There were similar oddities everywhere, phenomena which intersected in slanting paths and made Ralph think again of how the light had come slanting through the cracks in the roof and walls of that long-ago barn. But the real wonder was the people, and it was around them that the auras seemed most clearly defined and real, A bagboy came out of the supermarket, pushing a cartload of groceries and walking in a nimbus of such brilliant white that it was like a travelling spotlight.
The aura of the woman beside him was dingy by comparison, the gray-green of cheese which has begun to mould.
A young girl called to the bagboy from the open window of a Subaru and waved; her left hand left bright contrails, as pink as cotton candy, in the air as it moved. They began to fade almost as soon as they appeared. The bagboy grinned and waved back; his hand left a fantail of yellowish-white behind. To Ralph it looked like the fill of a tropical fish. This also began to fade, but more slowly.
Ralph’s fear at this confused, shining vision was considerable, but for the time being, at least, fear had taken a back seat to wonder, awe, and simple amazement. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen in his life. But it’s not real he cautioned himself.
Remember that, Ralph. He promised himself he would try, but for the time being that cautioning voice seemed very far away.
Now he noticed something else: there was a line of that lucid brightness emerging from the head of every person he could see. it trailed upward like a ribbon of bunting or brightly colored crepe paper until it attenuated and disappeared. For some people the point of disappearance was five feet above the head; for others it was ten or fifteen. In most cases the color of the bright, ascending line matched the rest of the aura-bright white for the bagboy, gray-green in the case of the female customer beside him, for instance but there were some striking exceptions. Ralph saw a rust-red line rising from a middle-aged man who was striding along in the middle of a dark blue aura, and a woman with a light gray aura whose ascending line was an amazing (and slightly alarming) shade of magenta. In some cases-two or three, not a lot-the rising lines were almost black.
Ralph didn’t like those, and he noticed that the people to whom these “balloon-strings” (they were named just that simply and quickly in his mind) belonged invariably looked unwell.
Of course they do. The balloon-strings are an indicator of health… and ill-health, in some cases. Like the Kirlian auras people were so fascinated with back in the late sixties and early seventies.
Ralph, another voice warned, you are not really seeing these things, okay? I mean, I hate to be a b*re, butBut wasn’t it at least possible that the phenomenon was real? That his persistent insomnia, coupled with the stabilizing influence of his lucid, coherent dreams, had afforded him a glimpse of a fabulous dimension just beyond the reach of ordinary perception?
Quit it, galpb, and right now. You have to do better than that, or you’ll end up in the same boat as poor old Ed Deepneau.
Thinking of Ed kicked off some association-something he’d said on the day he’d been arrested for beating his wife-but before Ralph could isolate it, a voice spoke almost at his left elbow.
“Mom? Mommy? Can we get the Honey Nut Cheerios again?”
“We’ll see once we get inside, lion.”
A young woman and a little boy passed in front of him, walking hand-in-hand. It was the boy, who looked to be four or five, who had spoken. His mother was walking in an envelope of almost blinding white. The “balloon-string” rising out of her blonde hair was also white and very wide-more like the ribbon on a fancy gift box than a string. It rose to a height of at least twenty feet and floated out slightly behind her as she walked. It made Ralph think of things bridal-trains, veils, gauzy billows of skirt.
Her son’s aura was a healthy dark blue verging on violet, and as the two of them walked past, Ralph saw a fascinating thing. Tendrils of aura were also rising from their clasped hands: white from the woman, dark blue from the boy. They twined in a pigtail as they rose, faded, and disappeared.
Mother-and-son, mother-and-son, Ralph thought. There was something perfectly, simply symbolic about those hands, which were wrapped around each other like woodbine climbing a garden stake.
Looking at them made his heart rejoice-corny, but it was exactly how he felt. Mother-and-son, white-and-blue, mother-and"Mom, what’s that man looking at?”
The blonde woman’s glance at Ralph was brief, but he saw the way her lips thinned down and pressed together before she turned away.
More important, he saw the brilliant aura which surrounded her suddenly darken, close in, and pick up spiraling tints of dark red.
That’s the color of fright, Ralph thought. Or maybe anger.
“I don’t know, Tim. Come on, stop dawdling.” She began to move him along faster, her ponytailed hair flipping back and forth and leaving small fans of gray-tinged-with-red in the air. To Ralph they looked like the arcs that wipers sometimes left on dirty windshields.
“Hey, Mom, get a life! Quit pulling! “The little boy had to trot in order to keep up.
That’s my fault, ralph thought, and an image of how he must have looked to the young mother flashed into his mind: old guy, tired face, big purplish pouches under his eyes. He’s standinghunching-by the mailbox outside the Rite Aid Pharmacy, staring at her and her little boy as if they were the most remarkable things in the world.
Which you just about are, ma’am, if you but knew it.
To her he must have looked like the biggest pervo of all time. He had to get rid of this. Real or hallucination, it didn’t matter-he had to make it quit. If he didn’t, somebody was going to call either the cops or the men with the butterfly nets. For all he knew, the pretty mother could be making the bank of pay-phones just inside the market’s main doors her first stop.
He was just asking himself how one thought away something which was all in one’s mind to begin with when he realized it had already happened. Psychic phenomenon or sensory hallucination, it had simply disappeared while he’d been thinking about how awful he must have looked to the pretty young mother. The day had gone back to its previous Indian summery brilliance, which was wonderful but still a long way from that pellucid, all-pervading glow. The people crisscrossing the parking lot of the strip-mall were just people again: no auras, no balloon-strings, no fireworks. just people on their way to buy groceries in the Shop in Save, or to pick up their last batch of summer pictures at Photo-Mat, or to grab a take-out coffee from Day Break, Sun Down. Some of them might even be ducking into the Rite Aid for a box of Trojans or, God bless us and keep us, a SLEEPING AID. just your ordinary, everyday citizens of Derry going about their ordinary, everyday business.
Ralph released pent-up breath in a gusty sigh and braced himself for a wave of relief. Relief did come, but not in the tidal wave he had expected. There was no sense of having drawn back from the brink of madness in the nick of time; no sense of having been close to any sort of brink. Yet he understood perfectly well that he couldn’t live for long in a world that bright and wonderful without endangering his sanity; it would be like having an orgasm which lasted for hours. That might be how geniuses and great artists experienced things, but it was not for him; so much juice would blow his fuses in short order, and when the men with the butterfly nets rolled up to give him a shot and take him away, he would probably be happy to go.
The most readily identifiable emotion he was feeling just now wasn’t relief but a species of pleasant melancholy which he remembered sometimes experiencing after sex when he was a very young man. This melancholy was not deep but it was wide, seeming to fill the empty places of his body and mind the way a receding flood leaves a scrim of loose, rich topsoil. He wondered if he would ever have such an alarming, exhilarating moment of epiphany again. He thought the chances were fairly good… at least until next month, when James Roy Hong got his needles into him, or perhaps until Anthony Forbes started swinging his gold pocket watch in front of his eyes and telling him he was getting… very… sleepy. It was possible that neither Hong nor Forbes would have any success in curing his insomnia, but if one of them did, Ralph guessed he would stop seeing auras and balloon-strings after his first good night’s sleep.