Insomnia (54 page)

‘
You bastard!
’ Ralph bellowed, and slammed his fist against the wall beside the window in frustration.

Half a dozen people were running toward the scene of the accident, but there was nothing they could do; Rosalie would be dead before even the closest of them arrived at the place where she lay in the glare of the car’s headlights. The black aura was solidifying, becoming something which looked almost like soot-darkened brick. It encased her like a form-fitting shroud, and Wyzer’s hand disappeared up to the wrist every time it slipped through that terrible garment.

Now Doc #3 raised his hand with the forefinger sticking up and cocked his head – a teacherly pantomime so good that it almost said
Pay attention, please!
right out loud. He tiptoed forward – unnecessary, as he couldn’t be seen by the people out there, but good theater – and reached toward Joe Wyzer’s back pocket. He glanced around at Ralph and Lois, as if to ask them if they were still paying attention. Then he began to tiptoe forward again, reaching out with his left hand.

‘Stop him, Ralph,’ Lois moaned. ‘Oh please stop him.’

Slowly, like a man who has been drugged, Ralph raised his hand and then chopped it down. A blue wedge of light flew from his fingertips, but it diffused as it passed through the windowglass. A pastel fog spread out a little distance from Lois’s house and then disappeared. The bald doctor shook his finger in an infuriating pantomime –
Oh, you naughty boy,
it said.

Doc #3 reached out again, and plucked something from Wyzer’s back pocket as he knelt in the street, mourning the dog. Ralph couldn’t tell for sure what it was until the creature in the dirty smock swept McGovern’s hat from his head and pretended to use it on his own nonexistent hair. He had taken a black pocket-comb, the kind you could buy in any convenience store for a buck twenty-nine. Then he leaped into the air, clicking his heels like a malignant elf.

Rosalie had raised her head at the bald doctor’s approach. Now she lowered it back to the pavement and died. The aura surrounding her disappeared at once, not fading but simply winking out of existence like a soap-bubble. Wyzer got to his feet, turned to a man standing on the curb, and began to tell him what had happened, gesturing with his hands to indicate how the dog had run out in front of his car. Ralph found he could actually read a string of six words as they came off Wyzer’s lips:
seemed to come out of nowhere
.

And when Ralph shifted his gaze back down to the side of Wyzer’s car, he saw that was the place to which the little bald doctor had returned.

Ralph was able to get his rustbucket Oldsmobile started, but it still took him twenty minutes to get them across town to Derry Home on the east side. Carolyn had understood his increasing worries about his driving and had tried to be sympathetic, but she’d had an impatient, hurry-up streak in her nature, and the years had not mellowed it much. On trips longer than half a mile or so, she was almost always unable to keep from lapsing into reproof. She would stew in silence for awhile, thinking, then begin her critique. If she was particularly exasperated with their progress – or lack of it – she might ask him if he thought an enema would help him get the lead out of his ass. She was a sweetheart, but there had always been an edge to her tongue.

Following such remarks, Ralph would always offer – and always without rancor – to pull over and let her drive. Such offers Carol had always declined. Her belief was that, on short hops, at least, it was the husband’s job to drive and the wife’s to offer constructive criticism.

He kept waiting for Lois to comment on either his speed or his sloppy driving habits (he didn’t think he would be able to remember his blinkers with any consistency these days even if someone put a gun to his head), but she said nothing – only sat where Carolyn had sat on five thousand rides or more, holding her purse on her lap exactly as Carolyn had always held hers. Wedges of light – store neon, traffic signals, streetlights – ran like rainbows across Lois’s cheeks and brows. Her dark eyes were distant and thoughtful. She had cried after Rosalie died, cried hard, and made Ralph pull down the shade again.

Ralph almost hadn’t done that. His first impulse had been to bolt out into the street before Joe Wyzer could get away. To tell Joe he had to be very careful. To tell him that when he emptied his pants pockets tonight, he was going to be missing a cheap comb, no big deal, people were always losing combs, except this time it
was
a big deal, and next time it might be Rite Aid pharmacist Joe Wyzer lying at the end of the skid.
Listen to me, Joe, and listen closely. You have to be very careful, because there’s all sorts of news from the Hyper-Reality Zone, and in your case all of it comes inside black borders
.

