Insomnia

CHAPTER 20

There was only one conversational exchange between them as the Oldsmobile rolled up Hospital Drive, and it was a brief one. “Ralph?” He glanced over at her, then quickly back at the road. That clacking sound under the hood had begun again, but Lois hadn’t mentioned it yet. He hoped she wasn’t going to do so now. “I think I know where he is. Ed, I mean. I was pretty sure, even up on the roof, that I recognized that ramshackle old building they showed us.”

“What is it? And where?”

“It’s an airplane garage. A whatdoyoucallit. Hangar.”

“Oh my God,” Ralph said. “Coastal Air, on the Bar Harbor Road? “Lois nodded. “They have charter flights, seaplane rides, things like that.

One Saturday when we were out for a drive, Mr. Chasse went in and asked a man who worked there how much he’d charge to take us for a sightseeing hop over the islands.

The man said forty dollars, which was much more than we could have afforded to spend on something like that, and in the summer I’m sure the man would’ve stuck to his guns, but it was only April, and Mr. Chasse was able to dicker him down to twenty. I thought that was still too much to spend on a ride that didn’t even last an hour, but I’m glad we went. It was scary, but it was beautiful.”

“Like the auras,” Ralph said.

“Yes, like…” Her voice wavered. Ralph looked over and saw tears trickling down her plump cheeks. like the auras.”

“Don’t cry, Lois.”

She found a Kleenex in her purse and wiped her eyes. “I can’t help it, That Japanese word on the card means kamikaze, doesn’t it, Ralph? Divine Wind.” She paused, lips trembling. “Suicide pilot.”

Ralph nodded. He was gripping the wheel very tightly. “Yes,” he said. “That’s what it means. Suicide pilot.”

Route 33-known as Newport Avenue in town-passed within four blocks of Harris Avenue, but Ralph had absolutely no intention of breaking their long fast over on the west side. The reason was as simple as it was compelling: he and Lois couldn’t afford to be seen by any of their old friends, not looking fifteen or twenty years younger than they had on Monday.

Had any of those old friends reported them missing to the police yet?

Ralph knew it was possible, but felt he could reasonably hope that so far they had escaped much notice and concern, at least from his circle; Faye and the rest of the folks who hung out in the picnic area near the Extension would be in too much of a dither over the passing of not just one Old Crock colleague but a pair of them to spend much time wondering about where Ralph Roberts had gotten his skinny old ass off to.

Both Bill and jimmy could have been waked, funeralled, and buried by now, he thought. we’ve got time for breakfast, Ralph, find a place as quick as you can-I’m so hungry I could eat a horse with the hide still on!”

They were almost a mile west of the hospital now-far enough away to allow Ralph to feel reasonably safe-and he saw the Derry Diner up ahead. As he signalled and turned into the parking lot, he realized he hadn’t been here since Carol had gotten sick… a year at least, maybe more.

“Here we are,” he told Lois. “And we’re not just going to eat, we’re going to eat all we can. We may not get another chance today.”

She grinned like a schoolkid. “You’ve just put your finger on one of my great talents, Ralph.” She wriggled a little on the seat.

“Also, I have to spend a penny.”

Ralph nodded. No food since Tuesday, and no bathroom stops, either. Lois could spend her penny; he intended to pop into the men’s room and let go of a couple of dollars.

“Come on,” he said, turning off the motor and silencing that troublesome clacking under the hood. “First the bathroom, then the foodquake.”

On the way to the door she told him (speaking in a voice Ralph found just a trifle too casual) that she didn’t think either Mina or Simone would have reported her missing, at least not yet. When Ralph turned his head to ask her why, he was amazed and amused to see she was blushing rosy-red.

“They both know I’ve had a crush on you for years.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Of course not,” she said, sounding a bit put out. “Carolyn knew too. Some women would have minded, but she understood how harmless it was. How harmless I was. She was such a dear, Ralph.”

“Yes. She was.”

“Anyway, they’ll probably assume that we’ve… you know “Gone off on a little French leave?”

Lois laughed. “Something like that.”

“Would you like to go off on a little French leave, Lois?”

She stood on tiptoe and nibbled briefly at his earlobe. “If we get out of this alive, you just ask me.”

He kissed the corner of her mouth before pushing open the door.

“You can count on it, lady.”

They made for the bathrooms, and when Ralph rejoined her, Lois looked both thoughtful and a little shaken. “I can’t believe it’s me,” she said in a low voice. “I mean, I must have spent at least two minutes staring at myself in the mirror, and I still can’t believe it, The crow’s-feet around my eyes are all gone, and Ralph… my hair.

… “Those dark Spanish eyes of hers looked up at him, filled with brilliance and wonder. “And you.” My God, I doubt if you looked this good when you were forty.”

“I didn’t, but you should have seen me when I was thirty. I was an a imal.” She giggled. “Come on, fool, let’s sit down and murder some calories.

“Lois?

She glanced up from the menu she’d plucked from a little collection of them filed between the salt and pepper shakers.

“When I was in the bathroom, I tried to make the auras come back.

This time I couldn’t do it.”

“Why would you want to, Ralph?”

He shrugged, not wanting to tell her about the feeling of paranoia that had dropped over him as he stood at the basin in the little bathroom, washing his hands and looking into his own strangely young face in the water-spotted mirror. It had suddenly occurred to him that he might not be alone in there. Worse, Lois might not be alone next door in the women’s room. Atropos might be creeping up behind her, completely unseen, diamond-cluster earrings glittering from his tiny lobes… scalpel outstretched…

Then, instead of Lois’s earrings or McGovern’s Panama, his mind’s eye had conjured the jumprope Atropos had been using when Ralph had spotted him

(three-six-nine lion the goose drank wine)

in the vacant lot between the bakery and the tanning salon, the jumprope which had once been the prized possession of a little girl who had stumbled during a game of apartment-tag, fallen out of a second-story window, and died of a broken neck (what a dreadful accident, she had her whole life ahead of her, if there’s a God why does He let things like that happen, and so on and so on, not to mention blah-blah-blah).

He had told himself to stop it, that things were bad enough without his indulging in gruesome fantasies of Atropos slashing Lois’s balloon-string, but it didn’t help much… mostly because he knew Atropos might really be here with them in the restaurant, and Atropos could do anything to them he liked. Anything at all.

Lois reached across the table and touched the back of his hand.

“Don’t worry. The colors will come back. They always do.”

“I suppose.” He took a menu of his own, opened it, and cast an eye down the breakfast bill of fare. His initial impression was that he wanted one of everything.

“The first time you saw Ed acting crazy, he was coming out of the Derry Airport,” Lois said. “Now we know why. He was taking flying lessons, wasn’t he?”

“Of course. While Trig was giving me a lift back to Harris Avenue, he even mentioned that you need a pass to come out that way, through the service gate. He asked me if I knew how Ed had gotten one, and I said I didn’t. Now I do. They must give them to all the General Aviation flying students.”

“Do you think Helen knew about his hobby?” Lois asked, “She probably didn’t, did she?”

“I’m sure she didn’t. I’ll bet he switched over to Coastal Air right after he ran into the guy from West Side Gardeners, too. That little episode could have convinced him he was losing control, and he might do well to move his lessons a little farther away from home.”

“Or maybe it was Atropos who convinced him,” Lois said bleakly.

“Atropos or someone from even higher up.”

Ralph didn’t care for the idea, but it felt right, just the same, Entities, he thought, and shivered. The Crimson King.

“They’re dancing him around like a puppet on a string, aren’t they?” Lois asked.

“Atropos, you mean?”

“No. Atropos is a nasty little bugger, but otherwise I think he’s not much different from Mr. C. and Mr. L.-low-level help, maybe only a step above unskilled labor in the grand scheme of things.”

“Janitors.”

“Well, yes, maybe,” Lois agreed. “Janitors and gofers. Atropos is probably the one who’s done most of the actual work on Ed, and I’d bet a cookie it’s work he loves, but I’d bet my house that his orders come from higher up. Does that sound more or less on the beam to you?”

“Yes. We’ll probably never know exactly how nuts he was before this started, or exactly when Atropos cut his balloon-string, but the thing I’m most curious about at this moment is pretty mundane. I’d like to know how in the hell he went Charlie Pickering’s ball and how he paid for his damned flying lessons.”

Before Lois could reply, a waitress approached them, digging an order-pad and a ballpoint pen out of the pocket of her apron. “Hell-) you guys”

“I’d like a cheese and mushroom omelet,” Ralph said.

“Uh-huh.” She switched her cud from one side of her jaw to the other. “Two-egg or three-egg, lion?”

“Four, if that’s okay.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly and jotted on the pad. “Okay by me if it’s okay by you. Anything with that?”

“Yes, please. A glass of o.j large, an order of bacon, an order of sausage, and an order of home fries. Better make that a double order of home fries.” He paused, thinking, then grinned. “Oh, and do you have any Danish left?”

“I think I might have one cheese and one apple.” She glanced up at him. “You a little hungry, lion?”

“Feel like I haven’t eaten for a week,” Ralph said. “I’ll have the cheese Danish. And coffee to start. Lots of black coffee, Did you get all that?”

“Oh, I got it, lion. I just want to see what you look like when you leave.” She looked at Lois. “How ’bout you, ma’am?”

Lois smiled sweetly. “I’ll have what he’s having. Bon,” Ralph looked past the retreating waitress to the clock on the wall.

It was only ten past seven, and that was good. They could be out at Barrett’s Orchards in less than half an hour, and with their mental lasers trained on Gretchen Tillbury, it was possible that the Susan Day speech could be called off-aborted, if you liked-as early as 9:00 a.m.

Yet instead of relief he felt relentless, gnawing anxiety. It was like having an itch in a place your fingers cannot quite reach.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s put it together. I think we can assume that Ed’s been concerned about abortion for a long time, that he’s probably been a pro-life supporter for years. Then he starts to lose sleep… hear voices

… see little bald men

“Well, one in particular Ralph agreed. “Atropos becomes his guru, filling him in on the Crimson King, the Centurions, the whole nine yards. When Ed talked to me about King Herod-”

“-he was thinking about Susan Day,” Lois finished. “Atropos has been… what do they say on TV?… psyching him up. Turning him into a guided missile.

Where did Ed get that scarf, do you think?”

“Atropos,” Ralph said. “Atropos has got a lot of stuff like that, I’ll bet.”

“And what do you suppose he’s got in the plane he’ll be flying tonight?” Lois’s voice was trembling. “Explosives or poison gas?”

“Explosives would seem the more likely bet if he really is planning to get everyone; a strong wind could create problems for him if it’s gas.” Ralph took a sip of his water and was interested to see that his hand was not quite steady. “On the other hand, we don’t know what goodies he might have been cooking up in his laboratory, do we?”

“No,” Lois said in a small voice.

Ralph put his water-glass down. “What he’s planning to use doesn’t interest me very much.”

“What does?”

The waitress came back with fresh coffee, and the smell alone seemed to light up Ralph’s nerves like neon. He and Lois grabbed their cups and began to sip as soon as she had started away. The coffee was strong and hot enough to burn Ralph’s lips, but it was heaven. When he set his cup back in its saucer again, it was halfempty and there was a very warm place in his midsection, as if he had swallowed a live ember.

Lois was looking at him somberly over the rim of her own cup.

“What interests me,” Ralph told her, “is us. You said Atropos has turned Ed into a guided missile. That’s right; that’s exactly what he’s done. World War II kamikaze pilots were. Hitler had his V-2s; Hirohito had his Divine Wind. The disturbing thing is that Clotho and Lachesis have done the same thing to us. We’ve been loaded up with a lot of special powers and programmed to fly out to High Ridge in my Oldsmobile and stop Susan Day. I’d just like to know why.”

“But we do know,” she protested. “If we don’t step in, Ed Deepneau is going to commit suicide tonight during that woman’s speech and take two thousand people with him.”

“Yeah,” Ralph said, “and we’re going to do whatever we can to stop him, Lois, don’t worry about that.”

He finished his coffee and set the cup down again. His stomach was fully awake now, and raving for food. “I could no more stand aside and let Ed kill those people than I could stand in one place and not duck if someone threw a baseball at my head. It’s just that we never got a chance to read the fine print at the bottom of the contract, and that scares me.” He hesitated a moment. “It also pisses me off.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About being played for a couple of patsies. We know why were going to try and stop Susan Day’s speech; we can’t stand the thought of a lunatic killing a couple of thousand innocent people.

But we don’t know why they want us to do it. That’s the part that scares me.”

“We have a chance to save two thousand lives,” she said. “Are you telling me that’s enough for us but not for them?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t think numbers impress these fellows very much; they clean us up not just by the tens or hundreds of thousands but by the millions. And they’re used to seeing the Random or the Purpose swat us in job lots.”

“Disasters like the fire at the Cocoanut Grove,” Lois said. “Or the flood here in Derry eight years ago.”

“Yes, but even things like that are pretty small beans compared to what can and does go on in the world every year. The Flood of ’85 here in Derry killed two hundred and twenty people, something like that, but last spring there was a flood in Pakistan that killed thirty-five hundred, and the last big earthquake in Turkey killed over four thousand. And how about that nuclear reactor accident in Russia? I read someplace that you can put the floor on that one at seventy thousand dead. That’s a lot of Panama hats and jumpropes and pairs of… of eyeglasses, Lois.” He was horrified at how close he had come to saying pairs of earrings.

“Don’t,” she said, and shuddered.

“I don’t like thinking about it any more than you do,” he said, “but we have to, if only because those two guys were so goddam anxious to keep us from doing just that. Do you see what I’m getting at yet?

You must. Big tragedies have always been a part of the Random; why is this so different?”

“I don’t know,” said Lois, but it was important enough for them to draft us, and I have an idea that was a pretty big step.”

Ralph nodded. He could feel the caffeine hitting him now, jiving up his head, his fingers the tiniest bit. “I’m sure it was. Now think back to the hospital roof. Did you ever in your entire life hear two guys explain so much without explaining anything?”

“I don’t get what you mean,” Lois said, but her face suggested something else: that she didn’t want to get what he meant.

“What I mean goes back to one central idea: maybe they can’t lie.

Suppose they can’t. If you have certain information you don’t want to give out but you can’t tell a lie, what do you do?”

“Keep dancing away from the danger zone,” Lois said. “Or’ zones.

“

“Bingo. And isn’t that what they did?”

“Well,” she said, “I guess it was a dance, all right, but I thought you did a fair amount of leading, Ralph. In fact, I was impressed by all the questions you asked. I think I spent most of the time we were on that roof just trying to convince myself it was all really happening.”

“Sure, I asked questions, lots of them, but He stopped, not sure how to express the concept in his head, a concept which seemed simultaneously complex and baby-simple to him. He made another effort to go up a little, searching inside his head for that sensation of blink, knowing that if he could reach her mind, he could show her a picture that would be crystal clear. Nothing happened, and he drummed his fingers on the tablecloth in frustration.

“I was just as amazed as you were,” he said finally. “If my amazement came out as questions, it’s because men-those from my generation, anyway-are taught that it’s very bad form to ooh and aah.

That’s for women who are picking out the drapes.”

“Sexist.” She smiled as she said it, but it was a smile Ralph couldn’t return. He was remembering Barbie Richards. If Ralph had moved toward her, she would almost certainly have pushed the alarm button beneath her desk, but she had allowed Lois to approach because she had swallowed a little too much of the old sister-sister sister crap.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I’m sexist, I’m old-fashioned, and sometimes it gets me in trouble.”

“Ralph, I didn’t mean-”

“I know what you meant, and it’s okay. What I’m trying to get across to you is that I was as amazed… as knocked out… as you were. So I asked questions, so what? Were they good questions-? Useful questions?”

“I guess not, huh?”

“Well, maybe I didn’t start out so badly. As I remember, the first thing I asked when we finally made it to the roof was who they were and what they wanted. They slipped those questions with a lot of philosophical blather, but I imagine they got a little sweaty on the backs of their necks for awhile, just the same.

Next we got all that background on the Purpose and the Random-fascinating, but nothing we exactly needed in order to drive out to High Ridge and persuade Gretchen Tillbury to cancel Susan Day’s speech. Hell, we would have done better-saved time-getting the road-directions from them that we ended up getting from Simone’s niece.”

Lois looked startled. “That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. And all the time we were talking, time was flying by the way it does when you go up a couple of levels. They were watching it fly, too, you can believe that. They were timing the whole scene so that when they finished telling us the things we did need to know, there would be no time left to ask the questions they didn’t want to answer. I think they wanted to leave us with the idea that this whole thing was a public service, that saving all those lives is what it’s all about, but they couldn’t come right out and say so, because-”

“Because that would be a lie, and maybe they can’t lie.”

“Right. Maybe they can’t lie.”

“So what do they want, Ralph?” He shook his head. “I don’t have a clue, Lois. Not even a hint.” She finished her own coffee, set the cup carefully back down in its saucer, studied her fingertips for a moment, then looked up at him. Again he was forcibly struck by her beauty-almost levelled by it. “They were good,” she said. “They are good. I felt that very strongly.

Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, almost reluctantly. Of course he had felt it. They were everything Atropos was not.

“And you’re going to try to stop Ed regardless-you said you could no more not try than you could not try to duck a baseball someone chucked at your head. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” he said, more reluctantly still.

“Then you should let the rest of it go,” she said calmly, meeting his blue eyes with her dark ones. “It’s just taking up space inside your head, Ralph. Making clutter.”

He saw the truth of what she said, but still doubted if he could simply open his hand and let that part of it fly free. May I be you had to live to be seventy before you could fully appreciate how hard it was to escape your upbringing. He was a man whose education on how to be a man had begun before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and he was still a prisoner of a generation that had listened to H. V.

Kaltenborn and the Andrews Sisters on the radio-a generation of men that believed in moonlight cocktails and walking a mile for a Camel. Such an upbringing almost negated such nice moral questions as who was working for the good and who was working for the bad; the important thing was not to let the bullies kick sand in your face. Not to be led by the nose.

Is that so? Carolyn asked, coolly amused. How fascinating. But let me be the first to let you in on a little secret, Ralph: that’s crap. it was crap back before Glenn Miller disappeared over the horizon an it’s crap now. The idea that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, now… there might be a little truth to that, even in this day and age, It’s a long walk back to Eden in any case, isn’t it, sweetheart?

Yes. A very long walk back to Eden.

“What are you smiling about, Ralph?”

He was saved the need to reply by the arrival of the waitress and a huge tray of food. He noticed for the first time that there was a button pinned to the frill of her apron. LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE, it read.

“Are you going to the rally at the Civic Center tonight?” Ralph asked her.

“I’ll be there,” she said, setting her tray down on the unoccupied table next to theirs in order to free her hands.

“Outside.

Carrying a sign. Walking roundy-round.”

“Are you a Friend of Life?” Lois asked as the waitress began to deal out omelets and side-dishes.

“Am I livin?” the waitress asked.

“Yes, you certainly appear to be,” Lois said politely.

“Well, I guess that makes me a Friend of Life, doesn’t it?

Killing something that could someday write a great poem or invent a drug that cures AIDS or cancer, in my book that’s just flat wrong.

So I’ll wave my sign around and make sure the Norma Kamali feminists and Volvo liberals can see that the word on it is MURDER.

They hate that word. They don’t use it at their cocktail parties and fundraisers.

You folks need ketchup?”

“No,” Ralph said. He could not take his eyes off her. A faint green glow had begun to spread around her-it almost seemed to come wisping up from her pores. The auras were coming back, cycling up to full brilliance.

“Did I grow a second head or something while I wasn’t looking?”

the waitress asked. She popped her gum and switched it to the other side of her mouth.

“I was staring, wasn’t I?” Ralph asked. He felt blood heating his cheeks. “Sorry.”

The waitress shrugged her beefy shoulders, setting the upper part of her aura into lazy, fascinating motion. “I try not to get carried away with this stuff, you know? Most days I just do my job and keep my mouth shut. But I ain’t no quitter, either. Do you know how long I’ve been marchin around in front of that brick slaughterin pen, on days hot enough to fry my butt and nights cold enough to freeze it off?”

Ralph and Lois shook their heads.

“Since 1984. Nine long years. You know what gets me the most about the choicers?”

“What?” Lois asked quietly.

“They’re the same people who want to see guns outlawed so people won’t shoot each other with them, the same ones who say the electric chair and the gas chamber are unconstitutional because they’re cruel and unusual punishment. They say those things, then go out and support laws that allow doctors-doctors.-to stick vacUUM tubes into women’s wombs and pull their unborn sons and daughters to pieces. That’s what gets me the most.”

The waitress said all this-it had the feel of a speech she had made many times before-without raising her voice or displaying the slightest outward sign of anger. Ralph only listened with half an ear; most of his attention was fixed on the pale-green aura which surrounded her. Except it wasn’t all pale green. A yellowish-black blotch revolved slowly over her lower right side like a dirty wagon wheel.

Her liver, Ralph thought. Something wrong with her liver.

“You wouldn’t really want anything to happen to Susan Day, would you?” Lois asked, looking at the waitress with troubled eyes.

“You seem like a very nice person, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want that.”

The waitress sighed through her nose, producing two jets of fine green mist. “I ain’t as nice as I look, lion. If God did something to her, I’d be the first wavin my hands around in the air and sayin ’Thy will be done,” believe me. But if you’re talking about some nut, I guess that’s different. Things like that drag us all down, put us on the same level as the people we’re trying to stop. The nuts don’t see it that way, though. They’re the jokers in the deck.”

“Yes,” Ralph said, “Jokers in the deck is just what they are.”

“I guess I really don’t want anything bad to happen to that woman,” the waitress said, “but something could. It really could.

And the way I look at it, if something does, she’s got no one to blame but herself. She’s running with the wolves… and women who run with wolves shouldn’t go acting too surprised if they get bitten.”

Ralph wasn’t sure how much he would want to eat after that, but his appetite turned out to have survived the waitress’s views on abortion and Susan Day quite nicely. The auras helped; food had never tasted this good to him, not even as a teenager, when he’d eaten five and even six meals a day, if he could get them.

Lois matched him bite for bite, at least for awhile. At last she pushed the remains of her home fries and her last two strips of bacon aside. Ralph plugged gamely on down the home stretch alone. He wrapped the last bite of toast around the last bit of sausage, pushed it into his mouth, swallowed, and sat back in his chair with a vast sigh.

“Your aura has gone two shades darker, Ralph. I don’t know if that means you finally got enough to eat or that you’re going to die of indigestion.”

“Could be both,” he said. “You see them again too, huh?”

She nodded.

“You know something?” he asked. “Of all the things in the world, the one I’d like most right now is a nap.” Yes indeed. Now that he was warm and fed, the last four months of largely sleepless nights seemed to have fallen on him like a bag filled with sashweights. His eyelids felt as if they had been dipped in cement.

“I think that would be a bad idea right now,” Lois said, sounding alarmed. “A very bad idea.”

“I suppose so,” Ralph agreed.

Lois started to raise her hand for the check, then lowered it again.

“What about calling your policeman friend?

Leydecker, isn’t that his name? Could he help us? Would he?”

Ralph considered this as carefully as his muzzy head would allow then reluctantly shook his head. “I don’t quite dare try it.

What could we tell him that wouldn’t get us committed? And that’s only part of the problem. If he did get involved… but in the wrong way… he might make things worse instead of better.”

“Okay.” Lois waved to the waitress. “We’re going to ride outing to stop at there with all the windows open, and we’re go’ the Dunkin’ Donuts out in the Old Cape for giant economy-sized coffees. My treat.”

Ralph smiled. It felt large and dopey and disconnected on his face-almost a drunken smile. “Yes, ma’am.”

When the waitress came over and slid their check facedown in front of him, Ralph noticed that the button reading LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE was no longer pinned to the frill of her apron, “Listen,” she said with an earnestness Ralph found almost painfully touching, “I’m sorry if I offended you folks. You came in for breakfast, not a lecture.”

“You didn’t offend us,” Ralph said. He glanced across the table at Lois, who nodded agreement.

The waitress smiled briefly. “Thanks for saying so, but I still kinda zoomed on you. Any other day I wouldn’ta, but we’re having OLir own rally this afternoon at four, and I’m introducing Mr. Dalton.

They told me I could have three minutes, and I guess that’s about what I gave you.”

“That’s all right,” Lois said, and patted her hand. “Really.”

The waitress’s smile was warmer and more genuine this time, but as she started to turn away, Ralph saw Lois’s pleasant expression falter.

She was looking at the yellow-black blob floating just above the waitress’s right hip.

Ralph pulled out the pen he kept clipped to his breast pocket, turned over his paper placemat, and printed quickly on the back.

When he was done, he took out his wallet and placed a five-dollar bill carefully below what he had written. When the waitress reached for the tip, she would hardly be able to avoid seeing the message.

He picked up the check and flapped it at Lois. “Our first real date and I guess it’ll have to be dutch,” he said. “I’m three bucks short if I leave her the five. Please tell me you’re not broke.”

“Who, the poker queen of Ludlow Grange? Don’t be seely, dollink.”

She handed him a helter-skelter fistful of bills from her purse.

While he sorted through them for what he needed, she read what he had written on the placemat: Madam: You are suffering from reduced liver function and should see your doctor immediately. And I strongly advise you to stay away from the Civic Center tonight.

“Pretty stupid, I know,” Ralph said.

She kissed the tip of his nose. “Trying to help other people is never stupid.”

“Thanks. She won’t believe it, though. She’ll think we were pissed off about her button and her little speech in spite of what we said.

That what I wrote is just our weird way of trying to get our own back on her.”

“Maybe there’s a way to convince her otherwise.”

Lois fixed the waitress-who was standing hipshot by the kitchen pass-through and talking to the short-order cook while she drank a cup of coffee-with a look of dark concentration. As she did, Ralph saw Lois’s normal blue-gray aura deepen in color and draw inward, becoming a kind of body-hugging capsule.

He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on… but he could feel it.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention; his forearms broken out in gooseflesh. She’s coming up, he thought, flipping the switches turning on all the turbines, and doing it on behalf of a woman she never saw before and she’ll probably never see again.

After a moment the waitress felt it, too. She turned to look at them as if she had heard her name called. Lois smiled casually and twiddled her fingers in a small wave, but when she spoke to Ralph, her voice was trembling with effort. “I’ve almost… almost got it.”

“Almost got what?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is I need. It’ll come in a second.

Her name is Zoe, with two dots over the e. Go pay the check.

Distract her. Try to keep her from looking at me. It makes it harder.”

He did as she asked and was fairly successful in spite of the way Zoe kept trying to look over his shoulder at Lois. The first time she attempted to ring the check into the register, Zoe came up with a total of $234.20. She cleared the numbers with an impatient poke of her finger, and when she looked up at Ralph, her face was pale and her eyes were upset.

“What’s with your wife?” she asked Ralph. “I apologized, didn’t I? So why does she keep looking at me like that?”

Ralph knew Zoe couldn’t see Lois, because he was all but tapdancing in an effort to keep his body between the two of them, but he also knew she was right-Lois was staring.

He attempted to smile. “I don’t know what-”

The waitress jumped and shot a startled, irritated glance back at the short-order cook. “Quit banging those pots around” she shouted, although the only thing Ralph had heard from the kitchen was a radio playing elevator-music. Zoe looked back at Ralph. “Christ, it sounds like VietNam back there. Now if you could just tell your wife it’s not polite to-”

“To stare? She’s not. She’s really not.” Ralph stood aside. Lois had gone to the door and was looking out at the street with her back to them. “See?”

Zoe didn’t reply for several seconds, although she kept looking at Lois. At last she turned back at Ralph. “Sure. I see. Now why don’t you and her just make yourselves scarce?”

“All right-still friends?”

“Whatever you want,” Zoe said, but she wouldn’t look at him. When Ralph rejoined Lois, he saw that her aura had gone back to its former, more diffuse state, but it was much brighter than it had been.

“Still tired, Lois?” he asked her softly. “No. As a matter of fact, I feel fine now. Let’s go.” He started to open the door for her, then stopped. “Got my pen?”

“Gee, no-I guess it’s still on the table.” Ralph went over to pick it up. Below his note, Lois had added a P.S. in rolling Palmer-method script: In 1989 you had a baby and gave him up for adoption. Saint Anne’s, in Providence, R.I. Go and see your doctor before it’s too late, Zoe. No joke. No trick. We know what we’re talking about.

“Oh boy,” Ralph said as he rejoined her. “That’s going to scare the bejesus out of her.”

“If she gets to her doctor before her liver goes belly-up, I don’t care.”

He nodded and they went out.

“Did you get that stuff about her kid when you dipped into her’ aura?” Ralph asked as they crossed the leaf-strewn parking lot. Lois nodded. Beyond the lot, the entire east side of Derry was shimmering with bright, kaleidoscopic light. It was coming back hard now, very hard, that secret light cycling up and up. Ralph reached out and put his hand on the side of his car. Touching it was like tasting a slick, licorice-flavored cough-drop.

“I don’t think I took very much of her… her stuff,” Lois said, “but it was as if I swallowed all of her.”

Ralph remembered something he’d read in a science magazine not long ago. “If every cell in our bodies contains a complete blueprint of how we’re made,” he said, “why shouldn’t every bit of a person’s aura contain a complete blueprint of what we are?”

“That doesn’t sound very scientific, Ralph.”

“I suppose not.”

She squeezed his arm and grinned up at him. “It does sound about right, though.”

He grinned back at her, “You need to take some more, too,” she told him. “it still feels wrong to me-like stealing-but if you don’t, I think you’re going to pass right out on your feet.”

“As soon as I can. Right now all I want to do is get out to High Ridge.” Yet once he got behind the wheel, his hand faltered away from the ignition key almost as soon as he touched it.

“Ralph? What is it?”

“Nothing… everything. I can’t drive like this. I’ll wrap us around a telephone pole or drive us into somebody’s living room,” He looked up at the sky and saw one of those huge birds, this one transparent, roosting atop a satellite dish on the roof of an apartment house across the way. A thin, lemon-colored haze drifted up from its folded prehistoric wings.

Are you seeing a. t? a part of his mind asked doubtfully.

Are you sure of that, Ralph? Are you really, really sure?

I’m seeing it, all right. Fortunately or unfortunately I’m seeing it all… but if there was ever a right time to see such things, this isn’t it.

He concentrated, and felt that interior blink happen deep within his mind. The bird faded away like a ghost-image on a TV screen.

The warmly glowing palette of colors spread out across the morning lost their vibrancy. He went on perceiving that other part of the world long enough to see the colors run into one another, creating the bright gray-blue haze which he’d begun seeing on the day he’d gone into Day Break, Sun Down for coffee and pie with Joe Wyzer, and then that was gone, too. Ralph felt an almost crushing need to curl up, pillow his head on his arm, and go to sleep. He began taking long, slow breaths instead, pulling each one a little deeper into his lungs, and then turned the ignition key. The engine roared into life, accompanied by that clacking sound. It was much louder now.

“What’s that?” Lois asked.

“I don’t know,” Ralph said, but he thought he did-either a tierod or a piston. In either case they would be in trouble if it let go.

At last the sound began to diminish, and Ralph dropped the transmission into Drive. “Just poke me hard if you see me starting to nod off, Lois.”

“You can count on it,” she said. “Now let’s go.”

CHAPTER 21

The Dunkin’ Donuts on Newport Avenue was a jolly pink sugarchurch in a drab neighborhood of tract houses. Most had been built in a single year, 1946, and were now crumbling. This was Derry’s Old Cape, where elderly cars with wired-up mufflers and cracked windshields wore bumper-stickers saying things like DON’T BLAME ME I VOTED FOR PEROT and ALL TIIL, WAY with THE N.R.A where no house was complete without at least one Fisher-Price Big Wheel trike standing on the listless lawn, where girls were stepping dynamite at sixteen and all too often dull-eyed, fat-bottomed mothers of three at twenty-four.

Two boys on fluorescent bikes with extravagant ape-hanger handlebars were doing wheelies in the parking lot, weaving in and out of each other’s path with a dexterity that suggested a solid background in video gaming and possible high-paying futures as airtraffic controllers… if they managed to stay away from coke ajicl car accidents, that was. Both wore their hats backward. Ralph wondered briefly why they weren’t in school on a Friday morning, or at least on the way, and decided he didn’t care.

Probably they didn’t, either.

Suddenly the two bikes, which had been avoiding each other easily up until then, crashed together. Both boys fell to the pavement, then got to their feet almost immediately. Ralph was relieved to see neither was hurt; their auras did not even flicker.

“Goddam wet end!” the one in the Nirvana tee-shirt yelled indignantly at his friend. He was perhaps eleven. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You ride a bike like old people fuck!”

“I heard something,” the other said, resetting his hat carefully on his dirty-blonde hair. “Great big bang. You tellin me you didn’t hear it? Boo-ya!”

“I didn’t hear jack shit,” Nirvana Boy said. He held out his palms, which were now dirty (or perhaps just dirtier) and oozing blood from two or three minor scratches. “Look at this-fuckin road-rash!”

“You’ll live,” his friend said.

“Yeah, but-” Nirvana Boy noticed Ralph, leaning against his rusty whale of an Oldsmobile with his hands in his pockets, watching them.

“The fuck you looking at?”

“You and your friend,” Ralph said. “That’s all.”

“That’s all, huh?”

“Yep-the whole story.”

Nirvana Boy glanced at his friend, then back at Ralph. His eyes glowered with a purity of suspicion which, in Ralph’s experience, could be found only here in the Old Cape. “You got a problem?”

“Not me,” Ralph said. He had inhaled a great deal of Nirvana Boy’s russet-colored aura and now felt quite a bit like Superman on a speed trip. He also felt like a child-molester. “I was just thinkingthat we didn’t talk much like you and your friend when I was a kid.”

Nirvana Boy regarded him insolently. “Yeah? What’d you talk like?”

“I can’t quite remember,” Ralph said, “but I don’t think we sounded quite so much like shitheads.” He turned away from them as the screen door slammed. Lois came out of the Dunkin’ Donuts with a large container of coffee in each hand. The boys, meanwhile, jumped on their fluorescent bikes and streaked off, Nirvana Boy giving Ralph one final distrustful look over his shoulder.

“Can you drink this and drive the car at the same time?” Lois asked, handing him a coffee.

“I think so,” Ralph said, “but I don’t really need it anymore.

I’m fine, Lois.”

She glanced after the two boys, then nodded. “Let’s go.”

The world blazed all around them as they drove out Route 33 toward what had once been Barrett’s Orchards, and they didn’t have to slide even a single inch up the ladder of perception to see it. The city fell away and they drove through second-growth woods on fire with autumn. The sky was a blue lane above the road, and the Oldsmobile’s shadow raced beside them, wavering across leaves and branches.

“God, it’s so beautiful,” Lois said. “Isn’t it beautiful, Ralph?”

“Yes. It is.”

“You know what I wish? More than anything?”

He shook his head.

“That we could just pull over to the side of the road-stop the car and get out and walk into the woods a little way, Find a clearing, 541 sit in the sun, and look up at the clouds.

You’d say, ’Look at that one, Lois, it looks like a horse.” And I’d say, ’Look over there, Ralph, it’s a man with a broom.” Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Yes,” Ralph said. The woods opened in a narrow aisle on their left; power-poles marched down the steep slope like soldiers.

Hightension lines shone silver between them in the morning sunlight, gossamer as spiderwebs. The feet of the poles were buried in brazen drifts of red sumac, and when Ralph looked up above the slash he saw a hawk riding an air-current as invisible as the world of auras.

“Yes,” he said again. “That would be nice. Maybe we’ll even get a chance to do it sometime. But

“But what?”

“’Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else,” Ralph said.

She looked at him, a little startled. “What a terrible idea!”

“Yeah. I think most true ideas are terrible. It’s from a book of poems called Cemetery Nights. Dorrance Marstellar gave it to me on the same day he slipped upstairs to my apartment and put the spray can of Bodyguard into my jacket pocket.”

He glanced up into his rear-view mirror and saw at least two miles of Route 33 laid out behind them, a strip of black running through the fiery woods. Sunlight twinkled on chrome. A car. Maybe two or three.

And coming fast, from the look.

“Old Dor,” she mused.

“Yes. You know, Lois, I think he’s also a part of this.”

“Maybe he is,” Lois said. “And if Ed’s a special case, maybe Dorrance is, too.”

“Yes, that thought occurred to me. The most interesting thing about him-Old Dor, I mean, not Ed-is that I don’t think Clotho and Lachesis know about him. It’s like he’s from an entirely different neighborhood.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. But Mr. C. and Mr. L. never nentioned him, Lind that… that seems…”

He glanced back at the rear-view. Now there was a fourth car, behind the others but moving up fast, and he could see the blue flashers atop the closer three. Police cars. Headed for Newport? No, probably headed for someplace a little closer than that.

Maybe they’re after us, Ralph thought. Maybe Lois’s suggestio that the Richards woman forget we were there didn’t hold.

But would the police send four cruisers after two golden-agers in a rustbucket Oldsmobile? Ralph didn’t think so. Helen’s face suddenly flashed into his mind. He felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach as he guided the Olds over to the side of the road.

