almost as soon as they appeared. The bagboy grinned and waved back; his hand left a fantail of yellowish-white behind. To Ralph it looked like the fill of a tropical fish. This also began to fade, but more slowly.
Ralph's fear at this confused, shining vision was considerable, but for the time being, at least, fear had taken a back seat to wonder, awe, and simple amazement. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen in his life. But it's not real he cautioned himself.
Remember that, Ralph. He promised himself he would try, but for the time being that cautioning voice seemed very far away.
Now he noticed something else: there was a line of that lucid brightness emerging from the head of every person he could see. it trailed upward like a ribbon of bunting or brightly colored crepe paper until it attenuated and disappeared. For some people the point of disappearance was five feet above the head; for others it was ten or fifteen. In most cases the color of the bright, ascending line matched the rest of the aura-bright white for the bagboy, gray-green in the case of the female customer beside him, for instance but there were some striking exceptions. Ralph saw a rust-red line rising from a middle-aged man who was striding along in the middle of a dark blue aura, and a woman with a light gray aura whose ascending line was an amazing (and slightly alarming) shade of magenta. In some cases-two or three, not a lot-the rising lines were almost black.
Ralph didn't like those, and he noticed that the people to whom these "balloon-strings" (they were named just that simply and quickly in his mind) belonged invariably looked unwell.
Of course they do. The balloon-strings are an indicator of health... and ill-health, in some cases. Like the Kirlian auras people were so fascinated with back in the late sixties and early seventies.
Ralph, another voice warned, you are not really seeing these things, okay? I mean, I hate to be a b*re, butBut wasn't it at least possible that the phenomenon was real? That his persistent insomnia, coupled with the stabilizing influence of his lucid, coherent dreams, had afforded him a glimpse of a fabulous dimension just beyond the reach of ordinary perception?
Quit it, galpb, and right now. You have to do better than that, or you'll end up in the same boat as poor old Ed Deepneau.
Thinking of Ed kicked off some association-something he'd said on the day he'd been arrested for beating his wife-but before Ralph could isolate it, a voice spoke almost at his left elbow.
"Mom? Mommy? Can we get the Honey Nut Cheerios again?"
"We'll see once we get inside, lion."
A young woman and a little boy passed in front of him, walking hand-in-hand. It was the boy, who looked to be four or five, who had spoken. His mother was walking in an envelope of almost blinding white. The "balloon-string" rising out of her blonde hair was also white and very wide-more like the ribbon on a fancy gift box than a string. It rose to a height of at least twenty feet and floated out slightly behind her as she walked. It made Ralph think of things bridal-trains, veils, gauzy billows of skirt.
Her son's aura was a healthy dark blue verging on violet, and as the two of them walked past, Ralph saw a fascinating thing. Tendrils of aura were also rising from their clasped hands: white from the woman, dark blue from the boy. They twined in a pigtail as they rose, faded, and disappeared.
Mother-and-son, mother-and-son, Ralph thought. There was something perfectly, simply symbolic about those hands, which were wrapped around each other like woodbine climbing a garden stake.
Looking at them made his heart rejoice-corny, but it was exactly how he felt. Mother-and-son, white-and-blue, mother-and"Mom, what's that man looking at?"
The blonde woman's glance at Ralph was brief, but he saw the way her lips thinned down and pressed together before she turned away.
More important, he saw the brilliant aura which surrounded her suddenly darken, close in, and pick up spiraling tints of dark red.
That's the color of fright, Ralph thought. Or maybe anger.
"I don't know, Tim. Come on, stop dawdling." She began to move him along faster, her ponytailed hair flipping back and forth and leaving small fans of gray-tinged-with-red in the air. To Ralph they looked like the arcs that wipers sometimes left on dirty windshields.
"Hey, Mom, get a life! Quit pulling! "The little boy had to