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  No, it wasn't like the auras or the tracks, and yes, he did know that. He also knew that no one was answering the door over there at 86 Harris Avenue, and that did not bode well for Bill McGovern's old Cardville schoolmate. He hadn't seen any blood on the scissors in Doc #1's hand, but given the iffy quality of the old Zeiss-Ikon binocs, that didn't prove much. Also, the guy could have wiped them clean before leaving the house. The thought had no more than crossed Ralph's mind before his imagination added a bloody handtowel lying beside the dead companion in the pink nightgown.

  'Come on, you two!' Ralph cried in a low voice. 'Jesus Christ, you gonna stand there all night?'

  More headlights splashed up Harris Avenue. The new arrival was an unmarked Ford sedan with a flashing red dashboard bubble. The man who got out was wearing plain clothes - gray poplin windbreaker and blue knitted watchcap. Ralph had maintained momentary hopes that the newcomer would turn out to be John Leydecker, even though Leydecker had told him he wouldn't be coming on until noon, but he didn't have to check with the binoculars to make sure it wasn't. This man was much slimmer, and wearing a dark mustache. Cop #2 went down the walk to meet him while Chris-or-Jess Nell went around the corner of Mrs Locher's house.

  One of those pauses which the movies so conveniently edit out then ensued. Cop #2 reholstered his gun. He and the newly arrived detective stood at the foot of Mrs Locher's stoop, apparently talking and glancing at the closed door every now and then. Once the uniformed cop took a step or two in the direction Nell had gone. The detective reached out, grasped his arm, detained him. They talked some more. Ralph clutched his upper thighs tighter and made a small, frustrated noise in his throat.

  A few minutes crawled by, and then everything happened at once in that confusing, overlapping, inconclusive way with which emergency situations seem to develop. Another police car arrived (Mrs Locher's house and those neighboring it on the right and left were now bathed in streaks of conflicting red and yellow light). Two more uniformed cops got out of it, opened the trunk, and removed a bulky contraption that looked to Ralph like a portable torture device. He believed this gadget was known as the Jaws of Life. Following the huge storm in the spring of 1985, a storm which had resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred people - many of whom had been trapped and drowned in their cars - Derry's schoolchildren had mounted a penny-drive to buy one.

  As the two new cops were carrying the Jaws of Life across the sidewalk, the front door of the house on the uphill side of Mrs Locher's opened and the Eberlys, Stan and Georgina, stepped out onto their stoop. They wore matching his 'n hers bathrobes, and Stan's gray hair was standing up in wild tufts that made Ralph think of Charlie Pickering. He raised the binoculars, scanned their curious, excited faces briefly, then put them back in his lap again.

  The next vehicle to appear was an ambulance from Derry Home Hospital. Like the police cars which had already arrived, its howler was off in deference to the hour, but it had a full roofrack of red lights, and they were strobing wildly. To Ralph, the developments across the street looked like a scene from one of his beloved Dirty Harry movies, only with the sound turned off.

  The two cops got the Jaws of Life halfway across the lawn and then dropped it. The detective in the windbreaker and the watchcap turned to them and raised his hands to shoulder-level, palms out, as if to say What did you think you were going to do with that thing? Break down the goddam door with it? At the same second, Officer Nell came back around the house. He was shaking his head.

  The detective in the watchcap abruptly turned, brushed past Nell and his partner, mounted the steps, raised one foot, and kicked in May Locher's front door. He paused to unzip his jacket, probably to free access to his gun, and then walked in without looking back.

  Ralph felt like applauding.

  Nell and his partner looked at each other uncertainly, then followed the detective up the steps and through the door. Ralph leaned forward even farther in his chair, now close enough to the window for his nostrils to make little fog-roses on the glass. Three men, their white hospital pants looking orange in the glare of the hi-intensity streetlamps, got out of the ambulance. One of them opened the rear doors and then all three of them simply stood there, hands in jacket pockets, waiting to see if they would be needed. The two cops who had carried the Jaws of Life halfway across Mrs Locher's lawn looked at each other, shrugged, picked it up, and began carrying it back toward their cruiser again. There were several large divots in the lawn where they had dropped it.