There were problems with that, however. The biggest was that Joe Wyzer, sympathetic as he had been on the day he had gotten Ralph an appointment with the acupuncturist, would think Ralph was crazy. Besides, how did one defend oneself against a creature one couldn’t even see?

So he had pulled the shade . . . but before he did, he took one last hard look at the man who had told him he used to be Joe Wyze but was now older and Wyzer. The auras were still there, and he could see Wyzer’s balloon-string, a bright orange-yellow, rising intact from the top of his head. So he was still all right.

For now, at least.

Ralph had led Lois into the kitchen and poured her another cup of coffee – black, with lots of sugar.

‘He killed her, didn’t he?’ she asked as she raised the cup to her lips with both hands. ‘The little beast killed her.’

‘Yes. But I don’t think he did it tonight. I think he really did it this morning.’

‘Why?
Why?
’

‘Because he could,’ Ralph said grimly. ‘I think that’s the only reason he needs. Just because he could.’

Lois had given him a long, appraising look, and an expression of relief had slowly crept into her eyes. ‘You’ve figured it out, haven’t you? I should have known it the minute I saw you this evening. I
would
have known, if I hadn’t had so many other things rolling around in what passes for my mind.’

‘Figured it out? I’m miles from that, but I have had some ideas. Lois, do you feel up to a trip to Derry Home with me?’

‘I suppose so. Do you want to see Bill?’

‘I’m not sure exactly
who
I want to see. It
might
be Bill, but it might be Bill’s friend, Bob Polhurst. Maybe even Jimmy Vandermeer – do you know him?’

‘Jimmy V? Of
course
I know him! I knew his wife even better. In fact, she used to play poker with us until she died. It was a heart attack, and so sudden –’ She broke off suddenly, looking at Ralph with her dark Spanish eyes. ‘Jimmy’s in the hospital? Oh God, it’s the cancer, isn’t it? The cancer came back.’

‘Yes. He’s in the room right next to Bill’s friend.’ Ralph told her about the conversation he’d had with Faye that morning and the note he’d found on the picnic table that afternoon. He pointed out the odd conjunction of rooms and residents – Polhurst, Jimmy V, Carolyn – and asked Lois if she thought it was just a coincidence.

‘No. I’m sure it isn’t.’ She had glanced at the clock. ‘Come on – regular visiting hours over there finish at nine-thirty, I think. If we’re going to get there before then, we’d better wiggle.’

Now, as he turned onto Hospital Drive (
Forgot your damned turnblinker again, sweetheart,
Carolyn commented), he glanced at Lois – Lois sitting there with her hands clasped on her purse and her aura invisible for the time being – and asked if she was all right.

She nodded. ‘Yes. Not great, but okay. Don’t worry about me.’

But I do worry, Lois,
Ralph thought.
A lot. And by the way, did you see Doc #3 take the comb out of Joe Wyzer’s pocket?

That was a stupid question. Of course she’d seen. The bald midget had
wanted
her to see. Had wanted
both
of them to see. The real question was how much significance she had attached to it.

There was a low brick building about a quarter of a mile farther down the feeder road – WomanCare. A number of spotlights (new additions, he was quite sure) threw fans of illumination across its lawn, and Ralph could see two men walking back and forth at the end of grotesquely elongated shadows . . . rent-a-cops, he supposed. Another new wrinkle; another straw flying in an evil wind.

He turned left (this time remembering the blinker, at least) and eased the Olds carefully up the chute which led into the multilevel hospital parking garage. At the top, an orange barrier-arm blocked the way.
PLEASE STOP
&
TAKE TICKET
, read the sign next to it. Ralph could recall a time when there used to be actual people in places like this, rendering them a little less eerie.
Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end,
he thought as he unrolled his window and took a ticket from the automated dispenser.

‘Ralph?’

