Buttonholes everyone who comes in, practically, and gives them his little peptalk on how any woman who has an abortion is going to perish in brimstone, and how the real baddies like Susan Day are going to burn forever in a lake of fire. But I cant figure out why hed take after you, Mr Roberts. Just lucky, I guess. Are you okay, Ralph? Leydecker asked. You look pale. Im fine, Ralph said, although he did not feel fine; in fact, he had begun to feel very queasy. I dont know about fine, but youre sure lucky. Lucky those women gave you that can of peppergas, lucky you had it with you, and luckiest of all that Pickering didnt just walk up behind you and stick that knife of his into the nape of your neck. Do you feel like coming down to the station and making a formal statement now, or Ralph abruptly lunged out of Mike Hanlons ancient swivel chair, bolted across the room with his left hand over his mouth, and clawed open the door in the rear right corner of the office, praying it wasnt a closet. If it was, he was probably going to fill up Mikes galoshes with a partially processed grilled cheese sandwich and some slightly used tomato soup. It turned out to be the room he needed. Ralph dropped to his knees in front of the toilet and vomited with his eyes closed and his left arm clamped tightly against the hole Pickering had made in his side. The pain as his muscles first locked and then pushed was still enormous. I take it thats a no, Mike Hanlon said from behind him, and then put a comforting hand on the back of Ralphs neck. Are you okay? Did you get that thing bleeding again? I dont think so, Ralph said. He started to unbutton his shirt, then paused and clamped his arm tight against his side again as his stomach gave another lurch before quieting once more. He raised his arm and looked at the dressing. It was pristine. I appear to be okay. Good, Leydecker said. He was standing just behind the librarian. You done? I think so, yes. Ralph looked at Mike shamefacedly. I apologize for that. Dont be a goof. Mike helped Ralph to his feet. Come on, Leydecker said,Ill give you a ride home. Tomorrow will be time enough for the statement. What you need is to put your feet up the rest of today, and a good nights sleep tonight. Nothing like a good nights sleep, Ralph agreed. They had reached the office door. You want to let go of my arm now, Detective Leydecker? Were not going steady just yet, are we? Leydecker looked startled, then dropped Ralphs arm. Mike started to laugh again. Not going  Thats pretty good, Mr Roberts. Leydecker was smiling. I guess were not, but you can call me Jack, if you want. Or John. Just not Johnny. Since my mother died, the only one who calls me Johnny is old Prof McGovern. Old Prof McGovern, Ralph thought. How strange that sounds. Okay  John it is. And both of you guys can call me Ralph. As far as Im concerned, Mr Roberts is always going to be a Broadway play starring Henry Fonda. You got it, Mike Hanlon said. And take care of yourself. Ill try, he said, then stopped in his tracks. Listen, I have something to thank you for, quite apart from your help today. Mike raised his eyebrows. Oh? Yes. You hired Helen Deepneau. Shes one of my favorite people, and she desperately needed the job. So thanks. Mike smiled and nodded. Ill be happy to accept the bouquets, but shes the one who did me the favor, really. Shes actually overqualified for the job, but I think she wants to stay in town. So do I, and youve helped make it possible. So thanks again. Mike grinned. My pleasure. 6 As Ralph and Leydecker stepped out behind the circulation desk, Leydecker said I guess that honeycomb must have really turned the trick, huh? Ralph at first had absolutely no idea what the big detective was talking about  he might as well have asked a question in Esperanto. Your insomnia, Leydecker said patiently. You got past it, right? Must have  you look a gajillion times better than on the day I first met you. I was a little stressed that day, Ralph said. He found himself remembering the old Billy Crystal routine about Fernando  the one that went, Listen, dahling, dont be a schnook; its not how you feel, its how you look! And you . . . look . . . MAHVELLOUS! And youre not today? Cmon, Ralph, this is me. So give  was it the honeycomb? Ralph appeared to think this over, then nodded. Yes, I guess that must have been what did it. Fantastic! Didnt I tell you? Leydecker said cheerfully as they pushed their way out into the rainy afternoon. 7 They were waiting for the light at the top of UpMile Hill when Ralph turned to Leydecker and asked what the chances were of nailing Ed as Charlie Pickerings accomplice. Because Ed put him up to it, he said. I know that as well as I know thats Strawford Park over there. Youre probably right, Leydecker replied, but dont kid yourself  the chances of nailing him as an accomplice are shitty. They wouldnt be very good even if the County Prosecutor wasnt as conservative as Dale Cox. Why not? First of all, I doubt if well be able to show any deep connection between the two men. Second, guys like Pickering tend to be fiercely loyal to the people they identify as friends, because they have so few of them  their worlds are mostly made up of enemies. Under interrogation I dont think Pickering will repeat much or any of what he told you while he was tickling your ribs with his hunting knife. Third, Ed Deepneau is no fool. Crazy, yes  maybe crazier than Pickering, when you get right down to it  but not a fool. He wont admit anything. Ralph nodded. It was exactly his opinion of Ed. If Pickering did say that Deepneau ordered him to find you and waste you  on the grounds that you were one of these babykilling, fetussnatching Centurions  Ed would just smile at us and nod and say he was sure that poor Charlie had told us that, that poor Charlie might even believe that, but that didnt make it true. The light turned green. Leydecker drove through the intersection, then bent left onto Harris Avenue. The windshield wipers thumped and flapped. Strawford Park, on Ralphs right, looked like a wavery mirage through the rain streaming down the passenger window. And what could we say to that? Leydecker asked. The fact is, Charlie Pickering has got a long history of mental instability  when it comes to nuthatches, hes made the grand tour Juniper Hill, Acadia Hospital, Bangor Mental Health Institute . . . if its a place where they have free electrical treatments and jackets that button up the back, Charlies most likely been there. These days his hobbyhorse is abortion. Back in the late sixties he had a bug up his ass about Margaret Chase Smith. He wrote letters to everyone  Derry PD, the State Police, the FBI  claiming she was a Russian spy. He had the evidence, he said. Good God, thats incredible. Nope; thats Charlie Pickering, and I bet theres a dozen like him in every city this size in the United States. Hell, all over the world. Ralphs hand crept to his left side and touched the square of bandage there. His fingers traced the butterfly shape beneath the gauze. What he kept remembering was Pickerings magnified brown eyes  how they had looked terrified and ecstatic at the same time. He was already having trouble believing the man to whom those eyes belonged had almost killed him, and he was afraid that by tomorrow the whole thing would seem like one of the socalled breakthrough dreams James A. Halls book talked about. The bitch of it is, Ralph, a nut like Charlie Pickering makes the perfect tool for a guy like Deepneau. Right now our little wifebeating buddy has got about a ton of deniability. Leydecker turned into the driveway next to Ralphs building and parked behind a large Oldsmobile with blotches of rust on the trunk lid and a very old sticker  DUKAKIS 88  on the bumper. Whos that brontosaurus belong to? The Prof? No, Ralph said. Thats my brontosaurus. Leydecker gave him an unbelieving look as he shoved the gearshift lever of his strippedtothebone Police Department Chevy into Park. If you own a car, how come youre out standing around the bus stop in the pouring rain? Doesnt it run? It runs, Ralph said a little stiffly, not wanting to add that he could be wrong about that; he hadnt had the Olds on the road in over two months. And I wasnt standing around in the pouring rain; its a bus shelter, not a bus stop. It has a roof. Even a bench inside. No cable TV, true, but wait till next year. Still . . . Leydecker said, gazing doubtfully at the Olds. I spent the last fifteen years of my working life driving a desk, but before that I was a salesman. For twentyfive years or so I averaged eight hundred miles a week. By the time I settled in at the printshop, I didnt care if I ever sat behind the wheel of a car again. And since my wife died, there hardly ever seems to be any reason to drive. The bus does me just fine for most things. All true enough; Ralph saw no need to add that he had increasingly come to mistrust both his reflexes and his short vision. A year ago, a kid of about seven had chased his football out into Harris Avenue as Ralph was coming back from the movies, and although he had been going only twenty miles an hour, Ralph had thought for two endless, horrifying seconds that he was going to run the little boy down. He hadnt, of course  it hadnt even been close, not really  but since then he thought he could count the number of times hed driven the Olds on both hands. He saw no need to tell John that, either. Well, whatever does it for you, Leydecker said, giving the Olds a vague wave. How does one oclock tomorrow afternoon sound for that statement, Ralph? I come on at noon, so I could kind of look over your shoulder. Buy you a coffee, if you wanted one. That sounds fine. And thanks for the ride home. No problem. One other thing . . . Ralph had started to open the car door. Now he closed it again and turned back to Leydecker, eyebrows raised. Leydecker looked down at his hands, shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel, cleared his throat, then looked up again. I just wanted to say that I think youre a class act, Leydecker said. Lots of guys forty years younger than you would have finished todays little adventure in the hospital. Or the morgue. My guardian angel was looking out for me, I guess, Ralph said, thinking of how surprised he had been when he realized what the round shape in his jacket pocket was. Well, maybe that was it, but you still want to be sure to lock your