Ralph thought he’d let Hong stick needles into him until he looked like a porcupine if the treatment allowed him to sleep until the sun came up.

And there was a third thing: the gray auras hadn’t actually been scary. They had been sort of… interesting.

“"People die from lack of sleep all the time,” Wyzer was saying, although the medical examiner usually ends up writing suicide on the cause-of-death line, rather than insomnia. Insomnia and alcoholism have a lot in common, but the major thing is this: they’re both diseases of the heart and mind, and when they’re allowed to run their course they usually gut the spirit long before they’re able to destroy the body. So yeah-people do die from lack of sleep. This is a dangerous time for you, and you have to take care of yourself.

If you start to feel really wonky, call Litchfield Do you hear me?

Don’t stand on ceremony. Ralph grimaced. “I think I’d be more apt to call you.”

Wyzer nodded as if he had absolutely expected this. “The number under Hong’s is mine,” he said.

Surprised, Ralph looked down at the card again. There was a second number there, marked J.W.

Wyzer said. “Really. You won’t disturb my wife; we’ve been divorced since 1983.”

Ralph tried to speak and found he couldn’t. All that came out was a choked, meaningless little sound. He swallowed hard, trying to clear the obstruction in his throat.

Wyzer saw he was struggling and clapped him on the back. “No bawling in the store, Ralph-it scares away the big spenders. You want a Kleenex?”

“No, I’m okay.” His voice was slightly watery, but audible and mostly under control.

Wyzer cast a critical eye on him. “Not yet, but you will be.”

Wyzer’s big hand swallowed Ralph’s once more, and this time Ralph didn’t worry about it. “For the time being, try to relax. And remember to be grateful for the sleep you do get.”

“Okay. Thanks again.”

Wyzer nodded and walked back to the prescription counter.

Ralph walked back down Aisle 3, turned left at the formidable condom display, and went out through a door with THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT RITE AID decaled above the push-bar. At first he thought there was nothing unusual about the fierce brightness that made him squint his eyes almost shut-it was midday, after all, and perhaps the drugstore had been a little darker than he had realized.

Then he opened his eyes wide again, and his breath came to a dead stop in his throat.

A look of thunderstruck amazement spread over his face. It was the expression an explorer might wear when, after pushing his way through just one more nondescript tangle of bushes, he finds himself looking at some fabulous lost city or brain-busting geological feature-a cliff of diamonds, perhaps, or a spiral waterfall, Ralph shrank back against the blue mailbox standing to one side of the drugstore’s entrance, still not breathing, his eyes shuttling jerkily from left to right as the brain behind them tried to understand the wonderful and terrible news it was receiving.

The auras were back, but that was a little like saying Hawaii was a place where you didn’t have to wear your overcoat. This time the light was everywhere, fierce and flowing, strange and beautiful.

Ralph had had only one experience in his entire life which was remotely similar to this. During the summer of 1941, the year he’d turned eighteen, he’d been riding his thumb from Derry to his uncle’s place in Poughkeepsie, New York, a distance of about four hundred miles. An early-evening thunderstorm at the end of his second day on the road had sent him scurrying for the nearest available shelter-a decrepit barn swaying drunkenly at the end of a long hayfield. He had spent more of that day walking than riding, and had fallen soundly asleep in one of the barn’s long-abandoned horse stalls even before the thunder had stopped blasting the sky overhead.

He’d awakened at mid-morning the next day after a solid fourteen hours of sleep and had looked around in utter wonder, not even sure, in those first few moments, where he was. He only knew it was some dark, sweet-smelling place, and that the world above and on all sides of him had been split open with brilliant seams of light.

Then he had remembered taking shelter in the barn, and it came to him that this strange vision had been caused by the cracks in the barn’s walls and roof combined with the bright summer sunlight… only that, and nothing more. Yet he’d sat there in mute wonder for at least five minutes just the same, a wide-eyed teenage boy with hay in his hair and his arms dusted with chaff; he sat there looking up at the tidal gold of dust-motes spinning lazily in the slanting, cross hatching rays of the sun. He remembered thinking it had been like being in church.

This was that experience to the tenth power. And the hell of it was simply this: he could not describe exactly what had happened, and how the world had changed, to make it so wonderful. Things and people, particularly the people, had auras, yes, but that was only where this amazing phenomenon began. Things had never been so brilliant, so utterly and completely there. The cars, the telephone poles, the shopping carts in the Kart Korral in front of the supermarket, the frame apartment buildings across the street-all these things seemed to pop out at him like 3-D images in an old film. All at once this dingy little strip-mall on Witcham Street had become wonderland, and although Ralph was looking right at it, he was not sure what he was looking at, only that it was rich and gorgeous and fabulously strange.

The only things he could isolate were the auras surrounding the people going in and out of stores, stowing packages in their trunks, or getting in their cars and driving away. Some of these auras were brighter than others, but even the dimmest were a hundred times brighter than his first glimpses of the phenomenon.

But it’s what Wyzer was talking about, no doubt of that. It’s hyperreality, and what you’re looking at is no more there than the hallucinations of people who are under the influence of LSD. What you’re seeing is just another symptom of your insomnia, no more and no less.

Look at it, Ralph, and marvel over it as much as you want-it I’s marvelous-just don’t believe it.

He didn’t need to tell himself to marvel, however-there were marvels everywhere. A bakery truck was backing out of a slot in front of Day Break, Sun Down, and a bright maroon substance-it was almost the color of dried blood-came from its tailpipe. It was neither smoke nor vapor but had some of the characteristics of each.

This brightness rose in gradually attenuating spikes, like the lines of an EEG readout. Ralph looked down at the pavement and saw the tread of the van’s tires printed on the concrete in that same maroon shade. The van speeded up as it left the parking lot, and the ghostly I graph-trail emerging with its exhaust turned the bright red of arterial blood as it did.

There were similar oddities everywhere, phenomena which intersected in slanting paths and made Ralph think again of how the light had come slanting through the cracks in the roof and walls of that long-ago barn. But the real wonder was the people, and it was around them that the auras seemed most clearly defined and real, A bagboy came out of the supermarket, pushing a cartload of groceries and walking in a nimbus of such brilliant white that it was like a travelling spotlight.

The aura of the woman beside him was dingy by comparison, the gray-green of cheese which has begun to mould.

A young girl called to the bagboy from the open window of a Subaru and waved; her left hand left bright contrails, as pink as cotton candy, in the air as it moved. They began to fade almost as soon as they appeared. The bagboy grinned and waved back; his hand left a fantail of yellowish-white behind. To Ralph it looked like the fill of a tropical fish. This also began to fade, but more slowly.