‘Hmmm?’ He was concentrating on avoiding the back bumpers of the cars slant-parked on both sides of the ascending aisles. He knew that the aisles were much too wide for the bumpers of those other cars to be an actual impediment to his progress –
intellectually
he knew it – but what his guts knew was something else.
How Carolyn would bitch and moan about the way I’m driving,
he thought with a certain distracted fondness.

‘
Do
you know what we’re doing here, or are we just winging it?’

‘Just another minute – let me get this damned thing parked.’

He passed several slots big enough for the Olds on the first level, but none with enough buffer-zone to make him feel comfortable. On the third level he found three spaces side by side (together they were big enough to hold a Sherman tank comfortably) and babied the Olds into the one in the middle. He killed the motor and turned to face Lois. Other engines idled above and below them, their locations impossible to pinpoint because of the echo. Orange light – that persistent, penetrating tone-glow now common to all such facilities as this, it seemed – lay upon their skins like thin toxic paint. Lois looked back at him steadily. He could see traces of the tears she had cried for Rosalie in her puffy, swollen lids, but the eyes themselves were calm and sure. He was struck by how much she had changed just since that morning, when he had found her sitting slump-shouldered on a park bench and weeping.
Lois,
he thought,
if your son and daughter-in-law could see you tonight, I think they might run away screaming at the top of their lungs. Not because you look scary, but because the woman they came to bulldoze into moving to Riverview Estates is gone
.

‘Well?’ she asked with just a hint of a smile. ‘Are you going to talk to me or just look at me?’

Ralph, ordinarily a cautious sort of man, recklessly said the first thing to come into his head. ‘What I’d
like
to do, I think, is eat you like ice-cream.’

Her smile deepened enough to make dimples at the corners of her mouth. ‘Maybe later we’ll see how much of an appetite for ice-cream you really have, Ralph. For now, just tell me why you brought me here. And don’t tell me you don’t know, because I think you do.’

Ralph closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and opened them again. ‘I guess we’re here to find the other two bald guys. The ones I saw coming out of May Locher’s. If anyone can explain what’s going on, it’ll be them.’

‘What makes you think you’ll find them here?’

‘I think they’ve got work to do . . . two men, Jimmy V and Bill’s friend, dying side by side. I should have known what the bald doctors are – what they
do
– from the minute I saw the ambulance guys bring Mrs Locher out strapped to a stretcher and with a sheet over her face. I
would
have known, if I hadn’t been so damned tired. The scissors should have been enough. Instead, it took me until this afternoon, and I only got it then because of something Mr Polhurst’s niece said.’

‘What was it?’

‘That death was stupid. That if an obstetrician took as much time cutting the umbilical cord, he’d be sued for malpractice. It made me think of a myth I read when I was in grade-school and couldn’t get enough of gods and goddesses and Trojan horses. The story was about three sisters – the Greek Sisters, maybe, or maybe it was the Weird Sisters. Shit, don’t ask me; I can’t even remember to use my damned turnblinkers half the time. Anyway, these sisters were responsible for the course of all human life. One of them spun the thread, one of them decided how long it would be . . . is any of this ringing a bell, Lois?’

‘Of course it is!’ she nearly shouted. ‘The balloon-strings!’

Ralph nodded. ‘Yes. The balloon-strings. I don’t remember the names of the first two sisters, but I never forgot the name of the last one – Atropos. And according to the story, her job is to cut the thread the first one spins and the second one measures. You could argue with her, you could beg, but it never made any difference. When she decided it was time to cut, she cut.’

Lois was nodding. ‘Yes, I remember that story. I don’t know if I read it or someone told it to me when I was a kid. You believe it’s actually true, Ralph, don’t you? Only it turns out to be the Bald Brothers instead of the Weird Sisters.’

‘Yes and no. As I remember the story, the sisters were all on the same side – a team. And that’s the feeling I got about the two men who came out of Mrs Locher’s house, that they were long-time partners with
immense
respect for each other. But the other guy, the one we saw again tonight, isn’t like them. I think Doc #3’s a rogue.’