Insomnia (47 page)

Of course,
Ralph thought.
The same way this guy’s buddies walked through May Locher’s locked front door after they finished doing the same thing to her.

This idea was followed by a thought too simple and gruesomely logical not to be believed: not space-aliens, not little bald doctors, but Centurions. Ed Deepneau’s Centurions. They didn’t look like the Roman soldiers you saw in tin-pants epics like
Spartacus
and
Ben Hur,
true, but they
had
to be Centurions . . . didn’t they?

Sixteen or twenty feet above the ground, Rosalie’s balloon-string simply faded away to nothingness.

Ralph looked back down in time to see the bald dwarf pull the faded blue bandanna off over the dog’s head and then push her down at the base of the tree. Ralph looked at her more closely and felt all his flesh shrink closer to his bones. His dream of Carolyn recurred with cruel intensity, and he found himself struggling to bottle up a shriek of terror.

Ah, but it was hard not to, because the dream-bugs which had come spewing out of Carolyn’s head were now pouring from Rosalie’s nostrils in writhing black streams.

No, not bugs – just another kind of aura. Nightmarish black stuff, neither liquid nor gas, was pumping out of Rosalie with each exhaled breath. It did not float away but instead began to surround her in slow, nasty coils of anti-light. That blackness should have hidden her from view, but it didn’t. Ralph could see her pleading, terrified eyes as the darkness gathered around her head and then began to ooze down her back and sides and legs.

It was a deathbag, a
real
deathbag this time, and he was watching as Rosalie, her balloon-string now cut, wove it relentlessly about herself like a poisonous placental sac. This metaphor triggered the voice of Ed Deepneau inside his head, Ed saying that the Centurions were ripping babies from the wombs of their mothers and taking them away in covered trucks.

Ever wonder what was under most of those tarps?
Ed had asked.

Doc #3 stood grinning down at Rosalie. Then he united the knot in her bandanna and put it around his own neck, tying it in a big, loose knot, making it look like a bohemian artist’s necktie. This done, he looked up at Ralph and Lois with an expression of loathsome complacency.
There!
his look said.
I took care of my business after all, and there wasn’t a damned thing you could do about it, was there?

[
‘Do something, Ralph! Please do something! Make him stop!’
]

Too late for that, but maybe not too late to send him packing before he could enjoy the sight of Rosalie dropping dead at the foot of the tree. He was pretty sure Lois couldn’t produce a karate-chop of blue light as he had done, but maybe she could do something else.

He didn’t know why he was so sure of that, but suddenly he was. He grabbed Lois by the shoulders to make her look at him, then raised his right hand. He cocked his thumb and pointed his forefinger at the bald man. He looked like a small child playing cops and robbers.

Lois responded with a look of dismay and incomprehension. Ralph grabbed her hand and stripped off her glove.

[
‘You! You, Lois!’
]

She got the idea, raised her own hand, extended her forefinger, and made the child’s shooting gesture: Pow! Pow!

Two compact lozenge shapes, their gray-blue shade identical to Lois’s aura but much brighter, flew from the end of her finger and streaked down the hill.

Doc #3 screeched and leaped upward, fisted hands held at shoulder height, the heels of his black shoes clipping against his buttocks, as the first of these ‘bullets’ went under him. It struck the ground, rebounded like a flat stone skipped across the surface of a pond, and hit the Portosan marked
WOMEN
. For a moment the entire front of it glowed fiercely, as the window of the Buffy-Buffy had done.

The second blue-gray pellet clipped the baldy’s left hip and ricocheted up into the sky. He screamed – a high, chattery sound that seemed to twist like a worm in the middle of Ralph’s head. Ralph raised his hands to his ears even though it could do no good, and saw Lois doing the same thing. He felt sure that if that scream went on for long, it would burst his head open just as surely as high C shatters fine crystal.

Doc #3 fell to the needle-carpeted ground beside Rosalie and rolled back and forth, howling and holding his hip the way a small child will hold the place he banged when he tumbled off his tricycle. After a few moments of this, his cries began to diminish and he scrambled to his feet. His eyes blazed at them from below the white expanse of his brow. Bill’s Panama was tilted far back on his head now, and the left side of his smock was black and smoking.

[
I’ll get you! I’ll get you both! Goddam interfering Short-Time fucks!
I
’
LL GET YOU BOTH
!
]

He whirled and bounded down the path which led to the playground and the tennis courts, running in big flying leaps like an astronaut on the moon. Lois’s shot didn’t appear to have done any real damage, judging by his speed afoot.

Lois seized Ralph’s shoulder and shook him. As she did, the auras began to fade again.

[
‘The children! It’s going toward the chi
      ]

She was fading out, and that seemed to make perfect sense, because he suddenly saw that Lois wasn’t really talking at all, only staring at him fixedly with her dark eyes as she clutched his shoulder.

‘I can’t hear you!’ he yelled. ‘Lois, I can’t hear you!’

‘What’s wrong, are you deaf? It’s going toward the playground! Toward the children!
We can’t let it hurt the children!
’

Ralph let out a deep, shuddering sigh. ‘It won’t.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I don’t know. I just am.’

‘I shot it.’ She turned her finger toward her face, for a moment looking like a woman who mimes suicide. ‘I shot it with my finger.’

‘Uh-huh. It stung him, too. Hard, from the way he looked.’

‘I can’t see the colors anymore, Ralph.’

He nodded. ‘They come and go, like radio stations at night.’

‘I don’t know how I feel . . . I don’t even know how I
want
to feel!’ She wailed this last, and Ralph folded her into his arms. In spite of everything that was going on in his life right now, one fact registered very clearly: it was wonderful to be holding a woman again.

