Insomnia (73 page)

‘No,’ Lois said, and slipped a lock of Natalie’s fine-spun auburn hair through her fingers. ‘You had this one to look out for, didn’t you? And still do.’

‘I suppose,’ she said dully. ‘I suppose I do. But she was my friend, Lois. My
friend
.’

‘I know, dear.’

Helen’s face twisted like a rag, and she began to cry. Natalie looked at her mother with an expression of comical astonishment for a moment, and then she began to cry, too.

‘Helen,’ Ralph said. ‘Helen, listen to me. I have something to ask you. It’s very, very important. Are you listening?’

Helen nodded, but she went on crying. Ralph had no idea if she was really hearing him or not. He glanced at the corner of the building, wondering how long it would be before the police charged around it, then took a deep breath. ‘Do you think there’s any chance that they’ll still hold the rally tonight? Any chance at all? You were as close to Gretchen as anybody. Tell me what you think.’

Helen stopped crying and looked at him with still, wide eyes, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Then those eyes began to fill with a frightening depth of anger.

‘How can you ask? How can you even
ask
?’

‘Well . . . because . . .’ He stopped, unable to go on. Ferocity was the last thing he had expected.

‘If they stop us now, they win,’ Helen said. ‘Don’t you see that? Gretchen’s dead, Merrilee’s dead, High Ridge is burning to the ground with everything some of these women own inside, and if they stop us now they win.’

One part of Ralph’s mind – a deep part – now made a terrible comparison. Another part, one that loved Helen, moved to block it, but it moved too late. Her eyes looked like Charlie Pickering’s eyes when Pickering had been sitting next to him in the library, and there was no reasoning with a mind that could make eyes look like that.

‘
If they stop us now they win!
’ she screamed. In her arms, Natalie began to cry harder. ‘
Don’t you get it? Don’t you fucking
GET
it? We’ll
never
let that happen! Never! Never! Never!
’

Abruptly she raised the hand she wasn’t using to hold the baby and went around the corner of the building. Ralph reached for her and touched the back of her blouse with his fingertips. That was all.

‘
Don’t shoot me!
’ Helen was crying at the police on the other side of the house. ‘
Don’t shoot me, I’m one of the women! I’m one of the women! I’m one of the women!
’

Ralph lunged after her – no thought, just instinct – and Lois seized him by the back of his belt. ‘Better not go out there, Ralph. You’re a man, and they might think—’

‘Hello, Ralph! Hello, Lois!’

They both turned toward this new voice. Ralph recognized it at once, and he felt both surprised and not surprised. Standing beyond the clotheslines with their freight of flaming sheets and garments, wearing a pair of faded flannel pants and an old pair of Converse high-tops which had been mended with electrician’s tape, was Dorrance Marstellar. His hair, as fine as Natalie’s (but white instead of auburn), blew about his head in the October wind which combed the top of this hill. As usual, he had a book in one hand.

‘Come on, you two,’ he said, waving to them and smiling. ‘Hurry up and hurry along. There’s not much time.’

He led them down a weedy, little-used path that meandered away from the house in a westerly direction. It wound first through a fair-sized garden-plot from which everything had been harvested but the pumpkins and squashes, then into an orchard where the apples were just coming to full ripeness, then through a dense blackberry tangle where thorns seemed to reach out everywhere to snag their clothes. As they passed out of the blackberry brambles and into a gloomy stand of old pines and spruces, it occurred to Ralph that they must be on the Newport side of the ridge now.

Dorrance walked briskly for a man of his years, and the placid smile never left his face. The book he carried was
For Love, Poems 1950–1960,
by a man named Robert Creeley. Ralph had never heard of him, but supposed Mr Creeley had never heard of Elmore Leonard, Ernest Haycox or Louis L’Amour, either. He only tried to talk to Old Dor once, when the three of them finally reached the foot of a slope made slick and treacherous with pine-needles. Just ahead of them, a small stream foamed coldly past.

‘Dorrance, what are you doing out here? How’d you
get
here, for that matter? And where the hell are we going?’

‘Oh, I hardly ever answer questions,’ Old Dor replied, smiling widely. He surveyed the stream, then raised one finger and pointed at the water. A small brown trout jumped into the air, flipped bright drops from its tail, and fell back into the water again. Ralph and Lois looked at each other with identical
Did I just see what I thought I saw?
expressions.

