Nirvana Boy regarded him insolently. “Yeah? What’d you talk like?”

“I can’t quite remember,” Ralph said, “but I don’t think we sounded quite so much like shitheads.” He turned away from them as the screen door slammed. Lois came out of the Dunkin’ Donuts with a large container of coffee in each hand. The boys, meanwhile, jumped on their fluorescent bikes and streaked off, Nirvana Boy giving Ralph one final distrustful look over his shoulder.

“Can you drink this and drive the car at the same time?” Lois asked, handing him a coffee.

“I think so,” Ralph said, “but I don’t really need it anymore.

I’m fine, Lois.”

She glanced after the two boys, then nodded. “Let’s go.”

The world blazed all around them as they drove out Route 33 toward what had once been Barrett’s Orchards, and they didn’t have to slide even a single inch up the ladder of perception to see it. The city fell away and they drove through second-growth woods on fire with autumn. The sky was a blue lane above the road, and the Oldsmobile’s shadow raced beside them, wavering across leaves and branches.

“God, it’s so beautiful,” Lois said. “Isn’t it beautiful, Ralph?”

“Yes. It is.”

“You know what I wish? More than anything?”

He shook his head.

“That we could just pull over to the side of the road-stop the car and get out and walk into the woods a little way, Find a clearing, 541 sit in the sun, and look up at the clouds.

You’d say, ’Look at that one, Lois, it looks like a horse.” And I’d say, ’Look over there, Ralph, it’s a man with a broom.” Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. The woods opened in a narrow aisle on their left; power-poles marched down the steep slope like soldiers.

Hightension lines shone silver between them in the morning sunlight, gossamer as spiderwebs. The feet of the poles were buried in brazen drifts of red sumac, and when Ralph looked up above the slash he saw a hawk riding an air-current as invisible as the world of auras.

“Yes,” he said again. “That would be nice. Maybe we’ll even get a chance to do it sometime. But

“But what?”

“’Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else,” Ralph said.

She looked at him, a little startled. “What a terrible idea!”

“Yeah. I think most true ideas are terrible. It’s from a book of poems called Cemetery Nights. Dorrance Marstellar gave it to me on the same day he slipped upstairs to my apartment and put the spray can of Bodyguard into my jacket pocket.”

He glanced up into his rear-view mirror and saw at least two miles of Route 33 laid out behind them, a strip of black running through the fiery woods. Sunlight twinkled on chrome. A car. Maybe two or three.

And coming fast, from the look.

“Old Dor,” she mused.

“Yes. You know, Lois, I think he’s also a part of this.”

“Maybe he is,” Lois said. “And if Ed’s a special case, maybe Dorrance is, too.”

“Yes, that thought occurred to me. The most interesting thing about him-Old Dor, I mean, not Ed-is that I don’t think Clotho and Lachesis know about him. It’s like he’s from an entirely different neighborhood.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. But Mr. C. and Mr. L. never nentioned him, Lind that… that seems…”

He glanced back at the rear-view. Now there was a fourth car, behind the others but moving up fast, and he could see the blue flashers atop the closer three. Police cars. Headed for Newport? No, probably headed for someplace a little closer than that.

Maybe they’re after us, Ralph thought. Maybe Lois’s suggestio that the Richards woman forget we were there didn’t hold.

But would the police send four cruisers after two golden-agers in a rustbucket Oldsmobile? Ralph didn’t think so. Helen’s face suddenly flashed into his mind. He felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach as he guided the Olds over to the side of the road.

“Ralph? What-” Then she heard the rising howl of the sirens and turned in her seat, alarm widening her eyes. The first three police-cars roared past at better than eighty miles an hour, pelting Ralph’s car with grit and sending crisp fallen leaves into dancing dervishes in their wake.

“Ralph!” she nearly screamed. “What if it’s High Ridge? Helen’s out there! Helen and her baby!”

“I know,” Ralph said, and as the fourth police car slammed by them hard enough to rock the Oldsmobile on its springs, he felt that interior blink happen again. He reached for the transmission lever, and then his hand stopped in mid-air, still three inches from it. His eyes were fixed upon the horizon. The smudge there was less spectral than the obscene black umbrella they had seen hanging over the Civic Center, but Ralph knew it was the same thing: a deathbag.

“Faster!” Lois shouted at him. “Go faster, Ralph!”

“I can’t,” he said. His teeth were clamped together, and the wor(-Is came out sounding squeezed. “I’ve got it matted.” Also, he did not add, this is the fastest I’ve gone in thirty-five years, and I’m scared to death.

The needle quivered a hair’s breadth beyond the 80 mark on the speedometer; the woods slid by in a blurred mix of reds and yellows and magentas; under the hood the engine was no longer just clacking but hammering like a platoon of blacksmiths on a hinge. In spite of this, the fresh trio of police cars Ralph saw in his mirror were catching up easily.

The road curved sharply right up ahead. Denying every instinct, Ralph kept his foot away from the brake pedal. He did take it off the gas as they went into the curve… then mashed it back to the mat again as he felt the rear end trying to break loose on the back side.

He was hunched over the wheel now, upper teeth clamped tightly on his lower lip, eyes wide open and bulging beneath the saltand-pepper tangle of his eyebrows. The sedan’s rear tires howled, and Lois fell into him, scrabbling at the back of her seat for purchase. Ralph clung to the wheel with sweaty fingers and waited for the car to flip. The Olds was one of the last true Detroit roadmonsters, however, wide and heavy and low. It outlasted the curve, and on the far side Ralph saw a red farmhouse on the left. There were two barns behind it.

“Ralph, there’s the turn!”

“I see.”

The new batch of police cars had caught up with them and were’ swinging out to pass. Ralph got as far over as he could, praying that none of them would rear-end him at this speed. None did; they zipped by in close bumper-to-bumper formation, swung left, and started up the long hill which led to High Bridge.

“Hang on, Lois.”

“Oh, I am, I am,” she said.

The Olds slid almost sideways as Ralph made the left onto what he and Carolyn had always called the Orchard Road. If the narrox, country lane had been tarred, the big car probably would have rolled over like a stunt vehicle in a thrill-show. It wasn’t, however, and instead of going door-over-roof the Olds just skidded extravagantly, sending up dry billows of dust. Lois gave a thin, out-of-breath shriek, and Ralph snatched a quick look at her.

“Go on!” She flapped an impatient hand at the road ahead, and in that moment she looked so eerily like Carolyn that Ralph almost felt he was seeing a ghost. He wondered what Carol, who had nearly made a career out of telling him to go faster during the last five years of her life, would have made of this little spin in the country. “Never mind me, just watch the road!”

More police cars were making the turn onto Orchard Road now.

How many was that in all? Ralph didn’t know; he’d lost count.

Maybe a dozen in all. He steered the Oldsmobile over until the right two wheels were running on the edge of a nasty-looking ditch, and the reinforcements-three with DERRY POLICE printed in gold on the sides and two State Police cruisers-blew past, throwing up fresh showers of dirt and gravel. For just a moment Ralph saw a uniformed policeman leaning out of one of the Derry police-cars, waving at him, and then the Olds was buried in a yellow cloud of dust. Ralph smothered a new and even stronger urge to climb on the brake by thinking of Helen and Nat. A moment later he could see again-sort of, anyway. The newest batch of police-cars was already coming up the hill.