McGovern sanded, reluctantly at first and then with his whole face.

“Now I know what keeps you awake-thinking up crap like that.

Sit still, Ralph, and think good thoughts about a hippopotamus, as my mother used to say. I’ll be right back. Probably won’t even catch him in, you know; funeral arrangements and all that. Want to look at the paper while you wait?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

McGovern handed him the paper, which still retained the tube shape into which it had been rolled, then went inside. Ralph glanced at the front page. The headline read PRO-CHOICE, PRO-LIFE ADVOCATES READY FOR ACTIVIST’s ARRIVAL. The story was flanked by two news photographs.

One showed half a dozen young women making signs which said things like OUR BODIES, OUR CHOICE and IT’s A BRAND-NEW DAY IN DERRY! The other showed picketers marching in front of WomanCare. They carried no signs and needed none; the hooded black robes they wore and the scythes they carried said it all.

Ralph heaved a sigh of his own, dropped the paper onto the seat of the rocking chair beside him, and watched Tuesday morning unfold along Harris Avenue. It occurred to him that McGovern might well be on the phone with John Leydecker rather than Larry Perrault, and that the two of them might at this very moment be having a little student-teacher conference about that nutty old insomniac Ralph Roberts.

Just thought you’d like to know who really made that 911 call, Johnny.

Thanks, Prof We were pretty sure, anyway, but it’s good to get confirmation. I imagine he’s harmless. I actually sort of like him.

Ralph pushed away his speculations about who Bill might or might not be calling. It was easier just to sit here and not think at all, not even good thoughts about a hippopotamus. Easier to watch the Budweiser truck lumber into the Red Apple parking lot, pausing to give courtesy to the Magazines Incorporated van which had dropped off this week’s ration of tabloids, magazines, and paperbacks and was now leaving. Easier to watch old Harriet Bennigan, who made Mrs. Perrine look like a spring chicken, bent over her walker in her bright red fall coat, out for her morning lurch. Easier to watch the young girl, who was wearing jeans, an oversized white tee-shirt, and a man’s hat about four sizes too big for her, jumping rope in the weedy vacant lot between Frank’s Bakery and Vicky Moon’s Tanning Saloon (Body Wraps Our Specialty). Easier to watch the girl’s small hands penduluming up and down. Easier to listen as she chanted her endless, shuttling rhyme.

Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine…

Some distant part of Ralph’s mind realized, with great astonishment, that he was on the verge of going to sleep as he sat here on the porch steps. At the same time this was happening, the auras were creeping into the world again, filling it with fabulous colors and motions. It was wonderful, but…

… but something was wrong with it. Something. What?

The girl jumping rope in the vacant lot. She was wrong. Her denim-clad legs pumped up and down like the bobbin of a sewing machine.

Her shadow jumped next to her on the jumbled pavemciit of an ancient alley overgrown with weeds and sunflowers. The rope whirled up and down… all around… up and down and all around…

Not an oversized tee-shirt, though, he’d been wrong about that.

The figure was wearing a smock. A white smock, like the kind worn by actors in the old TV doc-operas.

Three-six-nine, the goose drank wine, The monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line…

A cloud blocked the sun and a grim green light sailed across the day, driving it underwater. Ralph’s skin first chilled, then broke out in goosebumps. The girl’s pumping shadow disappeared. She looked up at Ralph and he saw she wasn’t a little girl at all. The creature looking at him was a man about four feet tan, Ralph had first taken the hat-shadowed face for that of a child because it was utterly smooth, unmarked by so much as a single line. And yet despite that, it conveyed a clear feeling to Ralph-a sense of evil, of malignity beyond the comprehension of a sane mind.

That’s it, Ralph thought numbly, staring at the skipping creature.

That’s exactly it. Whatever the thing over there is, it’s insane.

Totally gone.

The creature might have read Ralph’s thought, for at that moment its lips skinned back in a grin that was both coy and nasty, as if the two of them shared some unpleasant secret. And he was sure-yes, quite sure, almost positive-that it was somehow chanting through its grin, doing it without moving its lips in the slightest: [The line “The line broke. The monkey got choked. And they all died together in a little row-BOAT!”

It was neither of the two little bald doctors Ralph had seen coming out of Mrs. Locher’s, he was almost positive of that. Related to them, maybe, but not the same. It was The creature threw its jumprope away. The rope turned first yellow and then red, seeming to give off sparks as it flew through the air. The small figure-Doc # 3-stared at Ralph, grinning, and Ralph suddenly realized something else, something which filled him with horror. He finally recognized the hat the creature was wearing.

It was Bill McGovern’s missing Panama.

Again it was as if the creature had read his mind. It dragged the hat from its head, revealing the round, hairless skull beneath, and waved McGovern’s Panama in the air as if it were a cowpoke astride a bucking bronco, It continued to grin its unspeakable grin as it waved the hat.

Suddenly it pointed at Ralph, as if marking him. Then it clapped the hat back on its head and darted into the narrow, weed-choked opening between the tanning salon and the bakery. The sun sailed free of the cloud which had covered it, and the shifting brightness of the auras began to fade once more. A moment or two after the creature had disappeared it was just Harris Avenue in front of him again-boring old Harris Avenue, the same as always.

Ralph pulled a shuddering breath, remembering the madness in that small, grinning face. Remembering the way it had pointed (the monkey got CHOKED) at him, as if (they all died together in a little row-BOAT!) marking him.

“Tell me I fell asleep,” he whispered hoarsely. “Tell me I fell asleep and dreamed that little bugger.”

The door opened behind him. “Oh my, talking to yourself,” McGovern said, “Must have money in the bank, Ralphie.”

“Yeah, about enough to cover my burial expenses,” Ralph said.

To himself he sounded like a man who has Just suffered a terrible shock and is still trying to cope with the residual fright; he half expected Bill to dart forward, face filling with concern (or maybe just suspicion), to ask what was wrong.

McGovern did nothing of the sort. He plumped into the rocking chair, crossed his arms over his narrow chest in a brooding X, and looked out at Harris Avenue, the stage upon which he and Ralph and Lois and Dorrance Marstellar and so many other old folks-we golden-agers, in McGovern-ese-were destined to play out their often boring and sometimes painful last acts.

Suppose I told him about his hat? Ralph thought. Suppose I just opened the conversation by saying, “Bill, I also know what happened to your Panama. Some badass relation to the guys I saw last night has got it. He wears it when he jumps rope between the bakery and the tanning salon.”

If Bill had any lingering doubts about his sanity, that little newsflash would certainly set them to rest. Yep.

Ralph kept his mouth shut.

“Sorry I was gone so long,” McGovern said. “Larry claimed I just caught him going out the door to the funeral parlor, but before I could ask my questions and get away he’d rehashed half of May’s life and damned near all of his own. Talked nonstop for forty-five minutes.”

Positive this was an exaggeration-McGovern had surely been gone five minutes, tops-Ralph glanced at his watch and was astounded to see it was eleven-fifteen. He looked up the street and saw that Mrs. Bennigan had disappeared. So had the Budweiser truck. Had he been asleep? It seemed that he must have been but he could not for the life of him find the break in his conscious perceptions.