Ralph shook his head as if to clear it. He hadn’t been in an empty theater on all those nights, after all; someone else had been there, too. They had just been in separate boxes.
“Lois, the fight Bill and I had wasn’t really about chess. It-” Down the hill, Rosalie voiced a rusty bark and began struggling to her feet.
Ralph looked in that direction and felt an icicle slip into his belly.
Although the two of them had been sitting here for going on half an hour and no one had even come near the comfort stations at the bottom of the hill, the pressed plastic door of the Portosan marked MEN was now slowly opening.
Doc #3 emerged from it. McGovern’s hat, the Panama with the crescent bitten in the brim, was cocked back on his head, making him look weirdly as McGovern had on the day Ralph had first seen him in his brown fedora-like an enquiring newshawk in a forties crime drama.
Upraised in one hand the bald stranger held the rusty scalpel.
CHAPTER 13
“Lois?” To Ralph’s own ears, his voice seemed to be an echo winding down a long, deep canyon. “Lois, do you see that?”
“I don’t-” Her voice broke off. “Did the wind blow that bathroom door open? It didn’t, did it? Is someone there? Is that why the dog’s making that racket?”
Rosalie backed slowly away from the bald man, her ragged ears laid back, her muzzle wrinkled to expose teeth so badly eroded that they were not much more menacing than hard rubber pegs. She uttered a cracked volley of barks, then began to whine desperately.
“Yes! Don’t you see him, Lois? Look! He’s right there.i”
Ralph got to his feet. Lois got up with him, shielding her eyes with one hand. She peered down the slope with desperate intensity, “I see a shimmer, that’s all. Like the air over an incinerator.”
“I told you to leave her alone.” Ralph shouted down the hill.
“Quit it! Get the hell out!”
The bald man looked in Ralph’s direction, but there was no surprise in the glance this time; it was casual, dismissive. He raised the middle finger of his right hand, flicked it at Ralph in the ancient salute, then bared his own teeth-much sharper and much more menacing than Rosalie’s-in a silent laugh.
Rosalie cringed as the little man in the dirty smock began to walk toward her again, then actually raised a paw and put it on her own head, a cartoonish gesture that should have been funny and was horribly expressive of her terror instead.
“What can’t I see, Ralph?” Lois moaned. “I see something, but-”
“Get AWAYfrom her.” Ralph shouted, and raised his hand in that karate-chop gesture again. The hand inside-the hand which earlier had produced that wedge of tight blue light-still felt like an unloaded gun, however, and this time the bald doc seemed to know it. He glanced in Ralph’s direction and offered a small, jeering wave.
[Aw, quit it, Shorts-sit back, shut up, and enjoy the show.] The creature at the foot of the hill returned his attention to Rosalie, who sat huddled at the base of an old pine. The tree was emitting a thin green fog from the cracks in its bark. The bald doctor bent over Rosalie, one hand outstretched in a gesture of solicitude that went very badly with the scalpel curled into his left fist.
Rosalie whined… then stretched her neck forward and humbly licked the bald creature’s palm.
Ralph looked down at his own hands, sensing something in them, not the power he’d had before, nothing like that, but something.
Suddenly there were snaps of clear white light dancing just above his nails. It was as if his fingers had been turned into sparkplugs.
Lois was grabbing frantically at him now. “What’s wrong with the dog? Ralph, what’s wrong with it?”
With no thought about what he was doing or why, Ralph put his hands over Lois’s eyes, like someone playing Guess Who with a loved one. His fingers flashed a momentary white so bright it was almost blinding. Must be the white they’re always talking about in the detergent commercials, he thought.
Lois screamed. Her hands flew to his wrists, clamped on them, then loosened. “My God, Ralph, what did you do to me?”
He took his hands away and saw a glowing figure-eight surrOLinding her eyes; it was as if she had just taken off a pair of goggles which had been dipped in confectioners’ sugar. The white began to dim almost as soon as his hands were gone… except…
It’s not dimming, he thought. It’s sinking in.
“Never mind,” he said, and pointed. “Look!”
The widening of her eyes told him what he needed to know.
Doc #3, completely unmoved by Rosalie’s desperate effort to make friends, shoved her muzzle aside with the hand holding the scalpel, He seized the old bandanna hanging around her neck in his other hand and yanked her head up. Rosalie howled miserably. Slobber ran back along the sides of her face. The bald man voiced a scabrous chuckle that made Ralph’s flesh crawl.
[“Hi! Leave off! Leave off teasing that dog.t"l The bald man’s head snapped around. The grin ran off his face and he snarled at Lois, sounding a little like a dog himself, [Yahh, go fuck Yourself, You fat old Short-Time cunt. Dog’s mine, just like I already told your limpdick boyfriend!] The bald man had let go of the blue bandanna when Lois shouted at him, and Rosalie was now cringing back against the pine again, her eyes rolling, curds of foam dripping from the sides of her muzzle.
Ralph had never seen such a completely terrified creature in his life.
“Run!” Ralph screamed. “Get away.", She seemed not to hear him, and after a moment Ralph realized she wasn’t hearing him, because Rosalie was no longer entirely there.
The bald doctor had done something to her already-had pulled her at least partway out of ordinary reality like a farmer using his tractor and a length of chain to pull a stump.
Ralph tried once more, anyway.
[“Run, Rosalie.” Run away."’] This time her laid-back ears cocked forward and her head began to turn in Ralph’s direction. He didn’t know if she would have obeyed him or not, because the bald man renewed his hold on the bandanna before she could even begin to move. He yanked her head up again.
“He’s going to kill it!” Lois screamed. “He’s going to cut its throat with that thing he has! Don’t let him, Ralph! Make him stop!”
“I can’t! Maybe you can! Shoot him! Shoot your hand at him!”
She looked at him, not understanding. Ralph made frantic woodchopping gestures with his right hand, but before Lois could respond, Rosalie gave a dreadful lost howl. The bald doc raised the scalpel and brought it down, but it wasn’t Rosalie’s throat he cut.
He cut her balloon-string.
A thread emerged from each of Rosalie’s nostrils and floated upward.
They twined together about six inches above her snout, making a delicate pigtail, and it was at this point that Baldy #3’s scalpel did its work. Ralph watched, frozen with horror, as the severed pigtail rose into the sky like the string of a released helium balloon. It was unravelling as it went. He thought it would tangle in the branches of the old pine, but it didn’t. When the ascending balloon-string finally did meet one of the branches, it simply passed through.
Of course, Ralph thought. The same way this guy’s buddies walked through May Locher’s locked front door after they finished doing the same thing to her.
This idea was followed by a thought too simple and gruesomely logical not to be believed: not space-aliens, not little bald doctors, but Centurions. Ed Deepneau’s Centurions. They didn’t look like the Roman solders you saw in tin-pants epics like Spartacus and Ben Hur, true, but they had to be Centurions… didn’t they?
Sixteen or twenty feet above the ground, Rosalie’s balloon-string simply faded away to nothingness.
Ralph looked back down in time to see the bald dwarf pull the faded blue bandanna off over the dog’s head and then push hr down at the base of the tree. Ralph looked at her more closely and felt all his flesh shrink closer to his bones. His dream of Carolyn recurred with cruel intensity, and he found himself struggling to bottle up a shriek of terror.