Not even after he’d trained the binoculars on them.
Something else-probably not important, but at least you noticed it. Scissors-Toting Doc was right-handed, at least judging from the way he held his weapon. Scalpel-Wielding Doc is a southpaw.
No, probably not important, but something about it-another of those shapes in the mist, this a small one-tugged at him just the same.
Something about the dichotomy of left and right.
“Go to the left and you’ll be right,” Ralph muttered, repeating the punchline of some joke he no longer even remembered. “Go to the right and you’ll be left.”
Never mind. What else did he know about the docs?
Well, they had been surrounded by auras, of course-rather lovely greenish-gold ones-and they had left those (white-man tracks) Arthur Murray dance-diagrams behind them. And although their features had struck him as perfectly anonymous, their auras had conveyed feelings of power… and sobriety… and…And dignity, goddammit,” Ralph said.
The wind gusted again and more leaves blew down from the trees.
Some fifty yards from the picnic area, not far from the old train tracks, a twisted, halfuprooted tree seemed to reach in Ralph’s direction, stretching branches that actually did look a little like clutching hands.
It suddenly occurred to Ralph that he had seen quite a lot that night for an old guy who was supposed to be living on the edge of the last age of man, the one Shakespeare (and Bill McGovern) called “the slippered pantaloon.” And none of it-not one single thingsuggested danger or evil intent. That Ralph had inferred evil intent wasn’t very surprising. They were physically freakish strangers; he had observed them coming out of a sick woman’s house at a time of night when visitors seldom if ever called; he had seen them only minutes after waking from a nightmare of epic proportions.
Now, however, recollecting what he had seen, other things occurred. The way they had stood on Mrs. Locher’s stoop, for instance, as if they had every right to be there; the sense he had gotten of two old friends indulging themselves in a bit of conversation before going on their way. Two old buddies talking it over one more time before heading home after a long night’s work.
That was your impression, yes, but that doesn’t mean -you can trust it, Ralph.
But Ralph thought he could trust it. Old friends, long-time colleagues, done for the night, May Locher’s had been their last stop.
All right, so Docs #1 and #2 were as different from the third one as day is from night. They were clean while he was dirty, they were invested with auras while he had none (none that Ralph had seen, at least), they carried scissors while he carried a scalpel, they seemed as sane and sober as a couple of respected village elders V,while #3 seemed as crazy as a shithouse rat.
One thing is perfectly clear, though, isn’t it? Your playmates are supernatural beings, and other than Lois, the only person who seems to know they’re there is Ed Deepneau. Want to bet on how much sleep Ed is getting just lately?
“No,” Ralph said. He raised his hands from his knees and held them in front of his eyes. They were shaking a little. Ed had mentioned bald docs, and there were bald docs. Was it the docs he’d been talking about when he talked about Centurions? Ralph didn’t know.
He almost hoped so, because that word-Centurions-had begun to call up a much more terrible image in his mind each tillie it occurred to him: the Ringwraiths from Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy.
Hooded figures astride skeletal, red-eyed horses, bearing down on It small party of cowering hobbits outside the Prancing Pony Tavern in Bree.
Thinking of hobbits made him think of Lois, and the trembling in his hands grew worse.
Carolyn: it’s a long walk back to Eden, sweetheart, so don’t siveat il-,e si;,i(.” l staff.
Lois: In my ramiio d),lying at eighty I’s ’sing young.
Joe Wyzer: The medical examiner usually ends up on the cause-of-death line rather than insomnia. Bill: His specialty was the Civil War, and now he doesn’t even know that a civil war was, let alone who won ours.
Denise Polhurst: Death is very stupid. An obstetrician this slow in cutting a baby’s umbilical cordIt was as if someone had suddenly clicked on a bright searchlight inside his head, and Ralph cried out into the sunny autumn afternoon. Not even the Delta 727 settling in for a landing on Runway 3 could entirely drown that cry.
He spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the porch of the house he shared with McGovern, waiting impatiently for Lois to come back from her card-game. He could have tried McGovern again at the hospital, but didn’t. The need to speak to McGovern had passed.
Ralph didn’t understand everything yet, but he thought he understood a great deal more than he had, and if his sudden flash of insight at the picnic area had any validity at all, telling McGovern what had happened to his Panama would serve absolutely no purpose even if Bill believed him.
I have to get the hat back, Ralph thought. And I have to get Lois’s earrings back, too.
It was an amazing late afternoon and early evening. On the one hand, nothing happened. On the other hand, everything happened.
The world of auras came and went around him like the stately progression of cloud-shadows across the west side. Ralph sat and noting suicide watched, rapt, breaking off only to eat and make trips to the bathroom. He saw old Mrs. Bennigan standing on her front porch in her bright red coat, clutching her walker and taking inventory of her fall flowers. He saw the aura surrounding her-the scrubbed and healthy pink of a freshly bathed infant-and hoped Mrs. B. didn’t have a lot of relatives waiting around for her to die.
He saw a young man of no more than twenty bopping along the other side of the street toward the Red Apple. He was the picture of health in his faded jeans and sleeveless Celtics jersey, but Ralph could see a deathbag clinging to him like an oil slick, and a balloon string rising from the crown of his head that looked like a decaying drape-pull in a haunted house.
He saw no little bald doctors, but shortly after five-thirty, he observed a startling shaft of purple light erupt from a manhole cover in the middle of Harris Avenue; it rose into the sky like a special effect in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic for perhaps three minutes, then simply winked out. He also saw a huge bird that looked like a prehistoric hawk go floating between the chimneys of the old dairy building around the corner on Howard Street, and alternating red and blue thermals twisting over S trawford Park in long, lazy ribbons, When soccer practice at Fairmount Grammar let out at quarter to six, a dozen or so kids came swarming into the parking lot of the Red Apple, where they would buy tons of pre-supper candy and bales of trading cards-football cards by this time of year, Ralph supposed. Two of them stopped to argue about something, and their auras, one green and the other a vibrant shade of burnt orange, intensified, drew in, and began to gleam with rising spirals of scarlet thread.
Look out! Ralph shouted mentally at the boy within the orange envelope of light, before Green Boy dropped his schoolbooks and socked the other in the mouth. The two of them made a trip to grappled, spun around in a clumsy, aggressive dance, then tumbled to the sidewalk. A little circle of yelling, cheering kids formed around them. A purplish-red dome like a thunderhead began to build up around and above the fight. Ralph found this shape, which was circulating in a slow counter-clockwise movement, both terrible and beautiful, and he wondered what the aura above a full-scale military battle would look like. He decided that was a question to which he didn’t really want an answer. just as Orange Boy climbed on top of Green Boy and began to pummel him in earnest, Sue came out of the store and hollered at them to quit fighting in the damned parking lot.