'But that's not it,' he whispered. 'They were real. The auras, too.'
It's a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart . . . and watch out for those green-gold white-man tracks while you're on the way.
Tell someone. Lay it all out. Yes. And he ought to do it before John Leydecker listened to that 911 tape and showed up asking for an explanation. Wanting to know, basically, why Ralph had lied, and what Ralph actually knew about the death of May Locher.
Tell someone. Lay it all out.
But Carolyn was dead, Leydecker was still too new, Helen was lying low at the WomanCare shelter somewhere out in the willywags, and Lois Chasse might gossip to her girlfriends. Who did that leave?
The answer became clear once he put it to himself that way, but Ralph still felt a surprising reluctance to talk to McGovern about the things which had been happening to him. He remembered the day he had found Bill sitting on a bench by the softball field, crying over his old friend and mentor, Bob Polhurst. Ralph had tried to tell Bill about the auras, and it had been as if McGovern couldn't hear him; he had been too busy running through his well-thumbed script on the subject of how shitty it was to grow old.
Ralph thought of the satiric raised eyebrow. The unfailing cynicism. The long face, always so gloomy. The literary allusions, which usually made Ralph smile but often left him feeling a tad inferior, as well. And then there was McGovern's attitude toward Lois: condescending, even a touch cruel.
Yet this was a long way from being fair, and Ralph knew it. Bill McGovern was capable of kindness, and - perhaps far more important in this case - understanding. He and Ralph had known each other for over twenty years; for the last ten of those years they had lived in the same building. He had been one of Carolyn's pallbearers, and if Ralph couldn't talk to Bill about what had been happening to him, who could he talk to?
The answer seemed to be no one.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
1
The misty rings around the streetlamps were gone by the time daylight began to brighten the sky in the east, and by nine o'clock the day was clear and warm - the beginning of Indian summer's final brief passage, perhaps. Ralph went downstairs as soon as Good Morning America was over, determined to tell McGovern what had been happening to him (or as much as he dared, anyway) before he could lose his nerve. Standing outside the door of the downstairs apartment, however, he could hear the shower running and the mercifully distant sound of William D. McGovern singing 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco'.
Ralph went out to the porch, stuck his hands in his back pockets, and read the day like a catalogue. There was nothing, he reflected, really nothing in the world like October sunshine; he could almost feel his night-miseries draining away. They would undoubtedly be back, but for now he felt all right - tired and muzzy-headed, yes, but still pretty much all right. The day was more than pretty; it was downright gorgeous, and Ralph doubted if there would be another as good before next May. He decided he would be a fool not to take advantage of it. A walk up to the Harris Avenue Extension and back again would take half an hour, forty-five minutes if there happened to be someone up there worth batting a little breeze with, and by then Bill would be showered, shaved, combed, and dressed. Also ready to lend a sympathetic ear, if Ralph was lucky.
He walked as far as the picnic area outside the County Airport fence without quite admitting to himself that he was hoping to come across Old Dor. If he did, perhaps the two of them could talk a little poetry - Stephen Dobyns, for instance - or maybe even a bit of philosophy. They might start that part of their conversation with Dorrance explaining what 'long-time business' was, and why he believed Ralph shouldn't 'mess in' with it.
Except Dorrance wasn't at the picnic area; no one was there but Don Veazie, who wanted to explain to Ralph why Bill Clinton was doing such a horrible job as President, and why it would have been better for the good old US of A if the American people had elected that fiscal genius Ross Perot. Ralph (who had voted for Clinton and actually thought the man was doing a pretty good job) listened long enough to be polite, then said he had an appointment to have his hair cut. It was the only thing he could think of on short notice.
'Something else, too!' Don blared after him. 'That uppity wife of his! Woman's a lesbian! I can always tell! You know how? I look at their shoes! Shoes is like a secret code with em! They always wear those ones with the square toes and--'
'See you, Don!' Ralph called back, and beat a hasty retreat.
He had gone about a quarter of a mile back down the hill when the day exploded silently all around him.