‘Nope, nope,’ Dor continued, stepping off the bank and onto a wet rock. ‘Hardly ever. Too difficult. Too many possibilities. Too many levels . . . eh, Ralph? The world is full of levels, isn’t it? How are you, Lois?’

‘Fine,’ she said absently, watching Dorrance cross the stream on a number of conveniently placed stones. He did it with his arms held out to either side, a posture which made him look like the world’s oldest acrobat. Just as he reached the far bank, there was a violent exhalation from the ridge behind them – not quite an explosion.

There go the oil-tanks,
Ralph thought.

Dor turned to face them from the other side of the brook, smiling his placid Buddha’s smile. Ralph went up this time without any conscious intention of doing so, and without that sense of a blink inside his mind. Color rushed into the day, but he barely noticed; all his attention was fixed on Dorrance, and for a space of almost ten seconds, he forgot to breathe.

Ralph had seen auras of many shades in the last month or so, but none even remotely approached the splendid envelope that enclosed the old man Don Veazie had once described as ‘nice as hell, but really sort of a fool’. It was as if Dorrance’s aura had been strained through a prism . . . or a rainbow. He tossed off light in dazzling arcs: blue followed by magenta, magenta followed by red, red followed by pink, pink followed by the creamy yellow-white of a ripe banana.

He felt Lois’s hand groping for his and enfolded it.

[
‘My God, Ralph, do you see? Do you see how beautiful he is?’
]

[
‘I sure do.’
]

[
‘What is he? Is he even human?’
]

[
‘I don’t kn—’
]

[
‘Stop it, both of you. Come back down.’
]

Dorrance was still smiling, but the voice they heard in their heads was commanding and not a bit vague. And before Ralph could consciously think himself down, he felt a push. The colors and the heightened quality of the sounds dropped out of the day at once.

‘There’s no time for that now,’ Dor said. ‘Why, it’s noon already.’

‘
Noon?
’ Lois asked. ‘It
can’t
be! It wasn’t even nine when we got here, and that can’t have been half an hour ago!’

‘Time goes faster when you’re high,’ Old Dor said. He spoke solemnly, but his eyes twinkled. ‘Just ask anyone drinking beer and listening to country music on Saturday night. Come on! Hurry up! The clock is ticking! Cross the stream!’

Lois went first, stepping carefully from stone to stone with her arms held out, as Dorrance had done. Ralph followed with his hands poised to either side of her hips, ready to catch her if she showed signs of wavering, but he was the one who ended up almost tumbling in. He managed to avoid it, but only at the cost of wetting one foot all the way to the ankle. It seemed to him that someplace in the far reaches of his head, he could hear Carolyn laughing.

‘Can’t you tell us anything, Dor?’ he asked as they reached the far side. ‘We’re pretty lost here.’
And not just mentally or spiritually, either,
he thought. He had never been in these woods in his life, not even hunting partridge or deer as a young man. If the path they were on petered out, or if Old Dor lost whatever passed for his bearings, what then?

‘Yes,’ Dor responded at once. ‘I can tell you one thing, and it’s absolutely for sure.’

‘What?’

‘These are the best poems Robert Creeley ever wrote,’ Old Dor said, holding up his copy of
For Love,
and before either of them could respond to that, he turned around and once again began tracing his way along the faint path which ran west through the woods.

Ralph looked at Lois. Lois looked back at him, equally at a loss. Then she shrugged. ‘Come on, old buddy,’ she said. ‘We better not lose him now. I forgot the breadcrumbs.’

They climbed another hill, and from the top of it Ralph could see that the path they were on led down to an old woods road with a strip of grass running up the middle. It dead-ended in an overgrown gravel-pit about fifty yards further along. There was a car idling just outside the entrance to the pit, a perfectly anonymous late model Ford which Ralph nevertheless felt he knew. When the door opened and the driver got out, everything fell into place. Of course he knew the car; he had last seen it from Lois’s living room window on Tuesday night. Then it had been slued around in the middle of Harris Avenue with the driver kneeling in the glow of the headlights . . . kneeling beside the dying dog he had struck. Joe Wyzer heard them coming, looked up, and waved.

