The only peculiar quality he could isolate and name was the preternaturally smooth quality of their skin - neither of them had so much as a single visible line or wrinkle. No moles, blotches, or scars, either, although Ralph supposed those were things you might miss with even a great pair of binoculars. Beyond the smooth and strangely line-free quality of their skin, everything became subjective. And his only look had been so goddam brief ! If he had been able to get to the binoculars more quickly, without the rigmarole of the chair and the fishing net, and if he had realized that the lens caps were on right away instead of wasting more time fiddling with the focusing knob, he might have saved himself some or all of the unease he was now feeling.
They look sketched, he thought in the instant before they turned their backs on him. That's what's really bothering me, I think. Not the identical bald heads, the identical white smocks, or even the lack of wrinkles. It's how they look sketched - the eyes just circles, the small pink ears just squiggles made with a felt-tip pen, the mouths a pair of quick, almost careless strokes of pale pink watercolor. They don't really look like either people or aliens; they look like hasty representations of . . . well, of I don't know what.
He was sure of one thing: Docs #1 and #2 were both immersed in bright auras which in the binoculars appeared to be green-gold and filled with deep reddish-orange flecks that looked like sparks swirling up from a campfire. These auras conveyed a feeling of power and vitality to Ralph that their featureless, uninteresting faces did not.
The faces? I'm not sure I could pick them out again even if someone held a gun to my head. It's as if they were made to be forgotten. If they were still bald, sure - no problem. But if they were wearing wigs and maybe sitting down, so I couldn't see how short they are? Maybe . . . the lack of lines might do the trick . . . but then again, maybe not. The auras, though . . . those green-gold auras with the red flecks swirling through them . . . I'd know them anywhere. But there's something wrong with them, isn't there? What is it?
The answer popped into Ralph's mind as suddenly and easily as the two creatures had popped into view when he had finally remembered to remove the lens caps from the binoculars. Both of the little doctors were swaddled in brilliant auras . . . but neither had a balloon-string floating up from his hairless head. Not even a sign of one.
They went strolling down Harris Avenue in the direction of Strawford Park, moving with the ease of two friends out for a Sunday stroll. Just before they left the bright circle of light thrown by the streetlamp in front of May Locher's house, Ralph dropped the angle of the binoculars so they picked up the item in Doc #1's right hand. It wasn't a knife, as he had surmised, but it still wasn't the sort of object you felt comfortable seeing in the hand of a departing stranger in the wee hours of the morning.
It was a pair of long-bladed, stainless-steel scissors.
4
That sense of being pushed relentlessly toward the mouth of a tunnel where all sorts of unpleasant things were waiting was with him again, only now it was accompanied by a feeling of panic, because it seemed that the latest big shove had taken place while he had been asleep and dreaming of his dead wife. Something inside him wanted to shriek with terror, and Ralph understood that if he didn't do something to soothe it immediately, he would soon be shrieking out loud. He closed his eyes and began to take deep breaths, trying to picture a different item of food with each one: a tomato, a potato, an ice-cream sandwich, a Brussels sprout. Dr Jamal had taught Carolyn this simple relaxation technique, and it had frequently staved off her headaches before they could get up a full head of steam - even in the last six weeks, when the tumor had been out of control, the technique had sometimes worked, and it controlled Ralph's panic now. His heartbeat began to slow, and that feeling that he needed to scream began to pass.
Continuing to take deep breaths and to think (apple pear slice of lemon pie) of food, Ralph carefully snapped the lens caps back on the binoculars. His hands were still trembling, but not so badly he couldn't use them. Once the binoculars were capped and returned to their case, Ralph gingerly raised his left arm and looked at the bandage. There was a red spot in the center of it the size of an aspirin tablet, but it did not appear to be spreading. Good.
There isn't anything good about this, Ralph.
Fair enough, but that wasn't going to help him decide exactly what had happened, or what he was going to do about it. Step one was to push his dreadful dream of Carolyn to one side for the time being and decide what had actually happened.