2
He was opposite May Locher's house when it happened. He stopped dead in his tracks, staring down Harris Avenue with wide, unbelieving eyes. His right hand was pressed against the base of his throat and his mouth hung open. He looked like a man having a heart attack, and while his heart seemed all right - for the time being, anyway - he certainly felt as if he were having some kind of an attack. Nothing he had seen this fall had prepared him for this. Ralph didn't think anything could have prepared him for this.
That other world - the secret world of auras - had come into view again, and this time there was more of it than Ralph had ever dreamed . . . so much that he wondered fleetingly if it was possible for a person to die of perceptual overload. Upper Harris Avenue was a fiercely glowing wonderland filled with overlapping spheres and cones and crescents of color. The trees, which were still a week or more away from the climax of their fall transformation, none the less burned like torches in Ralph's eyes and mind. The sky had gone past color; it was a vast blue sonic boom.
The telephone lines on Derry's west side were still above ground, and Ralph stared fixedly at them, vaguely aware that he had stopped breathing and should probably start again soon if he didn't want to pass out. Jagged yellow spirals were running briskly up and down the black wires, reminding Ralph of how barber-poles had looked when he was a kid. Every now and then this bumblebee pattern was broken by a spiky red vertical stroke or a green flash that seemed to spread both ways at once, obliterating the yellow rings for a moment before fading out.
You're watching people talk, he thought numbly. Do you know that, Ralph? Aunt Sadie in Dallas is chatting with her favorite nephew, who lives in Derry; a farmer in Haven is jawing with the dealer he buys his tractor parts from; a minister is trying to help a troubled parishioner. Those are voices, and I think the bright strokes and flashes are coming from people in the grip of some strong emotion - love or hate, happiness or jealousy.
And Ralph sensed that all he was seeing and all he was feeling was not all; that there was a whole world still waiting just beyond the current reach of his senses. Enough, perhaps, to make even what he was seeing now seem faint and faded. And if there was more, how could he possibly bear it without going mad? Not even putting his eyes out would help; he understood somehow that his sense of 'seeing' these things came mostly from his lifelong acceptance of sight as his primary sense. But there was, in fact, a lot more than seeing going on here.
In order to prove this to himself he closed his eyes . . . and went right on seeing Harris Avenue. It was as if his eyelids had turned to glass. The only difference was that all the usual colors had reversed themselves, creating a world that looked like the negative of a color photograph. The trees were no longer orange and yellow but the bright, unnatural green of lime Gatorade. The surface of Harris Avenue, repaved with fresh asphalt in June, had become a great white way, and the sky was an amazing red lake. He opened his eyes again, almost positive that the auras would be gone, but they weren't; the world still boomed and rolled with color and movement and deep, resonating sound.
When do I start seeing them? Ralph wondered as he began to walk slowly down the hill again. When do the little bald doctors start coming out of the woodwork?
There were no doctors in evidence, however, bald or otherwise; no angels in the architecture; no devils peering up from the sewer gratings. There was only--
'Look out, Ro
berts, watch where you're going, can't you?'
The words, harsh and a little alarmed, seemed to have actual physical texture; it was like running a hand over oak panelling in some ancient abbey or ancestral hall. Ralph stopped short and saw Mrs Perrine from down the street. She had stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter to keep from being bowled over like a tenpin, and now she stood ankle-deep in fallen leaves, holding her net shopping bag in one hand and glaring at Ralph from beneath her thick salt-and-pepper eyebrows. The aura which surrounded her was the firm, no-nonsense gray of a West Point uniform.
'Are you drunk, Roberts?' she asked in a clipped voice, and suddenly the riot of color and sensation fell out of the world and it was just Harris Avenue again, drowsing its way through a lovely weekday morning in mid-autumn.
'Drunk? Me? Not at all. Sober as a judge, honest.'
He held out his hand to her. Mrs Perrine, over eighty but not giving in to it so much as a single inch, looked at it as if she believed Ralph might have a joy-buzzer hidden in his palm. Wouldn't put it past you, Roberts, her cool gray eyes said. Wouldn't put it past you at all. She stepped back onto the sidewalk without Ralph's aid.
'I'm sorry, Mrs Perrine. I wasn't watching where I was going.'