“Ralph? What-” Then she heard the rising howl of the sirens and turned in her seat, alarm widening her eyes. The first three police-cars roared past at better than eighty miles an hour, pelting Ralph’s car with grit and sending crisp fallen leaves into dancing dervishes in their wake.

“Ralph!” she nearly screamed. “What if it’s High Ridge? Helen’s out there! Helen and her baby!”

“I know,” Ralph said, and as the fourth police car slammed by them hard enough to rock the Oldsmobile on its springs, he felt that interior blink happen again. He reached for the transmission lever, and then his hand stopped in mid-air, still three inches from it. His eyes were fixed upon the horizon. The smudge there was less spectral than the obscene black umbrella they had seen hanging over the Civic Center, but Ralph knew it was the same thing: a deathbag.

“Faster!” Lois shouted at him. “Go faster, Ralph!”

“I can’t,” he said. His teeth were clamped together, and the wor(-Is came out sounding squeezed. “I’ve got it matted.” Also, he did not add, this is the fastest I’ve gone in thirty-five years, and I’m scared to death.

The needle quivered a hair’s breadth beyond the 80 mark on the speedometer; the woods slid by in a blurred mix of reds and yellows and magentas; under the hood the engine was no longer just clacking but hammering like a platoon of blacksmiths on a hinge. In spite of this, the fresh trio of police cars Ralph saw in his mirror were catching up easily.

The road curved sharply right up ahead. Denying every instinct, Ralph kept his foot away from the brake pedal. He did take it off the gas as they went into the curve… then mashed it back to the mat again as he felt the rear end trying to break loose on the back side.

He was hunched over the wheel now, upper teeth clamped tightly on his lower lip, eyes wide open and bulging beneath the saltand-pepper tangle of his eyebrows. The sedan’s rear tires howled, and Lois fell into him, scrabbling at the back of her seat for purchase. Ralph clung to the wheel with sweaty fingers and waited for the car to flip. The Olds was one of the last true Detroit roadmonsters, however, wide and heavy and low. It outlasted the curve, and on the far side Ralph saw a red farmhouse on the left. There were two barns behind it.

“Ralph, there’s the turn!”

“I see.”

The new batch of police cars had caught up with them and were’ swinging out to pass. Ralph got as far over as he could, praying that none of them would rear-end him at this speed. None did; they zipped by in close bumper-to-bumper formation, swung left, and started up the long hill which led to High Bridge.

“Hang on, Lois.”

“Oh, I am, I am,” she said.

The Olds slid almost sideways as Ralph made the left onto what he and Carolyn had always called the Orchard Road. If the narrox, country lane had been tarred, the big car probably would have rolled over like a stunt vehicle in a thrill-show. It wasn’t, however, and instead of going door-over-roof the Olds just skidded extravagantly, sending up dry billows of dust. Lois gave a thin, out-of-breath shriek, and Ralph snatched a quick look at her.

“Go on!” She flapped an impatient hand at the road ahead, and in that moment she looked so eerily like Carolyn that Ralph almost felt he was seeing a ghost. He wondered what Carol, who had nearly made a career out of telling him to go faster during the last five years of her life, would have made of this little spin in the country. “Never mind me, just watch the road!”

More police cars were making the turn onto Orchard Road now.

How many was that in all? Ralph didn’t know; he’d lost count.

Maybe a dozen in all. He steered the Oldsmobile over until the right two wheels were running on the edge of a nasty-looking ditch, and the reinforcements-three with DERRY POLICE printed in gold on the sides and two State Police cruisers-blew past, throwing up fresh showers of dirt and gravel. For just a moment Ralph saw a uniformed policeman leaning out of one of the Derry police-cars, waving at him, and then the Olds was buried in a yellow cloud of dust. Ralph smothered a new and even stronger urge to climb on the brake by thinking of Helen and Nat. A moment later he could see again-sort of, anyway. The newest batch of police-cars was already coming up the hill.

“That cop was waving you off, wasn’t he?” Lois asked.

“You bet.”

“They’re not even going to let us get close.” She was looking at the black smudge on top of the hill with wide, dismayed eyes.

“We’ll get as close as we need to.” Ralph checked the rear-view for more traffic and saw nothing but hanging road-dust.

“Ralph?”

“What?”

“Are you up? Do you see the colors?”

He took a quick look at her. She still looked beautiful to him, and marvelously young, but there was no sign of her aura. “No,” he said. “Do you?”

“I don’t know. I still see that.” She pointed through the windshield at the dark smudge on top of the hill. “What is it? If it’s not a deathbag, what is it?”

He opened his mouth to tell her it was smoke, and there was only one thing up there likely to be on fire, but before he could get out a single word, there was a tremendous hot bang from the Oldsmobile’s engine compartment. The hood jumped and even dimpled in one place, as if an angry fist had lashed up inside. The car took a single forward snap-jerk that felt like a hiccup; the red idiot-lights came on and the engine quit.

He steered the Olds toward the soft shoulder, and when the edge gave way beneath the right-side wheels and the car canted into the ditch, Ralph had a strong, clear premonition that he had just completed his last tour of duty as a motor vehicle operator. This idea was accompanied by absolutely no regret at all.

“What happened?” Lois nearly screamed.

“We blew a rod,” he said. “Looks like it’s shank’s pony the rest of the way up the hill, Lois. Come on out on my side so you don’t squelch in the mud.”

There was a brisk westerly breeze, and once they were out of the car the smell of smoke from the top of the hill was very strong. They started the last quarter-mile without talking about it, walking handin-hand and walking fast. By the time they saw the State Police cruiser slued sideways across the top of the road, the smoke was rising in billows above the trees and Lois was gasping for breath.

“Lois? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she gasped. “I just weigh too-” Crack-crack-crack.pistol-shots from beyond the car blocking the road.

They were followed by a hoarse, rapid coughing sound Ralph could easily identify from TV news stories about civil wars in third world countries and drive-by shootings in third-world American cities: an automatic weapon set to rapid-fire. There were more pistol-shots, then the louder, rougher report of a shotgun. This was followed by a shriek of pain that made Ralph wince and want to cover his ears. He thought it was a woman’s scream, and he suddenly remembered something which had been eluding him: the last name of the woman John Leydecker had mentioned. McKay, it had been.

Sandra McKay.

That thought coming at this time filled him with unreasoning horror. He tried to tell himself that the screamer could have been anyone-even a man, sometimes men sounded like women when they had been hurt-but he knew better. It was her. It was them.

Ed’s crazies. They had mounted an assault on High Ridge.

More sirens from behind them. The smell of the smoke, thicker now. Lois, looking at him with dismayed, frightened eyes and still gasping for breath. Ralph glanced up the hill and saw a silver R.F.D. box standing at the side of the road. There was no name on it, of course; the women who ran High Ridge had done their best to keep a low profile and maintain their anonymity, much good it had done them today.

The mailbox’s flag was up. Somebody had a letter for the postman.

That made Ralph think of the letter Helen had sent him from High Ridge-a cautious letter, but full of hope nevertheless.

More gunfire. The whine of a ricochet. Breaking glass. A bellow that might have been anger but was probably pain. The hungry crackle of hot flames gobbling dry wood. Warbling sirens. And Lois’s dark Spanish eyes, fixed on him because he was the man and she’d been raised to believe that men knew what to do in situations like this.

Then do something! he yelled at himself. For Christ’s sweet sake, do something.

But what? What?

PICKERING!” a bullhorn-amplified voice bellowed from beyond the place where the road curved into a grove of young Christmas tree-size spruces. Ralph could now see red sparks and licks of orange flame in the thickening smoke rising above the firs. “Pickering, THERE ARE WOMEN IN THERE! LET US SAVE THEM! WOMEN!”

“He knows there are women,” Lois murmured. “Don’t they understand that he knows that? Are theyfools, Ralph?”

A strange, wavering shriek answered the cop with the bullhorn, and it took Ralph a second or two to realize that this response was a species of laughter. There was another chattering burst of automatic fire. It was returned by a barrage of pistol-shots and shotgun blasts.

Lois squeezed his hand with chilly fingers. “What do we do, Ralph? What do we do now?”

He looked at the billowing gray-black smoke rising over the trees, then back down toward the police-cars racing up the hill-over half a dozen of them this time-and finally back to Lois’s pale, strained face.

His mind had cleared a little-not much, but enough for him to realize there was really just one answer to her question.

“We go up,” he said.

Blink.” and the flames shooting over the grove of spruces went from orange to green. The hungry crackling sound became muffled, like the sound of firecrackers going off inside a closed box. Still holding Lois’s hand, Ralph led her around the front bumper of the State Police car which had been left as a roadblock.

The newly arrived police-cars were pulling up behind the roadblock. Men in blue uniforms came spilling out of them almost before they had stopped. Several were carrying riot guns and most were wearing puffy black vests. One of them sprinted through Ralph like a gust of warm wind before he could dodge aside: a young man named David Wilbert who thought his wife might be having an affair with her boss at the real-estate office where she worked as a secretary. The question of his wife had taken a back seat (at least temporarily) to David Wilbert’s almost overpowering need to pee, however, and to the constant, frightened chant that wove through his thoughts like a snake: [“You won’t disgrace yourself, you won’t disgrace yourself, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t.”] “PicKERiNG!” the amplified voice bellowed, and Ralph found he could actually taste the words in his mouth, like small silver pellets.

(YOUR FRIENDS ARE DEAD, PICKERING! THROW DOW,N YOUR WEAPON AND STEP OUT INTO THE YARD! LET US SAVE THE WOMEN.”

“Ralph and Lois rounded the corner, unseen by the men running all around them, and came to a tangle of police-cars parked at the place where the road became a driveway lined on both sides by pretty planter-boxes filled with bright flowers.

The woman’s touch that means so much, Ralph thought.

The driveway opened into the dooryard of a rambling white farmhouse at least seventy years old. It was three storeys high, with two wings and a long porch which ran the length of the building and commanded a fabulous view toward the west, where dim blue mountains rose in the mid-morning light. This house with its peaceful view had once housed the Barrett family and their apple business and had more recently housed dozens of battered, frightened women, but one look was enough to tell Ralph that it would house no one at all come this time tomorrow morning. The south wing was in flames, and that side of the porch was catching; tongues of fire poked out the windows and licked lasciviously along the eaves, sending shingles floating upward in fiery scraps. He saw a wicker rocking chair burning at the far end of the porch. A half-knitted scarf lay over one of the rocker’s arms; the needles dangling from it glowed white-hot.

Somewhere a wind-chime was tinkling a mad repetitive melody.

A dead woman in green fatigues and a flak-jacket sprawled headdown on the porch steps, glaring at the sky through the bloodsmeared lenses of her glasses. There was dirt in her hair, a pistol in her hand, and a ragged black hole in her midsection. A man lay draped over the railing at the north end of the porch with one booted foot propped on the lawn-glider. He was also wearing fatigues and a flak-jacket. An assault-rifle with a banana clip sticking out of it lay in a flowerbed below him. Blood ran down his fingers and dripped from his nails. To Ralph’s heightened eye, the drops looked black and dead.

Felton, he thought. If the police are still yelling at Charlie Pickering-if Pickering’s inside-then that must be Frank Felton.

And what about Susan Day? Ed’s down the coast somewhere-Lois seemed sure of that, and I think she’s’ right-but what if Susan Day’s in there? Jesus, is that possible?

He supposed it was, but the possibilities didn’t matter-not now.

Helen and Natalie were almost certainly in there, along with God knew how many other helpless, terrorized women, and that did matter.

There was the sound of breaking glass from inside the house, followed by a soft explosion-almost a gasp. Ralph saw new flames jump up behind the panes of the front door.

Molotov cocktails, he thought. Charlie Pickering_finally got a chance to throw a few. How wonderful for him.

Ralph didn’t know how many cops were crouched behind the cars parked at the head of the driveway-it looked like at least thirty-but he picked out the two who had busted Ed Deepneau at once.

Chris Nell was crouched behind the front tire of the Derry police car closest to the house, and John Leydecker was down on one knee beside him. Nell was the one with the bullhorn, and as Ralph and Lois approached the police strongpoint, he glanced at Leydecker.

Leydecker nodded, pointed at the house, then pushed his palms at Nell in a gesture Ralph read easily: Be careful. He read something more distressing in Chris Nell’s aura-the younger man was too excited to be careful. Too stoked. And at that instant, almost as if Ralph’s thought had caused it to happen, Nell’s aura began changing color. It cycled from pale blue to dark gray to dead black with gruesome speed.

“GIVE IT UP, Pickering,!” Nell shouted, unaware that he was a dead man breathing.

The wire stock of an assault-rifle smashed through the glass of a window on the lower floor of the north wing, then disappeared back inside. At the same instant the fanlight over the front door exploded, showering the porch with glass. Flames roared out through the hole.

A second later the door itself shuddered open, as if nudged by an invisible hand. Nell leaned out farther, perhaps believing the shooter had finally seen reason and intended to give himself up.

Ralph, screaming: [“Pull him back, Johnny! PULL HIM BACK!

The rifle emerged again, barrel-first this time.

Leydecker reached for Nell’s collar, but he was too slow. The automatic rifle hacked its series of rapid dry coughs, and Ralph heard the metallic pank.tpank!pank. of bullets poking holes in the thin steel of the police car. Chris Nell’s aura was totally black now-it had become a deathbag. He jerked sideways as a bullet caught him in the neck, breaking Leydecker’s grip on his collar and sprawling into the dooryard with one foot kicking spasmodically. The bullhoril spilled from his hand with a brief squawk of feedback. A policeman behind one of the other cars cried out in surprise and horror. Lois’s shriek was much louder.

More bullets stitched across the ground toward Nell and then slapped small black holes into the thighs of his blue uniform. Ralph could dimly see the man inside the deathbag which was suffocating him; he was making blind efforts to roll over and get up. There was something singularly horrible about his struggles-to Ralph it was like watching a creature caught in a net drown in shallow, filthy water.

Leydecker lunged out from behind the police-car, and as his fingers disappeared into the black membrane surrounding Chris Nell, Ralph heard Old Dor say, I wouldn’t touch him anymore if I were you, Ralph-I can’t see your hands.

Lois: [“Don’t.” Don’t, he’s dead, he’s already dead!”] The gun poking out of the window had started to move to the right. Now it swivelled unhurriedly back toward Leydecker, the man behind it undeterred-and apparently unhurt-by the hail of bullets directed at him from the other police. Ralph raised his right hand and brought it down in the karate-chop gesture again, but this time instead of a wedge of light, his fingertips produced something that looked like a large blue teardrop. It spread across Leydecker’s lemon-colored aura just as the rifle sticking out of the window opened fire. Ralph saw two slugs strike the tree just to Leydecker’s right, sending chips of bark flying into the air and making black holes in the fir’s yellowish-white undersurface. A third struck the blue covering which had coated Leydecker’s aura-Ralph saw a momentary flicker of dark red just to the left of the detective’s temple and heard a low whine as the bullet either ricocheted or skipped, the way a flat stone will skip across the surface of a pond.

Leydecker pulled Nell back behind the car, looked at him, then’ tore open the driver’s-side door and threw himself into the front seat.

Ralph could no longer see him, but could hear him screaming at someone over the radio, asking where the fuck the rescue vehicles were.

More shattering glass, and Lois was grabbing frantically at Ralph’s arm, pointing at something-at a brick tumbling end over end into the dooryard. It had come through one of the low, narrow windows at the base of the north wing. These windows were almost obscured by the flowerbeds which edged the house.

“Help us!” a voice screamed through the broken window, even as the man with the assault-rifle fired reflexively at the tumbling brick, sending up puffs of reddish dust and then breaking it into three jagged chunks. Neither Ralph nor Lois had ever heard that voice raised in a scream, but both recognized it at once, nevertheless; it was Helen Deepneau’s voice. “Help us, Please.” We’re in the cellar.” We have children.” Please don’t let us burn to death, WE HAVE CHILDREN!”

Ralph and Lois exchanged a single wide-eyed glance, then ran for the house.

Two uniformed figures, looking more like pro-football linemen than cops in their bulky Kevlar vests, charged from behind one of the cruisers, running flat-out for the porch with their riot guns held at port arms. As they crossed the dooryard on a diagonal, Charlie Pickering leaned out of his window, still laughing wildly, his gray hair zanier than ever. The volume of fire directed at him was enormous, showering him with splinters from the sides of the window and actually knocking down the rusty gutter above his head-it struck the porch with a hollow honk-but not a single bullet touched him.

How can they not be hitting him? Ralph thought as he and Lois mounted the porch toward the lime-colored flames which were now billowing through the open front door.

Christ Jesus, it’s almost pointblank range, how can they possibly not be hitting him?

But he knew how… and why. Clotho had told them that both Atropos and Ed Deepneau had been surrounded by forces which were malignant yet protective. Was it not likely that those same forces were now taking care of Charlie Pickering, much as Ralph himself had taken care of Leydecker when he’d left the protection of the police-car to drag his dying colleague back to cover?

Pickering opened up on the charging State Troopers, his weapon switched to rapid-fire. He aimed low to negate the value of the vests they were wearing and swept their legs out from under them. One of them fell in a silent heap; the other crawled back the way he had come, shrieking that he was hit, he was hit, oh fuck, he was hit bad.

“Barbecue!” Pickering cried out the window in his screaming, laughing voice. “Barbecue! Barbecue. Holy cookout. Burn the bitches God’s fire.” God’s holy fire!”

There were more screams now, seemingly from right under Ralph’s feet, and when he looked down he saw a terrible thing: a medley of auras was seeping up from between the porch boards like steam, the variety of their colors muted by the scarlet blood-glow which was rising with them… and surrounding them. This blood red shape wasn’t quite the same as the thunderhead which had formed above the fight between Green Boy and Orange Boy outside the Red Apple, but Ralph thought it was closely related; the only difference was that this one had been born of fear instead of anger and aggression.

“Barbecue!” Charlie Pickering was screaming, and then something about killing the devil-cunts. Suddenly Ralph hated him more than he had ever hated anyone in his life.

[“Come on, Lois-let’s go get that asshole.”

He took her by the hand and pulled her into the burning house.

CHAPTER 22

The porch door opened on a central hallway that ran from the front of the house to the back, and the whole length of it was now engulfed in flames. To Ralph’s eyes they were a bright green, and when he and Lois passed through them, they were cool-it was like passing through gauzy membranes which had been infused with Mentholatum. The crackle of the burning house was muffled; the gunfire had become as faint and unimportant as the sound of thunder to someone who is swimming underwater… and that was what this felt like more than anything, Ralph decided-being underwater. He and Lois were unseen beings swimming through a river of fire.

He pointed to a doorway on the right and looked questioningly at Lois. She nodded. He reached for the knob and grimaced with disgust as his fingers passed right through it. just as well, of course; if he had actually been able to grab the damned thing, he would have left the top two layers of his fingers hanging off the brass knob in charbroiled strips.

[“We have to go through it, Ralph."’] He looked at her assessingly, saw a great deal of fear and worry in her eyes but no panic, and nodded. They went through the door together just as the chandelier half-\way down the hall fell to the floor with an unmusical crash of glass pendants and iron chain.

There was a parlor on the other side, and what they saw there made Ralph’s stomach clench in horror. Two women were propped against the wall below a large poster of Susan Day in jeans and a Western-style shirt (DON’T LET HIM CALL YOU BABY UNLESS YOU WANT HIM TO TREAT YOU LIKE ONE, the poster advised). Both had been shot in the head at point-blank range; brains, ragged flaps of scalp, and bits of bone were splattered across the flowered wallpaper and Susan Day’s fancy-stitched cowgirl boots. One of the women had been pregnant. The other had been Gretchen Tillbury.

Ralph remembered the day she had come to his home with Helen to warn him and to give him a can of something called Bodyguard; on that day he had thought her beautiful… but of course on that day her finely made head had still been intact and half of her pretty blonde hair hadn’t been roasted off by a close-range rifle-blast. Fifteen years after she had narrowly escaped being killed by her abusive husband, another man had put a gun to Gretchen Tillbury’s head and blown her right out of the world. She would never tell another woman about how she had gotten the scar on her left thigh.

For one horrible moment Ralph thought he was going to faint.

He concentrated and pulled himself back by thinking of Lois. Her aura had gone a dark, shocked red. jagged black lines raced across it and through it. They looked like the E.K.G readout of someone suffering a fatal heart-attack.

[“Oh Ralph Oh Ralph, dear God."’] Something exploded at the south end of the house with force enough to blow open the door they had just walked through. Ralph guessed it might have been a propane tank or tanks.

… not that it mattered much at this point. Flaming scraps of wallpaper came wafting in from the hall, and he saw both the room’s curtains and the remaining hair on Gretchen Tillbury’s head ripple toward the doorway as the fire sucked the air out of the room to feed itself. how long would it take for the fire to turn the women and children down cellar into crispy critters? Ralph didn’t know, and suspected that didn’t matter much, either; the people trapped down there would be dead of suffocation or smoke inhalation long before they began to burn.

Lois was staring at the dead women in horror. Tears slipped down her cheeks. The spectral gray light which rose from the tracks they left behind looked like vapor rising from dry ice. Ralph walked her across the parlor toward the closed double doors on the far side, paused before them long enough to take a deep breath, then put his arm around Lois’s waist and stepped into the wood.

There was a moment of darkness in which not just his nose but his entire body seemed suffused with the sweet aroma of sawdust, and then they were in the room beyond, the northernmost room in the house. It had perhaps once been a study, but had since been converted into a group therapy room. In the center, a dozen or so folding chairs had been set up in a circle. The walls were hung with plaques saying things like I CANNOT EXPECT RESPECT FROM ANYONE’ ELSE UNTIL I RESPECT MYSELF. On a blackboard at one end of the room someone had printed WE ARE FAMILY, I’ve GOT ALL MY SISTERS WITH ME in capital letters.

Crouched beside it at one of the east-facing windows that overlooked the porch, wearing his own Kevlar vest over a Snoopy sweatshirt Ralph would have recognized anywhere, was Charlie Pickering.

“Barbecue all Godless women!” he screamed. A bullet whined past his shoulder; another buried itself in the windowframe to his right and flicked a splinter against one of the lenses of his hornrimmed glasses.

The idea that he was being protected returned to Ralph, this time with the force of a conviction. “Lesbian cookout! Give em a taste of their own medicine! Teach em how it feels!”

[“Stay up, Lois-right up where you are now.”] [“What are you going to do?”] [“Take care of him.”] [“Don’t kill him, Ralph! Please don’t kill him!”] Why not? Ralph thought bitterly. I’d be doing the world a favor.

That was undoubtedly true, but this was no time to argue.

[“All right, I won’t kill him! Now stay put, Lois-there’s too many goddam bullets flying around for both of us to risk going down.”] Before she could reply, Ralph concentrated, summoned the blink, and dropped back to the Short-Time level. It happened so fast and hard this time that it left him feeling winded, as if he had jumped out of a second-storey window onto a hard patch of concrete. Some of the color drained out of the world and noise fell in to replace it: the crackle of fire, no longer muffled but sharp and close; the crump of a shotgun blast; the crack of pistol-shots fired in rapid succession.

The air tasted of soot, and the room was sweltering. Something that sounded like an insect droned past Ralph’s ear. He had an idea it was a.45-caliber bug.

Better hurry up, sweetheart, Carolyn advised. When bullets hit you on this level they kill you, remember?

He remembered.

Ralph ran bent-over toward Pickering’s turned back. His feet crunched on slivers of glass and scatters of splinters, but Pickering did not turn. In addition to the automatic weapon in his hands, there was a revolver on his hip and a small green duffel-bag by his left foot. The bag was unzipped, and Ralph saw a number of wine bottles’ inside. Their open mouths had been stuffed with wet rags.

“Kill the bitches!” Pickering screamed, spraying the yard with another burst of fire. He popped the clip and rased his sweatshirt, exposing three or four more tucked under his belt.

Ralph reached into the open duffel-bag, seized one of the gasoline-filled wine bottles by the neck, and swung it at the side of Pickering’s head. As he did, he saw the reason Pickering hadn’t heard his approach: the man was wearing shooter’s plugs. Before Ralph had time to reflect upon the irony of a man on a suicide mission taking pains to protect his hearing, the bottle shattered against Pickering’s temple, dousing him with amber liquid and green glass. He staggered backward, one hand going to his scalp, which was cut open in two places. Blood poured through his long fingers-fingers that should have belonged to a pianist or a painter, Ralph thought-and down his neck.

He turned, his eyes wide and shocked behind the smeary lenses of his spectacles, his hair reaching for the sky and making him look like a cartoon of a man who has just received a huge jolt of electricity.

“You.” he cried. “Devil-sent Centurion! Godless baby-killer!”

Ralph thought of the two women in the other room and was once more overwhelmed with anger… except that anger was too mild a word, much too mild. He felt as if his nerves were burning inside his skin.

And the thought that drummed at his mind was one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer.

Another high-caliber bug droned past his face. Ralph didn’t notice. Pickering was trying to lift the rifle with which he had undoubtedly killed Gretchen Tillbury and her pregnant friend. Ralph snatched it from his hands and turned it on him. Pickering shrieked with fear. The sound of it maddened Ralph even more, and he forgot the promise he had made to Lois. He raised the rifle, fully meanin to empty it into the man who was now cringing abjectly against the wall (in the heat of the moment it occurred to neither of them that there was currently no clip in the gun), but before he could pull the trigger he was distracted by a brilliant swarm of light bleeding into the air beside him. At first it was without shape, a fabulous kaleidoscope whose colors had somehow escaped the tube which was supposed to contain them, and then it took on the form of a woman with a long, gauzy gray ribbon rising from her head.

[“Don’t kill him! Ralph, please don’t kill him!

For a moment he could see the blackboard and read the quote chalked on it right through her, and then the colors became her clothes and hair and skin as she came all the way down. Pickering stared at her in cross-eyed terror. He shrieked again, and the crotch of his army fatigue pants darkened. He stuck his fingers into his mouth, as if to stifle the sound he was making. “A ghose!” he screamed through his mouthful of fingers. “A Hennurt’on anna ghose.” Lois ignored him and grabbed the barrel of the rifle. “Don’t kill him, Ralph! Don’t!”

Ralph was suddenly furious with her, too. “Don’t you understand, Lois? Don’t you get it? He understood what he was doing! On some level, he did understand-I saw it in his goddam aura.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, still holding the barrel of the rifle down so it pointed at the floor. “It doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t understand. We mustn’t do what they do. We mustn’t be what they are.”

“But-’ “Ralph, I want to let go of this gun-barrel. It’s hot.

It’s burning my fingers.”

“All right,” he said, and let go at the same instant she did. The gun fell to the floor between them, and Pickering, who had been sliding slowly down the wall with his fingers still in his mouth am his shining, glazed eyes still fixed on Lois, lunged for it with the speed of a striking rattlesnake.

What Ralph did then he did without forethought and certainly. without anger-he acted purely on instinct, reaching out for Pickering with both hands and grasping the sides of his face.

Something flashed brightly inside his mind as he did it, something that felt like the lens of a powerful magnifying glass. He slammed back up through the levels, for a split second going higher than either of them had yet been. At the height of his ascent, he felt a terrible force flash in his head and explode down his arms. Then, as he dropped back down, he heard the bang, a hollow but emphatic sound which was entirely different from the guns still firing outside.

Pickering’s body jerked galvanically, and his legs shot out with such force that one of his shoes flew off. His buttocks rose and then thumped down. His teeth clamped shut on his lower lip, and blood squirted out of his mouth. For a moment Ralph was almost sure he saw tiny blue sparks snapping from the ends of his zany hair. Then they were gone and Pickering slumped back against the wall. He stared at Ralph and Lois with eyes from which all concern had fled.

Lois screamed. At first Ralph thought she was screaming because of what he had done to Pickering, and then he saw she was beating at the top of her head. A piece of burning wallpaper had landed there and her hair was on fire.

He swept an arm around her, beat at the flames with his own hand, then covered her body with his as a fresh gust of rifle-and shotgun-fire hit the north wing. Ralph’s free hand was splayed out against the wall, and he saw a bullet-hole appear between the third and fourth fingers like a magic trick.

“Go up, Lois.l Go up [right now."’] They went up together, turning to colored smoke before Charlie Pickering’s empty eyes… and then disappearing.

[“What did you do to him, Ralph? For a second you were go e-you were up-and then… then he what did you do?”] She was looking at Charlie Pickering with stunned horror. Pickering was sitting against the wall in almost exactly the same position as the two dead women in the next room. As Ralph watched, a large pinkish spit-bubble appeared between his slack lips, grew, then popped.

He turned to Lois, took her by the arms just above the elbows, and made a picture in his mind: the circuit-breaker box in the basement of his house on Harris Avenue. Hands opened the box, then quickly flipped all the switches from ON to OFF. He wasn’t sure that this was right-it had all happened too fast for him to be sure of anything-but he thought it was close.

Lois’s eyes widened a little, and then she nodded. She looked at Pickering, then at Ralph.

[“He brought it of himself, didn’t he? You didn’t do it on purpose. “Ralph nodded, and then fresh screams came up from below their feet, screams he was quite sure he was not hearing with his ears.

[“Lois?”] [“Yes, Ralph-right now.”] He slipped his hands down her arms and gripped her -hands, as the four of them had held hands in the hospital, only this time they went down instead of up, sliding into the plank floor as if it were a pool of water. Ralph was once again aware of a knife-edge of darkness crossing his vision, and then they were in the cellar, sinking slowly down to a dirty cement floor. He saw shadowy furnace-pipe’s, grimy with dust, a snowblower covered with a large sheet of dirty transparent plastic, gardening equipment lined up to one side of a dim cylinder that was probably the water heater, and cartons stacked against one brick wall-soup, beans, spaghetti sauce, coffee, garbage bags, toilet-tissue. All of these things looked slightly hallucinatory, not quite there, and at first Ralph thought this was a new side-effect of having gone to the next level. Then he realized it was just smoke-the cellar was filling up with it rapidly.

There were eighteen or twenty people clustered at one end of the long, shadowy room, most of them women. Ralph also saw a little boy of about four clinging to his mother’s knees (Mommy’s face showed the fading bruises of what might have been an accident but was probably on purpose), a little girl a year or two older with her face pressed against her mother’s stomach… and he saw Helen.

She was holding Natalie in her arms and blowing into the baby’s face, as if she could keep the air around her clear of smoke that way.

Nat was coughing and screaming in choked, desperate whoops.

Behind the women and children, Ralph could make out a dusty set of steps climbing up into darkness.

[“Ralph? We have to go down now, don’t we?”]

He nodded, made that blink inside his head, and suddenly he was also coughing as he pulled acrid smoke into his lungs. They materialized directly in front of the group at the foot of the stairs, but only the little boy with his arms around his mother’s knees reacted.

In that moment, Ralph was positive he had seen this kid somewhere before, but he had no idea where-the day near the end of summer when he’d seen him playing roll-toss with his mother in Strawford Park was the furthest thing from his mind at that moment.

“Look, Mama!” the boy said, pointing and coughing. “Angels!”

Inside his head Ralph heard Clotho saying We’re no angels, Ralph, and then he pushed forward toward Helen through the thickening smoke, still holding Lois’s hand. His eyes were stinging and tearing already, and he could hear Lois coughing.

Helen was looking at him with dazed unrecognition-looking at him the way she had on that day in August when Ed had beaten her so badly.

“Helen!”

“Ralph?”

“Those stairs, Helen! Where do they go?”

“What are you doing here, Ralph? How did you get h-” She broke into a coughing spasm and doubled over. Natalie almost tumbled out of her arms and Lois took the screaming child before Helen could drop her.

Ralph looked at the woman to Helen’s left, saw she seemed even less aware of what was going on, then grabbed Helen again and shook her. “Where do the stairs go?”

She glanced over her shoulder at them. “Cellar bulkhead,” she told him. “But that’s no good. It’s-” She bent over, coughing dryly.

The sound was weirdly like the chatter of Charlie Pickering’s automatic weapon. “It’s locked,” Helen finished. “The fat woman locked it. She had the lock in her ocket. I saw her put it on. Why did she p do that, Ralph? How did she know we’d come down here?”

Where else did you have to go? Ralph thought bitterly, then turned to Lois. “See what you can do, will you?”

“Okay.” She handed him the screaming, coughing baby and pushed through the little crowd of women. Susan Day was not among them, so far as Ralph could see. At the far end of the cellar, a section of the floor fell in with a gush of sparks and a wave of baking heat. The girl with her face buried against her mother’s stomach began to scream.

Lois climbed four of the stairs, then reached up with her palms held out, like a minister giving a benediction. In the light of the swirling sparks, Ralph could dimly see the slanting shadow that was the bulkhead. Lois put her hands against it. For a moment nothing happened, and then she flickered briefly out of existence in a rainbow-swirl of colors, Ralph heard a sharp explosion that sounded like an aerosol can exploding in a hot fire, and then Lois was back.

At the same moment he thought he saw a pulse of white light from just above her head.

“What was that, Mama?” asked the little boy who had called Ralph and Lois angels. “What was that?” Before she could reply, a stack of curtains on a card-table about twenty feet away whooshed into flame, painting the faces of the trapped women in stark Halloween shades of black and orange.

“Ralph!” Lois cried. “Help me!”

He pushed through the dazed women and climbed the stairs.

“What?” His throat felt as if he had been gargling with kerosene.

“Can’t you get it?”

“I got it, I felt the lock break-in my mind I felt it-but this boogery door is too heavy for me! You’ll have to do that part. Give me the baby.”

He let her take Nat again, then reached up and tested the bulkhead. It was heavy, all right, but Ralph was running on pure adrenaline and when he put his shoulders into it and shoved, it flew open.

A flood of bright light and fresh air swept down the narrow stairwell.

In one of Ralph’s beloved films, such moments were usually greeted by screams of triumph and relief, but at first none of the women who had been trapped down here made any sound at all. They only stood in silence, looking up with stunned faces at the rectangle of blue sky Ralph had conjured in the roof of the room most of them had accepted as their grave.

And what will they say later? he wondered. If they really, do survive this, what will they say later? That a skinny man with bushy eyebrows and a lady on the stout side (but with beautiful Spanish eyes materialized in the cellar, broke the lock on the bulkhead door, an pulled them to safety?

He looked down and saw the strangely familiar little boy looking back up at him with large, grave eyes.

There was a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of the boy’s nose.

Ralph had an idea that this kid was the only one who had really seen them, even after they had dropped back down to the Short-Time level, and Ralph knew perfectly well what he would say: that angels had come, a man angel and a lady angel, and they had saved them. Should make for an interesting sidebar on the news tonight, Ralph thought.

Yes indeed.

Lisette Benson and John Kirkland would love it.

Lois slapped her hand against one of the support-posts. “Come on, you guys! Get going before the fire gets to the furnace oil-tanks!”

The woman with the little girl moved first. She hoisted her crying child into her arms and staggered upstairs, coughing and weeping.

The others began to follow. The little boy looked up at Ralph admiringly as his mother led him past. “Cool, man,” he said.

Ralph grinned at him-he couldn’t help it-then turned to Lois and pointed up the stairs. “If I’m not all turned around in my head, that comes out behind the house. Don’t let them go around to the front yet.

The cops are apt to blow half of them away before they realize they’re shooting the people they came to save.”

“All right,” she said-not a single question, not another word, and Ralph loved her for that. She went up the stairs at once, pausing only to shift Nat and grab one woman by the elbow when she stumbled.

Now only Ralph and Helen Deepneau were left. “Was that Lois?”

she asked him.

“Yes.”

“She had Natalie?”

“Yes.” Another large chunk of the cellar’s roof fell in, more sparks whooshed up, and runners of fire went racing nimbly along the overhead beams toward the furnace.

“Are you sure?” She clutched at his shirt and looked at him with frantic, swollen eyes. “Are you sure she had Nat?”

“Positive. Let’s go now.”

Helen looked around and seemed to count in her head. She looked alarmed. “Gretchen!” she exclaimed. “And Merrilee! We have to get Merrilee, Ralph, she’s seven months pregnant!”

“She’s up there,” Ralph said, grabbing Helen’s arm when she showed signs of wanting to leave the foot of the stairs and go back into the burning cellar. “She and Gretchen both. Is that everyone else?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good. Come on. We’re getting out of here.”

Ralph and Helen stepped out of the bulkhead in a cloud of darkgray smoke, looking like the conclusion of a world-class illusionist’s best trick. They were indeed in back of the house, near the clotheslines.

Dresses, slacks, underwear, and bed-linen flapped in the freshening breeze. As Ralph watched, a flaming shingle landed on one of the sheets and set it ablaze. More flames were billowing out of the kitchen windows. The heat was intense.

Helen sagged against him, not unconscious but simply used up for the time being. Ralph had to grab her around the waist to keep her from falling to the ground. She clawed weakly at the back of his neck, trying to say something about Natalie. Then she saw her in Lois’s arms and relaxed a little. Ralph got a better grip on her and half-carried, half-dragged her away from the bulkhead. As he did, he saw the remains of what looked like a brand-new padlock on the ground beside the open door. It was split into two pieces and oddly twisted, as if immensely powerful hands had torn it apart.

