dirty March dark and Carolyn went on fighting the last half of her last round. By then she had been running completely on autopilot, of course; the brain which had once existed within that finely made skull was gone. It had been replaced by a mutant-a stupid gray-black delinquent that could not think or feel but only eat and eat and eat until it had gorged itself to death.
SPickle-,vpickle-spackle-spackle, and he had seen that the T-shaped breathing apparatus in her nose had come askew. He waited for her to tear one of her awful, labored breaths out of the air and then, as she exhaled, he had leaned forward and replaced the small plastic nosepiece. He had gotten a little mucus on his fingers, he remembered, and had wiped it off on a tissue from the box on the bedside table.
He had sat back, waiting for the next breath, wanting to make sure the nosepiece didn't come askew again, but there Ivasn't aiiv next breath, and he realized that the ticking sound he had heard coming from everywhere since the previous summer seemed to have stopped. He remembered waiting as the minutes passed-one, then three, then six-unable to believe that all the good years and good times (not to mention the few bad ones) had ended in this flat and toneless fashion.
Her radio, tuned to the local easy-listening station, was playing ing softly in the corner and he listened to Simon and Garfunkel s' "Scarborough Fair." They sang it all the way to the end.
Wayne Newton came on next, and began to sing "Danke Schoen." He sang it all the way to the end. The weather report came next, but before the disc jockey could finish telling about how the weather was to be on Ralph Roberts's first full day as a widower, all that stuff about clearing and colder and winds shifting around to the northeast, Ralph finally got it through his head. The watch had stopped ticking, the train had come, the boxing match was over. All the metaphors had fallen down, leaving only the woman in the room, silent at last. Ralph began to cry. Still crying, he had blundered over into the corner and turned off the radio. He remembered the summer they had taken a fingerpaint class, and the night they had ended up fingerpainting each other's naked bodies. This memory made him cry harder. He went to the window and leaned his head against the cold glass and cried. In that first terrible minute of understanding, he had wanted only one thing: to be dead himself. A nurse heard him crying and came in. She tried to take Carolyn's pulse. Ralph told her to stop being a goddam fool.
She came over to Ralph and for a moment he thought she was going to try to take his pulse.
Instead, she had put her arms around him. She["Ralph? Ralph, are you all right?"
He looked around at Lois, started to say he was fine, and then remembered there was precious little he could hide from her while they were in this state.
["Feeling sad. Too many memories in here. Not good others."] ["I understand... but look on, Look on the floor,, Ralph He did, and his eyes widened. The floor was covered with an overlay of multicolored tracks, some fresh, most fading to invisibi Its.
Two sets stood out clearly from the rest, as brilliant as diamonds ill a litter of paste imitations. They were a deep green-gold in which ai few tiny reddish flecks still swam.
["Do they belong to the ones we're looking for, Ralph?"] ["Yes-the docs are here."] Ralph took Lois's hand-it felt very cold-and began to lead her slowly up the hall.
Part II THE SECRET CITY CHAPTER 17
They hadn't gone far when something very strange and rather frightening happened. For a moment the world bled white in front of them. The doors to the rooms ranged along the hall, barely visible in this bright white haze, expanded to the size of warehouse loading bays.
The corridor itself seemed to simultaneously elongate and grow taller.
Ralph felt the bottom go out of his stomach the way it often had back when he was a teenager, and a frequent customer on the Dust Devil roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach. He heard Lois moan, and she squeezed his hand with panicky tightness.
The whiteout lasted only a second, and when the colors swarmed back into the world, they were brighter and crisper than they had been a moment before. Normal perspective