  Just let her be okay, that's all, Ralph thought. Just let her - and anyone who was in the house with her - be okay.

  The detective appeared in the doorway again, and Ralph's heart sank as he motioned to the men standing at the rear of the ambulance. Two of them removed a stretcher with a collapsible undercarriage; the third remained where he was. The men with the stretcher went up the walk and into the house at a smart pace, but they did not run, and when the orderly who had remained behind produced a pack of cigarettes and lit one, Ralph knew - suddenly, completely, and with no doubts - that May Locher was dead.

  6

  Stan and Georgina Eberly walked to the low line of hedge which separated their front yard from Mrs Locher's. They had put their arms around each other's waists, and to Ralph they looked like the Bobbsey Twins grown old and fat and frightened.

  Other neighbors were also coming out, either awakened by the silent convergence of emergency lights or because the telephone network along this little stretch of Harris Avenue was already beginning to operate. Most of the people Ralph saw were old ('We golden-agers', Bill McGovern liked to call them . . . always with that small satirical lift of the eyebrow, of course), men and women whose rest was fragile and easily broken at the best of times. He suddenly realized that Ed, Helen, and Baby Natalie had been the youngest people between here and the Extension . . . and now the Deepneaus were gone.

  I could go down there, he thought. I'd fit right in. Just another one of Bill's golden-agers.

  Except he couldn't. His legs felt like bunches of teabags held together by weak twists of string, and he was quite sure that if he tried to get up, he would go flopping bonelessly to the floor. So he sat and watched from his window, watched the play develop below him on the stage which had always been empty at this hour before . . . except for the occasional walk-through by Rosalie, that was. It was a play he had produced himself, with a single anonymous telephone call. He watched the orderlies re-emerge with the stretcher, this time moving more slowly because of the sheeted figure which had been strapped to it. Warring streaks of blue and red light flickered over that sheet, and the shapes of legs, hips, arms, neck, and head beneath it.

  Ralph was suddenly plunged back into his dream. He saw his wife under the sheet - not May Locher but Carolyn Roberts, and at any moment her head would split open and the black bugs, the ones which had grown fat on the meat of her diseased brain, would begin to boil out.

  Ralph raised the heels of his palms to his eyes. Some sound - some inarticulate sound of grief and rage, horror and weariness - escaped him. He sat that way for a long time, wishing he had never seen any of this and hoping blindly that if there really was a tunnel, he would not be required to enter it after all. The auras were strange and beautiful, but there was not enough beauty in all of them to make up for one moment of that terrible dream in which he had discovered his wife buried below the high-tide line, not enough beauty to make up for the dreary horror of his lost, wakeful nights, or the sight of that sheeted figure being rolled out of the house across the street.

  It was a lot more than just wishing that the play was over; as he sat there with the heels of his palms pressing against the lids of his closed eyes, he wanted all of it to be over - all of it. For the first time in his twenty-five thousand days of life, Ralph Roberts found himself wishing he were dead.

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  1

  There was a movie poster, probably picked up at one of the local video stores for a buck
or three, on the wall of the cubbyhole which served Detective John Leydecker as an office. It showed Dumbo the elephant cruising along with his magical ears outstretched. A headshot of Susan Day had been pasted over Dumbo's face, carefully cut to allow for the trunk. On the cartoon landscape below, someone had drawn a signpost which read DERRY 250.

  'Oh, charming,' Ralph said.

  Leydecker laughed. 'Not very politically correct, is it?'

  'I think that's an understatement,' Ralph said, wondering what Carolyn would have made of the poster - wondering what Helen would make of it, for that matter. It was quarter of two on an overcast, chilly Monday afternoon, and he and Leydecker had just come across from the Derry County Courthouse, where Ralph had given his statement about his encounter with Charlie Pickering the day before. He had been questioned by an assistant district attorney who looked to Ralph as if he might be ready to start shaving in another year or two.

  Leydecker had accompanied him as promised, sitting in the corner of the assistant DA's office and saying nothing. His promise to buy Ralph a cup of coffee turned out to be mostly a figure of speech - the evil-looking brew had come from the Silex in the corner of the cluttered second-floor Police Department dayroom. Ralph sipped cautiously at his and was relieved to find it tasted a little better than it looked.