The women were about forty feet away, huddled at the corner of the house. Lois was facing them, talking to them, keeping them from going any farther. Ralph thought that with a little preparation and a little luck they would be okay when they did-the firing from the police strongpoint hadn’t stopped, but it had slackened off considerably. “Pickering!” It sounded like Leydecker, although the amplification of the bullhorn made it impossible to be sure. “WHY DON’T YOU BE SMART FOR ONCE IN YOUR LIFE AND COME OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN?”

More sirens were approaching, the distinctive watery warble of an ambulance among them. Ralph led Helen to the other women. Lois handed Natalie back to her, then turned in the direction of the amplified voice and cupped her hands around her mouth.

“Hello.” she screamed. “Hello out there, can you-” She stopped, coughing so hard she was nearly retching, doubled over with her hands on her knees and tears squirting from her smoke-irritated eyes.

“Lois, are you okay?” Ralph asked. From the corner of his eye he saw

Helen covering the face of the Exalted amp; Revered Baby with kisses. “Fine,” she said, wiping her cheeks with her fingers.” It’s the damn smoke, that’s all.” She cupped her hands around her mouth again.

“Can you hear me?” The firing had died down to a few isolated handgun pops. Still, Ralph thought, just one of those little pops in the wrong place might be enough to get an innocent woman killed. “Leydecker!” he yelled, cupping his own hands around his mouth. “John Leydecker.” There was a pause, and then the amplified voice gave a command that gladdened Ralph’s heart. “STOP FIRING!” One more pop, then silence except for the sound of the burning house. WHO’s TALKING TO ME? IDENTIFY YOURSELVES!” But Ralph thought he had enough problems without adding that to them. “The women are back here!” he yelled, now having to fight a need to cough himself. “I’m sending them around to the front."’

“NO, DON’T.I” Leydecker responded. “THERE’s A MAN W!ITII A GUN IN THE LAST ROOM ON THE GROUND FLOOR! HE’s shot,5Lo, ERAL PEOPLE ALREADY. “One of the women moaned at this and put her hands over her face. Ralph cleared his burning throat as best he could-at that moment he believed he would have swapped his whole retirement fund for one ice-cold bottle of Coke-and screamed back: “Don’t worry about Pickering! Pickering’s-” But what exactly was Pickering? That was a damned good question, wasn’t it?

“Mr. Pickerring is unconscious.” That’s why he’s stopped shooting!” Lois screamed from beside him, Ralph didn’t think “unconscious” really covered it, but it would do. “The women are coming around the side of the house with their hands up! Don’t shoot! Tell us you won’t shoot!”

There was a moment of silence. Then: “WE WON’T, BUT I HOPE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’re TALKING ABOUT, LADY “Ralph nodded at the mother of the little boy. “Go on, now. You two can lead the parade.”

“Are you sure they won’t hurt us?” The fading bruises on the young woman’s face (a face which Ralph also found vaguely familiar) suggested that questions of who would or would not hurt her and her son formed a vital part of her life. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Lois said, still coughing and leaking around the eyes.

“,Just put your hands up. You can do that, can’t you, big boy?”

The kid shot his hands up with the enthusiasm of a veteran copsand-robbers player, but his shining eyes never left Ralph’s face.

Pink roses, Ralph thought. If I could see his aura, that’s what color it would be. He wasn’t sure if that was intuition or memory, but he knew it was so.

“What about the people inside?” another woman asked. “What if they shoot? They had guns-what if they shoot?”

“There won’t be any more shooting from in there,” Ralph said.

“Go on, now.”

The little boy’s mother gave Ralph another doubtful look, then looked down at her son. “Ready, Pat”

“Yes! “Pat said, and grinned.

His mother nodded and raised one hand. The other she curled around his shoulders in a frail gesture of protection that touched Ralph’s heart. They walked around the side of the house that way.

“Don’t hurt us!” she cried. “Our hands are up and my little boy is with me, so don’t hurt us!”

The others waited a moment, and then the woman who had put her hands to her face went. The one with the little girl joined her (the child was in her arms now, but holding her hands obediently in the air just the same). The others followed along, most coughing, all with their empty hands held high. When Helen started to fall in at the end of the parade, Ralph touched her shoulder. She looked up at him, her reddened eyes both calm and wondering.

“That’s the second time you’ve been there when Nat and I needed you,” she said. “Are you our guardian angel, Ralph?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe I am. Listen, Helen-there isn’t much time.

Gretchen is dead.”

She nodded and began to cry. “I knew it. I didn’t want to, but somehow I did, just the same.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“We were having such a good time when they came-I mean, we were nervous, but there was also a lot of laughing and a lot of chatter. We were going to spend the day getting ready for the speech tonight. The rally and Susan Day’s speech.”

“It’s tonight I have to ask you about,” Ralph said, speaking as gently as he could. “Do you think they’ll still-”

“We were making breakfast when they came.” She spoke as if she hadn’t heard him; Ralph supposed she hadn’t. Nat was peeking over Helen’s shoulder, and although she was still coughing, she had stopped crying. Safe within the circle of her mother’s arms, she looked from Ralph to Lois and then back to Ralph again with lively curiosity.

“Helen-” Lois began.

“Look! See there?” Helen pointed to an old brown Cadillac parked beside the ramshackle shed which had been the cider-press in the days when Ralph and Carolyn had occasionally come out here; it had probably served High Ridge as a garage. The Caddy was in bad shape-cracked windshield, dented rocker panels, one headlight crisscrossed with masking tape. The bumper was layered with prolife stickers.

“That’s the car they came in. They drove around to the back of the house as if they meant to put it in our garage. I think that’s what fooled us. They drove right around to the back as if they belonged here.” She contemplated the car for a moment, then returned her smoke-reddened, unhappy eyes to Ralph and Lois. “Somebody should have paid attention to the stickers on the damned thing.”

Ralph suddenly thought of Barbara Richards back at WomanCare-Barbie Richards, who had relaxed when Lois approached. It hadn’t mattered to her that Lois was reaching for something in her purse; what had mattered was that Lois was a woman. Sandra McKay had been driving the Cadillac; Ralph didn’t need to ask Helen to know that.

They had seen the woman and ignored the bumperstickers. We are family; I’ve got all my sisters with me.

“When Deanie said the people getting out of the car were dressed in army clothes and carrying guns, we thought it was a joke. All of us but Gretchen, that is. She told us to get downstairs as quick as we could. Then she went into the parlor. To call the police, I suppose.

I should have stayed with her.”

“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.P We’ll never let that happen! Never! Never.f 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 fairsized 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, sailing 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?”] E “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 merrily.

“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 farther 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.

CHAPTER 23

“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 Doris 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 i-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?”

Dorrance leaned forward and whispered in Joe Wyzer’s ear, guarding his lips with one puffy, age-spotted hand. Then he sat back again, looking deeply satisfied with himself.

“He says we’re going to the Civic Center,” Joe said.

“The Civic Center!” Lois exclaimed, sounding alarmed. “No, that can’t be right! Those two little men said-”

“Never mind them right now, Dorrance said. ’Just remember what it’s about-nerve. Who has it, and who doesn’t.”

Silence in Joe Wyzer’s Ford for almost the space of a minute.

Dorrance opened his book of Robert Creeley poems and began to read one, tracing his way from line to line with the yellowed nail of one ancient finger. Ralph found himself remembering a game they had sometimes played as kids-not a very nice one. Snipe Hunt, it had been called.

You got kids who were a little younger and a lot more gullible than you were, fed them a cock-and-bun story about the mythical snipe, then gave them towsacks and sent them out to spend a strenuous afternoon wandering around in the damps and the willywags, looking for nonexistent birds. This game was also called Wild-Goose Chase, and he suddenly had the inescapable feeling that Clotho and Lachesis had been playing it with him and Lois up on the hospital roof.

He turned around in his seat and looked directly at Old Dor.

Dorrance folded over the top corner of the page he was reading, closed his book, and looked back at Ralph with polite interest.

“They told us we weren’t to go near either Ed Deepneau or Doc #3,” Ralph said. He spoke slowly and with great clarity. “They told us very specifically that we weren’t even to think of doing that, because the situation had invested both of them with great power and we were apt to get swatted like flies. In fact, I think Lachesis said that if we tried getting near either Ed or Atropos, we might end up having a visit from one of the upper-level honchos… someone Ed calls the Crimson King. Not a very nice fellow, either, by all reports.” Id us on the “Yes,” Lois said in a faint voice. “That’s what they to hospital roof. They said we had to convince the women in charge to cancel Susan Day’s appearance. That’s why we went out to High Ridge.”

“And did you succeed in convincing them?” Wyzer asked.

“No. Ed’s crazy friends came before we could get there, set the place on fire, and killed at least two of the women. Shot them. One was the woman we really wanted to talk to.”

“Gretchen Tillbury,” Ralph said.

“Yes,” Lois agreed. “But surely we don’t need to do any more-I can’t believe they’ll go ahead with the rally now. I mean, how could they? My God, at least four people are dead! Probably more! They’ll have to cancel her speech or at least postpone it. Isn’t that so?”

Neither Dorrance nor Joe replied. Ralph didn’t reply, either-he was thinking of Helen’s red-rimmed, furious eyes. How can you even ask? she’d said. If they stop us now, they win.

If they stop us now, they win.

Was there any legal way the police could stop them? Probably not.

The City Council, then? Maybe. Maybe they could hold a special meeting and revoke WomanCare’s rally permit. But would they? If there were two thousand angry, grief-stricken women marching around the Municipal Building and yelling If they stop us now they win in unison, would the Council revoke the permit?

Ralph began to feel a deep sinking sensation in his gut.

Helen clearly considered tonight’s rally more important than ever, and she wouldn’t be the only one. It was no longer just about choice and who had the right to decide what a woman did with her own body; now it was about causes important enough to die for and honoring the friends who had done just that. Now they were talking not just about politics but about a kind of secular requiem mass for the dead.

Lois had grabbed his shoulder and was shaking it hard. Ralph came back to the here and now, but slowly, like a man being shaken awake in the middle of an incredibly vivid dream.

“They will cancel it, won’t they? And even if they don’t, if for some crazy reason they don’t, most people will stay away, right-,) After what happened at High Ridge, they’ll be afraid to come!”

Ralph thought about that and then shook his head. “Most people will think the danger’s over. The news reports are going to say that two of the radicals who attacked High Ridge are dead, and the third is catatonic, or something.”

“But Ed! What about Ed?” she cried. “He’s the one who got them to attack, for heaven’s sake! He’s the one who sent them out there in the first place.”

“That may be true, probably is true, but how would we prove it?

Do you know what I think the cops will find at wherever Charlie Pickering’s been banging his hat? A note saying it was all his idea.

A note exonerating Ed completely, probably in the guise of an accusation… how Ed deserted them in their time of greatest need.

And if they don’t find a note like that in Charlie’s rented rooi-n, they’ll find it in Frank Felton’s. Or Sandra McKay’s.”

“But that… that’s…” Lois stopped, biting at her lower lip.

Then she looked at Wyzer with hopeful eyes. “What about Susan Day? Where is she? Does anybody know? Do you? Ralph and I will call her on the telephone and-”

“She’s already in Derry,” Wyzer said, although I doubt if even the police know for sure where she is. But what I heard on the news while the old fella and I were driving out here is that the rally is going to happen tonight… and that’s supposedly straight from the woman herself.”

Sure, Ralph thought. Sure it is. The show’s going on, the show has to go on, and she knows it. Someone who’s ridden the crest of the women’s movement all these years-hell, since the Chicago convention in ’68-knows a genuine watershed moment when she sees it.

She’s evaluated the risks and found them acceptable. Either that or she’s evaluated the situation and decided that the credibility-loss involved in walking away would be unacceptable. Maybe both. In any case, she’s as much a prisoner of events-of ka-tet-as the rest of us.

They were on the outskirts of Derry again. Ralph could see the Civic Center on the horizon.

Now it was Old Dor Lois turned to. “Where is she? Do you know?

It doesn’t matter how many security people she’s got around her; Ralph and I can be invisible when we want to be… and we’re very good at changing people’s minds.”

“Oh, changing Susan Day’s mind wouldn’t change anything,” Dor said. He still wore that broad, maddening smile. “They’ll come to the Civic Center tonight no matter what. If they come and find the doors locked, they’ll break them open and go inside and have their rally just the same. To show they’re not afraid.”

“Done-bun-can’the-undone,” Ralph said dully.

“Right, Ralph!” Dor said cheerily, and patted Ralph’s arm.

Five minutes later, Joe drove his Ford past the hideous plastic statue of Paul Bunyan which stood in front of the Civic Center and turned in at a sign which read THERE’s ALWAYS FREE PARKING AT YOUR CIVIC CENTER!

The acre of parking lot lay between the Civic Center building itself and the Bassey Park racetrack. If the event that evening had been a rock concert or a boat-show or a wrestling card, they would have had the parking lot entirely to themselves this early, but tonight’s event was clearly going to be light-years from an exhibition basketball game or a monster truck-pull. There were already sixty or seventy cars in the lot, and little groups of people standing around, looking at the building. Most of them were women. Some had picnic hampers, several were crying, and almost all wore black armbands.

Ralph saw a middle-aged woman with a weary, intelligent face and a great mass of gray hair passing these out from a carrybag. She was wearing a tee-shirt with Susan Day’s face on it and the words \\!I”

The drive-through area in front of the Civic Center’s bank of entrance doors was even busier than the parking lot. No fewer than six TV newsvans were parked there, and various tech crews stood under the triangular cement canopy in little clusters, discussing how they were going to handle tonight’s event. And according to the bedsheet banner which hung down from the canopy, flapping lazily in the breeze, there was going to be an event. RALLY IS oN, it read in large, blurry spray-paint letters. 8 P.M. COME SHOW YOUR

SOLIDARITY EXPRESS YOUR OUTRAGE COMFORT YOUR SISTERS.

Joe put the Ford in Park, then turned to Old Dor, eyebrows raised.

Dor nodded, and Joe looked at Ralph. “I guess this is where you and Lois get out, Ralph. Good luck. I’d come with you if I could-I even asked him-but he says I’m not equipped.”

“That’s all right,” Ralph said. “We appreciate everything you’ve done, don’t we, Lois?”

“We certainly do,” Lois said.

Ralph reached for the doorhandle, then let it go again. He turned to face Dorrance. “What’s this about? Really, I mean. It’s not about saving the two thousand or so people Clotho and Lachesis said are going to be here tonight, that’s for sure. To the kind of All-Time forces they talked about, two thousand lives are probably Just a little more grease on the bearings. So what’s it all about, Alfie? Why are we here?”

Dorrance’s grin had faded at last; with it gone he looked younger and strangely formidable. ’Job asked God the same question,” he said, “and got no answer. You’re not going to get one either, but I’ll tell you this much: you’ve become the pivot-point of great events and vast forces. The work of the higher universe has almost completely come to a stop as those of both the Random and the Purpose turn to mark your progress.”

“That’s great, but I don’t get it,” Ralph said, more in resignation than in anger.

“Neither do I, but those two thousand lives are enough for me,” Lois said quietly. “I could never live with myself if I didn’t at least try to stop what’s going to happen. I’d dream of the deathbag around that building for the rest of my life. Even if I only got an hour’s sleep a night I’d dream of it.”

Ralph considered this, then nodded. He opened his door and swung one foot out. “That’s a good point. And Helen’ll be there.

She might even bring Nat. Maybe, for little Short-Time farts like us, that’s enough.”

And maybe, he thought, I want a rematch with Doc #3.

Oh, Ralph, Carolyn mourned. Clint Eastwood? Again?

No, not Clint Eastwood. Not Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger, either. Not even John Wayne. He was no big action-hero or movie-star; he was just plain old Ralph Roberts from Harris Avenue. That didn’t make the grudge he bore the doc with the rusty scalpel any less real, however. And now that grudge was a lot bigger than just a stray dog and the retired history teacher who had lived downstairs for the last ten years or so. Ralph kept thinking of the parlor at High Ridge, and the women propped against the wall below the poster of Susan Day. It wasn’t upon Merrilee’s pregnant belly which the eye in his mind kept focusing but Gretchen Tillbury’s hair-her beautiful blonde hair that had been mostly burned off by the close-range rifle-shot that had taken her life. Charlie Pickering had pulled the trigger, and maybe Ed Deepneau had put the gun in his hands, but it was Atropos Ralph blamed, Atropos the jumprope-thief, Atropos the hat-thief, Atropos the comb-thief.

Atropos the earring-thief.

“Come on, Lois,” he said. “Let’s-” But she put her hand on his arm and shook her head. “Not just yet-get back in here and shut the door.”

He looked at her carefully, then did what she said. She paused, gathering her thoughts, and when she spoke, she looked directly at Old Dor.

“I still don’t understand why we were sent out to High Ridge,”

she said. “They never even came right out and said that was what we were supposed to do, but we know-don’t we, Ralph?-that that was what they wanted from us. And I want to understand. if we’re supposed to be here, why did we have to go out there? I mean, we saved some lives, and I’m glad, but I think Ralph’s right-a few lives don’t mean much to the people running this show.”

Silence for a moment, and then Dorrance said, “Did Clotho and Lachesis really strike you as all-wise and all-knowing, Lois?”

“Well… they were smart, but I guess they weren’t exactly geniuses,” she said after a moment’s thought. “At one point they called themselves working joes who were a long way down the ladder from the boardroom executives who actually made the decisions.”

Old Dor was nodding and smiling. “Clotho and Lachesis are almost Short-Timers themselves, in the big scheme of things. they have their own fears and mental blindspots. They are also capable of making bad decisions… but in the end, that doesn’t matter, because they also serve the Purpose. And ka-tet.”

“They thought we’d lose if we went head-to-head with Atropos, didn’t they?” Ralph asked. “That’s why they talked themselves into believing we could accomplish what they wanted by using the buck door… the back door being High Ridge.”

“Yes,” Dor said. “That’s it.”

“Great,” Ralph said. “I love a vote of confidence. Especiillo when-”

“No,” Dor said. “That’s not it.” Ralph and Lois exchanged a bewildered glance. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s both things at the same time. That’s very often the way things are within the Purpose. You see… well…” He sighed.

“I hate all these questions. I hardly ever answer questions, did I tell you that?”

“Yes,” Lois said. “You did.”

“Yes. And now, bingo! All these questions. Nasty! And useless!” Ralph looked at Lois, and she looked back at him. Neither of them made any move to get out. Dor heaved a sigh. “All right… but this is the last thing I’m going to say, so pay attention. Clotho and Lachesis may have sent you to High Ridge for the wrong reasons, but the Purpose sent you there for the right ones. You fulfilled your task there.”

“By saving the women,” Lois said. But Dorrance was shaking his head. “Then what did we do?” she nearly shouted. “What? Don’t we have a right to know what part of the goshdamned Purpose we fulfilled?”

“No,” Dorrance said. “At least not yet. Because you have to do it again.”

“This is crazy,” Ralph said. “It isn’t, though,” Dorrance replied. ’He was holding for Love tightly against his chest now, bending it back and forth and looking at Ralph earnestly. “Random is crazy. Purpose is sane.” All right, Ralph thought, what did we do at High Ridge besides save the people in the cellar? And John Leydecker, Of course-I think Pickering might have killed him as well as Chris Nell if I hadn’t intervened. Could it be something to do with Leydecker?

He supposed it could, but it didn’t feel right.

“Dorrance,” he said, “can’t you please give us a little more information? I mean-”

“No,” Old Dor said, not unkindly. “No more questions, no more time.

We’ll have a good meal together after this is over… if we’re still around, that is.”

“You really know how to cheer a fellow up, Dor.” Ralph opened his door. Lois did the same, and they both stepped out into the parking lot. He bent down and looked at Joe Wyzer. “Is there anything else?

Anything you can think of?”

“No, I don’t think-” Dor leaned forward and whispered in his ear.

Joe listened, frowning.

“Well?” Ralph asked when Dorrance sat back. “What did he say?”

“He said not to forget my comb,” Joe said. “I don’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about, but what else is new?”

“That’s okay,” Ralph said, and smiled a little. “It’s one of the few things I do understand. Come on, Lois-let’s check out the crowd.

Mingle a little.”

Halfway across the parking lot, she elbowed him so hard in the side that Ralph staggered. “Look!” she whispered. “Right over there!

Isn’t that Connie Chung?”

Ralph looked. Yes; the woman in the beige coat standing between two techs with the CBS logo on their ’jackets was almost certainly Connie Chung. He had admired her pretty, intelligent face and pleasant smile over too many evening meals to have much doubt about it.

“Either her or her twin sister,” he said.

Lois seemed to have forgotten all about Old Dor and High Fidge and the bald docs; in that moment she was once more the woman Bill McGovern had liked to call “Our Lois.”

“I’ll be darned!

What’s she doing here?”

“Well,” Ralph began, and then covered his mouth to hide a jawcracking yawn, “I guess what’s going on in Derry is national news now. She must be here to do a live segment in front of the Civic Center for tonight’s news. In any case-” Suddenly, with no warning at all, the auras swam back. Ralph gasped.

“Jesus! Lois, are you seeing this?”

But he didn’t think she was. If she had been, Ralph didn’t think Connie Chung would have rated even an honorable mention on Lois’s attention-roster. This was horrible almost beyond conceiving, and for the first time Ralph fully realized that even the bright world of auras had its dark side, one that would make an ordinary person fall on his knees and thank God for his reduced perceptions.

And this isn’t even stepping up the ladder, he thought. At least, I don’t think it is. I’m only looking at that wider world, like a man looking through a window. I’m not actually in it.

Nor did he want to be in it. just looking at something like this was almost enough to make you wish you were blind.

Lois was frowning at him. “What, the colors? No. Should I try to? Is there something wrong with them?”

He tried to answer and couldn’t. A moment later he felt her hand seize his arm in a painful pincers grip above the elbow and knew that no explanation was necessary. For better or worse, Lois was now seeing for herself.

“Oh dear,” she whimpered in a breathless little voice that teetered on the edge of tears. “Oh dear, oh dear, oh jeer Louise.”

From the roof of Derry Home, the aura hanging over the Civic Center had looked like a vast, saggy umbrella-the Travelers Insurance Company logo colored black by a child’s crayon, perhaps.

Standing here in the parking lot, it was like being inside a large and indescribably nasty mosquito net, one so old and badly cared for that its gauzy walls had silted up with blackish-green mildew. The bright October sun shrank to a bleary circle of tarnished silver. The air took on a gloomy, foggy cast that made Ralph think of pictures of London at the end of the nineteenth century. They were not just looking at the Civic Center deathbag, not anymore; they were buried alive in it. Ralph could feel it pressing hungrily in on him, trying to overwhelm him with feelings of loss and despair and dismay.

Why bother? he asked himself, watching apathetically as Joe Wyzer’s Ford drove back down toward Main Street with Old Dor still sitting in the back seat. I mean hey, really, what the hell is the use?

We can’t change this thing, no way we can. Maybe we did something out at High Ridge, but the difference between what was going on out there and what’s happening here is like the difference between a smudge and a black hole. If we try to mess in with this business, we’re going to get flattened.

He heard moaning from beside him and realized Lois was crying.

Mustering his flagging energy, he slid an arm around her shoulders.

“Hold on, Lois,” he said. “We can stand up to this.” But he wondered.

“We’re breathing it in.” she wept. “It’s like we’re sucking up death! Oh, Ralph, let’s get away from here! Please let’s just get away from here! “The idea sounded as good to him as the idea of water must sound to a man dying of thirst in the desert, but he shook his head.

“Two thousand people are going to die here tonight if we don’t do something. I’m pretty confused about the rest of this business but that much I can grasp with no trouble at all.”

“Okay,” she whispered. “Just keep your arm around me so I don’t crack my head open if I faint.”

It was ironic, Ralph thought. They now had the faces and bodies of people in the early years of a vigorous middle age, but they shuffled across the parking lot like a pair of old-timers whose muscles have turned to string and whose bones have turned to glass. He could hear Lois’s breathing, rapid and labored, like the breathing of a woman who has just sustained some serious injury.

“I’ll take you back if you want,” Ralph said, and he meant it. He would take her back to the parking lot, he would take her to the orange bus-stop bench he could see from here. And when the bus came, getting on and going back to Harris Avenue would be the simplest thing in the world.

He could feel the killer aura which surrounded this place pressing in on him, trying to smother him like a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and he found himself remembering something McGovern had said about May Locher’s emphysema-that it was one of those diseases that keep on giving. And now he supposed he had a pretty good idea of how May Locher had felt during her last few years. It didn’t matter how hard he sucked at the black air or how deep he dragged it down; it did not satisfy. His heart and head went on pounding, making him feel as if he were suffering the worst hangover of his life.

He was opening his mouth to repeat that he’d take her back when she spoke up, talking in little out-of-breath gasps. “I guess I can make it… but I hope… it won’t take long. Ralph, how come we can feel something this bad even without being able to see the colors? Why can’t they?” She pointed at the media people milling around the Civic Center, “Are we Short-Timers that insensitive? I hate to think that.”

He shook his head, indicating that he didn’t know, but he thought that perhaps the news crews, video technicians, and security guards clustered around the doors and beneath the spray-painted banner hanging from the canopy did feel something. He saw lots of hands holding styrofoam cups of coffee, but he didn’t see anyone actually drinking the stuff. There was a box of doughnuts sitting on the hood of a station wagon, but the only one which had been taken off had been laid aside on a napkin with just a single bite gone. Ralph i-an his eye over two dozen faces without seeing a single smile. The newspeople were going about their work-setting camera angles, marking locations from which the talking heads would do their standups, laying down coaxial cable and duct-taping it to the cement-but they were doing it without the sort of excitement which Ralph would have expected to accompany a story as big as this one was turning out to be.

Connie Chung walked out from beneath the canopy with a bearded, handsome cameraman-MICHAEL ROSENBERG the tag on his CBS jacket said-and then raised her small hands in a framing gesture, showing him how she wanted him to shoot the bedsheet banner hanging down from the canopy.

Rosenberg nodded. Chung’s face was pale and solemn, and at one point during her conversation with the bearded cameraman, Ralph saw her pause and raise a hand uncertainly to her temple, as if she had lost her train of thought or perhaps felt faint.

There seemed to be an underlying similarity to all the expressions he saw-a common chord-and he thought he knew what it was: they were all suffering from what had been called melancholia when he was a kid, and melancholia was just a fancy word for the blues.

Ralph found himself remembering times in his life when he’d hit the emotional equivalent of a cold spot while swimming or clear air turbulence while flying. You’d be cruising along through your day-sometimes feeling great, sometimes just feeling okay, but getting along and getting it done… and then, for no apparent reason at all, you’d go down in flames and crash. A sense of What the how the use would slide over you-unconnected to any real event in your life at that moment but incredibly powerful all the same-and you felt like simply creeping back to bed and pulling the covers up Over your head.

Maybe this is what causes feelings like that, he thought.

Maybe it’s running into something like this-some hig mess of death or sorrow waiting to happen, spread out like a banquet tent made of cobwebs and tears instead of canvas and rope. We don’t see it, not down on our Short-Time level, but we feel it. Oh yes, we feel it. And now…

Now it was trying to suck them dry. Maybe they weren’t vampires, as they both had feared, but this thing was. The deathbag had a sluggish, half-sentient life, and it would suck them dry if it could. if they let it.

Lois stumbled against him and Ralph had all he could do to keep them both from sprawling to the pavement. Then she lifted her head (Slowly, as if her hair had been dipped in cement), curled a hand around her mouth, and inhaled sharply-At the same time she flickered a little. Under other circumstances, Ralph might have dismissed that flicker as a momentary glitch in his own eyes, but not now. She had slid up. just a little. just enough to feed.

He hadn’t seen Lois dip into the waitress’s aura, but this time everything happened in front of him. The auras of the newspeople were like small but brightly colored Japanese lanterns glowing bravely in a vast, gloomy cavern. Now a tight beam of violet light speared out from one of them-from Michael Rosenberg, Connie Chung’s bearded cameraman, in fact. It divided in two an inch or so in front of Lois’s face. The upper branch divided in two again and slipped into her nostrils; the lower branch went between her parted lips and into her mouth. He could see it glowing faintly behind her cheeks, lighting her from the inside as a candle lights a jack-o’-lantern.

Her grip on him loosened, and suddenly the leaning pressure of her weight was gone. A moment later the violet beam of light disappeared.

She looked around at him. Color-not a lot, but somewas returning to her leaden cheeks.

“That’s better-a lot better. Now you, Ralph!”

He was reluctant-it still felt like stealing-but it had to be done if he didn’t want to simply collapse right here; he could almost feel the last of Nirvana Boy’s borrowed energy running out through his pores. He curled his hand around his mouth now as he had in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot that morning and turned slightly to his left, seeking a target. Connie Chung had backed several steps closer to them; she was still looking up at the bedsheet banner hanging from the canopy and talking to Rosenberg (who seemed none the worse for wear as a result of Lois’s borrowing) about it. With no further thought, Ralph inhaled sharply through the curled tube of his fingers.

Chung’s aura was the same lovely shade of wedding-gown ivory as those which had surrounded Helen and Nat on the day they’d come to his apartment with Gretchen Tillbury. Instead of a ray of light, something like a long, straight ribbon shot from Chung’s aura.

Ralph felt strength begin to fill him almost at once, banishing the aching weariness in his joints and muscles. And he could think clearly again, as if a big cloud of sludge had just been washed out of his brain.

Connie Chung broke off, looked up at the sky for a moment, then began to talk to the cameraman again. Ralph glanced around and saw Lois looking at him anxiously. “Any better?” she whispered.

“All kinds,” he said, “but it’s still like being zipped up in a body-bag.”

“I think-” Lois began, and then her eyes fixed on something to the left of the Civic Center doors. She screamed and shrank back against Ralph, her eyes so wide it seemed they must tumble from their sockets.

He followed her gaze and felt his breath stop in his throat.

The planners had tried to soften the building’s plain brick These had either sides by planting evergreen bushes along them been neglected or purposely allowed to grow until they nterlaced and threatened to entirely hide the narrow strip of grass between them and the concrete walk which bordered the drive-through.

Giant bugs that looked like prehistoric trilobites were squirming in and out of these evergreens in droves, crawling over each other, bumping heads, sometimes rearing up and pawing each other with their front legs like stags locking horns during mating season. They weren’t transparent, like the bird on the satellite dish, but there was something ghostly and unreal about them, just the same. Their auras flickered feverishly (and brainlessly, Ralph guessed) through a whole spectrum of colors; they were so bright and yet so ephemeral that it was almost possible to think of them as weird lightning-bugs, Except that’s not what they are. You know what they are.

“Hey!” It was Rosenberg, Chung’s cameraman, who hailed them, but most of the others in front of the building were looking. “She okay, bud?”

“Yes,” Ralph called back. He still had his hand curled around his mouth and lowered it quickly, feeling foolish. “She just-”

“I saw a mouse!” Lois called, smiling a daffy, dazed smile… an “Our Lois” smile if Ralph had ever seen one. He was very proud of her. She pointed toward the evergreen shrubs to the left of the door with a finger that was almost steady. “He went right in there. Gosh, but he was a fat one! Did you see him, Norton?”

“No, Alice.”

“Stick around, lady,” Michael Rosenberg called. “You’ll see all kinds of wildlife here tonight.” There was some desultory, almost forced laughter, and then they turned back to their tasks.

“God, Ralph!” Lois whispered. “Those… those things…

He took her hand and squeezed it. “Steady, Lois.”

“They know, don’t they? That’s why they’re here. They’re like vultures.”

Ralph nodded. As he watched, several bugs emerged from the tops of the bushes and began to ooze aimlessly up the wall.

They moved with dazed sluggishness-like flies buzzing against a windowpane. Then moved quickly and left slimy trails of dimmed and faded color behind them. Other bugs crawled out from beneath the bushes and onto the small strip of lawn.

One of the local news commentators began strolling toward this infested area, and when he turned his head, Ralph saw it was John Kirkland. He was talking to a good-looking woman dressed in one of those “power look” business outfits which Ralph found-under normal circumstances, anyway-extremely sexy.

He guessed she was Kirkland’s producer, and wondered if Lisette Benson’s aura turned green when this woman was around.

“They’re going toward those bugs!” Lois whispered fiercely at him.

“We have to stop them, Ralph-we have to!”

“We’re not going to do a damned thing.”

“But-”

“Lois, we can’t start raving about bugs nobody can see.

Besides, the bugs aren’t there We’ll end up in the nuthatch if we go for them.” He paused and added: “I hope.”

They watched as Kirkland and his good-looking colleague walked onto the lawn… and into a jellylike knot of the twitching, crawling trilobites. One slid onto Kirkland’s highly polished loafer, paused until he stopped moving for a second, then climbed onto his pantsleg.

“I don’t give much of a shit about Susan Day, one way or the other.”

WomanCare’s the story here,” Kirkland was saying. “"not her-crying babes wearing black armbands. “Watch out, John,” the woman said dryly.

“Your sensitivity Is showing.”

“Is it? Goddam.”

The bug on his pants leg appeared bound for his crotch. It occurred to Ralph that If Kirkland were suddenly given the power to see what was shortly going to be crawling over his balls, he would probably go right out of his mind.

“Okay, but be sure to talk to the women who run the local powernetwork,” the producer was saying. “Now that Tillbury’s dead, the ones that matter are Maggie Petrowsky, Barbara Richards, and Dr. Roberta Harper. Harper’s going to introduce the Big Kahuna tonight, I think… or maybe in this case it’s the Big Kahunette.”

The woman took a step off the sidewalk and one of her high heels skewered a lumbering color-bug. A rainbow of guts spewed out of it, and a waxy-white substance that looked like stale mashed potatoes.

Ralph had an idea the white stuff had been eggs.

Lois pressed her face against his arm.

“And keep your eyes open for a lady named Helen Deepneau,” the producer said, taking a step closer to the building. The bug stuck on the heel of her shoe flopped and twisted as she walked.

“Deepneau,” Kirkland said. He tapped his knuckles against his brow. “Somewhere, deep inside, a bell is ringing.”

“Nah, it’s just your last active brain-cell rolling around in there,” the producer said. “She’s Ed Deepneau’s wife. They’re separated. If you want tears, she’s your best bet. She and Tillbury were good friends. Maybe special friends, if you know what I mean.”

Kirkland leered-an expression so foreign to his on-camera persona that Ralph felt slightly disoriented. One of the color-bugs, meanwhile, had found its way onto the toe of the woman’s shoe and was working its way up her leg. Ralph watched in helpless fascination as it disappeared beneath the hem of her skirt. Watching the moving bump climb her thigh was like watching a kitten under a bathtowel.

And again, it seemed that Kirkland’s colleague felt something; as she talked to him about interviews during Day’s speech, she reached down and absently scratched at the lump, which had now made it almost all the way up to her right hip. Ralph didn’t hear the thick popping sound the fragile, flabby thing made when it burst, but he could imagine it. Was helpless not to, it seemed.

And he could imagine its innards dripping down her nyloned leg like pus. It would remain there at least until her evening shower, unseen, unfelt, unsuspected.

Now the two of them began discussing how they should cover the scheduled pro-life rally this afternoon… assuming it actually happened, that was. The woman was of the opinion that not even The Friends of Life would be dumbheaded enough to show up at the Civic Center after what had happened at High Ridge. Kirkland told her it was impossible to underestimate the idiocy of fanatics; people who could wear that much polyester in public were clearly a force to be reckoned with. And all the time they were talking, exchanging quips and ideas and gossip, more of the swollen, multicolored bugs were swarming busily up their legs and torsos. One pioneer had made it all the way up to Kirkland’s red tie, and was apparently bound for his face.

Movement off to the right caught Ralph’s eye. He turned toward the doors in time to see one of the techs elbowing a buddy and pointing at him and Lois. Ralph suddenly had an all-too-clear picture of what they were seeing: two people with no visible reason for being here (neither of them was wearing a black armband and they were clearly not representatives of the media) just hanging out at the edge of the parking lot. The lady, who had already screamed once, had her face buried against the gentleman’s arm… and the gentleman in question was gaping like a fool at nothing in particular.

Ralph spoke softly and from the corner of his mouth, like an inmate discussing escape in an old Warner Bros. jailbreak epic. “Get your head up. We’re attracting more attention than we can afford.”

For a moment he really didn’t believe she was going to be able to do that… and then she came through and lifted her head. She glanced at the shrubs growing along the wall one final time-an involuntary, horrified little peek-and then looked resolutely back at Ralph and only Ralph. “Do you see any sign of Atropos, Ralph?

That is why we’re here, isn’t it… to pick up his trail?”