door tonight. You hear what Im saying? Ralph smiled and nodded. Warranted or not, Leydeckers praise had made a warm spot in his chest. I will, and if I can just get McGovern to cooperate, everything will be hunkydory. Also, he thought, I can always go down and doublecheck the lock myself when I wake up. That should be just about two and a half hours after I fall asleep, the way things are going. Everything is going to be hunkydory, Leydecker said. No one down where I work was very pleased when Deepneau more or less coopted The Friends of Life, but I cant say we were surprised  hes an attractive, charismatic guy. If, that is, you happen to catch him on a day when he hasnt been using his wife for a punchingbag. Ralph nodded. On the other hand, weve seen guys like him before, and they have a way of selfdestructing. That process has already started with Deepneau. Hes lost his wife, hes lost his job . . . did you know that? Uhhuh. Helen told me. Now hes losing his more moderate followers. Theyre peeling off like jet fighters heading back to base because theyre running out of fuel. Not Ed, though  hes going on come hell or high water. I imagine hell keep at least some of them with him until the Susan Day speech, but after that I think its gonna be a case of the cheese stands alone. Has it occurred to you that he might try something Friday? That he might try to hurt Susan Day? Oh yes, Leydecker said. Its occurred to us, all right. It certainly has. 8 Ralph was extremely happy to find the porch door locked this time. He unlocked it just long enough to let himself in, then trudged up the front stairs, which seemed longer and gloomier than ever this afternoon. The apartment seemed too silent in spite of the steady beat of the rain on the roof, and the air seemed to smell of too many sleepless nights. Ralph took one of the chairs from the kitchen table over to the counter, stood on it, and looked at the top of the cabinet closest to the sink. It was as if he expected to find another can of Bodyguard  the original can, the one hed put up here after seeing Helen and her friend Gretchen off  on top of that cabinet, and part of him actually did expect that. There was nothing up there, however, but a toothpick, an old Buss fuse, and a lot of dust. He got carefully down off the chair, saw he had left muddy footprints on the seat, and used a swatch of paper towels to wipe them away. Then he replaced the chair at the table and went into the living room. He stood there, letting his eyes run from the couch with its dingy floral coverlet to the wingchair to the old television sitting on its oak table between the two windows looking out on Harris Avenue. From the TV his gaze moved into the far corner. When he had come into the apartment yesterday, still a little on edge from finding the porch door unlatched, Ralph had briefly mistaken his jacket hanging on the coattree in that corner for an intruder. Well, no need to be coy; he had thought for a moment that Ed had decided to pay him a visit. I never hang my coat up, though. It was one of the things about me  one of the few, I think  that used to genuinely irritate Carolyn. And if I never managed to get in the habit of hanging it up when she was alive, I sure as shit havent since she died. No, Im not the one who hung this jacket up. Ralph crossed the room, rummaging in the pockets of the gray leather jacket and putting the stuff he found on top of the television. Nothing in the left but an old roll of Life Savers with lint clinging to the top one, but the righthand pocket was a treasuretrove even with the aerosol can gone. There was a lemon Tootsie Pop, still in its wrapper; a crumpled advertising circular from the Derry House of Pizza; a doubleA battery; a small empty carton that had once contained an apple pie from McDonalds; his discount card from Daves Video Stop, just four punches away from a free rental (the card had been MIA for over two weeks and Ralph had been sure it was lost); a book of matches; various scraps of tinfoil . . . and a folded piece of lined blue paper. Ralph unfolded it and read a single sentence, written in a scrawling, slightly unsteady old mans script Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. That was all there was, but it was enough to confirm for his brain what his heart already knew Dorrance Marstellar had been on the porch steps when Ralph had returned from Back Pages with his paperbacks, but hed had other stuff to do before sitting down to wait. He had gone up to Ralphs apartment, taken the aerosol can from the top of the kitchen shelf, and put it in the righthand pocket of Ralphs old gray jacket. He had even left his callingcard a bit of poetry scrawled on a piece of paper probably torn from the battered notebook in which he sometimes recorded arrivals and departures along Runway 3. Then, instead of returning the jacket to wherever Ralph had left it, Old Dor had hung it neatly on the coattree. With that accomplished (donebuncantbeundone) he had returned to the porch to wait. Last night Ralph had given McGovern a scolding for leaving the front door unlocked again, and McGovern had borne it as patiently as Ralph himself had borne Carolyns scoldings about tossing his jacket onto the nearest chair when he came in instead of hanging it up, but now Ralph found himself wondering if he hadnt accused Bill unjustly. Perhaps Old Dor had picked the lock . . . or witched it. Under the circumstances, witchery seemed the more likely choice. Because . . . Because look, Ralph said in a low voice, mechanically scooping his pocket litter up from the top of the TV and dumping it back into his pockets. It isnt just like he knew Id need the stuff; he knew where to find it, and he knew where to put it. A chill zigzagged up his back at that, and his mind tried to gavel the whole idea down  to label it mad, illogical, just the sort of thing a man with a gradeA case of insomnia would think up. Maybe so. But that didnt explain the scrap of paper, did it? He looked at the scrawled words on the bluelined sheet again  Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. That wasnt his handwriting any more than Cemetery Nights was his book. Except it is now; Dor gave it to me, Ralph said, and the chill raced up his back again, jagged as a crack in a windshield. And what other explanation comes to mind? That can didnt just fly into your pocket. The sheet of notepaper, either. That sense of being pushed by invisible hands toward the maw of some dark tunnel had returned. Feeling like a man in a dream, Ralph walked back toward the kitchen. On the way he slipped out of the gray jacket and tossed it over the arm of the couch without even thinking about it. He stood in the doorway for some time, looking fixedly at the calendar with its picture of two laughing boys carving a jackolantern. Looking at tomorrows date, which was circled. Cancel the appointment with the pinsticker man, Dorrance had said; that was the message, and today the knifesticker man had more or less underlined it. Hell, lit it in neon. Ralph hunted out a number in the Yellow Pages and dialed it. You have reached the office of Dr James Roy Hong, a pleasant female voice informed him. There is no one available to take your call right now, so please leave a message at the sound of the tone. We will get back to you just as soon as possible. The answering machine beeped. In a voice which surprised him with its steadiness, Ralph saidThis is Ralph Roberts. Im scheduled to come in tomorrow at ten oclock. Im sorry, but I wont be able to make it. Something has come up. Thank you. He paused, then added Ill pay for the appointment, of course. He shut his eyes and groped the phone back into the cradle. Then he leaned his forehead against the wall. What are you doing, Ralph? What in Gods name do you think youre doing? Its a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart. You cant seriously think whatever youre thinking . . . can you?  . . . a long walk, so dont sweat the small stuff. What exactly are you thinking, Ralph? He didnt know; he didnt have the slightest idea. Something about fate, he supposed, and appointments in Samarra. He only knew for sure that rings of pain were spreading out from the little hole in his left side, the hole the knifesticker man had made. The EMT had given him half a dozen painpills and he supposed he should take one, but just now he felt too tired to go to the sink and draw a glass of water . . . and if he was too tired to cross one shitty little room, how the hell would he ever make the long walk back to Eden? Ralph didnt know, and for the time being he didnt care. He only wanted to stand where he was, with his forehead against the wall and his eyes shut so he wouldnt have to look at anything. CHAPTER EIGHT 1 The beach was a long white edging, like a flirt of silk slip at the hem of the bright blue sea, and it was totally empty except for a round object about seventy yards away. This round object was about the size of a basketball, and it filled Ralph with a fear that was both deep and  for the moment, at least  groundless. Dont go near it, he told himself. Theres something bad about it. Something really bad. Its a black dog barking at a blue moon, blood in the sink, a raven perched on a bust of Pallas just inside my chamber door. You dont want to go near it, Ralph, and you dont need to go near it, because this is one of Joe Wyzers lucid dreams. You can just turn and cruise away, if you want. Except his feet began to carry him forward anyway, so maybe this wasnt a lucid dream. Not pleasant, either, not at all. Because the closer he got to that object on the beach, the less it looked like a basketball. It was by far the most realistic dream Ralph had ever experienced, and the fact that he knew he was dreaming actually seemed to heighten that sense of realism. Of lucidity. He could feel the fine, loose sand under his bare feet, warm but not hot; he could hear the grinding, rockthroated roar of the incoming waves as they lost their balance and sprawled their way up the lower beach, where the sand glistened like wet tanned skin; could smell salt and drying seaweed, a strong and tearful smell that reminded him of summer vacations spent at Old Orchard Beach when he was a child. Hey, old buddy, if you cant change this dream, I think maybe you ought to hit the ejection switch and bail out of it  wake yourself up, in other words, and right away. He had