Insomnia (28 page)

A hand closed lightly on Ralph’s shoulder, startling him out of the book.

‘I wonder what they’ll look like?’ an ecstatic voice whispered in his ear, the words flowing on a tide of what smelled like spoiled bacon cooking slowly in a bath of garlic and rancid butter. ‘Your guts, I mean. I wonder what they’ll look like when I let them out all over the floor. What do you think, you Godless baby-killing Centurion? Do you think they’ll be yellow or black or red or what?’

Something hard and sharp pressed into Ralph’s left side and then slowly traced its way down along his ribs.

‘I can’t wait to find out,’ the ecstatic voice whispered. ‘I can’t
wait
.’

Ralph turned his head very slowly, hearing the tendons in his neck creak. He didn’t know the name of the man with the bad breath – the man who was sticking something that felt too much like a knife not to be one into his side – but he recognized him at once. The hornrimmed glasses helped, but the zany gray hair, standing up in clumps that reminded Ralph simultaneously of Don King and Albert Einstein, was the clincher. It was the man who had been standing with Ed Deepneau in the background of the newspaper photo that had showed Ham Davenport with his fist raised and Dan Dalton wearing Davenport’s
CHOICE, NOT FEAR
sign for a hat. Ralph thought he had seen this same guy in some of the TV news stories about the continuing abortion demonstrations. Just another sign-waving, chanting face in the crowd; just another spear-carrier. Except it now seemed that this particular spear-carrier intended to kill him.

‘What do you think?’ the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt asked, still in that ecstatic whisper. The sound of his voice frightened Ralph more than the blade as it slid slowly up and then back down his leather jacket, seeming to map the vulnerable organs on the left side of his body: lung, heart, kidney, intestines. ‘What color?’

His breath was nauseating, but Ralph was afraid to pull back or turn his head, afraid that any gesture might cause the knife to stop tracking and plunge. Now it was moving back up his side again. Behind the thick lenses of his hornrims, the man’s brown eyes floated like strange fish. The expression in them was disconnected and oddly frightened, Ralph thought. The eyes of a man who would see signs in the sky and perhaps hear voices whispering from deep in the closet late at night.

‘I don’t know,’ Ralph said. ‘I don’t know why you’d want to hurt me in the first place.’ He shot his eyes quickly around, still not moving his head, hoping to see someone, anyone, but the reading room remained empty. Outside, the wind gusted and rain racketed against the windows.

‘Because you’re a fucking
Centurion
!’ the gray-haired man spat. ‘A fucking
baby-killer
! Stealing the
fetal unborn
! Selling them to the
highest bidder
! I know all about you!’

Ralph dropped his right hand slowly from the side of his head. He was right-handed, and all the stuff he happened to pick up in the course of the day generally went into the handiest righthand pocket of whatever he was wearing. The old gray jacket had big flap pockets, but he was afraid that even if he could sneak his hand in there unnoticed, the most lethal thing he would find was apt to be a crumpled-up Dentyne wrapper. He doubted that he even had a nail-clipper.

‘Ed Deepneau told you that, didn’t he?’ Ralph asked, then grunted as the knife poked painfully into his side just below the place where his ribs stopped.

‘Don’t speak his name,’ the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt whispered. ‘Don’t you even speak his
name
! Stealer of infants! Cowardly murderer!
Centurion!
’ He thrust forward with the blade again, and this time there was real pain as the tip punched through the leather jacket. Ralph didn’t think he was cut – yet, anyway – but he was quite sure the nut had already applied enough pressure to leave a nasty bruise. That was okay, though; if he got out of this with no more than a bruise, he would count himself lucky.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I won’t mention his name.’

‘Say you’re sorry!’ the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt hissed, prodding with the knife again. This time it went through Ralph’s shirt, and he felt the first warm trickle of blood down his side.
What’s under the point of the blade right now?
he wondered.
Liver? Gall bladder? What’s under there on the lefthand side?