“Maybe. I suppose. Haven’t even looked, to tell the truth-too many other things going on. I think we ought to get a little closer to the building.” This wasn’t a thing he wanted to do, but it seemed very important to do something. He could feel the deathbag all around them, a gloomy, suffocating presence that was passively opposed to forward motion of any kind. That was what they had to fight.

“All right,” she said. “I’m going to ask for Connie Chung’s autograph, and I’m going to be all giggly and silly while I do it. Can you stand that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because that will mean that if they’re looking at anybody, they’ll be looking at me.”

“Sounds good.”

He spared one last look at John Kirkland and the woman producer.

They were now discussing what events might cause them to break into the evening’s network feed and go live, totally unaware of the lumbering trilobites crawling back and forth on their faces.

One of them was currently squirming’slowly into John Kirkland’s mouth.

Ralph looked away in a hurry and let Lois pull him over to where His. Chung stood with Rosenberg, the bearded cameraman. He saw the two of them glance first at Lois and then at each other. The shared look was one part amusement and three parts resignationhere comes one of them-and then Lois gave his hand a hard little squeeze that said, Never mind me, Ralph, you take care of your business and I’ll take care of mine.

“Pardon me, but aren’t you Connie Chung?” Lois asked in her gushiest isn’t-this-the-living-end voice. “I saw you over there and at first I said to Norton, ’Is that the lady who’s on with Dan Rather, or am I crazy?” And then-”

“I am Connie Chung, and it’s very nice to meet you, but I’m getting ready for tonight’s news, so if you could excuse me-”

“Oh, of course, I wouldn’t dream of bothering you, I only want an autograph-just a quick little scribble would do-because I’m your number one fan, at least in Maine.”

His. Chung glanced at Rosenberg. He was already holding a pen out in one hand, much as a good O.R. nurse has the instrument the doctor will want next even before he calls for it. Ralph turned his attention to the area in front of the Civic Center and slid his perceptions up the tiniest bit.

What he saw in front of the doors was a semi-transparent, blackish substance that puzzled him at first. It was about two inches deep and looked almost like some sort of geological formation. That couldn’t be, though… could it? If what he was looking at was real (the way objects in the Short-Time world were real, at least), the stuff would have blocked the doors from opening, and it wasn’t doing that. As Ralph watched, two TV techs strolled ankle-deep through the stuff as if it were no more substantial than low-lying groundmist.

Ralph remembered the aural footprints people left behind-the ones that looked like Arthur Murray learn-to-dance diagrams-and suddenly thought he understood. The tracks faded away like cigarette smoke… except that cigarette smoke really didn’t go away; it left a residue on walls, on windows, and in lungs. Apparently, human auras left their own residue. It probably wasn’t enough to see once the colors faded if it was only one person, but this was the biggest public meetingplace in Maine’s fourth-largest city. Ralph thought of all the people who had poured in and out through these doorsall the banquets, conventions, coin-shows, concerts, basketball tourneys-and understood that semi-transparent slag. It was the equivalent of the slight dip you sometimes saw in the middle of much-used steps.

Never mind that now, sweetheart-take care of your business.

Nearby, Connie Chung was scribbling her name on the back of Lois’s light-bill for September. Ralph looked at that slaggy residue on the cement apron in front of the doors, hunting for a trace of Atropos, something which might register more as smell than sight, a nasty, meaty aroma like the alley which used to run behind Mr. Huston’s butcher-shop when Ralph was a kid.

“Thank you!” Lois was burbling. “I said to Norton, ’she looks just like she does on TV, just like a little China doll.” Those were my exact words.”

“Very welcome, I’m sure,” Chung said, “but I really have to get back to work.”

“Of course you do. Say hello to Dan Rather for me, won’t you?

Tell him I said ’Courage! ’”

“I certainly will.” Chung smiled and nodded as she handed the pen back to Rosenberg. “Now, if you’ll excuse us…”

If it’s here, it’s higher up than I am, Ralph thought. I’ll have to slide up a little bit farther.

Yes, but he’d have to be careful, and not just because time had become an extremely valuable commodity’. The simple fact was that if he went up too high, he would disappear from the Short-Time world, and that was the sort of occurrence which might even distract these newspeople from the impending pro-choice rally at least for awhile.

Ralph concentrated, but when the painless spasm inside his head happened this time, it didn’t come as a blink but as the soft lowering of a lash. Color bloomed silently into the world; everything stood forth with exclamatory brilliance. Yet the strongest of these colors, the oppressive key-chord, was the black of the deathbag, and it was a negation of all the others. Depression and that sense of debilitating weakness fell on him again, sinking into his heart like the pointed ends of a clawhammer. He realized that if he had business to do up here, he had better do it quickly and scoot back down to the Short-Time level before he was stripped clean of life-force.

He looked at the doors again. For a moment there was still nothing but the fading auras of Short-Timers like himself -… and then what he was looking for suddenly came clear, rising into his view as a message which has been written in lemon-juice rises into sight when it is held close to a candle-flame.

He had expected something which would look and smell like the rotting guts in the bins behind Mr. Huston’s knacker’s shop, but the reality was even worse, possibly because it was so unexpected. There were fans of a bloody, mucusy substance on the doors themselvesmarks made by Atropos’s restless fingers, perhaps-and a revoltingly large puddle of the same stuff sinking into the hardened residue in front of the doors.

There was something so terrible about this stuffso alien-that it made the color-bugs look almost normal by comparison. It was like a pool of vomit left by a dog suffering from some new and dangerous strain of rabies. A trail of this stuff led away from the puddle, first in drying clots and splashes, then in smaller drips like spilled paint.

Of course, Ralph thought. That’s why we had to come here. The little bastard can’t stay away from the place. It’s like cocaine to a dope addict.

He could imagine Atropos standing right here where he, Ralph, was standing now, looking… grinning… then stepping forward and putting his hands on the doors. Caressing them. Creating those filthy, filmy marks. Could imagine Atropos drawing strength and energy from the very blackness which was robbing Ralph of his own vitality.

He has other places to go and other things to do, of course-veri dai, is undoubtedly a buy day when you’re a supernatural Psycho like(’ him-but it must be hard for him to stay away from this place for long, no matter how busy he is. And how does it make him feel?

Like a tight fuck on a summer afternoon, that’s how.

Lois tugged his sleeve from behind and he turned to her. She was still smiling, but the feverish intensity in her eyes made the expression on her lips look suspiciously like a scream. Behind her, Connie Chung and Rosenberg were strolling back toward the building.

“You’ve got to get me out of here,” Lois whispered. “I can’t stand it anymore. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

[“Okay-no problem.”] “I can’t hear you, Ralph-and I think I can see the sun shining through you. Jesus, I’m sure I can!”

[“Oh-wait-“] He concentrated, and felt the world slide slightly around him. The colors faded; Lois’s aura seemed to disappear back inside her skin.

“Better?”

“Well, soldier, anyway.”

He smiled briefly. “Good. Come on.”

He took her by the elbow and began guiding her back toward where Joe Wyzer had dropped them off. It was the same direction in which the bloody splashes led.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Yes.”

She brightened at once. “That’s great! I saw you go up, you know-it was very odd, like watching you turn into a sepia-toned photograph. And then… thinking I could see the sun shining through you… that was very peculiar.” She looked at him severely.

“Bad, huh?”

“No… not bad, exactly. just peculiar. Those bugs, now… they were bad. Ugh!”

“I know what you mean. But I think they’re all back there.”

“Maybe, but we’re still a long way from being out of the woods, aren’t we?”

“Yeah-a long way from Eden, Carol would have said.”

“Just stick with me, Ralph Roberts, and don’t get lost.”

“Ralph Roberts? Never heard of him. Norton’s the name.”

And that, he was happy to see, made her laugh.

CHAPTER 24

They walked slowly across the asphalt parking lot with its gridwork of spray-painted yellow lines. Tonight, Ralph knew, most of these spaces would be filled. Come, look, listen, be seen… and, most important, show your city and a whole watching country beyond it that you cannot be intimidated by the Charlie Pickerings of the world.

Even the minority kept away by fear would be replaced by the morbidly curious.

As they approached the racetrack, they also approached the edge of the deathbag. It was thicker here, and Ralph could see slow, swirling movement, as if the deathbag were made up of tiny specks of charred matter. It looked a bit like the air over an open incinerator, shimmering with heat and fragments of burnt paper.

And he could hear two sounds, one overlaying the other. The top one was a silvery sighing. The wind might make a sound like that, Ralph thought, if it learned how to weep. It was a creepy sound, but the one beneath it was actively unpleasant-a slobbery chewing noise, as if a gigantic toothless mouth were ingesting large amounts of soft food somewhere close by.

Lois stopped as they approached the deathbag’s dark, particle-flecked skin and turned frightened, apologetic eyes up to Ralph.

When she spoke, it was in a little girl’s voice: “I don’t think I can go through that.” She paused, struggled, and at last brought out the rest. “It’s alive, you know. The whole thing. It sees them”-Lois jerked a thumb back over her shoulder to indicate both the people in the parking lot and the news crews closer in to the building-and that’s bad, but it also sees us, and that’s worse… because it knows that we see it. It doesn’t like being seen. Felt, maybe, but not seen.

Now the lower-pitched sound-the slobbery eating soundseemed almost to be articulating words, and the longer Ralph listened, the more sure he became that that was actually the case.

[Geddout-Fuck off Beedit “Ralph,” Lois whispered. “Do you hear it?”

[Hatechew. Killyew. Eeechew.] He nodded and took her by the elbow again. “Come on, Lois.”

“Come-? Where?”

“Down, All the way.”

For a moment she only looked at him, not understanding; then the light dawned and she nodded. Ralph felt the blink happen inside him-a little stronger than the eyelash-flutter of a few moments ago-and suddenly the day around him cleared. The swirling, foggy barrier ahead of them melted away and was gone. Nevertheless, they closed their eyes and held their breath as they approached the place where they knew the edge of the deathbag lay.

Ralph felt Lois’s hand tighten on his as she hurried through the invisible barrier, and as he passed through himself, a dark node of tangled memories-the slow death of his wife, the loss of a favorite dog as a child, the sight of Bill McGovern leaning over with one hand pressed against his chest-seemed to first lightly surround his mind and then clamp down on it like a cruel hand. His ears filled with that silvery sobbing sound, so constant and so chillingly vacuous; the weeping voice of a congenital idiot.

Then they were through.

As soon as they had passed beneath the wooden arch on the far side of the parking lot (WE’re OFF TO THE RACES AT BASSEY PARK! was printed along its curve), Ralph drew Lois over to a bench and made her sit down, although she insisted vehemently that she was just fine.

“Good, but I need a second or two to get myself back together.”

She brushed a lock of hair off his temple and planted a gentle kiss in the hollow beneath. “Take all the time you need, dear heart.”

That turned out to be about five minutes. When he felt reasonably confident that he could stand up without coming unlocked at the knees, Ralph took her hand again and they stood up together.

“Did you find it, Ralph? Did you find as trail?”

He nodded. “In order to see it, we have to go up about two jumps.

I tried going up just enough to see the auras at first, because that doesn’t seem to speed everything up, but it didn’t work. It has to be a little more than that.”

“All right.”

“But we have to be careful. Because when we can see-”

“We can be seen. Yes. We can’t lose track of the time, either.”

“Absolutely not. Are you ready?”

“Almost. I think I need another kiss first. just a little one will do.”

Smiling, he gave it to her.

“Now I’m ready.”

“Okay-here we go.”

Blink!

The reddish splotches of spoor led them across the packed-dirt area where the midway stood during County Fair week, then to the racetrack, where the pacers ran from May to September. Lois stood at the chest-high slat fence for a moment, glanced around to make sure the grandstand was empty, and then boosted herself up. She moved with the sweet litheness of a young girl at first, but once she had swung a leg over the top and straddled the fence, she paused. On her face was an expression of mingled surprise and dismay.

[“Lois? Are you all right?”]

[“Yes, fine. it’s my darned old underwear.” I guess I’ve lost weight, because it just won It stay where it belongs! For gosh sakes-I”] Ralph realized he could see not just the frilly hem of Lois’s slip but three or four inches of pink nylon. He stifled a grin as she sat astride the broad plank top of the fence, yanking at the fabric.

He thought of telling her she looked cuter than kitten-britches and decided that might not be such a good idea.

[“Turn your back while I get this damned slip freed, Ralph. An wipe the smirk off your face while you’re at it.”] He turned his back on her and looked at the Civic Center. If there had been a smirk on his face (he thought it more likely that she had seen one in his aura), the sight of that dark, slowly swirling deathbag took care of it in a hurry.

[“Lois, you might be happier if you just took it off.”]

[“Pardon me all to heck and back, Ralph Roberts, but I wasn’l raised to take off my underwear and leave it lying around on race tracks, and if you ever knew a girl who did do things like that, I hope it was before you met Carolyn. I only wish I had a-“I Vague image of a gleaming steel safety-pin in Ralph’s head.

[“I don’t suppose you have one, do you, Ralph?”] He shook his head and sent back an image of his own: sand running through an hourglass.

[“All right, all right, I get the message. I think I’ve fixed it so it’ll hold together at least a little longer. You can turn around now.”] He did. She was letting herself down the other side of the board fence, and doing it with easy confidence, but her aura had paled considerably, and Ralph could see dark circles under her eyes again.

The Revolt of the Foundation Garments had been quelled, however, at least for the time being.

Ralph boosted himself up, swung a leg over the fence, and dropped down on the other side. He liked the way doing it felt-it seemed to wake old, long memories in his bones.

[“We’re going to need to power up again before long, Lois.”] Lois, nodding wearily: [“I know. Come on, let’s go.”

They followed the trail across the racetrack, climbed another board fence on the other side, then descended a brushy, overgrown slope to Neibolt Street. Ralph saw Lois grimly holding her slip up through the skirt of her dress as they struggled down the hill, thought again about asking if she wouldn’t be happier just ditching the damned thing, and decided again to mind his own business. If it became enough of a problem to her, she would do it without any further advice on the subject from him.

Ralph’s greatest worry-that Atropos’s trail would simply peter out on them-initially proved groundless. The dim pink blotches led directly down the crumbling, patched surface of Neibolt Street, between paintless tenements that should have been demolished years ago, Tattered laundry flapped on sagging lines; dirty children with snotty noses watched them pass from dusty front yards. A beautiful tow-headed boy of about three gave Ralph and Lois a deeply suspicious look from his front step, then grabbed his crotch with one hand and used the other to flash them the bird.

Neibolt Street dead-ended at the old trainyards, and here Ralph and Lois momentarily lost the track. They stood by one of the sawhorses blocking off an ancient rectangular cellar-hole-all that remained of the old passenger depot-and looked around at a big semicircle of waste ground. Rusty-red siding tracks glowered from deep within tangles of sunflowers and thorny weeds; shards from a hundred broken bottles twinkled in the afternoon sun. Spray-painted in hot-pink letters across the splintery side of the old diesel shed were the words SUZY SUCKT MY BIG FAT ONE. This sentimental declaration stood within a border of dancing swastikas.

Ralph: [“Where the hell did it go?”] [“Down there, Ralph-see?”] She was pointing along what had been the main line until 1963, the only line until 1983, and was now just another pair of rusty, overgrown steel tracks on the way to nowhere. Even most of the ties were gone, burned as evening campfires either by local winos or by wigs passing through on their way to the potato fields of Aroostook County or the apple orchards and fishing smacks of the maritimes on one of the few remaining crossties, Ralph saw splashes of pink spoor. They looked fresher than the ones they had followed down Neibolt Street. to He stared along the half-hidden course of the tracks, trying recall. If memory served, this line skirted the Municipal Golf Course on its way back to… well, on its way back to the west side. Ralph thought this must be the same set of defunct tracks which ran along the edge of the airport and past the picnic area where Faye Chap’ in might even now be brooding over the seedings in the upcoming Runway 3 Classic.

It’s all been one big loop, he thought. It’s taken us damned near three days, but I think in the end we’re going to be right back where we started… not Eden, but Harris Avenue.

“Say, you guys! How you doon?”

It was a voice Ralph almost thought he recognized, and that feeling was reinforced by his first look at the man it came from. He was standing behind them, at the point where the Neibolt Street sidewalk finally gave up the ghost. He looked fifty or so, but Ralph guessed he might actually be five or even ten years younger than that.

He was wearing a sweatshirt and old ragged jeans. The aura surrounding him was as green as a glass of Saint Patrick’s Day beer.

That was finally what turned the trick for Ralph. It was the wino who had approached him and Bill on the day he had found Bill in Strawford Park, bawling over his old pal Bob Polhurst… who, as it had turned out, had outlived him. Life was funnier than Groucho Marx sometimes.

A queer sense of fatalism was creeping over Ralph, and with it an intuitive understanding of the forces which now surrounded them.

It was one he could have done without. ’It hardly mattered if those forces were beneficent or malign, Random or Purpose; they were gigantic, that was what mattered, and they made the things Clotho and Lachesis had said about choice and free will seem like a joke.

He felt as if he and Lois were roped to the spokes of a gigantic wheel-a wheel which kept rolling them back to where they had come from even as it took them deeper and deeper into this horrible tunnel.

“You got a bitta the old spare change, mister?”

Ralph slid down a little so the wino would be sure to hear him when he talked.

“I’ll bet your uncle called you from Dexter,” Ralph said. “Told you you could have your old job back at the mill…

. but only if you got there today. Is that about right?”

The wino blinked at him in cautious surprise. “Well… yeah.

Sumpin like that.” He felt for the story-one he probably believed in more fully than anyone he told it to these days-and found its tattered thread again. “Dass a good job, you know? And I could have it back. There’s a Bangor n Aroostook bus at two o’clock, but the fare’s five-fifty and so far I got only toon a quarter. -.”

“Seventy-six cents is what you’ve got,” Lois said. “Two quarters, two dimes, one nickel, and a penny. But considering how much you drink, your aura looks extremely healthy, I’ll say that much for you.

You must have the constitution of an ox.”

The wino gave her a puzzled look, then took a step backward and wiped his nose with the palm of one hand.

“Don’t worry,” Ralph reassured him, “my wife sees auras everywhere. She’s a very spiritual person.”

“Izzat so, now?”

,Uh-huh. She’s also very generous, and I think she’ll do quite a bit better by you than a little spare change. Won’t you, Alice?”

“He’ll just drink it up,” she said. “There’s no job in Dexter.”

“No, probably not,” Ralph said, fixing her with his eyes, “but his aura does look extremely healthy. Extremely.”

“You kinda got your own spiritual side, I guess,” the wino said.

His eyes were still shifting cautiously back and forth between Ralph and Lois, but there was a guarded flicker of hope in them.

“You know, that’s true,” Ralph said. “And just lately it’s really come to the fore.” He pursed his lips as if an interesting thought had just occurred to him, and inhaled. A bright green ray shot out of the panhandler’s aura, crossed the ten feet separating him from Ralph and Lois, and entered Ralph’s mouth. The taste was clear and at once identifiable: Boone’s Farm Apple Wine. It was rough and lowdown, but sort of pleasant, just the same-it had a workingman’s sparkle to it.

With the taste came that sense of returning strength, which was good, and a sharp-edged clarity of thought that was even better.

Lois, meanwhile, was holding out a twenty-dollar bill. The wino didn’t immediately see it, however; he was scowling up into the sky.

At that instant, another bright green ray quilled out of his aura.

It shot across the weedy clearing beside the cellar-hole like a brilliant flashlight beam and into Lois’s mouth and nose. The bill in her hand shook briefly.

[“Oh, God, that’s so good."’]

“Goddam jet-jockeys from Charleston Air Force Base!” the wino cried disapprovingly. “They ain’t s’pored to boom the sound-barrier till they get out over the ocean! I damn near wet my-” His eye fell on the bill between Lois’s fingers, and his scowl deepened. “Sa-aay, what kind of joke you think you pullin here? I ain’t stupid, you know.

Maybe I like a drink every now n then, but that don’t make me stupid.”

Give it time, Ralph thought. It will.

“No one thinks you’re stupid,” Lois said, “and it’s no joke.

Take the money, sir.”

The bum tried to hold onto his suspicious glower, but after another close look at Lois (and a quick side-glance at Ralph), it was overwhelmed by a large and winning smile. He stepped toward Lois, putting out his hand to take the money, which he had earned without even knowing it.

Lois raised her hand just before he could close his fingers on the bill. “Just mind you get something to eat as well as something to drink. And you might ask yourself if you’re happy with the way you’re living.”

“You’re absolutely right!” the wino cried enthusiastically. His eyes never left the bill between Lois’s fingers. “Absolutely, ma’am!

They got a program other side of the river, detox and rehab, you know.

I’m thinking about it. I really am. I think about it every damn day.”

But his eyes were still tacked to the twenty, and he was almost drooling. Lois gave Ralph a brief, doubtful look, then shrugged and let the bill pass from her fingers to his. “Thanks! Thanks, lady!”

His eyes shifted to Ralph. “Dis lady a real princess! I jus hope you know dat!”

“As a matter of fact, I do,”

Ralph favored Lois with a fond glance. he said.

Half an hour later, the two of them were walking between the rusty steel rails as they curved gently past the Municipal Golf Course… except they had drifted up a little higher above the Short-Time world after their meeting with the wino (perhaps because he had been a little high himself), and walking was not exactly what they were doing.

There was little or no effort involved, for one thing, and although their feet were moving, to Ralph it felt more like gliding than walking. Nor was he entirely sure they were visible to the Short-Time world; squirrels hopped unconcernedly about their feet, busy gathering supplies for the winter ahead, and once he saw Lois duck sharply as a wren almost parted her hair. The bird veered to the left and upward, as if realizing only at the last moment that there was a human in its flight-pattern. The golfers didn’t pay them any mind, either. Ralph’s opinion of golfers was that they were self-absorbed to the point of obsession, but he thought this lack of interest extreme, even SO. If he had seen a couple of neatly dressed adults strolling along a defunct GS amp;WM spur-line in the middle of the day, he thought he might have taken a brief time-out to try and think guess what they were up to and where they might be going.

I’d be especially curious about why the lady kept on muttering “Stay where you are, you darned old thing” and hitching at her skirt, Ralph thought, and grinned. But the golfers didn’t even spare them a glance, although a foursome bound for the ninth hole passed close enough so that Ralph could hear them worrying over a developing softness in the bond market. The idea that he and Lois had become invisible again-or at least very dim-began to seem more and more plausible to Ralph. Plausible… and worrisome. Time goes faster when you’re high, Old Dor had said.

The trail became fresher as they went west, and Ralph liked the drips and splashes which made it up less and less. Where the goop had fallen on the steel rails, it had eaten away the rust like corrosive acid. The weeds it had fallen on were black and dead-even the hardiest of them had died. As Ralph and Lois passed Derry Mum’s third green and entered a tangle of scrawny trees and undergrowth, Lois tugged at his sleeve. She pointed ahead. Large splotches of Atropos’s spoor gleamed like sick paint on the trunks of the trees now pressing in close to the tracks, and there were pools of it in some of the sunken dips between the old rads-places where crossties had once been, Ralph supposed.

[“We’re getting close to where he lives, Ralph.”] [“Yes. “I [“If he comes back and finds us in his place, what will we do?”] Ralph shrugged. He didn’t know, and wasn’t sure he cared. Let the forces that were moving them around like pawns on a chessboard-the ones Mr. C. and Mr.

L. had called the Higher Purpose-worry about that. If Atropos showed up, Ralph would try to yank out the little bald bugger’s tongue and strangle him with it.

And if that upset somebody’s applecart, too goddam bad. He couldn’t take responsibility for grand plans and Long-Time business; his job now was to watch out for Lois, who was at risk, and try to stop the carnage that was going to occur not far from here in just a few hours. And who knew? He might even find a little extra time along the way which he could use to try and protect his own partially rejuvenated hide. This was the stuff he had to do, and if the nasty little fuck got in Ralph’s way, one of them was going down. If that didn’t fit in with the big boys’ plans, tough titty.

Lois was picking most of this up from his aura-he could read that in her own when she touched his arm and he turned to look at her.

[“What does that mean, Ralph? That you’ll try to kill him if he gets in our way?”] He considered this, then nodded.

[“Yeah-that’s exactly what it means.”] She thought about it, then nodded.

[“Ralph?” He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

[“If it needs to be done, I’ll help you do it.”] He was absurdly touched by this… and at pains to hide the rest of his thinking from her: that the only reason she was still with him at all was so that he could keep a protective eye on her. That thought led him back toward her earrings, but he pushed the image of them away, not wanting her to see-or even suspect-them in his aura.

Lois’s thoughts, meanwhile, had gone on in a different, marginally safer, direction. without meeting him, he’ll know some[“Even if we get in and out one was there, won’t he? He’ll probably know who it was, too.”] Ralph couldn’t deny it, but didn’t see that it mattered much; their options had been narrowed to just this one, at least temporarily.

They would take it a step at a time and just keep hoping that when the sun came up tomorrow morning, they would be around to see it.

Although, given a choice, I’d probably opt to sleep in, Ralph thought, and a small, wistful grin touched the corners of his mouth.

God, it feels like years since I slept in. His mind flashed from there to Carolyn’s favorite saying, the one about how it was a long walk back to Eden. It seemed to him right now that Eden might simply be sleeping until noon… or maybe a little past.

He took Lois’s hand and they started forward along Atropos’s trail again.

Forty feet east of the Cyclone fence marking the edge of the airport, the rusty tracks petered out. Atropos’s trail pushed on, however, although not for long; Ralph was quite sure he could see the spot where it ended, and the image of the two of them roped to the spokes of a big wheel recurred. If he was right, Atropos’s den was only a stone’s throw from where Ed had run into the fat man with the barrels of fertilizer in the back of his pickup truck.

The wind gusted, bringing them a sick, rotten smell from close by, and, from a little farther away, the voice of Faye Chapin, haranguing someone on his favorite subject: “… what I always say!

Mali-jongg is like chess, chess is like life, so if you can play either of those games-” The wind dropped again. Ralph could still hear Faye’s voice if he strained his ears, but he had lost the individual words. That was all right, though; he had heard the lecture often enough to know pretty much how it went.

[“Ralph, that stink is awful! It’s him, isn’t it?”] He nodded, but didn’t think Lois saw him. She held his hand tightly in hers, looking straight ahead with wide eyes. The splotchy track which had begun at the doors of the Civic Center ended at the base of a drunkenly leaning dead oak tree two hundred feet away. The cause of both the tree’s death and its final leaning position was clear: one side of the venerable relic had been peeled like a banana by a glancing stroke of lightning. The cracks and crenellations and bulges of its gray bark seemed to make the shapes of halfburied, silently screaming faces, and the tree spread its nude branches against the sky like grim ideograms… ones which boreat least in Ralph’s imagination-an uncomfortable resemblance to the Japanese ideograms which meant kamikaze. The bolt which had killed the tree hadn’t succeeded in knocking it over, but it had certainly done its best. The part of its extensive root-system which faced the airport had been yanked right out of the ground. These roots had extended beneath the chainlink fence and pulled a section of it upward and outward in a bell shape that made Ralph think, for the first time in years, of a childhood acquaintance named Charles Engstrom"Don’t you play with Chuckle,” Ralph’s mother used to tell him.

“He’s a dirty boy.” Ralph didn’t know if Chuckle was a dirty boy or not, but he was fruitcrackers, no question about that. Chuckle Engstrom liked to hide behind the tree in his front yard with a long tree-branch which he called his Peekle Wand. When a woman in a full skirt passed, Chuckle would tiptoe after her, extending the Peekie Wand under the hem and then lifting. Quite often he got to check out the color of the woman’s underwear (the color of ladies’ underwear held great fascination for Chuckle) before she realized is what was going on and chased the wildly cackling lad back to his house, threatening to tell his mother. The airport fence, pulled out and up by the old oak’s roots, reminded Ralph of the way the skirts of Chuckle’s victims had looked when he started to raise them with the Peekie Wand.

[“Ralph?”] He looked at her.

[“who is Piggyjuan? And why are you thinking about him now?”

Ralph burst out laughing.

[“Did -you see that in my aura?”] [“I guess so-I don’t really know anymore. Who is he?”] [“Tell you another time. Come on.” He took her hand and they walked slowly toward the oak tree where Atropos’s trail ended, into the thickening odor of wild decay that was his scent.

CHAPTER 25

They stood at the base of the oak, looking down. Lois was gnawing obsessively on her lower lip.

[“Do we have to go down there, Ralph? Do we really?”] E “Yes. “I [“But why? What are we supposed to do? Take something he stole?

Kill him? What?”] Other than retrieve Joe’s comb and Lois’s earrings, he didn’t know… but he felt certain he would know, that they both would, when the time came.

“I think for now we better just keep moving, Lois.”

The lightning had acted like a strong hand, shoving the tree violently toward the east and opening a large hole at the bottom on its western side. To a man or woman with Short-Time vision, that hole would undoubtedly look dark-and maybe a little scary, with its crumbly sides and barely glimpsed roots squirming in the deep shadows like snakes-but otherwise not very unusual.

A kid with a good imagination might see more, Ralph thought.

That dark space at the bottom of the tree might make him think of pirate treasure… outlaw hideouts… troll-holes…

But Ralph didn’t think even an imaginative Short-Time kid would have been able to see the dim red glow filtering up from beneath the tree, or realize that those squirming roots were actually rough rungs leading down to some unknown (and undoubtedly unpleasant) place.

No-even an imaginative kid wouldn’t see those things… but he or she might sense them.

Right. And after doing so, one with any brains would turn and run as if all the demons of hell were in hot pursuit. As would he and Lois, if they had any sense at all. Except for Lois’s earrings Except for Joe Wyzer’s comb. Except for his own lost place in the Purpose.

And, of course, except for Helen (and possibly Nat) and the two thousand other people who were going to be at the Civic Center tonight.

Lois was right. They were supposed to do something, and if they backed out now, it was a something that would remain forever done-bun-undone.

And those are the ropes, he thought. The ropes the powers-that-be use to the’e us poor, muddled Short-Time creatures to their wheel.

He now visualized Clotho and Lachesis through a bright lens of hate, and he thought that if the two of them had been here right now, they would have exchanged one of their uneasy looks and then taken a quick step or two away.

And they would be right to do that, he thought. Very right.

[“Ralph? What’s wrong? Why are you so angry?”] He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.

[“It’s nothing. Come on. Let’s go before we lose our nerve.”]

She looked at him a moment longer, then nodded. And when Ralph sat down and poked his legs into the gaping, root-lined mouth at the foot of the tree, she was right beside him.

Ralph slid beneath the tree on his back, holding his free hand over his face to keep dirt from crumbling into his open eyes. He tried not to flinch as root-knuckles caressed the side of his neck and prodded the small of his back. The smell under the tree was a revolting monkeyhouse aroma that made his gorge rise. He was able to go on kidding himself that he would get used to it until he was all the way into the hole under the oak, and then the kidding stopped. He raised himself on one elbow, feeling smaller roots digging at his scalp and dangling flaps of bark tickling his cheeks, and ejected as much of his breakfast as still remained in the holding-tank. He could hear Lois doing the same thing on his left.

A terrible, woozy faintness went rolling through his head like a breaking wave. The stench was so thick he was almost he could see the red stuff they had followed to this t eating it, and nightmare place under the tree all over his hands and arms. Just looking at this stuff had been bad; now he found himself taking a bath in it, for God’s sake.

Something groped for his hand and he almost gave in to panic before realizing it was Lois. He laced his fingers through hers.

[“Ralph, come up a little bit! It’s better You can breathe.” He understood what she meant at once, and had to restrain himself, haul himself down, at the last moment. If he hadn’t, he would have shot up the ladder of perception like a rocket under full thrust.

The world wavered, and suddenly there seemed to be a little more light in this stinking hole and a little more room, too.

The smell didn’t go away, but it became bearable, Now it was like being in a small closed tent full of people with dirty feet and sweaty armpitsnot nice, but something you could live with, at least for awhile.

Ralph suddenly imagined the face of a pocket-watch, complete with hands that were moving too fast. It was better without the stench trying to pour down his throat and gag him, but this was still a dangerous place to be-suppose they came out of here tomorrow morning, with nothing left of the Civic Center but a smoking hole on Main Street? And it could happen. Keeping track of time down here-short time, long time, or all time-was impossible. He glanced at his watch, but it was meaningless.

He should have set it earlier, but he had forgotten.

Let it go, Ralph-you can’t do anything about it, so let it go.

He tried, and as he did, it occurred to him that Old Dor had been a hundred percent correct on the day Ed had crashed into Mr. West Side Gardeners’ pickup truck; it was better not to mess into long-time business. And yet here they were, the world’s oldest Peter Pan and the world’s oldest Wendy, sliding under a magic tree into some slimy underworld neither one of them wanted to see.

Lois was looking at him, her pale face lit with that sick red glow, her expressive eyes full of fright. He saw dark threads on her chin and realized it was blood. She had quit.just nibbling at her lower lip and had begun taking bites out of it.

[“Ralph, are you all right?”]

[“I get to crawl under an old oak tree with a pretty girl and you even have to ask? I’m fine, Lois. But I think we better hurry.

[“All right.” He felt around below him and placed his foot on a gnarled rootknuckle. It took his weight and he slid down the stony slope, squeezing beneath another root and holding Lois around the waist. Her skirt skidded up to her thighs and Ralph thought again, briefly, about Chuckle Engstrom and his Peekie Wand. He was both amused and exasperated to see Lois was trying to pull the skirt back down.

[“I know that a lady tries to keep her skirt down whenever possible, but I think the rule goes by the boards when you’re sliding down the staircases under old oak trees. Okay?”] She gave him an embarrassed, frightened little smile.

[“If I’d known what we were going to he doing, I would have worn slacks. I thought we were just going to the hospital.”] If I’d known what we were going to be doing, Ralph thought, I would have cashed in my bonds, developing softness in the market or not, and had us on a plane to Rio, my dear.

He felt around with his other foot, very aware that if he fell, he was probably going to end up in a place far beyond the reach of Derry Rescue. Just above his eyes, a reddish worm poked out of the earth, dribbling little crumbles of dirt down on Ralph’s forehead.

For what seemed like an eternity he felt nothing, and then his foot found smooth wood-not a root this time, but something like a real step.

He slid down, still holding Lois around the waist, and waited to see if the thing he was standing on would hold or snap under their combined weight.

It held, and it was wide enough for both of them. Ralph looked down and saw that it was the top step of a narrow staircase which curved down into the red-tinged dark. It had been built for-and perhaps by-a creature that was a lot shorter than they were, making it necessary for them to hunch, but it was still better than the nightmare of the last few moments.

Ralph looked at the ragged wedge of daylight above them, his eyes gazing out of his dirt-and sweat-streaked face with an expression of dumb longing. Daylight had never looked so sweet or so distant. He turned back to Lois and nodded to her. She squeezed his hand Itlci nodded back. Bending over, cringing each time a dangling root touched their necks or backs, they started down the staircase.

The descent seemed endless. The red light grew brighter, the stench of Atropos grew thicker, and Ralph was aware that they were both,going up” as they went down; it was either that or be flattened by the smell.

He continued telling himself that they were doing what they had to do, and that there must be a timekeeper on an operation this big-someone who would give them a poke if and when the schedule got too tight for comfort-but he kept worrying, just the same. Because there might not be a timekeeper, or an jump, or a team of refs in zebra-striped shirts. All bets are off, Clotho had said. just as Ralph was starting to wonder if the stairs went all the way down into hell itself, they ended. A short stone-lined corridor, no more than forty inches high and twenty feet long, led to an arched doorway. Beyond it, that red glow pulsed and flared like the reflected glow of an open oven.

[“Come on, Lois, but be ready for anything. Be ready for him.”]

She nodded, hitched at her wayward slip again, then walked beside him up the narrow passage. Ralph kicked something that wasn’t a stone and bent over to pick it up. It was a red plastic cylinder, wider at one end than at the other. After a moment he realized what it was: a jumprope handle. Three-six-nine, lion, the goose drank wine.

Don’t butt into what doesn’t concern you, Short-Time, Atropos had said, but he had butted in, and not just because of what the little bald doctors called ka, either. He had gotten involved because what Atropos was up to was his concern, whatever the little creep might think to the contrary. Derry was his town, Lois Chasse was his friend, and Ralph found within himself a sincere desire to make Doc #3 sorry he’d ever seen Lois’s diamond earrings.

He flipped the jumprope handle away and started walking again.

A moment later he and Lois passed under the arch and simply stood there, staring into Atropos’s underground apartment.

With their wide eyes and linked hands, they looked more like children in a fairy-tale than ever-not Peter Pan and Wendy now but Hansel and Gretel, coming upon the witch’s candy house after days spent wandering in the trackless forest.

[“Oh, Ralph. Oh my God, Ralph… do you see?”] [“shhh, Lois. shhh.” Directly ahead of them was a small, mean chamber which seemed to be a combination kitchen and bedroom. The room was simultaneously sordid and creepy. Standing in the center was a low round table which Ralph thought was the amputated top half of a barrel.

The remains of a meal-some gray, rancid gruel that looked like liquefied brains congealing in a chipped soup tureen-stood on it.

