'Beg your pardon?' She sounded startled, as if her own mind had been drifting.
'You said something about cutting the cord.'
'I didn't mean anything,' she said. That nagging tone had grown stronger . . . except it wasn't nagging, Ralph realized; it was whining, and it was frightened. Something was wrong here. His heartbeat suddenly speeded up. 'I didn't mean anything at all,' she insisted, and suddenly the phone Ralph was holding turned a deep and sinister shade of blue in his hand.
She's been thinking about killing him, and not just idly, either - she's been thinking about putting a pillow over his face and smothering him with it. It wouldn't take long, she thinks. A mercy, she thinks. Over at last, she thinks.
Ralph pulled the phone away from his ear. Blue light, cold as a February sky, rose in pencil-thin rays from the holes in the earpiece.
Murder is blue, Ralph thought, holding the phone at arm's length and staring with wide-eyed unbelief as the blue rays began to bend and drip toward the floor. He could hear, very faintly, the quacking, anxious voice of Denise Polhurst. It wasn't anything I ever wanted to know, but I guess I know it anyway: murder is blue.
He brought the handset toward his mouth again, cocking it to keep the top half, with its freight of icicle aura, away from him. He was afraid that if that end of the handset got too close to his ear, it might deafen him with her cold and furious desperation.
'Tell Bill that Ralph called,' he said. 'Roberts, not Robbins.' He hung up without waiting for a reply. The blue rays shattered away from the phone's earpiece and tumbled toward the floor. Ralph was again reminded of icicles; this time of how they fell in a neat row when you ran your gloved hand along the underside of an eave after a warm winter day. They disappeared before they hit the linoleum. He glanced around. Nothing in the room glowed, shimmered, or vibrated. The auras were gone again. He began to let out a sigh of relief and then, from outside on Harris Avenue, a car backfired.
In the empty second-floor apartment, Ralph Roberts screamed.
4
He didn't want any more tea, but he was still thirsty. He found half a Diet Pepsi - flat but wet - in the back of the fridge, poured it into a plastic cup with a faded Red Apple logo on it, and took it outside. He could no longer stand to be in the apartment, which seemed to smell of unhappy wakefulness. Especially not after what had happened with the phone.
The day had become even more beautiful, if that was possible; a strong, mild wind had developed, rolling bands of light and shadow across the west side of Derry and combing the leaves from the trees. These the wind sent hurrying along the sidewalks in rattling dervishes of orange and yellow and red.
Ralph turned left not because he had any conscious desire to revisit the picnic area up by the airport but only because he wanted the wind at his back. Nevertheless, he found himself entering the little clearing again some ten minutes later. This time it was empty, and he wasn't surprised. There was no edge in the wind that had sprung up, nothing to make old men and women scurry indoors, but it was hard work keeping cards on the table or chess-pieces on the board when the puckish wind kept trying to snatch them away. As Ralph approached the small trestle table where Faye Chapin usually held court, he was not exactly surprised to see a note held down by a rock, and he had a good idea what the subject would be even before he put down his plastic Red Apple cup and picked it up.
Two walks; two sightings of the bald doc with the scalpel; two old people suffering insomnia and seeing brightly colored visions; two notes. It's like Noah leading the animals onto the ark, not one by one but in pairs . . . and is another hard rain going to fall? Well, what do you think, old man?
He didn't know what he thought . . . but Bill's note had been a kind of obituary-in-progress, and he had absolutely no doubt that Faye's was the same thing. That sense of being carried forward, effortlessly and without hesitation, was simply too strong to doubt; it was like awakening on some alien stage to find oneself speaking lines (or stumbling through them, anyway) in a drama for which one could not remember having rehearsed, or seeing a coherent shape in what had up until then looked like complete nonsense, or discovering . . .
Discovering what?
'Another secret city, that's what,' he murmured. 'The Derry of Auras.' Then he bent over Faye's note and read it while the wind played prankishly with his thinning hair.
5
Those of you who want to pay your final respects to Jimmy Vandermeer are advised to do so by tomorrow at the very latest. Father Coughlin came by this noon and told me the poor old guy is sinking fast. He CAN have visitors, tho. He is in Derry Home ICU, Room 315.
