He shut his eyes and groped the phone back into the cradle. Then he leaned his forehead against the wall.

What are you doing, Ralph? What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?

“It’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart.”

You can’t seriously think whatever you’re thinking… can you?

“… a long walk, so don’t sweat the small stuff What exactly are you thinking, Ralph?

He didn’t know; he didn’t have the slightest idea. Something about fate, he supposed, and appointments in Samarra. He only knew for sure that rings of pain were spreading out from the little hole in his left side, the hole the knife-sticker man had made. The E.M.T had given him half a dozen pain-pills and he supposed he should take one, but just now he felt too tired to go to the sink and draw a glass of water… and if he was too tired to cross one shitty little room, how the hell would he ever make the long walk back to Eden?

Ralph didn’t know, and for the time being he didn’t care. He only wanted to stand where he was, with his forehead against the wall and his eyes shut so he wouldn’t have to look at anything.

CHAPTER 8

The beach was a long white edging, like a flirt Of silk slip at the hem of the bright blue sea, and it was totally empty except for a round object about seventy yards away. This round object was about the size of a basketball, and it filled Ralph with a fear that was both deep and-for the moment, at least-groundless.

Don’t go near it, he told himself. There’s something bad about it.

Something really bad. It’s a black dog barking at a blue moon, blood in the sink, a raven perched on a bust of Pallasiust inside my chamber door. You don’t want to go near it, Ralph, and you don’t need to go near it, because this is one of Joe Wyzer’s lucid dreams. You ca light turn and cruise away, if you want.

Except his feet began to carry him forward anyway, so maybe this wasn’t a lucid dream. Not pleasant, either, not at all. Because the closer he got to that object on the beach, the less it looked like a basketball.

It was by far the most realistic dream Ralph had ever experienced, and the fact that he knew he was dreaming actually seemed to heighten that sense of realism. Of lucidity. He could feel the fine, loose sand under his bare feet, warm but not hot; he could hear the grinding, rock-throated roar of the incoming waves as they lost their balance and sprawled their way up the lower beach, where the sand glistened like wet tanned skin; could smell salt and drying seaweed, a strong and tearful smell that reminded him of summer vacations spent at Old Orchard Beach when he was a child.

Hey, old buddy, if you can’t change this dream, I think maybe you ought to hit the ejection switch and bail out of it-wake yourself up, in other words, and right away.

He had closed half the distance to the object on the beach and there was no longer any question about what it was-not a basketball but a head. Someone had buried a human being up to the chin in the sand.

… and, Ralph suddenly realized, the tide was coming in.

He didn’t bail out; he began to run. As he did, the frothy edge of a wave touched the head. It opened its mouth and began to scream.

Even raised in a shriek, Ralph knew that voice at once. It was Carolyn’s voice.

The froth of another wave ran up the beach and backwashed the hair which had been clinging to the head’s wet cheeks. Ralph began to run faster, knowing he was almost certainly going to be too late.

The tide was coming in fast. It would drown her long before he could free her buried body from the sand.

You don’t have to save her, Ralph. Carolyn’s already dead, and it didn’t happen on some deserted beach. It happened in Room 317 of Derry Home Hospital You were with her at the end, and the sound you heard wasn’t surf but sleet betting the window. Remember?

He remembered, but he ran faster nevertheless, sending puffs of sugary sand out behind him.

You won’t ever get to her, though,-you know how it is in dreams, don’t you? Each thing you rush toward turns into something else.

No, that wasn’t how the poem went… or was it? Ralph couldn’t be sure. All he clearly remembered now was that it had ended with the narrator running blindly from something deadly (Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape) which was hunting him through the woods. closing in.

Yet he was getting closer to the dark shape on the sand. it wasn’t changing into anything else, either, and when he felon his knees before Carolyn, he understood at once why he had not been able to recognize his wife of forty-five years, even from a distance: something was terribly wrong with her aura. It clung to her skin like a filthy dry-cleaning bag. When Ralph’s shadow fell on her, Carolyn’s eyes rolled up like the eyes of a horse that has shattered its leg going over a high fence. She was breathing in rapid, frightened gasps, and each expulsion of air sent jets of gray-black aura from her nostrils.

The tattered balloon-string straggling up from the crown of her head was the purple-black of a festering wound. When she opened her mouth to scream again, an unpleasant glowing substance flew from her lips in gummy strings which disappeared almtdst as soon as his eyes had registered their existence.

I’ll save you, Carol! he shouted. He fell on his knees and began digging at sand around her like a dog digging up a bone… and as the thought occurred to him, he realized that Rosalie, the early-morning scavenger of Harris Avenue, was sitting tiredly behind his screaming wife. It was as if the dog had been summoned by the thought. Rosalie, he saw, was also surrounded by one of those filthy black auras. She had Bill McGovern’s missing Panima hat between her paws, and it looked as though she had enjoyed many a good chew on it since it had come into her possession.

So that’s where the, damn hat went, Ralph thought, then tlirneci hunting him and back to Carolyn and began to dig even faster. So far he hadn’t managed to uncover so much as a single shoulder.

Never mind me.” Carolyn screamed at him. I’m already dead, remember? Watch for the white-man tracks, Ralph TheA wave, glassy green on the bottom and the curdled white of soapsuds on top, broke less than ten feet from the beach. It ran up the sand toward them, freezing Ralph’s balls with cold water and burying Carolyn’s head momentarily in a grit-filled surge of foam.

When the wave retreated, Ralph raised his own horror-filled shriek to the indifferent blue sky. The retreating wave had done in seconds what it had taken the radiation treatments almost a month to do; took her hair, washed her bald. And the crown of her head had begun to bulge at the spot where the blackish balloon-string was attached.

Carolyn, no! he howled, digging even faster. The sand was now dank and unpleasantly heavy.

Never mind, she said. Gray-black puffs came from her mouth with each word, like dirty vapor from an industrial smokestack. It’s just the tumor, and it’s inoperable, so don’t lose any sleep over that part of the show. What the hell, it’s a long walk back to Eden, so don’t sweat the small stuff, right? But you have to keep an eye out for those tracks…

Carolyn, I don’t know what you’re talking about!

Another wave came, wetting Ralph to the waist and inundating Carolyn again. When it withdrew, the swelling on the crown of her head was beginning to split open.

You’ll find out soon enough, Carolyn replied, and then the swelling on her head popped with a sound like a hammer striking a slab of meat.

A haze of blood flew into the clear, salt-smelling air, and a horde of black bugs the size of cockroaches came pouring out of her.

Ralph had never seen anything like them before-not even in a dream-and they filled him with an almost hysterical loathing. He would have fled, Carolyn or not, but he was frozen in place, too stunned to move a single finger, let alone get up and run.