There was a single dirty folding chair. To the right of the table was a primitive commode which consisted of a rusty steel drum with a toilet-seat balanced on top of it. The smell rising from this was incredibly foul. The room’s only decoration was a full-length brassbordered mirror on one wall, its reflective surface so age-darkened that the Ralph and Lois captured within it looked as if they might have been floating in ten or twelve feet of water.

To the left of the mirror was a stark sleeping accommodation which consisted of a filthy mattress and a burlap sack stuffed with straw or feathers. Both pillow and mattress glowed and raved with the nightsweats of the creature who used them. The dreams inside, that burlap pillow would drive me insane, Ralph thought.

Somewhere, God only knew how much farther under the earth, water was dripping hollowly.

On the far side of the apartment was another, higher arch, through which they could see a jumbled, surreal storage area. Ralph actually blinked two or three times to try to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

This is the place, all right, he thought. Whatever we came to find, it’s here.

Lois began to drift toward this second arch as if hypnotized. Her mouth was quivering with dismay, but her eyes were full of helpless curiosity-it was the expression, he was quite sure, that must have been on the face of Bluebeard’s wife when she had used the key which unlocked the door to her husband’s forbidden room. Ralph was suddenly sure that Atropos was lurking just inside that arch with his rusty scalpel poised. He hurried after Lois and stopped her just before she could step through. He grasped her upper arm, then put a finger to his lips and shook his head at her before she could speak.

He hunkered down with the fingers of one hand tented on the packed dirt floor, looking like a sprinter awaiting the crack of the starter’s gun. Then he launched himself through the arch (relishing the eager response of his body even at this moment), hitting on his shoulder and rolling. His feet struck a cardboard box and knocked it over, spilling out a jumble of stuff: mismatched gloves and socks, a couple of old paperbacks, a pair of Bermuda shorts, a screwdriver with smears of shaft.

Ralph got to his knees, looking back toward Lois, who was standing in the doorway and staring at him with her hands clasped under her chin. There was no one on either side of the archway, and really no room for anyone. More boxes were stacked on either side. Ralph read the printing on them with a kind of bemused wonder: jack Daniel’s, Gilbey’s, Smirnoff, J amp;B. Atropos, it seemed, was as fond of liquor cartons as anyone else who couldn’t bear to throw anything away.

[“Ralph? Is it safe?”] The word was a joke, but he nodded his head and held out his hand. She hurried toward him, giving her slip another sharp upward yank as she came and looking about herself in growing amazement.

Standing on the other side of the arch, in Atropos’s grim little apartment, this storage area had looked large. Now that they were actually in it, Ralph saw it went well beyond that; rooms this big were usually called warehouses. Aisles wandered among great, tottery piles of junk. Only the stuff by the door had actually been boxed; the rest had been piled any whichway, creating something which was two parts maze and three parts booby-trap. Ralph decided that even warehouse was too small a word-this was an underground suburb, and Atropos might be lurking anywhere within it… and if he was here, he was probably watching them.

Lois didn’t ask what they were looking at; he saw by her face that she already knew. When she did speak, it was in a dreamy tone that sent a chill scampering up Ralph’s back.

[“He must be so very old, Ralph.”] Yes. So very old.

Twenty yards into the room, which was lit with the same sunken, sourceless red glow as the stairway, Ralph could see a large spoked wheel lying atop a cane-backed chair which was, in turn, standing on top of a splintery old clothes press. Looking at that wheel brought a deeper chill; it was as if the metaphor his mind had seized to help grasp the concept of ka had become real. Then he noted the rusty ired iron strip which circled the wheel’s outer circumference and real it had probably come from one of those Gay Nineties bikes that looked like overgrown tricycles. all right, and it’s a hundred years old if it’s a day. It’s a bicycle whee, all ri -how day, he thought. That led him to wonder how many people many thousands or tens of thousands-had died in and around Derry since Atropos had somehow transported this wheel down here. And of those thousands, how many had been Random deaths?

And how far back does he go? How many hundreds of years?

No way of telling, of course; maybe all the way to the beginning, whenever or however that had been. And during that time, he had taken a little something from everyone he had fucked with… and here it all was.

Here it all was.

[“Ralph.”] He looked around and saw that Lois was holding out both hands.

In one was a Panama hat with a crescent bitten from the brim. In the other was a black nylon pocket-comb, the kind you could buy in any convenience store for a buck twenty-nine. A ghostly glimmer of orange-yellow still clung to it, which didn’t surprise Ralph much.

Each time the comb’s owner had used it, it must have picked up a little of that glow from both his aura and his balloon-string, like dandruff. It also didn’t surprise him that the comb should have been with

McGovern’s hat; the last time he’d seen those two things, they’d been together. He remembered Atropos’s sarcastic grin as he swept the Panama from his head and pretended to use the comb on his own bald dome.

And then he jumped up and clicked his heels together.

Lois was pointing at an old rocking chair with a broken runner.

[“The hat was right there, on the seat. The comb was underneath.

It’s Mr. Wyzer’s, isn’t it?”] [“Yes.] She held it out to him immediately.

[“You take it. I’m not as ditzy as Bill always thought, but sometimes I lose things. And if I lost this, I’d never forgive myself.”] He took the comb, started to put it into his back pocket, then thought how easily Atropos had plucked it from that same location.

Easy as falling off a log, it had been. He put it into his front pants pocket instead, then looked back at Lois, who was gazing at McGovern’s bitten hat with the sad wonder of Hamlet looking at the skull of his old pal Yorick. When she looked up, Ralph saw tears in her eyes.

[“He loved this hat. He thought he looked very dashing and debonair when he had it on. He didn’t just look like Bill-but he thought he looked good, and that’s the important part. Wouldn’t you say so, Ralph?”] [“Yes.”] She tossed the hat back into the seat of the old rocker and turned to examine a box of what looked like rummage-sale clothes. As soon as her back was to him, Ralph squatted down, peering beneath the chair, hoping to see a splintered double gleam in the darkness. If Bill’s hat and Joe’s comb were both here, then maybe Lois’s earringsThere was nothing beneath the rocker but dust and a pink knitted baby bootee.

Should have known that’d be too easy, Ralph thought, getting to his feet again. He suddenly felt exhausted. They had found Joe’s comb with no trouble at all, and that was good, absolutely great, but Ralph was afraid it had also been a spectacular case of beginner’s luck.

They still had Lois’s earrings to worry about… and doing whatever else it was they had been sent here to do, of course. And what was that? He didn’t know, and if someone from upstairs was sending instructions, he wasn’t receiving them.

[“Lois, do you have any idea what-“] [“Shhhh!” [“What is it?

Lois is it him?”] [“No.” Be quiet, Ralph.” Be quiet and listen!”] He listened. At first he heard nothing, and then the clenching sensation-the blink-came inside his head again. This time it was very slow, very cautious. He slipped upward a little farther, as lightly as a feather lifted in a draft of warm air. He became aware of a long, 6 low groaning sound, like an endlessly creaking door, There was something familiar about it-not in the sound itself, but in its associations. It was like-a burglar alarm, or maybe a smoke-detector.

It’s telling us here it is. It’s calling us.

Lois seized his hand with fingers that were as cold as ice.

[“That’s it, Ralph-that’s what we’re looking for. Do you hear it?”] Yes, of course he did. But whatever that sound was, it had nothing to

???? do with Lois’s earrings… and without Lois’s earrings, he wasn’t

???? leaving this place.

???? [“Come on, Ralph! Come on! We have to find it!”]

????

He let her lead him deeper into the room. Atropos’s souvenirs were piled at least three feet higher than their heads in most places.

How a shrimp like him had managed this trick Ralph didn’t know -levitation, maybe-but the result was that he quickly lost all sense of direction as they twisted, turned, and occasionally seemed to double back. All he knew for sure was that low groaning sound kept getting louder in his ears; as they began to draw near its source, it became an insectile buzzing which Ralph found increasingly unpleasant. He kept expecting to round a corner and find a giant locust staring at him with dull brownish-black eyes as big as grapefruit.

Although the separate auras of the objects which filled the storage vault had faded like the scent of flower-petals pressed between the pages of a book, they were still there beneath Atropos’s stenchand at this level of perception, with all their senses exquisitely awake and attuned, it was impossible not to sense those auras and be affected by them. These mute reminders of the Random dead were both terrible and pathetic. The place was more than a museum or a packrat’s lair, Ralph realized; it was a profane church where Atropos took his own version of Communion-grief for bread, tears for wine.

Their stumbling course through the narrow zigzag rows was a gruesome, almost shattering experience. Each not-quite-aimless turn I n presented a hundred more objects Ralph wished he had never seen and would not have to remember; each voiced its own small cry of pain and bewilderment. He did not have to wonder if Lois shared his feelings-she was sobbing steadily and quietly beside him.

Here was a child’s battered Flexible Flyer sled with the knotted towrope still draped over the steering bar. The boy to whom it had belonged had died of convulsions on a crisp January day in 1953, Here was a majorette’s baton with its shaft wrapped in purpleand-white spirals of crepe-the colors of Grant Academy. She had been raped and bludgeoned to death with a rock in the fall of 1967.

Her killer, who had never been caught, had stuffed her body into a small cave where her bones-along with the bones of two other unlucky victims-still lay.

Here was the cameo brooch of a woman who had been struck by a falling brick while walking down Main Street to buy the new issue of Vogue,-if she had left her home thirty seconds earlier or later, she would have been fine.

Here was the buck knife of a man who had been killed in a hunting accident in 1937.

Here was the compass of a Boy Scout who had fallen and broken his neck while hiking on Mount Katahdin.

The sneaker of a little boy named Gage Creed, run down by a speeding tanker-truck on Route 15 in Ludlow.

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random… and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

Lois, sobbing: [“I hate him! I hate him so much."’] He knew what she meant. It was one thing to hear Clotho and Lachesis say that Atropos was also part of the big picture, that he might even serve some Higher Purpose himself, and quite another to see the faded Boston Bruins cap of a little boy who had fallen into an overgrown cellar-hole and died in the dark, died in agony, died with no voice left after six hours spent screaming for his mother.

Ralph reached out and briefly touched the cap. Its owner’s name had been Billy Weatherbee. His final thought had been of ice cream.

Ralph’s hand tightened over Lois’s.

[“Ralph, what is it? I can hear you thinking-I’m sure I can-but it’s like listening to someone whisper under his breath.”] [“I was thinking that I want to bust that little bastard’s chops for him, Lois.

Maybe we could teach him what it’s like to lie awake at night.

What do you think?” Her grip on his hand tightened. She nodded.

They reached a place where the narrow corridor they’d been following branched into diverging paths. That low, steady buzz was coming from the left hand one, and not very far up it, either, by the sound.

It was now impossible for them to walk side by side, and as they worked their way toward the end, the passage grew narrower still.

Ralph was finally obliged to begin sidling along.

The reddish exudate Atropos left behind was very thick here, dripping down the jumbled stacks of souvenirs and making little puddles on the dirt floor. Lois was holding his hand with painful tightness now, but Ralph didn’t complain.

[“It’s like the Civic Center, Ralph-he spends a lot of time here.”] Ralph nodded. The question was, what did Mr. A. come donx,n this aisle to commune with? They were coming to the end now, it was blocked by a solid wall of junk, and he still couldn’t see what was making that buzzing sound. It was now starting to drive him crazy; it was like having a horsefly trapped in the middle Of Your head. As they approached the end of the passage, he became more and more sure that what they were looking for was on the other side of the wall of junk which blocked it-they would either have to retrace their steps and try to find a way around, or break through.

Either choice might consume more time than they could afford.

Ralph felt nibbles of desperation at the back of his mind.

But the corridor did not dead-end; on the left there was a crawlspace beneath a dining-room table piled high with dishes and stacks of green paper and…

Green paper? No, not quite. Stacks of bills. Tens, twenties, and fifties were piled up in random profusion on the dishes. There was a choke of hundreds in a cracked gravy-boat, and a rolled-up five-hundred-dollar bill poking drunkenly out of a dusty wineglass.

[“Ralph! My God, it’s a fortune!”]

She wasn’t looking at the table but at the other wall of the passageway. The last five feet had been constructed of banded gray-green bricks of currency. They were in an alleyway which was literally made of money, and Ralph realized he could now answer another of the questions that had been troubling him: where Ed had been getting his dough. Atropos was rolling in it… but Ralph had an idea that the little bald-headed sonofabitch still had trouble getting dates.

He bent down a little to get a better look into the crawlspace underneath the table. There appeared to be yet another chamber on the other side, this one very small. A slow red glow waxed and waned in there like the beating of a heart. It cast uneasy pulses of light on their shoes.

Ralph pointed, then looked at Lois. She nodded. He dropped to his knees and crawled beneath the money-laden table, and into the shrine Atropos had created around the thing which lay in the middle of the floor. It was what they had been sent to find, he hadn’t a single doubt about it, but he still had no idea what it was. The object, not much bigger than the sort of marbles children call croakers, was wrapped in a deathbag as impenetrable as the center of a black hole.

Oh, great-lovely. Now what?

[“Ralph.” Do you hear someting? It’s very faint.

He looked at her dubiously, then glanced around. He had already come to hate this cramped space, and although he was not claustrophobic by nature, he now felt a panicky desire to get away squeezing into his thoughts. A very distinct voice spoke up in his head. It’s not j I just what I want, Ralph,-it’s what I need. I’ll do my best to hang in with you, hut if you don’t finish whatever the hell it is you’re supposed to be doing in here soon, it won’t make any difference what either of us want-I’m just going to take over and run like hell.

The controlled terror in that voice didn’t surprise him, because this really was a horrible place-not a room at all but the bottom of a deep shaft whose circular walls were constructed of rickrack and stolen goods: toasters, footstools, clock-radios, cameras, books, crates, shoes, rakes. Dangling almost right in front of Ralph’s eyes was a battered saxophone on a frayed strap with the word JAKE printed on it in dust-dulled rhinestones. Ralph reached out to grab it, wanting to get the damned thing out of his face. Then he imagined the removal of this one object starting a landslide that would bring the walls down on them, burying them alive. He pulled his hand back. At the same time he opened his mind and senses as fully as he could. For a moment he thought he did hear something-a faint sigh, like the whisper of the ocean in a seashell-but then it was gone.

[“If there are voices in here, I can’t hear them, Lois-that damned thing is drowning them out.”] He pointed at the object in the middle of the circle-black beyond any previously held conception of black, a deathbag which was the apotheosis of all deathbags. But Lois was shaking her head.

[“No, not drowning them out. Sucking them dry. “I She looked at the screaming black thing with horror and loathing.

[“That thing is sucking the life out of all the stuff piled up around it… and it’s trying to suck the life out of us, too.”] Yes, of course it was. Now that Lois had actually said it out loud, Ralph could feel the deathbag-or the object inside it-pulling at something far down in his head, yanking at it, twisting at it, shoving at it…

. trying to pull it out like a tooth from its pink socket of gum.

Trying to suck the life out of them? Close, but no cigar. Ralph didn’t think it was their lives the thing inside the deathbag wanted, nor their souls… at least, not exactly. It was their life-force it wanted. Their ka.

Lois’s eyes widened as she picked up this thought… and then they shifted to a place just beyond his right shoulder. She leaned forward on her knees and reached out.

[“Lois, I wouldn’t do that-you could bring the whole place dow around our-”] Too late. She yanked something free, looked at it with horrified understanding, and then held it out to him.

[“It’s still alive-everything that’s ’ in here is still alive. I don’t kno how that can be but somehow it is. But they’re faint. What she was holding out to him was a small white sneaker that belonged to a woman or a child. As Ralph took it, he heard it singing softly in a distant voice. The sound was as lonely as November wind are they so faint?” on an overcast afternoon, but incredibly sweet, as well-an antidote to the endless bray of the black thing on the floor.

And it was a voice he knew. He was sure it was.

There was a maroon splatter on the sneaker’s toe. Ralph at first thought it was chocolate milk, then recognized it for what it really was: dried blood. In that instant he was outside the Red Apple again, grabbing Nat before Helen could drop her. He remembered how Helen’s feet had tangled together; how she had stumbled backward, leaning against the Red Apple’s door like a drunk against a lamppost, holding out her hands to him. Give me my bay-ee… gih me Natalie.

He knew the voice because it was Helen’s voice. This sneaker had been on her foot that day, and the drops of blood on the toe had come either from Helen’s smashed nose or from Helen’s lacerated cheek.

It sang and sang, its voice not quite buried beneath the buzz of the thing in the deathbag, and now that Ralph’s ears-or whatever passed for ears in the world of auras-were all the way open, he could hear all the other voices of all the other.objects. They sang like a lost choir.

Alive. Singing.

They could sing, all the things lining these walls could sing, because their owners could still sing.

Their owners were still alive.

Ralph looked up again, this time noting that while some of the objects he saw were old-the battered alto sax, for instance-a great many of them were new; there were no wheels from Gay Nineties bicycles in this little alcove. He saw three clock-radios, all of them digital.

A shaving kit that looked as if it had hardly been used. A lipstick that still had a Rite Aid pricetag on it.

[“Lois, Atropos has taken this stuff from the people who’ll be at the Civic Center tonight. Hasn’t he?”] [“Yes. I’m sure that’s right.”] He pointed at the black cocoon shrieking on the floor, almost drowning out the songs all around it… drowning them out as it fed on them.

[“And whatever’s inside that deathbag has something to do with what Clotho and Lachesis called the master-cord. It’s the thing that ties all these different objects-all these different lives-together.”] [“That makes them ka-tet. Yes.”] Ralph handed the sneaker back to Lois.

[“This goes with us when we go. It’s Helen’s.”] [“I know.”] Lois looked at it for a moment, then did something Ralph thought extremely clever: pulled out two eyelets’ worth of lacing and tied the sneaker to her left wrist like a bracelet.

He crawled closer to the small deathbag and then bent over it.

Getting close was hard, and staying close was harder-it was like placing your ear next to the motor-housing of a power drill shrieking at full volume or looking into a bright light without squinting. This time there seemed to be actual words buried within that buzzing, the same ones they’d heard as they approached the edge of the deathbag around the Civic Center: Geddout. Fucoff Beedit.

Ralph placed his hands over his ears for a moment, but of course that did no good. The sounds weren’t coming from the outside, not really. He let his hands drop again and looked at Lois.

[“What do you think? Any ideas on what we should do next?”] He didn’t know exactly what he had expected of her, but it wasn’t the quick, positive response he got.

[“Cut it open and take out what’s inside-and do it right away.

That thing’s dangerous. Also, it might be calling Atropos, have you thought of that? Tattling just like the hen tattled on jack in the story about the magic beanstalk.” Ralph actually had considered this possibility, although not in such vivid terms. All right, he thought.

Cut open the bag and take the prize. Except just how are we supposed to do that?

He remembered the bolt of lightning he’d sent at Atropos when the little bald creep had been trying to lure Rosalie across the street.

A good trick, but something like that might do more harm than good here; what if he vaporized the thing they were supposed to take?

“I don’t think you can do that.

All right, fair enough, as a matter of fact he didn’t think he could do it, either… but when you were surrounded by the possessions of people who could all be dead when the sun came up tomorrow, taking chances seemed like a very bad idea. An insane idea.

What I need isn’t lightning but a nice sharp pair of scissors, like the ones Clotho and Lachesis use toHe stared at Lois, startled by the clarity of the image.

[“I don’t know what you just thought of, but hurry up and do it, whatever it is.”] Ralph looked down at his right hand-a hand from which the wrinkles and the first twists of arthritis had now disappeared, a hand which lay inside a bright blue corona of light.

Feeling a little foolish, he folded his last two fingers against his palm and extended the first two, thinking of a game they’d played as kids-rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock.

Be scissors, he thought. I need a pair of scissors. Help me out.

Nothing. He glanced at Lois and saw her looking at him with a serene calm which was somehow terrifying. Oh Lois, if you only knew, he thought, and then swept that out of his mind. Because he had felt something, hadn’t he? Yes. Something.

This time he didn’t make words in his mind but a Picture: not the scissors Clotho had used to send on Jimmy V but the stainless-steel I shears from his mother’s sewing basket-long, slim blades tapering to a point almost as sharp as the tip of a knife. As he deepened h, is concentration, he could even see the two tiny words engraved on the metal just south of the pivot-point: SHEFFIELD STEEL.

And now he could feel that thing in his mind again, not a blink this time but a muscle-an immensely powerful one-slowly flexing. He looked fixedly down at his fingers and made the shears in his mind open and close. As they did, he slowly opened and closed his fingers, creating a V that widened and narrowed.

Now he could feel the energy he had taken from Nirvana Boy and the bum out at the trainyards, first gathering in his head and then moving down his right arm to his fingers like a cramp.

The aura surrounding the extended first and second fingers of his right hand began to thicken… and to lengthen. To take on the slim shape of blades. Ralph waited until they had extended themselves about five inches out from his nails and then worked his fingers back and forth again. The blades opened and closed.

[“Go, Ralph.” Do it!”] Yes-he couldn’t afford to wait around and run experiments. He felt like a car battery that had been called on to crank a motor much too big for it. He could feel all his energy-the stuff he’d taken as well as his own-running down his right arm and into those blades.

It wouldn’t last long.

He leaned forward, fingers pressed together in a pointing gesture, and sank the tip of the scissors into the deathbag. He had been concentrating so hard on first creating and then maintaining the scissors that he had stopped hearing that steady, hoarse buzz-at least with his conscious mind-but when the scissors-point sank into its black skin, the deathbag suddenly cycled up to a new, shrieking pitch of mingled pain and alarm. Ralph saw dribbles of thick, dark goo running out of the bag and across the floor. It looked like diseased snot. At the same time he felt the power-drain inside him roughly double. He could see it, he realized: his own aura running down his right arm and across the back of his hand in slow, peristaltic waves. And he could sense it dimming around the rest of his body as its essential protection of him thinned out.

[“Hurry, Ralph! Hurry!”] He made a tremendous effort and tore his fingers open. The shimmering blue blades also opened, making a small slit in the black egg.

It screamed, and two bright, jagged flashes of red light raced across its surface. Ralph brought his fingers together and watched the shears growing from their tips snap shut, cutting through dense black stuff that was part shell and part flesh. He cried out. It was not pain he felt, exactly, but a sense of awful weariness. This is what bleeding to death must feel like, he thought.

Something inside the bag gleamed bright gold.

Ralph gathered all his strength and attempted to open his fingers for another cut. At first he didn’t think he was going to be able to do it-they felt as if they had been stuck -together with Krazy Glue-and then they drew apart, widening the slit. Now he could almost see the object inside, something small and round and shiny.

Really only one thing it can be, he thought, and then his heart suddenly fluttered in his chest. The blue blades flickered.

[“Lois.” Help me!”] She seized his wrist. Ralph felt strength roar into him in big fresh volts. He watched, bemused, as the shears solidified again. Now only one of the blades was blue. The other was a pearly gray.

Lois, screaming inside his head: [“Cut it. Cut it now!”] He brought his fingers together again, and this time the blades cut the deathbag wide open. It uttered one last wavering shriek, turned entirely red, and disappeared. The shears growing from the tips of Ralph’s fingers flickered out of existence. He closed his eyes for a moment, suddenly aware that big warm drops of sweat were running down his cheeks like tears. In the dark field behind his eyelids he could see crazy afterimages that looked like dancing scissors-blades.

[“Lois? Are you okay?”] [“Yes… but drained. I don’t have the slightest idea bott, I’m supposed to get back to those stairs under the tree, let alone climb them. I’m not sure I can even stand UP.”] Ralph opened his eyes, put his hands on his thighs above the knees, and leaned forward again. Lying on the floor where the deathbag had been was a man’s wedding ring. He could easily read what had been engraved on the wide inner curve: He-ED 8-5-87.

Helen Deepneau and Edward Deepneau-Married on August 5th, 1987.

It was what they had come for. It was Ed’s token. All that remained now was to pick it up… slip it into the watchpocket of his pants… find Lois’s earrings… and get the hell out of here.

As he reached for the ring, a flicker of verse slipped through his mind-not Stephen Dobyns this time but J. R. R. Tolkien, who had invented the hobbits Ralph had last thought of in Lois’s cozy, picture-filled living room. It had been almost thirty years since he had read Tolkien’s story of Frodo and Gandalf and Sauron, the Dark Lord-a story which contained a token very similar to this one, now that he thought about it-but the lines were momentarily as clear as the scissors-blades had been only moments before: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

I won’t be able to pick it up, he thought. It will be as tightly bound to the wheel of ka as Lois and I are, and I won’t be able to pick it up. Either that, or it will be like grasping a live high-tension wire, and I’ll be dead before I know it’s happening.

Except he didn’t really believe either of those things was going to happen. If the ring was not his for the taking, why had it been protected by the deathbag? If the ring was not his for the taking, why had the forces which stood behind Clotho and Lachesis-and Dorrance, he couldn’t forget Dorrance-set him and Lois upon this journey in the first place?

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, Ralph thought, and closed his fingers around Ed’s wedding ring. For a moment he felt a deep, glassy pain in his hand and wrist and forearm; at the same moment, the softly singing voices of the objects which Atropos had hoarded here rose in a great, harmonic shout.

Ralph made a sound-perhaps a scream, perhaps only a moanand lifted the ring up, clenched tightly in his right hand. A sense of victory sang in his veins like wine, or like[“Ralph.

He looked at her, but Lois was looking down at where Ed’s ring had been, her eyes dark with a mixture of fear and confusion.

Where Ed’s ring had been; where Ed’s ring still was. It lay exactly as it had lain, a glimmering gold circlet with HD-ED 8-5-87 inscribed around the inner arc.

Ralph felt an instant of dizzy disorientation and controlled it with an effort. He opened his hand, half-expecting the ring to be gone in spite of what his senses told him, but it still lay in the center of his palm, neatly enclosed within the fork where his loveline and his lifeline diverged, glimmering in the baleful red light of this nasty place. HD-ED 8-5-87.

The two rings were identical.

One in his hand; one on the floor; absolutely no difference. At least none that Ralph could see.

Lois reached for the ring which had replaced the one Ralph had picked up, hesitated, then grasped it. As they watched, ghost-gold glowed just above the chamber’s floor, then solidified into a third wedding band. Like the other two, HD-ED 8-5-87 was inscribed on the inner curve.

Ralph found himself thinking of yet another story-not Tolkien’s long tale of the Ring, but a story by Dr. Seuss which he had read one of Carolyn’s sister’s kids back in the fifties. That was a long time ago, but he had never completely forgotten the story, which had been richer and darker than Dr. Seuss’s usual jingle-jangle nonsense about rats and bats and troublesome cats. It was called The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, and Ralph supposed it really wasn’t any wonder that the story had come to mind now.

Poor Bartholomew was a country hayseed who had the bad luck to be in the big city when the King happened by. You were supposed to take your hat off in the presence of that august personage, and Bartholomew had certainly tried, but without any luck; each time he took his hat off, another one, identical to the last, appeared beneath it.

[“Ralph, what’s happening? What does it mean?”]

a He shook his head without answering, eyes moving from the ring I on his palm to the one in Lois’s hand to the one on the floor, around and around and around. Three rings, all of them identical, just like the hats Bartholomew Cubbins had kept trying to take off. The poor kid had gone on trying to make his manners to the King, Ralph remembered, even as the executioner had led him up a curving flight of stairs to the place where he would be beheaded for the crime of disrespect…

Except that wasn’t right, because after awhile the hats on poor Bartholomew’s head did begin to change, to grow ever more fabulous and rococo.

And are the rings the same, Ralph? Are you sure?

No, he guessed he wasn’t. When he’d picked up the first one, he had felt a deep, momentary ache spread up his arm like rheumatism, but Lois had shown no signs of pain when she picked up the second one.

And the voices-I didn’t hear them shout when she picked up the one she has.

Ralph leaned forward and grasped the third ring. There was no jolt of pain and no shout from the objects which formed the walls of the room-they just kept singing softly. Meanwhile, a fourth ring materialized where the other three had. been, materialized exactly like another hat on the head of hapless Bartholomew Cubbins, but Ralph barely glanced at it. He looked at the first ring, lying between the fork of his lifeline and loveline on the palm of his right hand.

One Ring to rule them all, he thought. One Ring to hind them.

And I think that’s you, beautiful. I think the others are just clever counterfeits.

And maybe there was a way to check that. Ralph held the two rings to his ears. The one in his left hand was silent; the one in his right, the one that had been inside the deathbag when he cut it open, gave off a faint, chilling echo of the deathbag’s final scream.

The one in his right hand was alive.

[“Ralph?”

Her hand on his arm, cold and urgent. Ralph looked at her, then tossed the ring in his left hand away. He held the other up and gazed at Lois’s strained, strangely young face through it, as if through a telescope.

[“This is the one. The others are just place-holders, I think-like-e zeros in a big, complicated math problem.”]

[“You mean they don’t matter?”]

He hesitated, unsure of how to reply… because they did matter, that was the thing. He just didn’t know how to put his intuitive understanding of this into words. As long as the false rings kept appearing in this nasty little room, like hats on the head of Bartholomew Cubbins, the future represented by the deathbag around the Civic Center remained the one true future. But the first ring, the one which Atropos had actually stolen off Ed’s finger (perhaps as he lay sleeping next to Helen in the little Cape Cod house which was now standing empty), could change all that.

The replicas were tokens which preserved the shape of ka just as spokes radiating out from a hub preserved the shape of a wheel. The original, however…

Ralph thought the original was the hub: One Ring to bind them.

He gripped the gold band tightly, feeling its hard curve bite into his palm and fingers. Then he slipped it into his watchpocket.

There was one thing about ka they didn’t tell us, he thought.

It’s slippery. Slippery as some nasty oldfish that won’t come off the hook but just keeps flopping around in your hand.

And it was like climbing a sand dune, too-you slid one step back for every two you managed to lunge forward. They had gone out to High Ridge and accomplished something-just what, Ralph didn’t know, but Dorrance had assured them it was true; according to him, they had fulfilled their task there. Now they had come here and taken Ed’s token, but it still wasn’t enough, and why? Because k,i was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.

But most of all, perhaps, ka was like a ring.

Like a wedding ring.

He suddenly understood what all the talk on the hospital roof and all of Dorrance’s efforts to explain hadn’t been able to convey: Ed’s undesignated status, coupled with Atropos’s discovery of the poor, confused man, had conveyed a tremendous power upon him. A door had opened, and a demon called the Crimson King had strolled through, one that was stronger than Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, any of them. And it didn’t intend to be stopped by a Derry Old Crock like Ralph Roberts.

E “Ralph?” I

[“One Ring to rule them all, Lois-one Ring to find them.

[“What are ’you talking about? What do you mean?”] He patted his watchpocket, feeling the small yet momentous bulge that was Ed’s ring.

Then he reached out and grasped her shoulders.

[“The replacements-the false rings-are spokes, but this one is the hub. Take away the hub, and a wheel can’t turn.

[“Are you sure?”] He was sure, all right. He just didn’t know how to do it.

[“Yes. Now come on-let’s get out of here while we still can.”] Ralph sent her beneath the overloaded dining-room table first, then dropped to his knees and followed. He paused halfway under and looked back over his shoulder. He saw a strange and terrible thing: although the buzzing sound had not returned, the deathbag was re-knitting itself around the replacement wedding ring. Already the bright gold had dimmed to a ghostly circlet.

He stared at it for several seconds, fascinated, almost hypnotized, then tore his eyes away with an effort and began to crawl after LOIS.

Ralph was afraid they would lose valuable time trying to navigate their way back through the maze of corridors which crisscrossed Atropos’s storehouse of keepsakes, but that turned out not to be a problem. Their own footprints, fading but still visible, were there to guide them.

He began to feel a little stronger as they put the terrible little room behind them, but Lois was now flagging badly. By the time they reached the archway between the storehouse and Atropos’s filthy apartment, she was leaning on him. He asked if she was all right.

Lois managed a shrug and a small, tired smile.

[“Most of my problem is being in this place. It doesn’t really matter how high up we go, it’s still foul and I hate it. Once I get some fresh air, I think I’ll be fine. Honestly.”],n Ralph hoped she was right. As he ducked under the arch ’ to Atropos’s apartment, he was trying to think of a pretext by which he could send Lois on ahead of him. That would give him an opportunity to give the place a quick search. If that didn’t turn up the ing earrings, he would have to assume that Atropos was still wearing them.

He noticed her slip was hanging below the hem of her dress again, opened his mouth to tell her, and saw a flicker of movement from the tail of his left eye. He realized they had been a lot less cautious on the return trip-partly because they were worn out-and now they might have to pay a high price for dropping their guard.

[“Lois, look out!”] Too late. Ralph felt her arm jerked away as the snarling creature in the dirty tunic seized her about the waist and dragged her backward.

Atropos’s head only came to her armpit, but that was enough to allow him to hold his rusty blade over her. When Ralph made an instinctive lunge at him, Atropos brought the straight-razor down until it was touching the pearl-gray cord which drifted up from the crown of her head. He bared his teeth at Ralph in an unspeakable grin.

[Not another step, Shorts… not one!] Well, he didn’t have to worry about Lois’s errant earrings anymore, at least. They glittered a murky, pinkish-red against the tiny lobes of Atropos’s ears. It was more the sight of them than the shout that stopped Ralph where he was.

The scalpel drew back a little… but only a little.

[Now, Shorts-you took something of mine just now, didn’t you?

Don’t try to deny it,-I know. And now you’re going to give it back.] The scalpel returned to Lois’s balloon-string; Atropos caressed it with the flat of the blade.

[You give it back or this bitch is going to die here in front of you-you can stand there and watch the sack turn black. So what do you say, Short Stuff? Hand it over.]

CHAPTER 26

Atropos’s smile shone out, full of repulsive triumph, and full ofFull of fear. He caught You flat-footed, he’s got his scalpel to Lois’s balloon-string and his ban around her throat, but He’s still scared to death. Why?

[Come on! Quit wasting time, shithead. Give me the ring!] Ralph reached slowly into his watchpocket and grasped the ring, wondering why Atropos hadn’t killed Lois outright. Surely he didn’t intend to let her-to let either of them-go.

He’s afraid I might hammer him with another one of those telepathic karate-chops. And that’s just for starters. I think He’s also afraid of screwing up. Afraid of the thing-the entity-that’s running him.

Afraid of the Crimson King. You’re scare of the boss, aren’t you, “/-l filthy little friend?

He held the ring up between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and peeked through it again.

[“Come and get it, why don’t you? Don’t be shy.”

Atropos’s face knotted with rage. The expression twisted his nervy, gloating grin into a cartoon scowl.

[I’ll kill her, Shorts, didn’t you hear me? Is that what you want?] Ralph slowly and deliberately raised his left hand. He made a sawing gesture in the air with it, and was gratified to see Atropos wince when the edge of the palm turned momentarily toward him.

[“If you even nick her with that blade, I’ll hit you so hard you’ll need a pocket-knife to dig your teeth out of the wall. And that’s a promise.” [just give me the ring, Shorts.] They can’t lie, Ralph thought suddenly. I can’t remember if I was actually told that or just intuited it, but I’m sure it’s true-they can’t lie. I can, though.

[“I’ll tell you what, Mr. A. -promise me it’s a push and I’ll give it to you.”] Atropos gave him a narrow look in which doubt and suspicion were mingled.

[A push? What do you mean, a push?] [“Ralph, no."’] He glanced at her, then back at Atropos. He raised his left hand to scratch his cheek without considering how the gesture would look to the little bald doctor. The scalpel was pressed against Lois’s balloon-string again in a trice, this time hard enough to dent it and create a dark splotch at the point of contact. It looked like a bloodblister. Great beads of sweat stood out on Atropos’s brow, and when he spoke, his voice was a panicky shriek.

[Don’t you go throwing any of your cut-rate thunderbolts at me!

The woman dies if you do.”] Ralph lowered his hand in a hurry, then put both of them behind his back like a penitent child. Ed’s wedding ring was still folded into his hand, and now, almost without thinking about it, he tucked it into the back pocket of his pants. It was only then that he was completely sure he didn’t mean to give up the ring.

Even if it cost Lois her life-both of them their lives-he didn’t mean to give them the ring.

But perhaps it wouldn’t come to that.

“A push means we both walk away, Mr. A.-I give you the ring, you give me back my lady-friend. All you have to do is promise not to hurt her. What do you say?”] [“No, Ralph, no."’] What Atropos said was nothing. His eyes glittered at Ralph with leary, hateful impotence.

If ever in his long life he’d wished for the ability to lie, Ralph supposed he must be wishing for it at that moment. All it would take was Okay, it’s a deal, and the ball would be right back in Ralph’s court. But he couldn’t say that, because he couldn’t do that.

He knows he’s in a nasty corner, Ralph thought. It really doesn’t matter if he cuts her cord or lets her go-he must think I mean to flash-fry him in either case, and he’s not wrong.

How much damage can you actually do to him, sweetheart? Carolyn asked doubtfully from the place she kept inside his head. How much juice have you got left after cutting open the deathbag around the wedding ring?