Faye PS Remember that time is short.
Ralph read the note twice, put it back on the table with the rock on top to weight it down for the next Old Crock to happen along, then simply stood there with his hands in his pockets and his head down, gazing out at Runway 3 from beneath the bushy tangle of his brows. A crisp leaf, orange as one of the Halloween pumpkins which would soon decorate the street, came flipping down from the deep blue sky and landed in his sparse hair. Ralph brushed it away absently and thought of two hospital rooms on Home's ICU floor, two rooms side by side. Bob Polhurst in one, Jimmy V in the other. And the next room up the hall? That one was 317, the room in which his wife had died.
'This is not a coincidence,' he said softly.
But what was it? Shapes in the mist? A secret city? Evocative phrases, both of them, but they answered no questions.
Ralph sat on top of the picnic table next to the one upon which Faye had left his note, took off his shoes, and crossed his legs. The wind gusted, ruffling his hair. He sat there amid the falling leaves with his head slightly bent and his brow furrowed in thought. He looked like a Winslow Homer version of Buddha as he meditated with his hands cupping his kneecaps, carefully reviewing his impressions of Doc #1 and Doc #2 . . . and then contrasting these impressions with those he'd gotten of Doc #3.
First impression: all three docs had reminded him of the aliens in tabloids like Inside View, and pictures which were always labelled 'artist's conceptions'. Ralph knew that these bald-headed, dark-eyed images of mysterious visitors from space went back a good many years; people had been reporting contacts with short baldies - the so-called little doctors - for a long time, maybe for as long as people had been reporting UFOs. He was quite sure that he had read at least one such account way back in the sixties.
'Okay, so say there are quite a few of these fellows around,' Ralph told a sparrow which had just lit on the picnic area's litter barrel. 'Not just three docs but three hundred. Or three thousand. Lois and I aren't the only ones who've seen them. And . . .'
And didn't most of the people who gave accounts of such meetings also mention sharp objects?
Yes, but not scissors or scalpels - at least Ralph didn't think so. Most of the people who claimed to have been abducted by the little bald doctors talked about probes, didn't they?
The sparrow flew off. Ralph didn't notice. He was thinking about the little bald docs who had visited May Locher on the night of her death. What else did he know of them? What else had he seen? They had been dressed in white smocks, like the ones worn by TV-show doctors in the fifties and sixties, like the ones pharmacists still wore. Only their smocks, unlike the one worn by Doc #3, had been clean. #3 had been toting a rusty scalpel; if there had been any rust on the scissors Doc #1 had been holding in his right hand, Ralph hadn't noticed it. Not even after he'd trained the binoculars on them.
Something else - probably not important, but at least you noticed it. Scissors-Toting Doc was right-handed, at least judging from the way he held his weapon. Scalpel-Wielding Doc is a southpaw.
No, probably not important, but something about it - another of those shapes in the mist, this a small one - tugged at him just the same. Something about the dichotomy of left and right.
'Go to the left and you'll be right,' Ralph muttered, repeating the punchline of some joke he no longer even remembered. 'Go to the right and you'll
be left.'
Never mind. What else did he know about the docs?
Well, they had been surrounded by auras, of course - rather lovely greenish-gold ones - and they had left those (white-man tracks) Arthur Murray dance-diagrams behind them. And although their features had struck him as perfectly anonymous, their auras had conveyed feelings of power . . . and sobriety . . . and . . .
'And dignity, goddammit,' Ralph said. The wind gusted again and more leaves blew down from the trees. Some fifty yards from the picnic area, not far from the old train tracks, a twisted, half-uprooted tree seemed to reach in Ralph's direction, stretching branches that actually did look a little like clutching hands.
It suddenly occurred to Ralph that he had seen quite a lot that night for an old guy who was supposed to be living on the edge of the last age of man, the one Shakespeare (and Bill McGovern) called 'the slippered pantaloon'. And none of it - not one single thing - suggested danger or evil intent. That Ralph had inferred evil intent wasn't very surprising. They were physically freakish strangers; he had observed them coming out of a sick woman's house at a time of night when visitors seldom if ever called; he had seen them only minutes after waking from a nightmare of epic proportions.
