“Death is very stupid,” she said, speaking in the nagging and unlovely voice which only the very tired and the deeply heartsick seem to employ. “An obstetrician this slow in cutting a baby’s umbilical cord would be fired for malpractice.”

Ralph’s mind had a tendency to drift these days, but this time it snapped back in a hurry. “What did you say?”

“Beg your pardon?” She sounded startled, as if her own mind had been drifting.

“You said something about cutting the cord.”

“I didn’t mean anything,” she said. That nagging tone had grown stronger… except it wasn’t nagging, Ralph realized; it was whining, and it was frightened. Something was wrong here. His heartbeat suddenly speeded up. “I didn’t mean anything at all,” she insisted, and suddenly the phone Ralph was holding turned a deep and sinister shade of blue in his hand.

She’s been thinking about killing him, an not just idly, either she’s been thinking about putting a pillow over his face and smothering him ’ with it. “It wouldn’t take long, “she thinks. “A mercy,” she thinks.

“Over at last,” she thinks.

Ralph pulled the phone away from his ear. Blue light, cold as a February sky, rose in pencil-thin rays from the holes in the earpiece.

Murder is blue, Ralph thought, holding the phone at arm’s length and staring with wide-eyed unbelief as the blue rays began to bend and drip toward the floor. He could hear, very faintly, the quacking, anxious voice of Denise Polhurst. It wasn’t anything I ever wanted to know, hut

I guess I know it anyway: murder is blue.

He brought the handset toward his mouth again, cocking it to keep the top half, with its freight of icicle aura, away from him. He was afraid that if that end of the handset got too close to his ear, it might deafen him with her cold and furious desperation.

“Tell Bill that Ralph called,” he said. “Roberts, not Robbins.”

He hung up without waiting for a reply. The blue rays shattered away from the phone’s earpiece and tumbled toward the floor. Ralph was again reminded of icicles; this time of how they fell in a neat row when you ran your gloved hand along the underside of an eave after a warm winter day. They disappeared before they hit the linoleum.

He glanced around. Nothing in the room glowed, shimmered, or vibrated. The auras were gone again. He began to let out a sigh of relief and then, from outside on Harris Avenue, a car backfired.

In the empty second-floor apartment, Ralph Roberts screamed.

He didn’t want any more tea, but he was still thirsty. He found half a Diet Pepsi-flat but wet-in the back of the fridge, poured it into a plastic cup with a faded Red Apple logo on it, and took it outside.

He could no longer stand to be in the apartment, which seemed to n smell of unhappy wakefulness. Especially not after what had happened with the phone.

The day had become even more beautiful, if that was possible; a strong, mild wind had developed, rolling bands of light and shadow, across the west side of Derry and combing the leaves from the trees.

These the wind sent hurrying along the sidewalks in rattling dervishes of orange and yellow and red.

Ralph turned left not because he had any conscious desire to revisit the picnic area up by the airport but only because he wanted the wind at his back. Nevertheless, he found himself entering the little clearing again some ten minutes later. This time it was empty, and he wasn’t surprised. There was no edge in the wind that ha’d sprung up, nothing to make old men and women scurry indoors, but it was hard work keeping cards on the table or chess-pieces on the board when the puckish wind kept trying to snatch them away.

As Ralph approached the small trestle table where Faye Chapin usually held court, he was not exactly surprised to see a note held down by a rock, and he had a good idea what the subject would be even before he put down his plastic Red Apple cup and picked it up.

Two walks,-two sightings of the bald doc with the scalpel,-two old people suffering insomnia and seeing brightly colored visions,-two notes. It’s like Noah leading the animals onto the ark, not one by one, but in pairs… and is another hard rain going to fall?

Well, what do you think, old man?

He didn’t know what he thought… but Bill’s note had been a kind of obituary-in-progress, and he had absolutely no doubt that Faye’s was the same thing. That sense of being carried forward, effortlessly and without hesitation, was simply too strong to doubt; it was like awakening on some alien stage to find oneself speaking lines (or stumbling through them, anyway) in a drama for which one could not remember having rehearsed, or seeing a coherent shape in -,,hat had up until then looked like complete nonsense, or discovering…

Discovering what?

“Another secret city, that’s what,” he murmured. “The Derry or Auras.” Then he bent over Faye’s note and read it while the wind played prankishly with his thinning hair.

Those of you who want to pay your final respects to jimmy Va dermeer are advised to do so by tomorrow at the very latest. Father Coughlin came by this noon and told me the poor old guy is sinking fast. He CAN have visitors, tho. He is in Derry Home I.C.U Room 315.

Fetu’p.

P.S. Remember that time is short.

Ralph read the note twice, put it back on the table with the rock on top to weight it down for the next Old Crock to happen along, then simply stood there with his hands in his pockets and his head down, gazing out at Runway 3 from beneath the bushy tangle of his brows, A crisp leaf, orange as one of the Halloween pumpkins which would soon decorate the street, came flipping down from the deep blue sky and landed in his sparse hair. Ralph brushed it away absently and thought of two hospital rooms on Home’s I.C.U. floor, two rooms side by side.

Bob Polhurst in one, jimmy V. in the other.

And the next room up the hall? That one was 317, the room in which his wife had died.” he said softly.

“This is not a coincidence, But what was it? Shapes in the mist?

A secret city? Evocative phrases, both of them, but they answered no questions.

Ralph sat on top of the picnic table next to the one upon which Faye had left his note, took off his shoes, and crossed his legs.

The wind gusted, ruffling his hair. He sat there amid the falling leaves with his head slightly bent and his brow furrowed in thought.

He looked like a Winslow Homer version of Buddha as he meditated with his hands cupping his kneecaps, carefully reviewing his impressions of Doc #1 and Doc #2… and then contrasting these impressions with those he’d gotten of Doc #3.

First impression: all three docs had reminded him of the aliens tabloids like Inside Viezv, and pictures which were always labelled artist’s conceptions.” Ralph knew that these bald-headed, dark-eyed images of mysterious visitors from space went back a good many years; people had been reporting contacts with short baldies-the so-called little doctors-for a long time, maybe for as long as people had been reporting UFOS. He was quite sure that he had read at least one such account way back in the sixties.

“Okay, so say there are quite a few of these fellows around,” Ralph told a sparrow which had just lit on the picnic area’s litter barrel.

“Not just three docs but three hundred. Or three thousand. Lois and I aren’t the only ones who’ve seen them. And.

And didn’t most of the people who gave accounts of such meetings also mention sharp objects?

Yes, but not scissors or scalpels-at least Ralph didn’t think So.

Most of the people who claimed to have been abducted by the little bald doctors talked about probes, didn’t they?

The sparrow flew off. Ralph didn’t notice. He was thinking about the little bald docs who had visited May Locher on the night of her death. What else did he know of them? What else had he seen. They had been dressed in white smocks, like the ones worn by TV show doctors in the fifties and sixties, like the ones pharmacists still wore. Only their smocks, unlike the one worn by Doc #3, had been clean. #3 had been toting a rusty scalpel; if there had been any rust on the scissors Doc #1 had been holding in his right hand, Ralph hadn’t noticed it.