He assumed that the one taking his pulse must be the one who had called to him out of the brilliant yellow, and for a while he remained happy, for he knew this presence loved him.

Later, when he tried to express his gratitude, he discovered that he was mute, and his inability to speak reminded him of when he had been unable to reply to William Holden on the shore of the black lake.

Suddenly the looming pulse-taker seemed not to be glorified by the yellow aurora but to be hiding within the radiance, cunning and calculating, not a loving presence after all, but in fact the dark figure that had circled the shore of the lake, into the arms of whom Ryan would have delivered himself had it not been for Mr. Holden’s admonition.

The thumb and two fingers on his wrist, seeking his pulse, were cold, although they had not been cold a moment ago, were icy, and were squeezing harder than before, were pinching, and the shape of a head descended toward him through the yellow aurora, a face, a face, but a face constituted entirely of a wide and hungry maw-

With a throttled cry, grasping at the safety railing, Ryan sat up in a hospital bed, in a shadowy room redolent of an astringent pine-scented cleaning solution.

The sheets smelled of bleach and fabric softener. They crackled and felt crisp, as if starched.

In a lamplit corner, putting aside the book that he had been reading, a man dressed in white slacks and a white shirt rose from an armchair.

The lamp base and shade gleamed, stainless steel or polished nickel. The vinyl upholstery on the armchair glistered like the flesh of an avocado drizzled with olive oil.

Everything in the room appeared to have a coat of lacquer or to be wet. The polished white-tile floor, the shiny blue top on the nightstand, the wall paint glimmering with a crushed-pearl glaze.

Even the shadows had a hard gloss, as if they were layers of smoky glass, and Ryan understood that this universal sheen was less real than it was an effect caused by the sedative that he had been given.

He felt that he had come fully awake, his wits sharp and his perceptions clearer and more penetrating than ever in his life, but the witchy luster of everything led him to the realization that he was narcotized. Sleep would take him again the moment he returned his head to the pillow.

He felt helpless and at risk.

At the windows pressed the murky and unwelcoming chrome-yellow darkness of any large city at night.

“Bad dream?” asked the male nurse.

Wally. Wally Dunnaman. A member of Dr. Hobb’s team of eight. Earlier he had shaved Ryan’s chest and abdomen.

“My throat’s dry,” Ryan said.

“Doctor doesn’t want you having much to drink before surgery in the morning. But I can give you a few chips of ice to let melt in your mouth.”

“All right.”

At the nightstand, Wally removed the stopper from an insulated carafe. With a long-handled spoon, such a shiny spoon, he fished out a piece of ice, glimmering ice, and fed it to Ryan.

After allowing his patient three chips of ice, he stoppered the carafe and put down the spoon.

Studying his wristwatch, Wally Dunnaman timed Ryan’s pulse.

In the yellow dream, neither the loving presence nor the hateful one had been this man. Nothing in this room, in this hospital, had inspired the dream.

Releasing Ryan’s wrist, Wally said, “You need to sleep.”

In some way that Ryan could not explain, the reality of the dream equaled the reality of this room, neither superior to the other. He knew the truth of that in his bones, although he did not understand it.

“Sleep now,” Wally urged.

If sleep was a little death, as some poet had once written, this sleep would be more of a death than any other to which Ryan had given himself. He must resist it.

Yet he lowered his head again to the pillow, and he could not lift it.

Helpless and at risk.

He had made a mistake. He didn’t know the nature of the mistake, but he felt the weight of it, holding him down.

As he strained to keep his eyes open, every surface with a sheen became a surface with a shine, every shine a glare, every glossiness a blinding brilliance.

Bells. The bells foretold, and now the bells.

Tolling, tolling, tolling, rolling, rolling, rolling, a solemn monody of bells shook Ryan out of sleep.

He first thought they were dream bells, but the clamor persisted as he strove to find the strength to pull himself upright, both hands gripping the bed railing.

Darkness still owned the world beyond the window, and the male nurse stood on this side of the glass, looking out, gazing down, into waves of rising sound.

Huge heavy bells shook the night, as though they meant to shake it down, such melancholy menace in their tone.

Ryan spoke more than once before Wally Dunnaman heard him and glanced toward the bed, raising his voice to say, “There’s a church across the street.”

When first conducted to the room, Ryan had seen that house of worship in the next block. The bell tower rose above this fourth-floor window.

“They shouldn’t be ringing at this hour,” Wally said. “And not this much. No lights in the place.”

The strangely glossy shadows seemed to shiver with the tolling, such a moaning and a groaning, a hard insistent rolling.

The window-rattling, wall-strumming, bone-shivering clangor frightened Ryan, rang thickly in his blood, and made his heart pound like a hammer coming down. This swollen heart was still his own, so weak and so diseased, and he feared it might be tested to destruction by these thunderous peals.

He recalled his thought upon waking: Bells. The bells foretold, and now the bells.

Foretold when, by whom, and with what meaning?

If not for the sedative that fouled his blood and muddied his mind, he thought he would know the answer to at least two parts of that question.

But the drug not only lacquered every surface in the room, not only buffed a shine on every shadow, but also afflicted him with synesthesia, so he smelled the sound as well as heard it. The reek of ferric hydroxide, ferric oxide, call it rust, washed in bitter waves across the bed.

Interminable tolling, bells and bells and still more bells, knocked from Ryan all sense of time, and it seemed to him that soon it would knock sanity from him, as well.

Eventually raising his voice above the clangor, Wally Dunnaman said, “A police car down below. Ah, and another!”

Under the weight of the booming bells, Ryan fell back, his head once more upon the pillow.

He was helpless and at risk, risk, risk.

With a kind of fractured desperation that he could not focus to his benefit, he sorted through his broken thoughts, trying to piece them together like fragments of crockery. Something very wrong had happened that he still had time to rectify, if only he were able to understand what needed to be put right.

The bells began to toll less aggressively, their rage subsiding to anger, anger to sullenness, and sullenness to one final protracted groan that sounded like a great heavy door moaning closed on rusted hinges.

In the silence of the bells, as once more the sedative slowly drew over him its velvet thrall, Ryan felt tears on his cheeks and licked at the salt in the corner of his mouth. He did not have the strength to lift his hands and blot his face, and as he quietly wept his way into sleep, he no longer had the presence of mind either to be embarrassed by his tears or to wonder at them.

Shortly after dawn, when they rolled him on a gurney into the surgery, Ryan was alert, afraid, but resigned to the course that he had chosen.