CHAPTER 19

There was that sensation of blink. and a chill morning breeze struck his face. Ralph opened his eyes and looked at the woman beside him. For just a moment he could see her aura wisping away behind her like the gauzy overskirt of a lady’s ball-gown and then it was just Lois, looking twenty years younger than she had the week before… and also looking extremely out of place, in her light fall coat and good visiting-the-sick dress, here on the tar-and-gravel hospital roof.

Ralph hugged her tighter as she began to shiver. Of Lachesis and Clotho there was no sign.

Although they could be standing right beside us, Ralph thought.

Probably are, as a matter of fact.

He suddenly thought of that old carny pitchman’s line again, the one about how you had to pay if you wanted to play, so step right up, gentlemen, and lay your money down. But more often than not you were played instead of playing.

Played for what? A sucker, of course. And why did he have that feeling now?

Because there were a lot of things you never found out, Carolyn said from inside his head. They led you down a lot of interesting sidetracks and kept you away from the main point until it was too late for you to ask the questions they might not have wanted to answer…

. and I don’t think something like that happens by accident, do you?

No. He didn’t.

That feeling of being pushed by invisible hands into some dark tunnel where anything might be waiting was stronger now. That sense of being manipulated. He felt small… and vulnerable… and pissed off.

“W-Well, we’re b-b-back,” Lois said through her briskly chattering teeth. “What time is it, do you think?”

It felt like about six o’clock, but when Ralph glanced down at his watch, he wasn’t surprised to see it had stopped. He couldn’t remember when he had last wound it. Tuesday morning, probably.

He followed Lois’s gaze to the southwest and saw the Civic Center standing like an island in the middle of a parking-lot ocean. With the early-morning sunlight kicking bright sheets of reflection from its curved banks of windows, it looked like an oversized version of the office building George jetson worked in. The vast deathbag which had surrounded it only moments before was gone.

Oh, no us not. Don’t kid yourself, buddy. You may not be able to see it right now, but it’s there, all right.

“Early,” he said, pulling her more tightly against him as the wind gusted, blowing his hair-hair that now had almost as much black in it as white-back from his forehead. “But it’s going to get late fast, I think.”

She took his meaning and nodded. “Where are L-Lachesis and C-C-”

“On a level where the wind doesn’t freeze your ass off, I imagine.

Come on. Let’s find a door and get the hell off this roof.”

She stayed where she was a moment longer, though, shivering and looking across town. “What has he done?” she asked in a small voice.

“If he hasn’t planted a bomb in there, what can he have done?”

“Maybe he has planted a bomb and the dogs with the educated noses just haven’t found it yet. Or maybe it’s something the dogs aren’t trained to find. A canister stuck up in the rafters, say-a little something nasty Ed whipped up in the bathtub. Chemistry is what he did for a living, after all… at least until he gave up his job to become a full-time psycho. He could be planning to gas them like rats.

“

“Oh Jesus, Ralph!” She put her hand to her chest just above the swell of her bosom and looked at him with wide, dismayed eyes.

“Come on, Lois. Let’s get off this damned roof.”

This time she came willingly enough. Ralph led her toward the roof door… which, he fervently hoped, they would find unlocked, “Two thousand people,” she almost moaned as they reached the door. Ralph was relieved when the knob turned under his hand, but Lois seized his wrist with chilly fingers before he could pull the door open. Her uptilted face was full of frantic hope. “Maybe those little men were lying, Ralph-maybe they’ve got their own axe to grind, something we couldn’t even hope to understand, and they were lying.”

“I don’t think they can lie,” he said slowly. “That’s the hell of it, Lois-I don’t think they can. And then there’s that.” He pointed at the Civic Center, at the dirty membrane they couldn’t see but which both knew was still there. Lois would not turn to look at it. She put her cold hand over his instead, pulled the roof door open, and started down the stairs, Ralph opened the door at the foot of the stairs, peeped into the sixth-floor corridor, saw that it was empty, and drew Lois out of the stairwell. They headed for the elevators, then stopped together outside an open door with DOCTORS’ LOUNGE printed on the wall beside it in bright red letters. Inside was the room they had seen on their way up to the roof with Clotho and Lachesis-Winslow Homer prints hanging crooked on the walls, a Silex standing on a hotplate, hideous Swedish Modern furniture. No one was in the room right now, but the TV bolted to the wall was playing nevertheless, and their old friend Lisette Benson was reading the morning news. Ralph remembered the day he and Lois and Bill had sat in Lois’s living room, eating macaroni and cheese as they watched Lisette Benson report on the doll-throwing incident at WomanCare. Less than a month ago that had been. He suddenly remembered that Bill McGovern would never watch Lisette Benson again, or forget to lock the front door, and a sense of loss as fierce as a November gale swept through him. He could not completely believe it, at least not yet. How could Bill have died so quickly and so unceremoniously?

He would have hated it, Ralph thought, and not just because he would have considered dying of a heart-attack in a hospital corridor in bad taste. He would’ve considered it bad theater, as well.

But he had seen it happen, and Lois had actually felt it eating away at Bill’s insides. That made Ralph think of the deathbag surrounding the

Civic Center, and what was going to happen there if they didn’t stop the speech. He started toward the elevator again, but Lois pulled him back. She was looking at the TV, fascinated. -will feel a lot of relief when tonight’s speech by feminist abortion-rights advocate Susan Day is history,” Lisette Benson was saying, “but the police aren’t the only ones who will feel that way.

Apparently both pro-life and pro-choice advocates are beginning to feel the strain of living on the edge of confrontation, John Kirkland is live at the Derry Civic Center this morning, and he has more.

John?”

The pallid, unsmiling man standing next to Kirkland was Dan Dalton. The button on his shirt showed a scalpel descending toward an infant with its knees drawn up in the fetal position. This was In a cross surrounded by a red circle with a diagonal red line slashed it.

Ralph could see half a dozen police cars and two news trucks, one with the NBC logo on its side, in the background of the shot.

A uniformed cop strolled across the lawn leading two dogs-a bloodhound and a German shepherd-on leashes.

“That’s right, Lisette, I’m here at the Civic Center, where the mood could be termed one of worry and quiet determination. With me is Dan Dalton, President of The Friends of Life organization, which has been so vehemently opposed to His. Day’s speech. Mr. Dalton, would you agree with that assessment of the situation?”

“That there’s a lot of worry and determination in the air?”

Dalton asked. To Ralph his smile looked both nervous and disdainful.

“Yes, I suppose you could put it that way. We’re worried that Susan Day, one of this country’s greatest unindicted criminals, will succeed in her efforts to confuse the central issue here in Derry: the murder of twelve to fourteen helpless unborn children each and every day.”