The answer, unfortunately was not much. Maybe enough to singe his bald head, but probably not enough to saut amp; it. And Then Ralph saw something he didn’t like: the edge-of-panic quality in Atropos’s grin was being replaced by cautious confidence. And he felt those mad eyes crawling avidly over him-his face, his body, but mostly his aura.

Ralph had a sudden clear vision of a mechanic using a dipstick to find out how much oil was left in an automobile crankcase.

Do something, Lois begged him with her eyes. Please, Ralph.

But he didn’t know what to do. He was completely out of ideas Atropos’s smile took on a gloating, nasty edge.

[You’re unloaded, Short Stuff, ain’tcha? Gee, that’s sad.] [“Hurt her and you’ll find out, you sawed-off piece of shit.

Atropos’s grin went on widening.

[You couldn’t give a rat a hotfoot with what you’ve got left. Why don’t you just be a good boy and hand over the ring before I-”] [“Oh, you bastard."’] It was Lois. She was no longer looking at Ralph; she was looking across the room, into the mirror where Atropos no doubt checked the fit and tilt of his latest fashion accents-Rosalie’s bandanna, say, or Bill McGovern’s Panama. Her eyes were wide and full of fury, and Ralph knew exactly what she was seeing.

[“Those are MINE, you rotten little thief!” She shoved violently backward, using her greater weight to slam Atropos against the side of the archway. A startled grunt escaped him. The hand holding the scalpel flew upward; the blade dug dry scales of dirt from the wall.

Lois turned toward him, her face knotted in an angry snarl-a look so un-Our Lois that McGovern might have fainted in shock at the sight of it. Her hands clawed at the sides of his face, reaching for his ears.

One of her fingers dug into, his cheek. Atropos yapped like a dog whose paw has been stepped on, then grabbed her by the waist again and whirled her back around.

He turned the scalpel’s blade inward, getting ready to slash.

Ralph shook the forefinger of his right hand at it in a scolding gesture. A flash of light so pallid it was almost invisible shot out from the nail and struck the scalpel’s tip, momentarily knocking it away from Lois’s balloon-string. And that was all there was; Ralph sensed that his personal armory was now empty.

Atropos bared his teeth at him from over Lois’s shoulder as she bucked and twisted in his arms. She was not trying to get away, either; she was trying to turn and attack him. Her feet flailed out as she threw all her weight against him again, trying to squash him against the wall behind them, and without having the slightest idea of what he meant to do, Ralph lunged forward and dropped to his knees with his hands out. He looked like a manic suitor making strenuous marriage proposal, and one of Lois’s thrashing feet came close to kicking him in the throat. He snatched at the hem of her slip and it came free in a slithery little rush of pink nylon. Meanwhile, Lois was still yelling.

[“Miserable little thief! Here’s something for you! How do -you like it?”] Atropos uttered a squeal of pain, and when Ralph looked up, he saw that Lois had buried her teeth in his right wrist. His left hand, the one holding the scalpel, flailed blindly at her balloon-string, missing it by less than an inch. Ralph sprang to his feet and, still with no clear idea of what he was doing, pulled Lois’s pink half-slip over Atropos’s slashing hand… and his head.

[“Get away from him, Lois! Run!”] She spat out the small white hand and stumbled toward the barrelhead table in the center of the room, wiping Atropos’s blood from her mouth with atavistic loathing.

… but the dominant expression on her face was still one of anger.

Atropos himself, for the moment just a bawling, writhing shape under the pink half-slip, groped after her with his free hand, Ralph slapped it away and shoved him back against the side of the archway.

[“No you don’t, my friend-not at all.”] [Let me go! Let me go, you bastard You can’t do this!] And the weirdest thing of all is that he really believes that, Ralph thought. He’s had it his own way for so long that He’s completely forgotten what Short-Timers can do.

I can fix that, I think. Ralph remembered how Atropos had slashed Rosalie’s balloon string after the dog had licked his hand, and his hatred for this strutting, leering, complacently insane creature suddenly exploded in his head like a rotten-green roadflare. He grabbed one side of Lois’s slip and twisted his fist twice around it in a savage winding up gesture, pung it so tight that Atropos’s features stood out in a pink nylon deathmask.

Then, just as the blade of the scalpel popped through the fabric and began to cut it open, Ralph whirled Atropos around, using the slip as a man might use a sling to whirl a stone, and sent him flying across the archway. The damage might have been less if Atropos had fallen, but he didn’t; his feet knocked against each other but never quite crossed. He hit the rock facing of the archway with a thud, voiced a muffled scream of pain, and dropped to his knees. Spots of blood bloomed on Lois’s half-slip like flower-petals. The scalpel had disappeared back through the slit it had made in the cloth, Ralph sprang after Atropos just as it reappeared and lengthened the original cut, freeing the bald creature’s staring, bewildered face. His nose was bleeding; so were his forehead and right temple. Before he could begin to get up, Ralph grabbed the slippery pink bulges that were his shoulders.

[Stop it I’m warning you, Shorts! I’ll make you sorry you were ever bo-] Ralph ignored this pointless bluster and slammed Atropos forward, hard. The midget’s arms were still tangled in the slip and he caught the floor with nothing but face. His shriek was part amazement, mostly pain. Incredibly, Ralph felt Lois in the back of his mind, telling him that enough was enough, not to really hurt himnot to hurt the pint-sized psychotic who had just tried to kill her.

Atropos attempted to roll over. Ralph kneedropped him in the middle of the back and knocked him flat again.

[“Don’t move, friend. I like you just the way you are.”] He looked up at Lois, and saw that her amazing fury had departed as suddenly as it had come-like some freak weather phenomenon.

A tornado, perhaps, that touches down out of a clear blue sky, rips the top off a barn, and then disappears again. She was pointing at Atropos.

The nasty little thief has got my earrings, Ralph. [“He’s got my earrings. He’s wearing them!”] [“I know. I saw.”] One snarling side of Atropos’s face poked out of the slit in the nylon like the face of the world’s ugliest baby at the moment of its birth. Ralph could feel the muscles of the small creature’s back trembling beneath his pinioning knee, and he remembered an old proverb he’d read somewhere.

… maybe at the end of a Salad a teabag string: He who takes a tiger by the tail dare not let go. Now, in this unlikely den beneath the ground and feeling like a character in a fairy-tale concocted by a lunatic, Ralph thought he had achieved a sort of divine understanding of that proverb. Through a combination of Lois’s sudden rage and plain old shitass luck, he had wound up at least temporarily on top of the scuzzy little fuck-The questionand a fairly pressing one, at that-was what to do next.

The hand holding the scalpel lashed up, but the stroke was both weak and blind. Ralph avoided it easily. Sobbing and cursing, not afraid even now but clearly hurting and all but consumed with impotent rage, Atropos flailed up at him again.

[Let me up, you overgrown Short-Time bastard! Silly old white-hair, ugly wrinkle-face!] [“I look a little better than that just lately, my friend. Haven’t you noticed! [Asshole Stupid Short-Time asshole. I’ll make you sorry I’ll make you so sorry.”] Well, Ralph thought, at least he’s not begging. I almost would have expected him to start begging by now.

Atropos continued to flail weakly with the scalpel. Ralph ducked two or three of these strokes easily, then slid one hand toward the throat of the creature lying beneath him.

[“Ralph.” No.” Don’t."’] He shook his head at her, not knowing if he was expressing annoyance, reassurance, or both. He touched Atropos’s skin, and felt him shudder. The bald doc uttered a choked cry of revulsion, and Ralph knew exactly how he felt. It was sickening for both of them, but he didn’t take his hand away. Instead, he tried to close it around Atropos’s throat and wasn’t very surprised to find he couldn’t do it.

Still, hadn’t Lachesis said that only Short-Timers could oppose the will of Atropos? He thought so. The question was, how?

Beneath him, Atropos laughed nastily.

[“Please, Ralph. Please just get my earrings and we’ll go.”] Atropos rolled his eyes in her direction, then looked back at Ralph.

[Did you think you could kill me, Shorts? Well, guess again.] No, he hadn’t thought it, but he’d needed to find out for sure.

[Life’s a bitch, ain’t it, Shorts? Why don’t you just give me back the ring? I’m going to get it sooner or later, I guarantee you that.] “Fuck you, you little weasel.”] Tough talk, but talk was cheap.

The most pressing question was still unanswered: What the hell was he supposed to do with this monster?

Whatever it is, you won’t be able to do it with Lois standing there and watching you, a cold voice that was not quite Carolyn’s advised him. She was fine when she was pissed off, but she’s not pissed off now. She’s too tenderhearted for whatever’s going to happen next, Ralph. You have to get her out of here.

He turned toward Lois. Her eyes were half-closed. She looked ready to crumple at the base of the archway and go to sleep.

[“Lois, I want you to get out of here. Right now. Go up the stairs and wait for me under the tree.] The scalpel flashed up again, and this time it almost sliced off the end of Ralph’s nose. He recoiled, and his knee slid on nylon. Atropos gave a mighty heave and came within a whisker of rolling out from under. At the last second, Ralph shoved the little man’s head flat again with the heel of his hand-that, it seemed, was allowed by the rules-and replanted his knee.

[owww! Owww! Stop it! You’re killing me!]

Ralph ignored him and looked at Lois.

[“Go on, Lois! Go on up! I’ll be there as soon as I can."’]

[“I don’t think I can climb out on my own-I’m too tired.”] [“Yes, you can. You have to, and you can.”] Atropos subsided again-for the moment, at least-a small, gasping engine under Ralph’s knee. But that was a long way from being enough. Time was passing topside, passing fast, and right now time was the real enemy, not Ed Deepneau.

[“My earrings-“I [“I’ll bring them when I come’ Lois. I promise.

Making what looked like a supreme effort, Lois straightened and looked solemnly at Ralph.

[“You shouldn’t hurt him, Ralph, not if you don’t have to. It’s not Christian. “I No, not at all Christian, a capering little creature deep inside Ralph’s head agreed. Not Christian, but still…

I can’t wait to get started.

[“Go on, Lois. Leave him to me.”] She looked at him sadly.

[“It wouldn’t do me any good to ask you to promise not to hurt him, would it?”]

He thought about it, then shook his head.

[“No, but I’ll promise you this much: it won’t be any harder than he makes it. Is that good enough?”]

Lois considered carefully, then nodded.

[“Yes, I think that will do. And maybe I can make it back up, if I take it slow and easy… but what about you?”] [“I’ll be fine. Wait for me under the tree.

[“All right, Ralph.”] He watched her cross the filthy room, Helen’s sneaker bobbing from one wrist. She ducked beneath the arch between the apartment and the stairway and slowly started up. Ralph waited until her feet had disappeared from view, then turned back to Atropos.

[“Well, Chumley, here we are-two oldpals reunited. What should we do? Should we play? You like to play, don’t you?”] Atropos immediately renewed his struggles, simultaneously waving his scalpel above his head and trying to buck Ralph off.

[Quit it! Get your hands off me, you old faggot.”

Atropos thrashed so wildly that kneeling on him now was like kneeling on a snake. Ralph ignored the yelling, the bucking, and the blindly waving scalpel. Atropos’s whole head was now sticking out of the slip, which made things a lot easier. He grabbed Lois’s earrings and tugged.

They stayed where they were but earned him a hearty, pained scream from Atropos. Ralph leaned forward, smiling a little.

[“For pierced ears, aren’t they, pal?”] [Yes.” Yes, goddammit.”

[“To quote you, life’s a bitch, ain’t it?”] Ralph seized the earrings again and ripped them free. There were two small fans of blood as the minute holes in the lobes of Atropos’s ears became flaps.

The bald man’s scream was as sharp as a new drillbit. Ralph felt an uneasy mixture of pity and contempt.

Little bastard’s used to burtz’ g other people, but not being hurt himself Maybe he’s never been hurt himself Well say hello to how the other half lives, pal.

[Stop it. Stop it.” You can’t do this to me.”

[“I’ve got a ewsflash for you, buddy… I am doing it. Now why don’t you Just get with the program?”] [What do you think you’re going to accomplish by this, Shorts? It’ll happen anyway, you know. All those people at the Civic Center going to go bye-bye, and taking the ring won’t stop it.] Don’t I know it, Ralph thought.

Atropos was still panting, but he had stopped thrashing. Ralph felt able to look away from him for a moment and send his eyes on a quick tour of the room. He supposed what he was really looking for was inspiration-even a small bolt would do.

[“Can I make a suggestion, Mr. A.? As your new little pal and playmate? I know you)re busy, but you ought to find time to do something about this place. I’m not talking about getting it in House Beautiful or anything like that, but sheesh. What a sty."’] Atropos, simultaneously sulky and wary: [Do you think I give a fuck what you think, Shorts?] He could only think of one way to proceed. He didn’t like it, but he was going to go ahead, just the same. He had to go ahead; there was a picture in his mind that guaranteed it. It was a picture of Ed Deepneau flying toward Derry from the coast in a light plane, one with either a crate of high explosive or a tank of nerve-gas stowed in the nose.

[“What can I do with you, Mr. A.? Any ideas?”] The response was immediate and unequivocal.

[Let me go. That’s the answer. The only answer. I’ll leave you alone, both of You. Leave you for the Purpose. You’ll live another ten years.

Hell, maybe another twenty, it’s not impossible. All you and the little lady have to do is butt out. Go home. And when the big bang comes watch it on the TV news.

Ralph tried to sound as if he were honestly considering this.

“And you’d leave us alone? You’d promise to leave us alone?

[“Yes.”

Atropos’s face had taken on a hopeful look, and Ralph could sec the first traces of an aura springing up around the little creep. It was the same low and nasty red as the pulsing glow which lit the apartment.

[“Do you know something, Mr. A.?”]

Atropos, looking more hopeful than ever: [No, what?] Ralph shot one hand forward, grabbed Atropos’s left wrist, and twisted it hard.

Atropos shrieked in agony. His fingers loosened on the handle of the scalpel, and Ralph plucked it free with the ease of a veteran pickpocket lifting a wallet.

“I believe you.”] [Give it back.” Give it back.” Give it back!

Give it-I In his hysteria, Atropos might have gone on shrieking this for hours, so Ralph put a stop to it in the most direct way he knew.

He leaned forward and slashed a shallow vertical cut down the back of the big bald head poking out of the hole in Lois’s half-slip. No invisible hand tried to repel him, and his own hand moved with no trouble at all. Blood-a shocking amount of it-welled out of the line-cut. The aura around Atropos had now gone to the dark and baleful red of an infected wound.

He shrieked again.

Ralph rocked forward and spoke chummily into his ear.

[“Maybe I can’t kill you, but I can certainly fuck you up, can’t I?

And I don’t need to be loaded with psychic juice to do it, either.

This little honey will do just fine. “He used the scalpel to cross the first cut he’d made, making a lower-case t on the back of Atropos’s head. Atropos shrieked and began to flail wildly. Ralph was disgusted to discover that part of him-the capering gremlin-was enjoying this enormously. you want me to go on cutting you, go on struggling.

If you want me to stop, then you stop.”] Atropos became still at once.

[“Okay. Now I’m going to ask you a few questions. I think you’ll find it in your best interest to answer them.”] [Ask me anything Whatever you want! just don’t cut me anymore.”] [“That’s a pretty good attitude, pally, but I think there’s always room for improvement, don’t you? Let’s see. “Ralph sliced down again, this time opening a long gash in the side of Atropos’s skull. A flap of skin peeled loose like badly glued wallpaper. Atropos howled. Ralph felt a cramp of revulsion in the pit of his stomach and was actually relieved… but when he spoke/thought at Atropos, he took great pains not to let that feeling show.

[“Okay, that’s my motivational lecture, Doc. If I have to repeat it, you’ll need Krazy Glue to keep the top of your head from flying off in a high wind. Do you understand me?”]

[Yes! Yes!]

[“And do you believe me?”]

[Yes! Rotten old white-hair, YES!]

[“Okay, that’s good. Here’s my question, Mr. A.: If you make a promise, are you bound by it?”] Atropos was slow in answering, an encouraging sign. Ralph laid the flat of the scalpel’s blade against his cheek to hurry him up. He was rewarded with another scream and instant cooperation.

[Yes.” Yes.” Just don’t cut me again! Please don’t cut me again.”

Ralph took the scalpel away. The outline of the blade burned on the little creature’s unlined cheek like a birthmark.

[“Okay, sunshine, listen up. I want you to promise you’ll leave me and Lois alone until the rally at the Civic Center is over. No more chasing, no more slashing, no more bullshit. Promise me that.

[Fuck you.” Take your promise and shove it up your ass.”

Ralph was not put out of temper by this; his smile, in fact, widened.

Because Atropos hadn’t said I won’t, and even more important, Atropos hadn’t said I can’t. He had Just said no. just a little backsliding, in other words, and easily remedied.

Steeling himself, Ralph ran the scalpel straight down the middle of Atropos’s back. The slip split, the dirty white tunic beneath it split, and so did the flesh beneath the tunic. Blood poured out in a sickening flood, and Atropos’s tortured, wailing shriek beat at Ralph’s ears.

He leaned over and murmured into the small ear again, grimacing and avoiding the blood as best he could.

[“I don’t like doing this anymore, Chumley-in fact, about two more cuts and I’m going to throw up again-but I want you to know that I can do it and I’m going to keep on doing it until you either give me the promise I want or until the force that stopped me from choking you stops me again. I think if you wait for that to happen, you’re going to be one hurting unit. So what.do you say? Do you want to promise, or do you want me to peel you like a grape?”] Atropos was blubbering.

It was a nauseating, horrible sound.

[You don’t understand. If you succeed in stopping what’s been started-the chances are slim, but it’s possible that you might-I will be punished by the creature you call the Crimson King.”

Ralph clamped his teeth together and slashed down again, his lips pressed so tightly together that his mouth looked like a long-healed scar. There was a faint tug as the scalpel’s blade slid through gristle, and then Atropos’s left ear tumbled to the floor. Blood poured out of the hole on the side of his bald head, and his scream this time was loud enough to hurt Ralph’s ears.

They’re sure a long way from being gods, aren’t they? Ralph thought.

He felt sick with horror and dismay. The only real difference between them and us is that they live longer and the-v’re a little harder to see, And I guess I’m not much of a soldier-looking at all lhtil blood makes me feel like passing out. shit.

[All right, I promise.” just stop cutting me! No more.” Please, no more.”

[“That’s a start, but you’re going to have to be more specific. I want to hear you say that you promise to stay away from me and Lois an Ed, too, until the rally at the Civic Center is over.”] He expected more wiggling and weaseling, but Atropos surprised him.

[I promise I promise to stay away from You, and from the bitch you’re running around with-I [“Lois. Say her name. Lois.”

[Yeah, yeah, her-Lois Chasse I agree to stay away from her, and Deepneau, too. From all of you, just as long as you don’t cut me anymore. Are you satisfied? Is it good enough, God damn you?] Ralph decided he was satisfied… or as satisfied as any man can be when he is deeply sickened by his own methods and actions. He didn’t believe there were any trapdoors hidden in Atropos’s promise; the little bald man knew he might pay a high price later for giving in now, but in the end that hadn’t been able to offset the pain and terror Ralph had inflicted on him.

[“Yes, Mr. A I think it’s good enough.”]

Ralph sild off his small victim with his stomach rolling and a sensation-it had to be false, didn’t it?-that his throat was opening and closing like the valve of a clam. He looked at the blood-spattered scalpel for a moment, then cocked his arm back and threw it as hard as he could. it flew end-for-end through the arch and disappeared into the storeroom beyond.

Good riddance, Ralph thought. At least I didn’t get much on mlselfike crying.

There’s that. He no longer felt like vomiting. Now he felt I Atropos got slowly to his knees and looked around with the dazed eyes of a man who has survived a killer storm. He saw his ear lying on the floor and picked it up. He turned it over in his small hands and looked at the strands of gristle trailing out from the back side.

Then he looked up at Ralph. His eyes swam with tears of pain and humiliation, but there was something else in them as well-a rage so deep and deadly that Ralph recoiled from it. All his precautions seemed flimsy and foolish in the face of that rage. He took a blundering step backward and pointed at Atropos with an unsteady finger.

[“Remember your promise”] Atropos bared his teeth in a gruesome grin.

The dangling flap of skin on the side of his face swung back and forth like a slack sail, and the raw flesh beneath it oozed and trickled.

[Of course I’ll remember it-how could I forget? In fact, I’d like to make you another. Two for the price of one, you might say.] Atropos made a gesture Ralph remembered well from the hospital roof, spreading the first two fingers of his right hand in a V and then flicking them upward, creating a -red arc in the air. Within it, Ralph saw a human figure. Beyond it, dimly glimpsed, as if seen through a mist of blood, was the Red Apple Store. He started to ask who that was standing in the foreground, on the curb of Harris Avenue… and then, suddenly, he knew. He looked up at Atropos with shocked eyes.

[“Jesus, no.” No, you can’t."’] The grin on Atropos’s face continued to widen.

[You know, that’s what I kept thinking about you, Short-Time.

Only I was wrong. You are, too. Watch.] Atropos moved his spread fingers slightly wider. Ralph saw someone wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap come out of the Red Apple, and this time Ralph knew immediately whom he was looking at. This person called to the one across the street, and then something terrible began to happen. Ralph turned away, sickened, from the bloody arc of the future between Atropos’s small fingers.

But he heard it when it happened.

[The one I showed you-first belongs to the Random Shorts-to me. another words. And here’s my promise to you: if you go on getting in my way, what I’ve just shown you is going to happen. There’s nothing you can do, no warning you can give, that will stop it from happening.

But if you leave off now-if you and the woman simply stand aside and let events take their course-then I will stay my hand.] The vulgarities which formed so large a part of Atropos’s usual discourse had been left behind like a discarded costume, and for the first time Ralph had some clear sense of how truly old and malevolently wise this being was.

[Remember what the junkies say, Shorts.-dying is easy, living is hard. It’s a true saying. If anyone should know, it’s me. So what do you think? Having any second thoughts?] Ralph stood in the filthy chamber with his head down and his fists clenched. Lois’s earrings burned in one of them like small hot coals.

Ed’s ring also seemed to burn against him, and he knew there wasn’t a thing in the world to stop him from taking it out of his pocket and throwing it into the other room after the scalpel. He remembered a story he’d read in school about a thousand years ago.

“The Lady or the Tiger?” it had been called, and now he understood what it was to be given such a terrible power… and such a terrible choice. On the surface it seemed easy enough; what, after all, was one life against two thousand?

But that one life-!

Yet really it isn’t as if anyone would ever have to know, he thought coldly. No one except maybe for Lois… and Lois would accept my decision. Carolyn might not have done, hut they’re very different women.

Yes, but did he have the right?

Atropos also read this in his aura-it was spooky, how much the creature saw.

[Of course you do, Ralph-that’s what these matters of life and death are really about: who has the right. This time it’s you. So what do you say?] [“I don’t know what I say. I don’t know what I think. All I know is that I wish all three of you had LEFT ME THE FUCK ALONE!”] Ralph

Roberts raised his head toward the root-riddled ceiling of Atropos’s den and screamed.

Five minutes later, Ralph’s head poked out of the shadows beneath the old, leaning oak. He saw Lois at once. She was kneeling in front of him, peering anxiously through the tangle of roots at his upturned face. He raised a grimy, blood-streaked hand and she took it firmly, holding him steady as he made his way up the last few stepsgnarled roots that were actually more like ladder-rungs.

Ralph wriggled his way out from under the tree and turned over onto his back, taking the sweet air in great long pulls of breath. The thought air had never in his whole life tasted so good. In spite of everything else, he was enormously grateful to be out. To be free.

[“Ralph? Are you all right?”] He turned her hand over, kissed her palm, then put her earrings where his lips had been.

[“Yes. Fine. These are yours.”] She looked at them curiously, as if she had never seen earrings, these or any others-before, and then put them in her dress pocket.

CHAPTER 27

[“You saw them in the mirror, didn’t you, Lois?”] [“Yes, and it made me angry… hut I don’t think I was really surprised, not down deep.

[“Because you knew.”] [“Yes. I guess I did. maybe from when we first saw Atropos wearing Bill’s hat. I just kept it… you know… in the hack of my mind.

She was looking at him carefully, assessingly.

[“Never mind my earrings right now-what happened down there.) How did you get away?”] Ralph was afraid if she looked at him in that careful way for too long, she would see too much. He also had an idea that if he didn’t get moving soon, he might never move again; his weariness was now so large it was like some great encrusted object-a long-sunken ocean liner, perhaps-lying inside him, calling to him, trying to drag him down. He got to his feet. He couldn’t allow eitherof them to be dragged down, not now. The news the sky told wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it was bad enough-it was six o’clock at least. All over Derry, people who didn’t give a shit one way or the other about the abortion issue (the vast majority, in other words) were sitting down to hot dinners. At the Civic Center the doors would now be open; 10-K TV lights would be bathing them, and Minicams would be transmitting live shots of early-arriving pro-choice advocates driving past Dan Dalton and his sign-waving Friends of Life. Not far from here, people were chanting that old Ed Deepneau favorite, the one that went Hey, hey, Susan Day, how many kids did you kill today?

Whatever he and Lois did, they would have to do it in the next sixty to ninety minutes. The clock was ticking.

[“Come on, Lois. We have to get moving.

[“Are we going back to the Civic Center?”] [“No, not to start with. I think that to start with, we ought to… Ralph discovered that he simply couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say. Where did he think they ought to go to start with? Back to Derry Home? The Red Apple? His house? Where did you go when you needed to find a couple of well-meaning but far from allknowing fellows who had gotten you and your few close friends into a world of hurt and trouble? Or could you reasonably expect them to find you?

They might not want to find you, sweetheart. In fact, they might actually be hiding from You.

[“Ralph, are you sure you reHe suddenly thought of Rosalie, and knew.

[“The park, Lois. Strawford Park. That’s where we have to go.

But we need to make a stop on the way.”] He led her along the Cyclone fence, and soon they heard the lazy sound of interwoven voices.

Ralph could smell roasting hotdogs as well, and after the fetid stench of Atropos’s den, the smell was ambrosial. A minute or two later, he and Lois stepped to the edge of the little picnic area near Runway 3.

Dorrance was there, standing at the heart of his amazing, multicolored aura and watching as a light plane drifted down toward the runway. Behind him Faye Chapin and Don Veazie were sitting at one of the picnic tables with a chessboard between them and a half finished bottle of Blue Nun near to hand. Stan and Georgina Eberly were drinking beer and twiddling forks with hotdogs impaled upon them in the heat-shimmer-to Ralph that shimmer was a strangely dry pink, like coral-colored sand-above the picnic area’s barbecue pit.

For a moment Ralph simply stood where he was, struck dumb by their beauty-the ephemeral, powerful beauty that was, he supposed, what Short-Time life was mostly about. A snatch of song, something at least twenty-five years old, occurred to him: We are stardust, we are golden.

Dorrance’s aura was different-fabulously different-but even the most prosaic of the others glittered like rare and infinitely desirable gemstones.

[“Oh, Ralph, do you see? Do you see how beautiful they are?”] [“Yes. “I

[“What a shame they don’t know."’]

But was it? In light of all that had happened, Ralph wasn’t so sure.

And he had an idea-a vague but strong intuition he could never have put into words-that perhaps real beauty was something unrecognized by the conscious self, a work that was always in progress, a thing of being rather than seeing.

“Come on, dumbwit, make your move,” a voice said. Ralph jerked, first thinking the voice was speaking to him, but it was Faye, talking to Don Veazie. “You’re slower’n old creepin Jesus-.”

“Never mind,” Don said. “I’m thinking.”

“Think till hell freezes over, Slick, and it’s still gonna be mate in six moves.”

Don poured some wine into a paper cup and rolled his eyes. “oh boogersnot! “he cried. “I didn’t realize I was playin chess with Boris Spassky! I thought it was just plain old Faye Chapin! I apologize all to hell and gone!”

“That’s a riot, Don. An act like that, you could take it on the road and make a million dollars. You won’t have to wait long to do it, either-you can start just six moves from now.”

“Ain’t you smart,” Don said. “You just don’t know when to-”

“Hush.” Georgina Eberly said in a sharp tone. “What was that?

It sounded like something blew up!”

“That” was Lois, sucking a flood of vibrant rainforest green from Georgina’s aura.

Ralph raised his right hand, curled it into a tube around his lips, and began to inhale a similar stream of bright blue light from Stan Eberly’s aura. He felt fresh energy fill him at once; it was as if fluorescent lights were going on in his brain. But that vast sunken ship, which was really no more or less than four months’ worth of mostly sleepless nights, was still there, and still trying to suck him down to the place where it was.

The decision was still right there, too-not yet made one way or the other, but only deferred.

Stan was also looking around. No matter how much of his aura Ralph took (and he had drawn off a great deal, it seemed to him), the source remained as densely bright as ever. Apparently what they had been told about the all-but-endless reservoirs of energy surrounding each human being had been the exact, literal truth.

“Well,” Stan said, “I did hear something-”

“I didn’t,” Faye said.

“Coss not, you’re deaf as dirt,” Stan replied. “Stop interruptin for just one minute, can’tcha? I started to say it wasn’t a fuel-tank, because there ain’t no fire or smoke. Can’t be that Don farted, either, cause there ain’t no squirrels droppin dead out of the trees with their fur burnt off. I guess it musta been one of those big Air National Guard trucks backfirin. Don’t worry, darling, I’ll pertect ya.”

“Pertect this,” Georgina said, slapping one hand into the crook of her elbow and curling her fist at him. She was smiling, however.

“Oh boy,” Faye said. “Take a peek at Old Dor.”

They all looked at Dorrance, who was smiling and waving in the direction of the Harris Avenue Extension.

“Who do you see there, old fella?” Don Veazie asked with a grin.

“Ralph and Lois,” Dorrance said, smiling radiantly. “I see Ralph and Lois. They just came out from under the old tree!”

“Yep,” Stan said. He shaded his eyes, then pointed directly at them.

This delivered a wallop to Ralph’s nervous system which only abated when he realized Stan was just pointing where Dorrance was waving. “And look! There’s Glenn Miller coming out right behind em!

Goddam! “Georgia threw an elbow and Stan stepped away nimbly, grinning.

[“Hello, Ralph! Hello, Lois."’] [“Dorrance! We’re going to Strawford Park! Is that right?”] Dorrance, grinning happily: [“I don’t know, it’s all Long-Time business now, and I’m through with it. I’m going back home soon and read Walt Whitman. It’s going to be a windy night, and Whitman’s always best when the wind blows.”] Lois, sounding nearly frantic: [“Dorrance, help us!”] Doris grin faltered, and he looked at her solemnly.

[“I can’t. It’s passed out of my hands. Whatever’s done will have to be done by you and Ralph now.”] “Ugh,” Georgina said. “I hate it when he stares that way. You could almost believe he really does see someone.” She picked up her long-handled barbecue fork and began to toast her hbtdog again.

“Has anybody seen Ralph and Lois, by the way?”

“No,” Don said.

“They’re shacked up in one of those X-rated motels down the coast with a case of beer and a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil,” Stan said.

“The giant-economy-size bottle. I toldia that yesterday.”

“Filthy old man,” Georgina said, this time throwing the elbow with a little more force and a lot more accuracy.

Ralph: [“Dorrance, can’t you give us any help at all? At least tell us if we’re on the right track?”] For a moment he was sure Dor was going to reply. Then there was a buzzing, approaching drone from overhead and the old man looked up. His daffy, beautiful smile resurfaced. “Look!” he cried.

“An old Grumman Yellow Bird! And a beauty!” He jogged to the chainlink fence to watch the small yellow plane land, turning his back to them.

Ralph took Lois’s arm and tried to smile himself. It was hard going-he thought he had never felt quite so frightened and confused in his entire life-but he gave it the old college try.

[“Come on, dear. Let’s go.”] Ralph remembered thinking-this while they’d been making their way along the abandoned rail-line which had eventually taken them back to the airport-that walking was not exactly what they were doing; it had seemed more like gliding. They went from the picnic area at the end of Runway 3 back to Strawford Park in that same fashion, only the glide was faster and more pronounced now. It was like being carried along by an invisible conveyor belt.

As an experiment, he stopped walking. The houses and storefronts continued to flow mildly past. He looked down at his feet to make sure, and yes, they were completely still. It seemed the sidewalk was moving, not him.

Here came Mr. Dugan, head of the Derry Trust’s Loan Department, decked out in his customary three-piece suit and rimless eyeglasses.

As always, he looked to Ralph like the only man in the history of the world to be born without an asshole. He had once rejected Ralph’s application for a Bill-Payer loan, which, Ralph supposed, might account for a few of his negative feelings about the man. Now he saw that Dugan’s aura was the dull, uniform gray of a corridor in a VA hospital, and Ralph decided that didn’t surprise him much. He held his nose like a man forced to swim across a polluted canal and passed directly through the banker. Dugan did not so much as twitch.

That was sort of amusing, but when Ralph glanced at Lois, his amusement faded in a hurry. He saw the worry on her face, and the questions she wanted to ask. Questions to which he had no satisfactory answers.

Ahead was Strawford Park. As Ralph looked, the streetlights came on suddenly. The little playground where he and McGovern-Lois too, more often than not-had stood watching the children play was almost deserted. Two junior-high kids were sitting side by side on the swings, smoking cigarettes and talking, but the mothers and toddlers who came here during the daylight hours were all gone now.

Ralph thought of McGovern-of his ceaseless, morbid chatter and his self-pity, so hard to see when you first got to know him, so hard to miss once you’d been around him for awhile, both of them lightened and somehow turned into something better by his irreverent wit and his surprising, impulsive acts of kindness-and felt deep sadness steal over him. Short-Timers might be stardust, and they might be golden as well, but when they were gone they were as gone as the mothers and babies who made brief playtime visits here on sunny summer afternoons.

[“Ralph, what are we doing here? The deathbag’s over the Civic Center, not Strawford Park."’] Ralph guided her to the park bench where he had found her several centuries ago, crying over the argument she’d had with her son and daughter-in-law… and over her lost earrings.

Down the hill, the two Portosans glimmered in the deepening twilight.

Ralph closed his eyes. I am going mad, he thought, and I’m headed there on the express rather than the local. Which is it going to be?

The lady… or the tiger?

[“Ralph, we have to do something. Those lives… those thousands of lives… “I In the darkness behind his closed lids, Ralph saw someone coming out of the Red Apple Store. A figure in dark corduroy pants and a Red Sox cap. Soon the terrible thing would start to happen again, and because Ralph didn’t want to see it, he opened his eyes and looked at the woman beside him.

[“Every life is important, Lois, wouldn’t you agree? Every single one.”] He didn’t know what she saw in his aura, but it clearly terrified her.

[“What happened down there after I left? What did he do or say to you? Tell me, Ralph.” You tell me."’] So which was it going to be?

The one or the many? The lady or the tiger? If he didn’t choose soon, the choice would be taken out of his hands by nothing more than the simple passage of time. So which one? Which?

“Neither… or both,” he said hoarsely, unaware in his terrible agitation that he was speaking aloud, and on several different levels at once. “I won’t choose one or the other. I won’t. Do you hear me?”

He leaped up from the bench, looking around wildly.

“Do you hear me?” he shouted. “I reject this choice! I will have BOTH or I will have NEITHER!”

On one of the paths north of them, a wino who had been poking through a trash-barrel, searching for returnable cans and bottles, took one look at Ralph, then turned and ran. What he had seen was a man who appeared to be on fire.

Lois stood up and grasped his face between her hands.

[“Ralph, what is it? Who is it? Me? You? Because if it’s me, if you’re holding back because of me, I don’t want-”] He took a deep, steadying breath and then put his forehead against hers, looking into her eyes.

[“It’s not you, Lois, and not me. If it was either of us, I might be able to choose. But it’s not, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to be a pawn anymore.”]

He shook her loose and took a step away from her. His aura flashed out so brilliantly that she had to raise her hand in front of her eyes; it was as if he were somehow exploding. And when his voice came, it reverberated in her head like thunder.

“CLOTHO. LACHESIS COME TO ME, DAMMIT, AND COME NOW”] He took two or three more steps and stood looking down the hill.

The two junior-high-school boys sitting on the swings were looking up at him with identical expressions of startled fear. They were up and gone the moment Ralph’s eyes lit on them, running flat-out toward the lights of Witcham Street like a couple of deer, leaving their cigarettes to smolder in the foot-ditches beneath the swings.

[“CLOTHO! LACHESIS!”

He was burning like an electric arc, and suddenly all the strength ran out of Lois’s legs like water. She took one step backward and collapsed onto the park bench. Her head was whirling, her heart full of terror, and below everything was that vast exhaustion. Ralph saw it as a sunken ship; Lois saw it as a pit around which she was forced to walk in a gradually tightening spiral, a pit into which she must eventually fall.