closed half the distance to the object on the beach and there was no longer any question about what it was  not a basketball but a head. Someone had buried a human being up to the chin in the sand . . . and, Ralph suddenly realized, the tide was coming in. He didnt bail out; he began to run. As he did, the frothy edge of a wave touched the head. It opened its mouth and began to scream. Even raised in a shriek, Ralph knew that voice at once. It was Carolyns voice. The froth of another wave ran up the beach and backwashed the hair which had been clinging to the heads wet cheeks. Ralph began to run faster, knowing he was almost certainly going to be too late. The tide was coming in fast. It would drown her long before he could free her buried body from the sand. You dont have to save her, Ralph. Carolyns already dead, and it didnt happen on some deserted beach. It happened in Room 317 of Derry Home Hospital. You were with her at the end, and the sound you heard wasnt surf but sleet hitting the window. Remember? He remembered, but he ran faster nevertheless, sending puffs of sugary sand out behind him. You wont ever get to her, though; you know how it is in dreams, dont you? Each thing you rush toward turns into something else. No, that wasnt how the poem went . . . or was it? Ralph couldnt be sure. All he clearly remembered now was that it had ended with the narrator running blindly from something deadly (Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape) which was hunting him through the woods . . . hunting him and closing in. Yet he was getting closer to the dark shape on the sand. It wasnt changing into anything else, either, and when he fell on his knees before Carolyn, he understood at once why he had not been able to recognize his wife of fortyfive years, even from a distance something was terribly wrong with her aura. It clung to her skin like a filthy drycleaning bag. When Ralphs shadow fell on her, Carolyns eyes rolled up like the eyes of a horse that has shattered its leg going over a high fence. She was breathing in rapid, frightened gasps, and each expulsion of air sent jets of grayblack aura from her nostrils. The tattered balloonstring straggling up from the crown of her head was the purpleblack of a festering wound. When she opened her mouth to scream again, an unpleasant glowing substance flew from her lips in gummy strings which disappeared almost as soon as his eyes had registered their existence. Ill save you, Carol! he shouted. He fell on his knees and began digging at the sand around her like a dog digging up a bone . . . and as the thought occurred to him, he realized that Rosalie, the early morning scavenger of Harris Avenue, was sitting tiredly behind his screaming wife. It was as if the dog had been summoned by the thought. Rosalie, he saw, was also surrounded by one of those filthy black auras. She had Bill McGoverns missing Panama hat between her paws, and it looked as though she had enjoyed many a good chew on it since it had come into her possession. So thats where the damn hat went, Ralph thought, then turned back to Carolyn and began to dig even faster. So far he hadnt managed to uncover so much as a single shoulder. Never mind me! Carolyn screamed at him. Im already dead, remember? Watch for the whiteman tracks, Ralph! The A wave, glassy green on the bottom and the curdled white of soapsuds on top, broke less than ten feet from the beach. It ran up the sand toward them, freezing Ralphs balls with cold water and burying Carolyns head momentarily in a gritfilled surge of foam. When the wave retreated, Ralph raised his own horrorfilled shriek to the indifferent blue sky. The retreating wave had done in seconds what it had taken the radiation treatments almost a month to do; took her hair, washed her bald. And the crown of her head had begun to bulge at the spot where the blackish balloonstring was attached. Carolyn, no! he howled, digging even faster. The sand was now dank and unpleasantly heavy. Never mind, she said. Grayblack puffs came from her mouth with each word, like dirty vapor from an industrial smokestack. Its just the tumor, and its inoperable, so dont lose any sleep over that part of the show. What the hell, its a long walk back to Eden, so dont sweat the small stuff, right? But you have to keep an eye out for those tracks . . . Carolyn, I dont know what youre talking about! Another wave came, wetting Ralph to the waist and inundating Carolyn again. When it withdrew, the swelling on the crown of her head was beginning to split open. Youll find out soon enough, Carolyn replied, and then the swelling on her head popped with a sound like a hammer striking a slab of meat. A haze of blood flew into the clear, saltsmelling air, and a horde of black bugs the size of cockroaches were pouring out of her. Ralph had never seen anything like them before  not even in a dream  and they filled him with an almost hysterical loathing. He would have fled, Carolyn or not, but he was frozen in place, too stunned to move a single finger, let alone get up and run. Some of the black bugs ran back into Carolyn by way of her screaming mouth, but most of them hurried down her check and shoulder to the wet sand. Their accusing, alien eyes never left Ralph as they went. All this is your fault, the eyes seemed to say. You could have saved her, Ralph, and a better man would have saved her. Carolyn! he screamed. He put his hands out to her, then pulled them back, terrified of the black bugs, which were still spewing out of her head. Behind her, Rosalie sat in her own small pocket of darkness, looking gravely at him and now holding McGoverns misplaced chapeau in her mouth. One of Carolyns eyes popped out and lay on the wet sand like a blob of blueberry jelly. Bugs vomited from the nowempty socket. Carolyn! he screamed. Carolyn! Carolyn! Car 2  olyn! Carolyn! Car Suddenly, in the same instant that he knew the dream was over, Ralph was falling. He barely registered the fact before he thumped to the bedroom floor. He managed to break his fall with one outstretched hand, probably saving himself a nasty rap on the head but provoking a howl of pain from beneath the butterfly bandage taped high up on his left side. For the moment, at least, he barely registered the pain. What he felt was fear, revulsion, a horrible, aching grief . . . and most of all an overwhelming sense of gratitude. The bad dream  surely the worst dream hed ever had  was over, and he was in the world of real things again. He pulled back his mostly unbuttoned pajama top, checked the bandage for bleeding, saw none, and then sat up. Just doing that much seemed to exhaust him; the thought of getting up, even long enough to fall back into bed, seemed out of the question for the time being. Maybe after his panicky, racing heart slowed down a little. Can people die of bad dreams? he wondered, and in answer he heard Joe Wyzers voice You bet they can, Ralph, although the medical examiner usually ends up writing suicide on the causeofdeath line. In the shaky aftermath of his nightmare, sitting on the floor and hugging his knees with his right arm, Ralph had no real doubt that some dreams were powerful enough to kill. The details of this one were fading out now, but he could still remember the climax all too well that thudding sound, like a hammer hitting a thick cut of beef, and the vile spew of bugs from Carolyns head. Plump they had been, plump and lively, and why not? They had been feasting on his dead wifes brain. Ralph uttered a low, watery moan and swiped at his face with his left hand, provoking another jolt from beneath the bandage. His palm came away slick with sweat. What, exactly, had she been telling him to watch out for? Whiteman traps? No  tracks, not traps. Whiteman tracks, whatever they were. Had there been more? Maybe, maybe not. He couldnt remember for sure, and so what? It had been a dream, for Christs sake, just a dream, and outside of the fantasy world described in the tabloid newspapers, dreams meant nothing and proved nothing. When a person went to sleep, his mind seemed to turn into a kind of rathouse bargain hunter, sifting through the discount bins of mostly worthless shortterm memories, looking not for items which were valuable or even useful but only for things that were still bright and shiny. These it put together in freakshow collages which were often striking but had, for the most part, all the sense of Natalie Deepneaus conversation. Rosalie the dog had turned up, even Bills missing Panama had made a cameo appearance, but it all meant nothing . . . except tomorrow night he would not take one of the painpills the EMT had given him even if his arm felt like it was falling off. Not only had the one hed taken during the late news failed to keep him under, as he had hoped and halfexpected; it had probably played its own part in causing the nightmare. Ralph managed to get up off the floor and sit on the edge of the bed. A wave of faintness floated through his head like parachute silk, and he shut his eyes until the feeling passed. While he was sitting there with his head down and his eyes closed, he groped for the lamp on the bedside table and turned it on. When he opened his eyes, the area of the bedroom lit by its warm yellow glow looked very bright and very real. He looked at the clock beside the lamp 148 a.m., and he felt totally awake and totally alert, painpill or no painpill. He got up, walked slowly into the kitchen, and put on the teakettle. Then he leaned against the counter, absently massaging the bandage beneath his left armpit, trying to quiet the throbbing his most recent adventures had awakened there. When the kettle steamed, he poured hot water over a bag of Sleepytime  there was a joke for you  and then took the cup into the living room. He plopped into the wingback chair without bothering to turn on a light; the streetlamps and the dim glow coming from the bedroom provided all he needed. Well, he thought, here I am again, front row center. Let the play begin. Time passed, just how much he could not have said, but the throbbing beneath his arm had eased and the tea had gone from hot to barely lukewarm when he registered movement at the corner of his eye. Ralph turned his head, expecting to see Rosalie, but it wasnt Rosalie. It was two men stepping out onto the stoop of a house on the other side of Harris Avenue. Ralph couldnt make out the colors of the house  the orange arcsodiums the city had installed several years ago provided great visibility but made any perception of true colors almost impossible  yet he could see that the color of the trim was radically different from the color of the rest. That, coupled with its location, made Ralph almost positive it was May Lochers house. The two men on May Lochers stoop were very short, probably no more than four feet tall. They appeared to be surrounded by greenish auras.


