Helen stopped crying and looked at him with still, wide eyes, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Then those eyes began to fill with a frightening depth of anger.

“How can you ask? How can you even ask?”

“Well… because…” He stopped, unable to go on.

Ferocity was the last thing he had expected.

“If they stop us now, they win,” Helen said. “Don’t you see that?

Gretchen’s dead, Merrilee’s dead, High Ridge is burning to the ground with everything some of these women own inside, and if they stop us now they win.”

One part of Ralph’s mind-a deep part-now made a terrible comparison. Another part, one that loved Helen, moved to block it, but it moved too late. Her eyes looked like Charlie Pickering’s eyes when Pickering had been sitting next to him in the library, and there was no reasoning with a mind that could make eyes look like that.

“If they stop us now they win!” she screamed. In her arms, Natalie began to cry harder. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you fucking GET it.P We’ll never let that happen! Never! Never.f Never!”

Abruptly she raised the hand she wasn’t using to hold the baby and went around the corner of the building. Ralph reached for her and touched the back of her blouse with his fingertips. That was all.

“Don’t shoot me!” Helen was crying at the police on the other side of the house. “Don’t shoot me, I’m one of the women! I’m one of the women I’m one of the women!”

Ralph lunged after her-no thought, just instinct-and Lois seized him by the back of his belt. “Better not go out there, Ralph.

You’re a man, and they might think-”

“Hello, Ralph! Hello, Lois!”

They both turned toward this new voice. Ralph recognized it at once, and he felt both surprised and not surprised. Standing beyond the clotheslines with their freight of flaming sheets and garments, wearing a pair of faded flannel pants and an old pair of Converse high-tops which had been mended with electrician’s tape, was Dorrance Marstellar.

His hair, as fine as Natalie’s (but white instead of auburn), blew about his head in the October wind which combed the top of this hill. As usual, he had a book in one hand.

“Come on, you two,” he said, waving to them and smiling. “Hurry up and hurry along. There’s not much time.”

He led them down a weedy, little-used path that meandered away from the house in a westerly direction. It wound first through a fairsized garden-plot from which everything had been harvested but the pumpkins and squashes, then into an orchard where the apples were just coming to full ripeness, then through a dense blackberry tangle where thorns seemed to reach out everywhere to snag their clothes.

As they passed out of the blackberry brambles and into a gloomy stand of old pines and spruces, it occurred to Ralph that they must be on the Newport side of the ridge now.

Dorrance walked briskly for a man of his years, and the placid smile never left his face. The book he carried was for Love, Poems 1950-1960 by a man named Robert Creeley. Ralph had never heard of him, but supposed Mr. Creeley had never heard of Elmore Leonard, Ernest Haycox, or Louis L’Amour, either. He only tried to talk to Old Dor once, when the three of them finally reached the foot of a slope made slick and treacherous with pine-needles. just ahead of them, a small stream foamed coldly past.

“Dorrance, what are you doing out here? How’d you get here, for that matter? And where the hell are we going?”

“Oh, I hardly ever answer questions,” Old Dor replied, smiling widely. He surveyed the stream, then raised one finger and pointed at the water. A small brown trout jumped into the air, flipped bright drops from its tail, and fell back into the water again. Ralph and Lois looked at each other with identical Did I just see what I thought I saw? expressions.

“Nope, nope,” Dor continued, stepping off the bank and onto a wet rock. “Hardly ever. Too difficult. Too many possibilities. Too many levels… eh, Ralph? The world is full of levels, Isn’t it? How are you, Lois?”

“Fine,” she said absently, watching Dorrance cross the stream on a number of conveniently placed stones. He did it with his arms held out to either side, a posture which made him look like the world’s oldest acrobat. just as he reached the far bank, there was a violent exhalation from the ridge behind them-not quite an explosion.

There go the oil-tanks, Ralph thought.

Dor turned to face them from the other side of the brook, sailing his placid Buddha’s smile. Ralph went up this time without any conscious intention of doing so, and without that sense of a blink inside his mind. Color rushed into the day, but he barely noticed; all his attention was fixed on Dorrance, and for a space of almost ten seconds, he forgot to breathe.

Ralph had seen auras of many shades in the last month or so, but none even remotely approached the splendid envelope that enclosed the old man Don Veazie had once described as “nice as hell, but really sort of a fool.” It was as if Dorrance’s aura had been strained through a prism… or a rainbow. He tossed off light in dazzling arcs: blue followed by magenta, magenta followed by red, red followed by pink, pink followed by the creamy yellow-white of a ripe banana.

He felt Lois’s hand groping for his and enfolded it.

[“My God, Ralph, do you see? Do you see how beautiful he is?”] E “I sure do.”] [“What is he? Is he even human?”] [“I don’t kn-”] [“Stop it, both of you. Come back down.”] Dorrance was still smiling, but the voice they heard in their heads was commanding and not a bit vague.

And before Ralph could consciously think himself down, he felt a push.

The colors and the heightened quality of the sounds dropped out of the day at once.

“There’s no time for that now,” Dor said. “Why, it’s noon already-”

“Noon?” Lois asked. “It can’t be! It wasn’t even nine when we got here, and that can’t have been half an hour ago!”

“Time goes faster when you’re high,” Old Dor said. He spoke solemnly, but his eyes twinkled. ’Just ask anyone drinking beer and listening to country music on Saturday night. Come on! Hurry up!

The clock is ticking! Cross the stream!”

Lois went first, stepping carefully from stone to stone with her arms held out, as Dorrance had done. Ralph followed with his hands poised to either side of her hips, ready to catch her if she showed signs of wavering, but he was the one who ended up almost tumbling in.

He managed to avoid it, but only at the cost of wetting one foot all the way to the ankle. It seemed to him that someplace in the far reaches of his head, he could hear Carolyn laughing merrily.

“Can’t you tell us anything, Dor?” he asked as they reached the far side. “We’re pretty lost here.” And not just mentally or spiritually, either, he thought. He had never been in these woods in his life, not even hunting partridge or deer as a young man. If the path they were on petered out, or if Old Dor lost whatever passed for his bearings, what then?

“Yes,” Dor responded at once. “I can tell you one thing, and it’s absolutely for sure.”

“What?”

“These are the best poems Robert Creeley ever wrote,” Old Dor said, holding up his copy of for Love, and before either of them could respond to that, he turned around and once again began tracing his way along the faint path which ran west through the woods.

Ralph looked at Lois. Lois looked back at him, equally at a loss.

Then she shrugged. “Come on, old buddy,” she said. “We better not lose him now. I forgot the breadcrumbs.”

They climbed another hill, and from the top of it Ralph could see that the path they were on led down to an old woods road with a strip of grass running up the middle. It dead-ended in an overgrown gravel-pit about fifty yards farther along. There was a car idling just outside the entrance to the pit, a perfectly anonymous late-model Ford which Ralph nevertheless felt he knew. When the door opened and the driver got out, everything fell into place. Of course he knew the car; he had last seen it from Lois’s living-room window on Tuesday night. Then it had been slued around in the middle of Harris Avenue with the driver kneeling in the glow of the headlights… kneeling beside the dying dog he had struck. Joe Wyzer heard them coming, looked up, and waved.