[“CLOTHO. LACHESIS LAST CHANCE I MEAN IT!”] For a moment nothing happened, and then the doors of the Portosans at the foot of the hill opened in perfect unison. Clotho stepped from the one marked MEN, Lachesis from the one marked WOMEN. Their auras, the brilliant green-gold of summer dragonflies, glimmered in the ashy light of day’s end. They moved together until their auras overlapped, then walked slowly toward the top of the hill that way, with their white-clad shoulders almost touching. They looked like a pair of frightened children.

Ralph turned to Lois. His aura still blazed and burned.

[“Stay here.”]

[“Yes, Ralph.”] She let him get partway down the hill, then gathered her courage and called after him.

[“But I’ll try to stop Ed if you won’t. I mean it.

Of course she did, and his heart responded to her bravery… but she didn’t know what he knew. Hadn’t seen what he had seen.

He looked back at her for a moment, then walked down to where the two little bald doctors looked at him with their luminous, frightened eyes.

Lachesis, nervously: [We didn’t lie to you-we didn’t.] Clotho, even more nervously (if that was possible): [Deepneau is on his way.

You have to stop him, Ralph-you have to at least try.] The fact is I don’t have to do anything, and your faces show it, he thought. Then he turned to Lachesis, and was gratified to see the small bald man flinch from his gaze and drop his dark, pupilless eyes.

[“Is that so? When we were on the hospital roof you told us to stay away from Ed, Mr. L. You were very emphatic about that.] Lachesis shifted uncomfortably and fidgeted with his hands.

El… that is to say we… we can be wrong. This time we were.] Except Ralph knew that wrong wasn’t the best word for what they had been; self-deceived would be better. He wanted to scold them for it-to tell the truth, he wanted to scold them for getting him into this shitting mess in the first place-and found he couldn’t.

Because, according to Old Dor, even their self-deception had served the Purpose; the side-trip to High Ridge had for some reason not been a side-trip at all. He didn’t understand why or how that was, but he intended to find out, if finding out was possible.

[“Let’s forget that part of it for the time being, gentlemen, and talk about why all this is happening. If you want help from me and Lois, I

think you better tell me.] They looked at each other with their big, frightened eyes, then back at Ralph.

Lachesis: [Ralph, do you doubt that all those people are really going to die? Because if you do-] [“No, but I’m tired of having them waved in my face. If an earthquake that served the Purpose happened to be scheduled for this area and the butcher’s bill came to ten thousand instead of just two thousand and change, you’d never even bat an eye, would you? So what’s so special about this situation? Tell me!”] Clotho: [Ralph, we don’t make the rules any more than you do. We thought you understood that.] Ralph sighed.

[“You’re weaseling again, and not wasting anybody’s time but your own.] Clotho, uneasily: [All right, perhaps the picture we gave you wasn’t completely clear, but time was short and we were frightened.

And you must see that, regardless of all else, those people will die if you can’t stop Ed Deepneau!] [“Never mind all of them for now,I only want to know about one of them-the one who belongs to the Purpose and can’t be handed overjust because some undesignated pisher comes along with a headful of loose screws and a planeful of explosive.

Who is it You feel you can’t give up to the Random? Who? It’s Day, isn’t it? Susan Day.] Lachesis: [No. Susan Day is part of the Random.

She is none of our concern, none of our worry.] [“Who, then?”

Clotho and Lachesis exchanged another glance. Clotho nodded slightly, and then they both turned back to Ralph.

Once again Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating that peacock’s fan of light. It wasn’t McGovern Ralph saw this time, but a little boy with blond hair cut in bangs across his forehead and a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of his nose. Ralph placed him at once-the kid from the basement of High Ridge, the one with the bruised mother. The one who had called him and Lois angels.

And a little child shall lead them, he thought, utterly flabbergasted.

Oh my God. He looked disbelievingly at Clotho and Lachesis.

[“Am I understanding? All this has been about that one little boy?”] He expected more waffling, but the reply from Clotho was simple and direct: [Yes, Ralph.] Lachesis: [He’s at the Civic Center now. His mother, whose life you and Lois also saved this morning, got a call from her babysitter less than an hour ago, saying she’d cut herself badly on a piece of glass and wouldn’t be able to take care of the boy tonight after all. By then it was too late to find another sitter, of course, and this woman has been determined for weeks to see Susan Day… to shake her hand, even give her a hug, if possible. She idolizes the Day woman.] Ralph, who remembered the fading bruises on her face, supposed that was an idolatry he could understand. He understood something else even better: the babysitter’s cut hand had been no accident. Something was determined to place the little boy with the shaggy blond bangs and the smoke-reddened eyes at the Civic Center, and was willing to move heaven and earth to do it. His mother had taken him not because she was a bad parent, but because she was as subject to human nature as anyone else. She hadn’t wanted to miss her one chance at seeing Susan Day, that was all.

No, it’s not all, Ralph thought. She also took him because she thought it would be safe, with Pickering and his Daily Bread crackpots all dead. it must have seemed to her that the worst she’d have to protect her son from tonight would be a bunch of sign-waving pro-lifers, that lightning couldn’t possibly strike her and her son twice on the same day.

Ralph had been gazing off toward Witcham Street. Now he turned back to Clotho and Lachesis.

[“You’re sure he’s there? Positive?” Clotho: [Yes. Sitting in the upper north balcony next to his mother with a McDonald’s poster to color and some storybooks. Would it surprise you to know that one of the stories is The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins?]

Ralph shook his head. At this point, nothing would surprise him.

Lachesis: [It’s the north side of the Civic Center that Deepneau’s plane will strike. This little boy will be killed instantly if steps are not taken to prevent it… and that can’t be allowed to happen.

This boy must not die before his scheduled time.] Lachesis was looking earnestly at Ralph. The fan of blue-green light between his fingers had disappeared.

[We can’t go on talking like this, Ralph-he’s already in the air, less than a hundred miles from here. Soon it will be too late to stop him. That made Ralph feel frantic, but he held his place just the same.

Frantic, after all, was how they wanted him to feel. How they wanted both of them to feel.

[“I’m telling you that none of that matters until I understand what the stakes are. I won’t let it matter.”] Clotho: [Listen, then.

Every now and again a man or woman comes along whose life will affect not just those about him or her, or even all those who live in the Short-Time world, but those on mani, levels above and below, the Short-Time world-These people are the Great Ones, and their lives always serve the Purpose. If they are taken too soon, everything changes. The scales cease to balance. Can you imagine, for instance, how different the world might be today if Hitler had drowned in the bathtub as a child? You may believe the world would be better for that, but I can tell you that the world would not exist at all If it had happened. Suppose Winston Churchill had died of foodpoisoning before he ever became Prime Minister? Suppose Augustus Caesar had been born dead, strangled on his own umbilical cord? Yet the person we want you to save is of far greater importance than any of these.] [“Dammit, Lois and I already saved this kid once!

Didn’t that close the books, return him to the Purpose?”] Lachesis, patiently: [Yes, but he is not safe from Ed Deepneau, because Deepneau has no designation in either Random or Purpose.

Of all the people on earth, only Deepneau can harm him before his time comes. If Deepneau fails, the boy will be safe again-he will pass his time quietly until his moment comes and he steps upon the stage to play his brief but crucially important part.] [“One life means so much, then?” Lachesis: [Yes. If the child dies, the Tower of all existence will fall, and the consequences of such a fall are beyond -your comprehension.

And beyond ours, as well.] Ralph stared down at his shoes for a moment. His head seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. There was an irony here, one he was able to grasp easily in spite of his weariness.

Atropos had apparently set Ed in motion by inflaming some sort of Messiah complex which might have been pre-existing… a by-product of his undesignated status, perhaps. What Ed didn’t see-and would never believe if told-was that Atropos and his bosses on the upper levels intended to use him not to save the Messiah but to kill him.

He looked up again into the anxious faces of the two little bald doctors.

[“Okay, I don’t know how I’m supposed to stop Ed, but I’ll give it a shot.

Clotho and Lachesis looked at each other and smiled identical (and very human) broad smiles of relief. Ralph raised a cautioning finger.

[“Wait. You haven’t heard all of it.”] Their smiles faded.

“I want something back from you. One life. I’ll trade the life of your four-year-old boy for-“] Lois didn’t hear the end of that; his voice dropped below the range of audibility for a moment, but when she saw first Clotho and then Lachesis begin shaking their heads, her heart sank.

Lachesis: [I understand your distress, and yes, Atropos can certainly do as he threatens. Yet you must surely comprehend that this one life is hardly as important as-Ralph: [“But I think it is, don’t you see? I think it is. What you two guys need to get through your heads is that to me, both lives are equally-”] She lost him again, but had no problem hearing Clotho; in the depth of his distress he was almost wailing.

[But this is different! This boy’s life is different.] Now she heard Ralph clearly, speaking (if speech was what it was) with a fearless, relentless logic that made Lois think of her father.

[“All lives are different. All of them matter or none matters.

That’s only my short-sighted, Short-Time view, of course, but I guess -you boys are stuck with it, since I’m the one with the hammer.

The bottom line, Is this: I’ll trade you, even-up. The life of yours for the life of loise. All ’You have to do is promise, and the deal’s on.”] Lachesis: [Ralph, please.” Please understand that we really must not!] There was a long moment of silence. When Ralph spoke, his voice was soft but still audible. It was, however, the last completely audible thing Lois heard in their conversation.

[“There’s a world of difference between cannot and must not, wouldn’t you say?”] Clotho said something, but Lois caught only an isolated [trade might possibly bel phrase. Lachesis shook his head violently. Ralph replied and Lachesis answered by making a grim little scissoring gesture with his fingers.

Surprisingly, Ralph replied to this with a laugh and a nod.

Clotho put a hand on his colleague’s arm and spoke to him earnestly before turning back to Ralph.

Lois clenched her hands in her lap, willing them to reach some sort of agreement. Any agreement that would keep Ed Deepneau from killing all those people while they just stood here yattering.

Suddenly the side of the hill was illuminated by brilliant white light. At first Lois thought it came down from the sky, but that was only because myth and religion had taught her to believe the sky was the source of all supernatural emanations. In reality, it seemed to come from everywhere-trees, sky, ground, even from herself, streaming out of her aura like ribbons of fog.

There was a voice, then… or rather a Voice. It spoke only four words, but they echoed in Lois’s head like iron bells.

[IT MAY BE SO.] She saw Clotho, his small face a mask of terror and awe, reach into his back pocket and bring out his scissors. He fumbled and almost dropped them, a nervous blunder that made Lois feel real kinship for him. Then he was holding them up with one handle in each hand and the blades open.

Those four words came again:

[IT MAY BE SO,]

This time they were followed by a glare so bright that for a moment Lois believed she must be blinded. She clapped her hands over her eyes but saw-in the last instant when she could see anything-that the light had centered on the scissors Clotho was holding up like a two-pronged lightning-rod.

There was no refuge from that light; it turned her eyelids and upraised, shielding hands to glass. The glare outlined the bones of her fingers like X-ray pencils as it streamed through her flesh. From somewhere far away she heard a woman who sounded suspiciously like Lois Chasse, screaming at the top of her mental voice: [“Turn it off! God, please turn it off before it kills me!”] And at last, when it seemed to her that she could stand no more, the light did begin to fade. When it was gone-except for a fierce blue afterimage that floated in the new darkness like a pair of phantom scissors-she slowly opened her eyes.

For a moment she continued to see nothing but that brilliant blue cross and thought she had indeed been blinded. Then, as dim as a developing photograph at first, the world began to resurface. She saw Ralph, Clotho, and Lachesis lowering their own hands and peering around with the blind bewilderment of a nest of moles turned up by the blade of a harrow.

Lachesis was looking at the scissors in his colleague’s hands as if he had never seen them before, and Lois was willing to bet he never had seen them as they were now. The blades were still shining, shedding eldritch fairy-glimmers of light in misty droplets.

Lachesis: [Ralph! That was…] She lost the rest of it, but his tone was that of a common peasant who answers a knock at the door of his hut and finds that the Pope has stopped by for a spot of prayer and a little confession.

Clotho was still staring at the blades of the scissors. Ralph was also looking, but at last he lifted his gaze to the bald doctors.

Ralph: [“… the hurt?”] Lachesis, speaking like a man emerging from a deep dream: Yes… won’t last long, but… agony will be intense… change your mind, Ralph?] Lois was suddenly afraid of those shining scissors. She wanted to cry out to Ralph, tell him to never mind his one, to just give them their one, their little boy. She wanted to tell him to do whatever it took to get them to hide those scissors again.

But no words came from either her mouth or her mind.

Ralph: [“… in the least… Just wanted to know what to expect, Clotho: [… ready?… must be…

Tell them no, Ralph! she thought at him. Tell them NO!

Ralph: [“… ready.”] Lachesis: [Understand… terms he has… and the price?] Ralph, impatient now: [“Yes, yes. Can we please just… “I Clotho, with immense gravity: [Very well, Ralph. It may be so.] Lachesis put an arm around Ralph’s shoulders; he and Clotho led him a little farther down the hill, to the place where the younger children started their downhill sled-runs in the winter. There was a small flat area there, circular in shape, about the size of a nightclub stage. When they reached it, Lachesis stopped Ralph, then turned him so he and Clotho were facing each other.

Lois suddenly wanted to shut her eyes and found she couldn’t.

She could only watch and pray that Ralph knew what he was doing.

Clotho murmured to him. Ralph nodded and slipped out of McGovern’s sweater. He folded it and laid it neatly on the leafstrewn grass. When he straightened again, Clotho took his right wrist and held his arm out straight. He then nodded to Lachesis, who unbuttoned the cuff of Ralph’s shirt and rolled the sleeve to the elbow in three quick turns. With that done, Clotho rotated Ralph’s arm so it was wrist-up. The fine tracery of blue veins Just beneath the skin of his forearm was poignantly clear, highlighted in delicate strokes of aura.

All of this was horribly familiar to Lois: it was like watching a patient on a TV doctor-show being prepped for an operation.

Except this wasn’t TV.

Lachesis leaned forward and spoke again. Although she still couldn’t hear the words, Lois knew he was telling Ralph this was his last chance.

Ralph nodded, and although his aura now told her that he was terrified of what was coming, he somehow even managed a smile.

When he turned to Clotho and spoke, he did not seem to be seeking reassurance but rather offering a word of comfort, Clotho tried to return Ralph’s smile, but without success.

Lachesis wrapped one hand around Ralph’s wrist, more to steady the arm (or so it seemed to Lois) than to actually hold it immobile.

He reminded her of a nurse attending a patient who must receive a painful injection. Then he looked at his partner with frightened eyes and nodded. Clotho nodded back, took a breath, and then bent over Ralph’s upturned forearm with its ghostly tree of blue veins glowing beneath the skin. He paused for a moment, then slowly opened the jaws of the scissors with which he and his old friend traded life for death.

Lois staggered to her feet and stood swaying back and forth on legs that felt like lumber. She meant to break the paralysis which had locked her in such a cruel silence, to shout at Ralph and tell him to stop-tell him he didn’t know what they meant to do to him.

Except he did. It was in the pallor of his face, his half-closed eyes, his painfully thinned lips. Most of all it was in the blotches of red and black which were flashing across his aura like meteors, and in the aura itself, which had tightened down to a hard blue shell.

Ralph nodded at Clotho, who brought the lower scissor-blade down until it was touching Ralph’s forearm just below the fold of the elbow.

For a moment the skin only dimpled, and then a smooth dark blister of blood formed where the dimple had been. The blade slid into this blister. When Clotho squeezed his fingers, bringing the razor-sharp blades together, the skin on either side of the lengthwise cut snapped back with the suddenness of windowshades-Subcutaneous fat glimmered like melting ice in the fierce blue glow of Ralph’s aura. Lachesis tightened his hold on Ralph’s wrist, but so far as Lois could tell, Ralph did not make even a first instinctive effort to pull back, only lowered his head and clenched his left fist in the air like a man giving a Black Power salute. She could see the cords in his neck standing out like cables. Not a single sound escaped him.

Now that this terrible business was actually begun, Clotho proceeded with a speed which was both brutal and merciful. He cut rapidly down the middle of Ralph’s forearm to his wrist, using the scissors the way a man will to open a parcel which has been heavily taped, guiding the blades with the fingers and bearing down with the thumb. Inside Ralph’s arm, tendons gleamed like cuts of flank steak.

Blood ran in freshets, and there was a fine scarlet spray each time an artery or a vein was severed. Soon fans of backspatter decorated the white tunics of the two small men, making them look more like little doctors than ever.

When his blades had at last severed the Bracelets of Fortune at Ralph’s wrist (the “operation” took less than three seconds but seemed to last forever to Lois), Clotho removed the dripping scissors and handed them to Lachesis. Ralph’s upturned arm had been cut open from elbow to wrist in a dark furrow.

Clotho clamped his hands over this furrow at its point of origination and Lois thought: Now the other one will pick up ralph’s sweater and use it as a tourniquet. But Lachesis made no move to do that; he merely held the scissors and watched.

For a moment the blood went on flowing between Clotho’s grasping fingers, and then it stopped. He slowly drew his hands down Ralph’s arm, and the flesh which emerged from his grip was whole and firm, although seamed with a thick white ridge of scar-tissue.

[Lois… Lo-isssss… I This voice was not coming from inside her head, nor from down the hill; it had come from behind her. A soft voice, almost cajoling.

Atropos? No, not at all. She looked down and saw green and somehow sunken light flowing all around her-it rayed through the spaces between her arms and her body, between her legs, even between her fingers. It rippled her shadow ahead of her, scrawny and somehow twisted, like the shadow of a hanged woman. It caressed her with heatless fingers the color of Spanish moss.

[Turn around, Lo-isss…] At that moment the last thing on earth Lois Chasse wanted to do was turn around and look at the source of that green light.

[Turn around, Lo-isss… see me, Lo-isss… come into the light, Lo-isss… come into the light… see me and come into the light…] It was not a voice which could be disobeyed. Lois turned as slowly as a toy ballerina whose cogs have grown rusty, and her eyes seemed to fill up with Saint Elmo’s fire.

Lois came into the light.

CHAPTER 28

Clotho: [You have your visible sign, Ralph-are you satisfied?] Ralph looked down at his arm. Already the agony, which had swallowed him as the whale had swallowed jonah, seemed like a dream to him, or a mirage.

He supposed it was this same sort of distancing which allowed women to have lots of babies, forgetting the stark physical pain and effort of delivery each time the act was successfully accomplished.

The scar looked like a length of ragged white string rippling its way over the bulges of his scant muscles.

[“Yes. You were brave, and very quick. I thank you for both.”] Clotho smiled but said nothing.

Lachesis: [Ralph, are you ready? Time is now very short.] [“Yes, I’m-“]

[“Ralph! Ralph!”]

It was Lois, standing at the top of the hill and waving to him. for a moment he thought her aura had changed from its usual dove-gray to some other, darker color, and then the idea, undoubtedly caused by shock and weariness, assed. He trudged up the hill to where she stood.

Lois’s eyes were distant and dazed, as if she had just heard some amazing, life-changing word.

[“Lois, what is it? What’s wrong? is it my arm? Because if that’s it, don’t worry. Look.” Good as new."’] He held it out so she could see for herself, but Lois didn’t look.

She looked at him instead, and he saw the depth of her shock.

[“Ralph, a green man came.”] A green man? He reached out and took her hands, instantly concerned.

[“Green? Are you sure? It wasn’t Atropos or-”] He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to.

Lois shook her head slowly.

[“It was a green man. If there are sides in.this, I don’t know which one this… this person… I’s on. He felt good, hut I could be wrong.

I couldn’t see him. His aura was too bright. He told me to give these back to you. “I She held out her hand to him and tipped two small, glittering objects from her palm to his: her earrings. He could see a maroon speck on one, and supposed it was Atropos’s blood. He started to close his hand over them, then winced at a tiny prick of pain.

[“You forgot the backs, Lois.”] She spoke in the slow, unthoughtful tones of a woman in a dream.

[“No, I didn’t.] threw them away. The green man said to. Be careful. He felt… warm… but I don’t really know, do I?

Mr. Chasse always said I was the most gullible woman alive, always willing to believe the best of everybody. Of anybody.”] She reached out slowly and grasped his wrists, looking earnestly into his face all the while.

“I just don’t know.”

Vocalizing the thought seemed to wake her up, and she stood blinking at him. Ralph supposed it was possible-just barely-that she actually had been asleep, that she had dreamed this so-called green man, But perhaps it would be wiser to just take the earrings.

They might mean nothing, but then again, having Lois’s earrings in his pocket couldn’t hurt… unless he poked himself with them, that was.

Lachesis: [Ralph, what is it? Is something wrong?] He and Clotho had lagged behind, and so had missed Ralph’s conversation with Lois.

Ralph shook his head, turning his hand to hide the earrings from them.

Clotho had picked up McGovern’s sweater and brushed away the few bright leaves which had been clinging to it. Now he held it out to Ralph, who unobtrusively slipped Lois’s no-back earrings into one of its pockets before putting it on again.

Time to get going, and the line of warmth up the middle of his right arm-along the scar-told him how he was supposed to begin.

[“Lois?”] [“Yes, dear?”] [“I need to take from your aura, and I need to take a lot. Do you understand?”] [“Yes.”] [“Is it all right?”] [“Yes, of course.”] [“Be brave-it won’t take long.”] He put his arms on her shoulders and clasped his hands behind her neck. She copied the gesture, and they slowly leaned together until their foreheads were touching and their lips less than two inches apart. He could smell some perfume still lingering about her-coming perhaps from the dark, sweet hollows behind her ears.

[“Ready, dear?”]

He found what came in return both odd and comforting.

[“Yes, Ralph. See me. Come into the light. Come into the light an take the light.” Ralph pursed his lips and began to inhale.

A band of smoky brilliance began to flow from her mouth and nose and into him. His aura began to brighten at once, and it continued to do so until it had become a dazzling, cloudy corona around him. And still he went on inhaling, breathing with something that was beyond breath, feeling the scar on his arm grow hotter and hotter until it was like an electric filament buried in his flesh. He could not have stopped even if he had wanted to… and he didn’t.

She staggered once. He saw her eyes lose focus and felt her hands loosen for a moment on the back of his neck. Then her eyes, large and bright and full of trust, returned to his, and her grip firmed again.

At last, as that titanic intake of breath finally began to crest, Ralph realized her aura had grown so pale he could hardly see it.

Her cheeks were milk-white and the gray. had come back into her hair, so much that the black was now almost gone. He had to stop it, had to, or he was going to kill her.

He managed to pull his left hand free of his right, and that seemed to break some sort of circuit; he was able to step back from her.

Lois swayed on her feet and would have fallen, but Clotho and Lachesis, looking quite a bit like Lilliputians from Gulliver’s Travels, grabbed her arms and lowered her carefully to the bench again.

Ralph dropped to one knee before her. He was frantic with fear and guilt, and at the same time filled with a sense of power so great that he felt as if a single hard jolt might cause him to explode, like a bottle filled with nitroglycerine. He could knock down a building with that karate-chop gesture now-maybe a whole row of them.

Still, he had hurt Lois. Perhaps badly.

[“Lois.” Lois, can you hear me? I’m sorry."’] She looked up at him dazedly, a woman who had blasted forward from forty to sixty in a matter of seconds… and then right past it and into her seventies, like a rocket overshooting its intended target.

She tried a smile that didn’t work very well.

[“Lois, I’m sorry. I didn’t know, and once I did, I couldn’t stop. “I Lachesis: [If you’re to have any chance at all, Ralph, you must go now. He’s almost here.]

Lois was nodding agreement.

[“Go on, Ralph-I’m just weak, that’s all. I’ll hefine. I’mjust going to sit here until my strength comes back.”] Her eyes shifted to the left, and Ralph followed her gaze. He saw the wino they’d frightened away earlier. He had returned to inspect the litter-baskets at the top of the hill for returnable cans and bottles, and although his aura did not look as healthy as that of the fellow they had met out by the old trainyards earlier, Ralph reckoned he would do in a pinch… which, for Lois, this definitely was.

Clotho: [We’ll see that he wanders over this way, Ralph-we don’t have much power over the physical aspects of the Short-Time world, but I think we can manage that much.] [“You’re sure?”] [Yes. I [“Okay.

Good.”] Ralph took a quick look at the two little men, noted their anxious, frightened eyes, and nodded. Then he bent and kissed Lois’s cool, wrinkled cheek. She gave him the smile of a tired old grandmother.

I did that to her, he thought. Me.

Then you better make sure you didn’t do it for nothing, Carolyn’s voice responded tartly.

Ralph gave the three of them-Clotho and Lachesis were now flanking Lois protectively on the bench-a final glance, and then began to walk down the hill again.

When He reached the toilets, he stood between them for a moment, then leaned his head against the one marked WOMEN. He heard nothing.

When he tipped his head against the blue plastic wall of MEN, however, he heard a faint, droning voice raised in song: “Who believes that my wildest dreams And my craziest schemes will come true.

You, baby, nobody but you.”

Christ, he’s nuttier than a fruitcake.

This is news, sweetheart?

Ralph supposed it wasn’t. He walked around to the door of the Portosan and opened it. Now he could also hear the distant, waspy buzz of an airplane engine, but there was nothing to see that he hadn’t seen dozens of times before: the cracked toilet seat resting askew over the hole in the seat, a roll of toilet paper with a strange and somehow ominous swelled look, and, to -the left, a urinal that looked like a plastic teardrop. The walls were tangles of graffiti. The largest-and most exuberant-had been printed in foot-high red letters above the urinal: TONY BOYNTON HAS GOT THE TIGHTEST LITTLE BUNS IN DERRY! A cloying pine-scented deodorizer overlay the smells of shit, piss, and lingering wino-farts like makeup on the face of a corpse. The voice he was hearing seemed to come from the hole in the center of the Portosan’s bench seat, or perhaps it was seeping out of the very walls: “From the time I fall asleep Until the mornting comes I dream about you, baby, nobody but you.

Where is he? Ralph wondered. And how the hell do I get to him?

Ralph felt sudden heat against his hip; it was as if someone had slipped a warm coal into his watchpocket. He began to frown, then remembered what was in there. He reached into the scrap of a pocket with one finger, touched the gold band he had stowed there, and hooked it out. He laid it on his palm over the place where his loveline and lifeline diverged and poked at it gingerly. It had cooled again.

Ralph found he wasn’t very surprised.

“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to bind them,” Ralph murmured, and slipped Ed’s wedding band onto the third finger of his own left hand. It was a perfect fit. He pushed it up until it clinked softly against the wedding ring Carolyn had put onto his own finger some forty-five years ago. Then he looked up and saw that the back wall of the Portosan had disappeared.

What he saw, framed by the walls which did remain, was a just-pastsunset sky and a swatch of Maine countryside fading into a bluegray twilight haze. He estimated that he was looking out from a height of about ten thousand feet. He could see glimmering lakes and ponds and vast stretches of dark green woodland scrolling down toward the Portosan’s bench seat and then disappearing. Far ahead-up toward the roof of the toilet cubicle-Ralph could see a glimmering nest of lights. That was probably Derry, now no more than ten minutes away.

In the lower left quadrant of this vision Ralph could see part of an instrument panel. Taped over the altimeter was a small color photograph that stopped his breath. It was Helen, looking impossibly happy and impossibly beautiful. Cradled in her arms was the Exalted amp; Revered Baby, fast asleep and no more than four months old.

He wants them to be the last thing he sees in this world, Ralph thought. He’s been turned into a monster, but I guess even monsters don’t forget how to love.

Something on the instrument panel began to beep. A hand came into view and flicked a switch. Before it disappeared, Ralph could see the white indentation on the third finger of that hand, faint but still visible, where the wedding ring had rested for at least six years.

He saw something else, as well-the aura surrounding the hand was the same as the one which had surrounded the thunderstruck baby in the hospital elevator, a turbulent, rapidly moving membrane that seemed as alien as the atmosphere of a gas giant.

Ralph looked back once and raised his hand. Clotho and Lachesis raised theirs in return. Lois blew him a kiss. Ralph made a catching gesture, then turned and stepped into the Portosan.

He hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do about the bench seat, then remembered the oncoming hospital gurney, which should have crushed their skulls but hadn’t, and walked toward the back of the cubicle. He clenched his teeth, preparing to bark his shinwhat you knew was one thing, what you believed after seventy years of bumping into stuff quite another-and then stepped through the bench seat as if it were made of smoke… or as if he were.

There was a scary sensation of weightlessness and vertigo, and for a moment he was sure he was going to vomit. This was accompanied by a feeling of drain, as if much of the power he had taken in from Lois was now being siphoned off. He supposed it was. This was a form of teleportation, after all, fabulous science-fiction stuff, and something like that had to use up a lot of energy.

The vertigo passed, but it was replaced by a perception that was even worse-a feeling that he had been split at the neck somehow.

He realized he now had a completely unobstructed view of a whole sprawling section of the world.

Jesus Christ, what’s happened to me? What’s wrong?

His senses reluctantly reported back that there was nothing wrong, exactly, it was just that he had achieved a position which should have been impossible. He was seventy-three inches tall; the cockpit of the plane was sixty inches from floor to ceiling. This meant that any pilot much bigger than Clotho and Lachesis had to slouch his way to his seat. Ralph, however, had entered the plane not only while it was in flight but while he was standing up, and he was still standing up, between and slightly behind the two seats in the cockpit.

The reason his view was unobstructed was both simple and horrible: his head was sticking out of the top of the plane.

Ralph had a nightmare image of his old dog, Rex, who’d liked to ride with his head out the passenger window and his raggedy ears blowing back in the slipstream. He closed his eyes.

What if I fall? If I can stick my head out through the damned roof, what’s to keep me from sliding right down through the floor and falling all the way to the ground? Or maybe through the ground, and then through the very earth itself?

But that wasn’t happening, and nothing like it would happen, not on this level-all he had to do was remember the effortless way they’d risen through the floors of the hospital and the ease with which they’d stood on the roof. If he kept those things in mind, he would be okay.

Ralph tried to center on that idea, and when he felt quite sure he had himself under control, he opened his eyes again.

Sloping out just below him was the plane’s windshield. Beyond it was the nose, tipped with a quicksilver blur of propeller. The nestle of lights he had observed from the door of the Portosan was closer now.

Ralph bent his knees, and his head slid smoothly through the ceiling of the cockpit. For a moment he could taste oil in his mouth and the tiny hairs in his nose seemed to bristle as if with an electric shock, and then he was kneeling between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats.

He didn’t know what he had expected to feel, seeing Ed again after all this time and under such extravagantly weird circumstances, but the pang of regret-not just pity but regret-which came was a surprise. As on the day in the summer of ’92 when Ed had run into the West Side Gardeners truck, he was wearing an old tee-shirt instead of an Oxford or Arrow with buttons up the front and a fruitloop on the back. He had lost a lot of weight-Ralph thought perhaps as much as forty pounds-and it had had an extraordinary effect, making him look not emaciated but somehow heroic, in a gothic/romantic way; Ralph was forcefully reminded of Carolyn’s favorite poem, “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes. Ed’s skin was as pale as paper, his green eyes both dark and light (like emeralds in moonlight, Ralph thought) behind the small round John Lennon spectacles, his lips so red they looked as if they had been rouged.

He had tied the white silk scarf with its red Japanese characters around his forehead so that the fringed ends trailed down his back.

Within the thunderbolt swirls of his aura, Ed’s intelligent, mobile face was filled with terrible regret and fierce determination.

He was beautiful-beautiful-and Ralph felt a sense of deja vu twist through him. Now he knew what he had glimpsed on the day he’d stepped between Ed and the man from West Side Gardeners; he was seeing it again. Looking at Ed, lost inside a typhoon aura from which no balloon-string floated, was like looking at a priceless Ming vase which had been thrown against a wall and shattered.

At least he can’t see me, not on this level. At least, I don’t think he can.

As if in response to this thought, Ed turned and glanced directly at Ralph. His eyes were wide and full of mad caution; the corners of his finely moulded mouth quivered and gleamed with buds of saliva.

Ralph recoiled, momentarily positive that he was being seen, but Ed didn’t react to Ralph’s sudden backward movement.

He threw a suspicious glance into the empty four-seat passenger cabin behind him instead, as if he had heard the stealthy movements of a stowaway. At the same time he reached past Ralph and put his right hand on a cardboard carton which had been seatbelted into the copilot’s chair. The hand caressed the box briefly, then went to his forehead and made some tiny adjustment to the scarf serving him as a headband.

That done, he resumed singing… only this time it was a different song, one that sent a tremor zigzagging up Ralph’s back: “One pill makes you bigger, One pill makes you small, And the ones that Mother gives you Don’t do anything at all.

Right, Ralph thought. Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.

His heart was triphammering in his chest-having Ed suddenly turn around like that had scared him in a way even finding himself riding along at ten thousand feet with his head sticking out of the top of the plane hadn’t been able to do. Ed didn’t see him, Ralph was almost positive of that, but whoever had said that the senses of lunatics were more acute than those of the sane must have known what he was talking about, because Ed sure had an idea that something had changed.

The radio squawked, making both men jump. “This is for the Cherokee over South Haven. You are on the edge of Derry airspace at an altitude which requires a filed flight-plan. Repeat, you are about to enter controlled airspace over a municipal area. Get your hot-dogging butt up to 16,000 feet, Cherokee, and come to 170, that’s one-seven-oh.

While you’re doing it, please identify yourself an"i state-“Ed closed his hand into a fist and began to hammer the radio with it.

Glass flew; soon blood also began to fly. It spattered the instrument panel, the picture of Helen and Natalie, and Ed’s clean gray tee-shirt.

He went on hammering until the voice on the radio first began to fade into a rising roar of static and then quit altogether.

“Good,” he said in the low, sighing voice of a man who talks to himself a lot. “Lots better. I hate all those questions. They just-” He caught sight of his bloody hand and broke off. He held it up, looked at it more closely, and then rolled it into a fist again. A large sliver of glass was sticking out of his pinky just below the third knuckle. Ed pulled it free with his teeth, spat it casually aside, then did something which chilled Ralph’s heart: drew the side of his bloody fist first down his left cheek and then his right, leaving a pair of red marks. He reached into the elasticized pocket built into the wall on his left, pulled out a hand-mirror, and used it to check his makeshift warpaint. What he saw seemed to please him, because he smiled and nodded before returning the mirror to the pocket.

“Just remember what the dormouse said,” Ed advised himself in his low, sighing voice, and then pushed in on the control wheel. The Cherokee’s nose dropped and the altimeter slowly began to unwind.

Ralph could see Derry straight ahead now. The city looked like a handful of opals scattered across dark-blue velvet.

There was a hole in the side of the carton in the copilot’s seat.

Two wires came out of it. They led into the back of a doorbell taped to the arm of Ed’s seat. Ralph supposed that as soon as he had a visual on the Civic Center and actually began his kamikaze run, Ed would settle one finger on the raised white button in the middle of the plastic rectangle. And just before the plane hit, he would push it.

Ding-dong, Avon calling.

Break those wires, Ralph.” Break them!

An excellent idea with only one drawback: he couldn’t break so much as a strand of cobweb while he was on this level. That meant dropping back down to Short-Time country, and he was preparing to do just that when a soft, familiar voice on his right spoke his name.

[Ralph.] To his right? That was impossible. There was nothing on his right but the copilot’s seat, the side of the aircraft, and leagues of twilit New England air.

The scar along his arm had begun to tingle like a filament in an electric heater.

[Ralph!]

Don’t look. Don’t pay any attention at all. Ignore it.

But he couldn’t. Some great, bricklike force had come to bear on him, and his head began to turn. He fought it, aware that the airplane’s angle of descent was growing steeper, but it did no good.

[Ralph, look at me-don’t be afraid.] He made one last effort to disobey the voice and was unable. His head went on turning, and Ralph suddenly found himself looking at his mother, who had died of lung cancer twenty-five years ago.

Bertha Roberts sat in her bentwood rocker about five feet beyond where the sidewall of the Cherokee’s cockpit had been, knitting and rocking back and forth on thin air a mile or more above the ground.

The slippers Ralph had given her for her fiftieth birthday-lined with real mink, they had been, how goofy-were on her feet. A pink shawl was thrown around her shoulders. An old political buttonWIN WITH WILLKIE! it said-held the shawl closed.

That’s right, Ralph thought. She wore them as jewelry-it was her little affectation. I’d forgotten that.

The only thing that struck a wrong note (other than that she was dead and currently rocking at six thousand feet) was the bright red piece of afghan in her lap. Ralph had never seen his mother knit, wasn’t even sure she knew how, but she was knitting furiously just the same. The needles gleamed and winked as they shuttled through the stitches.

[“Mother? Mom? Is it really you?”]

The needles paused as she looked up from the crimson blanket in her lap. Yes, it was his mother-the version Ralph remembered from his teens, anyway. Narrow face, high scholar’s brow, brown eyes, and a bun of salt-and-pepper hair rolled tightly at the nape of the neck. It was her small mouth, which looked mean and ungenerous… until it smiled, that was.

[Why, Ralph Roberts! I’m surprised that you even have to ask!]