  'Sugar? Cream?' Leydecker asked. 'Gun to shoot it with?'

  Ralph smiled and shook his head. 'Tastes fine . . . although it'd probably be a mistake to trust my judgement. I cut back to two cups a day last summer, and now it all tastes pretty good to me.'

  'Like me with cigarettes - the less I smoke, the better they taste. Sin's a bitch.' Leydecker took out his little tube of toothpicks, shook one out, and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. Then he put his own cup on top of his computer terminal, went over to the Dumbo poster, and began to lever out the thumbtacks which held the corners.

  'Don't do it on my account,' Ralph said. 'It's your office.'

  'Wrong.' Leydecker pulled the carefully scissored photo of Susan Day off the poster, balled it up, tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he began to roll the poster itself into a tight little cylinder.

  'Oh? Then how come your name's on the door?'

  'It's my name, but the office belongs to you and your fellow taxpayers, Ralph. Also to any news vidiot with a Minicam who happens to wander in here, and if this poster happened to show up on News at Noon, I'd be in a world of hurt. I forgot to take it down when I left Friday night, and I had most of the weekend off - a rare occurrence around here, let me tell you.'

  'You didn't put it up, I take it.' Ralph moved some papers off the tiny office's one extra chair and sat down.

  'Nope. Some of the fellows had a party for me Friday afternoon. Complete with cake, ice cream, and presents.' Leydecker rummaged in his desk and came up with a rubber band. He slipped it around the poster so it wouldn't spring open again, peeked one amused eye through it at Ralph, then tossed it into the wastebasket. 'I got a set of those days-of-the-week panties with the crotches snipped out, a can of strawberry-scented vaginal douche, a packet of Friends of Life anti-abortion literature - said literature including a comic-book called Denise's Unwanted Pregnancy - and that poster.'

  'I guess it wasn't a birthday party, huh?'

  'Nope.' Leydecker cracked his knuckles and sighed at the ceiling. 'The boys were celebrating my appointment to a special detail.'

  Ralph could see faint flickers of blue aura around Leydecker's face and shoulders, but in this case he didn't have to try and read them. 'It's Susan Day, isn't it? You got the job of protecting her while she's in town.'

  'Hole in one. Of course the State Police will be around, but they stick pretty much to traffic control in situations like this. There may be some FBI, too, but what they do mostly is hang back, take pictures, and give each other the secret Club Sign.'

  'She's got her own security people, doesn't she?'

  'Yes, but I don't know how many or how good. I talked to the head guy this morning and he's at least coherent, but we have to put in our own guys. Five of them, according to the orders I got on Friday. That's me plus four guys who'll volunteer as soon as I tell em to. The object is . . . wait a minute . . . you'll like this . . .' Leydecker shuffled through the papers on his desk, found the one he was looking for, and held it up. '". . . to maintain a strong presence and high visibility".'

  He dropped the paper again and grinned at Ralph. The grin did not have a lot of humor in it.

  'In other words, if someone tries to shoot the bitch or give her an acid shampoo, we want Lisette Benson and the other vidiots to at least record the fact that we were there.' Leydecker looked at the rolled-up poster leaning in his wastebasket and flipped it the bird.

  'How can you dislike someone so much when you've never even met her?'

  'I don't just dislike her, Ralph; I fucking hate her. Listen - I'm a Catholic, my lovin mother was a Catholic, my kids - if I ever have any - are all gonna be altarboys at St Joe's. Great. Being a Catholic's great. They even let you eat meat on Fridays now. But if you think being Catholic means I'm in favor of making abortions illegal again, you got the wrong puppy. See, I'm the Catholic who gets to question the guys who beat their kids with rubber hoses or push them downstairs after a night of drinking good Irish whiskey and getting all sentimental about their mothers.'

  Leydecker fished inside his shirt and brought out a small gold medallion. He placed it on his fingers and tilted it toward Ralph.

