'Well?' she asked with just a hint of a smile. 'Are you going to talk to me or just look at me?'
Ralph, ordinarily a cautious sort of man, recklessly said the first thing to come into his head. 'What I'd like to do, I think, is eat you like ice-cream.'
Her smile deepened enough to make dimples at the corners of her mouth. 'Maybe later we'll see how much of an appetite for ice-cream you really have, Ralph. For now, just tell me why you brought me here. And don't tell me you don't know, because I think you do.'
Ralph closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and opened them again. 'I guess we're here to find the other two bald guys. The ones I saw coming out of May Locher's. If anyone can explain what's going on, it'll be them.'
'What makes you think you'll find them here?'
'I think they've got work to do . . . two men, Jimmy V and Bill's friend, dying side by side. I should have known what the bald doctors are - what they do - from the minute I saw the ambulance guys bring Mrs Locher out strapped to a stretcher and with a sheet over her face. I would have known, if I hadn't been so damned tired. The scissors should have been enough. Instead, it took me until this afternoon, and I only got it then because of something Mr Polhurst's niece said.'
'What was it?'
'That death was stupid. That if an obstetrician took as much time cutting the umbilical cord, he'd be sued for malpractice. It made me think of a myth I read when I was in grade-school and couldn't get enough of gods and goddesses and Trojan horses. The story was about three sisters - the Greek Sisters, maybe, or maybe it was the Weird Sisters. Shit, don't ask me; I can't even remember to use my damned turnblinkers half the time. Anyway, these sisters were responsible for the course of all human life. One of them spun the thread, one of them decided how long it would be . . . is any of this ringing a bell, Lois?'
'Of course it is!' she nearly shouted. 'The balloon-strings!'
Ralph nodded. 'Yes. The balloon-strings. I don't remember the names of the first two sisters, but I never forgot the name of the last one - Atropos. And according to the story, her job is to cut the thread the first one spins and the second one measures. You could argue with her, you could beg, but it never made any difference. When she decided it was time to cut, she cut.'
Lois was nodding. 'Yes, I remember that story. I don't know if I read it or someone told it to me when I was a kid. You believe it's actually true, Ralph, don't you? Only it turns out to be the Bald Brothers instead of the Weird Sisters.'
'Yes and no. As I remember the story, the sisters were all on the same side - a team. And that's the feeling I got about the two men who came out of Mrs Locher's house, that they were long-time partners with immense respect for each other. But the other guy, the one we saw again tonight, isn't like them. I think Doc #3's a rogue.'
Lois shivered, a theatrical gesture that became real at the last moment. 'He's awful, Ralph. I hate him.'
'I don't blame you.'
He reached for the doorhandle, but Lois stopped him with a touch. 'I saw him do something.'
Ralph turned and looked at her. The tendons in his neck creaked rustily. He had a pretty good idea what she was going to say.
'He picked the pocket of the man who hit Rosalie,' she said. 'While he was kneeling beside her in the street, the bald man picked his pocket. Except all he took was a comb. And the hat that bald man was wearing . . . I'm pretty sure I recognized it.'
Ralph went on looking at her, fervently hoping that Lois's memory of Doc #3's apparel did not extend any further.
'It was Bill's, wasn't it? Bill's Panama.'
Ralph nodded. 'Sure it was.'
Lois closed her eyes. 'Oh, Lord.'
'What do you say, Lois? Are you still game?'
'Yes.' She opened her door and swung her legs out. 'But let's get going right away, before I lose my nerve.'
'Tell me about it,' said Ralph Roberts.
3
As they approached the main doors of Derry Home, Ralph leaned toward Lois's ear and murmured, 'Is it happening to you?'
'Yes.' Her eyes were very wide. 'God, yes. It's strong this time, isn't it?'
