“What’s with your wife?” she asked Ralph. “I apologized, didn’t I? So why does she keep looking at me like that?”

Ralph knew Zoe couldn’t see Lois, because he was all but tapdancing in an effort to keep his body between the two of them, but he also knew she was right-Lois was staring.

He attempted to smile. “I don’t know what-”

The waitress jumped and shot a startled, irritated glance back at the short-order cook. “Quit banging those pots around” she shouted, although the only thing Ralph had heard from the kitchen was a radio playing elevator-music. Zoe looked back at Ralph. “Christ, it sounds like VietNam back there. Now if you could just tell your wife it’s not polite to-”

“To stare? She’s not. She’s really not.” Ralph stood aside. Lois had gone to the door and was looking out at the street with her back to them. “See?”

Zoe didn’t reply for several seconds, although she kept looking at Lois. At last she turned back at Ralph. “Sure. I see. Now why don’t you and her just make yourselves scarce?”

“All right-still friends?”

“Whatever you want,” Zoe said, but she wouldn’t look at him. When Ralph rejoined Lois, he saw that her aura had gone back to its former, more diffuse state, but it was much brighter than it had been.

“Still tired, Lois?” he asked her softly. “No. As a matter of fact, I feel fine now. Let’s go.” He started to open the door for her, then stopped. “Got my pen?”

“Gee, no-I guess it’s still on the table.” Ralph went over to pick it up. Below his note, Lois had added a P.S. in rolling Palmer-method script: In 1989 you had a baby and gave him up for adoption. Saint Anne’s, in Providence, R.I. Go and see your doctor before it’s too late, Zoe. No joke. No trick. We know what we’re talking about.

“Oh boy,” Ralph said as he rejoined her. “That’s going to scare the bejesus out of her.”

“If she gets to her doctor before her liver goes belly-up, I don’t care.”

He nodded and they went out.

“Did you get that stuff about her kid when you dipped into her’ aura?” Ralph asked as they crossed the leaf-strewn parking lot. Lois nodded. Beyond the lot, the entire east side of Derry was shimmering with bright, kaleidoscopic light. It was coming back hard now, very hard, that secret light cycling up and up. Ralph reached out and put his hand on the side of his car. Touching it was like tasting a slick, licorice-flavored cough-drop.

“I don’t think I took very much of her… her stuff,” Lois said, “but it was as if I swallowed all of her.”

Ralph remembered something he’d read in a science magazine not long ago. “If every cell in our bodies contains a complete blueprint of how we’re made,” he said, “why shouldn’t every bit of a person’s aura contain a complete blueprint of what we are?”

“That doesn’t sound very scientific, Ralph.”

“I suppose not.”

She squeezed his arm and grinned up at him. “It does sound about right, though.”

He grinned back at her, “You need to take some more, too,” she told him. “it still feels wrong to me-like stealing-but if you don’t, I think you’re going to pass right out on your feet.”

“As soon as I can. Right now all I want to do is get out to High Ridge.” Yet once he got behind the wheel, his hand faltered away from the ignition key almost as soon as he touched it.

“Ralph? What is it?”

“Nothing… everything. I can’t drive like this. I’ll wrap us around a telephone pole or drive us into somebody’s living room,” He looked up at the sky and saw one of those huge birds, this one transparent, roosting atop a satellite dish on the roof of an apartment house across the way. A thin, lemon-colored haze drifted up from its folded prehistoric wings.

Are you seeing a. t? a part of his mind asked doubtfully.

Are you sure of that, Ralph? Are you really, really sure?

I’m seeing it, all right. Fortunately or unfortunately I’m seeing it all… but if there was ever a right time to see such things, this isn’t it.

He concentrated, and felt that interior blink happen deep within his mind. The bird faded away like a ghost-image on a TV screen.

The warmly glowing palette of colors spread out across the morning lost their vibrancy. He went on perceiving that other part of the world long enough to see the colors run into one another, creating the bright gray-blue haze which he’d begun seeing on the day he’d gone into Day Break, Sun Down for coffee and pie with Joe Wyzer, and then that was gone, too. Ralph felt an almost crushing need to curl up, pillow his head on his arm, and go to sleep. He began taking long, slow breaths instead, pulling each one a little deeper into his lungs, and then turned the ignition key. The engine roared into life, accompanied by that clacking sound. It was much louder now.

“What’s that?” Lois asked.

“I don’t know,” Ralph said, but he thought he did-either a tierod or a piston. In either case they would be in trouble if it let go.

At last the sound began to diminish, and Ralph dropped the transmission into Drive. “Just poke me hard if you see me starting to nod off, Lois.”

“You can count on it,” she said. “Now let’s go.”

CHAPTER 21

The Dunkin’ Donuts on Newport Avenue was a jolly pink sugarchurch in a drab neighborhood of tract houses. Most had been built in a single year, 1946, and were now crumbling. This was Derry’s Old Cape, where elderly cars with wired-up mufflers and cracked windshields wore bumper-stickers saying things like DON’T BLAME ME I VOTED FOR PEROT and ALL TIIL, WAY with THE N.R.A where no house was complete without at least one Fisher-Price Big Wheel trike standing on the listless lawn, where girls were stepping dynamite at sixteen and all too often dull-eyed, fat-bottomed mothers of three at twenty-four.

Two boys on fluorescent bikes with extravagant ape-hanger handlebars were doing wheelies in the parking lot, weaving in and out of each other’s path with a dexterity that suggested a solid background in video gaming and possible high-paying futures as airtraffic controllers… if they managed to stay away from coke ajicl car accidents, that was. Both wore their hats backward. Ralph wondered briefly why they weren’t in school on a Friday morning, or at least on the way, and decided he didn’t care.

Probably they didn’t, either.

Suddenly the two bikes, which had been avoiding each other easily up until then, crashed together. Both boys fell to the pavement, then got to their feet almost immediately. Ralph was relieved to see neither was hurt; their auras did not even flicker.

“Goddam wet end!” the one in the Nirvana tee-shirt yelled indignantly at his friend. He was perhaps eleven. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You ride a bike like old people fuck!”

“I heard something,” the other said, resetting his hat carefully on his dirty-blonde hair. “Great big bang. You tellin me you didn’t hear it? Boo-ya!”

“I didn’t hear jack shit,” Nirvana Boy said. He held out his palms, which were now dirty (or perhaps just dirtier) and oozing blood from two or three minor scratches. “Look at this-fuckin road-rash!”

“You’ll live,” his friend said.

“Yeah, but-” Nirvana Boy noticed Ralph, leaning against his rusty whale of an Oldsmobile with his hands in his pockets, watching them.

“The fuck you looking at?”

“You and your friend,” Ralph said. “That’s all.”

“That’s all, huh?”

“Yep-the whole story.”

Nirvana Boy glanced at his friend, then back at Ralph. His eyes glowered with a purity of suspicion which, in Ralph’s experience, could be found only here in the Old Cape. “You got a problem?”

“Not me,” Ralph said. He had inhaled a great deal of Nirvana Boy’s russet-colored aura and now felt quite a bit like Superman on a speed trip. He also felt like a child-molester. “I was just thinkingthat we didn’t talk much like you and your friend when I was a kid.”