Ralph looked more closely and realized the thing had no head… no discernible tail, either. It was all body. He supposed it was alive-he had an idea all the auras were alive in some fashion-but he didn’t think it was really a snake, and he doubted that it was dangerous, at least to the likes of them.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff, sweetheart, he whispered back to her as they joined the short line at Central Information, and as he said it, the snake-thing seemed to melt into the ceiling and disappear.
Ralph didn’t know how important such things as the bird and the cyclone were in the secret world’s scheme of things, but he was positive that people were still the main show. The lobby of Derry Home Hospital was like a gorgeous Fourth of July fireworks display, a display in which the parts of the Roman candles and Chinese Fountains were being played by human beings.
Lois hooked a finger into his collar to make him bend his head toward her. “You’ll have to do the talking, Ralph,” she said in a strengthless, amazed little voice. “I’m having all I can do not to wee in my pants.”
The man ahead of them left the booth and Ralph stepped forward.
As he did, a clear, sweetly nostalgic memory of jimmy V. surfaced in his mind. They’d been on the road someplace in Rhode IslandKingston, maybe-and had decided on the spur of the moment that they wanted to attend the tent revival going on in a nearby hayfield.
They had both been drunk as fleas in a gin-bottle, of course. A pair of well-scrubbed young ladies had been standing outside the turnedback flaps of the tent, handing out tracts, and as he and jimmy neared them, they began to admonish each other in aromatic whispers to act sober, dammit, to just act sober. Had they gotten in that day?
Or"Help you?” the woman in the Central Information booth asked, her tone saying she was doing Ralph a real favor just by speaking to him.
He looked through the glass at her and saw a woman buried inside a troubled orange aura that looked like a burning bramblebush. Here’s a lady who loves the fine print and stands on all the ceremony she can, he thought, and on the heels of that, Ralph remembered that the two young women flanking the entrance to the tent had gotten one whiff of him and jimmy V. and turned them politely but firmly away. They had ended up spending the evening in a Central Falls juke-joint, as he recalled, and had probably been lucky not to get rolled when they staggered out after last call.
“Sir?” the woman in the glass booth asked impatiently. “Can I help you?”
Ralph came back to the present with a thud he could almost feel.
“Yes, ma’am. My wife and I would like to visit jimmy Vandermeer on the third floor, if-”
“That’s I.C.U,!” she snapped. “Can’t go up to I.C.U. without a special pass.” Orange hooks began to poke their way out of the glow around her head, and her aura began to look like barbed wire strung across some ghostly no-man’s-land.
“I know,” Ralph said, more humbly than ever, “but my frienj, Lafayette Chapin, he said-”
“Gosh!” the woman in the booth interrupted. “It’s wonderful, the way everyone’s got a friend. Really wonderful.” She rolled a satiric eye toward the ceiling.
“Faye said jimmy could have visitors, though. You see, he has cancer and he’s not expected to live much l-”
“Well, I’ll check the files, the woman in the booth said with the grudging air of one who knows she is being sent upon a fool’s errand, “but the computer is very slow tonight, so it’s going to take awhile. Give me your name, then you and your wife go sit over there.
I’ll page you as soon as-” Ralph decided that he had eaten enough humble pie in front of this bureaucratic guard dog. It wasn’t as if he wanted an exit-visa from Albania, after all; just a goddam I.C.U. pass would do.
There was a slot in the base of the glass booth. Ralph reached through it and grasped the woman’s wrist before she could pull it away.
There was a sensation, painless but very clear, of those orange hooks passing directly through his flesh without finding anything to catch on. Ralph squeezed gently and felt a small burst of force-something that would have been no bigger than a pellet if it had been seen-pass from him to the woman. Suddenly the officious orange aura around her left arm and side turned the faded turquoise of Ralph’s aura. She gasped and jerked forward on her chair, as if someone had just dumped a paper cup filled with ice-cubes down the back of her uniform.
[“Never mind the computer. just give me a couple of passes, please.
Right away.”
“Yes, sir,” she said at once, and Ralph let go of her wrist so she could reach beneath her desk. The turquoise glow around her arm was turning orange again, the change in color creeping down from her shoulder toward her wrist.
But I could have turned her all blue, Ralph thought. Take her offer.
Run her around the room like a wind-up toy.
He suddenly remembered Ed quoting Matthew’s Gospel-to Herod, When he said that he was mocked, was exceeding through a mixture of fright and shame filled him. Thoughts of vampirism recurred as well, and a snatch from a famous old Pogo comic strip: We have met the enemy and he is us.
Yes, he could probably do almost anything he wanted with this orange-haloed grump; his batteries were fully charged.
The only problem was that the juice in those batteries-and in Lois’s, as well-was stolen goods.
When the information-lady’s hand emerged from beneath the desk, it was holding two laminated pink badges marked INTENSIVE CARE/VISITOR.
“Here you are, sir,” she said in a courteous voice utterly unlike the tone in which she had first addressed him. “Enljoy your visit and thank you for waiting.”
“Thank you,” Ralph said. He took the badges and grasped Lois’s hand.
“Come on, dear. We ought to [“Ralph, what did yoU DO to her?”] [“Nothing, I guess-I think she’s all right.”] get upstairs and make our visit before it gets too late.”
Lois glanced back at the woman in the information booth. She was dealing with her next customer, but slowly, as if she’d just been granted some moderately amazing revelation and had to think it over.
The blue glow was now visible only at the very tips of her fingers, and as Lois watched, that disappeared as well.
Lois looked up at Ralph again and smiled.
I “Yes… she is all right. So stop beating up on yourself [“Was that what I was doing?” [“I think so, yes… we’re talking that way again, Ralph.”] I “I know,”] [“Ralph?”] [“Yes?”] I “This is all pretty wonderful, isn’t it?”] [“Yes.” Ralph tried to hide the rest of what he was thinking from her: that when the price for something which felt this wonderful came due, they were apt to discover it was very high.
[“Stop staring at that baby, Ralph. You’re making its mother nervous.”]
Ralph glanced at the woman in whose arms the baby slept and saw that Lois was right… but it was hard not to look. The baby, no more than three months old, lay within a capsule of violently shifting yellow-gray aura. This powerful but disquieting thunder light circled the tiny body with the idiot speed of the atmosphere surrounding a gas giant-Jupiter, say, or Saturn.
[“Jesus, Lois, that’s brain-damage, isn’t it?”] [“Yes. The woman says there was a car accident.”] [“Says? Have you been talking to her?”] [“No. It’s -.” [“I don’t understand.”] [“Join the club.”] The oversized hospital elevator labored slowly upward. Those inside-the lame, the halt, the guilty few in good health-didn’t speak but either turned their eyes up to the floor-indicator over the doors or down to inspect their own shoes. The only exception to this was the woman with the thunderstruck baby. She was watching Ralph with distrust and alarm, as if she expected him to leap forward at any moment and try to rip her infant from her arms.
It’s not just that I was looking, Ralph thought. At least I don’t think so. She felt me thinking about her hah-. Felt me… sensed me… heard me… some damned thing, anyway.