They were dressed in identical white smocks, which looked to Ralph like the ones worn by actors in those old TV docoperas  black and white melodramas like Ben Casey and Dr Kildare. One of them had something in his hand. Ralph squinted. He couldnt make it out, but it had a sharp and hungry look. He could not have sworn under oath that it was a knife, but he thought it might be. Yes, it might very well be a knife. His first clear evaluative thought about this experience was that the men over there looked like aliens in a movie about UFO abductions  Communion, perhaps, or Fire in the Sky. His second was that he had fallen asleep again, right here in his wingchair, without even noticing. Thats right, Ralph  its just a little more rummagesale action, probably brought on by the stress of being stabbed and helped along by that frigging painpill. He sensed nothing frightening about the two figures on May Lochers stoop other than the long, sharplooking thing one of them was holding. Ralph supposed that not even your dreaming mind could do much with a couple of short bald guys wearing white tunics which looked left over from Central Casting. Also, there was nothing frightening about their behaviour  nothing furtive, nothing menacing. They stood on the stoop as if they had every right to be there in the darkest, stillest hour of the morning. They were facing each other, the attitudes of their bodies and large bald heads suggesting two old friends having a sober, civilized conversation. They looked thoughtful and intelligent  the kind of spacetravellers who would be more apt to say We come in peace than kidnap you, stick a probe up your ass, and then take notes on your reaction. All right, so maybe this new dreams not an outandout nightmare. After the last one, are you complaining? No, of course he wasnt. Winding up on the floor once a night was plenty, thanks. Yet there was something very disquieting about this dream just the same; it felt real in a way that his dream of Carolyn had not. This was his own living room, after all, not some weird, deserted beach he had never seen before. He was sitting in the same wingback chair where he sat every morning, holding a cup of tea which was now almost cold in his left hand, and when he raised the fingers of his right hand to his nose, as he was doing now, he could still smell a faint whiff of soap beneath the nails . . . the Irish Spring he liked to use in the shower . . . Ralph suddenly reached beneath his left armpit and pressed his fingers to the bandage there. The pain was immediate and intense . . . but the two small bald men in the white tunics stayed right where they were, on May Lochers doorstep. It doesnt matter what you think you feel, Ralph. It cant matter, because Fuck you! Ralph said in a hoarse, low voice. He rose from the wingchair, putting his cup down on the little table beside it as he did. Sleepytime slopped onto the TV Guide there. Fuck you, this is no dream! 3 He hurried across the living room to the kitchen, pajamas flapping, old worn slippers scuffing and thumping, the place where Charlie Pickering had stuck him sending out hot little bursts of pain. He grabbed a chair and took it into the apartments small foyer. There was a closet here. Ralph opened its door, snapped on the light just inside, positioned the chair so he would be able to reach the closets top shelf, and then stood on it. The shelf was a clutter of lost or forgotten items, most of which had belonged to Carolyn. These were small things, little more than scraps, but looking at them drove away the last lingering conviction that this had to be a dream. There was an ancient bag of MMs  her secret snackfood, her comfortfood. There was a lace heart, a single discarded white satin pump with a broken heel, a photo album. These things hurt a lot more than the knifeprick under his arm, but he had no time to hurt just now. Ralph leaned forward, placing his left hand on the high, dusty shelf to balance his weight, then began to shuffle through the junk with his right hand, all the while praying that the kitchen chair wouldnt take a notion to scoot out from under him. The wound below his armpit was now throbbing outrageously, and he knew he was going to get it bleeding again if he didnt stop the athletics soon, but . . . Im sure theyre up here somewhere . . . well . . . almost sure . . . He pushed aside his old flybox and his wicker creel. There was a stack of magazines behind the creel. The one on top was an issue of Look with Andy Williams on the cover. Ralph shoved them aside with the heel of his hand, sending up a flurry of dust. The old bag of MMs fell to the floor and split open, spraying brightly colored bits of candy in every direction. Ralph leaned even farther forward, now almost on his toes. He supposed it was his imagination, but he thought he could sense the kitchen chair he was on getting ready to be evil. The thought had no more than crossed his mind when the chair squawked and began to slide slowly backward on the hardwood floor. Ralph ignored that, ignored his throbbing side, and ignored the voice telling him he ought to stop this, he really ought to, because he was dreaming awake, just as the Hall book said many insomniacs eventually did, and although those little fellows across the street didnt really exist, he could really be standing here on this slowly sliding chair, and he could really break his hip when it went out from under him, and just how the hell was he going to explain what had happened when some smartass doctor in the Emergency Room of Derry Home asked him? Grunting, he reached all the way back, pushed aside a carton from which half a Christmas tree star protruded like a strange spiky periscope (knocking the heelless evening pump to the floor in the process), and saw what he wanted in the far lefthand corner of the shelf the case which contained his old ZeissIkon binoculars. Ralph stepped off the chair just before it could slide all the way out from under him, moved it closer in, then got up on it again. He couldnt reach all the way into the corner where the binocular case stood, so he grabbed the troutnet which had been lying up here next to his creel and flybox for lo these many years and succeeded in bagging the case on his second try. He dragged it forward until he could grab the strap, stepped off the chair, and came down on the fallen evening pump. His ankle twisted painfully. Ralph staggered, flailed his arms for balance, and managed to avoid going facefirst into the wall. As he started back into the living room, however, he felt liquid warmth beneath the bandage on his side. He had managed to open the knifewound again after all. Wonderful. Just a wonderful night chez Roberts . . . and how long had he been away from the window? He didnt know, but it felt like a long time, and he was sure the little bald doctors would be gone when he got back there. The street would be empty, and He stopped dead, the binocular case dangling at the end of its strap and tracking a long slow trapezoidal shadow back and forth across the floor where the orange glow of the streetlights lay like an ugly coat of paint. Little bald doctors? Was that how he had just thought of them? Yes, of course, because that was what they called them  the folks who claimed to have been abducted by them . . . examined by them . . . operated on by them in some cases. They were physicians from space, proctologists from the great beyond. But that wasnt the big deal. The big deal was Ed used the phrase, Ralph thought. He used it the night he called me and warned me to stay away from him and his interests. He said it was the doctor who told him about the Crimson King and the Centurions and all the rest. Yes, Ralph whispered. His back was prickling madly with gooseflesh. Yes, thats what he said. The doctor told me. The little bald doctor. When he reached the window, he saw that the strangers were still out there, although they had moved from May Lochers stoop to the sidewalk while he had been fishing for the binoculars. They were standing directly beneath one of those damned orange streetlights, in fact. Ralphs feeling that Harris Avenue looked like a deserted stage set after the evening performance returned with weird, declamatory force . . . but with a different significance. For one thing, the set was no longer deserted, was it? Some ominous, longpastmidnight play had commenced in what the two odd creatures below no doubt assumed was a totally empty theater. What would they do if they knew they had an audience? Ralph wondered. What would they do to me? The bald doctors now had the shared demeanor of men who have nearly reached agreement. In that instant they did not look like doctors at all to Ralph, in spite of their smocks  they looked like bluecollar workers coming offshift at some plant or factory. These two guys, clearly buddies, have stopped outside the main gate for a moment or two to finish off some subject that cant wait even long enough for them to walk down the block to the nearest bar, knowing it will only take a minute or so in any case; total agreement is only a conversational exchange or two away. Ralph uncased the binoculars, raised them to his eyes, and wasted a moment or two in puzzled fiddling with the focus knob before realizing he had forgotten to take off the lens caps. He did so, then raised the glasses again. This time the two figures standing under the streetlamp jumped into his field of vision at once, large and perfectly lit, but fuzzed out. He turned the little knob between the barrels again, and the two men popped into focus almost immediately. Ralphs breath stopped in his throat. The look he got was extremely brief; no more than three seconds passed before one of the men (if they were men) nodded and clapped a hand on his companions shoulder. Then they both turned away, leaving Ralph with nothing to look at but their bald heads and smooth, whiteclad backs. Only three seconds at most, but Ralph saw enough in that brief space of time to make him profoundly uneasy. He had run to get the binoculars for two reasons, both predicated on his inability to go on believing that this was a dream. First, he wanted to be sure he could identify the two men if he was ever called upon to do so. Second (this one was less admissible to his conscious mind but every bit as urgent), he had wanted to dispel the unsettling notion that he was having his own close encounter of the third kind. Instead of dispelling it, his brief look through the binoculars intensified it. The little bald doctors did not actually seem to have features. They had faces, yes  eyes, noses, mouths  but they seemed as interchangeable as the chrome trim on the same make and model of a car. They could have been identical twins, but that wasnt the impression Ralph got, either. To him they looked more like department store mannequins with their Arnel wigs whisked off for the night, their eerie resemblance not the result of genetics but of mass production. 