‘He said he wanted me to drive,’ Wyzer told them as he carefully turned his car around at the entrance to the gravel-pit.

‘Where to?’ Lois asked. She was sitting in the back with Dorrance. Ralph was in the front seat with Joe Wyzer, who looked as if he weren’t quite sure where or even who he was. Ralph had slid up – just the tiniest bit – as he shook hands with the pharmacist, wanting to get a look at Wyzer’s aura. Both it and his balloon-string were there, and both looked perfectly healthy . . . but the bright yellow-orange looked slightly muted to him. Ralph had an idea that was very likely Old Dor’s influence.

‘Good question,’ Wyzer said. He voiced a small, confused laugh. ‘I don’t have the slightest idea, really. This has been the
weirdest
day of my entire life. Absolutely no doubt about it.’

The woods road ended in a T-junction with a stretch of two-lane blacktop. Wyzer stopped, looked for traffic, then turned left. They passed a sign reading
TO
1–95 almost right away, and Ralph guessed that Wyzer would turn north as soon as they reached the turnpike. He knew where they were now – just about two miles south of Route 33. From here they could be back in Derry in less than half an hour, and Ralph had no doubt that was just where they were going.

He abruptly began to laugh. ‘Well, here we are,’ he said. ‘Just three happy folks out for a midday drive. Make that four. Welcome to the wonderful world of hyper-reality, Joe.’

Joe gave him a sharp look, then relaxed into a grin. ‘Is that what this is?’ And before either Ralph or Lois could reply: ‘Yeah, I suppose it is.’

‘Did you read that poem?’ Dorrance asked from behind Ralph. ‘The one that starts “Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else”?’

Ralph turned and saw that Dorrance was still smiling his wide, placid smile. ‘Yes, I did. Dor—’

‘Isn’t it a crackerjack? It’s
so
good. Stephen Dobyns reminds me of Hart Crane without the pretensions. Or maybe I mean
Stephen
Crane, but I don’t think so. Of course he doesn’t have the music of Dylan Thomas, but is that so bad? Probably not. Modern poetry is not about music. It’s about
nerve
– who has it and who doesn’t.’

‘Oh boy,’ Lois said. She rolled her eyes.

‘He could probably tell us everything we need to know if we went up a few levels,’ Ralph said, ‘but you don’t want that, do you, Dor? Because time goes faster when you’re high.’

‘Bingo,’ Dorrance replied. The blue signs marking the north and south entrances to the turnpike glimmered up ahead. ‘You’ll have to go up later, I imagine, you and Lois both, and so it’s very important to save as much time as you can now. Save . . . time.’ He made a queerly evocative gesture, drawing a gnarled thumb and forefinger down in the air, bringing them together as he did, as if to indicate some narrowing passage.

Joe Wyzer put on his blinker, turned left, and headed down the northbound ramp to Derry.

‘How did you get involved in this, Joe?’ Ralph asked him. ‘Of all the people on the west side, why did Dorrance draft you as chauffeur?’

Wyzer shook his head, and when the car reached the turnpike it drifted immediately over into the passing lane. Ralph reached out quickly and made a midcourse correction, reminding himself that Joe probably hadn’t been getting much sleep himself just lately. He was very happy to see the highway was mostly deserted, at least this far out of town. It would save some anxiety, and God knew he would take whatever he could get in that department today.

‘We are all bound together by the Purpose,’ Dorrance said abruptly. ‘That’s
ka-tet,
which means one made of many. The way that many rhymes make up a single poem. You see?’

‘No.’ Ralph, Lois, and Joe said it at the same time, in perfect, unrehearsed chorus, and then laughed nervously together.
The Three Insomniacs of the Apocalypse,
Ralph thought.
Jesus save us
.

‘That’s okay,’ Old Dor said, smiling his wide smile. ‘Just take my word for it. You and Lois . . . Helen and her little daughter . . . Bill . . . Faye Chapin . . . Trigger Vachon . . . me! All part of the Purpose.’

‘That’s fine, Dor,’ Lois said, ‘but where’s the Purpose taking us now? And what are we supposed to do when we get there?’