And now Old Dor, turning up on his doorstep like some peculiar Old Testament prophet… only instead of telling him to repent, Dor had told him to cancel his appointment with the acupuncturist Joe Wyzer had recommended. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

The mouth of that tunnel. Looming closer every day. Was there really a tunnel? And if so, where did it lead?

I’m more interested in what might be waiting for me in there, Ralph thought. Waiting in the dark.

You shouldn’t have messed in, Dorrance had said. But it’s too late now.

“Done-bun-can’the-undone,” Ralph murmured, and suddenly decided he didn’t want to take the wide view anymore; it was unsettling.

Better to move in close again and consider things a detail at a time, beginning with his appointment for acupuncture treatment. Was hegoing to keep it, or follow the advice of Old Dor, alias the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father?

It really wasn’t a question that needed much thought, Ralph decided. Joe Wyzer had sweet-talked Hong’s secretary into finding him an appointment in early October, and Ralph intended to keep it. If there was a path out of this thicket, starting to sleep through the night was probably it. And that made Hong the next logical step.

“Done-bun-can’the-undone,” he repeated, and went into the living room to read one of his Westerns.

Instead he found himself paging through the book of poetry Dorrance had given him-Cemetery Nights, by Stephen Dobyns. Dorance had been right on both counts: the majority of the poems Were like stories, and Ralph discovered that he, liked them just fine. The poem from which Old Dor had quoted was called “Pursuit,” and it began: Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days passa blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral.

Through the windows of my speeding car, I see all that I love falling away: books unread,. okes untold, landscapes unvisited…

Ralph read the poem twice, completely absorbed, thinking he would have to read it to Carolyn. Carolyn would like it, which was good, and she would like him (who usually stuck to Westerns and historical novels) even more for finding it and bringing it to her like a bouquet of flowers. He was actually getting up to find a scrap of paper he could mark the page with when he-remembered that Carolyn had been dead for half a year now and burst into tears. He sat in the wing-chair for almost fifteen minutes, holding Cemetery Nights in his lap and wiping at his eyes with the heel of his left hand. At last he went into the bedroom, lay down, and tried to sleep, After an hour of staring at the ceiling, he got up, made himself a cup of coffee, and found a college football game on TV.

The Public Library was open on Sunday afternoons from one until six, and on the day after Dorrance’s visit, Ralph went down there, mostly because he had nothing better to do. The high-ceilinged reading room would ordinarily have contained a scattering of other old men like himself, most of them leafing through the various Sunday papers they now had time to read, but when Ralph emerged from the stacks where he had spent forty minutes browsing, he discovered he had the whole room to himself. Yesterday’s gorgeous blue skies had been replaced by driving rain that pasted the new-fallen leaves to the sidewalks or sent them flooding down the gutters and into Derry’s peculiar and unpleasantly tangled system of storm-drains.

The wind was still blowing, but it had shifted into the north and now had a nasty cutting edge. Old folks with any sense (or any luck) were at home where it was warm, possibly watching the last game of another dismal Red Sox season, possibly playing (Did Maid or Candyland with the grandkids, possibly napping off a big chicken dinner.

Ralph, on the other hand, did not care for the Red Sox, had no children or grandchildren, and seemed to have completely lost any capacity for napping he might once have had. So had taken the one o’clock Green Route bus down to the library, and here he was, wishing he had worn something heavier than his old scuffed gray jacket-the reading room was chilly. Gloomy, as well. The fireplace was empty, and the clankless radiators strongly suggested that the furnace had yet to be fired up. The Sunday librarian hadn’t bothered flipping the switches that turned on the hanging overhead globes, either. The light which did manage to find its way in here seemed to fall dead on the floor, and the corners were full of shadows. The loggers and soldiers and drummers and Indians in the old paintings on the walls looked like malevolent ghosts. Cold rain sighed and gusted against the windows.

I should have stayed home, Ralph thought, but didn’t really believe it; these days the apartment was even worse. Besides, he had found an interesting new book in what he had come to think of as the Mr. Sandman Section of the stacks: Patterns of Dreaming, by James A.

Hall, M.D. He turned on the overheads, rendering the room marginally less gruesome, sat down at one of the four long, empty tables, and was soon absorbed in his reading.

Prior to the realization that REM sleep and NREM sleep were distinct states [Hall wrote], studies concerned with total deprivation of a particular stage of sleep led to Dement’s suggestion (1960) that deprivatt’on… causes disorganization of the waking personality…

Boy, you got that right, my friend, Ralph thought. Can’t eve find a fucking Cup-A-Soup packet tvhen you want one.

… early dream-deprivation studies also raised the exciting speculation that schizophrenia might he a disorder in Which deprivation of dreaming at night led to a breakthrough of the dream process into everyday waking life.

Ralph hunched over the book, elbows on the table, fisted hands pressed against his temples, forehead lined and eyebrows drawn together in a clench of concentration, He wondered if Hall could be talking about the auras, maybe without even knowing it. Except he was still having dreams, dammit-very vivid ones, for the most part. just last night he’d had one in which he was dancing at the old Derry Pavillion (gone now; destroyed in the big storm which had wiped out most of the downtown area eight years before) with Lois Chasse.

He seemed to have taken her out with the intention of proposing to her, but Trigger Vachon, of all people, had kept trying to cut in.

He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, tried to focus his attention, and began to read again. He did not see the man in the baggy gray sweatshirt materialize in the doorway of the,reading room and stand there, silently watching him. After about three minutes of this, the man reached beneath the, sweatshirt (Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy was on the front, wearing his Joe Cool glasses) and produced a hunting knife from the scabbard on his belt. The hanging overhead globes threw a thread of light along the knife’s serrated blade as the man turned it this way and that, admiring the edge. Then he moved forward toward the table where Ralph was sitting with his head propped on his hands. He sat down beside Ralph, who noticed that someone was there only in the faintest, most distant way.

Tolerance to sleep loss varies somewhat with the age of the subject. Ywunger subjects show an earlier onset of disturbance and more physical reactions, while older subjectsA hand closed lightly on Ralph’s shoulder, startling him out of the book.

“I wonder what they’ll look like?” an ecstatic voice whispered in his ear, the words flowing on a tide of what smelled like spoiled bacon cooking slowly in a bath of garlic and rancid butter. “Your guts, I mean. I wonder what they’ll look like when I let them out all over the floor. What do you think, you Godless baby-killing Centurion? Do you think they’ll be yellow or black or red or what?”

Something hard and sharp pressed into Ralph’s left side and then slowly traced its way down along his ribs.