  'Mary, mother of Jesus. I've worn this since I was thirteen. Five years ago I arrested a man wearing one just like it. He had just boiled his two-year-old stepson. This is a true thing I'm telling you. Guy put on a great big pot of water, and when it was boiling, he picked the kid up by the ankles and dropped him into the pot like he was a lobster. Why? Because the kid wouldn't stop wetting the bed, he told us. I saw the body, and I'll tell you what, after you've seen something like that, the photos the right-to-life assholes like to show of vacuum abortions don't look so bad.'

  Leydecker's voice had picked up a slight tremor.

  'What I remember most of all is how the guy was crying, and how he kept holding onto that Mary medallion around his neck and saying he wanted to go to confession. Made me proud to be a Catholic, Ralph, let me tell you . . . and as far as the Pope goes, I don't think he should be allowed to have an opinion until he's had a kid himself, or at least spent a year or so taking care of crack-babies.'

  'Okay,' Ralph said. 'What's your problem with Susan Day?'

  'She's stirring the motherfucking pot!' Leydecker cried. 'She comes into my town and I have to protect her. Fine. I've got good men, and with just a pinch of luck, I think we can probably see her out of town with her head still on and her tits pointing the right way, but what about what happens before? And what happens after? Do you think she cares about any of that? Do you think the people who run WomanCare give much of a shit about the side-effects, as far as that goes?'

  'I don't know.'

  'The WomanCare advocates are a little less prone to violence than The Friends of Life, but in terms of the all-important ass-ache quotient, they're not much different. Do you know what this was all about when it started?'

  Ralph cast his memory back to his first conversation about Susan Day, the one he'd had with Ham Davenport. For a moment he almost had it, but then it squiggled away. The insomnia had won again. He shook his head.

  'Zoning,' Leydecker said, and laughed with disgusted amazement. 'Plain old garden-variety zoning regulations. Great, huh? Early this summer, two of our more conservative City Councillors, George Tandy and Emma Wheaton, petitioned the Zoning Committee to reconsider the zone with WomanCare in it, the idea being to kind of gerrymander the place out of existence. I doubt if that's exactly the right word, but you get the gist, don't you?'

  'Sure.'

  'Uh-huh. So the pro-choicers ask Susan Day to come to town and make a speech, help them to raise a war-chest to combat the pro-life grinches. The only problem is, the grinches never had a
chance of rezoning District 7, and the WomanCare people knew it! Hell, one of their directors, June Halliday, is on the City Council. She and the Wheaton bitch just about spit at each other when they pass in the hall.

  'Rezoning District 7 was a pipe-dream from the start, because WomanCare is technically a hospital, just like Derry Home, which is only a stone's throw away. If you change the zoning laws to make WomanCare illegal, you do the same to one of only three hospitals in Derry County - the third-largest county in the state of Maine. So it was never going to happen, but that's okay, because it was never about that in the first place. It was about being pissy and in-your-face. About being an ass-ache. And for most of the pro-choicers - one of the guys I work with calls em the Whale People - it's about being right.'

  'Right? I don't get you.'

  'It isn't enough that a woman can walk in there and get rid of the troublesome little fishie growing inside her any time she wants; the pro-choicers want the argument to end. What they want, down deep, is for people like Dan Dalton to admit they're right, and that'll never happen. It's more likely that the Arabs and the Jews will decide it was all a mistake and throw down their weapons. I support the right of a woman to have an abortion if she really needs to have one, but the pro-choicers' holier-than-thou attitude makes me want to puke. They're the new Puritans, as far as I'm concerned, people who believe that if you don't think the way they do, you're going to hell . . . only their version is a place where all you get on the radio is hillbilly music and all you can find to eat is chicken-fried steak.'

  'You sound pretty bitter.'

  'Try sitting on a powderkeg for three months and see how it makes you feel. Tell me this - do you think Pickering would have stuck a knife in your armpit yesterday if it hadn't been for WomanCare, The Friends of Life, and Susan Leave-My-Sacred-Twat-Alone Day?'

  Ralph appeared to give the question serious thought, but what he was really doing was watching John Leydecker's aura. It was a healthy dark blue, but the edges were tinged with rapidly shifting greenish light. It was this edging which interested Ralph; he had an idea he knew what it meant.