Insomnia (27 page)

Ralph
did
remember something, but he was damned if he knew exactly what. Nor did he care. He was tired, and he had already had to listen to a fair amount of tiresome proselytizing on the subject of Susan Day from Ham Davenport. He had no urge to go round and round with Dorrance Marstellar on top of that, no matter how beautiful this Saturday morning was. ‘Well then, just give me the message,’ he said, ‘and I’ll toddle along upstairs – how would that be?’

‘Oh, sure, good, fine.’ But then Dorrance stopped, looking across the street as a fresh gust of wind sent a funnel of leaves storming into the bright October sky. His faded eyes were wide, and something in them made Ralph think of the Exalted & Revered Baby again – of the way she had snatched at the gray-blue marks left by his fingers, and the way she had looked at the flowers sizzling in the vase by the sink. Ralph had seen Dor stand watching airplanes take off and land on Runway 3 with that same slack-jawed expression, sometimes for an hour or more.

‘Dor?’ he prompted.

Dorrance’s sparse eyelashes fluttered. ‘Oh! Right! The message! The message is . . .’ He frowned slightly and looked down at the book which he was now bending back and forth in his hands. Then his face cleared and he looked up at Ralph again. ‘The message is,“Cancel the appointment.”’

It was Ralph’s turn to frown. ‘What appointment?’

‘You shouldn’t have messed in,’ Dorrance repeated, then heaved a big sigh. ‘But it’s too late now. Done-bun-can’t-be-undone. Just cancel the appointment. Don’t let that fellow stick any pins in you.’

Ralph had been turning to the porch steps; now he turned back to Dorrance. ‘Hong? Are you talking about
Hong?
’

‘How would I know?’ Dorrance asked in an irritated tone of voice. ‘I don’t mess in, I told you that. Every now and then I carry a message, is all, like now. I was supposed to tell you to cancel the appointment with the pin-sticker man, and I done it. The rest is up to you.’

Dorrance was looking up at the trees across the street again, his odd, lineless face wearing an expression of mild exaltation. The strong fall wind rippled his hair like seaweed. When Ralph touched his shoulder the old man turned to him willingly enough, and Ralph suddenly realized that what Faye Chapin and the others saw as foolishness might actually be joy. If so, the mistake probably said more about them than it did about Old Dor.

‘Dorrance?’

‘What, Ralph?’

‘This message – who gave it to you?’

Dorrance thought it over – or perhaps only appeared to think it over – and then held out his copy of
Cemetery Nights
. ‘Take it.’

‘No, I’ll pass,’ Ralph said. ‘I’m not much on poetry, Dor.’

‘You’ll like these. They’re like stories—’

Ralph restrained a strong urge to reach out and shake the old man until his bones rattled like castanets. ‘I just picked up a couple oat operas downtown, at Back Pages. What I want to know is who gave you the message about—’

Dorrance thrust the book of poems into Ralph’s right hand – the one not holding the Westerns – with surprising force. ‘One of them starts, “Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else.”’

And before Ralph could say another word, Old Dor cut across the lawn to the sidewalk. He turned left and started toward the Extension with his face turned dreamily up to the blue sky where the leaves flew wildly, as if to some rendezvous over the horizon.

‘Dorrance!’ Ralph shouted, suddenly infuriated. Across the street at the Red Apple, Sue was sweeping fallen leaves off the hot-top in front of the door. At the sound of Ralph’s voice she stopped and looked curiously over at him. Feeling stupid – feeling
old
– Ralph manufactured what he hoped looked like a big, cheerful grin and waved to her. Sue waved back and resumed her sweeping. Dorrance, meanwhile, had continued serenely on his way. He was now almost half a block up the street.

Ralph decided to let him go.