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 linefree 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. Thats whats really bothering me, I think. Not the identical bald heads, the identical white smocks, or even the lack of wrinkles. Its how they look sketched  the eyes just circles, the small pink ears just squiggles made with a felttip pen, the mouths a pair of quick, almost careless strokes of pale pink watercolor. They dont really look like either people or aliens; they look like hasty representations of . . . well, of I dont 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 greengold and filled with deep reddishorange 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? Im not sure I could pick them out again even if someone held a gun to my head. Its 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 couldnt see how short they are? Maybe . . . the lack of lines might do the trick . . . but then again, maybe not. The auras, though . . . those greengold auras with the red flecks swirling through them . . . Id know them anywhere. But theres something wrong with them, isnt there? What is it? The answer popped into Ralphs 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 balloonstring 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 Lochers house, Ralph dropped the angle of the binoculars so they picked up the item in Doc 1s right hand. It wasnt a knife, as he had surmised, but it still wasnt 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 longbladed, stainlesssteel 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 didnt 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 icecream 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 Ralphs 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 couldnt 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 isnt anything good about this, Ralph. Fair enough, but that wasnt 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. Ive 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 greengold auras around them. He wasnt alone, either; Ed Deepneau had seen at least one of them, too. Ralph would have bet the farm on it, if hed had a farm to bet. It didnt ease his mind much, however, to know that he and the wifebeating paranoid from up the street were seeing the same little bald guys. And the auras, Ralph  didnt he say something about those, too? Well, he hadnt 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 Lochers 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 womans 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 fiftyfive. You may be able to save a womans life. Sir, would you please give me your name and Dont 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, couldnt 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. Thats LOCHER, first letter L as in Lexington. Mrs Locher is severely ill. Ive 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 dont 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. Theyll probably have to use a flashlight to pick it out because of the damned orange streetlights, but theyll find it. Yes, sir, Im 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 didnt, he decided they either didnt have the fancy traceback equipment he saw on the TV truecrime shows, or it hadnt been turned on. That was good. It didnt solve the problem of what he was going to do or say if they hauled May Locher out of her hideous yellowandpink house in pieces, but it did buy a little more thinking time. Below, Harris Avenue remained still and silent, lit only by the hiintensity 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 TrueValue Hardware next door. The faded bandanna flapped around her neck. This wasnt 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 Lochers 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 Rosalies 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 Loiss 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. Loiss had been gray; Bills olive green. Hallucinations, he had thought them at the time, back in the good old days before hed 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 greengold 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, shed 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 hadnt 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, sleepstarved 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 greengold tracks left by Doc 1 to those left by Doc 2, and then back to Doc 1s trail again. So now why dont you tell me what that stray bitch is following, Ralph? Do you think its possible for a dog to track a fucking hallucination? Its not a hallucination; its tracks. Real tracks. The whiteman tracks that Carolyn told you to watch out for. You know that. You see that. Its 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 beings capacity for selfdeception 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 threethirty. Uhhuh. 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. Rosalies 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 AvenueWitcham 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 didnt even have the comfort of the occasional game of gin rummy or pennyante 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 wingchair, 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 Lochers house (86, Ralph saw, and he didnt need the binoculars to read it, either), the cruisers taillights 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 secondfloor window across the street and the fading greengold 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 Eds 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 Lochers 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 DoorbellRinging, 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 wasnt surprised. Strange bald men with scissors notwithstanding, he doubted May Locher could even get out of bed. But if shes 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 whamwhamwham, openinthenameofthelaw 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 Ralphs 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 womans 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 womans pink flannel nightgown were half a dozen stabwounds made by the points of Doc 1s 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 wouldnt 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, lets get with it, what do you say? You know the things youre seeing are all in your head, dont you? he asked himself uneasily. I mean, there might be a couple of women lying dead over there, sure, there might be, but you dont know that, right? Its not like the auras, or the tracks . . . No, it wasnt like the auras or the tracks, and yes, he did know that. He also knew that no one was answering the door over there at 86 Harris Avenue, and that did not bode well for Bill McGoverns old Cardville schoolmate. He hadnt seen any blood on the scissors in Doc 1s hand, but given the iffy quality of the old ZeissIkon binocs, that didnt prove much. Also, the guy could have wiped them clean before leaving the house. The thought had no more than crossed Ralphs mind before his imagination added a bloody handtowel lying beside the dead companion in the pink nightgown. Come on, you two! Ralph cried in a low voice. Jesus Christ, you gonna stand there all night? More headlights splashed up Harris Avenue. The new arrival was an unmarked Ford sedan with a flashing red dashboard bubble. The man who got out was wearing plain clothes  gray poplin windbreaker and blue knitted watchcap. Ralph had maintained momentary hopes that the newcomer would turn out to be John Leydecker, even though Leydecker had told him he wouldnt be coming on until noon, but he didnt have to check with the binoculars to make sure it wasnt. This man was much slimmer, and wearing a dark mustache. Cop 2 went down the walk to meet him while ChrisorJess Nell went around the corner of Mrs Lochers house. One of those pauses which the movies so conveniently edit out then ensued. Cop 2 reholstered his gun. He and the newly arrived detective stood at the foot of Mrs Lochers stoop, apparently talking and glancing at the closed door every now and then. Once the uniformed cop took a step or two in the direction Nell had gone. The detective reached out, grasped his arm, detained him. They talked some more. Ralph clutched his upper thighs tighter and made a small, frustrated noise in his throat. A few minutes crawled by, and then everything happened at once in that confusing, overlapping, inconclusive way with which emergency situations seem to develop. Another police car arrived (Mrs Lochers house and those neighboring it on the right and left were now bathed in streaks of conflicting red and yellow light).


