Insomnia (32 page)

He sensed nothing frightening about the two figures on May Locher’s stoop other than the long, sharp-looking 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 space-travellers 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.

No, of course he wasn’t. 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 Locher’s doorstep.

‘Fuck you!’ Ralph said in a hoarse, low voice. He rose from the wing-chair, 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!
’

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 apartment’s 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 closet’s 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 M&M’s – her secret snack-food, her comfort-food. 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 knife-prick 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 wouldn’t 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 didn’t stop the athletics soon, but . . .

I’m sure they’re up here somewhere . . . well . . .
almost
sure . . .

He pushed aside his old fly-box 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 M&M’s 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 didn’t 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 heel-less 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 Zeiss-Ikon 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 couldn’t reach all the way into the corner where the binocular case stood, so he grabbed the trout-net which had been lying up here next to his creel and fly-box 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 face-first 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 knife-wound again after all. Wonderful. Just a wonderful night
chez
Roberts . . . and how long had he been away from the window? He didn’t 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 wasn’t 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, that’s 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 Locher’s 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. Ralph’s 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, long-past-midnight 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 blue-collar 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 can’t 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. Ralph’s 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 companion’s shoulder. Then they both turned away, leaving Ralph with nothing to look at but their bald heads and smooth, white-clad 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 wasn’t 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 line-free 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.
That’s what’s really bothering me, I think. Not the identical bald heads, the identical white smocks, or even the lack of wrinkles. It’s how they look sketched – the eyes just circles, the small pink ears just squiggles made with a felt-tip pen, the mouths a pair of quick, almost careless strokes of pale pink watercolor. They don’t really look like
either
people or aliens; they look like hasty representations of . . . well, of I don’t 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 green-gold and filled with deep reddish-orange 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 answer popped into Ralph’s 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 balloon-string 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 Locher’s house, Ralph dropped the angle of the binoculars so they picked up the item in Doc #1’s right hand. It wasn’t a knife, as he had surmised, but it still wasn’t 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 long-bladed, stainless-steel scissors.

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 didn’t 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 ice-cream 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 Ralph’s panic now. His heartbeat began to slow, and that feeling that he needed to scream began to pass.