'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 se
emed 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 righthanded, 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 t
he 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 righthand 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.