As they broke the electric-eye beam and the doors to the hospital lobby swung open before them, the surface of the world suddenly peeled back, disclosing another world, one that simmered with unseen colors and shifted with unseen shapes. Overhead, on the wall-to-wall mural depicting Derry as it had been during its halcyon lumbering days at the turn of the century, dark brown arrow-shapes chased each other, growing closer and closer together until they touched. When that happened, they flashed a momentary dark green and changed direction. A bright silver funnel that looked like either a waterspout or a toy cyclone was descending the curved staircase which led up to the second-floor meeting rooms, cafeteria, and auditorium. Its wide top end nodded back and forth as it moved from step to step, and to Ralph it felt distinctly friendly, like an anthropomorphic character in a Disney cartoon. As Ralph watched, two men with briefcases hurried up the stairs, and one of them passed directly through the silver funnel. He never paused in what he was saying to his companion, but when he emerged on the other side, Ralph saw he was absently using his free hand to smooth back his hair . . . although not a strand was out of place.
The funnel reached the bottom of the stairs, raced around the center of the lobby in a tight, exuberant figure-eight, and then popped out of existence, leaving only a faint, rosy mist behind. This quickly dissipated.
Lois dug her elbow into Ralph's side, started to point toward an area beyond the Central Information booth, realized there were people all around them, and settled for lifting her chin in that direction instead. Earlier, Ralph had seen a shape in the sky which had looked like a prehistoric bird. Now he saw something which looked like a long translucent snake. It was essing its way across the ceiling above a sign which read PLEASE WAIT HERE FOR BLOOD-TESTING.
'Is it alive?' Lois whispered with some alarm.
Ralph looked more closely and realized the thing had no head . . . no discernible tail, either. It was all body. He supposed it was alive - he had an idea all the auras were alive in some fashion - but he didn't think it was really a snake, and he doubted that it was dangerous, at least to the likes of them.
'Don't sweat the small stuff, sweetheart,' he whispered back to her as they joined the short line at Central Information, and as he said it, the snake-thing seemed to melt into the ceiling and disappear.
Ralph didn't know how important such things as the bird and the cyclone were in the secret world's scheme of things, but he was positive that people were still the main show. The lobby of Derry Home Hospital was like a gorgeous Fourth of July fireworks display, a display in which the parts of the Roman candles and Chinese fountains were being played by human beings.
Lois hooked a finger into his collar to make him bend his head toward her. 'You'll have to do the talking, Ralph,' she said in a strengthless, amazed little voice. 'I'm having all I can do not to wee in my pants.'
The man ahead of them left the booth and Ralph stepped forward. As he did, a clear, sweetly nostalgic memory of Jimmy V surfaced in his mind. They'd been on the road someplace in Rhode Island - Kingston, maybe - and had decided on the spur of the moment that they wanted to attend the tent revival going on in a nearby hayfield. They had both been drunk as fleas in a gin-bottle, of course. A pair of well-scrubbed young ladies had been standing outside the turned-back flaps of the tent, handing out tracts, and as he and Jimmy neared them, they began to admonish each other in aromatic whispers to act sober, dammit, to just act sober. Had they gotten in that day? Or--
'Help you?' the woman in the Central Information booth asked, her tone saying she was doing Ralph a real favor just by speaking to him. He looked through the glass at her and saw a woman buried inside a troubled orange aura that looked like a burning bramble-bush. Here's a lady who loves the fine print and stands on all the ceremony she can, he thought, and on the heels of that, Ralph remembered that the two young women flanking the entrance to
the tent had gotten one whiff of him and Jimmy V and turned them politely but firmly away. They had ended up spending the evening in a Central Falls juke-joint, as he recalled, and had probably been lucky not to get rolled when they staggered out after last call.
'Sir?' the woman in the glass booth asked impatiently. 'Can I help you?'
Ralph came back to the present with a thud he could almost feel. 'Yes, ma'am. My wife and I would like to visit Jimmy Vandermeer on the third floor, if--'
'That's ICU!' she snapped. 'Can't go up to ICU without a special pass.' Orange hooks began to poke their way out of the glow around her head, and her aura began to look like barbed wire strung across some ghostly no-man's-land.