'I've been awake ever since I hit the floor,' Ralph told the empty room. 'I know that, and I know I saw those men.'
Yes. He had really seen them, and the green-gold auras around them. He wasn't alone, either; Ed Deepneau had seen at least one of them, too. Ralph would have bet the farm on it, if he'd had a farm to bet. It didn't ease his mind much, however, to know that he and the wife-beating paranoid from up the street were seeing the same little bald guys.
And the auras, Ralph - didn't he say something about those, too?
Well, he hadn't used that exact word, but Ralph was quite sure he had spoken of the auras at least twice, just the same. Ralph, sometimes the world is full of colors. That had been August, shortly before John Leydecker had arrested Ed on a charge of domestic abuse, a misdemeanor. Then, almost a month later, when he had called Ralph on the phone: Are you seeing the colors yet?
First the colors, now the little bald doctors; surely the Crimson King himself would be along any time. And all that aside, what was he supposed to do about what he had just seen?
The answer came in an unexpected but welcome burst of clarity. The issue, he saw, was not his own sanity, not the auras, not the little bald doctors, but May Locher. He had just seen two strangers step out of Mrs Locher's house in the dead of night . . . and one of them had been carrying a potentially lethal weapon.
Ralph reached past the cased binoculars, took the telephone, and dialed 911.
5
'This is Officer Hagen.' A woman's voice. 'How may I help you?'
'By listening carefully and acting fast,' Ralph said crisply. The look of dazed indecision which he had worn so frequently since midsummer was gone now; sitting erect in the wingback chair with the phone in his lap he looked not seventy but a healthy and capable fifty-five. 'You may be able to save a woman's life.'
'Sir, would you please give me your name and--'
'Don't interrupt me, please, Officer Hagen,' said the man who could no longer remember the last four digits of the Derry Cinema Center. 'I woke up a short time ago, couldn't go back to sleep, and decided to sit up for a while. My living room looks out on upper Harris Avenue. I just saw--'
Here Ralph paused for the barest moment, thinking not about what he had seen but what he wanted to tell Officer Hagen he had seen. The answer came as quickly and effortlessly as the decision to call 911 in the first place.
'I saw two men coming out of a house up the street from the Red Apple store. The house belongs to a woman named May Locher. That's L-O-C-H-E-R, first letter L as in Lexington. Mrs Locher is severely ill. I've never seen these two men before.' He paused again, but this time consciously, wanting to achieve maximum effect. 'One of them had a pair of scissors in his hand.'
'Site address?' Officer Hagen asked. She was calm enough, but Ralph sensed he had turned on a lot of her lights.
'I don't know,' he said. 'Get it out of the phone book, Officer Hagen, or just tell the responding officers to look for the yellow house with the pink trim half a block or so up from the Red Apple. They'll probably have to use a flashlight to pick it out because of the damned orange streetlights, but they'll find it.'
'Yes, sir, I'm sure they will, but I still need your name and telephone number for our rec--'
Ralph replaced the phone gently in its cradle. He sat looking at it for almost a full minute, expecting it to ring. When it didn't, he decided they either didn't have the fancy traceback equipment he saw on the TV true-crime shows, or it hadn't been turned on. That
was good. It didn't solve the problem of what he was going to do or say if they hauled May Locher out of her hideous yellow-and-pink house in pieces, but it did buy a little more thinking time.
Below, Harris Avenue remained still and silent, lit only by the hi-intensity lamps which marched off in both directions like some surrealist dream of perspective. The play - short, but full of drama - appeared to be over. The stage was empty again. It--
No, not quite empty after all. Rosalie came limping out of the alley between the Red Apple and the True-Value Hardware next door. The faded bandanna flapped around her neck. This wasn't a Thursday, there were no garbage cans set out for Rosalie to investigate, and she moved briskly up the sidewalk until she got to May Locher's house. There she stopped and lowered her nose (looking at that long and rather pretty nose, Ralph had thought on occasion that there must be a collie somewhere in Rosalie's woodpile).
Something was glimmering there, Ralph realized.