Now, however, recollecting what he had seen, other things recurred. The way they had stood on Mrs Locher's stoop, for instance, as if they had every right to be there; the sense he had gotten of two old friends indulging themselves in a bit of conversation before going on their way. Two old buddies talking it over one more time before heading home after a long night's work.
That was your impression, yes, but that doesn't mean you can trust it, Ralph.
But Ralph thought he could trust it. Old friends, longtime colleagues, done for the night. May Locher's had been their last stop.
All right, so Docs #1 and #2 were as different from the third one as day is from night. They were clean while he was dirty, they were invested with auras while he had none (none that Ralph had seen, at least), they carried scissors while he carried a scalpel, they seemed as sane and sober as a couple of respected village elders while #3 seemed as crazy as a shithouse rat.
One thing is perfectly clear, though, isn't it? Your playmates are supernatural beings, and other than Lois, the only person who seems to know they're there is Ed Deepneau. Want to bet on how much sleep Ed is getting just lately?
'No,' Ralph said. He raised his hands from his knees and held them in front of his eyes. They were shaking a little. Ed had mentioned bald docs, and there were bald docs. Was it the docs he'd been talking about when he talked about Centurions? Ralph didn't know. He almost hoped so, because that word - Centurions - had begun to call up a much more terrible image in his mind each time it occurred to him: the Ringwraiths from Tolkien's fantasy trilogy. Hooded figures astride skeletal, red-eyed horses, bearing down on a small party of cowering hobbits outside the Prancing Pony Tavern in Bree.
Thinking of hobbits made him think of Lois, and the trembling in his hands grew worse.
Carolyn: It's a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don't sweat the small stuff.
Lois: In my family, dying at eighty is dying young.
Joe Wyzer: The medical examiner usually ends up writing suicide on the cause-of-death line rather than insomnia.
Bill: His specialty was the Civil War, and now he doesn't even know what a civil war is, let alone who won ours.
Denise Polhurst: Death is very stupid. An obstetrician this slow in cutting a baby's umbilical cord--
It was as if someone had suddenly clicked on a bright searchlight inside his head, and Ralph cried out into the sunny autumn afternoon. Not even the Delta 727 settling in for a landing on Runway 3 could entirely drown that cry.
6
He spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the porch of the house he shared with McGovern, waiting impatiently for Lois to come back from her card-game. He could have tried McGovern again at the hospital, but didn't. The need to speak to McGovern had passed. Ralph didn't understand everything yet, but he thought he understood a great deal more than he had, and if his sudden flash of insight at the picnic area had any validity at all, telling McGovern what had happened to his Panama would serve absolutely no purpose even if Bill believed him.
I have to get the hat back, Ralph thought. And I have to get Lois's earrings back, too.
It was an amazing late afternoon and early evening. On the one hand, nothing happened. On the other hand, everything happened. The world of auras came and went around him like the stately progression of cloud-shadows across the west side. Ralph sat and watched, rapt, breaking off only to eat a little and make a trip to the bathroom. He saw old Mrs Bennigan standing on her front porch in her bright red coat, clutching her walker and taking inventory of her fall flowers. He saw the aura surrounding her - the scrubbed and healthy pink of a freshly bathed infant - and hoped Mrs B didn't have a lot of relatives waiting around for her to die. He saw a young man of no more than twenty bopping along the other side of the street toward the Red Apple. He was the picture of health in his faded jeans and sleeveless Celtics jersey, but Ralph could see a deathbag clinging to him like an oilslick, and a balloon-string rising from the crown of his head that looked like a decaying drape-pull in a haunted house.
He saw no little bald doctors, but shortly after five-thirty he observed a startling shaft of purple light erupt from a manhole cover in the middle of Harris Avenue; it rose into the sky like a special effect in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic for perhaps three minutes, then simply winked out. He also saw a huge bird that looked like a prehistoric hawk go floating between the chimneys of the old dairy building around the corner on Howard Street, and alternating red and blue thermals twisting over Strawford Park in long, lazy ribbons.
