Ralph saw her coming out of Lois’s tiny bathroom. Saw her shoot an intense, furious glance toward the kitchen door-there is no sign of the sweety-sweety-sweet smile on that narrow, intense face now and then scoop the earrings out of the china dish. Saw her cram them into the left front pocket of her jeans.

No, Lois had not actually witnessed this small, ugly theft, but it had changed the color of Jan Chasse’s aura from pale green to a complex, layered pattern of browns and reds which Lois had seen and understood at once, probably without the slightest idea of what was really happening to her.

“She took them, all right,” Ralph said. He could see a gray mist drifting dreamily across the pupils of Lois’s wide eyes. He could have looked at it for the rest of the day.

“Yes, but-”

“If you’d agreed to keep the appointment at Riverview Estates after all, I bet you would have found them again after her next visit… or she would have found them, I guess that’s more likely. just a lucky accident-’Oh, Mother Lois, come see what I found!”

Under the bathroom sink, or in a closet, or lying in some dark corner.”

“Yes.” She was looking into his face now, fascinated, almost hypnotized. “She must feel terrible… and she won’t dare bring them back, will she? Not after the things I said. Ralph, how did you know?”

“The same way you did. How long have you been seeing the auras, Lois?”

“Auras? I don’t know what you mean.” Except she did.

“Litchfield told your son about the insomnia, but I doubt if that alone would have been enough to get even Litchfield to… you know, tattle. The other thing-what you said he called sensory problems-went right by me. I was too amazed by the idea of anyone thinking you could possibly be prematurely senile, I guess, even though I’ve been having my own sensory problems lately.”

You.

“Yes ma’am. Then, just a little bit ago, you said something even more interesting. You said you started to see Janet in a really funny way. A really scary way. You couldn’t remember what you said just before the two of them walked out, but you knew exactly how you felt.

You’re seeing the other part of the world-the rest of the world.

Shapes around things, shapes inside things, sounds within sounds.

I call it the world of auras, and that’s what you’re experiencing.

Isn’t it, Lois?”

She looked at him silently for a moment, then put her hands over her face. “I thought I was losing my mind,” she said, and then said it again: “Oh Ralph, I thought I was losing my mind.”

He hugged her, then let her go and tilted her chin up. “No more tears,” he said. “I didn’t bring a spare hanky.”

“No more tears,” she agreed, but her eyes were already brimming again. “Ralph, if you only knew how awful it’s been-”

“I do know.”

She smiled radiantly. “Yes… you do, don’t you?”

“What made that idiot Litchfield decide you were slipping into senility-except Alzheimer’s is probably what he had in mindwasn’t just Insomnia but insomnia accompanied by something else… something he decided were hallucinations. Right?”

“I guess, but he didn’t say anything like that at the time. When I told him about the things I’d been seeing-the colors and all-he seemed very understanding.”

“Uh-huh, and the minute you were out the door he called your son and told him to get the hell down to Derry and do something about old Mom, who’s started seeing people walking around in colored envelopes with long balloon-strings floating up from their heads.”

“You see those, too? Ralph, you see those, too?”

“Me too,” he said, and laughed. It sounded a bit loonlike, and he wasn’t surprised. There were a hundred things he wanted to ask her; wasn’t he felt crazed with impatience. And there was something else, something so unexpected he hadn’t even been able to identify it at first: he was horny. Not just interested; actually horny.

Lois was crying again. Her tears were the color of mist on a still lake, and they smoked a little as they slipped down her cheeks.

Ralph knew they would taste dark and mossy, like fiddleheads in spring.

“Ralph… this… this is… oh my!”

“Bigger than Michael Jackson at the Super Bowl, isn’t it?” She laughed weakly. “Well, just… you know, just a little.”

“There’s a name for what’s happening to us, Lois, and it’s not insomnia or senility or Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s hyper-reality.”

“Hyper-reality,” she murmured. “God, what an exotic word!”

“Yes, it is. A pharmacist down the street at Rite Aid, Joe Wyzer, told it to me. Only there’s a lot more to it than he knew. More than anyone in their right minds would guess.”

“Yes, like telepathy… if it’s really happening, that is. Ralph, are we in our right minds?”

“Did your daughter-in-law take your earrings?”

“I… she… yes.” Lois straightened. “Yes, she did.”

“No doubts?”

“No.”

“Then you’ve answered your own question. We’re sane, all right… but I think you’re wrong about the telepathy part. It isn’t minds we read, but auras. Listen, Lois, there’s all sorts of things I want to ask you, but I have an idea that right now there’s only one thing I really have to know. Have you seen-” He stopped abruptly, wondering if he really wanted to say what was on the tip of his tongue.

“Have I seen what?”

“Okay. This is going to sound crazier than anything you’ve told me, but I’m not crazy. Do you believe that? I’m not. “I believe you,” she said simply, and Ralph felt a vast weight slip from his heart. She was telling the truth. There was no question about it;

her belief shone all around her. “Okay, listen. Since this started happening to you, have you seen certain people who don’t look like they belong on Harris Avenue-?

People who don’t look like they belong anywhere in the ordinary world?” Lois was looking at him with puzzled incomprehension. “They’re bald, they’re very short, they wear white smock tops, and what they look like more than anything are the drawings of space aliens they sometimes have on the front pages of those tabloid newspapers they sell in the Red Apple. You haven’t seen anyone like that when you’ve been having one of these hyper-reality attacks?”

“No, no one.”

He banged a fist on his leg in frustration, thought for a moment, then looked up again. “Monday morning,” he said. “Before the cops showed up at Mrs. Locher’s… did you see me?”

Very slowly, Lois nodded her head. Her aura had darkened slightly, and spirals of scarlet, thin as threads, began to twist slowly up through it on a diagonal.

“I imagine you have a pretty good idea of who called the police, then,” Ralph said. “Don’t you?”

“Oh, I know it was you,” Lois said in a small voice. “I suspected before, but I wasn’t sure until just now. Until I saw it… you know, in your colors.”

In my colors, he thought. It was what Ed had called them, too.

“But you didn’t see two pint-sized versions of Mr. Clean come out of her house?”

“No,” she said, “but that doesn’t -mean anything. I can’t even see Mrs. Locher’s house from my bedroom window. The Red Apple’s roof is in the way.”

Ralph laced his hands together on top of his head. Of course it was, and he should have known it.

“The reason I thought you called the police is that just before I went to take a shower, I saw you looking at something through a pair of binoculars. I never saw you do that before, but I thought maybe you just wanted a better look at the stray dog who raids the garbage cans on Thursday mornings.” She pointed down the hill. “Him.” Ralph grinned. “That’s no him, that’s the gorgeous Rosalie.”

“Oh. Anyway, I was in the shower a long time, because there’s a special rinse I put in my hair. Not color,” she said sharply, as if he had accused her of this, “just proteins and things that are supposed to keep it looking a little thicker. When I came out, the police were flocking all around. I looked over your way once, but I couldn’t see you anymore. You’d either gone into a different room or kind of scrunched back in your chair. You do that, sometimes.”