'No, you certainly weren't. Lollygagging along with your mouth hanging open is what you were doing. You looked like the village idiot.'
'Sorry,' he repeated, and then had to bite his tongue to stifle a bray of laughter.
'Hmmp.' Mrs Perrine looked him slowly up and down, like a Marine drill-sergeant inspecting a raw recruit. 'There's a rip under the arm of that shirt, Roberts.'
Ralph raised his left arm and looked. There was indeed a large rip in his favorite plaid shirt. He could look through it and see the bandage with its dried spot of blood; also an unsightly tangle of old-man armpit hair. He lowered his arm hurriedly, feeling a blush rising in his cheeks.
'Hmmp,' Mrs Perrine said again, expressing everything she needed to express on the subject of Ralph Roberts without recourse to a single vowel. 'Drop it off at the house, if you like. Any other mending you might have, as well. I can still run a needle, you know.'
'Oh yes, I'll bet you can, Mrs Perrine.'
Mrs Perrine now gave him a look which said, You're a dried-up old asskisser, Ralph Roberts, but I suppose you can't help it.
'Not in the afternoon,' she said. 'I help make dinner at the homeless shelter in the afternoons, and help serve it out at five. It's God's work.'
'Yes, I'm sure it--'
'There'll be no homeless in heaven, Roberts. You can count on that. No ripped shirts, either, I'm sure. But while we're here, we have to get along and make do. It's our job.' And I, for one, am doing spectacularly well at it, Mrs Perrine's face proclaimed. 'Bring your mending in the morning or in the evening, Roberts. Don't stand on ceremony, but don't you show up on my doorstep after eight-thirty. I go to bed at nine.'
'That's very kind of you, Mrs Perrine,' Ralph said, and had to bite his tongue again. He was aware that very soon this trick would cease to work; soon it was going to be a case of laugh or die.
'Not at all. Christian duty. Also, Carolyn was a friend of mine.'
'Thank you,' Ralph said. 'Terrible about May Locher, wasn't it?'
'No,' Mrs Perrine said. 'God's mercy.' And she glided upon her way before Ralph could say another word. Her spine was so excruciatingly straight that it hurt him to look at it.
He walked on a dozen steps, then could hold it no longer. He leaned a forearm against a telephone pole, pressed his mouth to his arm, and laughed as quietly as he could - laughed until tears poured down his cheeks. When the fit (and that was what it really felt like; a kind of hysterical seizure) had passed, Ralph raised his head and looked around with attentive, curious, slightly teary eyes. He saw nothing that anyone else couldn't see as well, and that was a relief.
But it will come back, Ralph. You know it will. All of it.
Yes, he supposed he did know it, but that was for later. Right now he had some talking to do.
3
When Ralph finally arrived back from his amazing journey up the street, McGovern was sitting in his chair on the porch and idling through the morning paper. As Ralph turned up the walk, he came to a sudden decision. He would tell Bill a lot, but not everything. One of the things he would definitely leave out was how much the two guys he'd seen coming out of Mrs Locher's house had looked like the aliens in the tabloids for sale at the Red Apple.
McGovern looked up as he climbed the steps. 'Hello, Ralph.'
'Hi, Bill. Can I talk to you about something?'
'Of course.' He closed the paper and folded it carefully. 'They finally took my old friend Bob Polhurst to the hospital yesterday.'
'Oh? I thought you expected that to happen sooner.'
'I did. Everybody did. He fooled us. In fact, he seemed to be getting better - of the pneumonia, at least - and then he relapsed. He had a breathing arrest yesterday around noon, and his niece thought he was going to die before the ambulance got there. He didn't, though, and now he seems to have stabilized again.' McGovern looked up the street and sighed. 'May Locher pops off in the middle of the night and Bob just keeps chugging along. What a world, huh?'
'I guess so.'
'What did you want to talk about? Have you finally decided to pop the question to Lois? Want a little fatherly advice on how to handle it?'
'I need advice, all right, but not about my love-life.'
'Spill it,' McGovern said tersely.
