“Ralph?”

“Hmmm?” He was concentrating on avoiding the back bumpers of the cars slant-parked on both sides of the ascending aisles. He knew that the aisles were much too wide for the bumpers of those other cars to be an actual impediment to his progress-intellectually he knew it-but what his guts knew was something else. How Carolyn would bitch and moan about the way I’m driving, he thought with a certain distracted fondness.

“Do you know what we’re doing here, or are we just winging it?”

“Just another minute-let me get this damned thing parked.”

He passed several slots big enough for the Olds on the first level, but none with enough buffer-zone to make him feel comfortable.

On the third level he found three spaces side by side (together they were big enough to hold a Sherman tank comfortably) and babied the Olds into the one in the middle. He killed the motor and turned to face Lois. Other engines idled above and below them, their locations impossible to pinpoint because of the echo. Orange lightthat persistent, penetrating tone-glow now common to all such facilities as this, it seemed-lay upon their skins like thin toxic paint.

Lois looked back at him steadily. He could see traces of the tears she had cried for Rosalie in her puffy, swollen lids, but the eyes themselves were calm and sure. He was struck by how much she had changed just since that morning, when he had found her sitting slump-shouldered on a park bench and weeping. Lois, he thought, if your son and daughter-in-law could see you tonight, I think they might run away screaming at the top of their lungs. Not because you look scary, but because the woman they came to bulldoze into moving to Rivervie

Estates is gone.

“Well?” she asked with just a hint of a smile. “Are you going to talk to me or just look at me?”

Ralph, ordinarily a cautious sort of man, recklessly said the first thing to come into his head. “What I’d like to do, I think, is eat you like ice cream.”

Her smile deepened enough to make dimples at the corners of her mouth. “Maybe later we’ll see how much of an appetite for ice cream you really have, Ralph. For now, just tell me why you brought me here.

And don’t tell me you don’t know, because I think you do.” Ralph closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and opened them again. “I guess we’re here to find the other two bald guys. The ones I saw coming out of May Locher’s. If anyone can explain what’s going on, it’ll be them.”

“What makes you think you’ll find them here?”

“I think they’ve got work to do… two men, jimmy V. and Bill’s friend, dying side by side. I should have known what the bald doctors are-what they do-from the minute I saw the ambulance guys bring Mrs. Locher out strapped to a stretcher and with a sheet over her face.

I would have known, if I hadn’t been so damned tired. The scissors should have been enough. Instead, it took me until this afternoon, and I only got it then because of something Mr. Polhurst’s niece said.”

“What was it?”

“That death was stupid. That if an obstetrician took as much time cutting the umbilical cord, he’d be sued for malpractice. It made me think of a myth I read when I was in grade-school and couldn’t get enough of gods and goddesses and Trojan Horses. The story was about three sisters-the Greek Sisters, maybe, or maybe it was the Weird Sisters. Shit, don’t ask me; I can’t even remember to use my damned turnblinkers half the time. Anyway, these sisters were responsible for the course of all human life. One of them spun the thread, one of them decided how long it would be… is any of this ringing a bell, Lois?”

“Of course it is!” she nearly shouted. “The balloon-strings!

Ralph nodded. “Yes. The balloon-strings. I don’t remember the names of the first two sisters, but I never forgot the name of the last one-Atropos. And according to the story, her job is to cut the thread the first one spins and the second one measures. You could argue with her, you could beg, but it never made any difference.

When she decided it was time to cut, she cut.”

Lois was nodding. “Yes, I remember that story. I don’t know if I read it or someone told it to me when I was a kid. You believe it’s actually true, Ralph, don’t you? Only it turns out to be the Bald Brothers instead of the Weird Sisters.”

“Yes and no. As I remember the story, the sisters were all on the same side-a team. And that’s the feeling I got about the two men who came out of Mrs. Locher’s house, that they were long-time partners with immense respect for each other, But the other guy, the one we saw again tonight, isn’t like them. I think Doc #3’s a rogue.”

Lois shivered, a theatrical gesture that became real at the last moment. “He’s awful, Ralph. I hate him.”

“I don’t blame you.”

He reached for the doorhandle, but Lois stopped him with a touch.

“I saw him do something.”

Ralph turned and looked at her. The tendons in his neck creaked rustily. He had a pretty good idea what she was going to say.

“He picked the pocket of the man who hit Rosalie,” she said.

“While he was kneeling beside her in the street, the bald man picked his pocket. Except all he took was a comb. And the hat that bald man was wearing… I’m pretty sure I recognized it.”

Ralph went on looking at her, fervently hoping that Lois’s memory of Doc #3’s apparel did not extend any further.

“It was Bill’s, wasn’t it? Bill’s Panama.”

Ralph nodded. “Sure it was.”

Lois closed her eyes. “Oh, Lord.”

“What do you say, Lois? Are you still game?”

“Yes.” She opened her door and swung her legs out. “But let’s get going right away, before I lose my nerve.”

“Tell me about it,” said Ralph Roberts.

As they approached the main doors of Derry Home, Ralph leaned toward Lois’s ear and murmured, “is it happening to you?”

“Yes.” Her eyes were very wide. “God, yes. It’s strong this time, isn’t it?”

As they broke the electric-eye beam and the doors to the hospital lobby swung open before them, the surface of the world suddenly peeled back, disclosing another world, one that simmered with unseen colors and shifted with unseen shapes. Overhead, on the wallto-wall mural depicting Derry as it had been during its halcyon lumbering days at the turn of the century, dark brown arrow-shapes chased each other, growing closer and closer together until they touched. When that happened, they flashed a momentary dark green and changed direction. A bright silver funnel that looked like either a waterspout or a toy cyclone was descending the curved staircase which led up to the second-floor meeting rooms, cafeteria, and auditorium. Its wide top end nodded back and forth as it moved from step to step, and to Ralph it felt distinctly friendly, like an anthropomorphic character in a Disney cartoon. As Ralph watched, t\-“o men with briefcases hurried up the stairs, and one of them passed directly through the silver funnel. He never paused in what he was saying to his companion, but when he emerged on the other side, Ralph saw he was absently using his free hand to smooth back his hair… although not a strand was out of place.

The funnel reached the bottom of the stairs, raced around the center of the lobby in a tight, exuberant figure-eight, and then popped out of existence, leaving only a faint, rosy mist behind. This quickly dissipated.

Lois dug her elbow into Ralph’s side, started to point toward an area beyond the Central Information booth, realized there were people all around them, and settled for lifting her chin in that direction instead. Earlier, Ralph had seen a shape in the sky which had looked like a prehistoric bird. Now he saw something which looked like a long translucent snake. It was essing its way across the ceiling above a sign which read PLEASE WAIT HERE FOR BLOOD-TESTING.

“Is it alive?” Lois whispered with some alarm.