'I know,' Ralph said, more humbly than ever, 'but my friend, Lafayette Chapin, he said--'
'Gosh!' the woman in the booth interrupted. 'It's wonderful, the way everyone's got a friend. Really wonderful.' She rolled a satiric eye toward the ceiling.
'Faye said Jimmy could have visitors, though. You see, he has cancer and he's not expected to live much l--'
'Well, I'll check the files,' the woman in the booth said with the grudging air of one who knows she is being sent upon a fool's errand, 'but the computer is very slow tonight, so it's going to take awhile. Give me your name, then you and your wife go sit over there. I'll page you as soon as--'
Ralph decided that he had eaten enough humble pie in front of this bureaucratic guard dog. It wasn't as if he wanted an exit visa from Albania, after all; just a goddam ICU pass would do.
There was a slot in the base of the glass booth. Ralph reached through it and grasped the woman's wrist before she could pull it away. There was a sensation, painless but very clear, of those orange hooks passing directly through his flesh without finding anything to catch on. Ralph squeezed gently and felt a small burst of force - something that would have been no bigger than a pellet if it had been seen - pass from him to the woman. Suddenly the officious orange aura around her left arm and side turned the faded turquoise of Ralph's aura. She gasped and jerked forward on her chair, as if someone had just dumped a paper cup filled with ice-cubes down the back of her uniform.
['Never mind the computer. Just give me a couple of passes, please. Right away.']
'Yes, sir,' she said at once, and Ralph let go of her wrist so she could reach beneath her desk. The turquoise glow around her arm was turning orange again, the change in color creeping down from her shoulder toward her wrist.
But I could have turned her all blue, Ralph thought. Taken her over. Run her around the room like a wind-up toy.
He suddenly remembered Ed quoting Matthew's Gospel - Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked, was exceeding wroth - and a mixture of fright and shame filled him. Thoughts of vampirism recurred as well, and a snatch from a famous old Pogo comic strip: We have met the enemy and he is us. Yes, he could probably do almost anything he wanted with this orange-haloed grump; his batteries were fully charged. The only problem was that the juice in those batteries - and in Lois's, as well - was stolen goods.
When the information-lady's hand emerged from beneath the desk, it was holding two pink laminated badges marked INTENSIVE CARE/VISITOR. 'Here you are, sir,' she said in a courteous voice utterly unlike the tone in which she had first addressed him. 'Enjoy your visit and thank you for waiting.'
'Thank you,' Ralph said. He took the badges and grasped Lois's hand. 'Come on, dear. We ought to ['Ralph, what did you DO to her?']
['Nothing, I guess - I think she's all right.']
get upstairs and make our visit before it gets too late.'
Lois glanced back at the woman in the information booth. She was dealing with her next customer, but slowly, as if she'd just been granted some moderately amazing revelation and had to think it over. The blue glow was now visible only at the very tips of her fingers, and as Lois watched, that disappeared as well.
Lois looked up at Ralph again and smiled.
['Yes . . . she is all right. So stop beating up on yourself.']
['Was that what I was doing?']
['I think so, yes . . . we're talking that way again, Ralph.']
['I know.']
['Ralph?']
['Yes?']
['This is all pretty wonderful, isn't it?']
['Yes.']
Ralph tried to hide the rest of what he was thinking from her: that when the price for something which felt this wonderful came due, they were apt to discover it was very high.
4
['Stop staring at that baby, Ralph. You're making its mother nervous.']
Ralph glanced at the woman in whose arms the baby slept and saw that Lois was right . . . but it was hard not to look. The baby, no more than three months old, lay within a capsule of violently shifting yellow-gray aura. This powerful but disquieting thunderlight circled the tiny body with the idiot speed of the atmosphere surrounding a gas giant - Jupiter, say, or Saturn.
['Jesus, Lois, that's brain-damage, isn't it?']
['Yes. The woman says there was a car accident.']
['Says? Have you been talking to her?']
['No. It's - - - - -.']
['I don't understand.']
['Join the club.']