Ralph did, gratified and more than a little relieved by McGovern's silent attentiveness. He began by sketching in things Bill already knew about - the incident between Ed and the truck-driver in the summer of '92, and how similar Ed's rantings on that occasion had been to the things he had said on the day he had beaten Helen for signing the petition. As Ralph spoke, he began to feel more strongly than ever that there were connections between all the odd things which had been happening to him, connections he could almost see.
He told McGovern about the auras, although not about the silent cataclysm he had experienced less than half an hour before - that was also further than he was willing to go, at least for the time being. McGovern knew about Charlie Pickering's attack on Ralph, of course, and that Ralph had averted a much more serious injury by using the spray Helen and her friend had given him, but now Ralph told him something he had held back on Sunday night, when he'd told McGovern about the attack over a scratch dinner: how the spray-can had magically appeared in his jacket pocket. Except, he said, he suspected that the magician had been Old Dor.
'Holy shit!' McGovern exclaimed. 'You've been living dangerously, Ralph!'
'I guess so.'
'How much of this have you told Johnny Leydecker?'
Very little, Ralph started to say, then realized that even that would be an exaggeration. 'Almost none of it. And there's something else I haven't told him. Something a lot more . . . well, a lot more substantive, I guess. To do with what happened up there.' He pointed toward May Locher's house, where a couple of blue and white vans had just pulled up. MAINE STATE POLICE was written on the sides. Ralph assumed they were the forensics people Leydecker had mentioned.
'May?' McGovern leaned a little further forward in his chair. 'You know something about what happened to May?'
'I think I do.' Speaking carefully, moving from word to word like a man using stepping-stones to cross a treacherous brook, Ralph told McGovern about waking up, going into the living room, and seeing two men come out of Mrs Locher's house. He recounted his successful rummage for the binoculars, and told McGovern about the scissors he had seen one of the men carrying. He did not mention his nightmare of Carolyn or the glowing tracks, and he most certainly did not mention his belated impression that the two men might have come right through the door; that would have finished off any remaining tatters of credibility he might still possess. He ended with his anonymous call to 911 and then sat in his chair, looking at McGovern anxiously.
McGovern shook hi
s head as if to clear it. 'Auras, oracles, mysterious housebreakers with scissors . . . you have been living dangerously.'
'What do you think, Bill?'
McGovern sat quietly for several moments. He had rolled his newspaper up while Ralph was talking, and now he began to tap it absently against his leg. Ralph felt an urge to phrase his question even more bluntly - Do you think I'm crazy, Bill? - and quashed it. Did he really believe that was the sort of question to which people gave honest answers . . . at least without a healthy shot of sodium pentothal first? That Bill might say Oh yes, I think you're just as crazy as a bedbug, Ralphie-baby, so why don't we call Juniper Hill right away and see if they have a bed for you? Not very likely . . . and since any answer Bill gave would mean nothing, it was better to forgo the question.
'I don't exactly know what I think,' Bill said at last. 'Not yet, at least. What did they look like?'
'Their faces were hard to make out, even with the binoculars,' Ralph said. His voice was as steady as it had been yesterday, when he had denied making the 911 call.
'You probably don't have any idea of how old they were, either?'
'No.'
'Could either of them have been our old pal from up the street?'
'Ed Deepneau?' Ralph looked at McGovern in surprise. 'No, neither one was Ed.'
'What about Pickering?'
'No. Not Ed, not Charlie Pickering. I would have known either of them. What are you driving at? That my mind just sort of buckled and put the two guys who've caused me the most stress in the last few months on May Locher's front stoop?'
'Of course not,' McGovern replied, but the steady tap-tap-tap of the newspaper against his leg paused and his eyes flickered. Ralph felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach. Yes; that was in fact exactly what McGovern had been driving at, and it wasn't really so surprising, was it?
Maybe not, but it didn't change that sinking feeling.
'And Johnny said all the doors were locked.'
'Yes.'
'From the inside.'
'Uh-huh, but--'
McGovern got up from his chair so suddenly that for one crazy moment Ralph had the idea that he was going to run away, perhaps screaming Watch out for Roberts! He's gone crazy! as he went. But instead of bolting down the steps, he turned toward the door leading back into the house. In some ways Ralph found this even more alarming.