He either couldn’t remember or didn’t want to. A picture had come into his mind, and it was trying to get in the way of any organized thought – a deer hung head-down from a set of scales outside some country store during hunting season. Glazed eyes, lolling tongue, and a dark slit up the belly where a man with a knife – a knife just like this one – had opened it up and yanked its works out, leaving just head, meat, and hide.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ralph said in a voice which was no longer steady. ‘I am, really.’

‘Yeah, right! You ought to be, but you aren’t! You
aren’t
!’

Another prod. A bright lance of pain. More wet heat trickling down his side. And suddenly the room was brighter, as if two or three of the camera crews which had been wandering around Derry since the abortion protests began had crowded in here and turned on the floods they mounted over their videocams. There were no cameras, of course; the lights had gone on inside of
him
.

He turned toward the man with the knife – the man who was actually pressing the blade into him now – and saw he was surrounded by a shifting green and black aura that made Ralph think of

(
swampfire
)

the dim phosphorescence he had sometimes seen in marshy woods after dark. Twisting through it were spiky brambles of purest black. He looked at his assailant’s aura with mounting dismay, hardly feeling the tip of the knife sink a sixteenth of an inch deeper into him. He was distantly aware that blood was puddling at the bottom of his shirt, along the line of his belt, but that was all.

He’s crazy, and he really does mean to kill me – it isn’t just talk. He’s not quite ready to do it yet, he hasn’t quite worked himself up to it, but he’s almost there. And if I try to run – if I try to move even an inch away from the knife he’s got in me – he’ll do it right away. I think he’s hoping I
will
decide to move . . . then he can tell himself I brought it on myself, that it was my own fault
.

‘You and your kind, oh boy,’ the man with the zany shock of gray hair was saying. ‘We know all about
you
.’

Ralph’s hand had reached the right pocket . . . and felt a largish something inside he didn’t recognize or remember putting there. Not that that meant much; when you could no longer remember if the last four digits of the cinema center phone number were 1317 or 1713, anything was possible.

‘You guys, oh boy!’ the man with the zany hair said. ‘Ohboy ohboy
oh
BOY
!’ This time Ralph had no trouble feeling the pain when the man pushed with the knife; the tip spread a thin red net all the way across the curve of his chest wall and up the nape of his neck. He uttered a low moan, and his right hand clamped tight on the gray jacket’s right-hand pocket, moulding the leather to the curved side of the object inside.

‘Don’t scream,’ the man with the zany hair said in that low, ecstatic whisper. ‘Oh jeepers jeezly crow, you don’t want to do
that
!’ His brown eyes peered at Ralph’s face, and the lenses of his glasses so magnified them that the tiny flakes of dandruff caught in his lashes looked almost as big as pebbles. Ralph could see the man’s aura even in his eyes – it went sliding across his pupils like green smoke across black water. The snakelike twists running through the green light were thicker now, twining together, and Ralph understood that when the knife sank all the way in, the part of this man’s personality which was generating those black swirls would be what pushed it. The green was confusion and paranoia; the black was something else. Something

(
from outside
)

much worse.

‘No,’ he gasped. ‘I won’t. I won’t scream.’

‘Good. I can feel your heart, you know. It’s coming right up the blade of the knife and into the palm of my hand. It must be beating really hard.’ The man’s mouth pulled up in a jerky, humorless smile. Flecks of spittle clung to the corners of his lips. ‘Maybe you’ll just keel over and die of a heart attack, save me the trouble of killing you.’ Another gust of that sickening breath washed over Ralph’s face. ‘You’re awful old.’

Blood was now running down his side in what felt like two streams, maybe even three. The pain of the knifepoint gouging into him was maddening – like the stinger of a gigantic bee.

Or a pin,
Ralph thought, and discovered that this idea was funny in spite of the fix he was in . . . or perhaps because of it. This was the
real
pin-sticker man; James Roy Hong could be only a pale imitation.

