of icicles; this time of how they fell in a neat row when you ran your gloved hand along the underside of an eave after a warm winter day. They disappeared before they hit the linoleum.
He glanced around. Nothing in the room glowed, shimmered, or vibrated. The auras were gone again. He began to let out a sigh of relief and then, from outside on Harris Avenue, a car backfired.
In the empty second-floor apartment, Ralph Roberts screamed.
He didn’t want any more tea, but he was still thirsty. He found half a Diet Pepsi-flat but wet-in the back of the fridge, poured it into a plastic cup with a faded Red Apple logo on it, and took it outside.
He could no longer stand to be in the apartment, which seemed to n smell of unhappy wakefulness. Especially not after what had happened with the phone.
The day had become even more beautiful, if that was possible; a strong, mild wind had developed, rolling bands of light and shadow, across the west side of Derry and combing the leaves from the trees.
These the wind sent hurrying along the sidewalks in rattling dervishes of orange and yellow and red.
Ralph turned left not because he had any conscious desire to revisit the picnic area up by the airport but only because he wanted the wind at his back. Nevertheless, he found himself entering the little clearing again some ten minutes later. This time it was empty, and he wasn’t surprised. There was no edge in the wind that ha’d sprung up, nothing to make old men and women scurry indoors, but it was hard work keeping cards on the table or chess-pieces on the board when the puckish wind kept trying to snatch them away.
As Ralph approached the small trestle table where Faye Chapin usually held court, he was not exactly surprised to see a note held down by a rock, and he had a good idea what the subject would be even before he put down his plastic Red Apple cup and picked it up.
Two walks,-two sightings of the bald doc with the scalpel,-two old people suffering insomnia and seeing brightly colored visions,-two notes. It’s like Noah leading the animals onto the ark, not one by one, but in pairs… and is another hard rain going to fall?
Well, what do you think, old man?
He didn’t know what he thought… but Bill’s note had been a kind of obituary-in-progress, and he had absolutely no doubt that Faye’s was the same thing. That sense of being carried forward, effortlessly and without hesitation, was simply too strong to doubt; it was like awakening on some alien stage to find oneself speaking lines (or stumbling through them, anyway) in a drama for which one could not remember having rehearsed, or seeing a coherent shape in -,,hat had up until then looked like complete nonsense, or discovering…
Discovering what?
“Another secret city, that’s what,” he murmured. “The Derry or Auras.” Then he bent over Faye’s note and read it while the wind played prankishly with his thinning hair.
Those of you who want to pay your final respects to jimmy Va dermeer are advised to do so by tomorrow at the very latest. Father Coughlin came by this noon and told me the poor old guy is sinking fast. He CAN have visitors, tho. He is in Derry Home I.C.U Room 315.
Fetu’p.
P.S. Remember that time is short.
Ralph read the note twice, put it back on the table with the rock on top to weight it down for the next Old Crock to happen along, then simply stood there with his hands in his pockets and his head down, gazing out at Runway 3 from beneath the bushy tangle of his brows, A crisp leaf, orange as one of the Halloween pumpkins which would soon decorate the street, came flipping down from the deep blue sky and landed in his sparse hair. Ralph brushed it away absently and thought of two hospital rooms on Home’s I.C.U. floor, two rooms side by side.
Bob Polhurst in one, jimmy V. in the other.
And the next room up the hall? That one was 317, the room in which his wife had died.” he said softly.
“This is not a coincidence, But what was it? Shapes in the mist?
A secret city? Evocative phrases, both of them, but they answered no questions.
Ralph sat on top of the picnic table next to the one upon which Faye had left his note, took off his shoes, and crossed his legs.
The wind gusted, ruffling his hair. He sat there amid the falling leaves with his head slightly bent and his brow furrowed in thought.
He looked like a Winslow Homer version of Buddha as he meditated with his hands cupping his kneecaps, carefully reviewing his impressions of Doc #1 and Doc #2… and then contrasting these impressions with those he’d gotten of Doc #3.
First impression: all three docs had reminded him of the aliens tabloids like Inside Viezv, and pictures which were always labelled artist’s conceptions.” Ralph knew that these bald-headed, dark-eyed images of mysterious visitors from space went back a good many years; people had been reporting contacts with short baldies-the so-called little doctors-for a long time, maybe for as long as people had been reporting UFOS. He was quite sure that he had read at least one such account way back in the sixties.
“Okay, so say there are quite a few of these fellows around,” Ralph told a sparrow which had just lit on the picnic area’s litter barrel.
“Not just three docs but three hundred. Or three thousand. Lois and I aren’t the only ones who’ve seen them. And.
And didn’t most of the people who gave accounts of such meetings also mention sharp objects?
Yes, but not scissors or scalpels-at least Ralph didn’t think So.
Most of the people who claimed to have been abducted by the little bald doctors talked about probes, didn’t they?
