"You don't know how crazy," Ralph said, and for the first time he told them the story of what had happened the previous summer, out by the airport. It took about ten minutes. When he finished, neither of them said anything-they only looked at him with wide eyes.
"What?" Ralph asked uneasily. "You don't believe me? You think I imagined it?"
"Of course I believe it," Lois said. "I was just... well... stunned.
And frightened."
"Ralph, I think maybe you ought to pass that story on to John Leydecker," McGovern said. "I don't think he can do a goddam thing with it, but considering Ed's new playmates, I think it's information he should have."
Ralph thought it over carefully, then nodded and pushed himself to his feet. "No time like the present," he said. "Want to come, Lois?
"She thought it over, then shook her head. "I'm tired out," she said.
"And a little-what do the kids call it these days?-a little freaked.
I think I'll put my feet up for a bit. Take a nap."
"You do that," Ralph said. "You do look a little tuckered. And thanks for feeding us." Impulsively, he bent over her and kissed the corner of her mouth. Lois looked up at him with startled gratitude.
Ralph turned off his own television a little over six hours later, as Lisette Benson finished the evening news and handed off to the sports guy. The demonstration at WomanCare had been bumped to the number-two slot-the evening's big story was the continuing a allegation that Governor Greta Powers had used cocaine as a grad student-and there was nothing new, except that Dan Dalton was now being identified as the head of The Friends of Life.
Ralph thought figurehead was probably a better word. Was Ed actually in charge yet? If he wasn't, Ralph guessed he would be before longChristmas at the latest. A potentially more interesting question was what Ed's employers thought about Ed's legal adventures up the road in Derry. Ralph had an idea they would be a lot less comfortable with what had gone on today than with last month's domesticabuse charge; he had read only recently that Hawking Labs would soon become the fifth such research center in the Northeast to be working with fetal tissue.
They probably wouldn't applaud the information that one of their research chemists had been arrested for chucking dolls filled with fake blood at the side of a clinic that did abortions. And if they knew how crazy he really wasWho's going to tell them, Ralph? You?
No. That was a step further than he was willing to go, at least for the time being. Unlike going down to the police station with McGovern to talk to John Leydecker about the incident last summer, it felt like persecution. Like writing KILL THIS CUNT beside a picture of a woman with whose views you didn't agree.
That's bullshit, and you know it, "I don't know anything," he said, getting up and going to the window. "I'm too tired to know anything." But as he stood there, looking across the street at two men coming out of the Red Apple with a six-pack apiece, he suddenly did know something, remembered something that drew a cold line up his back.
This morning, when he had come out of the Rite Aid and been overwhelmed by the auras-and a sense of having stepped up to some new level of awareness-he had reminded himself again and again to enjoy but not to believe; that if he failed to make that crucial distinction, he was apt to end up in the same boat as Ed deep Neal!.
That thought had almost opened the door on some associative memory, but the shifting auras in the parking lot had pulled him away from it before it had been able to kick all the way in.
Now it came to him: Ed had said something about seeing auras, hadn't he?
No-he might have meant auras, but the word he actually used was colors. I'm almost positive of that. It was right after he talked about seeing the corpses of baht'es everyplace, even on the roofs. He saidRalph watched the two men get into a beat-up old van and thought that he would never be able to remember Ed's words exactly; he was just too tired. Then, as the van drove off trailing a cloud of exhaust that reminded him of the bright maroon stuff he'd seen coming from the tailpipe of the bakery truck