weird, Ralph. Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse are about as far from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as you can get. "Ralph?" Lois called, and he turned back.
There was one intersection and about a block's worth of distance between them now.
Cars zipped back and forth on Elizabeth Street, turning Ralph's view of them into a moderate stutter.
"What?" he called back.
"You look better! More rested! Are you finally getting some sleep?"
"Yes!" he returned, thinking Just another small lie, in another good cause.
"Didn't I say you'd feel better once the seasons changed? See you in a little while!"
Lois wiggled her fingers at him, and Ralph was amazed to see bright blue diagonal lines stream back from the short but carefully shaped nails. They looked like contrails.
What the fuck-?
He shut ' his eyes tight, then popped them open again. Nothing.
Only Bill and Lois once again walking up the street toward Lois's house, their backs to him. No bright blue diagonals in the air, nothing like thatRalph's eyes dropped to the sidewalk and he saw that Lois and Bill were leaving tracks behind them on the concrete, tracks that looked exactly like the footprints in the old Arthur Murray learn-todance instructions you used to be able to get by mail-order.
Lois's were gray. McGovern's-larger but still oddly delicate-were a dark shade of olive green, They glowed on the sidewalk, and Ralph, who was standing on the far side of Elizabeth Street with his jaw hanging almost down to his breastbone, suddenly realized he could see little ribbands of colored smoke rising from them. Or perhaps it was steam.
A city bus bound for Old Cape snored by, momentarily blocking his view, and when it passed the tracks were gone. There was nothing on the sidewalk but a message chalked inside a fading pink heart: SAM + DEANIE 4-EVER.
Those tracks are not gone, Ralph. they were never there in the first Place. You know that, don't you?
Yes, he knew. The idea that Bill and Lois looked like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had gotten into his head; progressing from that idea to a hallucination of phantom footprints leading up the sidewalk like tracks in an Arthur Murray dance-diagram had a certain bizarre log,c. Still, it was scary. His heart was beating too fast, and when he own, he saw those marks trailing up from Lois's waving fingers like bright blue jet contrails. don't, I've got to get more sleep, Ralph thought. I've got to. If I I'm apt to start seeing anything.
"That's right," he muttered under his breath as he turned toward the drugstore again. "Anything at all."
Ten minutes later, Ralph was standing at the front of the Rite Aid Pharmacy and looking at a sign which hung on chains from the ceiling.
FEEL BETTER AT RITE AID! it said, seeming to suggest that feeling better was a goal attainable by any reasonable, hard-working consumer.
Ralph had his doubts about that.
This, Ralph decided, was retail drug-dealing on a grand scale-it made the Rexall where he usually traded look like a tenement apartment by comparison. The fluorescent-lit aisles seemed as long as bowling alleys and displayed everything from toaster ovens to jigsaw puzzles.
After a little study, Ralph decided Aisle 3 contained most of the patent medicines and was probably his best bet. He made his way slowly through the area marked STOMACH REMEDIES, sojourned briefly in the kingdom of ANALGESICS, and quickly crossed the land of LAXATIVES. And there, between LAXATIVES and DECONGESTANTS, he stopped.
This is it, folks-my last shot. After this there's only Dr. Litchfield, and if he suggests chewing honeycomb or drinking chamomile tea, I'll probably snap and it'll take both the nurses and the receptionist to pull me off him. closed his eyes for a moment to try and calm down.
SLEEPING AIDS, the sign over this section of Aisle 3 read.
Ralph, never much of a patent-medicine user (he would otherwise have arrived here much sooner, no doubt), didn't know exactly what he'd expected, but it surely had not been this wild, almost indecent profusion of products. His eye slipped across the boxes (the majority were a soothing blue), reading the names. Most seemed strange and slightly ominous: Compoz, Nytol, Sleepinal, Z-Power, Sominex, Sleepinex, Drow-Zee. There was even a generic brand.
You have to be kidding, he thought. None of these things are going to work for you. It's time to quit fucking around, don't you know that? When you start to see colored footprints on the sidewalk, it is time to quit fucking around and go to the