The sparrow flew off. Ralph didn’t notice. He was thinking about the little bald docs who had visited May Locher on the night of her death. What else did he know of them? What else had he seen. They had been dressed in white smocks, like the ones worn by TV show doctors in the fifties and sixties, like the ones pharmacists still wore. Only their smocks, unlike the one worn by Doc #3, had been clean. #3 had been toting a rusty scalpel; if there had been any rust on the scissors Doc #1 had been holding in his right hand, Ralph hadn’t noticed it.
Not even after he’d trained the binoculars on them.
Something else-probably not important, but at least you noticed it. Scissors-Toting Doc was right-handed, at least judging from the way he held his weapon. Scalpel-Wielding Doc is a southpaw.
No, probably not important, but something about it-another of those shapes in the mist, this a small one-tugged at him just the same.
Something about the dichotomy of left and right.
“Go to the left and you’ll be right,” Ralph muttered, repeating the punchline of some joke he no longer even remembered. “Go to the right and you’ll be left.”
Never mind. What else did he know about the docs?
Well, they had been surrounded by auras, of course-rather lovely greenish-gold ones-and they had left those (white-man tracks) Arthur Murray dance- diagrams behind them. And although their features had struck him as perfectly anonymous, their auras had conveyed feelings of power… and sobriety… and…And dignity, goddammit,” Ralph said.
The wind gusted again and more leaves blew down from the trees.
Some fifty yards from the picnic area, not far from the old train tracks, a twisted, halfuprooted tree seemed to reach in Ralph’s direction, stretching branches that actually did look a little like clutching hands.
It suddenly occurred to Ralph that he had seen quite a lot that night for an old guy who was supposed to be living on the edge of the last age of man, the one Shakespeare (and Bill McGovern) called “the slippered pantaloon.” And none of it-not one single thingsuggested danger or evil intent. That Ralph had inferred evil intent wasn’t very surprising. They were physically freakish strangers; he had observed them coming out of a sick woman’s house at a time of night when visitors seldom if ever called; he had seen them only minutes after waking from a nightmare of epic proportions.
Now, however, recollecting what he had seen, other things occurred. The way they had stood on Mrs. Locher’s stoop, for instance, as if they had every right to be there; the sense he had gotten of two old friends indulging themselves in a bit of conversation before going on their way. Two old buddies talking it over one more time before heading home after a long night’s work.
That was your impression, yes, but that doesn’t mean -you can trust it, Ralph.
But Ralph thought he could trust it. Old friends, long-time colleagues, done for the night, May Locher’s had been their last stop.
All right, so Docs #1 and #2 were as different from the third one as day is from night. They were clean while he was dirty, they were invested with auras while he had none (none that Ralph had seen, at least), they carried scissors while he carried a scalpel, they seemed as sane and sober as a couple of respected village elders V,while #3 seemed as crazy as a shithouse rat.
One thing is perfectly clear, though, isn’t it? Your playmates are supernatural beings, and other than Lois, the only person who seems to know they’re there is Ed Deepneau. Want to bet on how much sleep Ed is getting just lately?
“No,” Ralph said. He raised his hands from his knees and held them in front of his eyes. They were shaking a little. Ed had mentioned bald docs, and there were bald docs. Was it the docs he’d been talking about when he talked about Centurions? Ralph didn’t know.
He almost hoped so, because that word-Centurions-had begun to call up a much more terrible image in his mind each tillie it occurred to him: the Ringwraiths from Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy.
Hooded figures astride skeletal, red-eyed horses, bearing down on It small party of cowering hobbits outside the Prancing Pony Tavern in Bree.
Thinking of hobbits made him think of Lois, and the trembling in his hands grew worse.
Carolyn: it’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don’t siveat il-,e si;,i(.” l staff.
Lois: In my ramiio d),lying at eighty I’s ’sing young.
Joe Wyzer: The medical examiner usually ends up on the cause-of-death line rather than insomnia. Bill: His specialty was the Civil War, and now he doesn’t even know that a civil war was, let alone who won ours.
Denise Polhurst: Death is very stupid. An obstetrician this slow in cutting a baby’s umbilical cordIt was as if someone had suddenly clicked on a bright searchlight inside his head, and Ralph cried out into the sunny autumn afternoon. Not even the Delta 727 settling in for a landing on Runway 3 could entirely drown that cry.
He spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the porch of the house he shared with McGovern, waiting impatiently for Lois to come back from her card- game. He could have tried McGovern again at the hospital, but didn’t. The need to speak to McGovern had passed.
Ralph didn’t understand everything yet, but he thought he understood a great deal more than he had, and if his sudden flash of insight at the picnic area had any validity at all, telling McGovern what had happened to his Panama would serve absolutely no purpose even if Bill believed him.
I have to get the hat back, Ralph thought. And I have to get Lois’s earrings back, too.
It was an amazing late afternoon and early evening. On the one hand, nothing happened. On the other hand, everything happened.
The world of auras came and went around him like the stately progression of cloud-shadows across the west side. Ralph sat and noting suicide watched,
