started seeing people walking around in colored envelopes with long balloon-strings floating up from their heads.”
“You see those, too? Ralph, you see those, too?”
“Me too,” he said, and laughed. It sounded a bit loonlike, and he wasn’t surprised. There were a hundred things he wanted to ask her; wasn’t he felt crazed with impatience. And there was something else, something so unexpected he hadn’t even been able to identify it at first: he was horny. Not just interested; actually horny.
Lois was crying again. Her tears were the color of mist on a still lake, and they smoked a little as they slipped down her cheeks.
Ralph knew they would taste dark and mossy, like fiddleheads in spring.
“Ralph… this… this is… oh my!”
“Bigger than Michael Jackson at the Super Bowl, isn’t it?” She laughed weakly. “Well, just… you know, just a little.”
“There’s a name for what’s happening to us, Lois, and it’s not insomnia or senility or Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s hyper-reality.”
“Hyper-reality,” she murmured. “God, what an exotic word!”
“Yes, it is. A pharmacist down the street at Rite Aid, Joe Wyzer, told it to me. Only there’s a lot more to it than he knew. More than anyone in their right minds would guess.”
“Yes, like telepathy… if it’s really happening, that is. Ralph, are we in our right minds?”
“Did your daughter-in-law take your earrings?”
“I… she… yes.” Lois straightened. “Yes, she did.”
“No doubts?”
“No.”
“Then you’ve answered your own question. We’re sane, all right… but I think you’re wrong about the telepathy part. It isn’t minds we read, but auras. Listen, Lois, there’s all sorts of things I want to ask you, but I have an idea that right now there’s only one thing I really have to know. Have you seen-” He stopped abruptly, wondering if he really wanted to say what was on the tip of his tongue.
“Have I seen what?”
“Okay. This is going to sound crazier than anything you’ve told me, but I’m not crazy. Do you believe that? I’m not. “I believe you,” she said simply, and Ralph felt a vast weight slip from his heart. She was telling the truth. There was no question about it;
her belief shone all around her. “Okay, listen. Since this started happening to you, have you seen certain people who don’t look like they belong on Harris Avenue-?
People who don’t look like they belong anywhere in the ordinary world?” Lois was looking at him with puzzled incomprehension. “They’re bald, they’re very short, they wear white smock tops, and what they look like more than anything are the drawings of space aliens they sometimes have on the front pages of those tabloid newspapers they sell in the Red Apple. You haven’t seen anyone like that when you’ve been having one of these hyper-reality attacks?”
“No, no one.”
He banged a fist on his leg in frustration, thought for a moment, then looked up again. “Monday morning,” he said. “Before the cops showed up at Mrs. Locher’s… did you see me?”
Very slowly, Lois nodded her head. Her aura had darkened slightly, and spirals of scarlet, thin as threads, began to twist slowly up through it on a diagonal.
“I imagine you have a pretty good idea of who called the police, then,” Ralph said. “Don’t you?”
“Oh, I know it was you,” Lois said in a small voice. “I suspected before, but I wasn’t sure until just now. Until I saw it… you know, in your colors.”
In my colors, he thought. It was what Ed had called them, too.
“But you didn’t see two pint-sized versions of Mr. Clean come out of her house?”
“No,” she said, “but that doesn’t -mean anything. I can’t even see Mrs. Locher’s house from my bedroom window. The Red Apple’s roof is in the way.”
Ralph laced his hands together on top of his head. Of course it was, and he should have known it.
“The reason I thought you called the police is that just before I went to take a shower, I saw you looking at something through a pair of binoculars. I never saw you do that before, but I thought maybe you just wanted a better look at the stray dog who raids the garbage cans on Thursday mornings.” She pointed down the hill. “Him.” Ralph grinned. “That’s no him, that’s the gorgeous Rosalie.”
“Oh. Anyway, I was in the shower a long time, because there’s a special rinse I put in my hair. Not color,” she said sharply, as if he had accused her of this, “just proteins and things that are supposed to keep it looking a little thicker. When I came out, the police were flocking all around. I looked over your way once, but I couldn’t see you anymore. You’d either gone into a different room or kind of scrunched back in your chair. You do that, sometimes.”
Ralph shook his head as if to clear it. He hadn’t been in an empty theater on all those nights, after all; someone else had been there, too. They had just been in separate boxes.
“Lois, the fight Bill and I had wasn’t really about chess. It-” Down the hill, Rosalie voiced a rusty bark and began struggling to her feet.
Ralph looked in that direction and felt an icicle slip into his belly.
Although the two of them had been sitting here for going on half an hour and no one had even come near the comfort stations at the bottom of the hill, the pressed plastic door of the Portosan marked MEN was now slowly opening.