Two more uniformed cops got out of it, opened the trunk, and removed a bulky contraption that looked to Ralph like a portable torture device. He believed this gadget was known as the Jaws of Life. Following the huge storm in the spring of 1985, a storm which had resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred people  many of whom had been trapped and drowned in their cars  Derrys schoolchildren had mounted a pennydrive to buy one. As the two new cops were carrying the Jaws of Life across the sidewalk, the front door of the house on the uphill side of Mrs Lochers opened and the Eberlys, Stan and Georgina, stepped out onto their stoop. They wore matching his n hers bathrobes, and Stans gray hair was standing up in wild tufts that made Ralph think of Charlie Pickering. He raised the binoculars, scanned their curious, excited faces briefly, then put them back in his lap again. The next vehicle to appear was an ambulance from Derry Home Hospital. Like the police cars which had already arrived, its howler was off in deference to the hour, but it had a full roofrack of red lights, and they were strobing wildly. To Ralph, the developments across the street looked like a scene from one of his beloved Dirty Harry movies, only with the sound turned off. The two cops got the Jaws of Life halfway across the lawn and then dropped it. The detective in the windbreaker and the watchcap turned to them and raised his hands to shoulderlevel, palms out, as if to say What did you think you were going to do with that thing? Break down the goddam door with it? At the same second, Officer Nell came back around the house. He was shaking his head. The detective in the watchcap abruptly turned, brushed past Nell and his partner, mounted the steps, raised one foot, and kicked in May Lochers front door. He paused to unzip his jacket, probably to free access to his gun, and then walked in without looking back. Ralph felt like applauding. Nell and his partner looked at each other uncertainly, then followed the detective up the steps and through the door. Ralph leaned forward even farther in his chair, now close enough to the window for his nostrils to make little fogroses on the glass. Three men, their white hospital pants looking orange in the glare of the hiintensity streetlamps, got out of the ambulance. One of them opened the rear doors and then all three of them simply stood there, hands in jacket pockets, waiting to see if they would be needed. The two cops who had carried the Jaws of Life halfway across Mrs Lochers lawn looked at each other, shrugged, picked it up, and began carrying it back toward their cruiser again. There were several large divots in the lawn where they had dropped it. Just let her be okay, thats all, Ralph thought. Just let her  and anyone who was in the house with her  be okay. The detective appeared in the doorway again, and Ralphs heart sank as he motioned to the men standing at the rear of the ambulance. Two of them removed a stretcher with a collapsible undercarriage; the third remained where he was. The men with the stretcher went up the walk and into the house at a smart pace, but they did not run, and when the orderly who had remained behind produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one, Ralph knew  suddenly, completely, and with no doubts  that May Locher was dead. 6 Stan and Georgina Eberly walked to the low line of hedge which separated their front yard from Mrs Lochers. They had put their arms around each others waists, and to Ralph they looked like the Bobbsey Twins grown old and fat and frightened. Other neighbors were also coming out, either awakened by the silent convergence of emergency lights or because the telephone network along this little stretch of Harris Avenue was already beginning to operate. Most of the people Ralph saw were old (We goldenagers, Bill McGovern liked to call them . . . always with that small satirical lift of the eyebrow, of course), men and women whose rest was fragile and easily broken at the best of times. He suddenly realized that Ed, Helen, and Baby Natalie had been the youngest people between here and the Extension . . . and now the Deepneaus were gone. I could go down there, he thought. Id fit right in. Just another one of Bills goldenagers. Except he couldnt. His legs felt like bunches of teabags held together by weak twists of string, and he was quite sure that if he tried to get up, he would go flopping bonelessly to the floor. So he sat and watched from his window, watched the play develop below him on the stage which had always been empty at this hour before . . . except for the occasional walkthrough by Rosalie, that was. It was a play he had produced himself, with a single anonymous telephone call. He watched the orderlies reemerge with the stretcher, this time moving more slowly because of the sheeted figure which had been strapped to it. Warring streaks of blue and red light flickered over that sheet, and the shapes of legs, hips, arms, neck, and head beneath it. Ralph was suddenly plunged back into his dream. He saw his wife under the sheet  not May Locher but Carolyn Roberts, and at any moment her head would split open and the black bugs, the ones which had grown fat on the meat of her diseased brain, would begin to boil out. Ralph raised the heels of his palms to his eyes. Some sound  some inarticulate sound of grief and rage, horror and weariness  escaped him. He sat that way for a long time, wishing he had never seen any of this and hoping blindly that if there really was a tunnel, he would not be required to enter it after all. The auras were strange and beautiful, but there was not enough beauty in all of them to make up for one moment of that terrible dream in which he had discovered his wife buried below the hightide line, not enough beauty to make up for the dreary horror of his lost, wakeful nights, or the sight of that sheeted figure being rolled out of the house across the street. It was a lot more than just wishing that the play was over; as he sat there with the heels of his palms pressing against the lids of his closed eyes, he wanted all of it to be over  all of it. For the first time in his twentyfive thousand days of life, Ralph Roberts found himself wishing he were dead. CHAPTER NINE 1 There was a movie poster, probably picked up at one of the local video stores for a buck or three, on the wall of the cubbyhole which served Detective John Leydecker as an office. It showed Dumbo the elephant cruising along with his magical ears outstretched. A headshot of Susan Day had been pasted over Dumbos face, carefully cut to allow for the trunk. On the cartoon landscape below, someone had drawn a signpost which read DERRY 250. Oh, charming, Ralph said. Leydecker laughed. Not very politically correct, is it? I think thats an understatement, Ralph said, wondering what Carolyn would have made of the poster  wondering what Helen would make of it, for that matter. It was quarter of two on an overcast, chilly Monday afternoon, and he and Leydecker had just come across from the Derry County Courthouse, where Ralph had given his statement about his encounter with Charlie Pickering the day before. He had been questioned by an assistant district attorney who looked to Ralph as if he might be ready to start shaving in another year or two. Leydecker had accompanied him as promised, sitting in the corner of the assistant DAs office and saying nothing. His promise to buy Ralph a cup of coffee turned out to be mostly a figure of speech  the evillooking brew had come from the Silex in the corner of the cluttered secondfloor Police Department dayroom. Ralph sipped cautiously at his and was relieved to find it tasted a little better than it looked. Sugar? Cream? Leydecker asked. Gun to shoot it with? Ralph smiled and shook his head. Tastes fine . . . although itd probably be a mistake to trust my judgement. I cut back to two cups a day last summer, and now it all tastes pretty good to me. Like me with cigarettes  the less I smoke, the better they taste. Sins a bitch. Leydecker took out his little tube of toothpicks, shook one out, and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. Then he put his own cup on top of his computer terminal, went over to the Dumbo poster, and began to lever out the thumbtacks which held the corners. Dont do it on my account, Ralph said. Its your office. Wrong. Leydecker pulled the carefully scissored photo of Susan Day off the poster, balled it up, tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he began to roll the poster itself into a tight little cylinder. Oh? Then how come your names on the door? Its my name, but the office belongs to you and your fellow taxpayers, Ralph. Also to any news vidiot with a Minicam who happens to wander in here, and if this poster happened to show up on News at Noon, Id be in a world of hurt. I forgot to take it down when I left Friday night, and I had most of the weekend off  a rare occurrence around here, let me tell you. You didnt put it up, I take it. Ralph moved some papers off the tiny offices one extra chair and sat down. Nope. Some of the fellows had a party for me Friday afternoon. Complete with cake, ice cream, and presents. Leydecker rummaged in his desk and came up with a rubber band. He slipped it around the poster so it wouldnt spring open again, peeked one amused eye through it at Ralph, then tossed it into the wastebasket. I got a set of those daysoftheweek panties with the crotches snipped out, a can of strawberryscented vaginal douche, a packet of Friends of Life antiabortion literature  said literature including a comicbook called Denises Unwanted Pregnancy  and that poster. I guess it wasnt a birthday party, huh? Nope. Leydecker cracked his knuckles and sighed at the ceiling. The boys were celebrating my appointment to a special detail. Ralph could see faint flickers of blue aura around Leydeckers face and shoulders, but in this case he didnt have to try and read them. Its Susan Day, isnt it? You got the job of protecting her while shes in town. Hole in one. Of course the State Police will be around, but they stick pretty much to traffic control in situations like this. There may be some FBI, too, but what they do mostly is hang back, take pictures, and give each other the secret Club Sign. Shes got her own security people, doesnt she? Yes, but I dont know how many or how good. I talked to the head guy this morning and hes at least coherent, but we have to put in our own guys. Five of them, according to the orders I got on Friday. Thats me plus four guys wholl volunteer as soon as I tell em to. The object is . . . wait a minute . . . youll like this . . . Leydecker shuffled through the papers on his desk, found the one he was looking for, and held it up. . . . to maintain a strong presence and high visibility. He dropped the paper again and grinned at Ralph. The grin did not have a lot of humor in it. In other words, if someone tries to shoot the bitch or give her an acid shampoo, we want Lisette Benson and the other vidiots to at least record the fact that we were there. Leydecker looked