That’s L-O-C-H-E-R, first letter L as in Lexington. Mrs. Locher is severely ill. I’ve never seen these two men before.” He paused again, but this time consciously, wanting to achieve maximum effect.
“One of them had a pair of scissors in his hand.”
“Site address?” Officer Hagen asked. She was calm enough, but Ralph sensed he had turned on a lot of her lights.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Get it out of the phone book, Officer Hagen, or just tell the responding officers to look for the yellow house with the pink trim half a block or so up from the Red Apple.
They’ll probably have to use a flashlight to pick it out because of the damned orange streetlights, but they’ll find it.”
“Yes, sir, I’m sure they will, but I still need your name and telephone number for our rec-” Ralph replaced the phone gently in its cradle. He sat looking at it for almost a full minute, expecting it to ring. When it didn’t, he decided they either didn’t have the fancy traceback equipment he saw on the TV true-crime shows, or it hadn’t been turned on. That was good. It didn’t solve the problem of what he was going to do or say if they hauled May Locher out of her hideous yellow-andpink house in pieces, but it did buy a little more thinking time.
Below, Harris Avenue remained still and silent, lit only by the hi-intensity lamps which marched off in both directions like some surrealist dream of perspective. The play-short, but full of drama appeared to be over. The stage was empty again. ItNo, not quite empty after all. Rosalie came limping out of the alley between the Red Apple and the True Value Hardware next door. The faded bandanna flapped around her neck. This wasn’t a Thursday, there were no garbage cans set out for Rosalie to investigate, and she moved briskly up the sidewalk until she got to May Locher’s house. There she stopped and lowered her nose, (looking at that long and rather pretty nose, Ralph had thought on occasion that there must be a collie somewhere in Rosalie’s woodpile).
Something was glimmering there, Ralph realized, He got the binoculars out of their case once more and trained them on Rosalie. As he did, he found his mind returning to September 10th again-this time to his meeting with Bill and Lois just outside the entrance to Strawford Park.
He remembered how Bill had put his arm around Lois’s waist and led her up the street; how the two of them together had made Ralph think of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Most of all he remembered the spectral tracks the two of them had left behind. Lois’s had been gray; Bill’s olive green.
Hallucinations, he had thought them at the time, back in the good old days before he’d started attracting the attention of nuts like Charlie Pickering and seeing little bald doctors in the middle of the night.
Rosalie was sniffing at a similar track. It was the same green-gold as the auras which had surrounded Bald Doc #1 and Bald Doc #2.
Ralph panned the binoculars slowly away from the dog and saw more tracks, two sets of them, leading down the sidewalk in the direction of the park. They were fading-he could almost see them fading as he looked at them-but they were there.
Ralph panned the binoculars back to Rosalie, suddenly feeling an enormous wave of affection for the mangy old stray… and why not?
If he had needed final, absolute proof that he had actually seen the things he thought he had seen, Rosalie was it.
If baby Natalie was here, she’d see them too, Ralph thought… and then all his doubts tried to crowd back in. Would she? Would she really? He thought he had seen the baby grab at the faint auras left by his fingers, and he had been sure she was gawking at the spectral green smoke sizzling off the flowers in the kitchen, but how could he be sure? How could anyone be sure what a baby was looking at or reaching for?
But Rosalie… look, right down there, see her?
The only trouble with that, Ralph realized, was that he hadn’t seen the tracks until Rosalie had begun to sniff the sidewalk. Maybe she was sniffing at an entrancing remnant of leftover postman, and what he was seeing had been created by nothing more than his tired, sleepstarved mind… like the little bald doctors themselves.
In the magnified field of the binoculars, Rosalie now began to make her way down Harris Avenue with her nose to the sidewalk and her ragged tail waving slowly back and forth. She was moving from the green-gold tracks left by Doc #1 to those left by Doc #2, and then back to Doc #2’s trail again.
So now why don’t you tell me what that stray bitch is following, Ralph? Do you think it’s possible for a dog to track a fucking hallucination? It’s not a hallucination,-“. it’s tracks. Real tracks. The white man tracks that Carolyn told you to watch out for.
You know that.
You see that.
“It’s crazy, though,” he told himself. “Crazy!”
But was it? Was it really? The dream might have been more than a dream. If there was such a thing as hyper-reality-and he could now testify that there was-then maybe there was such a thing as precognition, too. Or ghosts which came in dreams and foretold the future. Who knew? It was as if a door in the wall of reality had come ajar… and now all sorts of unwelcome things were flying through.
Of one thing he was sure: the tracks were really there. He saw them, Rosalie smelled them, and that was all there was to it. Ralph had discovered a number of strange and interesting things during his six months of premature waking, and one of them was that a human being’s capacity for self-deception seemed to be at its lowest ebb between three and six in the morning, and it was now…
Ralph leaned forward so he could see the clock on the kitchen wall. just past three-thirty. Uh-huh.
He raised the binoculars again and saw Rosalie still moving up the bald docs’ backtrail-If someone came strolling along Harris Avenue right now-unlikely, given the hour, but not impossible-they would see nothing but a stray mutt with a dirty coat, sniffing at the sidewalk in the aimless fashion of untrained, unowned dogs everywhere. But Ralph could see what Rosalie was sniffing at, and had finally given himself permission to believe his eyes. It was a permission he might revoke once the sun was up, but for now he knew exactly what he was seeing.
Rosalie’s head came up suddenly. Her ears cocked forward. For one moment she was almost beautiful, the way a hunting dog on point is beautiful. Then, moments before the headlights of a car approaching the Harris Avenue-Witcham Street intersection splashed the street, she was gone back the way she had come, running in a corkscrewing, limping gait that made Ralph feel sorry for her. When you came right down to it, what was Rosalie but another Harris Avenue Old Crock, one that didn’t even have the comfort of the occasional game of gin rummy or penny-ante poker with others of her kind? She darted back into the alley between the Red Apple and the hardware store an instant before a Derry police cruiser turned the corner and floated slowly up the street. Its siren was off, but the revolving flashers were on. They painted the sleeping houses and small businesses ranged along this part of Harris Avenue with alternating pulses of red and blue light.
Ralph put the binoculars back in his lap and leaned forward in the wing-chair, forearms on his thighs, watching intently. His heart was beating hard enough for him to be able to feel it in his temples.
The cruiser slowed to a crawl as it passed the Red Apple. The spotlight mounted on its right hand side snapped on, and the beam began to slide across the fronts of the sleeping houses on the far side of the street. In most cases it also slid across the street-numbers mounted beside doors or on porch columns. When it lit on the number of May Locher’s house (86, Ralph saw, and he didn’t need the binoculars to read it, either), the cruiser’s taillights flashed and the car came to a stop.