Ralph suddenly reached beneath his left armpit and pressed his fingers to the bandage there. The pain was immediate and intense… but the two small bald men in the white tunics stayed right where they were, on May Locher’s doorstep.

It doesn’t matter what you think you feel, Ralph. It can’t matter, because"Fuck you!” Ralph said in a hoarse, low voice. He rose from the wing-chair, putting his cup down on the little table beside it as he did. Sleepy time slopped onto the TV Guide there. “Fuck you, this Is no dream!”

He hurried across the living room to the kitchen, pajamas flapping, old worn slippers scuffing and thumping, the place where Charlie Pickering had stuck him sending O)ut he)t little bursts of pain. He grabbed a chair and took it into the apartment’s small foyer.

There was a closet here. Ralph opened its door, snapped on the light just inside, positioned the chair so he would be able to reach the closet’s top shelf, and then stared an it.

The shelf was a clutter of lost or forgotten items, most of which had belonged to Carolyn. These were small things, little more than scraps, but looking at them drove away the last lingering conviction that this had to be a dream. There was an ancient bag of M amp;M’s-her secret snack-food, her comfort-food. There was a lace heart, a single discarded white satin pump with a broken heel, a photo album. These things hurt a lot more than the knife-prick under his arm, but he had no time to hurt just now.

Ralph leaned forward, placing his left hand on the high, dusty shelf to balance his weight, then began to shuffle through the junk with his right hand, all the while praying that the kitchen chair wouldn’t take a notion to scoot out from under him. The wound below his armpit was now throbbing outrageously, and he knew he.was going to get it bleeding again if he didn’t stop the athletics soon, but…

I’m sure they’re up here somewhere… well… almost sure…

He pushed aside his old fly-box and his wicker creel. There was a stack of magazines behind the creel. The one on top was an issue of Ligok with Andy Williams on the cover. Ralph shoved them aside with the heel of his hand, sending up a flurry of dust. The old bag of M amp;M’s fell to the floor and split open, spraying brightly colored bits of candy in every direction. Ralph leaned even farther forward, now almost on his toes. He supposed it was his imagination, but he thought he could sense the kitchen chair he was on getting ready to be evil.

The thought had no more than crossed his mind when the chair squawked and began to slide slowly backward on the hardwood floor.

Ralph ignored that, ignored his throbbing side, and ignored the voice telling him he ought to stop this, he really ought to, because he was dreaming awake, just as the Hall book said many insomniacs eventually did, and although those little fellows across the street didn’t really exist, he could really be standing here on this slowly sliding chair, and he, could really break his hip when it went out from under him, and just how the hell was he going to explain what had happened when some smartass doctor in the Emergency Room of Derry Home asked him?

Grunting, he reached all the way back, pushed aside a carton from which half a Christmas tree star protruded like a strange spiky periscope (knocking the heelless evening pump to the floor in the process), and saw what he wanted in the far left hand corner of the shelf: the case which contained his old Zeiss-ikon binoculars.

Ralph stepped off the chair just before it could slide all the way out from under him, moved it closer in, then got up on it again. He couldn’t reach all the way into the corner where the binocular case stood, so he grabbed the trout-net which had been lying up here next to his creel and fly-box for lo these many years and succeeded in bagging the case on his second try. then dragged it forward until he could grab the strap, stepped off the chair, and came down on the fallen evening pump. His ankle twisted painfully. Ralph staggered, flailed his arms for balance, and managed to avoid going facefirst into the wall. As -he started back into the living room, however, he felt liquid warmth beneath the bandage on his side. He had managed to open the knife-wound again after all. Wonderful. just a wonderful night cher Roberts… and how long had he been away from the window? ’ He, didn’t know, but it felt like a long time, and he was sure the little bald doctors would be gone when he got back there. The street would be empty, and-he stopped dead, the binocular case dangling at the end of its strap and tracking a long slow trapezoidal shadow back and forth across the floor where the orange glow of the streetlights lay like an ugly coat of paint.

Little bald doctors? Was that how he had just thought of them?

Yes, of course, because that was what they called them-the folks who claimed to have been abducted by them… examined by them… operated on by them in some cases. They were physicians from space, proctologists from the great beyond. But that wasn’t the big deal.

The big deal wasEd used the phrase, Ralph thought. He used it the night he called me and warned me to stay away from him and his interests. He said it was the doctor who told him about the Crimson King and the Centurions and all the rest.

“Yes,” Ralph whispered. His back was prickling madly with gooseflesh. “Yes, that’s what he said. ’The doctor told me. The little bald doctor.”

“When he reached the window, he saw that the strangers were still out there, although they had moved from May Locher’s stoop to the sidewalk while he had been fishing for the binoculars. They were standing directly beneath one of those damned orange streetlights, in fact. Ralph’s feeling that Harris Avenue looked like a deserted stage set after the evening performance returned with weird, declamatory force… but with a different significance.

For one thing, the set was no longer deserted, was it? Some ominous, long-pastmidnight play had commenced in what the two odd creatures below no doubt assumed was a totally empty theater.

What would they do if they knew they had an audience? Ralph wondered, What would they do to me?

The bald doctors now had the shared demeanor of men who have nearly reached agreement. In that instant they did not look like doctors at all to Ralph, in spite of their smocks-they looked like bluecollar workers coming offshift at some plant or factory. These two guys, clearly buddies, have stopped outside the main gate for a moment or two to finish off some subject that can’t wait even long enough for them to walk down the block to the nearest bar, knowing it will only take a minute or so in any case; total agreement is only a conversational exchange or two away.

Ralph uncased the binoculars, raised them to his eyes, and wasted a moment or two in puzzled fiddling with the focus-knob before realizing he had forgotten to take off the lens caps. He did so, then raised the glasses again. This time the two figures standing under the streetlamp jumped into his field of vision at once, large and perfectly lit, but fuzzed out. He turned the little knob between the barrels again, and the two men popped into focus almost immediately.

Ralph’s breath stopped in his throat, The look he got was extremely brief; no more than three seconds passed before one of the men (if they were men) nodded and clapped a hand on his companion’s shoulder. Then they both turned away, leaving Ralph with nothing to look at but their bald heads and smooth, white-clad backs. Only three seconds at most, but Ralph saw enough in that brief space of time to make him profoundly uneasy.

He had run to get the binoculars for two reasons, both predicated on his inability to go on believing that this was a dream. First, he wanted to be sure he could identify the two men if he was ever called upon to do so. Second (this one was less admissible to his conscious mind but every bit as urgent), he had wanted to dispel the unsettling notion that he was having his own close encounter of the third kind.