rainbow. He tossed off light in dazzling arcs: blue followed by magenta, magenta followed by red, red followed by pink, pink followed by the creamy yellow-white of a ripe banana.
He felt Lois's hand groping for his and enfolded it.
["My God, Ralph, do you see? Do you see how beautiful he is?"] E "I sure do."] ["What is he? Is he even human?"] ["I don't kn-"] ["Stop it, both of you. Come back down."] Dorrance was still smiling, but the voice they heard in their heads was commanding and not a bit vague.
And before Ralph could consciously think himself down, he felt a push.
The colors and the heightened quality of the sounds dropped out of the day at once.
"There's no time for that now," Dor said. "Why, it's noon already-"
"Noon?" Lois asked. "It can't be! It wasn't even nine when we got here, and that can't have been half an hour ago!"
"Time goes faster when you're high," Old Dor said. He spoke solemnly, but his eyes twinkled. 'Just ask anyone drinking beer and listening to country music on Saturday night. Come on! Hurry up!
The clock is ticking! Cross the stream!"
Lois went first, stepping carefully from stone to stone with her arms held out, as Dorrance had done. Ralph followed with his hands poised to either side of her hips, ready to catch her if she showed signs of wavering, but he was the one who ended up almost tumbling in.
He managed to avoid it, but only at the cost of wetting one foot all the way to the ankle. It seemed to him that someplace in the far reaches of his head, he could hear Carolyn laughing merrily.
"Can't you tell us anything, Dor?" he asked as they reached the far side. "We're pretty lost here." And not just mentally or spiritually, either, he thought. He had never been in these woods in his life, not even hunting partridge or deer as a young man. If the path they were on petered out, or if Old Dor lost whatever passed for his bearings, what then?
"Yes," Dor responded at once. "I can tell you one thing, and it's absolutely for sure."
"What?"
"These are the best poems Robert Creeley ever wrote," Old Dor said, holding up his copy of for Love, and before either of them could respond to that, he turned around and once again began tracing his way along the faint path which ran west through the woods.
Ralph looked at Lois. Lois looked back at him, equally at a loss.
Then she shrugged. "Come on, old buddy," she said. "We better not lose him now. I forgot the breadcrumbs."
They climbed another hill, and from the top of it Ralph could see that the path they were on led down to an old woods road with a strip of grass running up the middle. It dead-ended in an overgrown gravel-pit about fifty yards farther along. There was a car idling just outside the entrance to the pit, a perfectly anonymous late-model Ford which Ralph nevertheless felt he knew. When the door opened and the driver got out, everything fell into place. Of course he knew the car; he had last seen it from Lois's living-room window on Tuesday night. Then it had been slued around in the middle of Harris Avenue with the driver kneeling in the glow of the headlights... kneeling beside the dying dog he had struck. Joe Wyzer heard them coming, looked up, and waved.
Part III THE CRIMSON KING CHAPTER 23
"He said he wanted me to drive," Wyzer told them as he carefully turned his car around at the entrance to the gravel-pit.
"Where to?" Lois asked. She was sitting in the back with Dorrance. Ralph was in the front seat with Joe Wyzer, who looked as if he weren't quite sure where or even who he was. Ralph had slid up-just the tiniest bit-as he shook hands with the pharmacist, wanting to get a look at Wyzer's aura. Both it and his balloon-string were there, and both looked perfectly healthy... but the bright yellow-orange looked slightly muted to him. Ralph had an idea that was very likely Old Doris influence.
"Good question," Wyzer said. He voiced a small, confused laugh.
"I don't have the slightest idea, really. This has been the weirdest day of my entire life. Absolutely no doubt about it."
The woods road ended in a T-junction with a stretch of two-lane blacktop. Wyzer stopped, looked for traffic, then turned left. They passed a sign reading TO i-95 almost right away, and Ralph