The Touch

Alan glanced back at Ponytail, now swaying drunkenly.

Lumps had appeared all over his skin; as Alan watched, they swelled, pointed, and burst, oozing trails of purulent, blood-tinged slime down his quaking body.

Reeling in confusion and shock, Alan tried to loosen his grip but found his fingers locked. Sweatshirt's knees crumbled under him. As Alan watched, the man's stomach began to swell, becoming enormously distended until it ruptured, spewing loops of his intestines out of the cavity to drape over his thighs like strings of boiled sausage.

A woman's voice screamed from high above. Ponytail, now an unrecognizable mass of festering sores, sank to the ground. As the buzz of the gathering flies mixed with the shrill sound of the woman's continued screaming, Alan turned and started walking once more. The images of the scene behind him were already fading into unreality as he picked up the beacon that lay to the northeast.

"Jeffy," he said.

Ba wheeled his Pacer up and down the rain-soaked streets. Chac had told him that the Doctor had headed northeast, and so Ba had driven that way, weaving a path from street to street through the teeming housing projects until he came to the East River. From there he took the Williamsburg Bridge and crossed into Brooklyn. He was unfamiliar with this area of the city. That, coupled with the maniacal fury of the storm and the almost nightlike darkness, slowed his search to a frustrating crawl.

Wherever this was, it was a nasty neighborhood. He did not like to think of the Doctor walking through here alone. Anything could happen to him. The storm, at least, was in his favor. It seemed to be keeping most people indoors.

He turned a corner onto a wider street and saw flashing red lights a few blocks down—two squad cars and an ambulance. Saying a silent prayer to his ancestors that the lights were not flashing for the Doctor, he accelerated toward them.

Ba double-parked and pressed through the buzzing crowd of rain-soaked onlookers to see what had drawn them out into the storm. Over their heads Ba could see a number of attendants in the alley fitting the second of two body bags around the gangrenous and shriveled remains of what had once been a human being. Despite the rain, he caught a whiff of putrescence on a gust of wind from the alley. And even in the red glow of the flashers, Ba detected a grim pallor to the attendants' faces. Both body bags were loaded into the ambulance. The sight of them brought back unwanted memories of the war back home.

"A murder?" Ba said to the man next to him.

He shrugged. "Two rotted bodies. Somebody must have dumped them there." As he glanced up at Ba, his eyes widened. He turned and hurried away.

A man who appeared to be a police detective cupped his hands around his mouth and called to the crowd. The man next to him held an umbrella over the two of them.

"I'll ask you all one last time: Did anyone see what happened here?"

"I told you!" said a wizened old woman from the stoop of the building behind the scene. "I saw the whole thing!"

"And we have your statement, ma'am," the policeman said in a tired voice without turning around. He rolled his eyes at his companion.

No one came forward. The crowd began to thin. Ba hesitated, unsure of what to do. Two rotted corpses… at least he was now sure that the Doctor had not been in one of those body bags. He should leave and continue the search, he knew, but something held him here.

That old woman on the stoop. He wanted to speak to her.

Alan walked up a ramp toward a highway. Cars rushed by him; the sheetlike cascades of dirty water from their tires added to the downpour, leaving not a dry spot on his body. He barely noticed. He did not know the name of the highway but sensed that it traveled in the right direction.

He reached the main span of the road and continued walking. Lightning blanched the dark sky and thunder drowned out the rumble of the cars and trucks speeding by. Wind lashed the rain into his eyes. He walked on, faster now, a sense of urgency lighting inside him. He was late, behind schedule. If he didn't hurry, he'd arrive too late for Jeffy.

Without thinking, he turned and began walking backwards. Of its own accord, almost as if by reflex, his arm thrust out toward the traffic, his thumb pointing toward his destination.

It was at a point in the road where the water was particularly deep and the cars had to slow to a crawl to pass through, that a car pulled to a stop beside him and the passenger door flew open.

"Boy, do you look like you could use a lift!" said a voice from within.

Alan got into the car and pulled the door closed after him.

"Where y' going?" said the plump man in the driver's seat. Alan said, "Jeffy."

Finally, the crowd, the ambulance, and the police cars were all gone. Only Ba and the old woman on the stoop remained, he in the rainy darkness, she in the pool of light under the overhang on her front stoop.

Ba walked over and stood at the bottom of the steps.

"What did you see?"

She gasped as she looked down at him. "Who the hell are you?"

"Someone who has seen strange things in his lifetime. What did you see?"

"I told the police."

"Tell me."

She sighed, looked over to the opening of the alley beside the building, and began to speak.

"I was watching the storm. Sitting at my window, watching the storm. I always sit at my window, rain or shine. Not much going on outside most of the time, but it's sure a helluva lot more than's going on inside. So I was sitting there, watching the lightning, when I seen this guy come walking down the alley, walking kind of fu

"Excuse me," Ba said, his interest aroused now. "But what did this man look like?"

"Maybe forty. Brown hair, blue pants, and a light blue shirt. Why? You know him?"

Ba nodded. That described the Doctor perfectly. "I'm looking for him."

"Well, you better hope you don't find him! You should have seen what happened to those two bums, God rest their souls"—she crossed herself—"when they tried to rob him! He grabbed them and they went into fits and died and rotted, all in a few minutes! You've never seen anything like ft! And neither have I until today!"

Ba said nothing, only stared at her, stu

"You think I'm crazy, too, dontcha? You and those cops. Well, go ahead. Think what you want. I saw what I saw."

"Did you see which way he went?" Ba said, as he found his voice again.

"No, I—" was all he heard, for she flinched as a particularly bright bolt of lightning cut through the rain and gloom, and whatever else she might have said was lost in the thunderclap that followed on its heels. She turned and opened the door to the building.

"I didn't hear you!" Ba called.

"I said I didn't want to see."

Ba hurried back to his car. As he sped along the streets, looking for a phone, his mind raced in time with the engine.

What was happening? First the senator, now these two men. Was the Dat-tay-vao turning evil? Or were these examples of what was meant by that line from the song: "If you value your well-being/Impede not its way"?

Perhaps Chac had been wise after all not to prevent the Doctor from leaving. He might have ended as a rotted corpse.

Ba was no longer searching for the Doctor. That could wait. Before he did anything else, he had to find a phone. The Missus had to be warned. If the Doctor made it to Toad Hall, the Missus might try to keep him from Jeffy, thinking it was for the Doctor's own good.

His mind turned away from what might happen.

He came to a light at a main thoroughfare, but couldn't find a sign to tell him its name. He saw a Shell station half a block to his left and headed for it. Fortunately, the pay phone there hadn't been vandalized and he called Toad Hall.