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medications, Jamal said, would probably prevent any further seizures, but things had reached a stage where all predictions had to be taken ‘with the grains of salt’. The tumor was spreading in spite of everything they had tried, unfortunately.
    ‘The motor-control problems may show up next,’ Dr Jamal said in his comforting voice. ‘And I am seeing some deterioration in the eyesight, I am afraid.’
    ‘Can I spend the night with her?’ Ralph asked quietly. ‘She’ll sleep better if I do.’ He paused, then added: ‘So will I.’
    ‘Of gorse!’ Dr Jamal said, brightening. ‘That is a fine idea!’
    ‘Yes,’ Ralph said heavily. ‘I think so, too.’
    6
    So he sat beside his sleeping wife, and he listened to the ticking that was not in the walls, and he thought: Some day soon – maybe this fall, maybe this winter – I will be back in this room with her . It had the feel not of speculation but of prophecy, and he leaned over and put his head on the white sheet that covered his wife’s breast. He didn’t want to cry again, but did a little anyway.
    That ticking. So loud and so steady.
    I’d like to get hold of what’s making that sound, he thought. I’d stamp it until it was so many pieces scattered across the floor. With God as my witness I would .
    He fell asleep in his chair a little after midnight, and when he woke the next morning the air was cooler than it had been in weeks, and Carolyn was wide awake, coherent, and bright-eyed. She seemed, in fact, hardly to be sick at all. Ralph took her home and began the not-inconsiderable job of making her last months as comfortable as possible. It was a long while before he thought of Ed Deepneau again; even after he began to see the bruises on Helen Deepneau’s face, it was a long time before he thought of Ed again.
    As that summer became fall, and as that fall darkened down toward Carolyn’s final winter, Ralph’s thoughts were occupied more and more by the deathwatch, which seemed to tick louder and louder even as it slowed down.
    But he had no trouble sleeping.
    That came later.

PART 1

    LITTLE BALD
DOCTORS

    There is a gulf fixed between those who can
    sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the
    great divisions of the human race.
    Iris Murdoch
    Nuns and Soldiers

CHAPTER ONE
----

    1
    About a month after the death of his wife, Ralph Roberts began to suffer from insomnia for the first time in his life.
    The problem was mild to begin with, but it grew steadily worse. Six months after the first interruptions in his heretofore unremarkable sleep cycle, Ralph had reached a state of misery he could hardly credit, let alone accept. Toward the end of the summer of 1993 he began to wonder what it would be like to spend his remaining years on earth in a starey-eyed daze of wakefulness. Of course it wouldn’t come to that, he told himself, it never does .
    But was that true? He didn’t really know, that was the devil of it, and the books on the subject Mike Hanlon steered him to down at the Derry Public Library weren’t much help. There were several on sleep disorders, but they seemed to contradict one another. Some called insomnia a symptom, others called it a disease, and at least one called it a myth. The problem went further than that, however; so far as Ralph could tell from the books, no one seemed exactly sure what sleep itself was, how it worked, or what it did.
    He knew he should quit playing amateur researcher and go to the doctor, but he found that surprisingly hard to do. He supposed he still bore Dr Litchfield a grudge. It was Litchfield, after all, who had originally diagnosed Carolyn’s brain tumor as tension headaches (except Ralph had an idea that Litchfield, a lifelong bachelor, might actually have believed that Carolyn was suffering from nothing but a moderate case of the vapors), and Litchfield who had made himself as scarce as medically possible once Carolyn was diagnosed. Ralph was positive that if he had asked the man about that