The one that goes from General Aviation out to the street?’ He pointed. A catering truck was currently driving away from the private terminal, its windshield reflecting bright darts of sunlight into their eyes. The truck stopped just short of the gate, breaking the electric-eye beam. The gate began to trundle open.
‘Sure I do,’ Faye said.
‘Last summer I saw Ed Deepneau using that road, which means he had a key-card to the gate. Any idea how he would have come by a thing like that?’
‘You mean The Friends of Life guy? Lab scientist who did a little research in wife-beating last summer?’
Ralph nodded. ‘But it’s the summer of ’92 I’m talking about. He was driving an old brown Datsun.’
Faye laughed. ‘I wouldn’t know a Datsun from a Toyota from a Honda, Ralph – I stopped bein able to tell cars apart around the time Chevrolet gave up the gullwing tailfins. But I can tell you who mostly uses that road: caterers, mechanics, pilots, crew, and flight controllers. Some passengers have key-cards, I think, if they fly private a lot. The only scientists over there are the ones who work at the air-testing station. Is that the kind of scientist he is?’
‘Nope, a chemist. He worked at Hawking Labs until just a little while ago.’
‘Played with the white rats, did he? Well there aren’t any rats over at the airport – that I know of, anyway – but now that I think of it, there is one other bunch of people who use that gate.’
‘Oh? Who?’
Faye pointed at a prefab building with a corrugated roof standing about seventy yards from the General Aviation terminal. ‘See that building? That’s SoloTech.’
‘What’s SoloTech?’
‘A school,’ Faye said. ‘They teach people to fly.’
4
Ralph walked back down Harris Avenue with his big hands stuffed into his pockets and his head lowered so he did not see much more than the cracks in the sidewalk passing beneath his sneakers. His mind was fixed on Ed Deepneau again . . . and on SoloTech. He had no way of knowing if SoloTech was the reason Ed had been out at the airport on the day he had run into Mr West Side Gardeners, but all of a sudden that was a question to which Ralph very much wanted an answer. He was also curious as to just where Ed was living these days. He wondered if John Leydecker might share his curiosity on these two points, and decided to find out.
He was passing the unpretentious double storefront which housed George Lyford, CPA, on one side and Maritime Jewelry (WE BUY YOUR OLD GOLD AT TOP PRICES) on the other, when he was pulled out of his thoughts by a short, strangled bark. He looked up and saw Rosalie sitting on the sidewalk just outside the upper entrance to Strawford Park. The old dog was panting rapidly; saliva drizzled off her lolling tongue, building up a dark puddle on the concrete between her paws. Her fur was stuck together in dark clumps, as if she had been running, and the faded blue bandanna around her neck seemed to shiver with her rapid respiration. As Ralph looked at her, she gave another bark, this one closer to a yelp.
He glanced across the street to see what she was barking at and saw nothing but the Buffy-Buffy Laundromat. There were a few women moving around inside, but Ralph found it impossible to believe Rosalie was barking at them. No one at all was currently passing on the sidewalk in front of the coin-op laundry.
Ralph looked back and suddenly realized that Rosalie wasn’t just sitting on the sidewalk but crouching there . . . cowering there. She looked scared almost to death.
Until that moment, Ralph had never thought much about how eerily human the expressions and body language of dogs were: they grinned when they were happy, hung their heads when they were ashamed, registered anxiety in their eyes and tension in the set of their shoulders – all things that people did. And, like people, they registered abject, total fear in every quivering line of the body.
He looked across the street again, at the spot where Rosalie’s attention seemed focused, and once again saw nothing but the laundry and the empty sidewalk in front of it. Then, suddenly, he remembered Natalie, the Exalted & Revered Baby, snatching at the gray-blue contrails his fingers left behind as he reached out with them to wipe the milk from her chin. To anyone else she would have looked as if she were grabbing at nothing, the way babies always appeared to be grabbing at nothing . . . but Ralph had known better.
He had seen better.
Rosalie uttered a string of panicky yelps that grated on Ralph’s ear like the sound of unoiled hinges.
So far it’s only happened on its own . . . but maybe I can make it happen. Maybe I can make myself see—
See what?
Well, the auras. Them, of course. And maybe whatever Rosalie
(three-six-nine hon)
was looking at, as well. Ralph already had a pretty good idea
(the goose drank wine)
of what it was, but he wanted to be sure. The question was how to do it.
How does a person see in the first place?
By looking, of course.
Ralph looked at Rosalie. Looked at her carefully, trying to see everything there was to see: the faded pattern on the blue bandanna which served as her collar, the dusty clumps and tangles in her uncared-for coat, the sprinkle of gray around her long muzzle. After a few moments of this she seemed to feel his gaze, for she turned, looked at him, and whined uneasily.
As she did, Ralph felt something turn over in his mind – it felt like the starter-motor of a car. There was a brief but very clear sense of being suddenly lighter, and then brightness flooded into the day. He had found his way back into that more vivid, more deeply textured world. He saw a murky membrane – it made him think of spoiled eggwhite – swim into existence around Rosalie, and saw a dark gray balloon-string rising from her. Its point of origin wasn’t the skull, however, as had been the case in all the people Ralph had seen while in this heightened state of awareness; Rosalie’s balloon-string rose from her muzzle.
Now you know the most essential difference between dogs and men, he thought. Their souls reside in different places.
[Doggy! Here, doggy, c’mere!]
Ralph winced and drew back from that voice, which was like chalk squeaking on a blackboard. The heels of his palms rose most of the way to his ears before he realized that wouldn’t help; he wasn’t really hearing it with his ears, and the part that the voice hurt the worst was deep inside his head, where his hands couldn’t reach.
[Hey, you fucking flea suitcase! You think I’ve got all day? Get your raggedy ass over here!]
Rosalie whined and switched her gaze from Ralph back toward whatever she had been looking at before. She started to get up, then shrank back down on her haunches again. The bandanna she wore was shaking harder than ever, and Ralph saw a dark crescent begin to spread around her left flank as her bladder let go.
He looked across the street and there was Doc #3, standing between the laundromat and the elderly apartment house next door, Doc #3 in his white smock (it was badly stained, Ralph noticed, as if he had been wearing it for a long time) and his midget-sized blue jeans. He still had McGovern’s Panama on his head. The hat now appeared to balance on the creature’s ears; it was so big for him that the top half of his head seemed submerged in it. He was grinning ferociously at the dog, and Ralph saw a double row of pointed white teeth – the teeth of a cannibal. In his left hand he was holding something which was either an old scalpel or a straight-razor. Part of Ralph’s mind tried to convince him that it was blood he saw on the blade, but he was pretty sure it was just rust.
Doc #3 slipped the first two fingers of his right hand into the corners of his mouth and blew a piercing whistle that went through Ralph’s head like a drillbit. Down the sidewalk, Rosalie flinched backward and then voiced a brief howl.
[Get your fucking ass over, Rover! Do it now!]
Rosalie got up, tail between her legs, and began to slink toward the street. She whined as she went, and her fear had worsened her limp to the point where she was barely able to stagger; her hindquarters threatened to slide out from under her at each reluctant, lurching step.
[‘Hey!’]
Ralph only realized that he had yelled when he saw the small blue cloud float up in front of his face. It was etched with gossamer silver lines that made it look like a snowflake.
The bald dwarf wheeled toward the sound of Ralph’s shout, instinctively raising the weapon he held as he did. His expression was one of snarling surprise. Rosalie had stopped with her front paws in the gutter and was looking at Ralph with wide, anxious brown eyes.
[What do you want, Shorts?]
There was fury at being interrupted in that voice, fury at being challenged . . . but Ralph thought there were other emotions underneath. Fear? He wished he could believe it. Perplexity and surprise seemed surer bets. Whatever this creature was, it wasn’t used to being seen by the likes of Ralph, let alone challenged.
[What’s the matter, Short-Time, cat got your tongue? Or have you already forgotten what you wanted?]
[‘I want you to leave that dog alone!’]
Ralph heard himself in two different ways. He was fairly sure he was speaking aloud, but the sound of his actual voice was distant and tinny, like music drifting up from a pair of Walkman headphones which have been temporarily laid aside. Someone standing right beside him might have heard what he said, but Ralph knew the words would have sounded like a weak, out-of-breath gasp – talk from a man who has just been gutpunched. Inside his head, however, he sounded as he hadn’t in years – young, strong, and confident.
Doc #3 must have heard it that second way, for he recoiled momentarily, again raising his weapon (Ralph was now almost certain it was a scalpel) for a moment, as if in self-defense. Then he seemed to regroup. He left the sidewalk and strode to the edge of Harris Avenue, standing on the leaf-drifted strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. He hitched at the waistband of his jeans, yanking it through the dirty smock, and stared grimly at Ralph for several moments. Then he raised the rusty scalpel in the air and made an unpleasantly suggestive sawing gesture with it.
[You can see me – big deal! Don’t poke your nose into what doesn’t concern you, Short-Time! The mutt belongs to me!]
The bald doc turned back to the cringing dog.
[I’m done fooling with you, Rover! Get over here! Right now! ]
Rosalie gave Ralph a beseeching, despairing look and then began to cross the street.
I don’t mess in with long-time business, Old Dor had told him on the day he’d given him the book of Stephen Dobyns poems. I told you not to, either.
Yes, he had, yes indeed, but Ralph had a feeling it was too late now. Even if it wasn’t, he had no intention of leaving Rosalie to the unpleasant little gnome standing in front of the coin-op laundry across the street. Not if he could help it, that was.
[‘Rosalie! Over here, girl! Heel!’]
Rosalie gave a single bark and trotted over to where Ralph stood. She placed herself behind his right leg and then sat down, panting and looking up at him. And here was another expression Ralph found he could read with ease: one part relief, two parts gratitude.
The face of Doc #3 was twisted into a grimace of hate so severe it was almost a cartoon.
[Better send her across, Shorts! I’m warning you!]
[‘No.’]
[I’ll fuck you over, Shorts. I’ll fuck you over big-time. And I’ll fuck your friends over. Do you get me? Do you—]
Ralph suddenly raised one hand to shoulder height with the palm turned inward toward the side of his head, as if he meant to administer a karate chop. He brought it down and watched, amazed, as a tight blue wedge of light flew off the tips of his fingers and sliced across the street like a thrown spear. Doc #3 ducked just in time, clapping one hand to McGovern’s Panama to keep it from flying off. The blue wedge skimmed two or three inches over that small, clutching hand and struck the front window of the Buffy-Buffy. There it spread like some supernatural liquid, and for a moment the dusty glass became the brilliant, perfect blue of today’s sky. It faded after only a moment and Ralph could see the women inside the laundromat again, folding their clothes and loading their washers exactly as if nothing had happened.
The bald dwarf straightened, rolled his hands into fists, and shook them at Ralph. Then he snatched McGovern’s hat off his head, stuck the brim in his mouth, and tore a bite out of it. As he performed this bizarre equivalent of a child’s tantrum, the sun struck splinters of fire from the lobes of his small, neatly made ears. He spat out the chunk of splintery straw and then clapped the hat back on his head.
[That dog was mine, Shorts! I was gonna play with her! I guess maybe I’ll have to play with you instead, huh? You and your asshole friends!]
[‘Get out of here.’]
[Cuntlicker! Fucked your mother and licked her cunt! ]
Ralph knew where he had heard that charming sentiment before: Ed Deepneau, out at the airport, in the summer of ’92. It wasn’t the sort of thing you forgot, and all at once he was terrified. What in God’s name had he stumbled into?
5
Ralph lifted his hand to the side of his head again, but something inside had changed. He could bring it down in that chopping gesture again, but he was almost positive that this time no bright blue flying wedge would result.
The doc apparently didn’t know he was being threatened with an empty gun, however. He shrank back, raising the hand holding the scalpel in a shielding gesture. The grotesquely bitten hat slipped down over his eyes, and for a moment he looked like a stage-melodrama version of Jack the Ripper . . . one who might have been working out pathologic inadequacies caused by extreme shortness.
[Gonna get you for this, Shorts! You wait! You just wait! No Short-Timer runs the game on me!]
But for the time being, the little bald doctor had had enough. He wheeled around and ran into the weedy lane between the laundromat and the apartment house with his dirty, too-long smock flapping and snapping at the legs of his jeans. The brightness slipped out of the day with him. Ralph marked its passage to a large extent with senses he had never before even suspected. He felt totally awake, totally energized, and almost exploding with delighted excitement.
I drove it off, by God! I drove the little sonofawhore off!
He had no idea what the creature in the white smock really was, but he knew he had saved Rosalie from it, and for now that was enough. Nagging questions about his sanity might creep back tomorrow morning as he sat in the wing-chair looking down at the deserted street below . . . but for the time being, he felt like a million bucks.
‘You saw him, didn’t you, Rosalie? You saw the nasty little—’
He looked down, saw that Rosalie was no longer sitting by his heel, and looked up in time to see her limping into the park, head down, right leg slueing stiffly off to the side with every pained stride.
‘Rosalie!’ he shouted. ‘Hey, girl!’ And, without really knowing why – except that they had just gone through something extraordinary together – Ralph started after her, first just jogging, then running, finally sprinting all out.
He didn’t sprint for long. A stitch that felt like a hot chrome needle buried itself in his left side, then spread rapidly across the left half of his chest wall. He stopped just inside the park, standing bent over at the intersection of two paths, hands clamped on his legs just above the knees. Sweat ran into his eyes and stung like tears. He panted harshly, wondering if it was just the ordinary sort of stitch he remembered from the last lap of the mile run in high-school track, or if this was how the onset of a fatal heart attack felt.
After thirty or forty seconds the pain began to abate, so maybe it had just been a stitch, after all. Still, it went a good piece toward supporting McGovern’s thesis, didn’t it? Let me tell you something, Ralph – at our age, mental illness is common! At our age it’s common as hell! Ralph didn’t know if that was true or not, but he did know that the year he had made All-State Track was now over half a century in the past, and sprinting after Rosalie the way he’d done was stupid and probably dangerous. If his heart had seized up, he supposed he wouldn’t have been the first old guy to be punished with a coronary thrombosis for getting excited and forgetting that when eighteen went, it went forever.
The pain was almost gone and he was getting his wind back, but his legs still felt untrustworthy, as if they might unlock at the knees and spill him onto the gravel path without the slightest warning. Ralph lifted his head, looking for the nearest park bench, and saw something that made him forget stray dogs, shaky legs, even possible heart attacks. The nearest bench was forty feet farther along the left-hand path, at the top of a gentle, sloping hill. Lois Chasse was sitting on that bench in her good blue fall coat. Her gloved hands were folded together in her lap, and she was sobbing as if her heart would break.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1
‘Lois?’ To Ralph’s own ears, his voice seemed to be an echo winding down a long, deep canyon. ‘Lois, do you see that?’
‘I don’t—’ Her voice broke off. ‘Did the wind blow that bathroom door open? It didn’t, did it? Is someone there? Is that why the dog’s making that racket?’
Rosalie backed slowly away from the bald man, her ragged ears laid back, her muzzle wrinkled to expose teeth so badly eroded that they were not much more menacing than hard rubber pegs. She uttered a cracked volley of barks, then began to whine desperately.
‘Yes! Don’t you see him, Lois? Look! He’s right there!’
Ralph got to his feet. Lois got up with him, shielding her eyes with one hand. She peered down the slope with desperate intensity. ‘I see a shimmer, that’s all. Like the air over an incinerator.’
‘I told you to leave her alone!’ Ralph shouted down the hill. ‘Quit it! Get the hell out!’
The bald man looked in Ralph’s direction, but there was no surprise in the glance this time; it was casual, dismissive. He raised the middle finger of his right hand, flicked it at Ralph in the ancient salute, then bared his own teeth – much sharper and much more menacing than Rosalie’s – in a silent laugh.
Rosalie cringed as the little man in the dirty smock began to walk toward her again, then actually raised a paw and put it on her own head, a cartoonish gesture that should have been funny and was horribly expressive of her terror instead.
‘What can’t I see, Ralph?’ Lois moaned. ‘I see something, but—’
‘Get AWAY from her!’ Ralph shouted, and raised his hand in that karate-chop gesture again. The hand inside – the hand which earlier had produced that wedge of tight blue light – still felt like an unloaded gun, however, and this time the bald doc seemed to know it. He glanced in Ralph’s direction and offered a small, jeering wave.
[Aw, quit it. Shorts – sit back, shut up, and enjoy the show.]
The creature at the foot of the hill returned his attention to Rosalie, who sat huddled at the base of an old pine. The tree was emitting a thin green fog from the cracks in its bark. The bald doctor bent over Rosalie, one hand outstretched in a gesture of solicitude that went very badly with the scalpel curled into his left fist.
Rosalie whined . . . then stretched her neck forward and humbly licked the bald creature’s palm.
Ralph looked down at his own hands, sensing something in them – not the power he’d had before, nothing like that, but something. Suddenly there were snaps of clear white light dancing just above his nails. It was as if his fingers had been turned into sparkplugs.
Lois was grabbing frantically at him now. ‘What’s wrong with the dog? Ralph, what’s wrong with it?’
With no thought about what he was doing or why, Ralph put his hands over Lois’s eyes, like someone playing Guess Who with a loved one. His fingers flashed a momentary white so bright it was almost blinding. Must be the white they’re always talking about in the detergent commercials, he thought.
Lois screamed. Her hands flew to his wrists, clamped on them, then loosened. ‘My God, Ralph, what did you do to me?’
He took his hands away and saw a glowing figure-eight surrounding her eyes; it was as if she had just taken off a pair of goggles which had been dipped in confectioner’s sugar. The white began to dim almost as soon as his hands were gone . . . except . . .
It’s not dimming, he thought. It’s sinking in.
‘Never mind,’ he said, and pointed. ‘Look!’
The widening of her eyes told him what he needed to know. Doc #3, completely unmoved by Rosalie’s desperate effort to make friends, shoved her muzzle aside with the hand holding the scalpel. He seized the old bandanna hanging around her neck in his other hand and yanked her head up. Rosalie howled miserably. Slobber ran back along the sides of her face. The bald man voiced a scabrous chuckle that made Ralph’s flesh crawl.
[‘Hi! Leave off! Leave off teasing that dog!’]
The bald man’s head snapped around. The grin ran off his face and he snarled at Lois, sounding a little like a dog himself.
[Yahh, go fuck yourself, you fat old Short-Time cunt! Dog’s mine, just like I already told your limpdick boyfriend!]
The bald man had let go of the blue bandanna when Lois shouted at him, and Rosalie was now cringing back against the pine again, her eyes rolling, curds of foam dripping from the sides of her muzzle. Ralph had never seen such a completely terrified creature in his life.
‘Run!’ Ralph screamed. ‘Get away!’
She seemed not to hear him, and after a moment Ralph realized she wasn’t hearing him, because Rosalie was no longer entirely there. The bald doctor had done something to her already – had pulled her at least partway out of ordinary reality like a farmer using his tractor and a length of chain to pull a stump.
Ralph tried once more, anyway.
[‘Run, Rosalie! Run away!’]
This time her laid-back ears cocked forward and her head began to turn in Ralph’s direction. He didn’t know if she would have obeyed him or not, because the bald man renewed his hold on the bandanna before she could even begin to move. He yanked her head up again.
‘He’s going to kill it!’ Lois screamed. ‘He’s going to cut its throat with that thing he has! Don’t let him, Ralph! Make him stop!’
‘I can’t! Maybe you can! Shoot him! Shoot your hand at him!’
She looked at him, not understanding. Ralph made frantic wood-chopping gestures with his right hand, but before Lois could respond, Rosalie gave a dreadful lost howl. The bald doc raised the scalpel and brought it down, but it wasn’t Rosalie’s throat he cut.
He cut her balloon-string.
2
A thread emerged from each of Rosalie’s nostrils and floated upward. They twined together about six inches above her snout, making a delicate pigtail, and it was at this point that Baldy #3’s scalpel did its work. Ralph watched, frozen with horror, as the severed pigtail rose into the sky like the string of a released helium balloon. It was unravelling as it went. He thought it would tangle in the branches of the old pine, but it didn’t. When the ascending balloon-string finally did meet one of the branches, it simply passed through.
Of course, Ralph thought. The same way this guy’s buddies walked through May Locher’s locked front door after they finished doing the same thing to her.
This idea was followed by a thought too simple and gruesomely logical not to be believed: not space-aliens, not little bald doctors, but Centurions. Ed Deepneau’s Centurions. They didn’t look like the Roman soldiers you saw in tin-pants epics like Spartacus and Ben Hur, true, but they had to be Centurions . . . didn’t they?
Sixteen or twenty feet above the ground, Rosalie’s balloon-string simply faded away to nothingness.
Ralph looked back down in time to see the bald dwarf pull the faded blue bandanna off over the dog’s head and then push her down at the base of the tree. Ralph looked at her more closely and felt all his flesh shrink closer to his bones. His dream of Carolyn recurred with cruel intensity, and he found himself struggling to bottle up a shriek of terror.
That’s right, Ralph, don’t scream. You don’t want to do that because once you start, you might not be able to stop – you might just go on doing it until your throat bursts. Remember Lois, because she’s in this now, too. Remember Lois and don’t start screaming.
Ah, but it was hard not to, because the dream-bugs which had come spewing out of Carolyn’s head were now pouring from Rosalie’s nostrils in writhing black streams.
Those aren’t bugs. I don’t know what they are, but they are not bugs.
No, not bugs – just another kind of aura. Nightmarish black stuff, neither liquid nor gas, was pumping out of Rosalie with each exhaled breath. It did not float away but instead began to surround her in slow, nasty coils of anti-light. That blackness should have hidden her from view, but it didn’t. Ralph could see her pleading, terrified eyes as the darkness gathered around her head and then began to ooze down her back and sides and legs.
It was a deathbag, a real deathbag this time, and he was watching as Rosalie, her balloon-string now cut, wove it relentlessly about herself like a poisonous placental sac. This metaphor triggered the voice of Ed Deepneau inside his head, Ed saying that the Centurions were ripping babies from the wombs of their mothers and taking them away in covered trucks.
Ever wonder what was under most of those tarps? Ed had asked.
Doc #3 stood grinning down at Rosalie. Then he united the knot in her bandanna and put it around his own neck, tying it in a big, loose knot, making it look like a bohemian artist’s necktie. This done, he looked up at Ralph and Lois with an expression of loathsome complacency. There! his look said. I took care of my business after all, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it, was there?
[‘Do something, Ralph! Please do something! Make him stop!’]
Too late for that, but maybe not too late to send him packing before he could enjoy the sight of Rosalie dropping dead at the foot of the tree. He was pretty sure Lois couldn’t produce a karate-chop of blue light as he had done, but maybe she could do something else.
Yes – she can shoot him in her own way.
He didn’t know why he was so sure of that, but suddenly he was. He grabbed Lois by the shoulders to make her look at him, then raised his right hand. He cocked his thumb and pointed his forefinger at the bald man. He looked like a small child playing cops and robbers.
Lois responded with a look of dismay and incomprehension. Ralph grabbed her hand and stripped off her glove.
[‘You! You, Lois!’]
She got the idea, raised her own hand, extended her forefinger, and made the child’s shooting gesture: Pow! Pow!
Two compact lozenge shapes, their gray-blue shade identical to Lois’s aura but much brighter, flew from the end of her finger and streaked down the hill.
Doc #3 screeched and leaped upward, fisted hands held at shoulder height, the heels of his black shoes clipping against his buttocks, as the first of these ‘bullets’ went under him. It struck the ground, rebounded like a flat stone skipped across the surface of a pond, and hit the Portosan marked WOMEN. For a moment the entire front of it glowed fiercely, as the window of the Buffy-Buffy had done.
The second blue-gray pellet clipped the baldy’s left hip and ricocheted up into the sky. He screamed – a high, chattery sound that seemed to twist like a worm in the middle of Ralph’s head. Ralph raised his hands to his ears even though it could do no good, and saw Lois doing the same thing. He felt sure that if that scream went on for long, it would burst his head open just as surely as high C shatters fine crystal.
Doc #3 fell to the needle-carpeted ground beside Rosalie and rolled back and forth, howling and holding his hip the way a small child will hold the place he banged when he tumbled off his tricycle. After a few moments of this, his cries began to diminish and he scrambled to his feet. His eyes blazed at them from below the white expanse of his brow. Bill’s Panama was tilted far back on his head now, and the left side of his smock was black and smoking.
[I’ll get you! I’ll get you both! Goddam interfering Short-Time fucks! I’LL GET YOU BOTH!]
He whirled and bounded down the path which led to the playground and the tennis courts, running in big flying leaps like an astronaut on the moon. Lois’s shot didn’t appear to have done any real damage, judging by his speed afoot.
Lois seized Ralph’s shoulder and shook him. As she did, the auras began to fade again.
[‘The children! It’s going toward the chi ]
She was fading out, and that seemed to make perfect sense, because he suddenly saw that Lois wasn’t really talking at all, only staring at him fixedly with her dark eyes as she clutched his shoulder.
‘I can’t hear you!’ he yelled. ‘Lois, I can’t hear you!’
‘What’s wrong, are you deaf? It’s going toward the playground! Toward the children! We can’t let it hurt the children!’
Ralph let out a deep, shuddering sigh. ‘It won’t.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I don’t know. I just am.’
‘I shot it.’ She turned her finger toward her face, for a moment looking like a woman who mimes suicide. ‘I shot it with my finger.’
‘Uh-huh. It stung him, too. Hard, from the way he looked.’
‘I can’t see the colors anymore, Ralph.’
He nodded. ‘They come and go, like radio stations at night.’
‘I don’t know how I feel . . . I don’t even know how I want to feel!’ She wailed this last, and Ralph folded her into his arms. In spite of everything that was going on in his life right now, one fact registered very clearly: it was wonderful to be holding a woman again.
‘That’s okay,’ he told her, and pressed his face against the top of her head. Her hair smelled sweet, with none of the underlying murk of beauty-shop chemicals he’d gotten used to in Carolyn’s hair over the last ten or fifteen years of their life together. ‘Let go of it for now, okay?’
She looked at him. He could no longer see the faint mist drifting across her pupils, but felt sure it was still there. And besides, they were very pretty eyes even without the extra added attraction. ‘What’s it for, Ralph? Do you know what it’s for?’
He shook his head. His mind was whirling with jigsaw pieces – hats, docs, bugs, protest signs, dolls that exploded in splatters of fake blood – that would not fit together. And for the time being, at least, the thing that seemed to recur with the most resonance was Old Dor’s nonsense saying: Done-bun-can’t-be-undone.
Ralph had an idea that was nothing but the truth.
3
A sad little whine came to his ears and Ralph looked down the hill. Rosalie was lying at the base of the big pine, trying to get up. Ralph could no longer see the black bag around her, but he was sure it was still there.
‘Oh Ralph, the poor thing! What can we do?’
There was nothing they could do. Ralph was sure of it. He took Lois’s right hand in both of his and waited for Rosalie to lie back and die.
Instead of that, she gave a whole-body lurch that sent her so strongly to her feet that she almost toppled over the other way. She stood still for a moment, her head held so low her muzzle was almost on the ground, and then sneezed three or four times. With that out of the way, she shook herself and looked up at Ralph and Lois. She yapped at them once, a short, brisk sound. To Ralph it sounded as if she were telling them to quit worrying. Then she turned and made off through a little grove of pine trees toward the park’s lower entrance. Before Ralph lost sight of her, she had achieved the limping yet insouciant trot which was her trademark. The bum leg was no better than it had been before Doc #3’s interference, but it seemed no worse. Clearly old but seemingly a long way from dead (Just like the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks, Ralph thought), she disappeared into the trees.
‘I thought that thing was going to kill her,’ Lois said. ‘In fact, I thought it had killed her.’
‘Me too,’ Ralph said.
‘Ralph, did all that really happen? It did, didn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘The balloon-strings . . . do you think they’re lifelines?’
He nodded slowly. ‘Yes. Like umbilical cords. And Rosalie . . .’
He thought back to his first real experience with the auras, of how he’d stood outside the Rite Aid with his back to the blue mailbox and his jaw hanging down almost to his breastbone. Of the sixty or seventy people he had observed before the auras faded again, only a few had been walking inside the dark envelopes he now thought of as deathbags, and the one Rosalie had knitted around herself just now had been blacker by far than any he had seen that day. Still, those people in the parking lot whose auras had been dingy-dark had invariably looked unwell . . . like Rosalie, whose aura had been the color of old sweatsocks even before Baldy #3 started messing with her.
Maybe he just hurried up what may otherwise be a perfectly natural process, he thought.
‘Ralph?’ Lois asked. ‘What about Rosalie?’
‘I think my old friend Rosalie is living on borrowed time now,’ Ralph said.
Lois considered this, looking down the hill and into the sun-dusty grove where Rosalie had disappeared. At last she turned to Ralph again. ‘That midget with the scalpel was one of the men you saw coming out of May Locher’s house, wasn’t he?’
‘No. Those were two other ones.’
‘Have you seen more?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think there are more?’
‘I don’t know.’
He had an idea that next she’d ask if Ralph had noticed that the creature had been wearing Bill’s Panama, but she didn’t. Ralph supposed it was possible she hadn’t recognized it. Too much weirdness swirling around, and besides, there hadn’t been a chunk bitten out of the brim the last time she’d seen Bill wearing it. Retired history teachers just aren’t the hat-biting type, he reflected, and grinned.
‘This has been quite a morning, Ralph.’ Lois met his gaze frankly, eye to eye. ‘I think we need to talk about this, don’t you? I really need to know what’s going on.’
Ralph remembered this morning – a thousand years ago, now – walking back down the street from the picnic area, running over his short list of acquaintances, trying to decide whom he should talk to. He had crossed Lois off that mental list on the grounds that she might gossip to her girlfriends, and he was now embarrassed by that facile judgement, which had been based more on McGovern’s picture of Lois than on his own. It turned out that the only person Lois had spoken to about the auras before today was the one person she should have been able to trust to keep her secret.
He nodded at her. ‘You’re right. We need to talk.’
‘Would you like to come back to my house for a little late lunch? I make a pretty mean stir-fry for an old gal who can’t keep track of her earrings.’
‘I’d love to. I’ll tell you what I know, but it’s going to take awhile. When I talked to Bill this morning, I gave him the Reader’s Digest version.’
‘So,’ Lois said. ‘The fight was about chess, was it?’
‘Well, maybe not,’ Ralph said, smiling down at his hands. ‘Maybe it was actually more like the fight you had with your son and your daughter-in-law. And I didn’t even tell him the craziest parts.’
‘But you’ll tell me?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and started to get up. ‘I’ll bet you’re a hell of a good cook, too. In fact—’ He stopped suddenly and clapped one hand to his chest. He sat back down on the bench, heavily, his eyes wide and his mouth ajar.
‘Ralph? Are you all right?’
Her alarmed voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. In his mind’s eye he was seeing Baldy #3 again, standing between the Buffy-Buffy and the apartment house next door. Baldy #3 trying to get Rosalie to cross Harris Avenue so he could cut her balloon-string. He’d failed then, but he’d gotten the job done
(I was gonna play with her! )
before the morning was out.
Maybe the fact that Bill McGovern isn’t the hat-biting type wasn’t the only reason Lois didn’t notice whose hat Baldy #3 was wearing, Ralph old buddy. Maybe she didn’t notice because she didn’t want to notice. Maybe there are a couple of pieces here that fit together, and if you’re right about that, the implications are wide-ranging. You see that, don’t you?
‘Ralph? What’s wrong?’
He saw the dwarf snatching a bite from the brim of the Panama and then clapping it back on his head. Heard him saying he guessed he would have to play with Ralph instead.
But not just me. Me and my friends, he said. Me and my asshole friends.
Now, thinking back on it, he saw something else, as well. He saw the sun striking splinters of fire from the lobes of Doc #3’s ears as he – or it – chomped into the brim of McGovern’s hat. The memory was too clear to deny, and so were those implications.
Those wide-ranging implications.
Take it easy – you don’t know a thing for sure, and the funny-farm is just over the horizon, my friend. I think you need to remember that, maybe use it as an anchor. I don’t care if Lois is also seeing all this stuff or not. The other men in the white coats, not the pint-sized baldies but the muscular guys with the butterfly nets and the Thorazine shots, can show up at any time. Any old time at all.
But still.
Still.
‘Ralph! Jesus Christ, talk to me!’ Lois was shaking him now and shaking hard, like a wife trying to rouse a husband who is going to be late for work.
He looked around at her and tried to manufacture a smile. It felt false from the inside but must have looked all right to Lois, because she relaxed. A little, anyway. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘For a few seconds there it all just sort of . . . you know, ganged up on me.’
‘Don’t you scare me like that! The way you grabbed your chest, my God!’
‘I’m fine,’ Ralph said, and forced his false smile even wider. He felt like a kid pulling a wad of Silly Putty, seeing how far he could stretch it before it thinned enough to tear. ‘And if you’re still cookin, I’m still eatin.’
Three-six-nine, hon, the goose drank wine.
Lois took a close look at him and then relaxed. ‘Good. That would be fun. I haven’t cooked for anyone but Simone and Mina – they’re my girlfriends, you know – in a long time.’ Then she laughed. ‘Except that isn’t what I mean. That isn’t why it would be, you know, fun.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That I haven’t cooked for a man in a long time. I hope I haven’t forgotten how.’
‘Well, there was the day Bill and I came in to watch the news with you – we had macaroni and cheese. It was good, too.’
She made a dismissive gesture. ‘Reheated. Not the same.’
The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line. The line broke—
Smiling wider than ever. Waiting for the rips to start. ‘I’m sure you haven’t forgotten how, Lois.’
‘Mr Chasse had a very hearty appetite. All sorts of hearty appetites, in fact. But then he started having his liver trouble, and . . .’ She sighed, then reached for Ralph’s arm and took it with a mixture of timidity and resolution he found completely endearing. ‘Never mind. I’m tired of snivelling and moaning about the past. I’ll leave that to Bill. Let’s go.’
He stood up, linked his arm through hers, and walked her down the hill and toward the lower entrance to the park. Lois beamed blindingly at the young mothers in the playground as she and Ralph passed them. Ralph was glad for the distraction. He could tell himself to withhold judgement, he could remind himself over and over again that he didn’t know enough about what was happening to him and Lois to even kid himself that he could think logically about it, but he kept jumping at that conclusion anyway. The conclusion felt right to his heart, and he had already come a long way toward believing that, in the world of auras, feeling and knowing were close to identical.
I don’t know about the other two, but #3 is one crazy medic . . . and he takes souvenirs. Takes them the way some of the crazies in Vietnam took ears.
That Lois’s daughter-in-law had given in to an evil impulse, scooping the diamond earrings from the china dish and putting them in the pocket of her jeans, he had no doubt. But Janet Chasse no longer had them; even now she was no doubt reproaching herself bitterly for having lost them and wondering why she had ever taken them in the first place.
Ralph knew the shrimp with the scalpel had McGovern’s hat even if Lois had failed to recognize it, and they had both seen him take Rosalie’s bandanna. What Ralph had realized as he started to get up from the bench was that those splinters of light he had seen reflected from the bald creature’s earlobes almost certainly meant that Doc #3 had Lois’s earrings, as well.