When soccer practice at Fairmount Grammar let out at quarter to six, a dozen or so kids came swarming into the parking lot of the Red Apple, where they would buy tons of pre-supper candy and bales of trading cards - football cards by this time of year, Ralph supposed. Two of them stopped to argue about something, and their auras, one green and the other a vibrant shade of burnt orange, intensified, drew in, and began to gleam with rising spirals of scarlet thread.
Look out! Ralph shouted mentally at the boy within the orange envelope of light, just a moment before Green Boy dropped his schoolbooks and socked the other in the mouth. The two of them grappled, spun around in a clumsy, aggressive dance, then tumbled to the sidewalk. A little circle of yelling, cheering kids formed around them. A purplish-red dome like a thunderhead began to build up around and above the fight. Ralph found this shape, which was circulating in a slow counter-clockwise movement, both terrible and beautiful, and he wondered what the aura above a full-scale military battle would look like. He decided that was a question to which he didn't really want an answer. Just as Orange Boy climbed on top of Green Boy and began to pummel him in earnest, Sue came out of the store and hollered at them to quit fighting in the damned parking lot.
Orange Boy dismounted reluctantly. The combatants rose to their feet, looking at each other warily. Then Green Boy, trying to appear nonchalant, turned and went into the store. Only his quick glance back over his shoulder to make sure his opponent was not pursuing, spoiled the effect.
The spectators were either following Green Boy into the store for their post-practice supplies or clustered around Orange Boy, congratulating him. Above them, unseen, that virulent red-purple toadstool was breaking up like a cloud-bank before a strong wind. Pieces of it tattered, unravelled, and disappeared.
The street is a carnival of energy, Ralph thought. The juice thrown off by those two boys during the ninety seconds they were mixing it up looked like enough to light Derry for a week, and if a person could tap the energy the watchers generated - the energy inside that mushroom cloud - you could probably light the whole state of Maine for a month. Can you imagine what it would be like to enter the world of auras in Times Square at two minutes to midnight on New Year's Eve?
He couldn't and didn't
want to. He suspected he had glimpsed the leading edge of a force so huge and so vital that it made all the nuclear weapons created since 1945 seem about as powerful as a child's cap-pistol fired into an empty peach can. Enough force to destroy the universe, perhaps . . . or to create a new one.
7
Ralph went upstairs, dumped a can of beans into one pot and a couple of hotdogs into another, and walked impatiently back and forth through the flat, snapping his fingers and occasionally running his fingers through his hair, as he waited for this impromptu bachelor's supper to cook. The bone-deep weariness which had hung on him like invisible weights ever since midsummer was, for the time being, at least, entirely gone; he felt filled with manic, antic energy, absolutely stuffed with it. He supposed this was why people liked Benzedrine and cocaine, only he had an idea that this was a much better high, that when it departed it would not leave him feeling plundered and mistreated, more used than user.
Ralph Roberts, unaware that the hair his fingers were combing through had grown thicker, and that threads of black were visible in it for the first time in five years, jive-toured his apartment, walking on the balls of his feet, first humming and then singing an old rock-and-roll tune from the early sixties: 'Hey, pretty bay-bee, you can't sit down . . . you gotta slop, bop, slip, slop, flip top alll about . . .'
The beans were bubbling in their pot, the hotdogs boiling in theirs - only it looked to Ralph almost as if they were dancing in there, doing the Bristol Stomp to the old Dovells tune. Still singing at the top of his lungs ('When you hear the hippie with the backbeat, you can't sit down'), Ralph cut the hotdogs into the beans, dumped in half a pint of ketchup, added some chili sauce, then stirred everything vigorously together and headed for the door. He carried his supper, still in the pot, in one hand. He ran down the stairs as nimbly as a kid who's running late on the first day of school. He hooked a baggy old cardigan sweater - McGovern's, but what the hell - out of the front hall closet, and then went back out on the porch.
The auras were gone, but Ralph wasn't dismayed; for the time being he was more interested in the smell of food. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt as flat-out hungry as he did at that moment. He sat on the top step with his long thighs and bony knees sticking out on either side of him, looking decidedly Ichabod Crane-ish, and began to eat. The first few bites burned his lips and tongue, but instead of being deterred, Ralph ate faster, almost gobbling.