“Nat’s bailing out on you-better let me take her.”

Ralph looked down and saw Nat looking across the room with heavy, fascinated eyes. He followed her gaze and saw the little vase standing on the windowsill beside the sink. He had filled it with fall flowers less than two hours ago and now a low green mist was sizzling off the stems and surrounding the blooms with a faint, misty glow.

I’m watching them breathe their last, Ralph thought. Oh my God, I’m never going to pick another flower in my life. I promise.

Helen took the baby gently from his arms. Nat went tractably enough, although her eyes never left the sizzling flowers as her mother went back around the table, sat down, and nestled her in the crook of her arm.

Gretchen tapped the face of her watch lightly. “If we’re going to make that meeting at noon-”

“Yes, of course,” Helen said, a little apologetically. “We’re on the official Susan Day Welcoming Committee,” she told Ralph, “and in this case that’s not quite as junior League as it sounds. Our main job really isn’t to welcome her but to help protect her.”

“Is that going to be a problem, do you think?”

“It’ll be tense, let’s put it that way,” Gretchen said. “She’s got half a dozen of her own security people, and they’ve been sending us turn-around faxes of all the Derry-related threats she’s received.

It’s standard operating procedure with them-she’s been in a lot of people’s faces for a lot of years. They’re keeping us in the picture, but they’re also making sure we understand that, because we’re the inviting group, her safety is WomanCare’s responsibility as well as theirs.” Ralph opened his mouth to ask if there had been many threats, but he supposed he already knew the answer to that question.

He’d lived in Derry for seventy years, off and on, and he knew it was a dangerous machine-there were a lot of sharp points and cutting edges just below the surface. That was true of a lot of cities, of course, but in Derry there had always seemed to be an extra dimension to the ugliness. Helen had called it home, and it was his home, tool butHe found himself remembering something which had happened almost ten years ago, shortly after the annual Canal Days Festival had ended.

Three boys had thrown an unassuming and inoffensive young gay man named Adrian Mellon into the Kenduskeag after repeatedly biting and stabbing him; it was rumored they had stood there on the bridge behind the Falcon Tavern and watched him die.

They’d told the police they hadn’t liked the hat he was wearing.

That was also Derry, and only a fool would ignore the fact.

As if this memory had led him to it (perhaps it had), Ralph looked at the photo on the front page of today’s paper again-Ham Davenport with his upraised fist, Dan Dalton with his bloody nose and dazed eyes, wearing Ham’s sign on his head.

“How many threats?” he asked. “Over a dozen?”

“Ah(out thirty,” Gretchen said. “Of those, her security people take half a dozen seriously. Two are threats to blow up the Civic Center if she doesn’t cancel. Hey-this is a real honey-it’s from someone who says he’s got a Big Squirt water-gun filled with battery acid. ’If I make a direct hit, not even your dyke friends will be able to look at you without throwing up,” that one says.”

“Nice,” Ralph said, ’It brings us to the point, anyway,” Gretchen said. She rummaged in her bag, brought out a small can with a red top, and put it on the table. “A little present from all your grateful friends at WomanCare.”

Ralph picked the can up. On one side was a picture of a woman spraying a cloud of gas at a man wearing a slouch hat and a Beagle Boys-type eye-mask. On the other was a single word in bright red capital letters:

“What is this?” he asked, shocked in spite of himself. “Mace?”

“No,” Gretchen said. “Mace is a risky proposition in Maine, legally speaking. This stuff is much milder… but if you give somebody a faceful, they won’t even think of hassling you for at least a couple of minutes. It numbs the skin, irritates the eyes, and causes nausea.”

Ralph took the cap off the can, looked at the red aerosol nozzle beneath, then replaced the cap. “Good Christ, woman, why would I want to lug around a can of this stuff?”

“Because you’ve been officially designated a Centurion,” Gretchen said.

“A what?” Ralph asked.

“A Centurion,” Helen repeated. Nat was fast asleep in her arms, and Ralph realized the auras were gone again. “It’s what The Friends of Life call their major enemies-the ringleaders of the opposition.”

“Okay,” Ralph said, “I’ve got it now. Ed talked about people he called Centurions on the day he… assaulted you. He talked about a lot of things that day, though, and all of them were crazy-”

“Yes, Ed’s at the bottom of it, and he is crazy,” Helen said. “We don’t think he’s mentioned this Centurion business except to a small inner circle-people who are almost as gonzo as he is. The rest of The Friends of Life… I don’t think they have any idea. I mean, did you? Until last month, did you have any idea that he was crazy?”

Ralph shook his head.

“Hawking Labs finally fired him,” Helen said. “Yesterday. They held onto him as long as they could-he’s great at what he does, and they had a lot invested in him-but in the end they had to let him go.

Three months’ severance pay in lieu of notice… not bad for a guy who beats up his wife and throws dolls loaded with fake blood at the windows of the local women’s clinic.” She tapped the newspaper.

“This last demonstration was the final straw. It’s the third or fourth time he’s been arrested since he got involved with The Friends of Life.”

“You have someone inside, don’t you?” Ralph said. “That’s how you know all this.”

Gretchen smiled. “We’re not the only ones who’ve got someone at least partway inside; we have a running joke that there really are no Friends of Life, just a bunch of double agents. Derry P.D."s got someone; the State Police do, too. And those are just the ones our… our person… knows about. Hell, the FBI could be monitoring them, as well. The Friends of Life are eminently infiltratable, Ralph, because they’re convinced that, deep down, everyone is on their side.

But we believe that our person is the only one who’s gotten in toward the middle, and this person says that Dan Dalton is just the tail Ed Deepneau wags.”

“I guessed that the first time I saw them together on the TV news,” Ralph said, Gretchen got up, gathered the coffee cups, took them over to the sink, and began to rinse them. “I’ve been active in the women’s movement for thirteen years now, and I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit, but I’ve never seen anything like this. He’s got these dopes believing that women in Derry are undergoing involuntary abortions, that half of them haven’t even realized they’re pregnant before the Centurions come in the night and take their babies.”

“Has he told them about the incinerator over in Newport?” Ralph asked. “The one that’s really a baby crematorium?”

Gretchen turned from the sink, her eyes wide. “How did -I,o I know about that?”

“Oh, I got the lowdown from Ed himself, up close and in person.

Starting in July of ’92.” He hesitated for just a moment, then gave them an account of the day he had met Ed out by the airport, and how Ed had accused the man in the pickup of hauling dead babies in the barrels marked WEED-co. Helen listened silently, her eyes growing steadily wider and rounder. “He was going on about the same stuff on the day he beat you up,” Ralph finished, “but he’d embellished it considerably by then.”

“That probably explains why he’s fixated on you,” Gretchen said, “but in a very real sense, the why doesn’t matter. The fact is, he’s given his nuttier friends a list of these so-called Centurions. We don’t know everyone who’s on it, but I am, and Helen is, and Susan Day, of course… and you.” Why me? Ralph almost asked, then recognized it as another pointless question. Maybe Ed had targeted him because he had called the cops after Ed had beaten Helen; more likely it had happened for no understandable reason at all. Ralph remembered reading somewhere that David Berkowitz-also known as the Son of Sam-claimed to have killed on some occasions under instructions from his dog.