Lois laughed ruefully. “To me or her?”
“Both of you.”
“Mina jumped and slapped the back of her neck. ’There’s a bug on me!” she said. ’It bit me! Get it off, Lo! Please get it off!” Of course there was no bug on her-I was the bug-but I brushed at her neck just the same, then opened the window and told her it was gone, it flew away. She was lucky I didn’t knock her brains out instead of just brushing her neck-that’s how full of pep I was. I felt like I could have opened the car door and run all the way home.”
Ralph nodded.
“It was wonderful… too wonderful. It’s like the stories about drugs you see on TV, how they take you to heaven at first and then lock you in hell. What if we start doing this and can’t stop?”
“Yeah,” Ralph said. “And what if it hurts people? I keep thinking about vampires.”
“Do you know what I keep thinking about?” Lois’s voice had dropped to a whisper. “Those things you said Ed Deepneau talked about.
Those Centurions. What if they’re us, Ralph? What if they’re us?”
He hugged her and kissed the top of her head. Hearing his worst fear coming from her mouth made it less heavy on his own heart, and that made him think of what Lois had said about loneliness being the worst part of getting old.
“I know,” he said. “And what I did to Mrs. Perrine was totally spur-of-the-moment-I don’t remember thinking about it at all, just doing it. Was it that way with you?”
“Yes. Just like that.” She laid her head against his shoulder.
“We can’t do it anymore,” he said. “Because it really might be addictive. Anything that feels that good just about has to be addictive, don’t you think? We’ve got to try and build up some safeguards against doing it unconsciously, too. Because I think I have been.
That could be why-” A scream of brakes and sliding, wailing tires cut him off. They stared at each other, wide-eyed, as outside on the street that sound went on and on, grief seeming to search for a point of impact.
There was a muffled thud from the street as the scream of the brakes and tires silenced. it was followed by a brief cry uttered by n either a woman or a child, Ralph could not tell which.
Someone else shouted, “What happened?” and then, “Oh, cripe There was a rattle of running footsteps on pavement.
“Stay on the couch,” Ralph said, and hurried to the living-room window. When he ran up the shade Lois was standing right beside him, and Ralph felt a flash of approval. It was what Carolyn would have done under similar circumstances.
They looked out on a nighttime world that pulsed with strange color and fabulous motion. Ralph knew it was Bill they were going to see, knew it-Bill hit by a car and lying dead in the street, his Panama with the crescent bitten out of the brim lying near one outstretched hand. He slipped an arm around Lois and she gripped his hand.
But it wasn’t McGovern in the fan of headlights thrown by the Ford which was slued around in the middle of Harris Avenue; it was Rosalie.
Her early-morning shopping expeditions were at an end.
She lay on her side in a spreading pool of blood, her back bunched and twisted in several places. As the driver of the car which had struck her knelt beside the old stray, the pitiless glare of the nearest streetlamp illuminated his face. It was Joe Wyzer, the Rite Aid druggist, his orange-yellow aura now swirling with confused eddies of red and blue. He stroked the old dog’s side, and each time his hand slipped into the vile black aura which clung to Rosalie, it disappeared.
Dreamy of terror washed through Ralph, dropping his temperature and shrivelling his testicles until they felt like hard little peachpits. Suddenly it was July of 1992 again, Carolyn dying, the deathwatch ticking, and something weird had happened to Ed Deepneau.
Ed had freaked out, and Ralph had found himself trying to keep fielen’s normally good-natured husband from springing at the man in the West Side Gardeners cap and attempting to rip his throat out.
Then-the cherry on the Charlotte russe, Carol would have said-Dorrance Marstellar had arrived. Old Dor.
And what had he said?
I wouldn’t touch him anymore… I can’t see -your hands.
I can’t see your hands.
“Oh my God,” Ralph whispered.
He was brought back to the here and now by the feeling of Lois swaying against him, as if she were on the edge of a faint.
“Lois!” he said sharply, gripping her arm. “Lois, are you okay?”
“I think so… but Ralph… do you see.
“Yes, it’s Rosalie. I guess she-”
“I don’t mean her,-I mean him!” She pointed to the right.
Doc #3 was leaning against the trunk of Joe Wyzer’s Ford, McGovern’s Panama tipped jauntily back on his bald skull. He looked toward Ralph and Lois, grinned insolently, then slowly raised his thumb to his nose and waggled his small fingers at them.
“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 attention, please.” right out loud. He tiptoed forward-an 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 soapbubble. 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 ill 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.
CHAPTER 16
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.