4
The late Mr Chasse’s rocking chair stood on faded linoleum by the door to the back porch. Lois led Ralph to it and admonished him to ‘stay out from underfoot’. Ralph thought this was an assignment he could handle. Strong light, mid-afternoon light, fell across his lap as he sat and rocked. Ralph wasn’t sure how it had gotten so late so fast, but somehow it had. Maybe I fell asleep, he thought. Maybe I’m asleep right now, and dreaming all this. He watched as Lois took down a wok (definitely hobbit-sized) from an overhead cupboard. Five minutes later, savory smells began to fill the kitchen.
‘I told you I’d cook for you someday,’ Lois said, adding vegetables from the fridge crisper and spices from one of the overhead cabinets. ‘That was the same day I gave you and Bill the leftover macaroni and cheese. Do you remember?’
‘I believe I do,’ Ralph said, smiling.
‘There’s a jug of fresh cider in the milk-box on the front porch – cider always keeps best outside. Would you get it? You can pour out, too. My good glasses are in the cupboard over the sink, the one I can’t reach without dragging over a chair. You’re tall enough to do without the chair, I judge. What are you, Ralph, about six-two?’
‘Six-three. At least I was; I guess maybe I’ve lost an inch or two in the last ten years. Your spine settles, or something. And you don’t have to go putting on the dog just for me. Honest.’
She looked at him levelly, hands on hips, the spoon with which she had been stirring the contents of the wok jutting from one of them. Her severity was offset by a trace of a smile. ‘I said my good glasses, Ralph Roberts, not my best glasses.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, grinning, then added: ‘From the way that smells, I guess you still remember how to cook for a man.’
‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating,’ Lois replied, but Ralph thought she looked pleased as she turned back to the wok.
5
The food was good, and they didn’t talk about what had happened in the park as they applied themselves to it. Ralph’s appetite had become uncertain, out more often than in, since his insomnia had really begun to bite, but today he ate heartily and chased Lois’s spicy stir-fry with three glasses of apple cider (hoping uneasily as he finished the last one that the rest of the day’s activities wouldn’t take him too far from a toilet). When they had finished, Lois got up, went to the sink, and began to draw hot water for dishes. As she did, she resumed their earlier conversation as if it were a half-finished piece of knitting which had been temporarily laid aside for some other, more pressing, chore.
‘What did you do to me?’ she asked him. ‘What did you do to make the colors come back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It was as if I was on the edge of that world, and when you put your hands over my eyes, you pushed me into it.’
He nodded, remembering how she’d looked in the first few seconds after he’d removed his hands – as if she’d just taken off a pair of goggles which had been dipped in powdered sugar. ‘It was pure instinct. And you’re right, it is like a world. I keep thinking of it just that way, as the world of auras.’
‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I mean, it’s scary, and when it first started to happen to me – back in late July or early August, this was – I was sure I was going crazy, but even then I liked it, too. I couldn’t help liking it.’
Ralph gazed at her, startled. Had he once upon a time thought of Lois as transparent? Gossipy? Unable to keep a secret?
No, I’m afraid it was a little worse than that, old buddy. You thought she was shallow. You saw her pretty much through Bill’s eyes, as a matter of fact: as ‘our Lois’. No less . . . but not much more.
‘What?’ she asked, a little uneasily. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘You’ve been seeing these auras since summer? That long?’
‘Yes – brighter and brighter. Also more often. That’s why I finally went to see the tattletale. Did I really shoot that thing with my finger, Ralph? The more time goes by, the less I can believe that part of it.’
‘You did. I did something like it myself shortly before I ran into you.’
He told her about his earlier confrontation with Doc #3, and about how he had banished the dwarf . . . temporarily, at least. He raised his hand to his shoulder and brought it swiftly down. ‘That’s all I did – like a kid pretending to be Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal. But it sent this incredible bolt of blue light at him, and he scurried in a hurry. Which was probably for the best, because I couldn’t have done it again. I don’t know how I did that, either. Could you have shot your finger again?’
Lois giggled, turned toward him, and cocked her finger in his general direction. ‘Want to find out? Kapow! Kablam!’
‘Don’t point dat ding at me, lady,’ Ralph told her. He smiled as he said it, but wasn’t entirely sure he was joking.
Lois lowered her finger and squirted Joy into the sink. As she began to stir the water around with one hand, puffing up the suds, she asked what Ralph thought of as the Big Questions: ‘Where did this power come from, Ralph? And what’s it for?’
He shook his head as he got up and walked over to the dish-drainer. ‘I don’t know and I don’t know. How’s that for helpful? Where do you keep your dish-wipers, Lois?’
‘Never mind where I keep my dish-wipers. Go sit down. Please tell me you’re not one of these modern men, Ralph – the ones that are always hugging each other and bawling.’
Ralph laughed and shook his head. ‘Nope. I was just well trained, that’s all.’
‘Okay. As long as you don’t start going on about how sensitive you are. There are some things a girl likes to find out for herself.’ She opened the cupboard under the sink and tossed him a faded but scrupulously clean dishtowel. ‘Just dry them and put them on the counter. I’ll put them away myself. While you’re working, you can tell me your story. The unabridged version.’
‘You got a deal.’
He was still wondering where to begin when his mouth opened, seemingly of its own accord, and began for him. ‘When I finally started to get it through my head that Carolyn was going to die, I went for a lot of walks. And one day, while I was out on the Extension . . .’
6
He told her everything, beginning with his intervention between Ed and the fat man wearing the West Side Gardeners gimme-cap and ending with Bill telling him that he’d better go see his doctor, because at their age mental illness was common, at their age it was common as hell. He had to double back several times to pick up dropped stitches – the way Old Dor had showed up in the middle of his efforts to keep Ed from going at the man from West Side Gardeners, for instance – but he didn’t mind doing that, and Lois didn’t seem to have any trouble keeping his narrative straight, either. The overall feeling Ralph was conscious of as he wound his way through his tale was a relief so deep it was nearly painful. It was as if someone had stacked bricks on his heart and mind and he was now removing them, one by one.
By the time he was finished, the dishes were done and they had left the kitchen in favor of the living room with its dozens of framed photographs, presided over by Mr Chasse from his place on the TV.
‘So?’ Ralph said. ‘How much of it do you believe?’
‘All of it, of course,’ she said, and either did not notice the expression of relief of Ralph’s face or chose to ignore it. ‘After what we saw this morning – not to mention what you knew about my wonderful daughter-in-law – I can’t very well not believe. That’s my advantage over Bill.’
Not your only one, Ralph thought but didn’t say.
‘None of this stuff is coincidental, is it?’ she asked him.
Ralph shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘When I was seventeen,’ she said, ‘my mother hired this boy from down the road – Richard Henderson, his name was – to do chores around our place. There were a lot of boys she could have hired, but she hired Richie because she liked him . . . and she liked him for me, if you understand what I mean.’
‘Of course I do. She was matchmaking.’
‘Uh-huh, but at least she wasn’t doing it in a big, gruesome, embarrassing way. Thank God, because I didn’t care a fig for Richie – at least not like that. Still, Mother gave it her very best. If I was studying my books at the kitchen table, she’d have him loading the woodbox even though it was May and already hot. If I was feeding the chickens, she’d have Richie cutting side-hay next to the dooryard. She wanted me to see him around . . . to get used to him . . . and if we got to like each other’s company and he asked me to a dance or the town fair, that would have been just fine with her. It was gentle, but it was there. A push. And that’s what this is like.’
‘The pushes don’t feel all that gentle to me,’ Ralph said. His hand went involuntarily to the place where Charlie Pickering had pricked him with the point of his knife.
‘No, of course they don’t. Having a man stick a knife in your ribs like that must have been horrible. Thank God you had that spray-can. Do you suppose Old Dor sees the auras, too? That something from that world told him to put the can in your pocket?’
Ralph gave a helpless shrug. What she was suggesting had crossed his mind, but once you got beyond it, the ground really started to slope away. Because if Dorrance had done that, it suggested that some
((entity)
force or being had known that Ralph would need help. Nor was that all. That force – or being – would also have had to know that (a) Ralph would be going out on Sunday afternoon, that (b) the weather, quite nice up until then, would turn nasty enough to require a jacket, and (c) which jacket he would wear. You were talking, in other words, about something that could foretell the future. The idea that he had been noticed by such a force frankly scared the hell out of him. He recognized that in the case of the aerosol can, at least, the intervention had probably saved his life, but it still scared the hell out of him.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe something did use Dorrance as an errand-boy. But why?’
‘And what do we do now?’ she added.
Ralph could only shake his head.
She glanced up at the clock squeezed in between the picture of the man in the raccoon coat and the young woman who looked ready to say Twenty-three skidoo any old time, then reached for the phone. ‘Almost three-thirty! My goodness!’
Ralph touched her hand. ‘Who are you calling?’
‘Simone Castonguay. I’d made plans to go over to Ludlow with her and Mina this afternoon – there’s a card-party at the Grange – but I can’t go after all this. I’d lose my shirt.’ She laughed, then colored prettily. ‘Just a figure of speech.’
Ralph put his hand over hers before she could lift the receiver. ‘Go on to your card-party, Lois.’
‘Really?’ She looked both doubtful and a little disappointed.
‘Yes.’ He was still unclear about what was going on here, but he sensed that was about to change. Lois had spoken of being pushed, but to Ralph it felt more as if he were being carried, the way a river carries a man in a small boat. But he couldn’t see where he was going; heavy mist shrouded the banks, and now, as the current began to grow swifter, he could hear the rumble of rapids somewhere up ahead.
Still, there are shapes, Ralph. Shapes in the mist.
Yes. Not very comforting ones, either. They might be trees that only looked like clutching fingers . . . but on the other hand, they might be clutching fingers trying to look like trees. Until Ralph knew which was the case, he liked the idea of Lois being out of town just fine. He had a strong intuition – or perhaps it was only hope masquerading as intuition – that Doc #3 couldn’t follow her to Ludlow, that he might not even be able to follow her across the Barrens to the east side.
You can’t know any such thing, Ralph.
Maybe not, but it felt right, and he was still convinced that in the world of the auras, feeling and knowing were pretty nearly the same thing. One thing he did know was that Doc #3 hadn’t cut Lois’s balloon-string yet; that Ralph had seen for himself, along with the joyously healthy gray glow of her aura. Yet Ralph could not escape a growing certainty that Doc #3 – Crazy Doc – intended to cut it, and that, no matter how lively Rosalie had looked when she went trotting away from Strawford Park, the severing of that cord was a mortal, murderous act.
Let’s say you’re right, Ralph; let’s say he can’t get at her this afternoon if she’s playing nickel-in, dime-or-out in Ludlow. What about tonight? Tomorrow? Next week? What’s the solution? Does she call up her son and her bitch of a daughter-in-law, tell them she’s changed her mind about Riverview Estates and wants to go there after all?
He didn’t know. But he knew he needed time to think, and he also knew that constructive thinking would be hard to do until he was fairly sure that Lois was safe, at least for awhile.
‘Ralph? You’re getting that moogy look again.’
‘That what look?’
‘Moogy.’ She tossed her hair pertly. ‘That’s a word I made up to describe how Mr Chasse looked when he was pretending to listen to me but was actually thinking about his coin collection. I know a moogy look when I see one, Ralph. What are you thinking about?’
‘I was wondering what time you think you’ll get back from your card-game.’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether or not we stop at Tubby’s for chocolate frappés.’ She spoke with the air of a woman revealing a secret vice.
‘Suppose you come straight back.’
‘Seven o’clock. Maybe seven-thirty.’
‘Call me as soon as you get home. Would you do that?’
‘Yes. You want me out of town, don’t you? That’s what that moogy look really means.’
‘Well . . .’
‘You think that nasty bald thing means to hurt me, don’t you?’
‘I think it’s a possibility.’
‘Well, he might hurt you, too!’
‘Yes, but . . .’
But so far as I can tell, Lois, he’s not wearing any of my fashion accessories.
‘But what?’
‘I’m going to be okay until you get back, that’s all.’ He remembered her deprecating remark about modern men hugging each other and bawling and tried for a masterful frown. ‘Go play cards and leave this business to me, at least for the time being. That’s an order.’
Carolyn would have either laughed or gotten angry at such comic-opera macho posturing. Lois, who belonged to an entirely different school of feminine thought, only nodded and looked grateful to have the decision taken out of her hands. ‘All right.’ She tilted his chin down so she could look directly into his eyes. ‘Do you know what you’re doing, Ralph?’
‘Nope. Not yet, anyway.’
‘All right. Just as long as you admit it.’ She placed a hand on his forearm and a soft, open-mouthed kiss on the corner of his mouth. Ralph felt an entirely welcome prickle of heat in his groin. ‘I’ll go to Ludlow and win five dollars playing poker with those silly women who are always trying to fill their inside straights. Tonight we’ll talk about what to do next. Okay?’
‘Yes.’
Her small smile – a thing more in the eyes than of the mouth – suggested that they might do a little more than just talk, if Ralph was bold . . . and at that moment he felt quite bold, indeed. Not even Mr Chasse’s stern gaze from his place atop the TV affected that feeling very much.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1
There was only one conversational exchange between them as the Oldsmobile rolled up Hospital Drive, and it was a brief one.
‘Ralph?’
He glanced over at her, then quickly back at the road. That clacking sound under the hood had begun again, but Lois hadn’t mentioned it yet. He hoped she wasn’t going to do so now.
‘I think I know where he is. Ed, I mean. I was pretty sure, even up on the roof, that I recognized that ramshackle old building they showed us.’
‘What is it? And where?’
‘It’s an airplane garage. A whatdoyoucallit. Hangar.’
‘Oh my God,’ Ralph said. ‘Coastal Air, on the Bar Harbor Road?’
Lois nodded. ‘They have charter flights, seaplane rides, things like that. One Saturday when we were out for a drive, Mr Chasse went in and asked a man who worked there how much he’d charge to take us for a sightseeing hop over the islands. The man said forty dollars, which was much more than we could have afforded to spend on something like that, and in the summer I’m sure the man would’ve stuck to his guns, but it was only April, and Mr Chasse was able to dicker him down to twenty. I thought that was still too much to spend on a ride that didn’t even last an hour, but I’m glad we went. It was scary, but it was beautiful.’
‘Like the auras,’ Ralph said.
‘Yes, like . . .’ Her voice wavered. Ralph looked over and saw tears trickling down her plump cheeks. ‘. . . like the auras.’
‘Don’t cry, Lois.’
She found a Kleenex in her purse and wiped her eyes. ‘I can’t help it. That Japanese word on the card means kamikaze, doesn’t it, Ralph? Divine Wind.’ She paused, lips trembling. ‘Suicide pilot.’
Ralph nodded. He was gripping the wheel very tightly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what it means. Suicide pilot.’
2
Route 33 – known as Newport Avenue in town – passed within four blocks of Harris Avenue, but Ralph had absolutely no intention of breaking their long fast over on the west side. The reason was as simple as it was compelling: he and Lois couldn’t afford to be seen by any of their old friends, not looking fifteen or twenty years younger than they had on Monday.
Had any of those old friends reported them missing to the police yet? Ralph knew it was possible, but felt he could reasonably hope that so far they had escaped much notice and concern, at least from his circle; Faye and the rest of the folks who hung out in the picnic area near the Extension would be in too much of a dither over the passing of not just one Old Crock colleague but a pair of them to spend much time wondering about where Ralph Roberts had gotten his skinny old ass off to.
Both Bill and Jimmy could have been waked, funeralled, and buried by now, he thought.
‘If we’ve got time for breakfast, Ralph, find a place as quick as you can – I’m so hungry I could eat a horse with the hide still on!’
They were almost a mile west of the hospital now – far enough away to allow Ralph to feel reasonably safe – and he saw the Derry Diner up ahead. As he signalled and turned into the parking lot, he realized he hadn’t been here since Carol had gotten sick . . . a year at least, maybe more.
‘Here we are,’ he told Lois. ‘And we’re not just going to eat, we’re going to eat all we can. We may not get another chance today.’
She grinned like a schoolkid. ‘You’ve just put your finger on one of my great talents, Ralph.’ She wriggled a little on the seat. ‘Also, I have to spend a penny.’
Ralph nodded. No food since Tuesday, and no bathroom stops, either. Lois could spend her penny; he intended to pop into the men’s room and let go of a couple of dollars.
‘Come on,’ he said, turning off the motor and silencing that troublesome clacking under the hood. ‘First the bathroom, then the foodquake.’
On the way to the door she told him (speaking in a voice Ralph found just a trifle too casual) that she didn’t think either Mina or Simone would have reported her missing, at least not yet. When Ralph turned his head to ask her why, he was amazed and amused to see she was blushing rosy-red.
‘They both know I’ve had a crush on you for years.’
‘Are you kidding?’
‘Of course not,’ she said, sounding a bit put out. ‘Carolyn knew, too. Some women would have minded, but she understood how harmless it was. How harmless I was. She was such a dear, Ralph.’
‘Yes. She was.’
‘Anyway, they’ll probably assume that we’ve . . . you know . . .’
‘Gone off on a little French leave?’
Lois laughed. ‘Something like that.’
‘Would you like to go off on a little French leave, Lois?’
She stood on tiptoe and nibbled briefly at his earlobe. ‘If we get out of this alive, you just ask me.’
He kissed the corner of her mouth before pushing open the door. ‘You can count on it, lady.’
They made for the bathrooms, and when Ralph rejoined her, Lois looked both thoughtful and a little shaken. ‘I can’t believe it’s me,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I mean, I must have spent at least two minutes staring at myself in the mirror, and I still can’t believe it. The crow’s-feet around my eyes are all gone, and Ralph . . . my hair . . .’ Those dark Spanish eyes of hers looked up at him, filled with brilliance and wonder. ‘And you! My God, I doubt if you looked this good when you were forty.’
‘I didn’t, but you should have seen me when I was thirty. I was an animal.’
She giggled. ‘Come on, fool, let’s sit down and murder some calories.’
3
‘Lois?’
She glanced up from the menu she’d plucked from a little collection of them filed between the salt and pepper shakers.
‘When I was in the bathroom, I tried to make the auras come back. This time I couldn’t do it.’
‘Why would you want to, Ralph?’
He shrugged, not wanting to tell her about the feeling of paranoia that had dropped over him as he stood at the basin in the little bathroom, washing his hands and looking into his own strangely young face in the water-spotted mirror. It had suddenly occurred to him that he might not be alone in there. Worse, Lois might not be alone next door in the women’s room. Atropos might be creeping up behind her, completely unseen, diamond-cluster earrings glittering from his tiny lobes . . . scalpel outstretched . . .
Then, instead of Lois’s earrings or McGovern’s Panama, his mind’s eye had conjured the jump-rope Atropos had been using when Ralph had spotted him
(three-six-nine, hon, the goose drank wine)
in the vacant lot between the bakery and the tanning salon, the jump-rope which had once been the prized possession of a little girl who had stumbled during a game of apartment-tag, fallen out of a second-storey window, and died of a broken neck (what a dreadful accident, she had her whole life ahead of her, if there’s a God why does He let things like that happen, and so on and so on, not to mention blah-blah-blah).
He had told himself to stop it, that things were bad enough without his indulging in gruesome fantasies of Atropos slashing Lois’s balloon-string, but it didn’t help much . . . mostly because he knew Atropos might really be here with them in the restaurant, and Atropos could do anything to them he liked. Anything at all.
Lois reached across the table and touched the back of his hand. ‘Don’t worry. The colors will come back. They always do.’
‘I suppose.’ He took a menu of his own, opened it, and cast an eye down the breakfast bill of fare. His initial impression was that he wanted one of everything.
‘The first time you saw Ed acting crazy, he was coming out of the Derry Airport,’ Lois said. ‘Now we know why. He was taking flying lessons, wasn’t he?’
‘Of course. While Trig was giving me a lift back to Harris Avenue, he even mentioned that you need a pass to come out that way, through the service gate. He asked me if I knew how Ed had gotten one, and I said I didn’t. Now I do. They must give them to all the General Aviation flying students.’
‘Do you think Helen knew about his hobby?’ Lois asked. ‘She probably didn’t, did she?’
‘I’m sure she didn’t. I’ll bet he switched over to Coastal Air right after he ran into the guy from West Side Gardeners, too. That little episode could have convinced him he was losing control, and he might do well to move his lessons a little farther away from home.’
‘Or maybe it was Atropos who convinced him,’ Lois said bleakly. ‘Atropos or someone from even higher up.’
Ralph didn’t care for the idea, but it felt right, just the same. Entities, he thought, and shivered. The Crimson King.
‘They’re dancing him around like a puppet on a string, aren’t they?’ Lois asked.
‘Atropos, you mean?’
‘No. Atropos is a nasty little bugger, but otherwise I think he’s not much different from Mr C and Mr L – low-level help, maybe only a step above unskilled labor in the grand scheme of things.’
‘Janitors.’
‘Well, yes, maybe,’ Lois agreed. ‘Janitors and gofers. Atropos is probably the one who’s done most of the actual work on Ed, and I’d bet a cookie it’s work he loves, but I’d bet my house that his orders come from higher up. Does that sound more or less on the beam to you?’
‘Yes. We’ll probably never know exactly how nuts he was before this started, or exactly when Atropos cut his balloon-string, but the thing I’m most curious about at this moment is pretty mundane. I’d like to know how in the hell he went Charlie Pickering’s bail and how he paid for his damned flying lessons.’
Before Lois could reply, a waitress approached them, digging an order-pad and a ballpoint pen out of the pocket of her apron. ‘Help you guys?’
‘I’d like a cheese and mushroom omelet,’ Ralph said.
‘Uh-huh.’ She switched her cud from one side of her jaw to the other. ‘Two-egg or three-egg, hon?’
‘Four, if that’s okay.’
She raised her eyebrows slightly and jotted on the pad. ‘Okay by me if it’s okay by you. Anything with that?’
‘Yes, please. A glass of OJ, large, an order of bacon, an order of sausage, and an order of home fries. Better make that a double order of home fries.’ He paused, thinking, then grinned. ‘Oh, and do you have any Danish left?’
‘I think I might have one cheese and one apple.’ She glanced up at him. ‘You a little hungry, hon?’
‘Feel like I haven’t eaten for a week,’ Ralph said. ‘I’ll have the cheese Danish. And coffee to start. Lots of black coffee. Did you get all that?’
‘Oh, I got it, hon. I just want to see what you look like when you leave.’ She looked at Lois. ‘How ’bout you, ma’am?’
Lois smiled sweetly. ‘I’ll have what he’s having. Hon.’
4
Ralph looked past the retreating waitress to the clock on the wall. It was only ten past seven, and that was good. They could be out at Barrett’s Orchards in less than half an hour, and with their mental lasers trained on Gretchen Tillbury, it was possible that the Susan Day speech could be called off – aborted, if you liked – as early as 9:00 a.m. Yet instead of relief he felt relentless, gnawing anxiety. It was like having an itch in a place your fingers cannot quite reach.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s put it together. I think we can assume that Ed’s been concerned about abortion for a long time, that he’s probably been a pro-life supporter for years. Then he starts to lose sleep . . . hear voices . . .’
‘. . . see little bald men . . .’
‘Well, one in particular,’ Ralph agreed. ‘Atropos becomes his guru, filling him in on the Crimson King, the Centurions, the whole nine yards. When Ed talked to me about King Herod—’
‘—he was thinking about Susan Day,’ Lois finished. ‘Atropos has been . . . what do they say on TV? . . . psyching him up. Turning him into a guided missile. Where did Ed get that scarf, do you think?’
‘Atropos,’ Ralph said. ‘Atropos has got a lot of stuff like that, I’ll bet.’
‘And what do you suppose he’s got in the plane he’ll be flying tonight?’ Lois’s voice was trembling. ‘Explosives or poison gas?’
‘Explosives would seem the more likely bet if he really is planning to get everyone; a strong wind could create problems for him if it’s gas.’ Ralph took a sip of his water and was interested to see that his hand was not quite steady. ‘On the other hand, we don’t know what goodies he might have been cooking up in his laboratory, do we?’
‘No,’ Lois said in a small voice.
Ralph put his water-glass down. ‘What he’s planning to use doesn’t interest me very much.’
‘What does?’
The waitress came back with fresh coffee, and the smell alone seemed to light up Ralph’s nerves like neon. He and Lois grabbed their cups and began to sip as soon as she had started away. The coffee was strong and hot enough to burn Ralph’s lips, but it was heaven. When he set his cup back in its saucer again, it was half empty and there was a very warm place in his midsection, as if he had swallowed a live ember. Lois was looking at him somberly over the rim of her own cup.
‘What interests me,’ Ralph told her, ‘is us. You said Atropos has turned Ed into a guided missile. That’s right; that’s exactly what the World War II kamikaze pilots were. Hitler had his V-2s; Hirohito had his Divine Wind. The disturbing thing is that Clotho and Lachesis have done the same thing to us. We’ve been loaded up with a lot of special powers and programmed to fly out to High Ridge in my Oldsmobile and stop Susan Day. I’d just like to know why.’
‘But we do know,’ she protested. ‘If we don’t step in, Ed Deepneau is going to commit suicide tonight during that woman’s speech and take two thousand people with him.’
‘Yeah,’ Ralph said, ‘and we’re going to do whatever we can to stop him, Lois, don’t worry about that.’ He finished his coffee and set the cup down again. His stomach was fully awake now, and raving for food. ‘I could no more stand aside and let Ed kill all those people than I could stand in one place and not duck if someone threw a baseball at my head. It’s just that we never got a chance to read the fine print at the bottom of the contract, and that scares me.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘It also pisses me off.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘About being played for a couple of patsies. We know why we’re going to try and stop Susan Day’s speech; we can’t stand the thought of a lunatic killing a couple of thousand innocent people. But we don’t know why they want us to do it. That’s the part that scares me.’
‘We have a chance to save two thousand lives,’ she said. ‘Are you telling me that’s enough for us but not for them?’
‘That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t think numbers impress these fellows very much; they clean us up not just by the tens or hundreds of thousands but by the millions. And they’re used to seeing the Random or the Purpose swat us in job lots.’
‘Disasters like the fire at the Cocoanut Grove,’ Lois said. ‘Or the flood here in Derry eight years ago.’
‘Yes, but even things like that are pretty small beans compared to what can and does go on in the world every year. The Flood of ’85 here in Derry killed two hundred and twenty people, something like that, but last spring there was a flood in Pakistan that killed thirty-five hundred, and the last big earthquake in Turkey killed over four thousand. And how about that nuclear reactor accident in Russia? I read someplace that you can put the floor on that one at seventy thousand dead. That’s a lot of Panama hats and jump-ropes and pairs of . . . of eyeglasses, Lois.’ He was horrified at how close he had come to saying pairs of earrings.
‘Don’t,’ she said, and shuddered.
‘I don’t like thinking about it any more than you do,’ he said, ‘but we have to, if only because those two guys were so goddam anxious to keep us from doing just that. Do you see what I’m getting at yet? You must. Big tragedies have always been a part of the Random; why is this so different?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lois said,‘but it was important enough for them to draft us, and I have an idea that was a pretty big step.’
Ralph nodded. He could feel the caffeine hitting him now, jiving up his head, jittering his fingers the tiniest bit. ‘I’m sure it was. Now think back to the hospital roof. Did you ever in your entire life hear two guys explain so much without explaining anything?’
‘I don’t get what you mean,’ Lois said, but her face suggested something else: that she didn’t want to get what he meant.
‘What I mean goes back to one central idea: maybe they can’t lie. Suppose they can’t. If you have certain information you don’t want to give out but you can’t tell a lie, what do you do?’
‘Keep dancing away from the danger zone,’ Lois said. ‘Or zones.’
‘Bingo. And isn’t that what they did?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I guess it was a dance, all right, but I thought you did a fair amount of leading, Ralph. In fact, I was impressed by all the questions you asked. I think I spent most of the time we were on that roof just trying to convince myself it was all really happening.’
‘Sure, I asked questions, lots of them, but . . .’ He stopped, not sure how to express the concept in his head, a concept which seemed simultaneously complex and baby-simple to him. He made another effort to go up a little, searching inside his head for that sensation of blink, knowing that if he could reach her mind, he could show her a picture that would be crystal clear. Nothing happened, and he drummed his fingers on the tablecloth in frustration.
‘I was just as amazed as you were,’ he said finally. ‘If my amazement came out as questions, it’s because men – those from my generation, anyway – are taught that it’s very bad form to ooh and aah. That’s for women who are picking out the drapes.’
‘Sexist.’ She smiled as she said it, but it was a smile Ralph couldn’t return. He was remembering Barbie Richards. If Ralph had moved toward her, she would almost certainly have pushed the alarm button beneath her desk, but she had allowed Lois to approach because she had swallowed a little too much of the old sister-sister-sister crap.
‘Yes,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m sexist, I’m old-fashioned, and sometimes it gets me in trouble.’
‘Ralph, I didn’t mean—’
‘I know what you meant, and it’s okay. What I’m trying to get across to you is that I was as amazed . . . as knocked out . . . as you were. So I asked questions, so what? Were they good questions? Useful questions?’
‘I guess not, huh?’
‘Well, maybe I didn’t start out so badly. As I remember, the first thing I asked when we finally made it to the roof was who they were and what they wanted. They slipped those questions with a lot of philosophical blather, but I imagine they got a little sweaty on the backs of their necks for awhile, just the same. Next we got all that background on the Purpose and the Random – fascinating, but nothing we exactly needed in order to drive out to High Ridge and persuade Gretchen Tillbury to cancel Susan Day’s speech. Hell, we would have done better – saved time – getting the road directions from them that we ended up getting from Simone’s niece.’
Lois looked startled. ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. And all the time we were talking, time was flying by the way it does when you go up a couple of levels. They were watching it fly, too, you can believe that. They were timing the whole scene so that when they finished telling us the things we did need to know, there would be no time left to ask the questions they didn’t want to answer. I think they wanted to leave us with the idea that this whole thing was a public service, that saving all those lives is what it’s all about, but they couldn’t come right out and say so, because—’
‘Because that would be a lie, and maybe they can’t lie.’
‘Right. Maybe they can’t lie.’
‘So what do they want, Ralph?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t have a clue, Lois. Not even a hint.’
She finished her own coffee, set the cup carefully back down in its saucer, studied her fingertips for a moment, then looked up at him. Again he was forcibly struck by her beauty – almost levelled by it.
‘They were good,’ she said. ‘They are good. I felt that very strongly. Didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said, almost reluctantly. Of course he had felt it. They were everything Atropos was not.
‘And you’re going to try to stop Ed regardless – you said you could no more not try than you could not try to duck a baseball someone chucked at your head. Isn’t that so?’
‘Yes,’ he said, more reluctantly still.
‘Then you should let the rest of it go,’ she said calmly, meeting his blue eyes with her dark ones. ‘It’s just taking up space inside your head, Ralph. Making clutter.’
He saw the truth of what she said, but still doubted if he could simply open his hand and let that part of it fly free. Maybe you had to live to be seventy before you could fully appreciate how hard it was to escape your upbringing. He was a man whose education on how to be a man had begun before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and he was still a prisoner of a generation that had listened to H.V. Kaltenborn and the Andrews Sisters on the radio – a generation of men that believed in moonlight cocktails and walking a mile for a Camel. Such an upbringing almost negated such nice moral questions as who was working for the good and who was working for the bad; the important thing was not to let the bullies kick sand in your face. Not to be led by the nose.
Is that so? Carolyn asked, coolly amused. How fascinating. But let me be the first to let you in on a little secret, Ralph: that’s crap. It was crap back before Glenn Miller disappeared over the horizon and it’s crap now. The idea that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, now . . . there might be a little truth to that, even in this day and age. It’s a long walk back to Eden in any case, isn’t it, sweetheart?
Yes. A very long walk back to Eden.
‘What are you smiling about, Ralph?’
He was saved the need to reply by the arrival of the waitress and a huge tray of food. He noticed for the first time that there was a button pinned to the frill of her apron. LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE, it read.
‘Are you going to the rally at the Civic Center tonight?’ Ralph asked her.
‘I’ll be there,’ she said, setting her tray down on the unoccupied table next to theirs in order to free her hands. ‘Outside. Carrying a sign. Walking roundy-round.’
‘Are you a Friend of Life?’ Lois asked as the waitress began to deal out omelets and side-dishes.
‘Am I livin?’ the waitress asked.
‘Yes, you certainly appear to be,’ Lois said politely.
‘Well, I guess that makes me a Friend of Life, doesn’t it? Killing something that could someday write a great poem or invent a drug that cures AIDS or cancer, in my book that’s just flat wrong. So I’ll wave my sign around and make sure the Norma Kamali feminists and Volvo liberals can see that the word on it is MURDER. They hate that word. They don’t use it at their cocktail parties and fundraisers. You folks need ketchup?’
‘No,’ Ralph said. He could not take his eyes off her. A faint green glow had begun to spread around her – it almost seemed to come wisping up from her pores. The auras were coming back, cycling up to full brilliance.
‘’D I grow a second head or somethin while I wasn’t lookin?’ the waitress asked. She popped her gum and switched it to the other side of her mouth.
‘I was staring, wasn’t I?’ Ralph asked. He felt blood heating his cheeks. ‘Sorry.’
The waitress shrugged her beefy shoulders, setting the upper part of her aura into lazy, fascinating motion. ‘I try not to get carried away with this stuff, you know? Most days I just do my job and keep my mouth shut. But I ain’t no quitter, either. Do you know how long I’ve been marchin around in front of that brick slaughterin pen, on days hot enough to fry my butt and nights cold enough to freeze it off?’
Ralph and Lois shook their heads.
‘Since 1984. Nine long years. You know what gets me the most about the choicers?’
‘What?’ Lois asked quietly.
‘They’re the same people who want to see guns outlawed so people won’t shoot each other with them, the same ones who say the electric chair and the gas chamber are unconstitutional because they’re cruel and unusual punishment. They say those things, then go out and support laws that allow doctors – doctors! – to stick vacuum tubes into women’s wombs and pull their unborn sons and daughters to pieces. That’s what gets me the most.’
The waitress said all this – it had the feel of a speech she had made many times before – without raising her voice or displaying the slightest outward sign of anger. Ralph only listened with half an ear; most of his attention was fixed on the pale green aura which surrounded her. Except it wasn’t all pale green. A yellowish-black blotch revolved slowly over her lower right side like a dirty wagon wheel.
Her liver, Ralph thought. Something wrong with her liver.
‘You wouldn’t really want anything to happen to Susan Day, would you?’ Lois asked, looking at the waitress with troubled eyes. ‘You seem like a very nice person, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that.’
The waitress sighed through her nose, producing two jets of fine green mist. ‘I ain’t as nice as I look, hon. If God did something to her, I’d be the first wavin my hands around in the air and sayin “Thy will be done,” believe me. But if you’re talking about some nut, I guess that’s different. Things like that drag us all down, put us on the same level as the people we’re trying to stop. The nuts don’t see it that way, though. They’re the jokers in the deck.’
‘Yes,’ Ralph said. ‘Jokers in the deck is just what they are.’
‘I guess I really don’t want anything bad to happen to that woman,’ the waitress said, ‘but something could. It really could. And the way I look at it, if something does, she’s got no one to blame but herself. She’s running with the wolves . . . and women who run with wolves shouldn’t go acting too surprised if they get bitten.’