The oversized hospital elevator labored slowly upward. Those inside - the lame, the halt, the guilty few in good health - didn't speak but either turned their eyes up to the floor-indicator over the doors or down to inspect their own shoes. The only exception to this was the woman with the thunderstruck baby. She was watching Ralph with distrust and alarm, as if she expected him to leap forward at any moment and try to rip her infant from her arms.
It's not just that I was looking, Ralph thought. At least I don't think so. She felt me thinking about her baby. Felt me . . . sensed me . . . heard me . . . some damned thing, anyway.
The elevator stopped on the second floor and the doors wheezed open. The woman with the baby turned to Ralph. The infant shifted slightly as she did, and Ralph got a look at the crown of its head. There was a deep crease in the tiny skull. A red scar ran the length of it. To Ralph it looked like a rill of tainted water standing at the bottom of a ditch. The ugly and confused yellow-gray aura which surrounded the baby was emerging from this scar like steam from a crack in the earth. The baby's balloon-string was the same color as its aura, and it was unlike any other balloon-string Ralph had seen so far - not unhealthy in appearance but short, ugly, and no more than a stub.
'Didn't your mother ever teach you any manners?' the baby's mother asked Ralph, and what cut him wasn't so much the admonition as the way she made it. He had scared her badly.
'Madam, I assure you--'
'Yeah, go on and assure my fanny,'she said, and stepped out of the car. The elevator doors started to slide closed. Ralph glanced at Lois and the two of them exchanged a moment of brief but total understanding. Lois shook her finger at the doors as if scolding them, and a gray, mesh-like substance fanned out from its tip. The doors struck this and then slid back into their slots, as they were programmed to do upon encountering any barrier to their progress.
['Madam!']
The woman stopped and turned around, clearly confused. She shot suspicious glances about her, trying to identify who had spoken. Her aura was a dark, buttery yellow with faint tints of orange spoking out from its inner edges. Ralph fixed her eyes with his.
['I'm sorry if I offended you. This is all very new to my friend and me. We're like children at a formal dinner. I apologize.']
['- - - - - - - - - - -.']
He didn't know just what she was trying to communicate - it was like watching someone talk inside a soundproof booth - but he sensed relief and deep unease . . . the sort of unease people feel when they think they may have been observed doing something they shouldn't. Her doubtful eyes remained on his face a moment or two longer, then she turned and began to walk rapidly down the corridor in the direction of a sign reading NEUROLOGICAL SURVEY. The gray mesh Lois had cast at the door was thinning, and when the doors tried to close again,
they cut neatly through it. The car continued its slow upward journey.
['Ralph . . . Ralph, I think I know what happened to that baby.']
She reached toward his face with her right hand and slipped it between his nose and mouth with her palm down. She pressed the pad of her thumb lightly against one of his cheekbones and the pad of her index finger lightly against the other. It was done so quickly and confidently that no one else in the elevator noticed. If one of the three other riders had noticed, he or she would have seen something that looked like a neatness-minded wife smoothing away a blot of skin lotion or a dollop of leftover shaving cream.
Ralph felt as if someone had pulled a high-voltage switch inside his brain, one that turned on whole banks of blazing stadium lights. In their raw, momentary glow, he saw a terrible image: hands clad in a violent brownish-purple aura reaching into a crib and snatching up the baby they had just seen. He was shaken back and forth, head snapping and rolling on the thin stalk of neck like the head of a Raggedy Andy doll--
- and thrown--
The lights in his head went black then, and Ralph let out a harsh, shuddery sigh of relief. He thought of the pro-life protestors he'd seen on the evening news just last night, men and women waving signs with Susan Day's picture and WANTED FOR MURDER on them, men and women in Grim Reaper robes, men and women carrying a banner which read LIFE, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE.
He wondered if the thunderstruck baby might have a differing opinion on that last one. He met Lois's amazed, agonized eyes with his own, and groped out to take her hands.
['Father did it, right? Threw the kid against the wall?']
['Yes. The baby wouldn't stop crying.']
['And she knows. She knows, but she hasn't told anyone.']
['No . . . but she might, Ralph. She's thinking about it.']
['She might also wait until he does it again. And next time he might finish the job.']