the exciting speculation that schizophrenia might he a disorder in Which deprivation of dreaming at night led to a breakthrough of the dream process into everyday waking life.
Ralph hunched over the book, elbows on the table, fisted hands pressed against his temples, forehead lined and eyebrows drawn together in a clench of concentration, He wondered if Hall could be talking about the auras, maybe without even knowing it. Except he was still having dreams, dammit-very vivid ones, for the most part. just last night he'd had one in which he was dancing at the old Derry Pavillion (gone now; destroyed in the big storm which had wiped out most of the downtown area eight years before) with Lois Chasse.
He seemed to have taken her out with the intention of proposing to her, but Trigger Vachon, of all people, had kept trying to cut in.
He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, tried to focus his attention, and began to read again. He did not see the man in the baggy gray sweatshirt materialize in the doorway of the,reading room and stand there, silently watching him. After about three minutes of this, the man reached beneath the, sweatshirt (Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy was on the front, wearing his Joe Cool glasses) and produced a hunting knife from the scabbard on his belt. The hanging overhead globes threw a thread of light along the knife's serrated blade as the man turned it this way and that, admiring the edge. Then he moved forward toward the table where Ralph was sitting with his head propped on his hands. He sat down beside Ralph, who noticed that someone was there only in the faintest, most distant way.
Tolerance to sleep loss varies somewhat with the age of the subject. Ywunger subjects show an earlier onset of disturbance and more physical reactions, while older subjectsA hand closed lightly on Ralph's shoulder, startling him out of the book.
"I wonder what they'll look like?" an ecstatic voice whispered in his ear, the words flowing on a tide of what smelled like spoiled bacon cooking slowly in a bath of garlic and rancid butter. "Your guts, I mean. I wonder what they'll look like when I let them out all over the floor. What do you think, you Godless baby-killing Centurion? Do you think they'll be yellow or black or red or what?"
Something hard and sharp pressed into Ralph's left side and then slowly traced its way down along his ribs.
"I can't wait to find out," the ecstatic voice whispered. "I can't wait.
Ralph turned his head very slowly, hearing the tendons in his neck creak. He didn't know the name of the man with the bad breaththe man who was sticking something that felt too much like a knife not to be one into his side-but he recognized him at once. The hornrimmed glasses helped, but the zany gray hair, standing up in clumps that reminded Ralph simultaneously of Don King and Albert Einstein, was the clincher. It was the man who had been standing with Ed Deepneau in the background of the newspaper photo that had showed Ham Davenport with his fist raised and Dan Da ton wearing Davenport's CHOICE, NOT FEAR sign for a hat. Ralph thought he had seen this same guy in some of the TV news stories about the continuing abortion demonstrations. just another signwaving, chanting face in the crowd; just another spear-carrier. Except it now seemed that this particular spear-carrier intended to kill him.
"What do you think?" the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt asked, still in that ecstatic whisper. The sound of his voice frightened Ralph more than the blade as it slid slowly up and then back down his leather jacket, seeming to map the vulnerable organs on the left side of his body: lung, heart, kidney, intestines. "What color?"
His breath was nauseating, but Ralph was afraid to pull back or turn his head, afraid that any gesture might cause the knife to stop tracking and plunge. Now it was moving back up his side again.
Behind the thick lenses of his hornrims, the man's brown eyes floated like strange fish, The expression in them was disconnected and oddly frightened, Ralph thought. The eyes of a man who would see signs in the sky and perhaps hear voices whispering from deep in the closet late at night.
"I don't know," Ralph said. "I don't know why you'd want to hurt me in the first place." He shot his eyes quickly around, still not moving his