5
Ralph wasn’t sure how much he would want to eat after that, but his appetite turned out to have survived the wait-ress’s views on abortion and Susan Day quite nicely. The auras helped; food had never tasted this good to him, not even as a teenager, when he’d eaten five and even six meals a day, if he could get them.
Lois matched him bite for bite, at least for awhile. At last she pushed the remains of her home fries and her last two strips of bacon aside. Ralph plugged gamely on down the home stretch alone. He wrapped the last bite of toast around the last bit of sausage, pushed it into his mouth, swallowed, and sat back in his chair with a vast sigh.
‘Your aura has gone two shades darker, Ralph. I don’t know if that means you finally got enough to eat or that you’re going to die of indigestion.’
‘Could be both,’ he said. ‘You see them again too, huh?’
She nodded.
‘You know something?’ he asked. ‘Of all the things in the world, the one I’d like most right now is a nap.’ Yes indeed. Now that he was warm and fed, the last four months of largely sleepless nights seemed to have fallen on him like a bag filled with sashweights. His eyelids felt as if they had been dipped in cement.
‘I think that would be a bad idea right now,’ Lois said, sounding alarmed. ‘A very bad idea.’
‘I suppose so,’ Ralph agreed.
Lois started to raise her hand for the check, then lowered it again. ‘What about calling your policeman friend? Leydecker, isn’t that his name? Could he help us? Would he?’
Ralph considered this as carefully as his muzzy head would allow, then reluctantly shook his head. ‘I don’t quite dare try it. What could we tell him that wouldn’t get us committed? And that’s only part of the problem. If he did get involved . . . but in the wrong way . . . he might make things worse instead of better.’
‘Okay.’ Lois waved to the waitress. ‘We’re going to ride out there with all the windows open, and we’re going to stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts out in the Old Cape for giant economy-sized coffees. My treat.’
Ralph smiled. It felt large and dopey and disconnected on his face – almost a drunken smile. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
When the waitress came over and slid their check face-down in front of him, Ralph noticed that the button reading LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE was no longer pinned to the frill of her apron.
‘Listen,’ she said with an earnestness Ralph found almost painfully touching,‘I’m sorry if I offended you folks. You came in for breakfast, not a lecture.’
‘You didn’t offend us,’ Ralph said. He glanced across the table at Lois, who nodded agreement.
The waitress smiled briefly. ‘Thanks for saying so, but I still kinda zoomed on you. Any other day I wouldn’ta, but we’re having our own rally this afternoon at four, and I’m introducing Mr Dalton. They told me I could have three minutes, and I guess that’s about what I gave you.’
‘That’s all right,’ Lois said, and patted her hand. ‘Really.’
The waitress’s smile was warmer and more genuine this time, but as she started to turn away, Ralph saw Lois’s pleasant expression falter. She was looking at the yellow-black blob floating just above the waitress’s right hip.
Ralph pulled out the pen he kept clipped to his breast pocket, turned over his paper placemat, and printed quickly on the back. When he was done, he took out his wallet and placed a five-dollar bill carefully below what he had written. When the waitress reached for the tip, she would hardly be able to avoid seeing the message.
He picked up the check and flapped it at Lois. ‘Our first real date and I guess it’ll have to be dutch,’ he said. ‘I’m three bucks short if I leave her the five. Please tell me you’re not broke.’
‘Who, the poker queen of Ludlow Grange? Don’t be seely, dollink.’ She handed him a helter-skelter fistful of bills from her purse. While he sorted through them for what he needed, she read what he had written on the placemat:
Madam:
You are suffering from reduced liver function and should see your doctor immediately. And I strongly advise you to stay away from the Civic Center tonight.
‘Pretty stupid, I know,’ Ralph said.
She kissed the tip of his nose. ‘Trying to help other people is never stupid.’
‘Thanks. She won’t believe it, though. She’ll think we were pissed off about her button and her little speech in spite of what we said. That what I wrote is just our weird way of trying to get our own back on her.’
‘Maybe there’s a way to convince her otherwise.’
Lois fixed the waitress – who was standing hipshot by the kitchen pass-through and talking to the short-order cook while she drank a cup of coffee – with a look of dark concentration. As she did, Ralph saw Lois’s normal blue-gray aura deepen in color and draw inward, becoming a kind of body-hugging capsule.
He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on . . . but he could feel it. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention; his forearms broke out in gooseflesh. She’s powering up, he thought, flipping all the switches, turning on all the turbines, and doing it on behalf of a woman she never saw before and will probably never see again.
After a moment the waitress felt it, too. She turned to look at them as if she had heard her name called. Lois smiled casually and twiddled her fingers in a small wave, but when she spoke to Ralph, her voice was trembling with effort. ‘I’ve almost . . . almost got it.’
‘Almost got what?’
‘I don’t know. Whatever it is I need. It’ll come in a second. Her name is Zoë, with two dots over the e. Go pay the check. Distract her. Try to keep her from looking at me. It makes it harder.’
He did as she asked and was fairly successful in spite of the way Zoë kept trying to look over his shoulder at Lois. The first time she attempted to ring the check into the register, Zoë came up with a total of $234.20. She cleared the numbers with an impatient poke of her finger, and when she looked up at Ralph, her face was pale and her eyes were upset.
‘What’s with your wife?’ she asked Ralph. ‘I apologized, didn’t I? So why does she keep looking at me like that?’
Ralph knew Zoë couldn’t see Lois, because he was all but tap-dancing in an effort to keep his body between the two of them, but he also knew she was right – Lois was staring.
He attempted to smile. ‘I don’t know what—’
The waitress jumped and shot a startled, irritated glance back at the short-order cook. ‘Quit banging those pots around!’ she shouted, although the only thing Ralph had heard from the kitchen was a radio playing elevator-music. Zoë looked back at Ralph. ‘Christ, it sounds like Vietnam back there. Now if you could just tell your wife it’s not polite to—’
‘To stare? She’s not. She’s really not.’ Ralph stood aside. Lois had gone to the door and was looking out at the street with her back to them. ‘See?’
Zoë didn’t reply for several seconds, although she kept looking at Lois. At last she turned back to Ralph. ‘Sure. I see. Now why don’t you and her just make yourselves scarce?’
‘All right – still friends?’
‘Whatever you want,’ Zoë said, but she wouldn’t look at him.
When Ralph rejoined Lois, he saw that her aura had gone back to its former, more diffuse state, but it was much brighter than it had been.
‘Still tired, Lois?’ he asked her softly.
‘No. As a matter of fact, I feel fine now. Let’s go.’
He started to open the door for her, then stopped. ‘Got my pen?’
‘Gee, no – I guess it’s still on the table.’
Ralph went over to pick it up. Below his note, Lois had added a PS in rolling Palmer-method script:
In 1989 you had a baby and gave him up for adoption. Saint Anne’s, in Providence, RI. Go and see your doctor before it’s too late, Zoë. No joke. No trick. We know what we’re talking about.
‘Oh boy,’ Ralph said as he rejoined her. ‘That’s going to scare the bejesus out of her.’
‘If she gets to her doctor before her liver goes belly-up, I don’t care.’
He nodded and they went out.
6
‘Did you get that stuff about her kid when you dipped into her aura?’ Ralph asked as they crossed the leaf-strewn parking lot.
Lois nodded. Beyond the lot, the entire east side of Derry was shimmering with bright, kaleidoscopic light. It was coming back hard now, very hard, that secret light cycling up and up. Ralph reached out and put his hand on the side of his car. Touching it was like tasting a slick, licorice-flavored cough-drop.
‘I don’t think I took very much of her . . . her stuff,’ Lois said, ‘but it was as if I swallowed all of her.’
Ralph remembered something he’d read in a science magazine not long ago. ‘If every cell in our bodies contains a complete blueprint of how we’re made,’ he said, ‘why shouldn’t every bit of a person’s aura contain a complete blueprint of what we are?’
‘That doesn’t sound very scientific, Ralph.’
‘I suppose not.’
She squeezed his arm and grinned up at him. ‘It does sound about right, though.’
He grinned back at her.
‘You need to take some more, too,’ she told him. ‘It still feels wrong to me – like stealing – but if you don’t, I think you’re going to pass right out on your feet.’
‘As soon as I can. Right now all I want to do is get out to High Ridge.’ Yet once he got behind the wheel, his hand faltered away from the ignition key almost as soon as he touched it.
‘Ralph? What is it?’
‘Nothing . . . everything. I can’t drive like this. I’ll wrap us around a telephone pole or drive us into some-body’s living room.’
He looked up at the sky and saw one of those huge birds, this one transparent, roosting atop a satellite dish on the roof of an apartment house across the way. A thin, lemon-colored haze drifted up from its folded prehistoric wings.
Are you seeing it? a part of his mind asked doubtfully. Are you sure of that, Ralph? Are you really, really sure?
I’m seeing it, all right. Fortunately or unfortunately, I’m seeing it all . . . but if there was ever a right time to see such things, this isn’t it.
He concentrated, and felt that interior blink happen deep within his mind. The bird faded away like a ghost-image on a TV screen. The warmly glowing palette of colors spread out across the morning lost their vibrancy. He went on perceiving that other part of the world long enough to see the colors run into one another, creating the bright gray-blue haze which he’d begun seeing on the day he’d gone into Day Break, Sun Down for coffee and pie with Joe Wyzer – and then that was gone, too. Ralph felt an almost crushing need to curl up, pillow his head on his arm, and go to sleep. He began taking long, slow breaths instead, pulling each one a little deeper into his lungs, and then turned the ignition key. The engine roared into life, accompanied by that clacking sound. It was much louder now.
‘What’s that?’ Lois asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said, but he thought he did – either a tie-rod or a piston. In either case they would be in trouble if it let go. At last the sound began to diminish, and Ralph dropped the transmission into Drive. ‘Just poke me hard if you see me starting to nod off, Lois.’
‘You can count on it,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1
‘He said he wanted me to drive,’ Wyzer told them as he carefully turned his car around at the entrance to the gravel-pit.
‘Where to?’ Lois asked. She was sitting in the back with Dorrance. Ralph was in the front seat with Joe Wyzer, who looked as if he weren’t quite sure where or even who he was. Ralph had slid up – just the tiniest bit – as he shook hands with the pharmacist, wanting to get a look at Wyzer’s aura. Both it and his balloon-string were there, and both looked perfectly healthy . . . but the bright yellow-orange looked slightly muted to him. Ralph had an idea that was very likely Old Dor’s influence.
‘Good question,’ Wyzer said. He voiced a small, confused laugh. ‘I don’t have the slightest idea, really. This has been the weirdest day of my entire life. Absolutely no doubt about it.’
The woods road ended in a T-junction with a stretch of two-lane blacktop. Wyzer stopped, looked for traffic, then turned left. They passed a sign reading TO 1–95 almost right away, and Ralph guessed that Wyzer would turn north as soon as they reached the turnpike. He knew where they were now – just about two miles south of Route 33. From here they could be back in Derry in less than half an hour, and Ralph had no doubt that was just where they were going.
He abruptly began to laugh. ‘Well, here we are,’ he said. ‘Just three happy folks out for a midday drive. Make that four. Welcome to the wonderful world of hyper-reality, Joe.’
Joe gave him a sharp look, then relaxed into a grin. ‘Is that what this is?’ And before either Ralph or Lois could reply: ‘Yeah, I suppose it is.’
‘Did you read that poem?’ Dorrance asked from behind Ralph. ‘The one that starts “Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else”?’
Ralph turned and saw that Dorrance was still smiling his wide, placid smile. ‘Yes, I did. Dor—’
‘Isn’t it a crackerjack? It’s so good. Stephen Dobyns reminds me of Hart Crane without the pretensions. Or maybe I mean Stephen Crane, but I don’t think so. Of course he doesn’t have the music of Dylan Thomas, but is that so bad? Probably not. Modern poetry is not about music. It’s about nerve – who has it and who doesn’t.’
‘Oh boy,’ Lois said. She rolled her eyes.
‘He could probably tell us everything we need to know if we went up a few levels,’ Ralph said, ‘but you don’t want that, do you, Dor? Because time goes faster when you’re high.’
‘Bingo,’ Dorrance replied. The blue signs marking the north and south entrances to the turnpike glimmered up ahead. ‘You’ll have to go up later, I imagine, you and Lois both, and so it’s very important to save as much time as you can now. Save . . . time.’ He made a queerly evocative gesture, drawing a gnarled thumb and forefinger down in the air, bringing them together as he did, as if to indicate some narrowing passage.
Joe Wyzer put on his blinker, turned left, and headed down the northbound ramp to Derry.
‘How did you get involved in this, Joe?’ Ralph asked him. ‘Of all the people on the west side, why did Dorrance draft you as chauffeur?’
Wyzer shook his head, and when the car reached the turnpike it drifted immediately over into the passing lane. Ralph reached out quickly and made a midcourse correction, reminding himself that Joe probably hadn’t been getting much sleep himself just lately. He was very happy to see the highway was mostly deserted, at least this far out of town. It would save some anxiety, and God knew he would take whatever he could get in that department today.
‘We are all bound together by the Purpose,’ Dorrance said abruptly. ‘That’s ka-tet, which means one made of many. The way that many rhymes make up a single poem. You see?’
‘No.’ Ralph, Lois, and Joe said it at the same time, in perfect, unrehearsed chorus, and then laughed nervously together. The Three Insomniacs of the Apocalypse, Ralph thought. Jesus save us.
‘That’s okay,’ Old Dor said, smiling his wide smile. ‘Just take my word for it. You and Lois . . . Helen and her little daughter . . . Bill . . . Faye Chapin . . . Trigger Vachon . . . me! All part of the Purpose.’
‘That’s fine, Dor,’ Lois said, ‘but where’s the Purpose taking us now? And what are we supposed to do when we get there?’
Dorrance leaned forward and whispered in Joe Wyzer’s ear, guarding his lips with one puffy, age-spotted hand. Then he sat back again, looking deeply satisfied with himself.
‘He says we’re going to the Civic Center,’ Joe said.
‘The Civic Center!’ Lois exclaimed, sounding alarmed. ‘No, that can’t be right! Those two little men said—’
‘Never mind them right now,’ Dorrance said. ‘Just remember what it’s about – nerve. Who has it, and who doesn’t.’
2
Silence in Joe Wyzer’s Ford for almost the space of a mile. Dorrance opened his book of Robert Creeley poems and began to read one, tracing his way from line to line with the yellowed nail of one ancient finger. Ralph found himself remembering a game they had sometimes played as kids – not a very nice one. Snipe Hunt, it had been called. You got kids who were a little younger and a lot more gullible than you were, fed them a cock-and-bull story about the mythical snipe, then gave them towsacks and sent them out to spend a strenuous afternoon wandering around in the damps and the willywags, looking for nonexistent birds. This game was also called Wild Goose Chase, and he suddenly had the inescapable feeling that Clotho and Lachesis had been playing it with him and Lois up on the hospital roof.
He turned around in his seat and looked directly at Old Dor. Dorrance folded over the top corner of the page he was reading, closed his book, and looked back at Ralph with polite interest.
‘They told us we weren’t to go near either Ed Deepneau or Doc #3,’ Ralph said. He spoke slowly and with great clarity. ‘They told us very specifically that we weren’t even to think of doing that, because the situation had invested both of them with great power and we were apt to get swatted like flies. In fact, I think Lachesis said that if we tried getting near either Ed or Atropos, we might end up having a visit from one of the upper-level honchos . . . someone Ed calls the Crimson King. Not a very nice fellow, either, by all reports.’
‘Yes,’ Lois said in a faint voice. ‘That’s what they told us on the hospital roof. They said we had to convince the women in charge to cancel Susan Day’s appearance. That’s why we went out to High Ridge.’
‘And did you succeed in convincing them?’ Wyzer asked.
‘No. Ed’s crazy friends came before we could get there, set the place on fire, and killed at least two of the women. Shot them. One was the woman we really wanted to talk to.’
‘Gretchen Tillbury,’ Ralph said.
‘Yes,’ Lois agreed. ‘But surely we don’t need to do any more – I can’t believe they’ll go ahead with the rally now. I mean, how could they? My God, at least four people are dead! Probably more! They’ll have to cancel her speech or at least postpone it. Isn’t that so?’
Neither Dorrance nor Joe replied. Ralph didn’t reply, either – he was thinking of Helen’s red-rimmed, furious eyes. How can you even ask? she’d said. If they stop us now, they win.
If they stop us now, they win.
Was there any legal way the police could stop them? Probably not. The City Council, then? Maybe. Maybe they could hold a special meeting and revoke WomanCare’s rally permit. But would they? If there were two thousand angry, grief-stricken women marching around the Municipal Building and yelling If they stop us now they win in unison, would the Council revoke the permit?
Ralph began to feel a deep sinking sensation in his gut.
Helen clearly considered tonight’s rally more important than ever, and she wouldn’t be the only one. It was no longer just about choice and who had the right to decide what a woman did with her own body; now it was about causes important enough to die for and honoring the friends who had done just that. Now they were talking not just about politics but about a kind of secular requiem mass for the dead.
Lois had grabbed his shoulder and was shaking it hard. Ralph came back to the here and now, but slowly, like a man being shaken awake in the middle of an incredibly vivid dream.
‘They will cancel it, won’t they? And even if they don’t, if for some crazy reason they don’t, most people will stay away, right? After what happened at High Ridge, they’ll be afraid to come!’
Ralph thought about that and then shook his head. ‘Most people will think the danger’s over. The news reports are going to say that two of the radicals who attacked High Ridge are dead, and the third is catatonic, or something.’
‘But Ed! What about Ed?’ she cried. ‘He’s the one who got them to attack, for heaven’s sake! He’s the one who sent them out there in the first place!’
‘That may be true, probably is true, but how would we prove it? Do you know what I think the cops will find at wherever Charlie Pickering’s been hanging his hat? A note saying it was all his idea. A note exonerating Ed completely, probably in the guise of an accusation . . . how Ed deserted them in their time of greatest need. And if they don’t find a note like that in Charlie’s rented room, they’ll find it in Frank Felton’s. Or Sandra McKay’s.’
‘But that . . . that’s . . .’ Lois stopped, biting at her lower lip. Then she looked at Wyzer with hopeful eyes. ‘What about Susan Day? Where is she? Does anybody know? Do you? Ralph and I will call her on the telephone and—’
‘She’s already in Derry,’ Wyzer said, ‘although I doubt if even the police know for sure where she is. But what I heard on the news while the old fella and I were driving out here is that the rally is going to happen tonight . . . and that’s supposedly straight from the woman herself.’
Sure, Ralph thought. Sure it is. The show’s going on, the show has to go on, and she knows it. Someone who’s ridden the crest of the women’s movement all these years – hell, since the Chicago convention in ’68 – knows a genuine watershed moment when she sees it. She’s evaluated the risks and found them acceptable. Either that or she’s evaluated the situation and decided that the credibility-loss involved in walking away would be unacceptable. Maybe both. In any case, she’s as much a prisoner of events – of ka-tet – as the rest of us.
They were on the outskirts of Derry again. Ralph could see the Civic Center on the horizon.
Now it was Old Dor Lois turned to. ‘Where is she? Do you know? It doesn’t matter how many security people she’s got around her; Ralph and I can be invisible when we want to be . . . and we’re very good at changing people’s minds.’
‘Oh, changing Susan Day’s mind wouldn’t change anything,’ Dor said. He still wore that broad, maddening smile. ‘They’ll come to the Civic Center tonight no matter what. If they come and find the doors locked, they’ll break them open and go inside and have their rally just the same. To show they’re not afraid.’
‘Done-bun-can’t-be-undone,’ Ralph said dully.
‘Right, Ralph!’ Dor said cheerily, and patted Ralph’s arm.
3
Five minutes later, Joe drove his Ford past the hideous plastic statue of Paul Bunyan which stood in front of the Civic Center and turned in at a sign which read THERE’S ALWAYS FREE PARKING AT YOUR CIVIC CENTER!
The acre of parking lot lay between the Civic Center building itself and the Bassey Park racetrack. If the event that evening had been a rock concert or a boat-show or a wrestling card, they would have had the parking lot entirely to themselves this early, but tonight’s event was clearly going to be light-years from an exhibition basketball game or a monster truck-pull. There were already sixty or seventy cars in the lot, and little groups of people standing around, looking at the building. Most of them were women. Some had picnic hampers, several were crying, and almost all wore black armbands. Ralph saw a middle-aged woman with a weary, intelligent face and a great mass of gray hair passing these out from a carrybag. She was wearing a tee-shirt with Susan Day’s face on it and the words WE SHALL Imag 2VERCImag 3ME.
The drive-through area in front of the Civic Center’s bank of entrance doors was even busier than the parking lot. No fewer than six TV newsvans were parked there, and various tech crews stood under the triangular cement canopy in little clusters, discussing how they were going to handle tonight’s event. And according to the bedsheet banner which hung down from the canopy, flapping lazily in the breeze, there was going to be an event. RALLY IS ON, it read in large, blurry spray-paint letters. 8 P.M. COME SHOW YOUR SOLIDARITY EXPRESS YOUR OUTRAGE COMFORT YOUR SISTERS.
Joe put the Ford in Park, then turned to Old Dor, eyebrows raised. Dor nodded, and Joe looked at Ralph. ‘I guess this is where you and Lois get out, Ralph. Good luck. I’d come with you if I could – I even asked him – but he says I’m not equipped.’
‘That’s all right,’ Ralph said. ‘We appreciate everything you’ve done, don’t we, Lois?’
‘We certainly do,’ Lois said.
Ralph reached for the doorhandle, then let it go again. He turned to face Dorrance. ‘What’s this about? Really, I mean. It’s not about saving the two thousand or so people Clotho and Lachesis said are going to be here tonight, that’s for sure. To the kind of All-Time forces they talked about, two thousand lives are probably just a little more grease on the bearings. So what’s it all about, Alfie? Why are we here?’
Dorrance’s grin had faded at last; with it gone he looked younger and strangely formidable. ‘Job asked God the same question,’ he said, ‘and got no answer. You’re not going to get one either, but I’ll tell you this much: you’ve become the pivot-point of great events and vast forces. The work of the higher universe has almost completely come to a stop as those of both the Random and the Purpose turn to mark your progress.’
‘That’s great, but I don’t get it,’ Ralph said, more in resignation than in anger.
‘Neither do I, but those two thousand lives are enough for me,’ Lois said quietly. ‘I could never live with myself if I didn’t at least try to stop what’s going to happen. I’d dream of the deathbag around that building for the rest of my life. Even if I only got an hour’s sleep a night I’d dream of it.’
Ralph considered this, then nodded. He opened his door and swung one foot out. ‘That’s a good point. And Helen’ll be there. She might even bring Nat. Maybe, for little Short-Time farts like us, that’s enough.’
And maybe, he thought, I want a rematch with Doc #3.
Oh, Ralph, Carolyn mourned. Clint Eastwood? Again?
No, not Clint Eastwood. Not Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, either. Not even John Wayne. He was no big action-hero or movie-star; he was just plain old Ralph Roberts from Harris Avenue. That didn’t make the grudge he bore the doc with the rusty scalpel any less real, however. And now that grudge was a lot bigger than just a stray dog and the retired history teacher who had lived downstairs for the last ten years or so. Ralph kept thinking of the parlor at High Ridge, and the women propped against the wall below the poster of Susan Day. It wasn’t upon Merrilee’s pregnant belly which the eye in his mind kept focusing but Gretchen Tillbury’s hair – her beautiful blonde hair that had been mostly burned off by the close-range rifle-shot that had taken her life. Charlie Pickering had pulled the trigger, and maybe Ed Deepneau had put the gun in his hands, but it was Atropos Ralph blamed, Atropos the jump-rope-thief, Atropos the hat-thief, Atropos the comb-thief.
Atropos the earring-thief.
‘Come on, Lois,’ he said. ‘Let’s—’
But she put her hand on his arm and shook her head. ‘Not just yet – get back in here and shut the door.’
He looked at her carefully, then did what she said. She paused, gathering her thoughts, and when she spoke, she looked directly at Old Dor.
‘I still don’t understand why we were sent out to High Ridge,’ she said. ‘They never even came right out and said that was what we were supposed to do, but we know – don’t we, Ralph? – that that was what they wanted from us. And I want to understand. If we’re supposed to be here, why did we have to go out there? I mean, we saved some lives, and I’m glad, but I think Ralph’s right – a few lives don’t mean much to the people running this show.’
Silence for a moment, and then Dorrance said, ‘Did Clotho and Lachesis really strike you as all-wise and all-knowing, Lois?’
‘Well . . . they were smart, but I guess they weren’t exactly geniuses,’ she said after a moment’s thought. ‘At one point they called themselves working joes who were a long way down the ladder from the boardroom executives who actually made the decisions.’
Old Dor was nodding and smiling. ‘Clotho and Lachesis are almost Short-Timers themselves, in the big scheme of things. They have their own fears and mental blindspots. They are also capable of making bad decisions . . . but in the end, that doesn’t matter, because they also serve the Purpose. And ka-tet.’
‘They thought we’d lose if we went head-to-head with Atropos, didn’t they?’ Ralph asked. ‘That’s why they talked themselves into believing we could accomplish what they wanted to using the back door . . . the back door being High Ridge.’
‘Yes,’ Dor said. ‘That’s it.’
‘Great,’ Ralph said. ‘I love a vote of confidence. Especially when—’
‘No,’ Dor said. ‘That’s not it.’
Ralph and Lois exchanged a bewildered glance.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘It’s both things at the same time. That’s very often the way things are within the Purpose. You see . . . well . . .’ He sighed. ‘I hate all these questions. I hardly ever answer questions, did I tell you that?’
‘Yes,’ Lois said. ‘You did.’
‘Yes. And now, bingo! All these questions. Nasty! And useless!’
Ralph looked at Lois, and she looked back at him. Neither of them made any move to get out.
Dor heaved a sigh. ‘All right . . . but this is the last thing I’m going to say, so pay attention. Clotho and Lachesis may have sent you to High Ridge for the wrong reasons, but the Purpose sent you there for the right ones. You fulfilled your task there.’
‘By saving the women,’ Lois said.
But Dorrance was shaking his head.
‘Then what did we do?’ she nearly shouted. ‘What? Don’t we have a right to know what part of the gosh-damned Purpose we fulfilled?’
‘No,’ Dorrance said. ‘At least not yet. Because you have to do it again.’
‘This is crazy,’ Ralph said.
‘It isn’t, though,’ Dorrance replied. He was holding For Love tightly against his chest now, bending it back and forth and looking at Ralph earnestly. ‘Random is crazy. Purpose is sane.’
All right, Ralph thought, what did we do at High Ridge besides save the people in the cellar? And John Leydecker, of course – I think Pickering might have killed him as well as Chris Nell if I hadn’t intervened. Could it be something to do with Leydecker?
He supposed it could, but it didn’t feel right.
‘Dorrance,’ he said, ‘can’t you please give us a little more information? I mean—’
‘No,’ Old Dor said, not unkindly. ‘No more questions, no more time. We’ll have a good meal together after this is over . . . if we’re still around, that is.’
‘You really know how to cheer a fellow up, Dor.’ Ralph opened his door. Lois did the same, and they both stepped out into the parking lot. He bent down and looked at Joe Wyzer. ‘Is there anything else? Anything you can think of?’
‘No, I don’t think—’
Dor leaned forward and whispered in his ear. Joe listened, frowning.
‘Well?’ Ralph asked when Dorrance sat back. ‘What did he say?’
‘He said not to forget my comb,’ Joe said. ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about, but what else is new?’
‘That’s okay,’ Ralph said, and smiled a little. ‘It’s one of the few things I do understand. Come on, Lois – let’s check out the crowd. Mingle a little.’
4
Halfway across the parking lot, she elbowed him so hard in the side that Ralph staggered. ‘Look!’ she whispered. ‘Right over there! Isn’t that Connie Chung?’
Ralph looked. Yes; the woman in the beige coat standing between two techs with the CBS logo on their jackets was almost certainly Connie Chung. He had admired her pretty, intelligent face and pleasant smile over too many evening meals to have much doubt about it.
‘Either her or her twin sister,’ he said.
Lois seemed to have forgotten all about Old Dor and High Ridge and the bald docs; in that moment she was once more the woman Bill McGovern had liked to call ‘our Lois’. ‘I’ll be darned! What’s she doing here?’
‘Well,’ Ralph began, and then covered his mouth to hide a jaw-cracking yawn, ‘I guess what’s going on in Derry is national news now. She must be here to do a live segment in front of the Civic Center for tonight’s news. In any case—’
Suddenly, with no warning at all, the auras swam back. Ralph gasped.
‘Jesus! Lois, are you seeing this?’
But he didn’t think she was. If she had been, Ralph didn’t think Connie Chung would have rated even an honorable mention on Lois’s attention-roster. This was horrible almost beyond conceiving, and for the first time Ralph fully realized that even the bright world of auras had its dark side, one that would make an ordinary person fall on his knees and thank God for his reduced perceptions.
And this isn’t even stepping up the ladder, he thought. At least, I don’t think it is. I’m only looking at that wider world, like a man looking through a window. I’m not actually in it.
Nor did he want to be in it. Just looking at something like this was almost enough to make you wish you were blind.
Lois was frowning at him. ‘What, the colors? No. Should I try to? Is there something wrong with them?’
He tried to answer and couldn’t. A moment later he felt her hand seize his arm in a painful pincers grip above the elbow and knew that no explanation was necessary. For better or worse, Lois was now seeing for herself.
‘Oh dear,’ she whimpered in a breathless little voice that teetered on the edge of tears. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh jeez Louise.’
From the roof of Derry Home, the aura hanging over the Civic Center had looked like a vast, saggy umbrella – the Travelers’ Insurance Company logo colored black by a child’s crayon, perhaps. Standing here in the parking lot, it was like being inside a large and indescribably nasty mosquito net, one so old and badly cared-for that its gauzy walls had silted up with blackish-green mildew. The bright October sun shrank to a bleary circle of tarnished silver. The air took on a gloomy, foggy cast that made Ralph think of pictures of London at the end of the nineteenth century. They were not just looking at the Civic Center deathbag, not anymore; they were buried alive in it. Ralph could feel it pressing hungrily in on him, trying to overwhelm him with feelings of loss and despair and dismay.
Why bother? he asked himself, watching apathetically as Joe Wyzer’s Ford drove back down toward Main Street with Old Dor still sitting in the back seat. I mean hey, really, what the hell is the use? We can’t change this thing, no way we can. Maybe we did something out at High Ridge, but the difference between what was going on out there and what’s happening here is like the difference between a smudge and a black hole. If we try to mess in with this business, we’re going to get flattened.
He heard moaning from beside him and realized Lois was crying. Mustering his flagging energy, he slid an arm around her shoulders. ‘Hold on, Lois,’ he said. ‘We can stand up to this.’ But he wondered.
‘We’re breathing it in!’ she wept. ‘It’s like we’re sucking up death! Oh, Ralph, let’s get away from here! Please let’s just get away from here!’
The idea sounded as good to him as the idea of water must sound to a man dying of thirst in the desert, but he shook his head. ‘Two thousand people are going to die here tonight if we don’t do something. I’m pretty confused about the rest of this business but that much I can grasp with no trouble at all.’
‘Okay,’ she whispered. ‘Just keep your arm around me so I don’t crack my head open if I faint.’
It was ironic, Ralph thought. They now had the faces and bodies of people in the early years of a vigorous middle age, but they shuffled across the parking lot like a pair of old-timers whose muscles have turned to string and whose bones have turned to glass. He could hear Lois’s breathing, rapid and labored, like the breathing of a woman who has just sustained some serious injury.
‘I’ll take you back if you want,’ Ralph said, and he meant it. He would take her back to the parking lot, he would take her to the orange bus-stop bench he could see from here. And when the bus came, getting on and going back to Harris Avenue would be the simplest thing in the world.
He could feel the killer aura which surrounded this place pressing in on him, trying to smother him like a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and he found himself remembering something McGovern had said about May Locher’s emphysema that it was one of those diseases that keep on giving. And now he supposed he had a pretty good idea of how May Locher had felt during her last few years. It didn’t matter how hard he sucked at the black air or how deep he dragged it down; it did not satisfy. His heart and head went on pounding, making him feel as if he were suffering the worst hangover of his life.
He was opening his mouth to repeat that he’d take her back when she spoke up, talking in little out-of-breath gasps. ‘I guess I can make it . . . but I hope . . . it won’t take long. Ralph, how come we can feel something this bad even without being able to see the colors? Why can’t they?’ She pointed at the media people milling around the Civic Center. ‘Are we Short-Timers that insensitive? I hate to think that.’
He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know, but he thought that perhaps the news crews, video technicians, and security guards clustered around the doors and beneath the spray-painted banner hanging from the canopy did feel something. He saw lots of hands holding styrofoam cups of coffee, but he didn’t see anyone actually drinking the stuff. There was a box of doughnuts sitting on the hood of a station wagon, but the only one which had been taken out had been laid aside on a napkin with just a single bite gone. Ralph ran his eye over two dozen faces without seeing a single smile. The news-people were going about their work – setting camera angles, marking locations from which the talking heads would do their stand-ups, laying down coaxial cable and duct-taping it to the cement – but they were doing it without the sort of excitement which Ralph would have expected to accompany a story as big as this one was turning out to be.
Connie Chung walked out from beneath the canopy with a bearded, handsome cameraman – MICHAEL ROSENBERG, the tag on his CBS jacket said – and then raised her small hands in a framing gesture, showing him how she wanted him to shoot the bedsheet banner hanging down from the canopy. Rosenberg nodded. Chung’s face was pale and solemn, and at one point during her conversation with the bearded cameraman, Ralph saw her pause and raise a hand uncertainly to her temple, as if she had lost her train of thought or perhaps felt faint.
There seemed to be an underlying similarity to all the expressions he saw – a common chord – and he thought he knew what it was: they were all suffering from what had been called melancholia when he was a kid, and melancholia was just a fancy word for the blues.
Ralph found himself remembering times in his life when he’d hit the emotional equivalent of a cold spot while swimming or clear air turbulence while flying. You’d be cruising along through your day, sometimes feeling great, sometimes just feeling okay, but getting along and getting it done . . . and then, for no apparent reason at all, you’d go down in flames and crash. A sense of What the hell’s the use would slide over you – unconnected to any real event in your life at that moment but incredibly powerful all the same – and you felt like simply creeping back to bed and pulling the covers up over your head.
Maybe this is what causes feelings like that, he thought. Maybe it’s running into something like this – some big mess of death or sorrow waiting to happen, spread out like a banquet tent made of cobwebs and tears instead of canvas and rope. We don’t see it, not down on our Short-Time level, but we feel it. Oh yes, we feel it. And now . . .
Now it was trying to suck them dry. Maybe they weren’t vampires, as they both had feared, but this thing was. The deathbag had a sluggish, half-sentient life, and it would suck them dry if it could. If they let it.
Lois stumbled against him and Ralph had all he could do to keep them both from sprawling to the pavement. Then she lifted her head (slowly, as if her hair had been dipped in cement), curled a hand around her mouth, and inhaled sharply. At the same time she flickered a little. Under other circumstances, Ralph might have dismissed that flicker as a momentary glitch in his own eyes, but not now. She had slid up. Just a little. Just enough to feed.