at the rolledup poster leaning in his wastebasket and flipped it the bird. How can you dislike someone so much when youve never even met her? I dont just dislike her, Ralph; I fucking hate her. Listen  Im a Catholic, my lovin mother was a Catholic, my kids  if I ever have any  are all gonna be altarboys at St Joes. Great. Being a Catholics great. They even let you eat meat on Fridays now. But if you think being Catholic means Im in favor of making abortions illegal again, you got the wrong puppy. See, Im the Catholic who gets to question the guys who beat their kids with rubber hoses or push them downstairs after a night of drinking good Irish whiskey and getting all sentimental about their mothers. Leydecker fished inside his shirt and brought out a small gold medallion. He placed it on his fingers and tilted it toward Ralph. Mary, mother of Jesus. Ive worn this since I was thirteen. Five years ago I arrested a man wearing one just like it. He had just boiled his twoyearold stepson. This is a true thing Im telling you. Guy put on a great big pot of water, and when it was boiling, he picked the kid up by the ankles and dropped him into the pot like he was a lobster. Why? Because the kid wouldnt stop wetting the bed, he told us. I saw the body, and Ill tell you what, after youve seen something like that, the photos the righttolife assholes like to show of vacuum abortions dont look so bad. Leydeckers voice had picked up a slight tremor. What I remember most of all is how the guy was crying, and how he kept holding onto that Mary medallion around his neck and saying he wanted to go to confession. Made me proud to be a Catholic, Ralph, let me tell you . . . and as far as the Pope goes, I dont think he should be allowed to have an opinion until hes had a kid himself, or at least spent a year or so taking care of crackbabies. Okay, Ralph said. Whats your problem with Susan Day? Shes stirring the motherfucking pot! Leydecker cried. She comes into my town and I have to protect her. Fine. Ive got good men, and with just a pinch of luck, I think we can probably see her out of town with her head still on and her tits pointing the right way, but what about what happens before? And what happens after? Do you think she cares about any of that? Do you think the people who run WomanCare give much of a shit about the sideeffects, as far as that goes? I dont know. The WomanCare advocates are a little less prone to violence than The Friends of Life, but in terms of the allimportant assache quotient, theyre not much different. Do you know what this was all about when it started? Ralph cast his memory back to his first conversation about Susan Day, the one hed had with Ham Davenport. For a moment he almost had it, but then it squiggled away. The insomnia had won again. He shook his head. Zoning, Leydecker said, and laughed with disgusted amazement. Plain old gardenvariety zoning regulations. Great, huh? Early this summer, two of our more conservative City Councillors, George Tandy and Emma Wheaton, petitioned the Zoning Committee to reconsider the zone with WomanCare in it, the idea being to kind of gerrymander the place out of existence. I doubt if thats exactly the right word, but you get the gist, dont you? Sure. Uhhuh. So the prochoicers ask Susan Day to come to town and make a speech, help them to raise a warchest to combat the prolife grinches. The only problem is, the grinches never had a chance of rezoning District 7, and the WomanCare people knew it! Hell, one of their directors, June Halliday, is on the City Council. She and the Wheaton bitch just about spit at each other when they pass in the hall. Rezoning District 7 was a pipedream from the start, because WomanCare is technically a hospital, just like Derry Home, which is only a stones throw away. If you change the zoning laws to make WomanCare illegal, you do the same to one of only three hospitals in Derry County  the thirdlargest county in the state of Maine. So it was never going to happen, but thats okay, because it was never about that in the first place. It was about being pissy and inyourface. About being an assache. And for most of the prochoicers  one of the guys I work with calls em the Whale People  its about being right. Right? I dont get you. It isnt enough that a woman can walk in there and get rid of the troublesome little fishie growing inside her any time she wants; the prochoicers want the argument to end. What they want, down deep, is for people like Dan Dalton to admit theyre right, and thatll never happen. Its more likely that the Arabs and the Jews will decide it was all a mistake and throw down their weapons. I support the right of a woman to have an abortion if she really needs to have one, but the prochoicers holierthanthou attitude makes me want to puke. Theyre the new Puritans, as far as Im concerned, people who believe that if you dont think the way they do, youre going to hell . . . only their version is a place where all you get on the radio is hillbilly music and all you can find to eat is chickenfried steak. You sound pretty bitter. Try sitting on a powderkeg for three months and see how it makes you feel. Tell me this  do you think Pickering would have stuck a knife in your armpit yesterday if it hadnt been for WomanCare, The Friends of Life, and Susan LeaveMySacredTwatAlone Day? Ralph appeared to give the question serious thought, but what he was really doing was watching John Leydeckers aura. It was a healthy dark blue, but the edges were tinged with rapidly shifting greenish light. It was this edging which interested Ralph; he had an idea he knew what it meant. Finally he said, No. I guess not. Me either. You got wounded in a war thats already been decided, Ralph, and you wont be the last. But if you went to the Whale People  or to Susan Day  and opened your shirt and pointed at the bandage and said This is partly your fault, so own the part thats yours, theyd raise their hands and say, Oh no, goodness no, were sorry you got hurt, Ralph, we whale watchers abhor violence, but it wasnt our fault, we have to keep WomanCare open, we have to man and woman the barricades, and if a little spilled blood is what it takes to do that, then so be it. But its not about WomanCare, and thats what drives me absolutely bugfuck. Its about  abortion. Shit, no! Abortion rights are safe in Maine and in Derry, no matter what Susan Day says at the Civic Center Friday night. This is about whose team is the best team. About whose side Gods on. Its about whos right. I wish theyd all just sing We Are the Champions and go get drunk. Ralph threw back his head and laughed. Leydecker laughed with him. So theyre assholes, he finished with a shrug. But theyre our assholes. Does that sounds like Im joking? Im not. WomanCare, Friends of Life, Body Watch, Daily Bread . . . theyre our assholes, Derry assholes, and I really dont mind watching out for our own. Thats why I took this job, and why I stay with it. But youll have to forgive me if Im less than crazy about being tapped to watch out for some longstemmed American Beauty from New York whos going to fly in here and give an incendiary speech and then fly out with a few more pressclippings and enough material for chapter five of her new book. To our faces shell talk about what a wonderful little grassroots community we are, and when she gets back to her duplex on Park Avenue, shell tell her friends about how she hasnt managed to shampoo the stink of our paper mills out of her hair yet. She is woman; hear her roar . . . and if were lucky, the whole thing will quiet down with no one dead or disabled. Ralph had become sure of what those greenish flickers meant. But youre scared, arent you? he asked. Leydecker looked at him, surprised. Shows, does it? Only a little, Ralph said, and thought Just in your aura, John, thats all. Just in your aura. Yeah, Im scared. On a personal level Im scared of fucking up the assignment, which has absolutely no upside to compensate for all the things that can go wrong. On a professional level Im scared of something happening to her on my watch. On a community level Im fucking terrified of what happens if theres some sort of confrontation and the genie comes out of the bottle . . . more coffee, Ralph? Ill pass. I ought to be going soon, anyway. Whats going to happen to Pickering? He didnt actually care much about Charlie Pickerings fate, but the big cop would probably think it strange if he asked about May Locher before he asked about Pickering. Suspicious, maybe. Steve Anderson  the ADA who questioned you  and Pickerings courtappointed attorney are probably horsetrading even as we speak. Pickerings guy will be saying he might be able to get his client  the thought of Charlie Pickering being anyones client  for anything, sort of blows my mind, by the way  to plead out to seconddegree assault. Anderson will say the time has come to put Pickering away for good and hes going for attempted murder. Pickerings lawyer will pretend to be shocked, and tomorrow your buddy is going to be charged with firstdegree assault with a deadly weapon and bound over for trial. Then, possibly in December but more likely early next year, youll be called as the star witness. Bail? Itll probably be set in the fortythousanddollar range. You can get out on ten per cent if the rest can be secured in event of flight, but Charlie Pickering doesnt have a house, a car, or even a Timex watch. In the end, hes liable to go back to Juniper Hill, but thats really not the object of the game. Were going to be able to keep him off the street for quite a while this time, and with people like Charlie, thats the object of the game. Any chance The Friends of Life might go his bail? Nah. Ed Deepneau spent a lot of last week with him, the two of them drinking coffee in the Bagel Shop. I imagine Ed was giving Charlie the lowdown on the Centurions and the King of Diamonds Crimson King is what Ed Whatever, Leydecker agreed, waving a hand. But most of all I imagine he spent the time explaining how you were the devils righthand man and how only a smart, brave, and dedicated fellow like Charlie Pickering could take you out of the picture. You make him sound like such a calculating shit, Ralph said. He was remembering the Ed Deepneau hed played chess with before Carolyn had fallen ill. That Ed had been an intelligent, wellspoken, civilized man with a deep capacity for kindness. Ralph still found it all