Ralph reached into the open duffel-bag, seized one of the gasoline-filled wine bottles by the neck, and swung it at the side of Pickering’s head. As he did, he saw the reason Pickering hadn’t heard his approach: the man was wearing shooter’s plugs. Before Ralph had time to reflect upon the irony of a man on a suicide mission taking pains to protect his hearing, the bottle shattered against Pickering’s temple, dousing him with amber liquid and green glass. He staggered backward, one hand going to his scalp, which was cut open in two places. Blood poured through his long fingers-fingers that should have belonged to a pianist or a painter, Ralph thought-and down his neck.

He turned, his eyes wide and shocked behind the smeary lenses of his spectacles, his hair reaching for the sky and making him look like a cartoon of a man who has just received a huge jolt of electricity.

“You.” he cried. “Devil-sent Centurion! Godless baby-killer!”

Ralph thought of the two women in the other room and was once more overwhelmed with anger… except that anger was too mild a word, much too mild. He felt as if his nerves were burning inside his skin.

And the thought that drummed at his mind was one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer.

Another high-caliber bug droned past his face. Ralph didn’t notice. Pickering was trying to lift the rifle with which he had undoubtedly killed Gretchen Tillbury and her pregnant friend. Ralph snatched it from his hands and turned it on him. Pickering shrieked with fear. The sound of it maddened Ralph even more, and he forgot the promise he had made to Lois. He raised the rifle, fully meanin to empty it into the man who was now cringing abjectly against the wall (in the heat of the moment it occurred to neither of them that there was currently no clip in the gun), but before he could pull the trigger he was distracted by a brilliant swarm of light bleeding into the air beside him. At first it was without shape, a fabulous kaleidoscope whose colors had somehow escaped the tube which was supposed to contain them, and then it took on the form of a woman with a long, gauzy gray ribbon rising from her head.

[“Don’t kill him! Ralph, please don’t kill him!

For a moment he could see the blackboard and read the quote chalked on it right through her, and then the colors became her clothes and hair and skin as she came all the way down. Pickering stared at her in cross-eyed terror. He shrieked again, and the crotch of his army fatigue pants darkened. He stuck his fingers into his mouth, as if to stifle the sound he was making. “A ghose!” he screamed through his mouthful of fingers. “A Hennurt’on anna ghose.” Lois ignored him and grabbed the barrel of the rifle. “Don’t kill him, Ralph! Don’t!”

Ralph was suddenly furious with her, too. “Don’t you understand, Lois? Don’t you get it? He understood what he was doing! On some level, he did understand-I saw it in his goddam aura.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, still holding the barrel of the rifle down so it pointed at the floor. “It doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t understand. We mustn’t do what they do. We mustn’t be what they are.”

“But-’ “Ralph, I want to let go of this gun-barrel. It’s hot.

It’s burning my fingers.”

“All right,” he said, and let go at the same instant she did. The gun fell to the floor between them, and Pickering, who had been sliding slowly down the wall with his fingers still in his mouth am his shining, glazed eyes still fixed on Lois, lunged for it with the speed of a striking rattlesnake.

What Ralph did then he did without forethought and certainly. without anger-he acted purely on instinct, reaching out for Pickering with both hands and grasping the sides of his face.

Something flashed brightly inside his mind as he did it, something that felt like the lens of a powerful magnifying glass. He slammed back up through the levels, for a split second going higher than either of them had yet been. At the height of his ascent, he felt a terrible force flash in his head and explode down his arms. Then, as he dropped back down, he heard the bang, a hollow but emphatic sound which was entirely different from the guns still firing outside.

Pickering’s body jerked galvanically, and his legs shot out with such force that one of his shoes flew off. His buttocks rose and then thumped down. His teeth clamped shut on his lower lip, and blood squirted out of his mouth. For a moment Ralph was almost sure he saw tiny blue sparks snapping from the ends of his zany hair. Then they were gone and Pickering slumped back against the wall. He stared at Ralph and Lois with eyes from which all concern had fled.

Lois screamed. At first Ralph thought she was screaming because of what he had done to Pickering, and then he saw she was beating at the top of her head. A piece of burning wallpaper had landed there and her hair was on fire.

He swept an arm around her, beat at the flames with his own hand, then covered her body with his as a fresh gust of rifle-and shotgun-fire hit the north wing. Ralph’s free hand was splayed out against the wall, and he saw a bullet-hole appear between the third and fourth fingers like a magic trick.

“Go up, Lois.l Go up [right now."’] They went up together, turning to colored smoke before Charlie Pickering’s empty eyes… and then disappearing.

[“What did you do to him, Ralph? For a second you were go e-you were up-and then… then he what did you do?”] She was looking at Charlie Pickering with stunned horror. Pickering was sitting against the wall in almost exactly the same position as the two dead women in the next room. As Ralph watched, a large pinkish spit-bubble appeared between his slack lips, grew, then popped.

He turned to Lois, took her by the arms just above the elbows, and made a picture in his mind: the circuit-breaker box in the basement of his house on Harris Avenue. Hands opened the box, then quickly flipped all the switches from ON to OFF. He wasn’t sure that this was right-it had all happened too fast for him to be sure of anything-but he thought it was close.

Lois’s eyes widened a little, and then she nodded. She looked at Pickering, then at Ralph.

[“He brought it of himself, didn’t he? You didn’t do it on purpose. “Ralph nodded, and then fresh screams came up from below their feet, screams he was quite sure he was not hearing with his ears.

[“Lois?”] [“Yes, Ralph-right now.”] He slipped his hands down her arms and gripped her -hands, as the four of them had held hands in the hospital, only this time they went down instead of up, sliding into the plank floor as if it were a pool of water. Ralph was once again aware of a knife-edge of darkness crossing his vision, and then they were in the cellar, sinking slowly down to a dirty cement floor. He saw shadowy furnace-pipe’s, grimy with dust, a snowblower covered with a large sheet of dirty transparent plastic, gardening equipment lined up to one side of a dim cylinder that was probably the water heater, and cartons stacked against one brick wall-soup, beans, spaghetti sauce, coffee, garbage bags, toilet-tissue. All of these things looked slightly hallucinatory, not quite there, and at first Ralph thought this was a new side-effect of having gone to the next level. Then he realized it was just smoke-the cellar was filling up with it rapidly.

There were eighteen or twenty people clustered at one end of the long, shadowy room, most of them women. Ralph also saw a little boy of about four clinging to his mother’s knees (Mommy’s face showed the fading bruises of what might have been an accident but was probably on purpose), a little girl a year or two older with her face pressed against her mother’s stomach… and he saw Helen.

She was holding Natalie in her arms and blowing into the baby’s face, as if she could keep the air around her clear of smoke that way.