He hadn’t seen Lois dip into the waitress’s aura, but this time everything happened in front of him. The auras of the newspeople were like small but brightly colored Japanese lanterns glowing bravely in a vast, gloomy cavern. Now a tight beam of violet light speared out from one of them – from Michael Rosenberg, Connie Chung’s bearded cameraman, in fact. It divided in two an inch or so in front of Lois’s face. The upper branch divided in two again and slipped into her nostrils; the lower branch went between her parted lips and into her mouth. He could see it glowing faintly behind her cheeks, lighting her from the inside as a candle lights a jack-o’-lantern.
Her grip on him loosened, and suddenly the leaning pressure of her weight was gone. A moment later the violet beam of light disappeared. She looked around at him. Color – not a lot, but some – was returning to her leaden cheeks.
‘That’s better – a lot better. Now you, Ralph!’
He was reluctant – it still felt like stealing – but it had to be done if he didn’t want to simply collapse right here; he could almost feel the last of Nirvana Boy’s borrowed energy running out through his pores. He curled his hand around his mouth now as he had in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot that morning and turned slightly to his left, seeking a target. Connie Chung had backed several steps closer to them; she was still looking up at the bedsheet banner hanging from the canopy and talking to Rosenberg (who seemed none the worse for wear as a result of Lois’s borrowing) about it. With no further thought, Ralph inhaled sharply through the curled tube of his fingers.
Chung’s aura was the same lovely shade of wedding-gown ivory as those which had surrounded Helen and Nat on the day they’d come to his apartment with Gretchen Tillbury. Instead of a ray of light, something like a long, straight ribbon shot from Chung’s aura. Ralph felt strength begin to fill him almost at once, banishing the aching weariness in his joints and muscles. And he could think clearly again, as if a big cloud of sludge had just been washed out of his brain.
Connie Chung broke off, looked up at the sky for a moment, then began to talk to the cameraman again. Ralph glanced around and saw Lois looking at him anxiously. ‘Any better?’ she whispered.
‘All kinds,’ he said, ‘but it’s still like being zipped up in a body-bag.’
‘I think –’ Lois began, and then her eyes fixed on something to the left of the Civic Center doors. She screamed and shrank back against Ralph, her eyes so wide it seemed they must tumble from their sockets. He followed her gaze and felt his breath stop in his throat. The planners had tried to soften the building’s plain brick sides by planting evergreen bushes along them. These had either been neglected or purposely allowed to grow until they interlaced and threatened to entirely hide the narrow strip of grass between them and the concrete walk which bordered the drive-through.
Giant bugs that looked like prehistoric trilobites were squirming in and out of these evergreens in droves, crawling over each other, bumping heads, sometimes rearing up and pawing each other with their front legs like stags locking horns during mating season. They weren’t transparent, like the bird on the satellite dish, but there was something ghostly and unreal about them, just the same. Their auras flickered feverishly (and brainlessly, Ralph guessed) through a whole spectrum of colors; they were so bright and yet so ephemeral that it was almost possible to think of them as weird lightning-bugs.
Except that’s not what they are. You know what they are.
‘Hey!’ It was Rosenberg, Chung’s cameraman, who hailed them, but most of the others in front of the building were looking. ‘She okay, bud?’
‘Yes,’ Ralph called back. He still had his hand curled around his mouth and lowered it quickly, feeling foolish. ‘She just . . .’
‘I saw a mouse!’ Lois called, smiling a daffy, dazed smile . . . an ‘our Lois’ smile if Ralph had ever seen one. He was very proud of her. She pointed toward the evergreen shrubs to the left of the door with a finger that was almost steady. ‘He went right in there. Gosh, but he was a fat one! Did you see him, Norton?’
‘No, Alice.’
‘Stick around, lady,’ Michael Rosenberg called. ‘You’ll see all kinds of wildlife here tonight.’ There was some desultory, almost forced laughter, and then they turned back to their tasks.
‘God, Ralph!’ Lois whispered. ‘Those . . . those things . . .’
He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘Steady, Lois.’
‘They know, don’t they? That’s why they’re here. They’re like vultures.’
Ralph nodded. As he watched, several bugs emerged from the tops of the bushes and began to ooze aimlessly up the wall. They moved with dazed sluggishness – like flies buzzing against a windowpane in November – and left slimy trails of color behind them. These quickly dimmed and faded. Other bugs crawled out from beneath the bushes and onto the small strip of lawn.
One of the local news commentators began strolling toward this infested area, and when he turned his head, Ralph saw it was John Kirkland. He was talking to a good-looking woman dressed in one of those ‘power look’ business outfits which Ralph found – under normal circumstances, anyway – extremely sexy. He guessed she was Kirkland’s producer, and wondered if Lisette Benson’s aura turned green when this woman was around.
‘They’re going toward those bugs!’ Lois whispered fiercely at him. ‘We have to stop them, Ralph – we have to!’
‘We’re not going to do a damned thing.’
‘But—’
‘Lois, we can’t start raving about bugs nobody but us can see. We’ll end up in the nuthatch if we do. Besides, the bugs aren’t there for them.’ He paused and added: ‘I hope.’
They watched as Kirkland and his good-looking colleague walked onto the lawn . . . and into a jellylike knot of the twitching, crawling trilobites. One slid onto Kirkland’s highly polished loafer, paused until he stopped moving for a second, then climbed onto his pantsleg.
‘I don’t give much of a shit about Susan Day, one way or the other,’ Kirkland was saying. ‘WomanCare’s the story here, not her – crying babes wearing black armbands.’
‘Watch out, John,’ the woman said dryly. ‘Your sensitivity is showing.’
‘Is it? Goddam.’ The bug on his pantsleg appeared bound for his crotch. It occurred to Ralph that if Kirkland were suddenly given the power to see what was shortly going to be crawling over his balls, he would probably go right out of his mind.
‘Okay, but be sure to talk to the women who run the local power-network,’ the producer was saying. ‘Now that Tillbury’s dead, the ones that matter are Maggie Petrowsky, Barbara Richards, and Dr Roberta Warper. Warper’s going to introduce the Big Kahuna tonight, I think . . . or maybe in this case it’s the Big Kahunette.’ The woman took a step off the sidewalk and one of her high heels skewered a lumbering color-bug. A rainbow of guts spewed out of it, and a waxy-white substance that looked like stale mashed potatoes. Ralph had an idea the white stuff had been eggs.
Lois pressed her face against his arm.
‘And keep your eyes open for a lady named Helen Deepneau,’ the producer said, taking a step closer to the building. The bug stuck on the heel of her shoe flopped and twisted as she walked.
‘Deepneau,’ Kirkland said. He tapped his knuckles against his brow. ‘Somewhere, deep inside, a bell is ringing.’
‘Nah, it’s just your last active brain-cell rolling around in there,’ the producer said. ‘She’s Ed Deepneau’s wife. They’re separated. If you want tears, she’s your best bet. She and Tillbury were good friends. Maybe special friends, if you know what I mean.’
Kirkland leered – an expression so foreign to his on-camera persona that Ralph felt slightly disoriented. One of the color-bugs, meanwhile, had found its way onto the toe of the woman’s shoe and was working its way up her leg. Ralph watched in helpless fascination as it disappeared beneath the hem of her skirt. Watching the moving bump climb her thigh was like watching a kitten under a bath-towel. And again, it seemed that Kirkland’s colleague felt something; as she talked to him about interviews during Day’s speech, she reached down and absently scratched at the lump, which had now made it almost all the way up to her right hip. Ralph didn’t hear the thick popping sound the fragile, flabby thing made when it burst, but he could imagine it. Was helpless not to, it seemed. And he could imagine its innards dripping down her nyloned leg like pus. It would remain there at least until her evening shower, unseen, unfelt, unsuspected.
Now the two of them began discussing how they should cover the scheduled pro-life rally this afternoon . . . assuming it actually happened, that was. The woman was of the opinion that not even The Friends of Life would be dumbheaded enough to show up at the Civic Center after what had happened at High Ridge. Kirkland told her it was impossible to underestimate the idiocy of fanatics; people who could wear that much polyester in public were clearly a force to be reckoned with. And all the time they were talking, exchanging quips and ideas and gossip, more of the swollen, multi-colored bugs were swarming busily up their legs and torsos. One pioneer had made it all the way up to Kirkland’s red tie, and was apparently bound for his face.
Movement off to the right caught Ralph’s eye. He turned toward the doors in time to see one of the techs elbowing a buddy and pointing at him and Lois. Ralph suddenly had an all-too-clear picture of what they were seeing: two people with no visible reason for being here (neither of them was wearing a black armband and they were clearly not representatives of the media) just hanging out at the edge of the parking lot. The lady, who had already screamed once, had her face buried against the gentleman’s arm . . . and the gentleman in question was gaping like a fool at nothing in particular.
Ralph spoke softly and from the corner of his mouth, like an inmate discussing escape in an old Warner Bros. jailbreak epic. ‘Get your head up. We’re attracting more attention than we can afford.’
For a moment he really didn’t believe she was going to be able to do that . . . and then she came through and lifted her head. She glanced at the shrubs growing along the wall one final time – an involuntary, horrified little peek – and then looked resolutely back at Ralph and only Ralph. ‘Do you see any sign of Atropos, Ralph? That is why we’re here, isn’t it . . . to pick up his trail?’
‘Maybe. I suppose. Haven’t even looked, to tell the truth – too many other things going on. I think we ought to get a little closer to the building.’ This wasn’t a thing he wanted to do, but it seemed very important to do something. He could feel the deathbag all around them, a gloomy, suffocating presence that was passively opposed to forward motion of any kind. That was what they had to fight.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m going to ask for Connie Chung’s autograph, and I’m going to be all giggly and silly while I do it. Can you stand that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Because that will mean that if they’re looking at anybody, they’ll be looking at me.’
‘Sounds good.’
He spared one last look at John Kirkland and the woman producer. They were now discussing what events might cause them to break into the evening’s network feed and go live, totally unaware of the lumbering trilobites crawling back and forth on their faces. One of them was currently squirming slowly into John Kirkland’s mouth.
Ralph looked away in a hurry and let Lois pull him over to where Ms Chung stood with Rosenberg, the bearded cameraman. He saw the two of them glance first at Lois and then at each other. The shared look was one part amusement and three parts resignation – here comes one of them – and then Lois gave his hand a hard little squeeze that said, Never mind me, Ralph, you take care of your business and I’ll take care of mine.’
‘Pardon me, but aren’t you Connie Chung?’ Lois asked in her gushiest isn’t-this-the-living-end voice. ‘I saw you over there and at first I said to Norton, “Is that the lady who’s on with Dan Rather, or am I crazy?” And then—’
‘I am Connie Chung, and it’s very nice to meet you, but I’m getting ready for tonight’s news, so if you could excuse me—’
‘Oh, of course, I wouldn’t dream of bothering you, I only want an autograph – just a quick little scribble would do – because I’m your number one fan, at least in Maine.’
Ms Chung glanced at Rosenberg. He was already holding a pen out in one hand, much as a good OR nurse has the instrument the doctor will want next even before he calls for it. Ralph turned his attention to the area in front of the Civic Center and slid his perceptions up the tiniest bit.
What he saw in front of the doors was a semitransparent, blackish substance that puzzled him at first. It was about two inches deep and looked almost like some sort of geological formation. That couldn’t be, though . . . could it? If what he was looking at was real (the way objects in the Short-Time world were real, at least), the stuff would have blocked the doors from opening, and it wasn’t doing that. As Ralph watched, two TV techs strolled ankle-deep through the stuff as if it were no more substantial than low-lying groundmist.
Ralph remembered the aural footprints people left behind – the ones that looked like Arthur Murray learn-to-dance diagrams – and suddenly thought he understood. The tracks faded away like cigarette smoke . . . except that cigarette smoke really didn’t go away; it left a residue on walls, on windows, and in lungs. Apparently, human auras left their own residue. It probably wasn’t enough to see once the colors faded if it was only one person, but this was the biggest public meetingplace in Maine’s fourth-largest city. Ralph thought of all the people who had poured in and out through these doors – all the banquets, conventions, coin-shows, concerts, basketball tourneys – and understood that semi-transparent slag. It was the equivalent of the slight dip you sometimes saw in the middle of much-used steps.
Never mind that now, sweetheart – take care of your business.
Nearby, Connie Chung was scribbling her name on the back of Lois’s light-bill for September. Ralph looked at that slaggy residue on the cement apron in front of the doors, hunting for a trace of Atropos, something which might register more as smell than sight, a nasty, meaty aroma like the alley which used to run behind Mr Huston’s butcher shop when Ralph was a kid.
‘Thank you!’ Lois was burbling. ‘I said to Norton, “She looks just like she does on TV, just like a little China doll.” Those were my exact words.’
‘Very welcome, I’m sure,’ Chung said, ‘but I really have to get back to work.’
‘Of course you do. Say hello to Dan Rather for me, won’t you? Tell him I said “Courage!”’
‘I certainly will.’ Chung smiled and nodded as she handed the pen back to Rosenberg. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse us—’
If it’s here, it’s higher up than I am, Ralph thought. I’ll have to slide up a little bit farther.
Yes, but he’d have to be careful, and not just because time had become an extremely valuable commodity. The simple fact was that if he went up too high, he would disappear from the Short-Time world, and that was the sort of occurrence which might even distract these news-people from the impending pro-choice rally . . . at least for awhile.
Ralph concentrated, but when the painless spasm inside his head happened this time, it didn’t come as a blink but as the soft lowering of a lash. Color bloomed silently into the world; everything stood forth with exclamatory brilliance. Yet the strongest of these colors, the oppressive key-chord, was the black of the deathbag, and it was a negation of all the others. Depression and that sense of debilitating weakness fell on him again, sinking into his heart like the pointed ends of a clawhammer. He realized that if he had business to do up here, he had better do it quickly and scoot back down to the Short-Time level before he was stripped clean of life-force.
He looked at the doors again. For a moment there was still nothing but the fading auras of Short-Timers like himself . . . and then what he was looking for suddenly came clear, rising into his view as a message which has been written in lemon juice rises into sight when it is held close to a candle-flame.
He had expected something which would look and smell like the rotting guts in the bins behind Mr Huston’s knacker’s shop, but the reality was even worse, possibly because it was so unexpected. There were fans of a bloody, mucusy substance on the doors themselves – marks made by Atropos’s restless fingers, perhaps – and a revoltingly large puddle of the same stuff sinking into the hardened residue in front of the doors. There was something so terrible about this stuff – so alien – that it made the color-bugs look almost normal by comparison. It was like a pool of vomit left by a dog suffering from some new and dangerous strain of rabies. A trail of this stuff led away from the puddle, first in drying clots and splashes, then in smaller drips like spilled paint.
Of course, Ralph thought. That’s why we had to come here. The little bastard can’t stay away from the place. It’s like cocaine to a dope-addict.
He could imagine Atropos standing right here where he, Ralph, was standing now, looking . . . grinning . . . then stepping forward and putting his hands on the doors. Caressing them. Creating those filthy, filmy marks. Could imagine Atropos drawing strength and energy from the very blackness which was robbing Ralph of his own vitality.
He has other places to go and other things to do, of course – every day is undoubtedly a busy day when you’re a supernatural psycho like him – but it must be hard for him to stay away from this place for long, no matter how busy he is. And how does it make him feel? Like a tight fuck on a summer afternoon, that’s how.
Lois tugged his sleeve from behind and he turned to her. She was still smiling, but the feverish intensity in her eyes made the expression on her lips look suspiciously like a scream. Behind her, Connie Chung and Rosenberg were strolling back toward the building.
‘You’ve got to get me out of here,’ Lois whispered. ‘I can’t stand it anymore. I feel like I’m losing my mind.’
[‘Okay – no problem.’]
‘I can’t hear you, Ralph – and I think I can see the sun shining through you. Jesus, I’m sure I can!’
[‘Oh – wait—’]
He concentrated, and felt the world slide slightly around him. The colors faded; Lois’s aura seemed to disappear back inside her skin.
‘Better?’
‘Well, solider, anyway.’
He smiled briefly. ‘Good. Come on.’
He took her by the elbow and began guiding her back toward where Joe Wyzer had dropped them off. It was the same direction in which the bloody splashes led.
‘Did you find what you were looking for?’
‘Yes.’
She brightened at once. ‘That’s great! I saw you go up, you know – it was very odd, like watching you turn into a sepia-toned photograph. And then . . . thinking I could see the sun shining through you . . . that was very peculiar.’ She looked at him severely.
‘Bad, huh?’
‘No . . . not bad, exactly. Just peculiar. Those bugs, now . . . they were bad. Ugh!’
‘I know what you mean. But I think they’re all back there.’
‘Maybe, but we’re still a long way from being out of the woods, aren’t we?’
‘Yeah – a long way from Eden, Carol would have said.’
‘Just stick with me, Ralph Roberts, and don’t get lost.’
‘Ralph Roberts? Never heard of him. Norton’s the name.’
And that, he was happy to see, made her laugh.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
1
They stood at the base of the oak, looking down. Lois was gnawing obsessively on her lower lip.
[‘Do we have to go down there, Ralph? Do we really?’]
[‘Yes.’]
[‘But why? What are we supposed to do? Take something he stole? Kill him? What?’]
Other than retrieve Joe’s comb and Lois’s earrings, he didn’t know . . . but he felt certain he would know, that they both would, when the time came.
[‘I think for now we better just keep moving, Lois.’]
The lightning had acted like a strong hand, shoving the tree violently toward the east and opening a large hole at the bottom on its western side. To a man or woman with Short-Time vision, that hole would undoubtedly look dark – and maybe a little scary, with its crumbly sides and barely glimpsed roots squirming in the deep shadows like snakes – but otherwise not very unusual.
A kid with a good imagination might see more, Ralph thought. That dark space at the bottom of the tree might make him think of pirate treasure . . . outlaw hideouts . . . troll-holes . . .
But Ralph didn’t think even an imaginative Short-Time kid would have been able to see the dim red glow filtering up from beneath the tree, or realize that those squirming roots were actually rough rungs leading down to some unknown (and undoubtedly unpleasant) place.
No – even an imaginative kid wouldn’t see those things . . . but he or she might sense them.
Right. And after doing so, one with any brains would turn and run as if all the demons of hell were in hot pursuit. As would he and Lois, if they had any sense at all. Except for Lois’s earrings. Except for Joe Wyzer’s comb. Except for his own lost place in the Purpose. And, of course, except for Helen (and possibly Nat) and the two thousand other people who were going to be at the Civic Center tonight. Lois was right. They were supposed to do something, and if they backed out now, it was a something that would remain forever done-bun-undone.
And those are the ropes, he thought. The ropes the powers that be use to tie us poor, muddled Short-Time creatures to their wheel.
He now visualized Clotho and Lachesis through a bright lens of hate, and he thought that if the two of them had been here right now, they would have exchanged one of their uneasy looks and then taken a quick step or two away.
And they would be right to do that, he thought. Very right.
[‘Ralph? What’s wrong? Why are you so angry?’]
He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.
[‘It’s nothing. Come on. Let’s go before we lose our nerve.’]
She looked at him a moment longer, then nodded. And when Ralph sat down and poked his legs into the gaping, root-lined mouth at the foot of the tree, she was right beside him.
2
Ralph slid beneath the tree on his back, holding his free hand over his face to keep dirt from crumbling into his open eyes. He tried not to flinch as root-knuckles caressed the side of his neck and prodded the small of his back. The smell under the tree was a revolting monkeyhouse aroma that made his gorge rise. He was able to go on kidding himself that he would get used to it until he was all the way into the hole under the oak, and then the kidding stopped. He raised himself on one elbow, feeling smaller roots digging at his scalp and dangling flaps of bark tickling his cheeks, and ejected as much of his breakfast as still remained in the holding-tank. He could hear Lois doing the same thing on his left.
A terrible, woozy faintness went rolling through his head like a breaking wave. The stench was so thick he was almost eating it, and he could see the red stuff they had followed to this nightmare place under the tree all over his hands and arms. Just looking at this stuff had been bad; now he found himself taking a bath in it, for God’s sake.
Something groped for his hand and he almost gave in to panic before realizing it was Lois. He laced his fingers through hers.
[‘Ralph, come up a little bit! It’s better! You can breathe!’]
He understood what she meant at once, and had to restrain himself, haul himself down, at the last moment. If he hadn’t, he would have shot up the ladder of perception like a rocket under full thrust.
The world wavered, and suddenly there seemed to be a little more light in this stinking hole . . . and a little more room, too. The smell didn’t go away, but it became bearable. Now it was like being in a small closed tent full of people with dirty feet and sweaty armpits – not nice, but something you could live with, at least for awhile.
Ralph suddenly imagined the face of a pocket-watch, complete with hands that were moving too fast. It was better without the stench trying to pour down his throat and gag him, but this was still a dangerous place to be – suppose they came out of here tomorrow morning, with nothing left of the Civic Center but a smoking hole on Main Street? And it could happen. Keeping track of time down here – short time, long time, or all-time – was impossible. He glanced at his watch, but it was meaningless. He should have set it earlier, but he had forgotten.
Let it go, Ralph – you can’t do anything about it, so let it go.
He tried, and as he did it occurred to him that Old Dor had been a hundred per cent correct on the day Ed had crashed into Mr West Side Gardeners’ pickup truck; it was better not to mess into Long-Time business. And yet here they were, the world’s oldest Peter Pan and the world’s oldest Wendy, sliding under a magic tree into some slimy underworld neither one of them wanted to see.
Lois was looking at him, her pale face lit with that sick red glow, her expressive eyes full of fright. He saw dark threads on her chin and realized it was blood. She had quit just nibbling at her lower lip and had begun taking bites out of it.
[‘Ralph, are you all right?’]
[‘I get to crawl under an old oak tree with a pretty girl and you even have to ask? I’m fine, Lois. But I think we better hurry.’]
[‘All right.’]
He felt around below him and placed his foot on a gnarled root-knuckle. It took his weight and he slid down the stony slope, squeezing beneath another root and holding Lois around the waist. Her skirt skidded up to her thighs and Ralph thought again, briefly, about Chuckie Engstrom and his Peekie Wand. He was both amused and exasperated to see Lois was trying to pull the skirt back down.
[‘I know that a lady tries to keep her skirt down whenever possible, but I think the rule goes by the boards when you’re sliding down troll staircases under old oak trees. Okay?’]
She gave him an embarrassed, frightened little smile.
[‘If I’d known what we were going to be doing, I would have worn slacks. I thought we were just going to the hospital.’]
If I’d known what we were going to be doing, Ralph thought, I would have cashed in my bonds, developing softness in the market or not, and had us on a plane to Rio, my dear.
He felt around with his other foot, very aware that if he fell, he was probably going to end up in a place far beyond the reach of Derry Rescue. Just above his eyes, a reddish worm poked out of the earth, dribbling little crumbles of dirt down on Ralph’s forehead.
For what seemed like an eternity he felt nothing, and then his foot found smooth wood – not a root this time, but something like a real step. He slid down, still holding Lois around the waist, and waited to see if the thing he was standing on would hold or snap under their combined weight.
It held, and it was wide enough for both of them. Ralph looked down and saw that it was the top step of a narrow staircase which curved down into the red-tinged dark. It had been built for – and perhaps by – a creature that was a lot shorter than they were, making it necessary for them to hunch, but it was still better than the nightmare of the last few moments.
Ralph looked at the ragged wedge of daylight above them, his eyes gazing out of his dirt- and sweat-streaked face with an expression of dumb longing. Daylight had never looked so sweet or so distant. He turned back to Lois and nodded to her. She squeezed his hand and nodded back. Bending over, cringing each time a dangling root touched their necks or backs, they started down the staircase.
3
The descent seemed endless. The red light grew brighter, the stench of Atropos grew thicker, and Ralph was aware that they were both ‘going up’ as they went down; it was either that or be flattened by the smell. He continued telling himself that they were doing what they had to do, and that there must be a timekeeper on an operation this big – someone who would give them a poke if and when the schedule got too tight for comfort – but he kept worrying, just the same. Because there might not be a timekeeper, or an ump, or a team of refs in zebra-striped shirts. All bets are off, Clotho had said.
Just as Ralph was starting to wonder if the stairs went all the way down into hell itself, they ended. A short stone-lined corridor, no more than forty inches high and twenty feet long, led to an arched doorway. Beyond it, that red glow pulsed and flared like the reflected glow of an open oven.
[‘Come on, Lois, but be ready for anything. Be ready for him.’]
She nodded, hitched at her wayward slip again, then walked beside him up the narrow passage. Ralph kicked something that wasn’t a stone and bent over to pick it up. It was a red plastic cylinder, wider at one end than at the other. After a moment he realized what it was: a jump-rope handle. Three-six-nine, hon, the goose drank wine.
Don’t butt into what doesn’t concern you, Short-Time, Atropos had said, but he had butted in, and not just because of what the little bald doctors called ka, either. He had gotten involved because what Atropos was up to was his concern, whatever the little creep might think to the contrary. Derry was his town, Lois Chasse was his friend, and Ralph found within himself a sincere desire to make Doc #3 sorry he’d ever seen Lois’s diamond earrings.
He flipped the jump-rope handle away and started walking again. A moment later he and Lois passed under the arch and simply stood there, staring into Atropos’s underground apartment. With their wide eyes and linked hands, they looked more like children in a fairy-tale than ever – not Peter Pan and Wendy now but Hansel and Gretel, coming upon the witch’s candy house after days spent wandering in the trackless forest.
4
[‘Oh, Ralph. Oh my God, Ralph . . . do you see?’]
[‘Shhh, Lois. Shhh.’]
Directly ahead of them was a small, mean chamber which seemed to be a combination kitchen and bedroom. The room was simultaneously sordid and creepy. Standing in the center was a low round table which Ralph thought was the amputated top half of a barrel. The remains of a meal – some gray, rancid gruel that looked like liquefied brains congealing in a chipped soup tureen – stood on it. There was a single dirty folding chair. To the right of the table was a primitive commode which consisted of a rusty steel drum with a toilet-seat balanced on top of it. The smell rising from this was incredibly foul. The room’s only decoration was a full-length brass-bordered mirror on one wall, its reflective surface so age-darkened that the Ralph and Lois captured within it looked as if they might have been floating in ten or twelve feet of water.
To the left of the mirror was a stark sleeping accommodation which consisted of a filthy mattress and a burlap sack stuffed with straw or feathers. Both pillow and mattress glowed and raved with the nightsweats of the creature who used them. The dreams inside that burlap pillow would drive me insane, Ralph thought.
Somewhere, God only knew how much further under the earth, water was dripping hollowly.
On the far side of the apartment was another, higher arch, through which they could see a jumbled, surreal storage area. Ralph actually blinked two or three times to try to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.
This is the place, all right, he thought. Whatever we came to find, it’s here.
Lois began to drift toward this second arch as if hypnotized. Her mouth was quivering with dismay, but her eyes were full of helpless curiosity – it was the expression, he was quite sure, that must have been on the face of Bluebeard’s wife when she had used the key which unlocked the door to her husband’s forbidden room. Ralph was suddenly sure that Atropos was lurking just inside that arch with his rusty scalpel poised. He hurried after Lois and stopped her just before she could step through. He grasped her upper arm, then put a finger to his lips and shook his head at her before she could speak.
He hunkered down with the fingers of one hand tented on the packed dirt floor, looking like a sprinter awaiting the crack of the starter’s gun. Then he launched himself through the arch (relishing the eager response of his body even at this moment), hitting on his shoulder and rolling. His feet struck a cardboard box and knocked it over, spilling out a jumble of stuff: mismatched gloves and socks, a couple of old paperbacks, a pair of Bermuda shorts, a screwdriver with smears of maroon stuff – maybe paint, maybe blood – on its steel shaft.
Ralph got to his knees, looking back toward Lois, who was standing in the doorway and staring at him with her hands clasped under her chin. There was no one on either side of the archway, and really no room for anyone. More boxes were stacked on either side. Ralph read the printing on them with a kind of bemused wonder: Jack Daniel’s, Gilbey’s, Smirnoff, J&B. Atropos, it seemed, was as fond of liquor cartons as anyone else who couldn’t bear to throw anything away.
[‘Ralph? Is it safe?’]
The word was a joke, but he nodded his head and held out his hand. She hurried toward him, giving her slip another sharp upward yank as she came and looking about herself in growing amazement.
Standing on the other side of the arch, in Atropos’s grim little apartment, this storage area had looked large. Now that they were actually in it, Ralph saw it went well beyond that; rooms this big were usually called warehouses. Aisles wandered among great, tottery piles of junk. Only the stuff by the door had actually been boxed; the rest had been piled any whichway, creating something which was two parts maze and three parts booby-trap. Ralph decided that even warehouse was too small a word – this was an underground suburb, and Atropos might be lurking anywhere within it . . . and if he was here, he was probably watching them.
Lois didn’t ask what they were looking at; he saw by her face that she already knew. When she did speak, it was in a dreamy tone that sent a chill scampering up Ralph’s back.
[‘He must be so very old, Ralph.’]
Yes. So very old.
Twenty yards into the room, which was lit with the same sunken, sourceless red glow as the stairway, Ralph could see a large spoked wheel lying atop a cane-backed chair which was, in turn, standing on top of a splintery old clothes press. Looking at that wheel brought a deeper chill; it was as if the metaphor his mind had seized to help grasp the concept of ka had become real. Then he noted the rusty iron strip which circled the wheel’s outer circumference and realized it had probably come from one of those Gay Nineties bikes that looked like overgrown tricycles.
It’s a bicycle wheel, all right, and it’s a hundred years old if it’s a day, he thought. That led him to wonder how many people – how many thousands or tens of thousands – had died in and around Derry since Atropos had somehow transported this wheel down here. And of those thousands, how many had been Random deaths?
And how far back does he go? How many hundreds of years?
No way of telling, of course; maybe all the way to the beginning, whenever or however that had been. And during that time, he had taken a little something from everyone he had fucked with . . . and here it all was.
Here it all was.
[‘Ralph!’]
He looked around and saw that Lois was holding out both hands. In one was a Panama hat with a crescent bitten from the brim. In the other was a black nylon pocket-comb, the kind you could buy in any convenience store for a buck twenty-nine. A ghostly glimmer of orange-yellow still clung to it, which didn’t surprise Ralph much. Each time the comb’s owner had used it, it must have picked up a little of that glow from both his aura and his balloon-string, like dandruff. It also didn’t surprise him that the comb should have been with McGovern’s hat; the last time he’d seen those two things, they’d been together. He remembered Atropos’s sarcastic grin as he swept the Panama from his head and pretended to use the comb on his own bald dome.
And then he jumped up and clicked his heels together.
Lois was pointing at an old rocking chair with a broken runner.
[‘The hat was right there, on the seat. The comb was underneath. It’s Mr Wyzer’s, isn’t it?’]
[‘Yes.’]
She held it out to him immediately.
[‘You take it. I’m not as ditzy as Bill always thought, but sometimes I lose things. And if I lost this, I’d never forgive myself.’]
He took the comb, started to put it into his back pocket, then thought how easily Atropos had plucked it from that same location. Easy as falling off a log, it had been. He put it into his front pants pocket instead, then looked back at Lois, who was gazing at McGovern’s bitten hat with the sad wonder of Hamlet looking at the skull of his old pal Yorick. When she looked up, Ralph saw tears in her eyes.
[‘He loved this hat. He thought he looked very dashing and debonair when he had it on. He didn’t – he just looked like Bill – but he thought he looked good, and that’s the important part. Wouldn’t you say so, Ralph?’]
[‘Yes.’]
She tossed the hat back into the seat of the old rocker and turned to examine a box of what looked like rummage-sale clothes. As soon as her back was to him, Ralph squatted down, peering beneath the chair, hoping to see a splintered double gleam in the darkness. If Bill’s hat and Joe’s comb were both here, then maybe Lois’s earrings –
There was nothing beneath the rocker but dust and a pink knitted baby bootee.
Should have known that’d be too easy, Ralph thought, getting to his feet again. He suddenly felt exhausted. They had found Joe’s comb with no trouble at all, and that was good, absolutely great, but Ralph was afraid it had also been a spectacular case of beginner’s luck. They still had Lois’s earrings to worry about . . . and doing whatever else it was they had been sent here to do, of course. And what was that? He didn’t know, and if someone from upstairs was sending instructions, he wasn’t receiving them.
[‘Lois, do you have any idea what—’]
[‘Shhhh!’]
[‘What is it? Lois, is it him?’]
[‘No! Be quiet, Ralph! Be quiet and listen!’]
He listened. At first he heard nothing, and then the clenching sensation – the blink – came inside his head again. This time it was very slow, very cautious. He slipped upward a little further, as lightly as a feather lifted in a draft of warm air. He became aware of a long, low groaning sound, like an endlessly creaking door. There was something familiar about it – not in the sound itself, but in its associations. It was like—
– a burglar alarm, or maybe a smoke-detector. It’s telling us where it is. It’s calling us.
Lois seized his hand with fingers that were as cold as ice.
[‘That’s it, Ralph – that’s what we’re looking for. Do you hear it?’]
Yes, of course he did. But whatever that sound was, it had nothing to do with Lois’s earrings . . . and without Lois’s earrings, he wasn’t leaving this place.
[‘Come on, Ralph! Come on! We have to find it!’]
He let her lead him deeper into the room. Atropos’s souvenirs were piled at least three feet higher than their heads in most places. How a shrimp like him had managed this trick Ralph didn’t know – levitation, maybe – but the result was that he quickly lost all sense of direction as they twisted, turned, and occasionally seemed to double back. All he knew for sure was that low groaning sound kept getting louder in his ears; as they began to draw near its source, it became an insectile buzzing which Ralph found increasingly unpleasant. He kept expecting to round a corner and find a giant locust staring at him with dull brownish-black eyes as big as grapefruits.
Although the separate auras of the objects which filled the storage vault had faded like the scent of flower-petals pressed between the pages of a book, they were still there beneath Atropos’s stench – and at this level of perception, with all their senses exquisitely awake and attuned, it was impossible not to sense those auras and be affected by them. These mute reminders of the Random dead were both terrible and pathetic. The place was more than a museum or a packrat’s lair, Ralph realized; it was a profane church where Atropos took his own version of Communion – grief for bread, tears for wine.
Their stumbling course through the narrow zigzag rows was a gruesome, almost shattering experience. Each not-quite-aimless turn presented a hundred more objects Ralph wished he had never seen and would not have to remember; each voiced its own small cry of pain and bewilderment. He did not have to wonder if Lois shared his feelings – she was sobbing steadily and quietly beside him.
Here was a child’s battered Flexible Flyer sled with the knotted towrope still draped over the steering bar. The boy to whom it had belonged had died of convulsions on a crisp January day in 1953.
Here was a majorette’s baton with its shaft wrapped in purple and white spirals of crepe – the colors of Grant Academy. She had been raped and bludgeoned to death with a rock in the fall of 1967. Her killer, who had never been caught, had stuffed her body into a small cave where her bones – along with the bones of two other unlucky victims – still lay.
Here was the cameo brooch of a woman who had been struck by a falling brick while walking down Main Street to buy the new issue of Vogue; if she had left her home thirty seconds earlier or later, she would have been fine.
Here was the buck knife of a man who had been killed in a hunting accident in 1937.
Here was the compass of a Boy Scout who had fallen and broken his neck while hiking on Mount Katahdin.
The sneaker of a little boy named Gage Creed, run down by a speeding tanker-truck on Route 15 in Ludlow.
