head, hoping to see someone, anyone, but the reading room remained empty. Outside, the wind gusted and rain racketed against the windows.
"Because you're a fucking Centurion!" the gray-haired man spat.
"A fucking baby-killer! Stealing the fetal unborn." Selling them to the highest bidder! I know all about you!"
Ralph dropped his right hand slowly from the side of his head.
He was right-handed, and all the stuff he happened to pick up in the course of the day generally went into the handiest right hand pocket of whatever he was wearing. The old gray jacket had big flap pockets, but he was afraid that even if he could sneak his hand in there unnoticed, the most lethal thing he would find was apt to be a crumpled-up Dentyne wrapper. He doubted that he even had a nail-clipper.
"Ed Deepneau told you that, didn't he?" Ralph asked, then grunted as the knife poked painfully into his side just below the place where his ribs stopped.
"Don't speak his name," the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt whispered. "Don't you even speak his name! Stealer of infants!
Cowardly murderer! Centurion!" He thrust forward with the blade again, and this time there was real pain as the tip punched through the leather jacket. Ralph didn't think he was cut-yet, anyway-but he was quite sure the nut had already applied enough pressure to leave a nasty bruise. That was okay, though; if he got out of this with no more than a bruise, he would count himself lucky.
"All right," he said. "I won't mention his name."
"Say you're sorry! "the man in the Snoopy sweatshirt hissed, prodding with the knife again. This time it went through Ralph's shirt,and he felt the first warm trickle of blood down his side. Which is under the point of the blade right now? he wondered.
Liver?
bladder? What's under there on the left hand side?
He either couldn't remember or didn't want to. A picture had come into his mind, and it was trying to get in the way of any organized thought-a deer hung head-down from a set of scales outside some country store during hunting season. Glazed eyes, lolling tongue, and a dark slit up the belly where a man with a knifea knife just like this one-had opened it up and yanked its works out, leaving just head, meat, and hide.
"I'm sorry," Ralph said in a voice which was no longer steady. "I am, really."
"Yeah, right! You ought to be, but you aren't! You aren't." Another prod. A bright lance of pain. More wet heat trickling down his side. And suddenly the room was brighter, as if two or three of the camera crews which had been wandering around Derry since the abortion protests began had crowded in here and turned on the floods they mounted over their videocams. There were no cameras, of course; the lights had gone on inside of him.
He turned toward the man with the knife-the man who was actually pressing the blade into him now-and saw he was surrounded by a shifting green and black aura that made Ralph think of
(swampfire)
the dim phosphorescence he had sometimes seen in marshy woods after dark. Twisting through it were spiky brambles of purest black.
He looked at his assailant's aura with mounting dismay, hardly feeling the tip of the knife sink a sixteenth of an inch deeper into him.
He was distantly aware that blood was puddling at the bottom of his shirt, along the line of his belt, but that was all.
He's crazy, and he really does mean to kill me-it isn't I'll bet He's not quite ready to do it yet, he hasn't quite worked himself itp to it, but he's almost there. And if I try to run-if I try to move even an inch away from the knife He's got in me-he'll do it right away.
I think He's hoping I will decide to move... then he can tell himself I brought it on myself, that it was my own fault.
"You and your kind, oh boy," the man with the zany shock of gray hair was saying. "We know all about you."
Ralph's hand had reached the right pocket... and felt a largish something inside he didn't recognize or remember putting there. Not that that meant much; when you could no longer remember if the last four digits of the cinema center phone number were 1317 or 1713, anything was possible.
"You guys, oh boy!" the man with the zany hair said. "Ohboy ohboy ohBOY!" This time Ralph had no trouble feeling the pain when