Doc #3 emerged from it. McGovern’s hat, the Panama with the crescent bitten in the brim, was cocked back on his head, making him look weirdly as McGovern had on the day Ralph had first seen him in his brown fedora-like an enquiring newshawk in a forties crime drama.
Upraised in one hand the bald stranger held the rusty scalpel.
CHAPTER 13
“Lois?” To Ralph’s own ears, his voice seemed to be an echo winding down a long, deep canyon. “Lois, do you see that?”
“I don’t-” Her voice broke off. “Did the wind blow that bathroom door open? It didn’t, did it? Is someone there? Is that why the dog’s making that racket?”
Rosalie backed slowly away from the bald man, her ragged ears laid back, her muzzle wrinkled to expose teeth so badly eroded that they were not much more menacing than hard rubber pegs. She uttered a cracked volley of barks, then began to whine desperately.
“Yes! Don’t you see him, Lois? Look! He’s right there.i”
Ralph got to his feet. Lois got up with him, shielding her eyes with one hand. She peered down the slope with desperate intensity, “I see a shimmer, that’s all. Like the air over an incinerator.”
“I told you to leave her alone.” Ralph shouted down the hill.
“Quit it! Get the hell out!”
The bald man looked in Ralph’s direction, but there was no surprise in the glance this time; it was casual, dismissive. He raised the middle finger of his right hand, flicked it at Ralph in the ancient salute, then bared his own teeth-much sharper and much more menacing than Rosalie’s-in a silent laugh.
Rosalie cringed as the little man in the dirty smock began to walk toward her again, then actually raised a paw and put it on her own head, a cartoonish gesture that should have been funny and was horribly expressive of her terror instead.
“What can’t I see, Ralph?” Lois moaned. “I see something, but-”
“Get AWAYfrom her.” Ralph shouted, and raised his hand in that karate-chop gesture again. The hand inside-the hand which earlier had produced that wedge of tight blue light-still felt like an unloaded gun, however, and this time the bald doc seemed to know it. He glanced in Ralph’s direction and offered a small, jeering wave.
[Aw, quit it, Shorts-sit back, shut up, and enjoy the show.] The creature at the foot of the hill returned his attention to Rosalie, who sat huddled at the base of an old pine. The tree was emitting a thin green fog from the cracks in its bark. The bald doctor bent over Rosalie, one hand outstretched in a gesture of solicitude that went very badly with the scalpel curled into his left fist.
Rosalie whined… then stretched her neck forward and humbly licked the bald creature’s palm.
Ralph looked down at his own hands, sensing something in them, not the power he’d had before, nothing like that, but something.
Suddenly there were snaps of clear white light dancing just above his nails. It was as if his fingers had been turned into sparkplugs.
Lois was grabbing frantically at him now. “What’s wrong with the dog? Ralph, what’s wrong with it?”
With no thought about what he was doing or why, Ralph put his hands over Lois’s eyes, like someone playing Guess Who with a loved one. His fingers flashed a momentary white so bright it was almost blinding. Must be the white they’re always talking about in the detergent commercials, he thought.
Lois screamed. Her hands flew to his wrists, clamped on them, then loosened. “My God, Ralph, what did you do to me?”
He took his hands away and saw a glowing figure-eight surrOLinding her eyes; it was as if she had just taken off a pair of goggles which had been dipped in confectioners’ sugar. The white began to dim almost as soon as his hands were gone… except…
It’s not dimming, he thought. It’s sinking in.
“Never mind,” he said, and pointed. “Look!”
The widening of her eyes told him what he needed to know.
Doc #3, completely unmoved by Rosalie’s desperate effort to make friends, shoved her muzzle aside with the hand holding the scalpel, He seized the old bandanna hanging around her neck in his other hand and yanked her head up. Rosalie howled miserably. Slobber ran back along the sides of her face. The bald man voiced a scabrous chuckle that made Ralph’s flesh crawl.
[“Hi! Leave off! Leave off teasing that dog.t'l The bald man’s head snapped around. The grin ran off his face and he snarled at Lois, sounding a little like a dog himself, [Yahh, go fuck Yourself, You fat old Short-Time cunt. Dog’s mine, just like I already told your limpdick boyfriend!] The bald man had let go of the blue bandanna when Lois shouted at him, and Rosalie was now cringing back against the pine again, her eyes rolling, curds of foam dripping from the sides of her muzzle.
Ralph had never seen such a completely terrified creature in his life.
“Run!” Ralph screamed. “Get away.', She seemed not to hear him, and after a moment Ralph realized she wasn’t hearing him, because Rosalie was no