Rings and magazines; key-chains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random . . . and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.
Lois, sobbing: [‘I hate him! I hate him so much!’]
He knew what she meant. It was one thing to hear Clotho and Lachesis say that Atropos was also part of the big picture, that he might even serve some higher purpose himself, and quite another to see the faded Boston Bruins cap of a little boy who had fallen into an overgrown cellar-hole and died in the dark, died in agony, died with no voice left after six hours spent screaming for his mother.
Ralph reached out and briefly touched the cap. Its owner’s name had been Billy Weatherbee. His final thought had been of ice-cream.
Ralph’s hand tightened over Lois’s.
[‘Ralph, what is it? I can hear you thinking – I’m sure I can – but it’s like listening to someone whisper under his breath.’]
[‘I was thinking that I want to bust that little bastard’s chops for him, Lois. Maybe we could teach him what it’s like to lie awake at night. What do you think?’]
Her grip on his hand tightened. She nodded.
5
They reached a place where the narrow corridor they’d been following branched into diverging paths. That low, steady buzz was coming from the lefthand one, and not very far up it, either, by the sound. It was now impossible for them to walk side by side, and as they worked their way toward the end, the passage grew narrower still. Ralph was finally obliged to begin sidling along.
The reddish exudate Atropos left behind was very thick here, dripping down the jumbled stacks of souvenirs and making little puddles on the dirt floor. Lois was holding his hand with painful tightness now, but Ralph didn’t complain.
[‘It’s like the Civic Center, Ralph – he spends a lot of time here.’]
Ralph nodded. The question was, what did Mr A come down this aisle to commune with? They were coming to the end now – it was blocked by a solid wall of junk – and he still couldn’t see what was making that buzzing sound. It was now starting to drive him crazy; it was like having a horsefly trapped in the middle of your head. As they approached the end of the passage, he became more and more sure that what they were looking for was on the other side of the wall of junk which blocked it – they would either have to retrace their steps and try to find a way around, or break through. Either choice might consume more time than they could afford. Ralph felt nibbles of desperation at the back of his mind.
But the corridor did not dead-end; on the left there was a crawlspace beneath a dining room table piled high with dishes and stacks of green paper and . . .
Green paper? No, not quite. Stacks of bills. Tens, twenties, and fifties were piled up in random profusion on the dishes. There was a choke of hundreds in a cracked gravy-boat, and a rolled-up five hundred dollar bill poking drunkenly out of a dusty wineglass.
[‘Ralph! My God, it’s a fortune!’]
She wasn’t looking at the table but at the other wall of the passageway. The last five feet had been constructed of banded gray-green bricks of currency. They were in an alleyway which was literally made of money, and Ralph realized he could now answer another of the questions that had been troubling him: where Ed had been getting his dough. Atropos was rolling in it . . . but Ralph had an idea that the little bald-headed sonofabitch still had trouble getting dates.
He bent down a little to get a better look into the crawlspace underneath the table. There appeared to be yet another chamber on the other side, this one very small. A slow red glow waxed and waned in there like the beating of a heart. It cast uneasy pulses of light on their shoes.
Ralph pointed, then looked at Lois. She nodded. He dropped to his knees and crawled beneath the money-laden table, and into the shrine Atropos had created around the thing which lay in the middle of the floor. It was what they had been sent to find, he hadn’t a single doubt about it, but he still had no idea what it was. The object, not much bigger than the sort of marbles children call croakers, was wrapped in a deathbag as impenetrable as the center of a black hole.
Oh, great – lovely. Now what?
[‘Ralph! Do you hear singing? It’s very faint.’]
He looked at her dubiously, then glanced around. He had already come to hate this cramped space, and although he was not claustrophobic by nature, he now felt a panicky desire to get away squeezing into his thoughts. A very distinct voice spoke up in his head. It’s not just what I want, Ralph; it’s what I need. I’ll do my best to hang in with you, but if you don’t finish whatever the hell it is you’re supposed to be doing in here soon, it won’t make any difference what either of us want – I’m just going to take over and run like hell.
The controlled terror in that voice didn’t surprise him, because this really was a horrible place – not a room at all but the bottom of a deep shaft whose circular walls were constructed of rickrack and stolen goods: toasters, footstools, clock-radios, cameras, books, crates, shoes, rakes. Dangling almost right in front of Ralph’s eyes was a battered saxophone on a frayed strap with the word JAKE printed on it in dust-dulled rhinestones. Ralph reached out to grab it, wanting to get the damned thing out of his face. Then he imagined the removal of this one object starting a landslide that would bring the walls down on them, burying them alive. He pulled his hand back. At the same time he opened his mind and senses as fully as he could. For a moment he thought he did hear something – a faint sigh, like the whisper of the ocean in a seashell – but then it was gone.
[‘If there are voices in here, I can’t hear them, Lois – that damned thing is drowning them out.’]
He pointed at the object in the middle of the circle – black beyond any previously held conception of black, a deathbag which was the apotheosis of all deathbags. But Lois was shaking her head.
[‘No, not drowning them out. Sucking them dry.’]
She looked at the screaming black thing with horror and loathing.
[‘That thing is sucking the life out of all this stuff piled up around it . . . and it’s trying to suck the life out of us, too.’]
Yes, of course it was. Now that Lois had actually said it out loud, Ralph could feel the deathbag – or the object inside it – pulling at something far down in his head, yanking at it, twisting at it, shoving at it . . . trying to pull it out like a tooth from its pink socket of gum.
Trying to suck the life out of them? Close, but no cigar. Ralph didn’t think it was their lives the thing inside the deathbag wanted, nor their souls . . . at least, not exactly. It was their life-force it wanted. Their ka.
Lois’s eyes widened as she picked up this thought . . . and then they shifted to a place just beyond his right shoulder. She leaned forward on her knees and reached out.
[‘Lois, I wouldn’t do that – you could bring the whole place down around our—’]
Too late. She yanked something free, looked at it with horrified understanding, and then held it out to him.
[‘It’s still alive – everything that’s in here is still alive. I don’t know how that can be, but it is . . . somehow it is. But they’re faint. Why are they so faint?’]
What she was holding out to him was a small white sneaker that belonged to a woman or a child. As Ralph took it, he heard it singing softly in a distant voice. The sound was as lonely as November wind on an overcast afternoon, but incredibly sweet, as well – an antidote to the endless bray of the black thing on the floor.
And it was a voice he knew. He was sure it was.
There was a maroon splatter on the sneaker’s toe. Ralph at first thought it was chocolate milk, then recognized it for what it really was: dried blood. In that instant he was outside the Red Apple again, grabbing Nat before Helen could drop her. He remembered how Helen’s feet had tangled together; how she had stumbled backward, leaning against the Red Apple’s door like a drunk against a lamppost, holding out her hands to him. Gih me my bay-ee . . . Gih me Nah-lie.
He knew the voice because it was Helen’s voice. This sneaker had been on her foot that day, and the drops of blood on the toe had come either from Helen’s smashed nose or from Helen’s lacerated cheek.
It sang and sang, its voice not quite buried beneath the buzz of the thing in the deathbag, and now that Ralph’s ears – or whatever passed for ears in the world of auras – were all the way open, he could hear all the other voices of all the other objects. They sang like a lost choir.
Alive. Singing.
They could sing, all the things lining these walls could sing, because their owners could still sing.
Their owners were still alive.
Ralph looked up again, this time noting that while some of the objects he saw were old – the battered alto sax, for instance – a great many of them were new; there were no wheels from Gay Nineties bicycles in this little alcove. He saw three clock-radios, all of them digital. A shaving kit that looked as if it had hardly been used. A lipstick that still had a Rite Aid pricetag on it.
[‘Lois, Atropos has taken this stuff from the people who’ll be at the Civic Center tonight. Hasn’t he?’]
[‘Yes. I’m sure that’s right.’]
He pointed at the black cocoon shrieking on the floor, almost drowning out the songs all around it . . . drowning them out as it fed on them.
[‘And whatever’s inside that deathbag has something to do with what Clotho and Lachesis called the master-cord. It’s the thing that ties all these different objects – all these different lives – together.’]
[‘That makes them ka-tet. Yes.’]
Ralph handed the sneaker back to Lois.
[‘This goes with us when we go. It’s Helen’s.’]
[‘I know.’]
Lois looked at it for a moment, then did something Ralph thought extremely clever: pulled out two eyelets’ worth of lacing and tied the sneaker to her left wrist like a bracelet.
He crawled closer to the small deathbag and then bent over it. Getting close was hard, and staying close was harder – it was like placing your ear next to the motor-housing of a power drill shrieking at full volume or looking into a bright light without squinting. This time there seemed to be actual words buried within that buzzing, the same ones they’d heard as they approached the edge of the deathbag around the Civic Center: Geddout. Fucoff. Beedit.
Ralph placed his hands over his ears for a moment, but of course that did no good. The sounds weren’t coming from the outside, not really. He let his hands drop again and looked at Lois.
[‘What do you think? Any ideas on what we should do next?’]
He didn’t know exactly what he had expected of her, but it wasn’t the quick, positive response he got.
[‘Cut it open and take out what’s inside – and do it right away. That thing’s dangerous. Also, it might be calling Atropos, have you thought of that? Tattling just like the hen tattled on Jack in the story about the magic beanstalk.’]
Ralph actually had considered this possibility, although not in such vivid terms. All right, he thought. Cut open the bag and take the prize. Except just how are we supposed to do that?
He remembered the bolt of lightning he’d sent at Atropos when the little bald creep had been trying to lure Rosalie across the street. A good trick, but something like that might do more harm than good here; what if he vaporized the thing they were supposed to take?
I don’t think you can do that.
All right, fair enough, as a matter of fact he didn’t think he could do it, either . . . but when you were surrounded by the possessions of people who could all be dead when the sun came up tomorrow, taking chances seemed like a very bad idea. An insane idea.
What I need isn’t lightning but a nice sharp pair of scissors, like the ones Clotho and Lachesis use to—
He stared at Lois, startled by the clarity of the image.
[‘I don’t know what you just thought of, but hurry up and do it, whatever it is.’]
6
Ralph looked down at his right hand – a hand from which the wrinkles and the first twists of arthritis had now disappeared, a hand which lay inside a bright blue corona of light. Feeling a little foolish, he folded his last two fingers against his palm and extended the first two, thinking of a game they’d played as kids – rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock.
Be scissors, he thought. I need a pair of scissors. Help me out.
Nothing. He glanced at Lois and saw her looking at him with a serene calm which was somehow terrifying. Oh Lois, if you only knew, he thought, and then swept that out of his mind. Because he had felt something, hadn’t he? Yes. Something.
This time he didn’t make words in his mind but a picture: not the scissors Clotho had used to send on Jimmy V but the stainless-steel shears from his mother’s sewing basket – long, slim blades tapering to a point almost as sharp as the tip of a knife. As he deepened his concentration, he could even see the two tiny words engraved on the metal just south of the pivot-point: SHEFFIELD STEEL. And now he could feel that thing in his mind again, not a blink this time but a muscle – an immensely powerful one – slowly flexing. He looked fixedly down at his fingers and made the shears in his mind open and close. As they did, he slowly opened and closed his fingers, creating a V that widened and narrowed.
Now he could feel the energy he had taken from Nirvana Boy and the bum out at the trainyards, first gathering in his head and then moving down his right arm to his fingers like a cramp.
The aura surrounding the extended first and second fingers of his right hand began to thicken . . . and to lengthen. To take on the slim shape of blades. Ralph waited until they had extended themselves about five inches out from his nails and then worked his fingers back and forth again. The blades opened and closed.
[‘Go, Ralph! Do it!’]
Yes – he couldn’t afford to wait around and run experiments. He felt like a car battery that had been called on to crank a motor much too big for it. He could feel all his energy – the stuff he’d taken as well as his own – running down his right arm and into those blades. It wouldn’t last long.
He leaned forward, fingers pressed together in a pointing gesture, and sank the tip of the scissors into the deathbag. He had been concentrating so hard on first creating and then maintaining the scissors that he had stopped hearing that steady, hoarse buzz – at least with his conscious mind – but when the scissors-point sank into its black skin, the deathbag suddenly cycled up to a new, shrieking pitch of mingled pain and alarm. Ralph saw dribbles of thick, dark goo running out of the bag and across the floor. It looked like diseased snot. At the same time he felt the power-drain inside him roughly double. He could see it, he realized: his own aura running down his right arm and across the back of his hand in slow, peristaltic waves. And he could sense it dimming around the rest of his body as its essential protection of him thinned out.
[‘Hurry, Ralph! Hurry!’]
He made a tremendous effort and tore his fingers open. The shimmering blue blades also opened, making a small slit in the black egg. It screamed, and two bright, jagged flashes of red light raced across its surface. Ralph brought his fingers together and watched the shears growing from their tips snap shut, cutting through dense black stuff that was part shell and part flesh. He cried out. It was not pain he felt, exactly, but a sense of awful weariness. This is what bleeding to death must feel like, he thought.
Something inside the bag gleamed bright gold.
Ralph gathered all his strength and attempted to open his fingers for another cut. At first he didn’t think he was going to be able to do it – they felt as if they had been stuck together with Krazy Glue – and then they drew apart, widening the slit. Now he could almost see the object inside, something small and round and shiny. Really only one thing it can be, he thought, and then his heart suddenly fluttered in his chest. The blue blades flickered.
[‘Lois! Help me!’]
She seized his wrist. Ralph felt strength roar into him in big fresh volts. He watched, bemused, as the shears solidified again. Now only one of the blades was blue. The other was a pearly gray.
Lois, screaming inside his head: [‘Cut it! Cut it now!’]
He brought his fingers together again, and this time the blades cut the deathbag wide open. It uttered one last wavering shriek, turned entirely red, and disappeared. The shears growing from the tips of Ralph’s fingers flickered out of existence. He closed his eyes for a moment, suddenly aware that big warm drops of sweat were running down his cheeks like tears. In the dark field behind his eyelids he could see crazy afterimages that looked like dancing scissors-blades.
[‘Lois? Are you okay?’]
[‘Yes . . . but drained. I don’t have the slightest idea how I’m supposed to get back to those stairs under the tree, let alone climb them. I’m not sure I can even stand up.’]
Ralph opened his eyes, put his hands on his thighs above the knees, and leaned forward again. Lying on the floor where the deathbag had been was a man’s wedding ring. He could easily read what had been engraved on the wide inner curve: HD – ED 5–8–87.
Helen Deepneau and Edward Deepneau. Married on August 5th, 1987.
It was what they had come for. It was Ed’s token. All that remained now was to pick it up . . . slip it into the watchpocket of his pants . . . find Lois’s earrings . . . and get the hell out of here.
7
As he reached for the ring, a flicker of verse slipped through his mind – not Stephen Dobyns this time but J. R. R. Tolkien, who had invented the hobbits Ralph had last thought of in Lois’s cozy, picture-filled living room. It had been almost thirty years since he had read Tolkien’s story of Frodo and Gandalf and Sauron, the Dark Lord – a story which contained a token very similar to this one, now that he thought about it – but the lines were momentarily as clear as the scissors-blades had been only moments before:
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
I won’t be able to pick it up, he thought. It will be as tightly bound to the wheel of ka as Lois and I are, and I won’t be able to pick it up. Either that, or it will be like grasping a live high-tension wire, and I’ll be dead before I know it’s happening.
Except he didn’t really believe either of those things were going to happen. If the ring was not his for the taking, why had it been protected by the deathbag? If the ring was not his for the taking, why had the forces which stood behind Clotho and Lachesis – and Dorrance, he couldn’t forget Dorrance – set him and Lois upon this journey in the first place?
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, Ralph thought, and closed his fingers around Ed’s wedding ring. For a moment he felt a deep, glassy pain in his hand and wrist and forearm; at the same moment, the softly singing voices of the objects which Atropos had hoarded here rose in a great, harmonic shout.
Ralph made a sound – perhaps a scream, perhaps only a moan – and lifted the ring up, clenched tightly in his right hand. A sense of victory sang in his veins like wine, or like—
[‘Ralph.’]
He looked at her, but Lois was looking down at where Ed’s ring had been, her eyes dark with a mixture of fear and confusion.
Where Ed’s ring had been; where Ed’s ring still was. It lay exactly as it had lain, a glimmering gold circlet with HD – ED 5–8–87 inscribed around the inner arc.
Ralph felt an instant of dizzy disorientation and controlled it with an effort. He opened his hand, half expecting the ring to be gone in spite of what his senses told him, but it still lay in the center of his palm, neatly enclosed within the fork where his loveline and his lifeline diverged, glimmering in the baleful red light of this nasty place. HD – ED 5–8–87.
The two rings were identical.
8
One in his hand; one on the floor; absolutely no difference. At least none that Ralph could see.
Lois reached for the ring which had replaced the one Ralph had picked up, hesitated, then grasped it. As they watched, ghost-gold glowed just above the chamber’s floor, then solidified into a third wedding band. Like the other two, HD – ED 5–8–87 was inscribed on the inner curve.
Ralph found himself thinking of yet another story – not Tolkien’s long tale of the Ring, but a story by Dr Seuss which he had read one of Carolyn’s sister’s kids back in the fifties. That was a long time ago, but he had never completely forgotten the story, which had been richer and darker than Dr Seuss’s usual jingle-jangle nonsense about rats and bats and troublesome cats. It was called The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, and Ralph supposed it really wasn’t any wonder that the story had come to mind now.
Poor Bartholomew was a country hayseed who had the bad luck to be in the big city when the King happened by. You were supposed to take your hat off in the presence of that august personage, and Bartholomew had certainly tried, but without any luck; each time he took his hat off, another one, identical to the last, appeared beneath it.
[‘Ralph, what’s happening? What does it mean?’]
He shook his head without answering, eyes moving from the ring on his palm to the one in Lois’s hand to the one on the floor, around and around and around. Three rings, all of them identical, just like the hats Bartholomew Cubbins had kept trying to take off. The poor kid had gone on trying to make his manners to the King, Ralph remembered, even as the executioner had led him up a curving flight of stairs to the place where he would be beheaded for the crime of disrespect . . .
Except that wasn’t right, because after awhile the hats on poor Bartholomew’s head did begin to change, to grow ever more fabulous and rococo.
And are the rings the same, Ralph? Are you sure?
No, he guessed he wasn’t. When he’d picked up the first one, he had felt a deep, momentary ache spread up his arm like rheumatism, but Lois had shown no signs of pain when she picked up the second one.
And the voices – I didn’t hear them shout when she picked up the one she has.
Ralph leaned forward and grasped the third ring. There was no jolt of pain and no shout from the objects which formed the walls of the room – they just kept singing softly. Meanwhile, a fourth ring materialized where the other three had been, materialized exactly like another hat on the head of hapless Bartholomew Cubbins, but Ralph barely glanced at it. He looked at the first ring, lying between the fork of his lifeline and loveline on the palm of his right hand.
One Ring to rule them all, he thought. One Ring to bind them. And I think that’s you, beautiful. I think the others are just clever counterfeits.
And maybe there was a way to check that. Ralph held the two rings to his ears. The one in his left hand was silent; the one in his right, the one that had been inside the deathbag when he cut it open, gave off a faint, chilling echo of the deathbag’s final scream.
The one in his right hand was alive.
[‘Ralph?’]
Her hand on his arm, cold and urgent. Ralph looked at her, then tossed the ring in his left hand away. He held the other up and gazed at Lois’s strained, strangely young face through it, as if through a telescope.
[‘This is the one. The others are just place-holders, I think – like zeros in a big, complicated math problem.’]
[‘You mean they don’t matter?’]
He hesitated, unsure of how to reply . . . because they did matter, that was the thing. He just didn’t know how to put his intuitive understanding of this into words. As long as the false rings kept appearing in this nasty little room, like hats on the head of Bartholomew Cubbins, the future represented by the deathbag around the Civic Center remained the one true future. But the first ring, the one which Atropos had actually stolen off Ed’s finger (perhaps as he lay sleeping next to Helen in the little Cape Cod house which was now standing empty), could change all that.
The replicas were tokens which preserved the shape of ka just as spokes radiating out from a hub preserved the shape of a wheel. The original, however . . .
Ralph thought the original was the hub: One Ring to bind them.
He gripped the gold band tightly, feeling its hard curve bite into his palm and fingers. Then he slipped it into his watchpocket.
There was one thing about ka they didn’t tell us, he thought. It’s slippery. Slippery as some nasty old fish that won’t come off the hook but just keeps flopping around in your hand.
And it was like climbing a sand dune, too – you slid one step back for every two you managed to lunge forward. They had gone out to High Ridge and accomplished something – just what Ralph didn’t know, but Dorrance had assured them it was true; according to him, they had fulfilled their task there. Now they had come here and taken Ed’s token, but it still wasn’t enough, and why? Because ka was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.
But most of all, perhaps, ka was like a ring.
Like a wedding ring.
He suddenly understood what all the talk on the hospital roof and all of Dorrance’s efforts to explain hadn’t been able to convey: Ed’s undesignated status, coupled with Atropos’s discovery of the poor, confused man, had conveyed a tremendous power upon him. A door had opened, and a demon called the Crimson King had strolled through, one that was stronger than Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, any of them. And it didn’t intend to be stopped by a Derry Old Crock like Ralph Roberts.
[‘Ralph?’]
[‘One Ring to rule them all, Lois – One Ring to bind them.’]
[‘What are you talking about? What do you mean?’]
He patted his watchpocket, feeling the small yet momentous bulge that was Ed’s ring. Then he reached out and grasped her shoulders.
[‘The replacements – the false rings – are spokes, but this one is the hub. Take away the hub, and a wheel can’t turn.’]
[‘Are you sure?’]
He was sure, all right. He just didn’t know how to do it.
[‘Yes. Now come on – let’s get out of here while we still can.’]
Ralph sent her beneath the overloaded dining room table first, then dropped to his knees and followed. He paused halfway under and looked back over his shoulder. He saw a strange and terrible thing: although the buzzing sound had not returned, the deathbag was reknitting itself around the replacement wedding ring. Already the bright gold had dimmed to a ghostly circlet.
He stared at it for several seconds, fascinated, almost hypnotized, then tore his eyes away with an effort and began to crawl after Lois.
9
Ralph was afraid they would lose valuable time trying to navigate their way back through the maze of corridors which crisscrossed Atropos’s storehouse of keepsakes, but that turned out not to be a problem. Their own footprints, fading but still visible, were there to guide them.
He began to feel a little stronger as they put the terrible little room behind them, but Lois was now flagging badly. By the time they reached the archway between the storehouse and Atropos’s filthy apartment, she was leaning on him. He asked if she was all right. Lois managed a shrug and a small, tired smile.
[‘Most of my problem is being in this place. It doesn’t really matter how high up we go, it’s still foul and I hate it. Once I get some fresh air, I think I’ll be fine. Honestly.’]
Ralph hoped she was right. As he ducked under the arch into Atropos’s apartment, he was trying to think of a pretext by which he could send Lois on ahead of him. That would give him an opportunity to give the place a quick search. If that didn’t turn up the earrings, he would have to assume that Atropos was still wearing them.
He noticed her slip was hanging below the hem of her dress again, opened his mouth to tell her, and saw a flicker of movement from the tail of his left eye. He realized they had been a lot less cautious on the return trip – partly because they were worn out – and now they might have to pay a high price for dropping their guard.
[‘Lois, look out!’]
Too late. Ralph felt her arm jerked away as the snarling creature in the dirty tunic seized her about the waist and dragged her backward. Atropos’s head only came to her armpit, but that was enough to allow him to hold his rusty blade over her. When Ralph made an instinctive lunge at him, Atropos brought the straight-razor down until it was touching the pearl-gray cord which drifted up from the crown of her head. He bared his teeth at Ralph in an unspeakable grin.
[Not another step, Shorts . . . not one!]
Well, he didn’t have to worry about Lois’s errant earrings anymore, at least. They glittered a murky, pinkish-red against the tiny lobes of Atropos’s ears. It was more the sight of them than the shout that stopped Ralph where he was.
The scalpel drew back a little . . . but only a little.
[Now, Shorts – you took something of mine just now, didn’t you? Don’t try to deny it; I know. And now you’re going to give it back.]
The scalpel returned to Lois’s balloon-string; Atropos caressed it with the flat of the blade.
[You give it back or this bitch is going to die here in front of you – you can stand there and watch the sack turn black. So what do you say, Short Stuff? Hand it over.]
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
1
Five minutes later, Ralph’s head poked out of the shadows beneath the old, leaning oak. He saw Lois at once. She was kneeling in front of him, peering anxiously through the tangle of roots at his upturned face. He raised a grimy, blood-streaked hand and she took it firmly, holding him steady as he made his way up the last few steps – gnarled roots that were actually more like ladder-rungs.
Ralph wriggled his way out from under the tree and turned over on his back, taking the sweet air in great long pulls of breath. He thought air had never in his whole life tasted so good. In spite of everything else, he was enormously grateful to be out. To be free.
[‘Ralph? Are you all right?’]
He turned her hand over, kissed her palm, then put her earrings where his lips had been.
[‘Yes. Fine. These are yours.’]
She looked at them curiously, as if she had never seen earrings – these or any others – before, and then put them in her dress pocket.
[‘You saw them in the mirror, didn’t you, Lois?’]
[‘Yes, and it made me angry . . . but I don’t think I was really surprised, not down deep.’]
[‘Because you knew.’]
[‘Yes. I guess I did. Maybe from when we first saw Atropos wearing Bill’s hat. I just kept it . . . you know . . . in the back of my mind.’]
She was looking at him carefully, assessingly.
[‘Never mind my earrings right now – what happened down there? How did you get away?’]
Ralph was afraid if she looked at him in that careful way for too long, she would see too much. He also had an idea that if he didn’t get moving soon, he might never move again; his weariness was now so large it was like some great encrusted object – a long-sunken ocean liner, perhaps – lying inside him, calling to him, trying to drag him down. He got to his feet. He couldn’t allow either of them to be dragged down, not now. The news the sky told wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it was bad enough – it was six o’clock at least. All over Derry, people who didn’t give a shit one way or the other about the abortion issue (the vast majority, in other words) were sitting down to hot dinners. At the Civic Center the doors would now be open; 10-K TV lights would be bathing them, and Minicams would be transmitting live shots of early arriving pro-choice advocates driving past Dan Dalton and his sign-waving Friends of Life. Not far from here, people were chanting that old Ed Deepneau favorite, the one that went Hey, hey, Susan Day, how many kids did you kill today? Whatever he and Lois did, they would have to do it in the next sixty to ninety minutes. The clock was ticking.
[‘Come on, Lois. We have to get moving.’]
[‘Are we going back to the Civic Center?’]
[‘No, not to start with. I think that to start with, we ought to . . .’]
Ralph discovered that he simply couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say. Where did he think they ought to go to start with? Back to Derry Home? The Red Apple? His house? Where did you go when you needed to find a couple of well-meaning but far from all-knowing fellows who had gotten you and your few close friends into a world of hurt and trouble? Or could you reasonably expect them to find you?
They might not want to find you, sweetheart. In fact, they might actually be hiding from you.
[‘Ralph, are you sure you’re—’]
He suddenly thought of Rosalie, and knew.
[‘The park, Lois. Strawford Park. That’s where we have to go. But we need to make a stop on the way.’]
He led her along the Cyclone fence, and soon they heard the lazy sound of interwoven voices. Ralph could smell roasting hotdogs as well, and after the fetid stench of Atropos’s den, the smell was ambrosial. A minute or two later, he and Lois stepped to the edge of the little picnic area near Runway 3.
Dorrance was there, standing at the heart of his amazing, multicolored aura and watching as a light plane drifted down toward the runway. Behind him, Faye Chapin and Don Veazie were sitting at one of the picnic tables with a chessboard between them and a half-finished bottle of Blue Nun near to hand. Stan and Georgina Eberly were drinking beer and twiddling forks with hotdogs impaled upon them in the heat-shimmer – to Ralph that shimmer was a strangely dry pink, like coral-colored sand – above the picnic area’s barbecue pit.
For a moment Ralph simply stood where he was, struck dumb by their beauty – the ephemeral, powerful beauty that was, he supposed, what Short-Time life was mostly about. A snatch of song, something at least twenty-five years old, occurred to him: We are stardust, we are golden. Dorrance’s aura was different – fabulously different – but even the most prosaic of the others glittered like rare and infinitely desirable gemstones.
[‘Oh, Ralph, do you see? Do you see how beautiful they are?’]
[‘Yes.’]
[‘What a shame they don’t know!’]
But was it? In light of all that had happened, Ralph wasn’t so sure. And he had an idea – a vague but strong intuition he could never have put into words – that perhaps real beauty was something unrecognized by the conscious self, a work that was always in progress, a thing of being rather than seeing.
‘Come on, dumbwit, make your move,’ a voice said. Ralph jerked, first thinking the voice was speaking to him, but it was Faye, talking to Don Veazie. ‘You’re slower’n old creepin Jesus.’
‘Never mind,’ Don said. ‘I’m thinkin.’
‘Think till hell freezes over, Slick, and it’s still gonna be mate in six moves.’
Don poured some wine into a paper cup and rolled his eyes. ‘Oh boogersnot!’ he cried. ‘I didn’t realize I was playin chess with Boris Spassky! I thought it was just plain old Faye Chapin! I apologize all to hell and gone!’
‘That’s a riot, Don. An act like that, you could take it on the road and make a million dollars. You won’t have to wait long to do it, either – you can start just six moves from now.’
‘Ain’t you smart,’ Don said. ‘You just don’t know when to—’
‘Hush!’ Georgina Eberly said in a sharp tone. ‘What was that? It sounded like something blew up!’
‘That’ was Lois, sucking a flood of vibrant rainforest green from Georgina’s aura.
Ralph raised his right hand, curled it into a tube around his lips, and began to inhale a similar stream of bright blue light from Stan Eberly’s aura. He felt fresh energy fill him at once; it was as if fluorescent lights were going on in his brain. But that vast sunken ship, which was really no more or less than four months’ worth of mostly sleepless nights, was still there, and still trying to suck him down to the place where it was.
The decision was still right there, too – not yet made one way or the other, but only deferred.
Stan was also looking around. No matter how much of his aura Ralph took (and he had drawn off a great deal, it seemed to him), the source remained as densely bright as ever. Apparently what they had been told about the all-but-endless reservoirs of energy surrounding each human being had been the exact, literal truth.
‘Well,’ Stan said, ‘I did hear somethin—’
‘I didn’t,’ Faye said.
‘Coss not, you’re deaf as dirt,’ Stan replied. ‘Stop interruptin for just one minute, can’tcha? I started to say it wasn’t a fuel-tank, because there ain’t no fire or smoke. Can’t be that Don farted, either, cause there ain’t no squirrels droppin dead out of the trees with their fur burnt off. I guess it musta been one of those big Air National Guard trucks backfirin. Don’t worry, darlin, I’ll pertect ya.’
‘Pertect this,’ Georgina said, slapping one hand into the crook of her elbow and curling her fist at him. She was smiling, however.
‘Oh boy,’ Faye said. ‘Take a peek at Old Dor.’
They all looked at Dorrance, who was smiling and waving in the direction of the Harris Avenue Extension.
‘Who do you see there, old fella?’ Don Veazie asked with a grin.
‘Ralph and Lois,’ Dorrance said, smiling radiantly. ‘I see Ralph and Lois. They just came out from under the old tree!’
‘Yep,’ Stan said. He shaded his eyes, then pointed directly at them. This delivered a wallop to Ralph’s nervous system which only abated when he realized Stan was just pointing where Dorrance was waving. ‘And look! There’s Glenn Miller coming out right behind em! Goddam!’
Georgina threw an elbow and Stan stepped away nimbly, grinning.
[‘Hello, Ralph! Hello, Lois!’]
[‘Dorrance! We’re going to Strawford Park! Is that right?’]
Dorrance, grinning happily: [‘I don’t know, it’s all Long-Time business now, and I’m through with it. I’m going back home soon and read Walt Whitman. It’s going to be a windy night, and Whitman’s always best when the wind blows.’]
Lois, sounding nearly frantic: [‘Dorrance, help us!’]
Dor’s grin faltered, and he looked at her solemnly.
[‘I can’t. It’s passed out of my hands. Whatever’s done will have to be done by you and Ralph now.’]
‘Ugh,’ Georgina said. ‘I hate it when he stares that way. You could almost believe he really does see someone.’ She picked up her long-handled barbecue fork and began to toast her hotdog again. ‘Has anybody seen Ralph and Lois, by the way?’
‘No,’ Don said.
‘They’re shacked up in one of those X-rated motels down the coast with a case of beer and a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil,’ Stan said. ‘The giant-economy-size bottle. I toldja that yesterday.’
‘Filthy old man,’ Georgina said, this time throwing the elbow with a little more force and a lot more accuracy.
Ralph: [‘Dorrance, can’t you give us any help at all? At least tell us if we’re on the right track?’]
For a moment he was sure Dor was going to reply. Then there was a buzzing, approaching drone from overhead and the old man looked up. His daffy, beautiful smile resurfaced. ‘Look!’ he cried. ‘An old Grumman Yellow Bird! And a beauty!’ He jogged to the chainlink fence to watch the small yellow plane land, turning his back to them.
Ralph took Lois’s arm and tried to smile himself. It was hard going – he thought he had never felt quite so frightened and confused in his entire life – but he gave it the old college try.
[‘Come on, dear. Let’s go.’]
2
Ralph remembered thinking – this while they’d been making their way along the abandoned rail-line which had eventually taken them back to the airport – that walking was not exactly what they were doing; it had seemed more like gliding. They went from the picnic area at the end of Runway 3 back to Strawford Park in that same fashion, only the glide was faster and more pronounced now. It was like being carried along by an invisible conveyor belt.
As an experiment, he stopped walking. The houses and storefronts continued to flow mildly past. He looked down at his feet to make sure, and yes, they were completely still. It seemed the sidewalk was moving, not him.
Here came Mr Dugan, head of the Derry Trust’s Loan Department, decked out in his customary three-piece suit and rimless eyeglasses. As always, he looked to Ralph like the only man in the history of the world to be born without an asshole. He had once rejected Ralph’s application for a Bill-Payer loan, which, Ralph supposed, might account for a few of his negative feelings about the man. Now he saw that Dugan’s aura was the dull, uniform gray of a corridor in a Veterans Administration hospital, and Ralph decided that didn’t surprise him much. He held his nose like a man forced to swim across a polluted canal and passed directly through the banker. Dugan did not so much as twitch.
That was sort of amusing, but when Ralph glanced at Lois, his amusement faded in a hurry. He saw the worry on her face, and the questions she wanted to ask. Questions to which he had no satisfactory answers.
Ahead was Strawford Park. As Ralph looked, the streetlights came on suddenly. The little playground where he and McGovern – Lois too, more often than not – had stood watching the children play was almost deserted. Two junior-high kids were sitting side by side on the swings, smoking cigarettes and talking, but the mothers and toddlers who came here during the daylight hours were all gone now.
Ralph thought of McGovern – of his ceaseless, morbid chatter and his self-pity, so hard to see when you first got to know him, so hard to miss once you’d been around him for awhile, both of them lightened and somehow turned into something better by his irreverent wit and his surprising, impulsive acts of kindness – and felt deep sadness steal over him. Short-Timers might be stardust, and they might be golden as well, but when they were gone they were as gone as the mothers and babies who made brief playtime visits here on sunny summer afternoons.