He got the binoculars out of their case once more and trained them on Rosalie. As he did, he found his mind returning to September 10th again - this time to his meeting with Bill and Lois just outside the entrance to Strawford Park. He remembered how Bill had put his arm around Lois's waist and led her up the street; how the two of them together had made Ralph think of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Most of all he remembered the spectral tracks the two of them had left behind. Lois's had been gray; Bill's olive green. Hallucinations, he had thought them at the time, back in the good old days before he'd started attracting the attention of nuts like Charlie Pickering and seeing little bald doctors in the middle of the night.
Rosalie was sniffing at a similar track. It was the same green-gold as the auras which had surrounded Bald Doc #1 and Bald Doc #2. Ralph panned the binoculars slowly away from the dog and saw more tracks, two sets of them, leading down the sidewalk in the direction of the park. They were fading - he could almost see them fading as he looked at them - but they were there.
Ralph panned the binoculars back to Rosalie, suddenly feeling an enormous wave of affection for the mangy old stray . . . and why not? If he had needed final, absolute proof that he had actually seen the things he thought he had seen, Rosalie was it.
If baby Natalie was here, she'd see them too, Ralph thought . . . and then all his doubts tried to crowd back in. Would she? Would she really? He thought he had seen the baby grab at the faint auras left by his fingers, and he had been sure she was gawking at the spectral green smoke sizzling off the flowers in the kitchen, but how could he be sure? How could anyone be sure what a baby was looking at or reaching for?
But Rosalie . . . look, right down there, see her?
The only trouble with that, Ralph realized, was that he hadn't seen the tracks until Rosalie had begun to sniff the sidewalk. Maybe she was sniffing at an entrancing remnant of leftover postman, and what he was seeing had been created by nothing more than his tired, sleep-starved mind . . . like the little bald doctors themselves.
In the magnified field of the binoculars, Rosalie now began to make her way down Harris Avenue with her nose to the sidewalk and her ragged tail waving slowly back and forth. She was moving from the green-gold tracks left by Doc #1 to those left by Doc #2, and then back to Doc #1's trail again.
So now why don't you tell me what that stray bitch is following, Ralph? Do you think it's possible for a dog to track a fucking hallucination? It's not a hallucination; it's tracks. Real tracks. The white-man tracks that Carolyn told you to watch out for. You know that. You see that.
'It's crazy, though,' he told himself. 'Crazy!'
But was it? Was it really? The dream might have been more than a dream. If there was such a thing as hyperreality - and he could now testify that there was - then maybe there was such a thing as precognition, too. Or ghosts which came in dreams and foretold the future. Who knew? It was as if a door in the wall of reality had come ajar . . . and now all sorts of unwelcome things were flying through.
Of one thing he was sure: the tracks were really there. He saw them, Rosalie smelled them, and that was all there was to it. Ralph had discovered a number of strange and interesting things during his six months of premature waking, and one of them was that a human being's capacity for self-deception seemed to be at its lowest ebb between three and six in the morning, and it was now . . .
Ralph leaned forward so he could see the clock on the kitchen wall. Just past three-thirty. Uh-huh.
He raised the binoculars again and saw Rosalie still moving up the bald docs' backtrail. If someone came strolling along Harris Avenue right now - unlikely, given the hour, but not impossible - they would see nothing but a stray mutt with a dirty coat, sniffing at the sidewalk in the aimless fashion of untrained, unowned dogs everywhere. But Ralph could see what Rosalie was sniffing at, and had finally given himself permission to believe his eyes. It was a permission he might revoke once the sun was up, but for now he knew exactly what he was seeing.
Rosalie's head came up suddenly. Her ears cocked forward. For one moment she was almost beautiful, the way a hunting dog on point is beautiful. Then, moments before the headlights of a car approaching the Harris Avenue-Witcham Street intersection splashed the street, she was gone back the way she had come, running in a corkscrewing, limping gait that made Ralph feel sorry for her. When you came right down to it, what was Rosalie but another Harris Avenue Old Crock, one that didn't even have the comfort of the occasional game of gin rummy or penny-ante poker with others of her kind? She darted back into the alley between the Red Apple and the hardware store an instant before a Derry police cruiser turned the corner and floated slowly up the street. Its siren was off, but the revolving flashers were on. They painted the sleeping houses and small businesses ranged along this part of Harris Avenue with alternating pulses of red and blue light.
