old-Ralph manufactured what he hoped looked like a big, cheerful grin and m,aved to her. Sue waved back and resumed her sweeping. Dorrance, meanwhile, had continued serenely on his way. He was now almost half a block up the street.
Ralph decided to let him go.
He climbed the steps to the porch, switching the book Dorrance had given him to his left hand so he could grope for his key-ring, and then saw he didn't have to bother-the door was not only unlocked but standing ajar. Ralph had scolded McGovern repeatedly for his carelessness about locking the front door, and had thought he was finally having some success in getting the message through his downstairs tenant's thick skull. Now, however, it seemed that McGovern had backslid.
"Dammit, Bill," he said under his breath, pushing his way into the shadowy lower hall and looking nervously up the stairs. It was all too easy to imagine Ed Deepneau lurking up there, broad daylight or not.
Still, he could not stay here in the foyer all day. ' He turned the thumb-bolt on the front door and started up the stairs.
There was nothing to worry about, of course. He had one bad moment when he thought -he saw someone standing in the far corner of the living room, but it was only his own old gray jacket. He had actually hung it on the coat-tree for a change instead of just slinging it onto a chair or draping it over the arm of the sofa; no wonder it had given him a turn.
He went into the kitchen and, with his hands poked into his back pockets, stood l(looking at the calendar. Monday was circled, and within the circle he had scrawled HONG-10:00.
I was supposed to tell you to cancel the appointment with the pinsticker man, and I done it. The rest is up to you.
For a moment Ralph felt himself step back from his life, so he was able to look at the latest section of the mural it made instead of just the detail which was this day. What he saw frightened him: an unknown road heading into a lightless tunnel where anything might be waiting.
Anything at all.
Then turn back, Ralph!
But he had an idea he couldn't do that. He-had an idea he was for the tunnel, whether he wanted to go in there or not. The feeling was not one of being led so much as it was one of being shoved forward by powerful, invisible hands.
"Never mind," he muttered, rubbing his temples nervously with the tips of his fingers and still looking at the circled date-two days from now-on the calendar. "It's the insomnia. That's when things really started to-"
Really started to what?
"To get weird," he told the empty apartment. "That's when things started to get really weird."
Yes, weird. Lots of weird things, but the auras he was seeing were clearly the weirdest of them all. Cold gray light-it had looked like living frost-creeping over the man reading the paper in Day Break, Sun Down. The mother and son walking toward the supermarket, their entwined auras rising from their clasped hands like a pigtail.
Helen and Nat buried in gorgeous clouds of ivory light; Natalie snatching at the marks left by his moving fingers, ghostly contrails which only she and Ralph had been able to see.
And now Old Dor, turning up on his doorstep like some peculiar Old Testament prophet... only instead of telling him to repent, Dor had told him to cancel his appointment with the acupuncturist Joe Wyzer had recommended. It should have been funny, but it wasn't.
The mouth of that tunnel. Looming closer every day. Was there really a tunnel? And if so, where did it lead?
I'm more interested in what might be waiting for me in there, Ralph thought. Waiting in the dark.
You shouldn't have messed in, Dorrance had said. But it's too late now.
"Done-bun-can'the-undone," Ralph murmured, and suddenly decided he didn't want to take the wide view anymore; it was unsettling.
Better to move in close again and consider things a detail at a time, beginning with his appointment for acupuncture treatment. Was hegoing to keep it, or follow the advice of Old Dor, alias the Ghost of Hamlet's Father?
It really wasn't a question that needed much thought, Ralph decided. Joe Wyzer had sweet-talked Hong's secretary into finding him an appointment in early October, and Ralph intended to keep it. If there was a path out of this thicket, starting to sleep through the night was probably it. And that