[‘Ralph, what are we doing here? The deathbag’s over the Civic Center, not Strawford Park!’]
Ralph guided her to the park bench where he had found her several centuries ago, crying over the argument she’d had with her son and daughter-in-law . . . and over her lost earrings. Down the hill, the two Portosans glimmered in the deepening twilight.
Ralph closed his eyes. I am going mad, he thought, and I’m headed there on the express rather than the local. Which is it going to be? The lady . . . or the tiger?
[‘Ralph, we have to do something. Those lives . . . those thousands of lives . . .’]
In the darkness behind his closed lids, Ralph saw someone coming out of the Red Apple Store. A figure in dark corduroy pants and a Red Sox cap. Soon the terrible thing would start to happen again, and because Ralph didn’t want to see it, he opened his eyes and looked at the woman beside him.
[‘Every life is important, Lois, wouldn’t you agree? Every single one.’]
He didn’t know what she saw in his aura, but it clearly terrified her.
[‘What happened down there after I left? What did he do or say to you? Tell me, Ralph! You tell me!’]
So which was it going to be? The one or the many? The lady or the tiger? If he didn’t choose soon, the choice would be taken out of his hands by nothing more than the simple passage of time. So which one? Which?
‘Neither . . . or both,’ he said hoarsely, unaware in his terrible agitation that he was speaking aloud, and on several different levels at once. ‘I won’t choose one or the other. I won’t. Do you hear me?’
He leaped up from the bench, looking around wildly.
‘Do you hear me?’ he shouted. ‘I reject this choice! I will have BOTH or I will have NEITHER!’
On one of the paths north of them, a wino who had been poking through a trash-barrel, searching for returnable cans and bottles, took one look at Ralph, then turned and ran. What he had seen was a man who appeared to be on fire.
Lois stood up and grasped his face between her hands.
[‘Ralph, what is it? Who is it? Me? You? Because if it’s me, if you’re holding back because of me, I don’t want—’]
He took a deep, steadying breath and then put his forehead against hers, looking into her eyes.
[‘It’s not you, Lois, and not me. If it was either of us, I might be able to choose. But it’s not, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to be a pawn anymore.’]
He shook her loose and took a step away from her. His aura flashed out so brilliantly that she had to raise her hand in front of her eyes; it was as if he were somehow exploding. And when his voice came, it reverberated in her head like thunder.
[‘CLOTHO! LACHESIS! COME TO ME, DAMMIT, AND COME NOW!’]
3
He took two or three more steps and stood looking down the hill. The two junior-high-school boys sitting on the swings were looking up at him with identical expressions of startled fear. They were up and gone the moment Ralph’s eyes lit on them, running flat-out toward the lights of Witcham Street like a couple of deer, leaving their cigarettes to smolder in the foot-ditches beneath the swings.
[‘CLOTHO! LACHESIS!’]
He was burning like an electric arc, and suddenly all the strength ran out of Lois’s legs like water. She took one step backward and collapsed onto the park bench. Her head was whirling, her heart full of terror, and below everything was that vast exhaustion. Ralph saw it as a sunken ship; Lois saw it as a pit around which she was forced to walk in a gradually tightening spiral, a pit into which she must eventually fall.
[‘CLOTHO! LACHESIS! LAST CHANCE! I MEAN IT!’]
For a moment nothing happened, and then the doors of the Portosans at the foot of the hill opened in perfect unison. Clotho stepped from the one marked MEN, Lachesis from the one marked WOMEN. Their auras, the brilliant green-gold of summer dragonflies, glimmered in the ashy light of day’s end. They moved together until their auras overlapped, then walked slowly toward the top of the hill that way, with their white-clad shoulders almost touching. They looked like a pair of frightened children.
Ralph turned to Lois. His aura still blazed and burned.
[‘Stay here.’]
[‘Yes, Ralph.’]
She let him get partway down the hill, then gathered her courage and called after him.
[‘But I’ll try to stop Ed if you won’t. I mean it.’]
Of course she did, and his heart responded to her bravery . . . but she didn’t know what he knew. Hadn’t seen what he had seen.
He looked back at her for a moment, then walked down to where the two little bald doctors looked at him with their luminous, frightened eyes.
4
Lachesis, nervously: [We didn’t lie to you – we didn’t.]
Clotho, even more nervously (if that were possible): [Deepneau is on his way. You have to stop him, Ralph – you have to at least try.]
The fact is I don’t have to anything, and your faces show it, he thought. Then he turned to Lachesis, and was gratified to see the small bald man flinch from his gaze and drop his dark, pupil-less eyes.
[‘Is that so? When we were on the hospital roof you told us to stay away from Ed, Mr L. You were very emphatic about that.’]
Lachesis shifted uncomfortably and fidgeted with his hands.
[I . . . that is to say we . . . we can be wrong. This time we were.]
Except Ralph knew that wrong wasn’t the best word for what they had been; self-deceived would be better. He wanted to scold them for it – oh, tell the truth, he wanted to scold them for getting him into this shitting mess in the first place – and found he couldn’t. Because, according to old Dor, even their self-deception had served the Purpose; the side-trip to High Ridge had for some reason not been a side-trip at all. He didn’t understand why or how that was, but he intended to find out, if finding out was possible.
[‘Let’s forget that part of it for the time being, gentlemen, and talk about why all this is happening. If you want help from me and Lois, I think you better tell me.’]
They looked at each other with their big, frightened eyes, then back at Ralph.
Lachesis: [Ralph, do you doubt that all those people are really going to die? Because if you do—]
[‘No, but I’m tired of having them waved in my face. If an earthquake that served the Purpose happened to be scheduled for this area and the butcher’s bill came to ten thousand instead of just two thousand and change, you’d never even bat an eye, would you? So what’s so special about this situation? Tell me!’]
Clotho: [Ralph, we don’t make the rules any more than you do. We thought you understood that.]
Ralph sighed.
[‘You’re weaseling again, and not wasting anybody’s time but your own.’]
Clotho, uneasily: [All right, perhaps the picture we gave you wasn’t completely clear, but time was short and we were frightened. And you must see that, regardless of all else, those people will die if you can’t stop Ed Deepneau!]
[‘Never mind all of them for now; I only want to know about one of them – the one who belongs to the Purpose and can’t be handed over just because some undesignated pisher comes along with a headful of loose screws and a planeful of explosive. Who is it you feel you can’t give up to the Random? Who? It’s Day, isn’t it? Susan Day.’]
Lachesis: [No. Susan Day is part of the Random. She is none of our concern, none of our worry.]
[‘Who, then?’]
Clotho and Lachesis exchanged another glance. Clotho nodded slightly, and then they both turned back to Ralph. Once again Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating that peacock’s fan of light. It wasn’t McGovern Ralph saw this time, but a little boy with blond hair cut in bangs across his forehead and a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of his nose. Ralph placed him at once – the kid from the basement of High Ridge, the one with the bruised mother. The one who had called him and Lois angels.
And a little child shall lead them, he thought, utterly flabbergasted. Oh my God. He looked disbelievingly at Clotho and Lachesis.
[‘Am I understanding? All this has been about that one little boy?’]
He expected more waffling, but the reply from Clotho was simple and direct: [Yes, Ralph.]
Lachesis: [He’s at the Civic Center now. His mother, whose life you and Lois also saved this morning, got a call from her babysitter less than an hour ago, saying she’d cut herself badly on a piece of glass and wouldn’t be able to take care of the boy tonight after all. By then it was too late to find another sitter, of course, and this woman has been determined for weeks to see Susan Day . . . to shake her hand, even give her a hug, if possible. She idolizes the Day woman.]
Ralph, who remembered the fading bruises on her face, supposed that was an idolatry he could understand. He understood something else even better: the babysitter’s cut hand had been no accident. Something was determined to place the little boy with the shaggy blond bangs and the smoke-reddened eyes at the Civic Center, and was willing to move heaven and earth to do it. His mother had taken him not because she was a bad parent, but because she was as subject to human nature as anyone else. She hadn’t wanted to miss her one chance at seeing Susan Day, that was all.
No, it’s not all, Ralph thought. She also took him because she thought it would be safe, with Pickering and his Daily Bread crazies all dead. It must have seemed to her that the worst she’d have to protect her son from tonight would be a bunch of sign-waving pro-lifers, that lightning couldn’t possibly strike her and her son twice on the same day.
Ralph had been gazing off toward Witcham Street. Now he turned back to Clotho and Lachesis.
[‘You’re sure he’s there? Positive?’]
Clotho: [Yes. Sitting in the upper north balcony next to his mother with a McDonald’s poster to color and some storybooks. Would it surprise you to know that one of the stories is The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins?]
Ralph shook his head. At this point, nothing would surprise him.
Lachesis: [It’s the north side of the Civic Center that Deepneau’s plane will strike. This little boy will be killed instantly if steps are not taken to prevent it . . . and that can’t be allowed to happen. This boy must not die before his scheduled time.]
5
Lachesis was looking earnestly at Ralph. The fan of blue-green light between his fingers had disappeared.
[We can’t go on talking like this, Ralph – he’s already in the air, less than a hundred miles from here. Soon it will be too late to stop him.]
That made Ralph feel frantic, but he held his place just the same. Frantic, after all, was how they wanted him to feel. How they wanted both of them to feel.
[‘I’m telling you that none of that matters until I understand what the stakes are. I won’t let it matter.’]
Clotho: [Listen, then. Every now and again a man or woman comes along whose life will affect not just those about him or her, or even all those who live in the Short-Time world, but those on many levels above and below the Short-Time world. These people are the Great Ones, and their lives always serve the Purpose. If they are taken too soon, everything changes. The scales cease to balance. Can you imagine, for instance, how different the world might be today if Hitler had drowned in the bathtub as a child? You may believe the world would be better for that, but I can tell you that the world would not exist at all if it had happened. Suppose Winston Churchill had died of food-poisoning before he ever became Prime Minister? Suppose Augustus Caesar had been born dead, strangled on his own umbilicus? Yet the person we want you to save is of far greater importance than any of these.]
[‘Dammit, Lois and I already saved this kid once! Didn’t that close the books, return him to the Purpose?’]
Lachesis, patiently: [Yes, but he is not safe from Ed Deepneau, because Deepneau has no designation in either Random or Purpose. Of all the people on earth, only Deepneau can harm him before his time comes. If Deepneau fails, the boy will be safe again – he will pass his time quietly until his moment comes and he steps upon the stage to play his brief but crucially important part.]
[‘One life means so much, then?’]
Lachesis: [Yes. If the child dies, the Tower of all existence will fall, and the consequences of such a fall are beyond your comprehension. And beyond ours, as well.]
Ralph stared down at his shoes for a moment. His head seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. There was an irony here, one he was able to grasp easily in spite of his weariness. Atropos had apparently set Ed in motion by inflaming some sort of Messiah complex which might have been pre-existing . . . a by-product of his undesignated status, perhaps. What Ed didn’t see – and would never believe if told – was that Atropos and his bosses on the upper levels intended to use him not to save the Messiah but to kill him.
He looked up again into the anxious faces of the two little bald doctors.
[‘Okay, I don’t know how I’m supposed to stop Ed, but I’ll give it a shot.’]
Clotho and Lachesis looked at each other and smiled identical (and very human) broad smiles of relief. Ralph raised a cautioning finger.
[‘Wait. You haven’t heard all of it.’]
Their smiles faded.
[‘I want something back from you. One life. I’ll trade the life of your four-year-old boy for—’]
6
Lois didn’t hear the end of that; his voice dropped below the range of audibility for a moment, but when she saw first Clotho and then Lachesis begin shaking their heads, her heart sank.
Lachesis: [I understand your distress, and yes, Atropos can certainly do as he threatens. Yet you must surely comprehend that this one life is hardly as important as—]
Ralph: [‘But I think it is, don’t you see? I think it is. What you two guys need to get through your heads is that to me, both lives are equally—’]
She lost him again, but had no problem hearing Clotho; in the depth of his distress he was almost wailing.
[But this is different! This boy’s life is different!]
Now she heard Ralph clearly, speaking (if speech was what it was) with a fearless, relentless logic that made Lois think of her father.
[‘All lives are different. All of them matter or none matters. That’s only my short-sighted, Short-Time view, of course, but I guess you boys are stuck with it, since I’m the one with the hammer. The bottom line is this: I’ll trade you, even-up. The life of yours for the life of mine. All you have to do is promise, and the deal’s on.’]
Lachesis: [Ralph, please! Please understand that we really must not!]
There was a long moment of silence. When Ralph spoke, his voice was soft but still audible. It was, however, the last completely audible thing Lois heard in their conversation.
[‘There’s a world of difference between cannot and must not, wouldn’t you say?’]
Clotho said something, but Lois caught only an isolated
[trade might possibly be]
phrase. Lachesis shook his head violently. Ralph replied and Lachesis answered by making a grim little scissoring gesture with his fingers.
Surprisingly, Ralph replied to this with a laugh and a nod.
Clotho put a hand on his colleague’s arm and spoke to him earnestly before turning back to Ralph.
Lois clenched her hands in her lap, willing them to reach some sort of agreement. Any agreement that would keep Ed Deepneau from killing all those people while they just stood here yattering.
Suddenly the side of the hill was illuminated by brilliant white light. At first Lois thought it came down from the sky, but that was only because myth and religion had taught her to believe the sky was the source of all supernatural emanations. In reality, it seemed to come from everywhere – trees, sky, ground, even from herself, streaming out of her aura like ribbons of fog.
There was a voice, then . . . or rather a Voice. It spoke only four words, but they echoed in Lois’s head like iron bells.
[IT MAY BE SO.]
She saw Clotho, his small face a mask of terror and awe, reach into his back pocket and bring out his scissors. He fumbled and almost dropped them, a nervous blunder that made Lois feel real kinship for him. Then he was holding them up with one handle in each hand and the blades open.
Those four words came again:
[IT MAY BE SO.]
This time they were followed by a glare so bright that for a moment Lois believed she must be blinded. She clapped her hands over her eyes but saw – in the last instant when she could see anything – that the light had centered on the scissors Clotho was holding up like a two-pronged lightning-rod.
There was no refuge from that light; it turned her eyelids and upraised, shielding hands to glass. The glare outlined the bones of her fingers like X-ray pencils as it streamed through her flesh. From somewhere far away she heard a woman who sounded suspiciously like Lois Chasse, screaming at the top of her mental voice:
[‘Turn it off! God, please turn it off before it kills me!’]
And at last, when it seemed to her that she could stand no more, the light did begin to fade. When it was gone – except for a fierce blue afterimage that floated in the new darkness like a pair of phantom scissors – she slowly opened her eyes. For a moment she continued to see nothing but that brilliant blue cross and thought she had indeed been blinded. Then, as dim as a developing photograph at first, the world began to resurface. She saw Ralph, Clotho, and Lachesis lowering their own hands and peering around with the blind bewilderment of a nest of moles turned up by the blade of a harrow.
Lachesis was looking at the scissors in his colleague’s hands as if he had never seen them before, and Lois was willing to bet he never had seen them as they were now. The blades were still shining, shedding eldritch fairy-glimmers of light in misty droplets.
Lachesis: [Ralph! That was . . . ]
She lost the rest of it, but his tone was that of a common peasant who answers a knock at the door of his hut and finds that the Pope has stopped by for a spot of prayer and a little confession.
Clotho was still staring at the blades of the scissors. Ralph was also looking, but at last he lifted his gaze to the bald doctors.
Ralph: [‘ . . . the hurt?’]
Lachesis, speaking like a man emerging from a deep dream: [Yes . . . won’t last long, but . . . agony will be intense . . . change your mind, Ralph?]
Lois was suddenly afraid of those shining scissors. She wanted to cry out to Ralph, tell him to never mind his one, to just give them their one, their little boy. She wanted to tell him to do whatever it took to get them to hide those scissors again.
But no words came from either her mouth or her mind.
Ralph: [‘. . . in the least . . . just wanted to know what to expect.’]
Clotho: [. . . ready? . . . must be . . . ]
Tell them no, Ralph! she thought at him. Tell them NO!
Ralph: [‘. . . ready.’]
Lachesis: [Understand . . . terms he has . . . and the price?]
Ralph, impatient now: [‘Yes, yes. Can we please just . . .’]
Clotho, with immense gravity: [Very well, Ralph. It may be so.]
Lachesis put an arm around Ralph’s shoulders; he and Clotho led him a little further down the hill, to the place where the younger children started their downhill sled-runs in the winter. There was a small flat area there, circular in shape, about the size of a nightclub stage. When they reached it, Lachesis stopped Ralph, then turned him so he and Clotho were facing each other.
Lois suddenly wanted to shut her eyes and found she couldn’t. She could only watch and pray that Ralph knew what he was doing.
Clotho murmured to him. Ralph nodded and slipped out of McGovern’s sweater. He folded it and laid it neatly on the leaf-strewn grass. When he straightened again, Clotho took his right wrist and held his arm out straight. He then nodded to Lachesis, who unbuttoned the cuff of Ralph’s shirt and rolled the sleeve to the elbow in three quick turns. With that done, Clotho rotated Ralph’s arm so it was wrist-up. The fine tracery of blue veins just beneath the skin of his forearm was poignantly clear, highlighted in delicate strokes of aura. All of this was horribly familiar to Lois: it was like watching a patient on a TV doctor-show being prepped for an operation.
Except this wasn’t TV.
Lachesis leaned forward and spoke again. Although she still couldn’t hear the words, Lois knew he was telling Ralph this was his last chance.
Ralph nodded, and although his aura now told her that he was terrified of what was coming, he somehow even managed a smile. When he turned to Clotho and spoke, he did not seem to be seeking reassurance but rather offering a word of comfort. Clotho tried to return Ralph’s smile, but without success.
Lachesis wrapped one hand around Ralph’s wrist, more to steady the arm (or so it seemed to Lois) than to actually hold it immobile. He reminded her of a nurse attending a patient who must receive a painful injection. Then he looked at his partner with frightened eyes and nodded. Clotho nodded back, took a breath, and then bent over Ralph’s upturned forearm with its ghostly tree of blue veins glowing beneath the skin. He paused for a moment, then slowly opened the jaws of the scissors with which he and his old friend traded life for death.
7
Lois staggered to her feet and stood swaying back and forth on legs that felt like lumber. She meant to break the paralysis which had locked her in such a cruel silence, to shout at Ralph and tell him to stop – tell him he didn’t know what they meant to do to him.
Except he did. It was in the pallor of his face, his half-closed eyes, his painfully thinned lips. Most of all it was in the blotches of red and black which were flashing across his aura like meteors, and in the aura itself, which had tightened down to a hard blue shell.
Ralph nodded at Clotho, who brought the lower scissorblade down until it was touching Ralph’s forearm just below the fold of the elbow. For a moment the skin only dimpled, and then a smooth dark blister of blood formed where the dimple had been. The blade slid into this blister. When Clotho squeezed his fingers, bringing the razor-sharp blades together, the skin on either side of the lengthwise cut snapped back with the suddenness of windowshades. Subcutaneous fat glimmered like melting ice in the fierce blue glow of Ralph’s aura. Lachesis tightened his hold on Ralph’s wrist, but so far as Lois could tell, Ralph did not make even a first instinctive effort to pull back, only lowered his head and clenched his left fist in the air like a man giving a Black Power salute. She could see the cords in his neck standing out like cables. Not a single sound escaped him.
Now that this terrible business was actually begun, Clotho proceeded with a speed which was both brutal and merciful. He cut rapidly down the middle of Ralph’s forearm to his wrist, using the scissors the way a man will to open a parcel which has been heavily taped, guiding the blades with the fingers and bearing down with the thumb. Inside Ralph’s arm, tendons gleamed like cuts of flank steak. Blood ran in freshets, and there was a fine scarlet spray each time an artery or a vein was severed. Soon fans of backspatter decorated the white tunics of the two small men, making them look more like little doctors than ever.
When his blades had at last severed the Bracelets of Fortune at Ralph’s wrist (the ‘operation’ took less than three seconds but seemed to last forever to Lois), Clotho removed the dripping scissors and handed them to Lachesis. Ralph’s upturned arm had been cut open from elbow to wrist in a dark furrow. Clotho clamped his hands over this furrow at its point of origination and Lois thought: Now the other one will pick up Ralph’s sweater and use it as a tourniquet. But Lachesis made no move to do that; he merely held the scissors and watched.
For a moment the blood went on flowing between Clotho’s grasping fingers, and then it stopped. He slowly drew his hands down Ralph’s arm, and the flesh which emerged from his grip was whole and firm, although seamed with a thick white ridge of scar-tissue.
[Lois . . . Lo-isssss . . . ]
This voice was not coming from inside her head, nor from down the hill; it had come from behind her. A soft voice, almost cajoling. Atropos? No, not at all. She looked down and saw green and somehow sunken light flowing all around her – it rayed through the spaces between her arms and her body, between her legs, even between her fingers. It rippled her shadow ahead of her, scrawny and somehow twisted, like the shadow of a hanged woman. It caressed her with heatless fingers the color of Spanish moss.
[Turn around, Lo-isss . . . ]
At that moment the last thing on earth Lois Chasse wanted to do was turn around and look at the source of that green light.
[Turn around, Lo-isss . . . see me, Lo-isss . . . come into the light, Lo-isss . . . come into the light . . . see me and come into the light . . . ]
It was not a voice which could be disobeyed. Lois turned as slowly as a toy ballerina whose cogs have grown rusty, and her eyes seemed to fill up with Saint Elmo’s fire.
Lois came into the light.
CHAPTER THIRTY
1
Just before the explosion came, Susan Day, standing in a hot white spotlight at the front of the Civic Center and now living through the last few seconds of her fabulous, provocative life, was saying: ‘I haven’t come to Derry to heal you, hector you, or to incite you, but to mourn with you – this is a situation which has passed far beyond political considerations. There is no right in violence, nor refuge in self-righteousness. I am here to ask that you put your positions and your rhetoric aside and help each other find a way to help each other. To turn away from the attractions of—’
The high windows lining the south side of the auditorium suddenly lit up with a brilliant white glare and then blew inward.
2
The Cherokee missed the Hoodsie wagon, but that didn’t save it. The plane took one final half-turn in the air and then screwed itself into the parking lot about twenty-five feet from the fence where, earlier that day, Lois had paused to yank up her troublesome half-slip. The wings snapped off. The cockpit made a quick and violent journey back through the passenger section. The fuselage blew out with the fury of a bottle of champagne in a microwave oven. Glass flew. The tail bent over the Cherokee’s body like the stinger of a dying scorpion and impaled itself in the roof of a Dodge van with the words PROTECT WOMEN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE! stencilled on the side. There was a bright and bitter crunch-clang that sounded like a dropped pile of scrap iron.
‘Holy shi –’ one of the cops posted on the edge of the parking lot began, and then the C-4 inside the cardboard box flew free like a big gray glob of phlegm and struck the remains of the instrument panel where several ‘hot’ wires rammed into it like hypo needles. The plastique exploded with an ear-crunching thud, flash-frying the Bassey Park racetrack and turning the parking lot into a hurricane of white light and shrapnel. John Leydecker, who had been standing under the Civic Center’s cement canopy and talking to a State cop, was thrown through one of the open doors and all the way across the lobby. He struck the far wall and fell unconscious into the shattered glass from the harness-racing trophy case. At that, he was luckier than the man with whom he had been standing; the State cop was thrown into the post between two of the open doors and chopped in half.
The ranks of cars actually shielded the Civic Center from the worst of the hammering, concussive blow, but that blessing would only be counted later. Inside, over two thousand people at first sat stunned, unsure of what they should do and even more unsure of what most of them had just seen: America’s most famous feminist decapitated by a jagged chunk of flying glass. Her head went flying into the sixth row like some strange white bowling ball with a blonde wig pasted on it.
They didn’t erupt into panic until the lights went out.
3
Seventy-one people were killed in the trampling, panicked rush to the exits, and the next day’s Derry News would trumpet the event with a forty-eight-point scare headline, calling it a terrible tragedy. Ralph Roberts could have told them that, all things considered, they had gotten off lucky. Very lucky, indeed.
4
Halfway up the north balcony, a woman named Sonia Danville – a woman with the bruises of the last beating any man would ever give her still fading from her face – sat with her arms around the shoulders of her son, Patrick. Patrick’s McDonald’s poster, showing Ronald and Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar dancing the Boot-Scootin’ Boogie just outside a drive-thru window, was on his lap, but he had hardly done more than color the golden arches before turning the poster over to the blank side. It wasn’t that he had lost interest; it was just that he’d had an idea for a picture of his own, and it had come as such ideas often did to him, with the force of a compulsion. He had spent most of the day thinking about what had happened in the cellar at High Ridge – the smoke, the heat, the frightened women, and the two angels that had come to save them – but his splendid idea banished these disturbing thoughts, and he fell to work with silent enthusiasm. Soon Patrick felt almost as if he were living in the world he was drawing with his Crayolas.
He was an amazingly competent artist already, only four years old or not (‘My little genius’, Sonia sometimes called him), and his picture was much better than the color-it-in poster on the other side of the sheet. What he had managed before the lights went out was work a gifted first-year art student might have been proud of. In the middle of the poster-sheet, a tower of dark, soot-colored stone rose into a blue sky dotted with fat white clouds. Surrounding it was a field of roses so red they almost seemed to clamor aloud. Standing off to one side was a man dressed in faded blue jeans. A pair of gunbelts crossed his flat middle; a holster hung below each hip. At the very top of the tower, a man in a red robe was looking down at the gunfighter with an expression of mingled hate and fear. His hands, which were curled over the parapet, also appeared to be red.
Sonia had been mesmerized by the presence of Susan Day, who was sitting behind the lectern and listening to her introduction, but she had happened to glance down at her son’s picture just before the introduction ended. She had known for two years that Patrick was what the child psychologists called a prodigy, and she sometimes told herself she had gotten used to his sophisticated drawings and the Play-Doh sculptures he called the Clay Family. Perhaps she even had to some degree, but this particular picture gave her a strange, deep chill that she could not entirely dismiss as emotional fallout from her long and stressful day.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked, tapping the tiny figure peering jealously down from the top of the dark tower.
‘Him’s the Red King,’ Patrick said.
‘Oh, the Red King, I see. And who’s this man with the guns?’
As he opened his mouth to answer, Roberta Harper, the woman at the podium, lifted her left arm (there was a black mourning band on it) toward the woman sitting behind her. ‘My friends, Ms Susan Day!’ she cried, and Patrick Danville’s answer to his mother’s second question was lost in the rising storm of applause.
Him’s name is Roland, Mama. I dream about him, sometimes. Him’s a King, too.
5
Now the two of them sat in the dark with their ears ringing, and two thoughts ran through Sonia’s mind like rats chasing each other on a treadmill: Won’t this day ever end, I knew I shouldn’t have brought him, won’t this day ever end, I knew I shouldn’t have brought him, won’t this day—
‘Mommy, you’re scrunching my picture!’ Patrick said. He sounded a little out of breath, and Sonia realized she must be scrunching him, too. She eased up a little. A tattered skein of screams, shouts, and babbled questions came from the dark pit below them, where the people rich enough to pony up fifteen-dollar ‘donations’ had been seated in folding chairs. A rough howl of pain cut through this babble, making Sonia jump in her seat.
The thudding crump which had followed the initial explosion had pressed in painfully on their ears and shaken the building. The blasts which were still going on – cars exploding like firecrackers in the parking lot – sounded small and inconsequential in comparison, but Sonia felt Patrick flinch against her with each one.
‘Stay calm, Pat,’ she told him. ‘Something bad’s happened, but I think it happened outside.’ Because her eyes had been drawn to the bright glare in the windows, Sonia had mercifully missed seeing her heroine’s head leaving her shoulders, but she knew that somehow lightning had struck in the same place
(shouldn’t have brought him, shouldn’t have brought him)
and that at least some of the people below them were panicking. If she panicked, she and Young Rembrandt were going to be in serious trouble.
But I’m not going to. I didn’t get out of that deathbox this morning just to panic now. I’ll be goddamned if I will.
She reached down and took one of Patrick’s hands – the one that wasn’t clutching his picture. It was very cold.
‘Do you think the angels will come to save us again, Mama?’ he asked in a voice that quivered slightly.
‘Nah,’ she said. ‘I think this time we better do it ourselves. But we can do that. I mean, we’re all right now, aren’t we?’
‘Yes,’ he said, but then slumped against her. She had a terrible moment when she was sure he had fainted and she’d have to carry him from the Civic Center in her arms, but then he straightened up again. ‘My books was on the floor,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to leave without my books, especially the one about the boy who can’t take off his hat. Are we leaving. Mama?’
‘Yes. As soon as people stop running around. There’ll be lights in the halls, ones that run on batteries, even though the ones in here are out. When I say, we’re going to get up and walk – walk! – up the steps to the door. I’m not going to carry you, but I’m going to walk right behind you with both my hands on your shoulders. Do you understand, Pat?’
‘Yes, Mama.’ No questions. No blubbering. Just his books, thrust into her hands for safekeeping. He held onto the picture himself. She gave him a quick hug and kissed his cheek.
They waited in their seats five minutes by her slow count to three hundred. She sensed that most of their immediate neighbors were gone before she got to a hundred and fifty, but she made herself wait. She could now see a little, enough for her to believe that something was burning fiercely outside, but on the far side of the building. That was very lucky. She could hear the warble-wail of approaching police cars, ambulances, and fire-trucks.
Sonia got to her feet. ‘Come on. Keep right in front of me.’
Pat Danville stepped into the aisle with his mother’s hands pressed firmly down on his shoulders. He led her up the steps toward the dim yellow lights which marked the north balcony corridor, stopping only once as the dark shape of a running man hurtled toward them. His mother’s hands tightened on his shoulders as she yanked him aside.
‘Goddam right-to-lifers!’ the running man cried. ‘Fucking self-righteous turds! I’d like to kill them all!’
Then he was gone and Pat began walking up the stairs again. She felt a calmness in him now, a centered lack of fear, that touched her heart with love, and with some queer darkness, as well. He was so different, her son, so special . . . but the world did not love people like that. The world tried to root them out, like tares from a garden.
They emerged at last into the corridor. A few deeply shocked people wandered back and forth, eyes dazed and mouths agape, like zombies in a horror movie. Sonia hardly glanced at them, just got Pat moving toward the stairs. Three minutes later they exited into the fireshot night perfectly unscathed, and upon all the levels of the universe, matters both Random and Purposeful resumed their ordained courses. Worlds which had trembled for a moment in their orbits now steadied, and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations.
6
Across town, in Strawford Park, the door of the Portosan marked MEN blew open. Lois Chasse and Ralph Roberts came flying out backwards in a haze of smoke, clutching each other. From within came the sound of the Cherokee hitting and then the plastique exploding. There was a flash of white light and the toilet’s blue walls bulged outward, as if some giant had hammered them with his fists. A second later they heard the explosion all over again; this time it came rolling across the open air. The second version was fainter, but somehow more real.
Lois’s feet stuttered and she thumped to the grass of the lower hillside with a cry which was partly relief. Ralph landed beside her, then pushed himself up to a sitting position. He stared unbelievingly at the Civic Center, where a fist of fire was now clenched on the horizon. A purple lump the size of a doorknob was rising on his forehead, where Ed had hit him. His left side still throbbed, but he thought maybe the ribs in there were only sprung, not broken.
[‘Lois, are you all right?’]
She looked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, then began to feel at her face and neck and shoulders. There was something so perfectly, sweetly Our Lois about this examination that Ralph laughed. He couldn’t help it. Lois smiled tentatively back at him.
[‘I think I’m fine. In fact, I’m quite sure I am.’]
[‘What were you doing there? You could have been killed!’]
Lois, appearing somewhat rejuvenated (Ralph guessed that the handy wino had had something to do with that) looked him in the eye.
[‘I may be old-fashioned, Ralph, but if you think I’m going to spend the next twenty years or so fainting and fluttering like the heroine’s best friend in those Regency romances my friend Mina’s always reading, you better pick another woman to chum around with.’]
He gaped for a moment, then pulled her to her feet and hugged her. Lois hugged back. She was incredibly warm, incredibly there. Ralph reflected for a moment on the similarities between loneliness and insomnia – how they were both insidious, cumulative, and divisive, the friends of despair and the enemies of love – and then he pushed those thoughts aside and kissed her.
Clotho and Lachesis, who had been standing at the top of the hill and looking as anxious as workmen who have wagered their Christmas bonuses on a prizefight underdog, now rushed down to where Ralph and Lois stood with their foreheads once more pressed together, looking into each other’s eyes like lovestruck teenagers. From the far side of the Barrens, the sound of sirens rose like voices heard in uneasy dreams. The pillar of fire which marked the grave of Ed Deepneau’s obsession was now too bright to look at without squinting. Ralph could hear the faint sound of cars exploding, and he thought of his car sitting abandoned somewhere out in the williwags. He decided that was okay. He was too old to drive.
7
Clotho: [Are you both all right?]
Ralph: [‘We’re fine. Lois reeled me in. She saved my life.’]
Lachesis: [Yes. We saw her go in. It was very brave.]
Also very perplexing, right, Mr L? Ralph thought. You saw it and you admire it . . . but I don’t think you have any idea of how or why she could bring herself to do it. I think that, to you and your friend, the concept of rescue must seem almost as foreign as the idea of love.
For the first time, Ralph felt a kind of pity for the little bald doctors, and understood the central irony of their lives: they were aware that the Short-Timers whose existences they had been sent to prune lived powerful inner lives, but they did not in the least comprehend the reality of those lives, the emotions which drove them, or the actions – sometimes noble, sometimes foolish – which resulted. Mr C and Mr L had studied their Short-Time charges as certain rich but timid Englishmen had studied the maps brought back by the explorers of the Victorian Age, explorers who had in many cases been funded by these same rich but timid men. With their clipped nails and soft fingers the philanthropists had traced paper rivers upon which they would never ride and paper jungles through which they would never safari. They lived in fearful perplexity and passed it off as imagination.
Clotho and Lachesis had drafted them, and had used them with a certain crude effectiveness, but they understood neither the joy of risk nor the sorrow of loss – the best they had been able to manage in the way of emotion was a nagging fear that Ralph and Lois would try to take on the Crimson King’s pet research chemist directly and be swatted like elderly flies for their pains. The little bald doctors lived long lives, but Ralph suspected that, brilliant dragonfly auras notwithstanding, they were gray lives. He looked at their unlined, oddly childish faces from the safe haven of Lois’s arms and remembered how terrified of them he had been when he had first seen them coming out of May Locher’s house in the early hours of the morning. Terror, he had since discovered, could not survive mere acquaintanceship, let alone knowledge, and now he had some of both.
Clotho and Lachesis returned his gaze with an uneasiness Ralph found he had absolutely no urge to allay. It seemed very right to him, somehow, that they should feel the way they were feeling.
Ralph: [‘Yes, she’s very brave and I love her very much and I think we’ll make each other very happy until—’]
He broke off, and Lois stirred in his arms. He realized with a mixture of amusement and relief that she had been half asleep.
[‘Until what, Ralph?’]
[‘Until you name it. I guess that there’s always an until when you’re a Short-Timer, and maybe that’s okay.’]
