Instead of dispelling it, his brief look through the binoculars intensified it, The little bald doctors did not actually seem to hast, features. They had faces, yes-eyes, noses, mouths-but they seemed as interchangeable as the chrome trim on the same make and model of a car.
They could have been identical twins, but that wasn’t the impression Ralph got, either. To him they looked more like department store mannequins with their Arnel wigs whisked off for the night, their eerie resemblance not the result of genetics but of mass production.
The only peculiar quality he could isolate and name was the preternaturally smooth quality of their skin-neither of them had so much as a single visible line or wrinkle. No moles, blotches, or scars, either, although Ralph supposed those were things you might miss with even a great pair of binoculars. Beyond the smooth and strangely line-free quality of their skin, everything became subjective.
And his only look had been so goddam brief! If he had been able to get to the binoculars more quickly, without the rigmarole of the chair and the fishing net, and if he had realized that the lens caps were on right away instead of wasting more time fiddling with the focusing knob, he might have saved himself some or all of the unease be-was now feeling.
They look sketched, he thought in the instant before they turned their backs on him. That’s what’s really bothering me, I think. Not the identical bald heads, the identical white smocks, or even the lack Of wrinkles. It’s how they look sketched-the eyes just circles, the small pink ears just squiggles made with a felt-tip pen, the mouths a pair of quick, almost careless strokes of pale pink watercolor. They don’t really look like either people or aliens,-they look like hasty representations Of… well, of I don’t know what.
He was sure of one thing: Docs #1 and #2 were both immersed in bright auras which in the binoculars appeared to be green-gold and filled with deep reddish-orange flecks that looked like sparks swirling up from a campfire. These auras conveyed a feeling of power and vitality to Ralph that their featureless, uninteresting faces did not.
The faces? I’m not sure I could pick them out again even if someone held a gun to my head. It’s as if they were made to be forgotten. If they were still bald, sure-no problem. But if they were wearing wigs and maybe sitting down, so I couldn’t see how short they are?
Maybe… the lack of lines might do the trick but then again, maybe not. The auras, though… those green-gold auras with the red flecks swirling through them… I’d know them anywhere. But there’s something wrong with them, isn’t there? What is it?
The answer popped into Ralph’s mind as suddenly and easily as the two creatures had popped into view when he had finally remembered to remove the lens caps from the binoculars. Both of the little doctors were swaddled in brilliant auras… but neither had a balloon-string floating up from his hairless head. Not even a sign of one.
They went strolling down Harris Avenue in the direction of Strawford Park, moving with the ease of two friends out for a Sunday stroll. just before they left the bright circle of light thrown by the streetlamp in front of May Locher’s house, Ralph dropped the angle of the binoculars so they picked up the item in Doc #2’s right hand.
It wasn’t a knife, as he had surmised, but it still wasn’t the sort of object you felt comfortable seeing in the hand of a departing stranger in the wee hours of the morning.
It was a pair of long-bladed, stainless-steel scissors.
That sense of being pushed relentlessly toward the mouth of a tunnel where all sorts of unpleasant things were waiting was with him again, only now it was accompanied by a feeling of panic, because it seemed that the latest big shove had taken place while he had been asleep and dreaming of his dead wife. Something inside him wanted to shriek with terror, and Ralph understood that if he didn’t do something to soothe it immediately, he would soon be shrieking out loud.
He closed his eyes and began to take deep breaths, trying to picture a different item of food with each one: a tomato, a potato, an icecream sandwich, a Brussels sprout. Dr. jamal had taught Carolyn this simple relaxation technique, and it had frequently staved off her headaches before they could get up a full head of steam-even in the last six weeks, when the tumor had been out of control, the technique had sometimes worked, and it controlled Ralph’s panic now. His heartbeat began to slow, and that feeling that he needed to scream began to pass.
Continuing to take deep breaths and to think
(apple pear slice of lemon pie)
of food, Ralph carefully snapped the,lens caps back on the binoculars. His hands were still trembling, but not so badly he couldn’t use them. Once the binoculars were capped and returned to their case, Ralph gingerly raised his left arm and looked at the bandage.
There was a red spot in the center of it the size of an aspirin tablet, but it did not appear to be spreading. Good.
There isn’t anything good about this, Ralph.
Fair enough, but that wasn’t going to help him decide exactly what had happened, or what he was going to do about it. Step one was to push his dreadful dream of Carolyn to one side for the time being and decide what had actually happened.
“I’ve been awake ever since I hit the floor,” Ralph told the empty room. “I know that, and I know I saw those men.”
Yes. He had really seen them, and the green-gold auras around them. He wasn’t alone, either; Ed Deepneau had seen at least one of them, too. Ralph would have bet the farm on it, if he’d had a farm to bet. It didn’t ease his mind much, however, to know that he and the wife-beating paranoid from up the street were seeing the same little bald guys.
And the auras, Ralph-didn’t he say something about those, too?
Well, he hadn’t used that exact word, but Ralph was quite sure he had spoken of the auras at least twice, just the same. Ralph, sometimes the world is full of colors. That had been August, shortly before John Leydecker had arrested Ed on a charge of domestic abuse, a misdemeanor.
Then, almost a month later, when he had called Ralph on the phone: Are you seeing the colors yet?
First the colors, now the little bald doctors; surely the Crimson King himself would be along any time. And all that aside, what was he supposed to do about what he had just seen?
The answer came in an unexpected but welcome burst (of clarity.
The issue, he saw, was not his own sanity, not the auras, not the little bald doctors, but May Locher. He had just seen two strangers step out of Mrs. Locher’s house in the dead of night… and one of them had been carrying a potentially lethal weapon, Ralph reached past the cased binoculars, took the telephone, and dialed 911.
“This is Officer Hagen.” A woman’s voice. “How may I help you?”
“By listening carefully and acting fast,” Ralph said crisply. The look of dazed indecision which he had worn so frequently since midsummer was gone now; sitting erect in the wing-back chair with the phone in his lap he looked not seventy but a healthy and capable fifty-five. “You may be able to save a woman’s life.”
“Sir, would you please give me your name and-”
“Don’t interrupt me, please, Officer Hagen,” said the man who could no longer remember the last four digits of the Derry Cinema Center. “I woke up a short time ago, couldn’t go back to sleep, and decided to sit up for awhile. My living room looks out on upper Harris Avenue. I just saw-” Here Ralph paused for the barest moment, thinking not about what he had seen but what he wanted to tell Officer Hagen he had seen. The answer came as quickly and effortlessly as the decision to call 911 in the first place.
“I saw two men coming out of a house up the street from the Red Apple Store. The house belongs to a woman named May Locher.