but impossible to reconcile that Ed with the one hed first glimpsed in July of 1992. He had come to think of the more recent arrival as rooster Ed. Not just a calculating shit, a dangerous calculating shit, Leydecker said. For him Charlie was just a tool, like a paring knife youd use to peel an apple with. If the blade snaps off a paring knife, you dont run to the knifegrinders to get a new one put on; thats too much trouble. You toss it in the wastebasket and get a new paring knife instead. Thats the way guys like Ed treat guys like Charlie, and since Ed is The Friends of Life  for the time being, at least  I dont think you have to worry about Charlie making bail. In the next few days, hes going to be lonelier than a Maytag repairman. Okay? Okay, Ralph said. He was a little appalled to realize he felt sorry for Pickering. I want to thank you for keeping my name out of the paper, too . . . if you were the one who did it, that is. There had been a brief mention of the incident in the Derry Newss Police Beat column, but it said only that Charles H. Pickering had been arrested on a weapons charge at the Derry Public Library. Sometimes we ask them for a favor, sometimes they ask us for one, Leydecker said, standing up. Its how things work in the real world. If the nuts in The Friends of Life and the prigs in The Friends of WomanCare ever discover that, my job is going to get a lot easier. Ralph plucked the rolledup Dumbo poster from the wastebasket, then stood up on his side of Leydeckers desk. Could I have this? I know a little girl who might really like it, in a year or so. Leydecker held out his hands expansively. Be my guest  think of it as a little premium for being a good citizen. Just dont ask for my crotchless panties. Ralph laughed. Wouldnt think of it. Seriously, I appreciate you coming in. Thanks, Ralph. No problem. He reached across the desk, shook Leydeckers hand, then headed for the door. He felt absurdly like Lieutenant Columbo on TV  all he needed was the cigar and the ratty trenchcoat. He put his hand on the knob, then paused and turned back. Can I ask you about something totally unrelated to Charlie Pickering? Fire away. This morning in the Red Apple Store I heard that Mrs Locher, my neighbor up the street, died in the night. Nothing so surprising about that; she had emphysema. But there are policeline tapes up between the sidewalk and her front yard, plus a sign on the door saying the site has been sealed by the Derry PD. Do you know what its about? Leydecker looked at him so long and hard that Ralph would have felt acutely uncomfortable . . . if not for the mans aura. There was nothing in it which communicated suspicion. God, Ralph, youre taking these things a little too seriously, arent you? Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Either way he was glad that the green flickers at the edges of Leydeckers aura had not reappeared. Why are you looking at me that way? Ralph asked. If I presumed or spoke out of turn, Im sorry. Not at all, Leydecker said. Its a little weird, thats all. If I tell you about it, can you keep it quiet? Yes. Its your downstairs tenant Im chiefly worried about. When the word discretion is mentioned, its not the Prof I think of. Ralph laughed heartily. I wont say a word to him  Scouts Honor  but its interesting youd mention him; Bill went to school with Mrs Locher, way back when. Grammar school. Man, I cant imagine the Prof in grammar school, Leydecker said. Can you? Sort of, Ralph said, but the picture which rose in his mind was an exceedingly peculiar one Bill McGovern looking like a cross between Little Lord Fauntleroy and Tom Sawyer in a pair of knickers, long white socks . . . and a Panama hat. Were not sure what happened to Mrs Locher, Leydecker said. What we do know is that shortly after three a.m., 911 logged an anonymous call from someone  a male  who claimed to have just seen two men, one carrying a pair of scissors, come out of Mrs Lochers house. She was killed? Ralph exclaimed, realizing two things simultaneously that he sounded more believable than he ever would have expected, and that he had just crossed a bridge. He hadnt burned it behind him  not yet, anyway  but he would not be able to go back to the other side without a lot of explanations. Leydecker turned his hands palms up and shrugged. If she was, it wasnt with a pair of scissors or any other sharp object. There wasnt a mark on her. That, at least, was something of a relief. On the other hand, its possible to scare someone to death  especially someone whos old and sick  during the commission of a crime, Leydecker said. Anyway, thisll be easier to explain if you let me just tell you what I know. It wont take long, believe me. Of course. Sorry. Want to hear something funny? The first person I thought of when I looked over the 911 callsheet was you. Because of the insomnia, right? Ralph asked. His voice was steady. That and the fact that the caller claimed to have seen these men from his living room. Your living room looks out on the Avenue, doesnt it? Yes. Uhhuh. I even thought of listening to the tape, then I remembered that you were coming in today . . . and that youre sleeping through again. Thats right, isnt it? Without an instant of pause or consideration, Ralph set fire to the bridge he had just crossed. Well, Im not sleeping like I did when I was sixteen and working two afterschool jobs, I wont kid you about that, but if I was the guy who called 911 last night, I did it in my sleep. Exactly what I figured. Besides, if you saw something a little offkilter on the street, why would you make the call anonymously? I dont know, Ralph said, and thought, But suppose it was a little more than offkilter, John? Suppose it was completely unbelievable? Me, neither, Leydecker said. Your place has a view of Harris Avenue, yes, but so do about three dozen others . . . and just because the guy who made the call said he was inside, that doesnt mean he really was, does it? I guess not. Theres a payphone outside the Red Apple he could have called from, plus one outside the liquor store. A couple in Strawford Park, too, if they work. Actually there are four in the park, and they all work. We checked. Why would he lie about where he was calling from? The most likely reason is because he was lying about the rest of what he had to say, too. Anyway, Donna Hagen said the guy sounded very young and sure of himself. The words were barely out of his mouth before Leydecker winced and put a hand on top of his head. That didnt come out just the way I meant it, Ralph. Sorry. Its okay  the idea that I sound like an old fart on a pension is not exactly a new concept to me. I am an old fart on a pension. Go on. Chris Nell was the responding officer  first on the scene. Do you remember him from the day we arrested Ed? I remember the name. Uhhuh. Steve Utterback was the responding detective and the OIC  officer in charge. Hes a good man. The guy in the watchcap, Ralph thought. The lady was dead in bed, but there was no sign of violence. Nothing obvious taken, either, although old ladies like May Locher arent usually into a lot of real hockable stuff  no VCR, no big fancy stereo, nothing like that. She did have one of those Bose Waves, though, and two or three pretty nice pieces of jewelry. This is not to say that there wasnt other jewelry as nice or nicer, but But why would a burglar take some and not all? Exactly. Whats more interesting in this case is that the front door  the one the 911 caller said he saw the two men coming out of  was locked from the inside. Not just a springlock, either; there was a thumbbolt and a chain. Same with the back door, by the way. So if the 911 caller was on the up and up, and if May Locher was dead when the two guys left, who locked the doors? Maybe it was the Crimson King, Ralph thought . . . and to his horror, almost said aloud. I dont know. What about the windows? Locked. Thumblatches turned. And, just in case thats not Agatha Christie enough for you, Steve says the storms were on. One of the neighbors told him Mrs Locher hired a kid to put them on just last week. Sure she did, Ralph said. Pete Sullivan, the same kid who delivers the newspaper. Now that I think of it, I saw him doing it. Mysterynovel bullshit, Leydecker said, but Ralph thought Leydecker would have swapped Susan Day for May Locher in about three seconds. The prelim medical came in just before I left for the courthouse to meet you. I had a glance at it. Myocardial this, thrombosis that . . . heartfailures what it comes down to. Right now were treating the 911 call as a crank  we get em all the time, all cities do  and the ladys death as a heartattack brought on by her emphysema. Just a coincidence, in other words. That conclusion might save him a lot of trouble  if it flew, that was  but Ralph could hear the disbelief in his own voice. Yeah, I dont like it, either. Neither does Steve, which is why the house has been sealed. State Forensics will give it a complete toptobottom, probably starting tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, Mrs Locher has taken a little ride down to Augusta for a more comprehensive postmortem. Who knows what itll show? Sometimes they do show things. Youd be surprised. I suppose I would, Ralph said. Leydecker tossed his toothpick into the trash, appeared to brood for a moment, then brightened up. Hey, heres an idea  maybe Ill get someone in clerical to make a dupe of that 911 call. I could bring it over and play it for you. Maybe youll recognize the voice. Who knows? Stranger things have happened. I suppose they have, Ralph said, smiling uneasily. Anyway, its Utterbacks case. Come on, Ill see you out. In the hall, Leydecker gave Ralph another searching look. This one made Ralph feel a good deal more uncomfortable, because he had no idea what it meant. The auras had disappeared again. He tried on a smile that felt lame. Something hanging out of my nose that shouldnt be? Nope. Im just amazed at how good you look for someone who went through what you did yesterday. And compared to how you looked last summer . . . if thats what honeycomb can do, Im going to buy myself a beehive. Ralph laughed as though this were the funniest thing he had ever heard. 2 142 a.m., Tuesday morning. Ralph sat in the wingchair, watching wheels of fine mist revolve around the streetlights. Up the street, the policeline tapes hung dispiritedly in front of May Lochers house.