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 wingback 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.