“I can’t wait to find out,” the ecstatic voice whispered. “I can’t wait.

Ralph turned his head very slowly, hearing the tendons in his neck creak. He didn’t know the name of the man with the bad breaththe man who was sticking something that felt too much like a knife not to be one into his side-but he recognized him at once. The hornrimmed glasses helped, but the zany gray hair, standing up in clumps that reminded Ralph simultaneously of Don King and Albert Einstein, was the clincher. It was the man who had been standing with Ed Deepneau in the background of the newspaper photo that had showed Ham Davenport with his fist raised and Dan Da ton wearing Davenport’s CHOICE, NOT FEAR sign for a hat. Ralph thought he had seen this same guy in some of the TV news stories about the continuing abortion demonstrations. just another signwaving, chanting face in the crowd; just another spear-carrier. Except it now seemed that this particular spear-carrier intended to kill him.

“What do you think?” the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt asked, still in that ecstatic whisper. The sound of his voice frightened Ralph more than the blade as it slid slowly up and then back down his leather jacket, seeming to map the vulnerable organs on the left side of his body: lung, heart, kidney, intestines. “What color?”

His breath was nauseating, but Ralph was afraid to pull back or turn his head, afraid that any gesture might cause the knife to stop tracking and plunge. Now it was moving back up his side again.

Behind the thick lenses of his hornrims, the man’s brown eyes floated like strange fish, The expression in them was disconnected and oddly frightened, Ralph thought. The eyes of a man who would see signs in the sky and perhaps hear voices whispering from deep in the closet late at night.

“I don’t know,” Ralph said. “I don’t know why you’d want to hurt me in the first place.” He shot his eyes quickly around, still not moving his head, hoping to see someone, anyone, but the reading room remained empty. Outside, the wind gusted and rain racketed against the windows.

“Because you’re a fucking Centurion!” the gray-haired man spat.

“A fucking baby-killer! Stealing the fetal unborn.” Selling them to the highest bidder! I know all about you!”

Ralph dropped his right hand slowly from the side of his head.

He was right-handed, and all the stuff he happened to pick up in the course of the day generally went into the handiest right hand pocket of whatever he was wearing. The old gray jacket had big flap pockets, but he was afraid that even if he could sneak his hand in there unnoticed, the most lethal thing he would find was apt to be a crumpled-up Dentyne wrapper. He doubted that he even had a nail-clipper.

“Ed Deepneau told you that, didn’t he?” Ralph asked, then grunted as the knife poked painfully into his side just below the place where his ribs stopped.

“Don’t speak his name,” the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt whispered. “Don’t you even speak his name! Stealer of infants!

Cowardly murderer! Centurion!” He thrust forward with the blade again, and this time there was real pain as the tip punched through the leather jacket. Ralph didn’t think he was cut-yet, anyway-but he was quite sure the nut had already applied enough pressure to leave a nasty bruise. That was okay, though; if he got out of this with no more than a bruise, he would count himself lucky.

“All right,” he said. “I won’t mention his name.”

“Say you’re sorry! “the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt hissed, prodding with the knife again. This time it went through Ralph’s shirt,and he felt the first warm trickle of blood down his side. Which is under the point of the blade right now? he wondered.

Liver?

bladder? What’s under there on the left hand side?

He either couldn’t remember or didn’t want to. A picture had come into his mind, and it was trying to get in the way of any organized thought-a deer hung head-down from a set of scales outside some country store during hunting season. Glazed eyes, lolling tongue, and a dark slit up the belly where a man with a knifea knife just like this one-had opened it up and yanked its works out, leaving just head, meat, and hide.

“I’m sorry,” Ralph said in a voice which was no longer steady. “I am, really.”

“Yeah, right! You ought to be, but you aren’t! You aren’t.” Another prod. A bright lance of pain. More wet heat trickling down his side. And suddenly the room was brighter, as if two or three of the camera crews which had been wandering around Derry since the abortion protests began had crowded in here and turned on the floods they mounted over their videocams. There were no cameras, of course; the lights had gone on inside of him.

He turned toward the man with the knife-the man who was actually pressing the blade into him now-and saw he was surrounded by a shifting green and black aura that made Ralph think of

(swampfire)

the dim phosphorescence he had sometimes seen in marshy woods after dark. Twisting through it were spiky brambles of purest black.

He looked at his assailant’s aura with mounting dismay, hardly feeling the tip of the knife sink a sixteenth of an inch deeper into him.

He was distantly aware that blood was puddling at the bottom of his shirt, along the line of his belt, but that was all.

He’s crazy, and he really does mean to kill me-it isn’t I’ll bet He’s not quite ready to do it yet, he hasn’t quite worked himself itp to it, but he’s almost there. And if I try to run-if I try to move even an inch away from the knife He’s got in me-he’ll do it right away.

I think He’s hoping I will decide to move… then he can tell himself I brought it on myself, that it was my own fault.

“You and your kind, oh boy,” the man with the zany shock of gray hair was saying. “We know all about you.”

Ralph’s hand had reached the right pocket… and felt a largish something inside he didn’t recognize or remember putting there. Not that that meant much; when you could no longer remember if the last four digits of the cinema center phone number were 1317 or 1713, anything was possible.

“You guys, oh boy!” the man with the zany hair said. “Ohboy ohboy ohBOY!” This time Ralph had no trouble feeling the pain when the man pushed with the knife; the tip spread a thin red net all the way across the curve of his chest wall and up the nape of his neck. He uttered a low moan, and his right hand clamped tight on the gray jacket’s right hand pocket, moulding the leather to the curved side of the object inside.

“Don’t scream,” the man with the zany hair said in that low, ecstatic whisper. “Oh jeepers jeezly crow, you don’t want to do that.” His brown eyes peered at Ralph’s face, and the lenses of his glasses so magnified them that the tiny flakes of dandruff caught in his lashes looked almost as big as pebbles. Ralph could see the man’s aura even in his eyes-it went sliding across his pupils like green smoke across black water. The snakelike twists running through the green light were thicker now, twining together, and Ralph understood that when the knife sank all the way in, the part of this man’s personality which was

???? generating those black swirls would be what pushed it. The green was

???? confusion and paranoia; the black was something else. Something (from

???? outside) much worse.

???? "No,” he gasped. "I won’t. I won’t scream.”

????

“Good. I can feel your heart, you know. It’s coming right up the blade of the knife and into the palm of my hand. It must be beating really hard.” The man’s mouth pulled up in a jerky, humorless smile.

Flecks of spittle clung to the corners of his lips. “Maybe you’ll just keel over and die of a heart-attack, save me the trouble of killing you.” Another gust of that sickening breath washed over Ralph’s face. “You’re awful old.”

Blood was now running down his side in what felt like two streams, maybe even three. The pain of the knife-point gouging into him was maddening-like the stinger of a gigantic bee.