Ralph put the binoculars back in his lap and leaned forward in the wing-chair, forearms on his thighs, watching intently. His heart was beating hard enough for him to be able to feel it in his temples.
The cruiser slowed to a crawl as it passed the Red Apple. The spotlight mounted on its righthand side snapped on, and the beam began to slide across the fronts of the sleeping houses on the far side of the street. In most cases it also slid across the street numbers mounted beside doors or on porch columns. When it lit on the number of May Locher's house (86, Ralph saw, and he didn't need the binoculars to read it, either), the cruiser's tail-lights flashed and the car came to a stop.
Two uniformed policemen got out and approached the walk leading up to the house, oblivious of both the man watching from a darkened second-floor window across the street and the fading green-gold footprints over which they were walking. They conferred, and Ralph raised the binoculars again to get a closer look. He was almost positive that the younger of the two men was the uniformed cop who had shown up with Leydecker at Ed's house on the day Ed had been arrested. Knoll? Had that been his name?
'No,' Ralph murmured. 'Nell. Chris Nell. Or maybe it was Jess.'
Nell and his partner seemed to be having a serious discussion about something - much more serious than the one the little bald doctors had been having before they strolled away. This one ended with the cops drawing their sidearms and then climbing the narrow steps to Mrs Locher's stoop in single file, with Nell in front. He pressed the doorbell, waited, then pressed it again. This time he leaned on the button for a good five seconds. They waited a little more, and then the second cop brushed past Nell and had a go at the button himself.
Maybe that one knows The Secret Art of Doorbell-Ringing, Ralph thought. Probably learned it by answering a Rosicrucians ad.
If so, the technique failed him this time. There was still no response, and Ralph wasn't surprised. Strange bald men with scissors notwithstanding, he doubted May Locher could even get out of bed.
But if she's bedridden, she might have a companion, someone to get her her meals, help her to the toilet or give her the bedpan--
Chris Nell - or maybe it was Jess - stepped up to
the plate again. This time he forwent the doorbell in favor of the old wham-wham-wham, open-in-the-name-of-the-law technique. He used his left fist to do this. He was still holding his gun in his right, the barrel pressed against the leg of his uniform pants.
A terrible image, every bit as clear and persuasive as the auras he had been seeing, suddenly filled Ralph's mind. He saw a woman with a clear plastic oxygen mask over her mouth and nose lying in bed. Above the mask, her glazed eyes bulged sightlessly from their sockets. Below it, her throat had been opened in a wide, ragged smile. The bedclothes and the bosom of the woman's nightgown were drenched with blood. Not far away, lying on the floor, was the facedown corpse of another woman - the companion. Marching up the back of this second woman's pink flannel nightgown were half a dozen stab-wounds made by the points of Doc #1's scissors. And, Ralph knew, if you raised the nightgown for a closer look, each would look a lot like the wound under his own arm . . . like the sort of oversized period made by children just learning to print.
Ralph tried to blink the grisly vision away. It wouldn't go. He felt dull pain in his hands and saw he had closed them into tight fists; the nails were digging into his palms. He forced his hands open and clamped them on his thighs. Now the eye in his mind saw the woman in the pink nightgown twitching slightly - she was still alive. But maybe not for long. Almost certainly not for long unless these two oafs decided to try something a little more productive than just standing on the stoop and taking turns knocking or jazzing the doorbell.
'Come on, you guys,' Ralph said, squeezing at his thighs. 'Come on, come on, let's get with it, what do you say?'
You know the things you're seeing are all in your head, don't you? he asked himself uneasily. I mean, there might be a couple of women lying dead over there, sure, there might be, but you don't know that, right? It's not like the auras, or the tracks . . .