And I never had a chance to cancel this appointment,
Ralph thought. But then again, he had an idea that nuts like the guy in the Snoopy sweatshirt didn’t take cancellations. Nuts like this had their own agenda and they stuck to it, come hell or high water.

Whatever else might happen, Ralph knew he couldn’t stand that knife-tip boring into him much longer. He used his thumb to lift the flap of his coat pocket and slipped his hand inside. He knew what the object was the minute his fingertips touched it: the aerosol can Gretchen had taken out of her purse and put on his kitchen table.
A little present from all your grateful friends at WomanCare,
she had said.

Ralph had no idea how it had gotten from the top of the kitchen cabinet where he had put it into the pocket of his battered old fall jacket, and he didn’t care. His hand closed around it, and he used his thumb again, this time to pop off the can’s plastic top. He never took his eyes away from the twitching, frightened, exhilarated face of the man with the zany hair as he did this.

‘I know something,’ Ralph said. ‘If you promise not to kill me, I’ll tell you.’

‘What?’ the man with the zany hair asked. ‘Jeepers, what could a scum like
you
know?’

What
could
a scum like me know?
Ralph asked himself, and the answer came at once, popping into his mind like jackpot bars in the windows of a slot machine. He forced himself to lean into the green aura swirling around the man, into the terrible cloud of stink coming from his disturbed guts. At the same time he eased the small can from his pocket, held it against his thigh, and settled his index finger on the button which triggered the spray.

‘I know who the Crimson King is,’ he murmured.

The eyes widened behind the dirty hornrims – not just in surprise but in shock – and the man with the zany hair recoiled a little. For a moment the terrible pressure high on Ralph’s left side eased. It was his chance, the only one he was apt to have, and he took it, throwing himself to the right, falling off his chair and tumbling to the floor. The back of his head smacked the tiles, but the pain seemed distant and unimportant compared to the relief at the removal of the knife-point.

The man with the zany hair squawked – a sound of mingled rage and resignation, as if he had become used to such setbacks over his long and difficult life. He leaned over Ralph’s now-empty chair, his twitching face thrust forward, his eyes looking like the sort of fantastic, glowing creatures which live in the ocean’s deepest trenches. Ralph raised the spray-can and had just a moment to realize he hadn’t had time to check which direction the pinhole in the nozzle was pointing – he might very well succeed only in giving himself a faceful of Bodyguard.

No time to worry about that now.

He pressed the nozzle as the man with the zany hair thrust his knife forward. The man’s face was enveloped in a thin haze of droplets that looked like the stuff that came out of the pine-scented air-freshener Ralph kept on the bathroom toilet tank. The lenses of his glasses fogged over.

The result was immediate and all Ralph could have wished for. The man with the zany hair screamed in pain, dropped his knife (it landed on Ralph’s left knee and came to rest between his legs), and clutched at his face, pulling his glasses off. They landed on the table. At the same time the thin, somehow greasy aura around him flashed a brilliant red and then winked out – out of Ralph’s view, at least.

‘
I’m blind!
’ the man with the zany hair cried in a high, shrieky voice. ‘
I’m blind, I’m blind!
’

‘No, you’re not,’ Ralph said, getting shakily to his feet. ‘You’re just—’

The man with the zany hair screamed again and fell to the floor. He rolled back and forth on the black and white tiles with his hands over his face, howling like a child who has gotten his hand caught in a door. Ralph could see little pie-wedges of cheeks between his splayed fingers. The skin there was turning an alarming shade of red.

Ralph told himself to leave the guy alone, that he was crazy as a loon and dangerous as a rattlesnake, but he found himself too horrified and ashamed of what he had done to take this no doubt excellent advice. The idea that it had been a matter of survival, of disabling his assailant or dying, had already begun to seem unreal. He bent down and put a tentative hand on the man’s arm. The nut rolled away from him and began to drum his dirty low-top sneakers on the floor like a child having a tantrum. ‘
Oh you son of a bitch!
’ he was screaming. ‘
You shot me with something!
’ And then, incredibly: ‘
I’ll sue the pants off you!
’