Closer to hand, he watched as Mrs. Perrine’s aura sprang to life around her-that firm gray that reminded him of a West Point cadet’s uniform. A few darker spots, like phantom buttons, shimmered above her bosom (Ralph assumed there was a bosom hidden somewhere beneath the overcoat). He was not sure, but thought these might be signs of impending ill health.
“Good evening, Mrs. Perrine,” he said politely, and watched(!
LIS the words rose in front of his eyes in snowflake shapes.
She gave him a penetrating glance, flicking her eyes up and down, seeming to simultaneously sum him up and dismiss him in a single look.
“I see you’re still wearing that same shirt, Roberts,” she said.
What she didn’t say-but what Ralph was sure she was thinking was I also see you sitting there an eating beans right out of the tin, like some ragged street-person who never learned any better…
“I have a habit of remembering what I see, Roberts.
“So I am,” Ralph said. “I guess I forgot to change it.”
“Hmmp,” said Mrs. Perrine, and now he thought it was his underwear she was considering. When was the last time it occurred to you to change that? I shudder to think, Roberts.
“Lovely evening, isn’t it, Mrs. Perrine?”
Another of those quick, birdlike glances, this time up at the sky.
Then back to Ralph. “It’s going to turn cold.”
“Do you think so?”
“Oh, yes-Indian summer’s over. My back isn’t good for much besides weather forecasting these days, but at that it does very well.”
She paused. “I believe that’s Bill McGovern’s sweater.”
“I guess it is,” Ralph agreed, wondering if she would ask him next if Bill knew he had it. He wouldn’t have put it past her.
Instead, she told him. to button it up. “You don’t want to be a candidate for pneumonia, do you?” she asked, and the tucked set of her mouth added, As well as for the nuthouse?
“Absolutely not,” Ralph said. He set the pot aside, reached for the sweater-buttons, then stopped. He was still wearing a quilted stove-glove on his left hand. He hadn’t noticed it until now.
“It will be easier if you take that off,” Mrs. Perrine said.
There might have been the faintest gleam in her eyes.
“I suppose so,” Ralph said humbly. He shook off the glove and buttoned McGovern’s sweater.
“My offer holds good, Roberts.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“My offer to mend your shirt. If you can bring yourself to part with it for a day or so, that is.” She paused. “You do have another shirt, I assume? One you could wear while I mend the one you have on?”
“Oh, yes,” Ralph said. “You bet. Quite a few of them.”
“Choosing among them each day must be challenging for you.
There’s bean-juice on your chin, Roberts.” With this pronouncement, Mrs. Perrine’s eyes flicked forward and she began to march once more.
What Ralph did then he did with no forethought or understanding; it was as instinctive as the chopping gesture he had made earlier to scare Doc #3 away from Rosalie. He raised the hand which ad been wearing the thermal glove and curled it into a tube around his mouth.
Then he inhaled sharply, producing a faint, whispery whistle.
The results were amazing. A pencil of gray light poked out of Mrs. Perrine’s aura like the quill of a porcupine. It lengthened rapidly, angling backward as the lady herself moved forward, until it had crossed the leaf-littered lawn and darted into the tube formed by Ralph’s curled fingers. He felt it enter him as he inhaled and it was like swallowing pure energy. He suddenly felt lit up, like a neon sign or the marquee of a big-city movie theater. An explosive sense of force-a feeling of power-ran through his chest and stomach, then raced down his legs all the way to the tips of his toes, At the same time it rocketed upward into his head, threatening to blow off the top of his skull as if it were the thin concrete roof of a missile silo, He could see rays of light, as gray as electrified fog, smoking out from between his fingers. A terrible, joyous sense of power lit up his thoughts, but only for a moment. It was followed by shame and amazed horror.
What are you doing, Ralph? Whatever that stuff is, it doesn’t belong to YOU. Would you reach into her purse and take some of her money ibhile she wasn’t looking?
He felt his face flush. He lowered his cupped hand and shut his mouth. As his lips and teeth came together, he clearly heard-and actually felt something crunch crisply inside. It was the sound you heard when you were chomping off a bite of fresh rhubarb, Mrs. Perrine stopped, and Ralph watched apprehensively as she made a half-turn and looked out at Harris Avenue. I didn’t mean to, he thought at her.
Honest I didn’t, Mrs. P.-I’m still learning my way around this thing.
“Roberts?”
“Yes?”
“Did you hear something? It sounded almost like a gunshot.”
Ralph. could feel his ears throbbing with hot blood as he shook his head. “No… but my ears aren’t what they-”
“Probably just a backfire over on Kansas Street,” she said, dismissing his weak-sister excuses out of hand. “It made my heart miss a beat, though, I can tell YOU.”
She started off again in her odd, gliding, chess-queen walk, then stopped once more and looked back at him. Her aura had begun to fade out of Ralph’s view, but he had no trouble seeing her eyesthey were as sharp as a kestrel’s.
“You look different, Roberts, she said. “Younger, somehow.”
Ralph, who had expected something else (Give me back what you stole, Roberts, and right this minute, for instance), could only flounder. “Do you think… that’s very… I mean to say thank y-” She flapped an impatient oh-shut-up hand at him. “Probably the light.
I advise you not to dribble on that sweater, Roberts. My impression of Mr. McGovern is that he is a man who takes care of his things.”
“He should have taken better care of his hat,” Ralph said.
Those bright eyes, which had begun once more to shift away from him, shifted back. “I beg your pardon?”
“His Panama,” Ralph said. “He lost it somewhere.”
Mrs. Perrine held this up to the light of her intellect for a moment, then cast it aside with another Hmmp. “Go inside, Roberts. If you stay out here much longer, you’ll catch your death of cold.” And then she slid upon her way, not visibly the worse for wear as a result of Ralph’s thoughtless act of thievery.
Thieve? I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong word, Ralph. What you did-is just it was a lot closer to"Vampirism,” Ralph said bleakly.
He put the pot of beans aside and began to slowly rub his hands together. He felt ashamed… guilty… and all but exploding with energy.
You stole some of her life-force instead of her blood, but a vampire is a vampire, Ralph.
Yes indeed. And it suddenly occurred to Ralph that this must not have been the first time he had done such a thing.
You look different, Roberts. Younger, somehow. That was what Mrs. Perrine had said tonight, but people had been making similar comments to him ever since the end of the summer, hadn’t they?
The main reason his friends hadn’t hectored him into going to the doctor was because he didn’t look like anything was wrong with bin-i.
He complained of insomnia, but he apparently looked like the picture of health. I guess that honeycomb must have really turned the trick, Johnny Leydecker had said just before the two of them had left the library on Sunday-back in the Iron Age, that felt like no"N.
And when Ralph had asked him what he was talking about, Leydecker had said he was talking about Ralph’s insomnia. You look a gajillion times better than on the day I first met you.