Lachesis: [Well, I guess this is goodbye.]
Ralph grinned in spite of himself, reminded of The Lone Ranger radio program, where almost every episode had ended with some version of that line. He reached out toward Lachesis and was sourly amused to see the little man recoil from him.
Ralph: [‘Wait a minute . . . let’s not be so hasty, fellas.’]
Clotho, with a tinge of apprehension: [Is something wrong?]
[‘I don’t think so, but after getting popped in the head, popped in the ribs, and then damned near roasted alive, I think I have a right to make sure that it’s really over. Is it? Is your boy safe?’]
Clotho, smiling and clearly relieved: [Yes. Can’t you feel it? Eighteen years from now, just before his death, the boy is going to save the lives of two men who would otherwise die . . . and one of those men must not die, if the balance between the Random and the Purpose is to be maintained.]
Lois: [‘Never mind all that. I just want to know if we can go back to being regular Short-Timers again.’]
Lachesis: [Not only can, Lois, but must. If you and Ralph were to stay up here much longer, you wouldn’t be able to go back down.]
Ralph felt Lois press more tightly against him.
[‘I wouldn’t like that.’]
Clotho and Lachesis turned toward each other and a subtle, perplexed glance – how could anybody not like it up here? their eyes asked – passed between them before they turned back to Ralph and Lois.
Lachesis: [We really must be going. I’m sorry, but—]
Ralph: [‘Hold on, neighbors – you’re not going anywhere yet.’]
They looked at him apprehensively while Ralph slowly pushed up the sleeve of his sweater – the cuff was now stiff with some fluid, perhaps catfish ichor, that he found he did not want to think about – and showed them the white, knotted line of scar on his forearm.
[‘Put away the constipated looks, guys. I just want to remind you that you gave me your word. Don’t forget that part of it.’]
Clotho, with obvious relief: [You can depend on it, Ralph. What was your weapon is now our bond. The promise will not be forgotten.]
Ralph was beginning to believe it really was over. And, crazy as it seemed, part of him regretted it. Now it was real life – life as it went on on the floors below this level – that seemed almost like a mirage, and he understood what Lachesis had meant when he told them that they would never be able to return to their normal lives if they stayed up here much longer.
Lachesis: [We really must go. Fare you well, Ralph and Lois. We will never forget the service you have rendered us.]
Ralph: [‘Did we ever have a choice? Did we really?’]
Lachesis, very softly: [We told you so, didn’t we? For Short-Timers there is always a choice. We find that frightening . . . but we also find it beautiful.]
Ralph: [‘Say – do you fellows ever shake hands?’]
Clotho and Lachesis glanced at each other, startled, and Ralph sensed some quick dialogue flashing between them in a kind of telepathic shorthand. When they looked back at Ralph, they wore identical nervous smiles – the smiles of teenage boys who have decided that if they can’t find enough courage to ride the big rollercoaster at the amusement park this summer, they will never truly be men.
Clotho: [We have observed this custom many times, of course, but no – we have never shaken hands.]
Ralph looked at Lois and saw she was smiling . . . but he thought he saw a shimmer of tears in her eyes, as well.
He offered his hand to Lachesis first, because Mr L seemed marginally less jumpy than his colleague.
[‘Put ’er there, Mr L.’]
Lachesis looked at Ralph’s hand for so long that Ralph began to think he wasn’t going to be able to actually do it, although he clearly wanted to. Then, timidly, he put out his own small hand and allowed Ralph’s larger one to close over it. There was a tingling vibration in Ralph’s flesh as their auras first mingled, then merged . . . and in that merging he saw a series of swift, beautiful silver patterns. They reminded him of the Japanese characters on Ed’s scarf.
He pumped Lachesis’s hand twice, slowly and formally, then released it. Lachesis’s look of apprehension had been replaced by a large goony smile. He turned to his partner.
[His force is almost completely unguarded during this ceremony! I felt it! It’s quite wonderful!]
Clotho inched his own hand out to meet Ralph’s, and in the instant before they touched, Mr C closed his eyes like a man expecting a painful injection. Lachesis, meanwhile, was shaking hands with Lois and grinning like a vaudeville hoofer taking an encore.
Clotho appeared to steel himself, then seized Ralph’s hand. He flagged it once, firmly. Ralph grinned.
[‘Take her easy, Mr C.’]
Clotho withdrew his hand. He seemed to be searching for the proper response.
[Thank you, Ralph. I will take her any way I can get her. Correct?]
Ralph burst out laughing. Clotho, now turning to shake hands with Lois, gave him a puzzled smile, and Ralph clapped him on the back.
[‘You got it right, Mr C – absolutely right.’]
He slipped his arm around Lois and gave the little bald doctors a final curious look.
[‘I’ll be seeing you fellows again, won’t I?’]
Clotho: [Yes, Ralph.]
Ralph: [‘Well, that’s fine. About seventy years from now would be good for me; why don’t you boys just put it down on your calendar?’]
They responded with the smiles of politicians, which didn’t surprise him much. Ralph gave them a little bow, then put his arms around Lois’s shoulders and watched as Mr C and Mr L walked slowly down the hill. Lachesis opened the door of the slightly warped Portosan marked MEN; Clotho stood in the open doorway of WOMEN. Lachesis smiled and waved. Clotho lifted the long-bladed scissors in a queer sort of salute.
Ralph and Lois waved back.
The bald doctors stepped inside and closed the doors.
Lois wiped her streaming eyes and turned to Ralph.
[‘Is that it? It is, isn’t it?’]
Ralph nodded.
[‘What do we do now?’]
He held out his arm.
[‘May I see you home, madam?’]
Smiling, she clasped his forearm just below the elbow.
[‘Thank you, sir. You may.’]
They left Strawford Park that way, returning to the Short-Time level as they came out on Harris Avenue, slipping back down to their normal place in the scheme of things with no fuss or bother – without, in fact, even being aware they were doing it until it was done.
8
Derry groaned with panic and sweated with excitement. Sirens wailed, people shouted from second-storey windows to friends on the sidewalks below, and on every street-corner people had clustered to watch the fire on the other side of the valley.
Ralph and Lois paid no attention to the tumult and hooraw. They walked slowly up Up-Mile Hill, increasingly aware of their exhaustion; it seemed to come piling into them like softly thrown bags of sand. The pool of white light marking the Red Apple Store’s parking lot seemed an impossible distance away, although Ralph knew it was only three blocks, and short ones, at that.
To make matters worse, the temperature had dropped a good fifteen degrees since that morning, the wind was blowing hard, and neither of them was dressed for the weather. Ralph suspected this might be the leading edge of autumn’s first big gale, and that in Derry, Indian summer was over.
Faye Chapin, Don Veazie, and Stan Eberly came hurrying down the hill toward them, obviously bound for Strawford Park. The field-glasses Old Dor sometimes used to watch planes taxi, land, and take off were bouncing around Faye’s neck. With Don, who was balding and heavy set, in the middle, their resemblance to a more famous trio was inescapable. The Three Stooges of the Apocalypse, Ralph thought, and grinned.
‘Ralph!’ Faye exclaimed. He was breathing fast, almost panting. The wind blew his hair into his eyes and he raked it back impatiently. ‘Goddam Civic Center blew up! Someone bombed it from a light plane! We heard there’s a thousand people dead!’
‘I heard about the same,’ Ralph agreed gravely. ‘In fact, Lois and I have just been down at the park, having a look. You can see straight across the valley from there, you know.’
‘Christ, I know that, I’ve lived here all my damn life, haven’t I? Where do you think we’re going? Come on back with us!’
‘Lois and I were just headed up to her house to see what they’ve got about it on TV. Maybe we’ll join you later.’
‘Okay, we – jeepers-creepers, Ralph, what’d you do to your head?’
For a moment Ralph drew a blank – what had he done to his head? – and then, in an instant of nightmarish recall, he saw Ed’s snarling mouth and mad eyes. Oh no, don’t, Ed had screamed at him. You’ll spoil everything.
‘We were running to get a better look and Ralph ran into a tree,’ Lois said. ‘He’s lucky not to be in the hospital.’
Don laughed at that, but in the half-distracted manner of a fellow who has bigger fish to fry. Faye wasn’t paying attention to them at all. Stan Eberly was, however, and Stan didn’t laugh. He was looking at them with close, puzzled curiosity.
‘Lois,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Did you know you’ve got a sneaker tied to your wrist?’
She looked down at it. Ralph looked down at it. Then Lois looked up and gave Stan a dazzling, eye-frying smile. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘It’s an interesting look, isn’t it? Sort of a . . . a life-sized charm bracelet!’
‘Yeah,’ Stan said. ‘Sure.’ But he wasn’t looking at the sneaker anymore; now he was looking at Lois’s face. Ralph wondered how in hell they were going to explain how they looked tomorrow, when there were no shadows between the streetlights to hide them.
‘Come on!’ Faye cried impatiently. ‘Let’s get going!’
They hurried off (Stan gave them one last doubtful glance over his shoulder as they went). Ralph listened after them, almost expecting Don Veazie to give out a nyucknyuck or two.
‘Boy, that sounded so dumb,’ Lois said, ‘but I had to say something, didn’t I?’
‘You did fine.’
‘Well, when I open my mouth, something always seems to fall out,’ she said. ‘It’s one of my two great talents, the other being the ability to clean out an entire Whitman’s Sampler during a two-hour TV movie.’ She untied Helen’s sneaker and looked at it. ‘She’s safe, isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ Ralph agreed, and reached for the sneaker. As he did, he realized he already had something in his left hand. The fingers had been clamped down so long that they were creaky and reluctant to open. When they finally did, he saw the marks of his nails pressed into the flesh of his palm. The first thing he was aware of was that, while his own wedding ring was still in its accustomed place, Ed’s was gone. It had seemed a perfect fit, but apparently it had slipped off his finger at some point during the last half an hour, just the same.
Maybe not, a voice whispered, and Ralph was amused to realize that it wasn’t Carolyn’s this time. This time the voice in his head belonged to Bill McGovern. Maybe it just disappeared. You know, poof.
But he didn’t think so. He had an idea that Ed’s wedding band might have been invested with powers that hadn’t necessarily died with Ed. The Ring Bilbo Baggins had found and reluctantly given up to his grandson, Frodo, had had a way of going where it wanted to . . . and when. Perhaps Ed’s ring wasn’t all that different.
Before he could consider this idea further, Lois traded Helen’s sneaker for the thing in his hand: a small stiff crumple of paper. She smoothed it out and looked at it. Her curiosity slowly changed to solemnity.
‘I remember this picture,’ she said. ‘The big one was on the mantel in their living room, in a fancy gold frame. It had pride of place.’
Ralph nodded. ‘This must have been the one he carried in his wallet. It was taped to the instrument panel of the plane. Until I took it, he was beating me, and not even breathing hard while he did it. Grabbing his picture was all I could think of to do. When I did, his focus switched from the Civic Center to them. The last thing I heard him say was “Give them back, they’re mine.”’
‘And was he talking to you when he said it?’
Ralph stuck the sneaker into his back pocket and shook his head. ‘Nope. Don’t think so.’
‘Helen was at the Civic Center tonight, wasn’t she?’
‘Yes.’ Ralph thought of how she had looked out at High Ridge – her pale face and smoke-reddened, watering eyes. If they stop us now, they win, she’d said. Don’t you see that?
And now he did see.
He took the picture from Lois’s hand, crumpled it up again, and walked over to the litter-basket which stood on the corner of Harris Avenue and Kossuth Lane. ‘We’ll get another picture of them sometime, one we can keep on our own mantel. Something not quite so formal. This one, though . . . I don’t want it.’
He tossed the little ball of paper at the litter-basket, an easy shot, two feet at the most, but the wind picked that moment to gust and the crumpled photo of Helen and Natalie which had been taped above the altimeter of Ed’s plane flew away on its cold breath. The two of them watched it whirl up into the sky, almost hypnotized. It was Lois who looked away first. She glanced at Ralph with a trace of a smile curving her lips.
‘Did I hear a backhand proposal of marriage from you, or am I just tired?’ she asked.
He opened his mouth to reply and another gust of wind struck them, this one so hard it made them both wince their eyes shut. When he opened his, Lois had already started up the hill again.
‘Anything’s possible, Lois,’ he said. ‘I know that now.’
9
Five minutes later, Lois’s key rattled in the lock of her front door. She led Ralph inside and shut it firmly behind them, closing out the windy, contentious night. He followed her into the living room and would have stopped there, but Lois never hesitated. Still holding his hand, not quite pulling him along (but perhaps meaning to do so if he began to lag), she showed him into her bedroom.
He looked at her. Lois looked calmly back . . . and suddenly he felt the blink happen again. He watched her aura bloom around her like a gray rose. It was still diminished, but it was already coming back, reknitting itself, healing itself.
[‘Lois, are you sure this is what you want?’]
[‘Of course it is! Did you think I was going to give you a pat on the head and send you home after all we’ve been through?’]
Suddenly she smiled – a wickedly mischievous smile.
[‘Besides, Ralph – do you really feel like getting up to dickens tonight? Tell me the truth. Better still, don’t flatter me.’]
He considered it, then laughed and drew her into his arms. Her mouth was sweet and slightly moist, like the skin of a ripe peach. That kiss seemed to tingle through his entire body, but the sensation was most concentrated in his mouth, where it felt almost like an electric shock. When their lips parted, he felt more excited than ever . . . but he also felt queerly drained.
[‘What if I say I do, Lois? What if I say I do want to get up to dickens?’]
She stood back and looked at him critically, as if trying to decide whether he meant what he said or if it was just the usual male bluff and brag. At the same time her hands went to the buttons of her dress. As she began to slip them free, Ralph noticed a wonderful thing: she looked younger again. Not forty by any stretch of the imagination, but surely no more than fifty . . . and a young fifty. It had been the kiss, of course, and the really amusing thing was he didn’t think she had the slightest idea that she had added a helping of Ralph to her earlier helping of wino. And what was wrong with that?
She finished her inspection, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek.
[‘I think that there’ll be plenty of time for getting up to dickens later, Ralph – tonight’s for sleeping.’]
He supposed she was right. Five minutes ago he had been more than willing – he had always loved the act of physical love, and it had been a long time. For now, however, the spark was gone. Ralph didn’t regret that in the least. He knew, after all, where it had gone.
[‘Okay, Lois – tonight’s for sleeping.’]
She went into the bathroom and the shower went on. A few minutes later, Ralph heard her brushing her teeth. It was nice to know she still had them. During the ten minutes she was gone he managed to do a certain amount of undressing, although his throbbing ribs made it slow work. He finally succeeded in wriggling McGovern’s sweater off and pushing out of his shoes. His shirt came next, and he was fumbling ineffectually with the buckle of his belt when Lois came out with her hair tied back and her face shining. Ralph was stunned by her beauty, and suddenly felt much too big and stupid (not to mention old) for his own good. She was wearing a long rose-colored silk nightgown and he could smell the lotion she had used on her hands. It was a good smell.
‘Let me do that,’ she said, and had his belt unbuckled before he could say much, one way or the other. There was nothing erotic about it; she moved with the efficiency of a woman who had often helped her husband dress and undress during the last year of his life.
‘We’re down again,’ he said. ‘This time I didn’t even feel it happening.’
‘I did, while I was in the shower. I was glad, actually. Trying to wash your hair through an aura is very distracting.’
The wind gusted outside, shaking the house and blowing a long, shivering note across the mouth of a downspout. They looked toward the window, and although he was back down on the Short-Time level, Ralph was suddenly sure that Lois was sharing his own thought: Atropos was out there somewhere right now, no doubt disappointed by the way things had gone but by no means crushed, bloody but unbowed, down but not out. From now on they can call him Old One-Ear, Ralph thought, and shivered. He imagined Atropos swinging erratically through the scared, excited populace of the city like a rogue asteroid, peering and hiding, stealing souvenirs and slashing balloon-strings . . . taking solace in his work, in other words. Ralph found it almost impossible to believe that he had been sitting on top of that creature and slashing at him with his own scalpel not very long ago. How did I ever find the courage? he wondered, but he supposed he knew. The diamond earrings the little monster had been wearing had provided most of it. Did Atropos know those earrings had been his biggest mistake? Probably not. In his way, Doc #3 had proved even more ignorant of Short-Time motivations than Clotho and Lachesis.
He turned to Lois and grasped her hands. ‘I lost your earrings again. This time they’re gone for good, I think. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologize. They were already lost, remember? And I’m not worried about Harold and Jan anymore, because now I’ve got a friend to help me when people don’t treat me right, or when I just get scared. Don’t I?’
‘Yes. You most certainly do.’
She put her arms around him, hugged him tightly, and kissed him again. Lois had apparently not forgotten a single thing she’d ever learned about kissing, and it seemed to Ralph that she’d learned quite a lot. ‘Go on and hop in the shower.’ He started to say that he thought he’d fall asleep the moment he got his head under a stream of warm water, but then she added something which changed his mind in a hurry: ‘Don’t take offense, but there’s a funny smell on you, especially on your hands. It’s the way my brother Vic used to smell after he’d spent the day cleaning fish.’
Ralph was in the shower two minutes later, and in soapsuds up to his elbows.
10
When he came out, Lois was buried beneath two puffy quilts. Only her face showed, and that was visible only from the nose up. Ralph crossed the room quickly, wearing only his undershorts and painfully conscious of his spindly legs and potbelly. He tossed back the covers and slid in quickly, gasping a little as the cool sheets slid along his warm skin.
Lois slipped over to his side of the bed at once and put her arms around him. He put his face in her hair and let himself relax against her. It was very good, being with Lois under the quilts while the wind shrieked and gusted outside, sometimes hard enough to rattle the storm windows in their frames. It was, in fact, heaven.
‘Thank God there’s a man in my bed,’ Lois said sleepily.
‘Thank God it’s me,’ Ralph replied, and she laughed.
‘Are your ribs okay? Do you want me to find you an aspirin?’
‘Nope. I’m sure they’ll hurt again in the morning, but right now the hot water seems to have loosened everything up.’ The subject of what might or might not happen in the morning raised a question in his mind – one that had probably been waiting there all along. ‘Lois?’
‘Mmmmm?’
In his mind’s eye Ralph could see himself snapping awake in the dark, deeply tired but not at all sleepy (it was surely one of the world’s cruelest paradoxes), as the numbers on the digital clock turned wearily over from 3:47 a.m. to 3:48. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, when every hour was long enough to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops.
‘Do you think we’ll sleep through?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said unhesitatingly. ‘I think we’ll sleep just fine.’
A moment later, Lois was doing just that.
11
Ralph stayed awake for perhaps five minutes longer, holding her in his arms, smelling the wonderful interwoven scents rising from her warm skin, luxuriating in the smooth, sensuous glide of the silk under his hands, marvelling at where he was even more than the events which had brought him here. He was filled with some deep and simple emotion, one he recognized but could not immediately name, perhaps because it had been gone from his life too long.
The wind gusted and moaned outside, producing that hollow hooting sound over the top of the drainpipe again – like the world’s biggest Nirvana Boy blowing over the mouth of the world’s biggest pop-bottle – and it occurred to Ralph that maybe nothing in life was better than lying deep in a soft bed with a sleeping woman in your arms while the fall wind screamed outside your safe haven.
Except there was something better, one thing, at least, and that was the feeling of falling asleep, of going gently into that good night, slipping out into the currents of unknowing the way a canoe slips away from a dock and slides into the current of a wide, slow river on a bright summer day.
Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best, Ralph thought.
The wind gusted again outside (the sound of it now seeming to come from a great distance) and as he felt the tug of that great river take him, he was finally able to identify the emotion he had been feeling ever since Lois had put her arms around him and fallen asleep as easily and as trustingly as a child. It went under many different names – peace, serenity, fulfillment – but now, as the wind blew and Lois made some dark sound of sleeping contentment far back in her throat, it seemed to Ralph that it was one of those rare things which are known but essentially unnameable: a texture, an aura, perhaps a whole level of being in that column of existence. It was the smooth russet color of rest; it was the silence which follows the completion of some arduous but necessary task.
When the wind gusted again, bringing the sound of distant sirens with it, Ralph didn’t hear it. He was asleep. Once he dreamed that he got up to use the bathroom, and he supposed that might not have been a dream. At another time he dreamed that he and Lois made slow, sweet love, and that might not have been a dream, either. If there were other dreams or moments of waking, he did not remember them, and this time there was no snapping awake at three or four o’clock in the morning. They slept – sometimes apart but mostly together – until just past seven o’clock on Saturday evening; about twenty-two hours, all told.
Lois made them breakfast at sunset – splendidly puffy waffles, bacon, home fries. While she cooked, Ralph tried to flex that muscle buried deep in his mind – to create that sensation of blink. He couldn’t do it. When Lois tried, she was also unable, although Ralph could have sworn that just for a moment she flickered, and he could see the stove right through her.
‘Just as well,’ she said, bringing their plates to the table.
‘I suppose,’ Ralph agreed, but he still felt as he would have if he had lost the ring Carolyn had given him instead of the one he had taken from Atropos – as if some small but essential object had gone rolling out of his life with a wink and a gleam.
12
Following two more nights of sound, unbroken sleep, the auras had begun to fade, as well. By the following week they were gone, and Ralph began to wonder if perhaps the whole thing hadn’t been some strange dream. He knew that wasn’t so, but it became harder and harder to believe what he did know. There was the scar between the elbow and wrist of his right arm, of course, but he even began to wonder if that wasn’t something he had acquired long ago, during those years of his life when there had been no white in his hair and he had still believed, deep in his heart, that old age was a myth, or a dream, or a thing reserved for people not as special as he was.
1
On January 2nd, 1994, Lois Chasse became Lois Roberts. Her son, Harold, gave her away. Harold’s wife did not attend the ceremony; she was up in Bangor with what Ralph considered a highly suspect case of bronchitis. He kept his suspicions to himself, however, being far from disappointed at Jan Chasse’s failure to appear. The groom’s best man was Detective John Leydecker, who still wore a cast on his right arm but otherwise showed no signs of the assignment which had nearly killed him. He had spent four days in a coma, but Leydecker knew how lucky he was; in addition to the State Trooper who had been standing beside him at the time of the explosion, six cops had died, two of them members of Leydecker’s handpicked team.
The bride’s maid of honor was her friend Simone Castonguay, and at the reception, the first toast was made by a fellow who liked to say he used to be Joe Wyze but was now older and Wyzer. Trigger Vachon delivered a fractured but heartfelt follow-up, concluding with the wish that ‘Dese two people gonna live to a hunnert and fifty and never know a day of the rheumatiz or constipations!’
When Ralph and Lois left the reception hall, their hair still full of rice thrown for the most part by Faye Chapin and the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks, an old man with a book in his hand and a fine cloud of white hair floating around his head came walking up to them. He had a wide smile on his face.
‘Congratulations, Ralph,’ he said. ‘Congratulations, Lois.’
‘Thanks, Dor,’ Ralph said.
‘We missed you,’ Lois told him. ‘Didn’t you get your invitation? Faye said he’d give it to you.’
‘Oh, he gave it to me. Yes, oh yes, he did, but I don’t go to those things if they’re inside. Too stuffy. Funerals are even worse. Here, this is for you. I didn’t wrap it, because the arthritis is in my fingers too bad for stuff like that now.’
Ralph took it. It was a book of poems called Concurring Beasts. The poet’s name, Stephen Dobyns, gave him a funny little chill, but he wasn’t quite sure why.
‘Thanks,’ he told Dorrance.
‘Not as good as some of his later work, but good. Dobyns is very good.’
‘We’ll read them to each other on our honeymoon,’ Lois said.
‘That’s a good time to read poetry,’ Dorrance said. ‘Maybe the best time. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.’
He started off, then looked back.
‘You did a great thing. The Long-Timers are very pleased.’
He walked away.
Lois looked at Ralph. ‘What was he talking about? Do you know?’
Ralph shook his head. He didn’t, not for sure, although he felt as if he should know. The scar on his arm had begun to tingle as it sometimes did, a feeling which was almost like a deep-seated itch.
‘Long-Timers,’she mused. ‘Maybe he meant us, Ralph – after all, we’re hardly spring chickens these days, are we?’
‘That’s probably just what he did mean,’ Ralph agreed, but he knew better . . . and her eyes said that, somewhere deep down, so did she.
2
On that same day, and just as Ralph and Lois were saying their ‘I do’s, a certain wino with a bright green aura – one who actually did have an uncle in Dexter, although the uncle hadn’t seen this ne’er-do-well nephew for five years or more – was tramping across Strawford Park, slitting his eyes against the formidable glare of sun on snow. He was looking for returnable cans and bottles. Enough to buy a pint of whiskey would be great, but a pint of Night Train wine would do.
Not far from the Portosan marked MEN, he saw a bright gleam of metal. It was probably just the sun reflecting off a bottle-cap, but such things needed to be checked out. It might be a dime . . . although to the wino, it actually seemed to have a goldy sort of gleam. It—
‘Holy Judas!’ he cried, snatching up the wedding ring which lay mysteriously on top of the snow. It was a broad band, almost certainly gold. He tilted it to read the engraving on the inside: HD – ED 5–8–87.
A pint? Hell, no. This little baby was going to secure him a quart. Several quarts. Possibly a week’s worth of quarts.
Hurrying across the intersection of Witcham and Jackson, the one where Ralph Roberts had once almost fainted, the wino never saw the approaching Green Line bus. The driver saw him, and put on his brakes, but the bus struck a patch of ice.
The wino never knew what hit him. At one moment he was debating between Old Crow and Old Grand Dad; at the next he had passed into the darkness which awaits us all. The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way – an often unpleasant one – of turning up.
3
Ralph and Lois didn’t live happily ever after.
There really are no evers in the Short-Time world, happy or otherwise, a fact which Clotho and Lachesis undoubtedly knew well. They did live happily for quite some time, though. Neither of them liked to come right out and say these were the happiest years of all, because both remembered their first partners in marriage with love and affection, but in their hearts, both did consider them the happiest. Ralph wasn’t sure that autumn love was the richest love, but he came firmly to believe that it was the kindest, and the most fulfilling.
Our Lois, he often said, and laughed. Lois pretended to be irritated at this, but pretending was all it ever was; she saw the look in his eyes when he said it.
On their first Christmas morning as man and wife (they had moved into Lois’s tidy little house and put his own white rhino up for sale), Lois gave him a beagle puppy. ‘Do you like her?’ she asked apprehensively. ‘I almost didn’t get her, Dear Abby says you should never give pets as presents, but she looked so sweet in the petshop window . . . and so sad . . . if you don’t like her, or don’t want to spend the rest of the winter trying to housebreak a puppy, just say so. We’ll find someone—’
‘Lois,’ he said, giving his eyebrow what he hoped was that special ironic Bill McGovern lift, ‘you’re babbling.’
‘I am?’
‘You am. It’s something you do when you’re nervous, but you can stop being nervous right now. I’m crazy ’bout dis lady.’ Nor was that an exaggeration; he fell in love with the black-and-tan beagle bitch almost at once.
‘What will you name her?’ Lois asked. ‘Any idea?’
‘Sure,’ Ralph said. ‘Rosalie.’
4
The next four years were, by and large, good ones for Helen and Nat Deepneau, as well. They lived frugally in an apartment on the east side of town for awhile, getting along on Helen’s librarian’s salary but not doing much more than that. The little Cape Cod up the street from Ralph’s place had sold, but that money had gone to pay outstanding bills. Then, in June of 1994, Helen received an insurance windfall . . . only the wind that blew it her way was John Leydecker.
The Great Eastern Insurance Company had originally refused to pay off on Ed Deepneau’s life insurance policy, claiming he had taken his own life. Then, after a great deal of harrumphing and muttering under their corporate breath, they had offered a substantial settlement. They were persuaded to do this by a poker-buddy of John Leydecker’s named Howard Hayman. When he wasn’t playing lowball, five-card stud, and three-card draw, Hayman was a lawyer who enjoyed lunching on insurance companies.
Leydecker had re-met Helen at Ralph and Lois’s in February of 1994, had fallen head over heels in fascination with her (‘It was never quite love,’ he told Ralph and Lois later, ‘which was probably just as well, considering how things turned out’), and had introduced her to Hayman because he thought the insurance company was trying to screw her. ‘He was insane, not suicidal,’ Leydecker said, and stuck to that long after Helen had handed him his hat and shown him the door.
After being faced with a suit in which Howard Hayman threatened to make Great Eastern look like Snidely Whiplash tying Little Nell to the railroad tracks, Helen had received a check for seventy thousand dollars. In the late fall of 1994 she had used most of this money to buy a house on Harris Avenue, just three doors up from her old place and right across from Harriet Bennigan’s.
‘I was never really happy on the east side,’ she told Lois one day in November of that year. They were on their way back from the park, and Natalie had been sitting slumped and fast asleep in her stroller, her presence little more than a pink nose-tip and a fog of cold breath below a large ski-hat which Lois had knitted herself. ‘I used to dream about Harris Avenue. Isn’t that crazy?’
‘I don’t think dreams are ever crazy,’ Lois replied.
Helen and John Leydecker dated for most of that summer, but neither Ralph nor Lois was particularly surprised when the courtship abruptly ended after Labor Day, or when Helen began to wear a discreet pink triangle pin on her prim, high-necked librarian’s blouses. Perhaps they were not surprised because they were old enough to have seen everything at least once, or perhaps on some deep level they were still glimpsing the auras which surround things, creating a bright gateway opening on a secret city of hidden meanings, concealed motives, and camouflaged agendas.
5
Ralph and Lois babysat Natalie frequently after Helen moved back to Harris Avenue, and they enjoyed these stints tremendously. Nat was the child their marriage might have produced if it had happened thirty years sooner, and the coldest, most overcast winter day warmed and brightened when Natalie came toddling in, looking like a midget version of the Goodyear blimp in her pink quilted snowsuit with the mittens hanging from the cuffs, and yelled exuberantly: ‘Hi, Walf! Hi, Roliss! I come to bizzit you!’
In June of 1995, Helen bought a reconditioned Volvo. On the back she put a sticker which read A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE. This sentiment did not particularly surprise Ralph, either, but glimpsing that sticker always made him feel unhappy. He sometimes thought Ed’s meanest legacy to his widow was summed up in its brittle, not-quite-funny sentiment, and when he saw it, Ralph often remembered how Ed had looked on that summer afternoon when he had walked up from the Red Apple Store to confront him. How Ed had been sitting, shirtless, in the spray thrown by the sprinkler. How there had been a drop of blood on one lens of his glasses. How he had leaned forward, looking at Ralph with his earnest, intelligent eyes, and said that once stupidity reached a certain level, it became hard to live with.
And after that, stuff started to happen, Ralph would sometimes think. Just what stuff was something he could no longer remember, though, and probably that was just as well. But his lapse of memory (if that was what it was) did not change his belief that Helen had been cheated in some obscure fashion . . . that some bad-tempered fate had tied a can to her tail, and she didn’t even know it.
6
A month after Helen bought her Volvo, Faye Chapin suffered a heart attack while drafting a preliminary list of seeds for that fall’s Runway 3 Classic. He was taken to Derry Home Hospital, where he died seven hours later. Ralph visited him shortly before the end, and when he saw the numbers on the door – 315 – a fierce sense of déjà vu washed over him. At first he thought it was because Carolyn had finished her last illness just up the hall, and then he remembered that Jimmy V had died in this very room. He and Lois had visited Jimmy just before the end, and Ralph thought Jimmy had recognized them both, although he couldn’t be sure; his memories of the time when he had first begun to really notice Lois were mixed up and hazy in his mind. He supposed some of that was love, and probably some of it had to do with getting on in years, but probably most of it had been the insomnia – he’d gone through a really bad patch of that in the months after Carolyn’s death, although it had eventually cured itself, as such things sometimes did. Still, it seemed to him that something
([hello woman hello man we’ve been waiting for you])
far out of the ordinary had happened in this room, and as he took Faye’s dry, strengthless hand and smiled into Faye’s frightened, confused eyes, a strange thought came to him: They’re standing right over there in the corner and watching us.
He looked over. There was no one at all in the corner, of course, but for a moment . . . for just a moment . . .
7
Life in the years between 1993 and 1998 went on as life in places like Derry always does: the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in mid-December and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door. Sometimes people in the prime of their lives went out through the out door, too.
In Derry there were five years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners at Parker’s Cove and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.
In the early fall of 1996, Ralph became convinced he had colon cancer. He had begun to see more than trace amounts of blood in his stool, and when he finally went to see Dr Pickard (Dr Litchfield’s cheerful, rumpled replacement), he did so with visions of hospital beds and chemotherapy IV-drips dancing bleakly in his head. Instead of cancer, the problem turned out to be a hemorrhoid which had, in Dr Pickard’s memorable phrase, ‘popped its top.’ He wrote Ralph a prescription for suppositories, which Ralph took to the Rite Aid down the street. Joe Wyzer read it, then grinned cheerfully at Ralph. ‘Lousy,’ he said, ‘but it beats the hell out of colon cancer, don’t you think?’
‘The thought of colon cancer never crossed my mind,’ Ralph replied stiffly.
One day during the winter of 1997, Lois took it into her head to slide down her favorite hill in Strawford Park on Nat Deepneau’s plastic flying-saucer sled. She went down ‘faster’n a pig in a greased chute’ (this was Don Veazie’s phrase; he just happened to be there that day, watching the action) and crashed into the side of the Portosan marked WOMEN. She sprained her knee and twisted her back, and although Ralph knew he had no business doing so – it was unsympathetic to say the least – he laughed hilariously most of the way to the emergency room. The fact that Lois was also howling with laughter despite the pain did nothing to help Ralph regain control. He laughed until tears poured from his eyes and he thought he might have a stroke. She had just looked so goddamned Our Lois going down the hill on that thing, spinning around and around with her legs crossed like one of those yogis from the Mysterious East, and she had almost knocked the Portosan over when she hit it. She was completely recovered by the time spring rolled around, although that knee always ached on rainy nights and she did get tired of Don Veazie asking, almost every time he saw her, if she’d slid into any shithouses lately.
8
Just life, going on as it always does – which is to say mostly between the lines and outside the margins. It’s what happens while we’re making other plans, according to some sage or other, and if life was exceptionally good to Ralph Roberts during those years, it might have been because he had no other plans to make. He maintained friendships with Joe Wyzer and John Leydecker, but his best friend during those years was his wife. They went almost everywhere together, had no secrets, and fought so seldom one might just as well have said never. He also had Rosalie the beagle, the rocker that had once been Mr Chasse’s and was now his, and almost daily visits from Natalie (who had begun calling them Ralph and Lois instead of Walf and Roliss, a change neither of them found to be an improvement). And he was healthy, which was maybe the best thing of all. It was just life, full of Short-Time rewards and setbacks, and Ralph lived it with enjoyment and serenity until mid-March of 1998, when he awoke one morning, glanced at the digital clock beside his bed, and saw it was 5:49 a.m.
He lay quietly beside Lois, not wanting to disturb her by getting up, and wondering what had awakened him.
You know what, Ralph.
No I don’t.
Yes, you do. Listen.
So he listened. He listened very carefully. And after awhile he began to hear it in the walls: the low, soft ticking of the deathwatch.
