Ralph shook his head as if to clear it. He hadn't been in an empty theater on all those nights, after all; someone else had been there, too. They had just been in separate boxes.
'Lois, the fight Bill and I had wasn't really about chess. It--'
Down the hill, Rosalie voiced a rusty bark and began struggling to her feet. Ralph looked in that direction and felt an icicle slip into his belly. Although the two of them had been sitting here for going on half an hour and no one had even come near the comfort stations at the bottom of the hill, the pressed plastic door of the Portosan marked MEN was now slowly opening.
Doc #3 emerged from it. McGovern's hat, the Panama with the crescent bitten in the brim, was cocked back on his head, making him look weirdly as McGovern had on the day Ralph had first seen him in his brown fedora - like an enquiring newshawk in a forties crime drama.
Upraised in one hand the bald stranger held the rusty scalpel.
CHAPTER 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 d
on'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 exper
ience 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.