“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.
Yes-she can shoot him in her own way.
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 Burry-Burry 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-Timed 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 to-” 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?”