“What can’t I see, Ralph?” Lois moaned. “I see something, but-”
“Get AWAYfrom her.” Ralph shouted, and raised his hand in that karate-chop gesture again. The hand inside-the hand which earlier had produced that wedge of tight blue light-still felt like an unloaded gun, however, and this time the bald doc seemed to know it. He glanced in Ralph’s direction and offered a small, jeering wave.
[Aw, quit it, Shorts-sit back, shut up, and enjoy the show.] The creature at the foot of the hill returned his attention to Rosalie, who sat huddled at the base of an old pine. The tree was emitting a thin green fog from the cracks in its bark. The bald doctor bent over Rosalie, one hand outstretched in a gesture of solicitude that went very badly with the scalpel curled into his left fist.
Rosalie whined… then stretched her neck forward and humbly licked the bald creature’s palm.
Ralph looked down at his own hands, sensing something in them, not the power he’d had before, nothing like that, but something.
Suddenly there were snaps of clear white light dancing just above his nails. It was as if his fingers had been turned into sparkplugs.
Lois was grabbing frantically at him now. “What’s wrong with the dog? Ralph, what’s wrong with it?”
With no thought about what he was doing or why, Ralph put his hands over Lois’s eyes, like someone playing Guess Who with a loved one. His fingers flashed a momentary white so bright it was almost blinding. Must be the white they’re always talking about in the detergent commercials, he thought.
Lois screamed. Her hands flew to his wrists, clamped on them, then loosened. “My God, Ralph, what did you do to me?”
He took his hands away and saw a glowing figure-eight surrOLinding her eyes; it was as if she had just taken off a pair of goggles which had been dipped in confectioners’ sugar. The white began to dim almost as soon as his hands were gone… except…
It’s not dimming, he thought. It’s sinking in.
“Never mind,” he said, and pointed. “Look!”
The widening of her eyes told him what he needed to know.
Doc #3, completely unmoved by Rosalie’s desperate effort to make friends, shoved her muzzle aside with the hand holding the scalpel, He seized the old bandanna hanging around her neck in his other hand and yanked her head up. Rosalie howled miserably. Slobber ran back along the sides of her face. The bald man voiced a scabrous chuckle that made Ralph’s flesh crawl.
[“Hi! Leave off! Leave off teasing that dog.t"l The bald man’s head snapped around. The grin ran off his face and he snarled at Lois, sounding a little like a dog himself, [Yahh, go fuck Yourself, You fat old Short-Time cunt. Dog’s mine, just like I already told your limpdick boyfriend!] The bald man had let go of the blue bandanna when Lois shouted at him, and Rosalie was now cringing back against the pine again, her eyes rolling, curds of foam dripping from the sides of her muzzle.
Ralph had never seen such a completely terrified creature in his life.
“Run!” Ralph screamed. “Get away.", She seemed not to hear him, and after a moment Ralph realized she wasn’t hearing him, because Rosalie was no longer entirely there.
The bald doctor had done something to her already-had pulled her at least partway out of ordinary reality like a farmer using his tractor and a length of chain to pull a stump.
Ralph tried once more, anyway.
[“Run, Rosalie.” Run away."’] This time her laid-back ears cocked forward and her head began to turn in Ralph’s direction. He didn’t know if she would have obeyed him or not, because the bald man renewed his hold on the bandanna before she could even begin to move. He yanked her head up again.
“He’s going to kill it!” Lois screamed. “He’s going to cut its throat with that thing he has! Don’t let him, Ralph! Make him stop!”
“I can’t! Maybe you can! Shoot him! Shoot your hand at him!”
She looked at him, not understanding. Ralph made frantic woodchopping gestures with his right hand, but before Lois could respond, Rosalie gave a dreadful lost howl. The bald doc raised the scalpel and brought it down, but it wasn’t Rosalie’s throat he cut.
He cut her balloon-string.
A thread emerged from each of Rosalie’s nostrils and floated upward.
They twined together about six inches above her snout, making a delicate pigtail, and it was at this point that Baldy #3’s scalpel did its work. Ralph watched, frozen with horror, as the severed pigtail rose into the sky like the string of a released helium balloon. It was unravelling as it went. He thought it would tangle in the branches of the old pine, but it didn’t. When the ascending balloon-string finally did meet one of the branches, it simply passed through.
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 solders 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 hr 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.
Right, that’s right, Ralph, don’t scream. You don’t Want to do that because once you start, you might not be able to stop-you might just go on doing it until your throat bursts. Remember Lois, because she’s in this now, too. Remember Lois and don’t start screaming.
I Ah, but it was hard not to, because e the dream-bugs which had come spewing out of Carolyn’s head were now pouring from Rosalie’s nostrils in writhing black streams.
Those aren’t bugs. I don’t know What they are, but they are not bugs.
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 chilled 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 onder what was under most of those tarps? Ed had asked.
Doc #3 stood grinning down at Rosalie. Then he untied the knot in her bandanna and put it around his own neck, tying it in a 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.