He climbed the steps to the porch, switching the book Dorrance had given him to his left hand so he could grope for his key-ring, and then saw he didn’t have to bother – the door was not only unlocked but standing ajar. Ralph had scolded McGovern repeatedly for his carelessness about locking the front door, and had thought he was finally having some success in getting the message through his downstairs tenant’s thick skull. Now, however, it seemed that McGovern had backslid.

‘Dammit, Bill,’ he said under his breath, pushing his way into the shadowy lower hall and looking nervously up the stairs. It was all too easy to imagine Ed Deepneau lurking up there, broad daylight or not. Still, he could not stay here in the foyer all day. He turned the thumb-bolt on the front door and started up the stairs.

There was nothing to worry about, of course. He had one bad moment when he thought he saw someone standing in the far corner of the living room, but it was only his own old gray jacket. He had actually hung it on the coat-tree for a change instead of just slinging it onto a chair or draping it over the arm of the sofa; no wonder it had given him a turn.

He went into the kitchen and, with his hands poked into his back pockets, stood looking at the calendar. Monday was circled, and within the circle he had scrawled
HONG
– 10:00.

For a moment Ralph felt himself step back from his life so he was able to look at the latest section of the mural it made instead of just the detail which was this day. What he saw frightened him: an unknown road heading into a lightless tunnel where anything might be waiting. Anything at all.

But he had an idea he couldn’t do that. He had an idea he was for the tunnel, whether he wanted to go in there or not. The feeling was not one of being led so much as it was one of being shoved forward by powerful, invisible hands.

‘Never mind,’ he muttered, rubbing his temples nervously with the tips of his fingers and still looking at the circled date – two days from now – on the calendar. ‘It’s the insomnia. That’s when things really started to . . .’

Really started to
what
?

‘To get weird,’ he told the empty apartment. ‘That’s when things started to get really weird.’

Yes, weird. Lots of weird things, but the auras he was seeing were clearly the weirdest of them all. Cold gray light – it had looked like living frost – creeping over the man reading the paper in Day Break, Sun Down. The mother and son walking toward the supermarket, their entwined auras rising from their clasped hands like a pigtail. Helen and Nat buried in gorgeous clouds of ivory light; Natalie snatching at the marks left by his moving fingers, ghostly contrails which only she and Ralph had been able to see.

And now Old Dor, turning up on his doorstep like some peculiar Old Testament prophet . . . only instead of telling him to repent, Dor had told him to cancel his appointment with the acupuncturist Joe Wyzer had recommended. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

The mouth of that tunnel. Looming closer every day.
Was
there really a tunnel? And if so, where did it lead?

I’m more interested in what might be waiting for me in there,
Ralph thought.
Waiting in the dark
.

You shouldn’t have messed in,
Dorrance had said.
Anyway, it’s too late now
.

‘Done-bun-can’t-be-undone,’ Ralph murmured, and suddenly decided he didn’t want to take the wide view anymore; it was unsettling. Better to move in close again and consider things a detail at a time, beginning with his appointment for acupuncture treatment. Was he going to keep it, or follow the advice of Old Dor, alias the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father?

It really wasn’t a question that needed much thought, Ralph decided. Joe Wyzer had sweet-talked Hong’s secretary into finding him an appointment in early October, and Ralph intended to keep it. If there was a path out of this thicket, starting to sleep through the night was probably it. And that made Hong the next logical step.

‘Done-bun-can’t-be-undone,’ he repeated, and went into the living room to read one of his Westerns.

Instead he found himself paging through the book of poetry Dorrance had given him –
Cemetery Nights,
by Stephen Dobyns. Dorrance had been right on both counts: the majority of the poems
were
like stories, and Ralph discovered that he liked them just fine. The poem from which Old Dor had quoted was called ‘Pursuit’, and it began:

Ralph read the poem twice, completely absorbed, thinking he would have to read it to Carolyn. Carolyn would like it, which was good, and she would like him (who usually stuck to Westerns and historical novels) even more for finding it and bringing it to her like a bouquet of flowers. He was actually getting up to find a scrap of paper he could mark the page with when he remembered that Carolyn had been dead for half a year now and burst into tears. He sat in the wing-chair for almost fifteen minutes, holding
Cemetery Nights
in his lap and wiping at his eyes with the heel of his left hand. At last he went into the bedroom, lay down, and tried to sleep. After an hour of staring at the ceiling, he got up, made himself a cup of coffee, and found a college football game on TV.