‘That’s okay,’ he told her, and pressed his face against the top of her head. Her hair smelled sweet, with none of the underlying murk of beauty-shop chemicals he’d gotten used to in Carolyn’s hair over the last ten or fifteen years of their life together. ‘Let go of it for now, okay?’

She looked at him. He could no longer see the faint mist drifting across her pupils, but felt sure it was still there. And besides, they were very pretty eyes even without the extra added attraction. ‘What’s it for, Ralph? Do you know what it’s
for
?’

He shook his head. His mind was whirling with jigsaw pieces – hats, docs, bugs, protest signs, dolls that exploded in splatters of fake blood – that would not fit together. And for the time being, at least, the thing that seemed to recur with the most resonance was Old Dor’s nonsense saying:
Done-bun-can’t-be-undone
.

Ralph had an idea that was nothing but the truth.

A sad little whine came to his ears and Ralph looked down the hill. Rosalie was lying at the base of the big pine, trying to get up. Ralph could no longer see the black bag around her, but he was sure it was still there.

‘Oh Ralph, the poor thing! What can we do?’

There was nothing they could do. Ralph was sure of it. He took Lois’s right hand in both of his and waited for Rosalie to lie back and die.

Instead of that, she gave a whole-body lurch that sent her so strongly to her feet that she almost toppled over the other way. She stood still for a moment, her head held so low her muzzle was almost on the ground, and then sneezed three or four times. With that out of the way, she shook herself and looked up at Ralph and Lois. She yapped at them once, a short, brisk sound. To Ralph it sounded as if she were telling them to quit worrying. Then she turned and made off through a little grove of pine trees toward the park’s lower entrance. Before Ralph lost sight of her, she had achieved the limping yet insouciant trot which was her trademark. The bum leg was no better than it had been before Doc #3’s interference, but it seemed no worse. Clearly old but seemingly a long way from dead (
Just like the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks,
Ralph thought), she disappeared into the trees.

‘I thought that thing was going to kill her,’ Lois said. ‘In fact, I thought it
had
killed her.’

‘Me too,’ Ralph said.

‘Ralph, did all that really happen? It did, didn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘The balloon-strings . . . do you think they’re lifelines?’

He nodded slowly. ‘Yes. Like umbilical cords. And Rosalie . . .’

He thought back to his first real experience with the auras, of how he’d stood outside the Rite Aid with his back to the blue mailbox and his jaw hanging down almost to his breastbone. Of the sixty or seventy people he had observed before the auras faded again, only a few had been walking inside the dark envelopes he now thought of as deathbags, and the one Rosalie had knitted around herself just now had been blacker by far than any he had seen that day. Still, those people in the parking lot whose auras had been dingy-dark had invariably looked unwell . . . like Rosalie, whose aura had been the color of old sweatsocks even before Baldy #3 started messing with her.

Maybe he just hurried up what may otherwise be a perfectly natural process,
he thought.

‘Ralph?’ Lois asked. ‘What about Rosalie?’

‘I think my old friend Rosalie is living on borrowed time now,’ Ralph said.

Lois considered this, looking down the hill and into the sun-dusty grove where Rosalie had disappeared. At last she turned to Ralph again. ‘That midget with the scalpel was one of the men you saw coming out of May Locher’s house, wasn’t he?’

‘No. Those were two other ones.’

‘Have you seen more?’

‘No.’

‘Do you think there
are
more?’

‘I don’t know.’

He had an idea that next she’d ask if Ralph had noticed that the creature had been wearing Bill’s Panama, but she didn’t. Ralph supposed it was possible she hadn’t recognized it. Too much weirdness swirling around, and besides, there hadn’t been a chunk bitten out of the brim the last time she’d seen Bill wearing it.
Retired history teachers just aren’t the hat-biting type,
he reflected, and grinned.

‘This has been quite a morning, Ralph.’ Lois met his gaze frankly, eye to eye. ‘I think we need to talk about this, don’t you? I really need to know what’s going on.’

Ralph remembered this morning – a thousand years ago, now – walking back down the street from the picnic area, running over his short list of acquaintances, trying to decide whom he should talk to. He had crossed Lois off that mental list on the grounds that she might gossip to her girlfriends, and he was now embarrassed by that facile judgement, which had been based more on McGovern’s picture of Lois than on his own. It turned out that the only person Lois had spoken to about the auras before today was the one person she should have been able to trust to keep her secret.

He nodded at her. ‘You’re right. We need to talk.’

‘Would you like to come back to my house for a little late lunch? I make a pretty mean stir-fry for an old gal who can’t keep track of her earrings.’

‘I’d love to. I’ll tell you what I know, but it’s going to take awhile. When I talked to Bill this morning, I gave him the
Reader’s Digest
version.’

‘So,’ Lois said. ‘The fight was about chess, was it?’

‘Well, maybe not,’ Ralph said, smiling down at his hands. ‘Maybe it was actually more like the fight you had with your son and your daughter-in-law. And I didn’t even tell him the craziest parts.’

‘But you’ll tell me?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and started to get up. ‘I’ll bet you’re a hell of a good cook, too. In fact—’ He stopped suddenly and clapped one hand to his chest. He sat back down on the bench, heavily, his eyes wide and his mouth ajar.

‘Ralph? Are you all right?’

Her alarmed voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. In his mind’s eye he was seeing Baldy #3 again, standing between the Buffy-Buffy and the apartment house next door. Baldy #3 trying to get Rosalie to cross Harris Avenue so he could cut her balloon-string. He’d failed then, but he’d gotten the job done

(
I was gonna play with her!
)

before the morning was out.

‘Ralph? What’s wrong?’

He saw the dwarf snatching a bite from the brim of the Panama and then clapping it back on his head. Heard him saying he guessed he would have to play with Ralph instead.