9
Ralph awoke at 5:47 the following morning, and at 5:44 the morning after that. His sleep was whittled away, minute by minute, as winter slowly loosened its grip on Derry and allowed spring to find its way back in. By May he was hearing the tick of the deathwatch everywhere, but understood it was all coming from one place and simply projecting itself, as a good ventriloquist can project his voice. Before, it had been coming from Carolyn. Now it was coming from him.
He felt none of the terror that had gripped him when he’d been so sure he had developed cancer, and none of the desperation he vaguely remembered from his previous bout of insomnia. He tired more easily and began to find it more difficult to concentrate and remember even simple things, but he accepted what was happening calmly.
‘Are you sleeping all right, Ralph?’ Lois asked him one day. ‘You’re getting these big dark circles under your eyes.’
‘It’s the dope I take,’ Ralph said.
‘Very funny, you old poop.’
He took her in his arms and hugged her. ‘Don’t worry about me, sweetheart – I’m getting all the sleep I need.’
He awoke one morning a week later at 4:02 a.m. with a line of deep heat throbbing in his arm – throbbing in perfect sync with the sound of the deathwatch, which was, of course, nothing more or less than the beat of his own heart. But this new thing wasn’t his heart, or at least Ralph didn’t think it was; it felt as if an electric filament had been embedded in the flesh of his forearm.
It’s the scar, he thought, and then: No, it’s the promise. The time of the promise is almost here.
What promise, Ralph? What promise?
He didn’t know.
10
One day in early June, Helen and Nat blew in to visit and tell Ralph and Lois about the trip they had taken to Boston with ‘Aunt Melanie,’ a bank teller with whom Helen had become close friends. Helen and Aunt Melanie had gone to some sort of feminist convention while Natalie networked with about a billion new kids in the day-care center, and then Aunt Melanie had left to do some more feminist things in New York and Washington. Helen and Nat had stayed on in Boston for a couple of days, just sightseeing.
‘We went to see a movie cartoon,’ Natalie said. ‘It was about animals in the woods. They talked!’ She pronounced this last word with Shakespearian grandiosity – talked.
‘Movies where animals talk are neat, aren’t they?’ Lois asked.
‘Yes! Also I got this new dress!’
‘And a very pretty dress it is,’ Lois said.
Helen was looking at Ralph. ‘Are you okay, old chum? You look pale, and you haven’t said boo.’
‘Never better,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking how cute you two look in those caps. Did you get them at Fenway Park?’
Both Helen and Nat were wearing Boston Red Sox caps. These were common enough in New England during warm weather (‘common as catdirt,’ Lois would have said), but the sight of them on the heads of these two people filled Ralph with some deep, resonant feeling . . . and it was tied to a specific image, one he did not in the least understand: the front of the Red Apple Store.
Helen, meantime, had taken off her hat and was examining it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We went, but we only stayed for three innings. Men hitting balls and catching balls. I guess I just don’t have much patience for men and their balls these days . . . but we like our nifty Bosox hats, don’t we, Natalie?’
‘Yes!’ Nat agreed smartly, and when Ralph awoke the next morning at 4:01, the scar throbbed its thin line of heat inside his arm and the deathwatch seemed almost to have gained a voice, one which whispered a strange, foreign-sounding name over and over: Atropos . . . Atropos . . . Atropos.
I know that name.
Do you, Ralph?
Yes, he was the one with the rusty scalpel and the nasty disposition, the one who called me Shorts, the one who took . . . took . . .
Took what, Ralph?
He was getting used to these silent discussions; they seemed to come to him on some mental radio band, a pirate frequency that operated only during the little hours, the ones when he lay awake beside his sleeping wife, waiting for the sun to come up.
Took what? Do you remember?
He didn’t expect to; the questions that voice asked him almost always went unanswered, but this time, unexpectedly, an answer came.
Bill McGovern’s hat, of course. Atropos took Bill’s hat, and once I made him so mad he actually took a bite out of the brim.
Who is he? Who is Atropos?
Of this he was not so sure. He only knew that Atropos had something to do with Helen, who now owned a Boston Red Sox cap of which she seemed very fond, and that he had a rusty scalpel.
Soon, thought Ralph Roberts as he lay in the dark, listening to the soft, steady tick of the deathwatch in the walls. I’ll know soon.
11
During the third week of that baking hot June, Ralph began to see the auras again.
12
As June slipped into July, Ralph found himself bursting into tears often, usually for no discernible reason at all. It was strange; he had no sense of depression or discontent, but sometimes he would look at something – maybe only a bird winging its solitary way across the sky – and his heart would vibrate with sorrow and loss.
It’s almost over, the inside voice said. It no longer belonged to Carolyn or Bill or even his own younger self; it was all its own now, the voice of a stranger, although not necessarily an unkind one. That’s why you’re sad, Ralph. It’s perfectly normal to be sad as things start to wind down.
Nothing’s almost over! he cried back. Why should it be? At my last checkup, Dr Pickard said I was sound as a drum! I’m fine! Never better!
Silence from the voice inside. But it was a knowing silence.
13
‘Okay,’ Ralph said out loud one hot afternoon near the end of July. He was sitting on a bench not far from the place where the Derry Standpipe had stood until 1985, when the big storm had come along and knocked it down. At the base of the hill, near the birdbath, a young man (a serious birdwatcher, from the binoculars he wore and the thick stack of paperbacks on the grass beside him) was making careful notes in what looked like some sort of journal. ‘Okay, tell me why it’s almost over. Just tell me that.’
There was no immediate answer, but that was all right; Ralph was willing to wait. It had been quite a stroll over here, the day was hot, and he was tired. He was now waking around three-thirty every morning. He had begun taking long walks again, but not in any hope they would help him sleep better or longer; he thought he was making pilgrimages, visiting all his favorite spots in Derry one last time. Saying goodbye.
Because the time of the promise has almost come, the voice answered, and the scar began to throb with its deep, narrow heat again. The one that was made to you, and the one you made in return.
‘What was it?’ he asked, agitated. ‘Please, if I made a promise, why can’t I remember what it was?’
The serious birdwatcher heard that and looked up the hill. What he saw was a man sitting on a park bench and apparently having a conversation with himself. The corners of the serious birdwatcher’s mouth turned down in disgust and he thought, I hope I die before I get that old. I really do. Then he turned back to the birdbath and began making notes again.
Deep inside Ralph’s head, the clenching sensation – that feeling of blink – suddenly came again, and although he didn’t stir from the bench, Ralph felt himself propelled rapidly upward none the less . . . faster and further than ever before.
Not at all, the voice said. Once you were much higher than this, Ralph – Lois, too. But you’re getting there. You’ll be ready soon.
The birdwatcher, who lived all unknowing in the center of a gorgeous spun-gold aura, looked around cautiously, perhaps wanting to make sure that the senile old man on the bench at the top of the hill wasn’t creeping up on him with a blunt instrument. What he saw caused the tight, prissy line of his mouth to soften in astonishment. His eyes widened. Ralph observed sudden radiating spokes of indigo in the serious birdwatcher’s aura and realized he was looking at shock.
What’s the matter with him? What does he see?
But that was wrong. It wasn’t what the birdwatcher saw; it was what he didn’t see. He didn’t see Ralph, because Ralph had gone up high enough to disappear from this level – had become the visual equivalent of a note blown on a dog-whistle.
If they were here now, I could see them easily.
Who, Ralph? If who was here?
Clotho. Lachesis. And Atropos.
All at once the pieces began to fly together in his mind, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had looked a great deal more complicated than it actually was.
Ralph, whispering: [‘Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.’]
14
Six days later, Ralph awoke at quarter past three in the morning and knew that the time of the promise had come.
15
‘I think I’ll walk upstreet to the Red Apple and get an ice-cream bar,’ Ralph said. It was almost ten o’clock. His heart was beating much too fast, and his thoughts were hard to find under the constant white noise of terror which now filled him. He had never felt less like ice-cream in his entire life, but it was a reasonable enough excuse for a trip to the Red Apple; it was the first week of August, and the weatherman had said the mercury would probably top ninety by early afternoon, with thunderstorms to follow in the early evening.
Ralph thought he needn’t worry about the thunderstorms.
A bookcase stood on a spread of newspapers by the kitchen door. Lois had been painting it barn-red. Now she got to her feet, put her hands into the small of her back, and stretched. Ralph could hear the minute crackling sounds of her spine. ‘I’ll go with you. My head’ll ache tonight if I don’t get away from that paint for awhile. I don’t know why I wanted to paint on such a muggy day in the first place.’
The last thing on earth Ralph wanted was to be accompanied up to the Red Apple by Lois. ‘You don’t have to, honey; I’ll bring you back one of those coconut Popsicles you like. I wasn’t even planning on taking Rosalie, it’s so humid. Go sit on the back porch, why don’t you?’
‘Any Popsicle you carry back from the store on a day like this will be falling off the stick by the time you get it here,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go while there’s still shade on this side of the . . .’
She trailed off. The little smile she’d been wearing slipped off her face. It was replaced by a look of dismay, and the gray of her aura, which had only darkened slightly during the years Ralph hadn’t been able to see it, now began to glow with flocks of reddish-pink embers.
‘Ralph, what’s wrong? What are you really going to do?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, but the scar was glowing inside his arm and the tick of the deathwatch was everywhere, loud and everywhere. It was telling him he had an appointment to keep. A promise to keep.
‘Yes, there is, and it’s been wrong for the last two or three months, maybe longer. I’m a foolish woman – I knew something was happening, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it dead-on. Because I was afraid. And I was right to be afraid, wasn’t I? I was right.’
‘Lois—’
She was suddenly crossing the room to him, crossing fast, almost leaping, the old back injury not slowing her down in the least, and before he could stop her, she had seized his right arm and was holding it out, looking at it fixedly.
The scar was glowing a fierce bright red.
Ralph had a moment to hope that it was strictly an aural glow and she wouldn’t be able to see it. Then she looked up, her eyes round and full of terror. Terror, and something else. Ralph thought that something else was recognition.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered. ‘The men in the park. The ones with the funny names . . . Clothes and Lashes, something like that . . . and one of them cut you. Oh Ralph, oh my God, what are you supposed to do?’
‘Now, Lois, don’t take on—’
‘Don’t you dare tell me not to take on!’ she shrieked into his face. ‘Don’t you dare! Don’t you DARE!’
Hurry, the interior voice whispered. You don’t have time to stand around and discuss this; somewhere it’s already begun to happen, and the deathwatch you hear may not be ticking just for you.
‘I have to go.’ He turned and blundered toward the door. In his agitation he did not notice a certain Sherlock Holmesian circumstance attending this scene: a dog which should have barked – a dog which always barked her stern disapproval when voices were raised in this house – but did not. Rosalie was missing from her usual place by the screen door . . . and the door itself was standing ajar.
Rosalie was the furthest thing from Ralph’s mind at that moment. He felt knee-deep in molasses, and thought he would be doing well just to make the porch, let alone the Red Apple up the street. His heart thumped and skidded in his chest; his eyes were burning.
‘No!’ Lois screamed. ‘No, Ralph, please! Please don’t leave me!’
She ran after him, clutched his arm. She was still holding her paintbrush, and the fine red droplets which splattered his shirt looked like blood. Now she was crying, and her expression of utter, abject sorrow nearly broke his heart. He didn’t want to leave her like this; wasn’t sure he could leave her like this.
He turned and took her by her forearms. ‘Lois, I have to go.’
‘You haven’t been sleeping,’ she babbled,‘I knew that, and I knew it meant something was wrong, but it doesn’t matter, we’ll go away, we can leave right now, this minute, we’ll just take Rosalie and our toothbrushes and go—’
He squeezed her arms and she stopped, looking up at him with her wet eyes. Her lips were trembling.
‘Lois, listen to me. I have to do this.’
‘I lost Paul, I can’t lose you, too!’ she wailed. ‘I couldn’t stand it! Oh Ralph, I couldn’t stand it!’
You’ll be able to, he thought. Short-Timers are a lot tougher than they look. They have to be.
Ralph felt a couple of tears trickle down his cheeks. He suspected their source was more weariness than grief. If he could make her see that all this changed nothing, only made what he had to do harder . . .
He held her at arm’s length. The scar on his arm was throbbing more fiercely than ever, and the feeling of time slipping relentlessly away had become overwhelming.
‘Walk with me at least partway, if you want,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can even help me do what I have to do. I’ve had my life, Lois, and a fine one it was. But she hasn’t really had anything yet, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let that son of a bitch have her just because he’s got a score to settle with me.’
‘What son of a bitch? Ralph, what in the world are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about Natalie Deepneau. She’s supposed to die this morning, only I’m not going to let that happen.’
‘Nat? Ralph, why would anyone want to hurt Nat?’
She looked very bewildered, very our Lois . . . but wasn’t there something else beneath that daffy exterior? Something careful and calculating? Ralph thought the answer was yes. Ralph had an idea Lois wasn’t half as bewildered as she was pretending to be. She had fooled Bill McGovern for years with that act – him, too, at least part of the time – and this was just another (and rather brilliant) variation of the same old scam.
What she was really trying to do was hold him here. She loved Nat deeply, but to Lois, a choice between her husband and the little girl who lived up the lane was no choice at all. She didn’t consider either age or questions of fairness to have any bearing on the situation. Ralph was her man, and to Lois, that was all that mattered.
‘It won’t work,’ he said, not unkindly. He disengaged himself and started for the door again. ‘I made a promise, and I’m all out of time.’
‘Break it, then!’ she cried, and the mixture of terror and rage in her voice stunned him. ‘I don’t remember much about that time, but I remember we got involved with things that almost got us killed, and for reasons we couldn’t even understand. So break it, Ralph! Better your promise than my heart!’
‘And what about the kid? What about Helen, for that matter? Nat’s all she lives for. Doesn’t Helen deserve something better from me than a broken promise?’
‘I don’t care what she deserves! What any of them deserve!’ she shouted, and then her face crumpled. ‘Yes, all right, I suppose I do. But what about us, Ralph? Don’t we count?’ Her eyes, those dark and eloquent Spanish eyes of hers, pleaded with him. If he looked into them too long, it would become all too easy to cry it off, so Ralph looked away.
‘I mean to do it, honey. Nat’s going to get what you and I have already had – another seventy years or so of days and nights.’
She looked at him helplessly, but made no attempt to stop him again. Instead, she began to cry. ‘Foolish old man!’ she whispered. ‘Foolish, willful old man!’
‘Yes, I suppose,’ he said, and lifted her chin. ‘But I’m a foolish, willful old man of my word. Come with me. I’d like that.’
‘All right, Ralph.’ She could hardly hear her own voice, and her skin was as cold as clay. Her aura had gone almost completely red. ‘What is it? What’s going to happen to her?’
‘She’s going to be hit by a green Ford sedan. Unless I take her place, she’s going to be splashed all over Harris Avenue . . . and Helen’s going to see it happen.’
16
As they walked up the hill toward the Red Apple (at first Lois kept falling behind, then trotting to catch up, but she quit when she saw she could not slow him with such a simple trick), Ralph told her what little more he could. She had some memory of being under the lightning-struck tree out by the Extension – a memory she had believed, at least until this morning, to be the memory of a dream – but of course she hadn’t been there during Ralph’s final confrontation with Atropos. Ralph told her of it now – of the random death Atropos intended Natalie to suffer if Ralph continued standing in the way of his plans. He told her of how he’d extracted a promise from Clotho and Lachesis that Atropos might in this case be overruled, and Nat saved.
‘I have an idea that . . . the decision was made . . . very near the top of this crazy building . . . this Tower . . . they kept talking about. Maybe . . . at the very top.’ He was panting out the words and his heart was beating more rapidly than ever, but he thought most of that could be attributed to the fast walk and the torrid day; his fear had subsided somewhat. Talking to Lois had done that much.
Now he could see the Red Apple. Mrs Perrine was at the bus stop half a block further up, standing straight as a general reviewing troops. Her net shopping bag hung over her arm. There was a bus shelter nearby, and it was shady inside, but Mrs Perrine stolidly ignored its existence. Even in the dazzling sunlight he could see that her aura was the same West Point gray as it had been on that October evening in 1993. Of Helen and Nat there was as yet no sign.
17
‘Of course I knew who he was,’ Esther Perrine later tells the reporter from the Derry News. ‘Do I look incompetent to you, young man? Or senile? I’ve known Ralph Roberts for over twenty years. A good man. Not cut from the same cloth as his first wife, of course – Carolyn was a Satterwaite, from the Bangor Satterwaites – but a very fine man, just the same. I recognized the driver of that green Ford auto, too, right away. Pete Sullivan delivered my paper for six years, and he did a good job. The new one, the Morrison boy, always throws it in my flower-beds or up on the porch roof. Pete was driving with his mother, on his learner’s permit, I understand. I hope he won’t take on too much about what happened, for he’s a good lad, and it really wasn’t his fault. I saw the whole thing, and I’ll take my oath on it.
‘I suppose you think I’m rambling. Don’t bother denying it; I can read your face just like it was your own newspaper. Never mind, though – I’ve said most of what I have to say. I knew it was Ralph right away, but here’s something you’ll get wrong even if you put it in your story . . . which you probably won’t. He came from nowhere to save that little girl.’
Esther Perrine fixes the respectfully silent young reporter with a formidable glance – fixes him as a lepidopterist might fix a butterfly on a pin after administering the chloroform.
‘I don’t mean it was like he came from nowhere, young man, although I bet that’s what you’ll print.’
She leans toward the reporter, her eyes never leaving his face, and says it again.
‘He came from nowhere to save that little girl. Do you follow me? From nowhere.’
18
The accident made the front page of the following day’s Derry News. Esther Perrine was sufficiently colorful in her remarks to warrant a sidebar of her own, and staff photographer Tom Matthews got a picture to go with it that made her look like Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. The headline of the sidebar read: ‘IT WAS LIKE HE CAME FROM NOWHERE,’ EYEWITNESS TO TRAGEDY SAYS.
When she read it, Mrs Perrine was not at all surprised.
19
‘In the end I got what I wanted,’ Ralph said, ‘but only because Clotho and Lachesis – and whoever it is they work for on the upper levels – were desperate to stop Ed.’
‘Upper levels? What upper levels? What building?’
‘Never mind. You’ve forgotten, but remembering wouldn’t change anything. The point is just this, Lois: they didn’t want to stop Ed because thousands of people would have died if he’d hit the Civic Center dead-on. They wanted to stop him because there was one person whose life needed to be preserved at any cost . . . in their reckoning, anyway. When I was finally able to make them see that I felt the same about my kid as they did about theirs, arrangements were made.’
‘That’s when they cut you, wasn’t it? And when you made the promise. The one you used to talk about in your sleep.’
He shot her a wide-eyed, startled, and heartbreakingly boyish glance. She only looked back.
‘Yes,’ he said, and wiped his forehead. ‘I guess so.’ The air lay in his lungs like metal shavings. ‘A life for a life, that was the deal – Natalie’s in exchange for mine. And—’
[Hey! Quit tryin to wiggle away! Quit it, Rover, or I’ll kick your asshole square!]
Ralph broke off at the sound of that shrill, hectoring, horridly familiar voice – a voice no human being on Harris Avenue but him could hear – and looked across the street.
‘Ralph? What—’
‘Shhh!’
He pulled her back against the summer-dry hedge in front of the Applebaums’ house. He wasn’t doing anything so polite as perspiring now; his whole body was crawling with a stinking sweat as heavy as engine oil, and he could feel every gland in his body dumping a hot load into his blood. His underwear was trying to crawl up into the crack of his ass and disappear. His tongue tasted like a blown fuse.
Lois followed the direction of his gaze. ‘Rosalie!’ she cried. ‘Rosalie, you bad dog! What are you doing over there?’
The black-and-tan beagle she had given Ralph on their first Christmas was across the street, standing (except cringing was actually the word for what she was doing) on the sidewalk in front of the house where Helen and Nat had lived until Ed had popped his wig. For the first time in the years they’d had her, the beagle reminded Lois of Rosalie #1. Rosalie #2 appeared to be all alone over there, but that did not allay Lois’s sudden terror.
Oh, what have I done? she thought. What have I done?
‘Rosalie!’ she screamed. ‘Rosalie, get over here!’
The dog heard, Lois could see that she did, but she didn’t move.
‘Ralph? What’s happening over there?’
‘Shhhh!’ he said again, and then, just a little further up the street, Lois saw something which stopped her breath. Her last, unstated hope that all this was happening only in Ralph’s head, that it was a kind of flashback to their previous experience, disappeared, because now their dog had company.
Holding a skip-rope looped over her right arm, six-year-old Nat Deepneau came to the end of her walk and looked down the street toward a house she didn’t remember ever living in, toward a lawn where her shirtless father, an undesignated player named Ed Deepneau, had once sat among intersecting rainbows, listening to the Jefferson Airplane as a single spot of blood dried on his John Lennon spectacles. Natalie looked down the street and smiled happily at Rosalie, who was panting and watching her with miserable, frightened eyes.
20
Atropos doesn’t see me, Ralph thought. He’s concentrating on Rosie . . . and on Natalie, of course . . . and he doesn’t see me.
Everything had come around with a sort of hideous perfection. The house was there, Rosalie was there, and Atropos was there, too, wearing a hat cocked back on his head and looking like a wiseacre news reporter in a 1950s B-picture – something directed by Ida Lupino, perhaps. Only this time it wasn’t a Panama with a bite gone from the brim; this time it was a Boston Red Sox cap and it was too small even for Atropos because the adjustable band in the back had been pulled all the way over to the last hole. It had to be, in order to fit the head of the little girl who owned it.
All we need now is Pete the paperboy and the show would be perfect, Ralph thought. The final scene of Insomnia, or, Short-Time Life on Harris Avenue, a Tragi-Comedy in Three Acts. Everyone takes a bow and then exits stage right.
This dog was afraid of Atropos, just as Rosalie #1 had been, and the main reason the little bald doc hadn’t seen Ralph and Lois was that he was trying to keep her from running off before he was ready. And here came Nat, headed down the sidewalk toward her favorite dog in the whole world, Ralph and Lois’s Rosalie. Her jump-rope
(three-six-nine, hon, the goose drank wine)
was slung over her arm. She looked impossibly beautiful and impossibly fragile in her sailor shirt and blue shorts. Her pigtails bounced.
It’s happening too fast, Ralph thought. Everything is happening much too fast.
[Not at all, Ralph! You did splendidly five years ago; you’ll do splendidly now.]
It sounded like Clotho, but there was no time to look. A green car was coming slowly down Harris Avenue from the direction of the airport, moving with the sort of agonized care which usually meant a driver who was very old or very young. Agonized care or not, it was unquestionably the car; a dirty membrane hung over it like a shroud.
Life is a wheel, Ralph thought, and it occurred to him that this was not the first time the idea had occurred to him. Sooner or later everything you thought you’d left behind comes around again. For good or ill, it comes around again.
Rosie made another abortive lunge for freedom, and as Atropos yanked her back, losing his hat, Nat knelt before her and patted her. ‘Are you lost, girl? Did you get out by yourself? That’s okay, I’ll take you home.’ She gave Rosie a hug, her small arms passing through Atropos’s arms, her small, beautiful face only inches from his ugly, grinning one. Then she got up. ‘Come on, Rosie! Come on, sugarpie.’
Rosalie started down the sidewalk at Nat’s heel, looking back once at the grinning little man and whining uneasily. On the other side of Harris Avenue, Helen came out of the Red Apple, and the last condition of the vision Atropos had shown Ralph was fulfilled. Helen had a loaf of bread in one hand. Her Red Sox hat was on her head.
Ralph swept Lois into his arms and kissed her fiercely. ‘I love you with all my heart,’ he said. ‘Remember that, Lois.’
‘I know you do,’ she said calmly. ‘And I love you. That’s why I can’t let you do it.’
She seized him around the neck, her arms like bands of iron, and he felt her breasts push against him hard as she drew in all the breath her lungs would hold.
‘Go away, you rotten bastard!’ she screamed. ‘I can’t see you, but I know you’re there! Go away! Go away and leave us alone!’
Natalie stopped dead in her tracks and looked at Lois with wide-eyed surprise. Rosalie stopped beside her, ears pricking.
‘Don’t go into the street, Nat!’ Lois screamed at her. ‘Don’t—’
Then her hands, which had been laced together at the back of Ralph’s neck, were holding nothing; her arms, which had been locked about his shoulders in a deathgrip, were empty.
He was gone like smoke.
21
Atropos looked toward the cry of alarm and saw Ralph and Lois standing on the other side of Harris Avenue. More important, he saw Ralph seeing him. His eyes widened; his lips parted in a hateful snarl. One hand flew to his bald pate – it was crisscrossed with old scars, the remnants of wounds made with his own scalpel – in an instinctive gesture of defense that was five years too late.
[Fuck you, Shorts! This little bitch is mine!]
Ralph saw Nat, looking at Lois with uncertainty and surprise. He heard Lois shrieking at her, telling her not to go into the street. Then it was Lachesis he heard, speaking from someplace close by.
[Come up, Ralph! As far as you can! Quickly!]
He felt the clench in the center of his head, felt that brief swoop of vertigo in his stomach, and suddenly the whole world brightened and filled with color. He half-saw and half-felt Lois’s arms and locked hands collapse inward, through the place where his body had been a moment before, and then he was drawing away from her – no, being carried away from her. He felt the pull of some great current and understood, in a vague way, that if there was such a thing as a Higher Purpose, he had joined it and would soon be swept downriver with it.
Natalie and Rosalie were now standing directly in front of the house which Ralph had once shared with Bill McGovern before selling up and moving into Lois’s house. Nat glanced doubtfully at Lois, then waved tentatively. ‘She’s okay, Lois – see, she’s right here.’ She patted Rosalie’s head. ‘I’ll cross her safe, don’t worry.’ Then, as she started into the street, she called to her mother. ‘I can’t find my baseball cap! I think somebody stoled it!’
Rosalie was still on the sidewalk. Nat turned to her impatiently. ‘Come on, girl!’
The green car was moving in the child’s direction, but very slowly. It did not at first look like much of a danger to her. Ralph recognized the driver at once, and he did not doubt his senses or suspect he was having a hallucination. In that instant it seemed very right that the approaching sedan should be piloted by his old paperboy.
‘Natalie!’ Lois screamed. ‘Natalie, no!’
Atropos darted forward and slapped Rosalie #2 on the rump.
[Get outta here, mutt! G’wan! Before I change my mind!]
Atropos spared Ralph one final grimacing leer as Rosie yelped and darted into the street . . . and into the path of the Ford driven by sixteen-year-old Pete Sullivan.
Natalie didn’t see the car; she was looking at Lois, whose face was all red and scary. It had finally occurred to Nat that Lois wasn’t screaming about Rosie at all, but something else entirely.
Pete registered the sprinting beagle; it was the little girl he didn’t see. He swerved to avoid Rosalie, a maneuver that ended with the Ford aimed directly at Natalie. Ralph could see two frightened faces behind the windshield as the car veered, and he thought Mrs Sullivan was screaming.
Atropos was leaping up and down, doing an obscenely joyful hornpipe.
[Yahh, Short-Time! Silly white-hair! Toldja I’d fix you!]
In slow motion Helen dropped the loaf of bread she was holding. ‘Natalie, LOOK OUUUUUUTTT!’ she shrieked.
Ralph ran. Again there was that clear sensation of moving by thought alone. And as he closed in on Nat, now diving forward with his hands stretched out, aware of the car looming just beyond her, kicking bright arrows of sun through its dark deathbag and into his eyes, he clenched his mind again, bringing himself back down to the Short-Time world for the last time.
He fell into a landscape that rang with splintered screams: Helen’s mingled with Lois’s mingled with the ones being made by the tires of the Ford. Weaving its way through them like an outlaw vine was the sound of Atropos’s jeers. Ralph got a brief glimpse of Nat’s wide blue eyes, and then he shoved her in the chest and stomach as hard as he could, sending her flying backwards with her hands and feet thrust out in front of her. She landed sitting up in the gutter, bruising her tailbone on the curb but breaking nothing. From some distant place, Ralph heard Atropos squawk in fury and disbelief.
Then two tons of Ford, still travelling at twenty miles an hour, struck Ralph and the soundtrack dropped dead. He was heaved upward and backward in a low, slow arc – it felt slow, anyway, from inside – and went with the Ford’s hood ornament imprinted on his cheek like a tattoo and one broken leg trailing behind him. There was time to see his shadow sliding along the pavement beneath him in a shape like an X; there was time to see a spray of red droplets in the air just above him and to think that Lois must have splattered more paint on him than he had thought at first. And there was time to see Natalie sitting at the side of the street, weeping but all right . . . and to sense Atropos on the sidewalk behind her, shaking his fists and dancing with rage.
I believe I did pretty damned good for an old geezer, Ralph thought, but now I think I could really do with a nap.
Then he came back to earth with a terrible mortal smack and rolled – skull fracturing, back breaking, lungs punctured by brittle thorns of bone as his ribcage exploded, liver turning to pulp, intestines first coming unanchored and then rupturing.
And nothing hurt.
Nothing at all.
22
Lois never forgot the awful thud that was the sound of Ralph’s return to Harris Avenue, or the bloody splash-marks he left behind as he cartwheeled to a stop. She wanted to scream but dared not; some deep, true voice told her that if she did that, the combination of shock, horror, and summer heat would send her unconscious to the sidewalk, and when she came to again, Ralph would be beyond her.
She ran instead of screaming, losing one shoe, marginally aware that Pete Sullivan was getting out of the Ford, which had come to rest almost exactly where Joe Wyzer’s car – also a Ford – had come to rest after Joe had hit Rosalie #1 all those years ago. She was also marginally aware that Pete was screaming.
She reached Ralph and fell on her knees beside him, seeing that his shape had somehow been changed by the green Ford, that the body beneath the familiar chino pants and paint-splattered shirt was fundamentally different from the body which had been pressed against hers less than a minute ago. But his eyes were open, and they were bright and aware.
‘Ralph?’
‘Yes.’ His voice was clear and strong, unmarked by either confusion or pain. ‘Yes, Lois, I hear you.’
She started to put her arms around him and hesitated, thinking about how you weren’t supposed to move people who had been badly injured because you might hurt them even worse or kill them. Then she looked at him again, at the blood pouring from the sides of his mouth and the way his lower body seemed to have come unhinged from the upper part, and decided it would be impossible to hurt Ralph more than he had been hurt already. She hugged him, leaning close, leaning into the smells of disaster: blood and the sweet-sour acetone odor of spent adrenaline on the outrush of his breath.
‘You did it this time, didn’t you?’ Lois asked. She kissed his cheek, his blood-soaked eyebrows, his bloody forehead where the skin had been peeled away from his skull in a flap. She began to cry. ‘Look at you! Shirt torn, pants torn . . . do you think clothes grow on trees?’
‘Is he all right?’ Helen asked from behind her. Lois didn’t turn around, but she saw the shadows on the street: Helen with her arm around her weeping daughter’s shoulders, and Rosie standing by Helen’s right leg. ‘He saved Nat’s life and I didn’t even see where he came from. Please, Lois, say he’s all r—’
Then the shadows shifted as Helen moved to a place where she could actually see Ralph, and she pulled Nat’s face against her blouse and began to wail.
Lois leaned closer to Ralph, caressing his cheeks with the palms of her hands, wanting to tell him that she had meant to come with him – she had meant to, yes, but in the end he had been too quick for her. In the end he had left her behind.
‘Love you, sweetheart,’ Ralph said. He reached up and copied her gesture with his own palm. He tried to raise his left hand as well, but it would only lie on the pavement and twitch.
Lois took his hand and kissed it. ‘Love you, too, Ralph. Always. So much.’
‘I had to do it. You see?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t know if she did see, didn’t know if she would ever see . . . but she knew he was dying. ‘Yes, I see.’
He sighed harshly – that sweet acetone smell wafted up to her again – and smiled.
‘Miz Chasse? Miz Roberts, I mean?’ It was Pete, speaking in hitching gasps. ‘Is Mr Roberts okay? Please say I didn’t hurt him!’
‘Stay away, Pete,’ she said without turning around. ‘Ralph is fine. He just tore his pants and shirt a little . . . didn’t you, Ralph?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You bet. You’ll just have to hosswhip me for—’
He broke off and looked to her left. No one was there, but Ralph smiled anyway. ‘Lachesis!’ he said.
He put out his trembling, blood-grimy right hand, and as Lois, Helen, and Pete Sullivan watched, it rose and fell twice in the empty air. Ralph’s eyes moved again, this time to the right. Slowly, very slowly, he moved his hand in that direction. When he spoke this time, his voice had begun to fade. ‘Hi, Clotho. Now remember: this . . . doesn’t . . . hurt. Right?’
Ralph appeared to listen, and then smiled.
‘Yep,’ he whispered, ‘any way you can get her.’
His hand rose and fell again in the air, then dropped back to his chest. He looked up at Lois with his fading blue eyes.
‘Listen,’ he said, speaking with great effort. Yet his eyes blazed, would not let hers go. ‘Every day I woke up next to you was like waking up young and seeing . . . everything new.’ He tried to raise his hand to her cheek again, and could not. ‘Every day, Lois.’
‘It was like that for me, too, Ralph – like waking up young.’
‘Lois?’
‘What?’
‘The ticking,’ he said. He swallowed and then said it again, enunciating the words with great effort. ‘The ticking.’
‘What ticking?’
‘Never mind, it’s stopped,’ he said, and smiled brilliantly. Then Ralph stopped, too.
23
Clotho and Lachesis stood watching Lois weep over the man who lay dead in the street. In one hand Clotho held his scissors; he raised the other to eye-level and looked at it wonderingly.
It glowed and blazed with Ralph’s aura.
Clotho: [He’s here . . . in here . . . how wonderful!]
Lachesis raised his own right hand. Like Clotho’s left, it looked as if someone had pulled a blue mitten over the normal green-gold aura which swaddled it.
Lachesis: [Yes. He was a wonderful man.]
Clotho: [Shall we give him to her?]
Lachesis: [Can we?]
Clotho: [There’s one way to find out.]
They approached Lois. Each placed the hand Ralph had shaken on one side of Lois’s face.
24
‘Mommy!’ Natalie Deepnau cried. In her agitation, she had reverted to the patois of her babyhood. ‘Who those wittle men? Why they touchin Roliss?’
‘Shh, honey,’ Helen said, and buried Nat’s head against her breast again. There were no men, little or otherwise, near Lois Roberts; she was kneeling alone in the street next to the man who had saved her daughter’s life.
25
Lois looked up suddenly, her eyes wide and surprised, her grief forgotten as a gorgeous feeling of
(light blue light)
calmness and peace filled her. For a moment Harris Avenue was gone. She was in a dark place filled with the sweet smells of hay and cows, a dark place that was split by a hundred brilliant seams of light. She never forgot the fierce joy that leaped up in her at that moment, nor the sure sense that she was seeing a representation of a universe that Ralph wanted her to see, a universe where there was dazzling light behind the darkness . . . couldn’t she see it through the cracks?
‘Can you ever forgive me?’ Pete was sobbing. ‘Oh my God, can you ever forgive me?’
‘Oh yes, I think so,’ Lois said calmly.
She passed her hand down Ralph’s face, closing his eyes, and then held his head in her lap and waited for the police to come. To Lois, Ralph looked as if he had gone to sleep. And, she saw, the long white scar on his right forearm was gone.
September 10, 1990 – November 10, 1993