The Public Library was open on Sunday afternoons from one until six, and on the day after Dorrance’s visit, Ralph went down there, mostly because he had nothing better to do. The high-ceilinged reading room would ordinarily have contained a scattering of other old men like himself, most of them leafing through the various Sunday papers they now had time to read, but when Ralph emerged from the stacks where he had spent forty minutes browsing, he discovered he had the whole room to himself. Yesterday’s gorgeous blue skies had been replaced by driving rain that pasted the new-fallen leaves to the sidewalks or sent them flooding down the gutters and into Derry’s peculiar and unpleasantly tangled system of storm-drains. The wind was still blowing, but it had shifted into the north and now had a nasty cutting edge. Old folks with any sense (or any luck) were at home where it was warm, possibly watching the last game of another dismal Red Sox season, possibly playing Old Maid or Candyland with the grandkids, possibly napping off a big chicken dinner.

Ralph, on the other hand, did not care for the Red Sox, had no children or grandchildren, and seemed to have completely lost any capacity for napping he might once have had. So he had taken the one o’clock Green Route bus down to the library, and here he was, wishing he had worn something heavier than his old scuffed gray jacket – the reading room was chilly. Gloomy, as well. The fireplace was empty, and the clankless radiators strongly suggested that the furnace had yet to be fired up. The Sunday librarian hadn’t bothered flipping the switches that turned on the hanging overhead globes, either. The light which did manage to find its way in here seemed to fall dead on the floor, and the corners were full of shadows. The loggers and soldiers and drummers and Indians in the old paintings on the walls looked like malevolent ghosts. Cold rain sighed and gusted against the windows.

I should have stayed home,
Ralph thought, but didn’t really believe it; these days the apartment was even worse. Besides, he had found an interesting new book in what he had come to think of as the Mr Sandman Section of the stacks:
Patterns of Dreaming,
by James A. Hall, MD. He turned on the overheads, rendering the room marginally less gruesome, sat down at one of the four long, empty tables, and was soon absorbed in his reading.

Prior to the realization that REM sleep and NREM sleep were distinct states
[Hall wrote]
, studies concerned with total deprivation of a particular stage of sleep led to Dement’s suggestion (1960) that deprivation . . . causes disorganization of the waking personality . . .

Boy, you got
that
right, my friend,
Ralph thought.
Can’t even find a fucking Cup-A-Soup packet when you want one.

Ralph hunched over the book, elbows on the table, fisted hands pressed against his temples, forehead lined and eyebrows drawn together in a clench of concentration. He wondered if Hall could be talking about the auras, maybe without even knowing it. Except he was still
having
dreams, dammit – very vivid ones, for the most part. Just last night he’d had one in which he was dancing at the old Derry Pavilion (gone now; destroyed in the big storm which had wiped out most of the downtown area eight years before) with Lois Chasse. He seemed to have taken her out with the intention of proposing to her, but Trigger Vachon, of all people, had kept trying to cut in.

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, tried to focus his attention, and began to read again. He did not see the man in the baggy gray sweatshirt materialize in the doorway of the reading room and stand there, silently watching him. After about three minutes of this, the man reached beneath the sweatshirt (Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy was on the front, wearing his Joe Cool glasses) and produced a hunting knife from the scabbard on his belt. The hanging overhead globes threw a thread of light along the knife’s serrated blade as the man turned it this way and that, admiring the edge. Then he moved forward toward the table where Ralph was sitting with his head propped on his hands. He sat down beside Ralph, who noticed that someone was there only in the faintest, most distant way.