That’s not really an answer, though, is it? Ralph thought. He opened his mouth to say so and then decided it might be wiser for the time being, at least-to keep quiet. A milky shape was now swimming in the air to her right. Whelp Ralph looked at it, it darkened and solidified into the cherry-stained magazine stand he had made her in woodshop during his sophomore year at Derry High. It was filled with Reader’s Digests and Life magazines. And now the ground far below her began to disappear into a pattern of brown and dark-red squares that spread out from the rocker in a widening ring, like a pond-ripple.

Ralph recognized it at once-the kitchen linoleum of the house on Richmond Street in Mary Mead, the one where he’d grown up. At first he could see the ground through it, geometries of farmland and, not far ahead, the Kenduskeag flowing through Derry, and then it solidified. A ghostly shape like a big milkweed puff became his mom’s old Angora cat, Futzy, curled up on the windowsill and looking out at the gulls circling above the old dump in the Barrens. Futzy had died around the time Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had stopped making movies together.

[That old man was right, boy. You’ve no business messing into Long-Time affairs. Pay attention to your mother and stay out of what doesn’t concern you. Mind me, now,] Pay attention to your mother… mind me, now. Those words had pretty well summed up Bertha Roberts’s views on the art and science of child-rearing, hadn’t they?

Whether it was an order to wait an hour after eating before taking a swim or to make sure that old thief Butch Bowers didn’t put a lot of rotten potatoes at the bottom of the peck basket she’d sent you to fetch, the prologue (Pay attention to your mother) and the epilogue (Mind me, now-) were always the same. And if you failed to pay attention, if you failed to mind her, you had to face the Wrath of Mother, and God help you then.

She picked up the needles and began to knit again, running off scarlet stitches with fingers that looked faintly red themselves.

Ralph supposed that was just an illusion. Or maybe the dye wasn’t completely colorfast, and some of it was coming off on his fingers.

His fingers? What a silly mistake that was. Her fingers.

Except…

Well, there were little bunches of whiskers at the corners of her mouth. Long ones. Nasty, somehow. And unfamiliar. Ralph could remember a fine down on her upper lip, but whiskers? No way.

Those were new.

New? New? What are you thinking about? She died two days after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, so what in the name, of God can be new about her?

Two converging walls had bloomed on either side of Bertha Roberts, creating the kitchen corner where she had spent so much time, On one of them was a painting Ralph remembered well. It showed a family at supper-Dad, Mom, two kids. They were passing the potatoes and the corn, and looked like they were discussing their respective days. None of them noticed that there was a fifth person in the room-a white-robed man with a sandy beard and long hair.

He was standing in the corner and watching them. CHRIST, THE UNSEEN VISITOR, the plaque beneath this painting read. Except the Christ Ralph remembered had looked both kind and a little embarrassed to be eavesdropping. This version, however, looked coldly thoughtful.

… evaluative… judgmental, perhaps. And his color was very high, almost choleric, as if he had heard something which had made him furious.

[“Mom? Are you-”]

She put the needles down again on the red blanket-that oddly shiny red blanket-and raised a hand to stop him.

[Mom me no Moms, Ralph-just pay attention and mind. Stay out of this! It’s too late for your muddling and meddling. You can only make things worse.] The voice was right, but the face was wrong and becoming wronger. Mostly it was her skin. Smooth and unlined, her skin had been Bertha Roberts’s only vanity. The skin of the creature in the rocker was rough… more than rough, in fact. It was scaly. And there were two growths (or perhaps they were sores?) on the sides of her neck. At the sight of them, some terrible memory (get it off me Johnny oh please GET IT OFF) stirred far down in his mind. AndWell, her aura. Where was her aura?

[Never mind my aura and never mind about that fat old whore you’ve been running around with… although I’ll bet Carolyn is just rolling in her grave.] The mouth of the woman (not a woman that thing is not a woman) in the rocker was no longer small. The lower lip had spread, n puffed outward and downward. The mouth itself had developed a drooping sneer. A strangelyfamiliar drooping sneer.

(Johnny it’s biting me it’s BITING ME.) Something horridly familiar about the bunches of whiskers bristling at the corners of the mouth, too.

(Johnny please its eyes its black eyes)

[Johnny can’t help you, boy. He didn’t help you then and he can’t help you now.] Of course he couldn’t. His older brother Johnny had died six years ago. Ralph had been a pallbearer at his funeral.

Johnny had died of a heart-attack, possibly as Random as the one which had felled Bill McGovern, andRalph looked to the left, but the pilot’s side of the cockpit had also disappeared, and Ed Deepneau with it.

Ralph saw the old combination gas-and-woodstove on which his mother had cooked in the house on Richmond Street (a job she had resented bitterly and done badly all her life) and the arch leading into the dining room.

He saw their maple dining table. A glass pitcher stood in the center of it.

The pitcher had been filled with a choke of lurid red roses. Each seemed to have a face… a blood-red, gasping face…

But that’s wrong, he thought. All wrong. She never had roses in the house-she was allergic to most blooms, and roses were the worst.

She used to sneeze like crazy when she was around them.

The only thing I ever saw her put on the dining-room table was Indian Bouquet, and that wasn’t anything but autumn grasses. I see roses becauseHe looked back at the creature in the rocking chair, at red fingers which had now melted together into appendages that looked almost like fins. He regarded the scarlet mass which lay in the creature’s lap, and the scar along his arm began to tingle again.

What in God’s name is going on here?

But he knew, of course; he only had to look from the red thing in the rocking chair to the picture hanging on the wall, the picture of the scarlet-faced, malevolent Jesus watching the family eat their supper, to confirm it. He was not in his old house in Mary Mead, and he was not precisely in an aircraft over Derry, either.

He was in the Court of the Crimson King.

CHAPTER 29

Without thinking about why he was doing it, Ralph slipped a hand into his sweater pocket and loosely cupped one of Lois’s earrings.

His hand felt far away, something which belonged to someone else.

He was realizing an interesting thing: he had never been frightened in his life until now. Not once. He had thought he’d been frightened, of course, but it had been an illusion-the only time he’d even come close had been in the Derry Public Library, when Charlie Pickering stuck a knife into his armpit and said he was going to let Ralph’s guts out all over the floor. That, however, was nothing but a mild moment of discomfort next to what he was feeling now.

A green man came… He felt good, but I could be wrong.

He hoped she wasn’t; he most sincerely hoped she wasn’t. Because the green man was about all he had left now.

The green man, and Lois’s earrings.

[Ralph.” Stop ivoolgathering. Look at your mother when she’s talking to you.” Seventy years old and you still act like you were sixteen, with a bad case of pecker-rash.”

He turned back to the red-finned thing slumped in the rocker. It now bore only a passing resemblance to his late mother.

[“You’re not my mother, and I’m still in the airplane.

[You’re not, boy. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are.

Take one step out of my kitchen and you’re in for a very long fall.

[“You might as well stop now. I can see what you are.”] The thing spoke in a bubbly, choked voice that turned Ralph’s spine to a narrow line of ice.

[You don’t. You may think you do, hut you don’t. And you don’t want to. You don’t ever want to see me with my disguises laid aside.

Believe me, Ralph, you don’t.] He realized with mounting horror that the mother-thing had turned into an enormous female catfish, a hungry bottom-feeder with stubby teeth gleaming between its pendulous lips and whiskers which dangled almost to the collar of the dress it still wore.

The gills in its neck opened and closed like razor-cuts,"revealing troubled red inner flesh. Its eyes had grown round and purplish, and as Ralph watched, the sockets began to slide away from each other. This continued until the eyes bulged from the sides rather than the front of the creature’s scaly face.

[Don’t move so much as a single muscle, Ralph. You’ll probably die in the explosion no matter what level you’re on-the shockwaves travel here just as they do in any building-but that death will still be a great deal better than my death.] The catfish opened its mouth.

Its teeth ringed a blood-colored maw which looked full of strange guts and tumors. It seemed to be laughing at him.

[“Who are you? Are you the Crimson King?”

[That’s Ed’s name for me-we ought to have our own, don’t you think? Lets see. If you don’t want me to be Mom Roberts, why not call me the Kingfish? You remember the Kingfish from the radio, don’t you?] Yes, of course he did… but the real Kingfish had never been on Amos in’ Andy, and it hadn’t really been a kingfish at all. The real Kingfish had been a queenfish, and it had lived in the Barrens.

On a summer’s day during the year when Ralph Roberts was seven, He had hooked an enormous catfish out of the Kenduskeag while fishing with his brother, John-this had been when it was still possible to eat what you caught down in the Barrens. Ralph had asked his older brother to take the convulsively flopping thing off his hook for him and put it in the bucket of fresh water they kept on the bank beside them. Johnny had refused, loftily citing what he called the Fisherman’s Creed: good fishermen tie their own flies, dig thef’r own worms, and unhook their own catches. It was only later that Ralph realized Johnny might have been trying to hide his own fear of the huge and somehow alien creature his kid brother had reeled out of the Kenduskeag’s muddy, piss-warm water that day.

Ralph had at last brought himself to grasp the catfish’s pulsing body, which was at the same time slick, scaly, and prickly. As he did, Johnny had added to his terror by telling him, in a low and ominous voice, to look out for the whiskers. They’re poison, Bobb,lo Therriault told me if one of em sticks ya, you could get paralyse in Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. So be careful, Ralphie.

Ralph had twisted the creature this way and that, trying to free the hook from its dark, wet innards without getting his hand too near its whiskers (not believing Johnny about the poison and at the same time believing him completely), exquisitely aware of the gills, the eyes, the fishy smell that seemed to shimmer its way more deeply into his lungs each time he inhaled.

At last he’d heard a gristly ripping from deep within the catfish and felt the hook start to slide free. Fresh streamlets of blood trickled from the corners of its flexing, dying mouth. Ralph gave a little sigh of relief-prematurely, as it turned out. The catfish gave a tremendous flap of its tail as the hook came out. The hand Ralph had been using to free it slipped, and all at once the catfish’s bleeding mouth clamped shut on his first two fingers. How much pain had there been? A lot? Some? Maybe none at all? Ralph couldn’t remember.

What he did remember was Johnny’s completely unfeigned shriek of horror and his own surety that the catfish was going to make him pay for taking its life by eating two fingers off his right hand.

He remembered screaming himself, and shaking his hand, and begging Johnny to help him, but Johnny had been backing away, his face pale, his mouth a knotted line of revulsion. Ralph shook his hand in big, swooping arcs, but the cat hung on like death, whiskers (Poison whiskers put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life) snapping and flapping against Ralph’s wrist, black eyes staring.

At last he’d struck it against a nearby tree, breaking its back.

It had dropped to the grass, still flopping, and Ralph had stamped on it with one foot, provoking the final horror. A spew of guts vomited from its mouth, and from the place where Ralph’s heel had smashed it open had come a gluey torrent of bloody eggs. That was when he had realized that the Kingfish had really been the Queenfish, and only a day or two from roeing.

Ralph had stared from this freakish mess to his own bloody, scaleencrusted hand, and then howled like a banshee. When Johnny touched his arm in an effort to calm him, Ralph had bolted. He hadn’t stopped running until he got home, and he’d refused to come out of his room for the rest of the day. It had been almost a year before he’d eaten another piece of fish, and he’d never had anything to do with catfish again.

Until now, that was.

[“Ralph!”] That was Lois’s voice… but distant! So distant!

[“You have to do something right away! Don’t let it stop you."’] Ralph now realized that what he’d taken for an afghan in his mother’s lap was actually a mat of bloody eggs in the lap of the Crimson King.

It was leaning toward him over this throbbing blanket, its thick lips quivering in a parody of concern.

[Something wrong, Ralphzie? Where does it hurt? Tell Mother.] [“You’re not my mother.”] [No-I be the Queenfish! I be loud and I be proud! I got the walk and I got the talk.” Actually, I can be whatever I want. You may not know it, but shape-changing is a time-honored custom in Derry.] [“Do you know the green man Lois saw?”] [Of course!

I know all the neighborhoodfolks!] But Ralph sensed momentary puzzlement on that scaly face.

The heat along his forearm cranked up another notch, and Ralph had a sudden realization: if Lois were here now, she would hardly be able to see him. The Queenfish was putting out a pulsing, everbrightening glow, and it was gradually surrounding film, The glow was red instead of black, but it was still a deathbag, and now he knew what it was like to be on the inside, caught in a web woven from your sickest fears and most traumatic experiences. There was no way to retreat from it, and no way to cut through it, as he had cut through the deathbag which had surrounded Ed’s wedding ring.

If I’m going to escape, Ralph thought, I’m going to have to do it by running forward so hard and fast I rip right out the other side.

The earring was still in his hand. Now he shifted it so that the naked prong at the back was sticking out between the two fingers a catfish had tried to swallow sixty-three years ago. Then he said a brief prayer, not to God but to Lois’s green man.

The catfish leaned farther forward, a cartoon leer spreading across its noseless face. The teeth inside that flabby grin looked longer and sharper now. Ralph saw drops of colorless fluid heading the ends of the whiskers and thought, Poison. Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. Man, I’m so scared. Scared to fucking death.

Lois, screaming far away: [“Hurry, Ralph! You HAVE To HURRY!”] A little boy was screaming from somewhere a lot closer; screaming and waving his right hand, waving the fish clinging to the fingers buried inside the gullet of a pregnant monster that would not let go.

The catfish leaned closer yet. The dress it wore rustled. Ralph could smell his mother’s perfume, Saint Elena, mixing obscenely with the fishy, garbagey aroma of bottom-feeder.

[I intend Ed Deepneau’s errand to end in success, Ralph; I intend that the boy your friends told you about should die in his mother’s arms, and I want to see it happen. I’ve worked very hard here in Derry, and I don’t feel that’s too much to ask, but it means I have to finish with you right now.]-Ralph took a step deeper into the thing’s garbagey stink. And now he began to see a shape behind the shape of Mother, behind the shape of the Queenfish. He began to see a bright man, a red man with cold eyes and a merciless mouth. This man resembled the Christ he had seen only moments ago… but not the one which had re"Illy hung in his mother’s kitchen corner.

An expression of surprise came into the lidless black eyes of the Queenfish… and into the cold eyes of the red man beneath.

[What do you think you’re doing? Get away from me! Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?] [“I can think of worse things, pal-my days of playing first base are pretty definitely over.”] The voice rose, becoming the voice of his mother when she was angry.

[Pay attention to me, boy! Pay attention and mind me!] For a moment the old commands, given in a voice so eerily like his mother’s, made him hesitate. Then he came on again. The Queenfish shrank back in the rocker, its tail flipping up and down below the hem of the old housedress.

[JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’re DOING?] [“I don’t know,-maybe ljust want to give your whiskers a tug. See for myself if they’re real.”] And, exerting all of his willpower to keep from shrieking and fleeing, he reached out with his right hand. Lois’s earring felt like a small, warm pebble closed within his fist. Lois herself seemed very close, and Ralph decided that wasn’t surprising, considering how’ much of her aura he’d taken on. Perhaps she was even a part of him now.

The feeling of her presence was deeply comforting.

[No, you don’t dare! You’ll be paralyzed!] [“Catfish aren’t poisonous-that was the story of a ten-year-old boy who might have been even more scared than I was. “] Ralph reached for the whiskers with the hand concealing the metal thorn, and the massive, scaly head flinched away, as some part of him had known it would. It began to ripple and change, and its fearful red aura began to seep through. If sickness and palor had a color, Ralph thought, that would be it. And before the change could go any further, before that man he could now see-tall and coldly handsome with his blond hair and glaring red eyes-could step through the shimmer of the illusion it had cast, Ralph drove the sharp point of the earring into one black and bulging fisheye.

It made a terrible buzzing sound-like a cicada, Ralph thoughtand tried to draw back. Its rapidly flipping tall produced a sound like a fan with a piece of paper caught in the blades. It slid down in the rocker, which was now changing into something that looked like a throne carved from dull orange rock. And then the tail was gone, the Queenfish was gone, and it was the Crimson King sitting there, his handsome face twisted into a snarl of pain and amazement.

One of his eyes glared as red as the eye of a lynx in firelight; the other was filled with the fierce, splintered glow of diamonds.

Ralph reached into the blanket of eggs ’With his left hand, ripped it away, and saw nothing but blackness on the other side of the abortion. The other side of the deathbag. The way out.

[You were warned, you Short-Time son of a bitch You think you can pull my whiskers? Well, let’s see, shall we? Let’s just see!] The Crimson

King leaned forward again on its throne, its mouth yawning, its remaining eye blazing with red light. Ralph fought the urge to yank his now-empty right hand away. Instead he pistoned it forward toward the mouth of the Crimson King, which yawned wide to engulf it, as that long-ago catfish had done that day in the Barrens.

Things-not flesh-first squirmed and jostled against his hand, then began to bite like horseflies. At the same time Ralph felt real teeth-no, fangs-sink into his arm. In a moment, two at the most, the Crimson King would bite through his wrist and swallow his hand whole.

Ralph closed his eyes and was at once able to find that pattern of thought and concentration which allowed movement between the levels-his pain and his fear were no bar to that. Only this time his purpose was not to move but to trigger Clotho and Lachesis had planted a booby-trap inside his arm, and the time had come to set it off.

Ralph felt that sensation of blink inside his head. The scar on his arm immediately went white-hot and critical. That heat didn’t burn Ralph but flew out from him in an expanding ripple of energy. He was aware of a titanic green flash, so bright that for one moment it was as if the Emerald City of Oz had exploded all around him.

Something or someone was screaming. That high, jagged sound would have driven him mad if it had gone on for long, but it didn’t.

It was followed by a vast, hollow bang that made Ralph think of the time he had lit an M-80 firecracker and tossed it into a steel culvert.

A sudden rush of force blew past him in a fan of wind and fading green light. He caught a strange, skewed glimpse of the Crimson King, no longer handsome and no longer young but ancient and twisted and less human than the strangest creature to ever flop or hop its way along the Short-Time level of existence. Then something above them opened, revealing darkness shot through with conflicting swirls and rays of color. The wind seemed to blow the Crimson King up toward it, like a leaf in a chimney-flue. The colors began to brighten, and Ralph turned his face away, raising one hand to shield his eyes. He understood that a conduit had opened between the level where he was and the unimaginable levels stacked above it; he also understood that if he looked for long into that brightening glow, those (deadlights) swirling colors, then death would be not the worst thing that could happen to him but the best. He did not just squeeze his eyes shut; he squeezed his mind shut.

A moment later everything was gone-the creature which had identified itself to Ed as the Crimson King, the kitchen in the old house on Richmond Street, his mother’s rocking chair. Ralph was kneeling on thin air about six feet to the right of the Cherokee’s nose, his hands upraised as an oft-beaten child might raise his hands before the approach of a cruel parent, and when he looked between his knees, he saw the Civic Center and the adjacent parking lot directly below him. At first he thought his eyes were being fooled by an optical illusion, because the arc-sodiums in the parking lot seemed to be spreading apart. They almost looked like a crowd of very tall, very skinny people which is starting to break up because the excitement, whatever it was, is over. And the lot itself seemed to be… well… expanding.

Not expanding but getting closer, Ralph thought coldly. He’s going down. He’s started his kamikaze run.

For a moment Ralph was frozen in place, enchanted by the simple wonder of his position. He had become a mythical in-between creature, clearly no god (no god could be as tired and terrified as he was right now) but clearly no such earthbound creature as a man, either.

This was what it was really like to fly; to see the earth from above, with no border around it. This [“RALPH!”] Her scream was like a shotgun fired beside his ear. Ralph flinched from it, and the moment his gaze left the hypnotic sight of the ground swelling up toward him, he was able to move. He rose to his feet and walked back to the plane.

He did this as easily and normally as a man walking down a hallway in his own home. No wind buffeted his face or blew his hair back from his brow, and when his left shoulder passed through the Cherokee’s propeller, the whirling blade harmed him no more than it would have harmed smoke.

For a moment he saw Ed’s pallid, handsome face-the face of the highwayman who’d come riding up to the old inn door in the poem which had always made Carolyn cry-and his previous feeling of mingled pity and regret was replaced by anger. It was difficult to become really infuriated with Ed-he was, after all, just another chess-piece being moved across the board-and yet the building he had aimed his airplane at was full of real people. Innocent people.

Ralph saw something balky, childish, and willful about the dopey expression of disassociation on Ed’s face, and as he passed through the thin skin of the cockpit wall, Ralph thought, I think that on some level, Ed, you knew the devil had come in. I think you might even have been able to put him out again… didn’t Mr. C. and Mr. L. say there’s always a choice? If there is, you have to own a piece of this goddam you.

For a moment Ralph’s head poked through the ceiling as it had done before, and he knelt again. Now the Civic Center filled the entire windshield of the plane and he understood that it was too late to stop Ed from doing something.

He had pulled the doorbell free of the tape. He was holding it in his hand.

Ralph reached into his pocket and gripped the remaining earring, once again holding it between his fingers with the prong sticking out.

He curled his other hand into a tube around the wires running between the cardboard carton and the doorbell. Then he closed his eyes and concentrated, creating that flexing sensation in the middle of his head again. There was a sudden hollow, fluttery sensation in his stomach, and he had time to think Whoa! This is the expr(,-V elevator.” Then he was down on the Short-Time level where there were no gods or devils, no bald doctors with magic scissors and scalpels, no auras. Down where passing through walls and walking away from plane-crashes was an impossibility. Down on the Short-Time level where he could be seen… and Ed, Ralph realized, was doing just that.

“Ralph?” It was the drugged voice of a man just waking from his life’s soundest sleep. “Ralph Roberts? What are you doing here?”

“Oh, I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop in,” Ralph said. “Drag up a rock, so to speak.” And with that, he closed his curled hand into a fist and tore the wires out of the box.

“No!” Ed shrieked. “Oh no, don’t, you’ll spoil everything!”

Yes indeed, Ralph thought, then reached over Ed’s lap to grab the Cherokee’s control-wheel. The Civic Center was now no more than twelve hundred feet below them, perhaps less. Ralph still didn’t know for sure what was in the box strapped to the copilot’s chair, but he had an idea it was probably the plastique stuff the terrorists always used in the martial arts movies starring Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal. It was supposed to be fairly stable-not like the nitro in Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, certainly-but this was hardly the time to put his trust in the Gospel of Movieland. And even a stable explosive might go off without a detonator when dropped from a height of almost two miles.

He jammed the control-wheel as far over to the left as he could.

Below them, the Civic Center began to wheel sickeningly around, as if it had been mounted on the spindle of a gigantic top.

“No, you bastard.” Ed yelled, and something that felt like the head of a small hammer struck Ralph in the side, almost paralyzing him with pain and making it all but impossible to breathe. His hand slid off the control-wheel as Ed hammered him again, this time in the armpit. Ed seized the wheel and yanked it savagely back over. The Civic Center, which had begun to slip toward the side of the windshield, began to rotate back toward dead center.

Ralph clawed at the wheel. Ed placed the heel of his hand on his forehead and shoved him backward. “Why couldn’t you stay out of it?”

he snarled. “Why’d you have to meddle?” His teeth were bared, his lips pulled back in a Jealous snarl. Ralph’s appearance in the cockpit should have incapacitated him with shock but hadn’t.

Of course not, he’s nuts, Ralph thought, and suddenly raised his interior voice in a panicked yell:

[“Clotho! Lachesiv For Christ’s sake, help me."’]

Nothing. It didn’t feel as if his shout were going anywhere. And why would it? He was back down on the Short-Time level, and that meant he was on his own.

The Civic Center was only eight or nine hundred feet below them now. Ralph could see every brick, every window, every person standing outside-he could almost even tell which ones were carrying signs. They were looking up, trying to figure out what this crazy plane was doing.

Ralph couldn’t see the fear on their faces, not yet, but in another three or four secondsHe launched himself at Ed again, ignoring the throb in his left side and driving his right fist forward, using his thumb to ride the prong of the earring out beyond his fingers as far as possible.

The old Earring Gag had worked on the Crimson King, but Ralph had been higher then, and he’d had the element of surprise more firmly in hand. He went for the eye this time, too, but Ed snapped his head away at the last moment. The prong drove into the side of his face just above the cheekbone. Ed swatted at it as if it were a gnat, holding on tightly to the control-wheel with his left hand as he did it.

Ralph went for the wheel again. Ed lashed out at him. His fist connected above Ralph’s left eye, driving him backward. A single loud tone, pure and silvery, filled Ralph’s ears. It was as if there were a large tuning fork somewhere in between them, and someone had struck it. The world went as gray and grainy as a newsprint photograph.

[“RALPH. HURRY!”] It was Lois, and now she was in terror. He knew why; time had all but run out. He had maybe ten seconds, twenty at most. He lunged forward again, this time not at Ed but at the picture of Helen and Nat that was taped above the altimeter. He snatched it, held it up… and then crumpled it between his fingers. He didn’t know exactly what reaction he’d hoped for, but the one he got exceeded his wildest hopes.

“GIVE THEN BACK!” Ed screamed. He forgot about the controlwheel and groped for the picture instead. As he did, Ralph again saw the man he had glimpsed on the day Ed had beaten Helen-a man who was desperately unhappy and afraid of the forces which had been set loose within him. There were tears not just in his eyes but running down his cheeks, and Ralph thought confusedly: Has he been crying all along?

“GIVE them BACK.I” he bawled again, but Ralph was no longer sure he was the subject of that cry; he thought his former neighbor might be addressing the being which had stepped into his life, looked around itself to make sure it would do, and then simply taken it over.

Lois’s earring glittered in Ed’s cheek like a barbaric funerary ornament. “GltE THEM BACK, THERE MINE!”

Ralph held the crumpled photograph just beyond the reach of Ed’s waving hands. Ed lunged, the seatbelt bit into his gut, and Ralph punched him in the throat as hard as he could, feeling an indescribable mixture of satisfaction and revulsion as the blow landed on the hard, gristly protuberance of Ed’s Adam’s apple. Ed fell back against the cockpit wall, eyes bulging with pain and dismay and bewilderment, hands going to his throat. A thick gagging noise came from somewhere deep inside him. It sounded like some heavy piece of machinery in the process of stripping its gears.

Ralph shoved himself forward over Ed’s lap and saw the Civic Center now leaping up toward the airplane. He turned the wheel all the way to the left again and below him-directly below him-the Civic Center again began to rotate toward the side of the Cherokee’s soon-to-be-defunct windshield… but it moved with agonizing slowness.

Ralph realized he could smell something in the cockpit-some faint aroma both sweet and familiar. Before he could think what it might be, he saw something that distracted him completely. It was the Hoodsie Ice Cream wagon that sometimes cruised along Harris Avenue, tinkling its cheery little bell.

My God, Ralph thought, more in awe than in fear. I think I’m going to wind up in the deep freeze along with the Creamsicles and Hoodsie Rockets.

That sweet smell was stronger, and as hands suddenly seized his shoulders, Ralph realized it was Lois Chasse’s perfume.

“Come up!” she screamed. “Ralph, you dummy, you have to-” He didn’t think about it; he just did it. The thing in his mind clenched, the blink happened, and he heard the rest of what she had to say in that eerie, penetrating way that was more thought than speech.

[”-come up! Push with your feet.” Too late, he thought, but he did as she said nevertheless, planting his feet against the base of the radically canted instrument panel and shoving as hard as he could. He felt Lois rising up through the column of existence with him as the Cherokee shot through the last hundred feet between it and the ground, and as they zoomed upward, he felt a sudden blast of Lois-power wrap itself around him and yank him backward like a bungee cord. There was a brief, nauseating sensation of flying in two directions at the same time.

Ralph caught a final glimpse of Ed Deepneau slumped against the sidewall of the cockpit, but in a very real sense he did not see him at all. The thunderstruck yellow-gray aura was gone. Ed was also gone, buried in a deathbag as black as midnight in hell.

Then he and Lois were falling as well as flying.

CHAPTER 30

Just before the explosion came, Susan Day, standing in a hot white spotlight at the front of the Civic Center and now living through the last few seconds of her fabulous, provocative life, was saying: “I haven’t come to Derry to heal you, hector you, or to incite you, but to mourn with you-this is a situation which has passed far beyond political considerations. There is no right in violence, nor refuge in self-righteousness. I am here to ask that you put your positions and your rhetoric aside and help each other find a way to help each other.

To turn away from the attractions of-” The high windows lining the south side of the auditorium suddenly lit up with a brilliant white glare and then blew inward.

The Cherokee missed the Hoodsie wagon, but that didn’t save it.

The plane took one final half-turn in the air and then screwed itself into the parking lot about twenty-five feet from the fence where, earlier that day, Lois had paused to yank up her troublesome halfslip. The wings snapped off. The cockpit made a quick and violent journey back through the passenger section. The fuselage blew out with the fury of a bottle of champagne in a microwave oven. Glass flew.

The tail bent over the Cherokee’s body like the stinger of a dying scorpion and impaled itself in the roof of a Dodge van with the words PROTECT WOMEN’s IPJGHT TO CHOOSE! stencilled on the side. There was a bright and bitter crunch-clang that sounded like a dropped pile of scrap iron.

“Holy shi-” one of the cops posted on the edge of the parking lot began, and then the C-4 inside the cardboard box flew free like a big gray glob of phlegm and struck the remains of the instrument panel where several “hot” wires rammed into it like hypo needles.

The plastique exploded with an ear-crunching thud, flash-frying the Bassey Park racetrack and turning the parking lot into a hurricane of white light and shrapnel. John Leydecker, who had been standing under the Civic Center’s cement canopy-and talking to a State cop, was thrown through one of the open doors and all the way across the lobby.

He struck the far wall and fell unconscious into the shattered glass from the harness-racing trophy case. At that, he was luckier than the man with whom he had been standing; the State cop was thrown into the post between two of the open doors and chopped in half.

The ranks of cars actually shielded the Civic Center from the worst of the hammering, concussive blow, but that blessing would only be counted later. Inside, over two thousand people at first sat stunned, unsure of what they should do and even more unsure of what most of them had just seen: America’s most famous feminist decapitated by a jagged chunk of flying glass. Her head went flying into the sixth row like some strange white bowling ball with a blonde wig pasted on it.

They didn’t erupt into panic until the lights went out.

Seventy-one people were killed in the trampling, panicked rush to the exits, and the next day’s Derry News would trumpet the event with a forty-eight-point scare headline, calling it a terrible tragedy.

Ralph Roberts could have told them that, all things considered, they had gotten off lucky. Very lucky, indeed.

Halfway up the north balcony, a woman named Sonia Danville-a woman with the bruises of the last beating any man would ever give her still fading from her face-sat with her arms around the shoulders of her son, Patrick. Patrick’s McDonald’s poster, showing Ronald and Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar dancing the BootScootin’ Boogie just outside a drive-thru window, was on his lap, but he had hardly done more than color the golden arches before turning the poster over to the blank side. It wasn’t that he had lost interest; it was just that he’d had an idea for a picture of his own, and it had come, as such ideas often did to him, with the force of a compulsion.

He had spent most of the day thinking about what had happened in the cellar at High Ridge-the smoke, the heat, the frightened women, and the two angels that had come to save them-but his splendid idea banished these disturbing thoughts, and he fell to work with silent enthusiasm. Soon Patrick felt almost as if he were living in the world he was drawing with his Crayolas.

He was an amazingly competent artist already, only four years old or not (“My little genius,” Sonia sometimes called him), and his picture was much better than the color-it-in poster on the other side of the sheet. What he had managed before the lights went out was work a gifted first-year art student might have been proud of. In the middle of the poster-sheet, a tower of dark, soot-colored stone rose into a blue sky dotted with fat white clouds. Surrounding it was a field of roses so red they almost seemed to clamor aloud. Standing off to one side was a man dressed in faded bluejeans. A pair of gunbelts crossed his flat middle; a holster hung below each hip. At the very top of the tower, a man in a red robe was looking down at the gunfighter with an expression of mingled hate and fear. His hands, which were curled over the parapet, also appeared to be red.

Sonia had been mesmerized by the presence of Susan Day, who was sitting behind the lectern and listening to her introduction, but she had happened to glance down at her son’s picture just before the introduction ended. She had known for two years that Patrick was what the child psychologists called a prodigy, and she sometimes told herself she had gotten used to his sophisticated drawings and the Play-Doli sculptures he called the Clay Family. Perhaps she even had, to some degree, but this particular picture gave her a strange, deep chill that she could not entirely dismiss as emotional fallout from her long and stressful day.

“Who’s that?” she asked, tapping the tiny figure peering jealously down from the top of the dark tower.

“Him’s the Red King,” Patrick said.

“Oh, the Red King, I see. And who’s this man with the guns?”

As he opened his mouth to answer, Roberta Harper, the woman at the podium, lifted her left arm (there was a black mourning band on it) toward the woman sitting behind her. “My friends, His. Susan Day.i” she cried, and Patrick Danville’s answer to his mother’s second question was lost in the rising storm of applause: Him’s name is Roland, Mama. I dream about him, sometimes.

He’s a King, too.

Now the two of them sat in the dark with their ears ringing, and two thoughts ran through Sonia’s mind like rats chasing each other on a treadmill: Won’t this day ever end, I knew I shouldn’t have brought him, won’t this day ever end, I knew I shouldn’t have brought him, won’t this day"Mommy, you’re scrunching my picture!” Patrick said. He sounded a little out of breath, and Sonia realized she must be scrunching him, too. She eased up a little. A tattered skein of screams, shouts, and babbled questions came from the dark pit below them, where the people rich enough to pony up fifteen-dollar “donations” had been seated in folding chairs. A rough howl of pain cut through this babble, making Sonia jump in her seat.

The thudding crump which had followed the initial explosion had pressed in painfully on their ears and shaken the building. The blasts which were still going on-cars exploding like firecrackers in the parking lot-sounded small and inconsequential in comparison, but Sonia felt Patrick flinch against her with each one.

“Stay calm, Pat,” she told him. “Something bad’s happened, but I think it happened outside.” Because her eyes had been drawn to the bright glare in the windows, Sonia had mercifully missed seeing her heroine’s head leaving her shoulders, but she knew that somehow lightning had struck in the same place.

(shouldn’t have brought him, shouldn’t have brought him) and that at least some of the people below them were panicking.

If she panicked, she and Young Rembrandt were going to be in serious trouble.

But I’m not going to. I didn’t get out of that deathbox this morning just to panic now. I’ll be goddamned if I will.

She reached down and took one of Patrick’s hands-the one that wasn’t clutching his picture. It was very cold.

“Do you think the angels will come to save us again, Mama?” he asked in a voice that quivered slightly.

“Nah,” she said. “I think this time we better do it ourselves.

But we can do that. I mean, we’re all right now, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” he said, but then slumped against her. She had a terrible moment when she was sure he had fainted and she’d have to carry him from the Civic Center in her arms, but then he straightened up again.

“My books was on the floor,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave without my books, especially the one about the boy who can’t take off his hat.

Are we leaving, Mama?”

“Yes. As soon as people stop running around. There’ll be lights in the halls, ones that run on batteries, even though the ones in here are out. When I say, we’re going to get up and walk-walk-up the steps to the door. I’m not going to carry you, but I’m going to walk right behind you with both my hands on your shoulders. Do you understand, Pat?”

“Yes, Mama.” No questions. No blubbering. just his books, thrust into her hands for safekeeping. He held onto the picture himself.

She gave him a quick hug and kissed his cheek.

They waited in their seats five minutes by her slow count to three hundred. She sensed that most of their immediate neighbors were gone before she got to a hundred and fifty, but she made herself wait. She could now see a little, enough for her to believe that something was burning fiercely outside, but on the far side of the building. That was very lucky. She could hear the warble-wail of approaching police cars, ambulances, and fire-trucks.

Sonia got to her feet. “Come on. Keep right in front of me.”

Pat Danville stepped into the aisle with his mother’s hands pressed firmly down on his shoulders. He led her up the steps toward the dim yellow lights which marked the north balcony corridor, stopping only once as the dark shape of a running man hurtled toward them.

His mother’s hands tightened on his shoulders as she yanked him aside.

“Goddam right-to-lifers!” the running man cried, “Fucking selfrighteous turds I’d like to kill them all!”

Then he was gone and Pat began walking up the stairs again. She felt a calmness in him now, a centered lack of fear, that touched her heart with love, and with some queer darkness, as well. He was so different, her son, so special… but the world did not love people like that, The world tried to root them out, like tares from a garden.

They emerged at last into the corridor. A few deeply shocked people wandered back and forth, eyes dazed and mouths agape, like zombies in a horror movie. Sonia hardly glanced at them, just got Pat moving toward the stairs. Three minutes later they exited into the fireshot night perfectly unscathed, and upon all the levels of the universe, matters both Random and Purposeful resumed their ordained courses. Worlds which had trembled for a moment in their orbits now steadied, and in one of those worlds, in a desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts, a man named Roland turned over in his bedroll and slept easily once again beneath the alien constellations.

Across town, in Strawford Park, the door of the Portosan marked MEN blew open. Lois Chasse and Ralph Roberts came flying out backward in a haze of smoke, clutching each other. From within came the sound of the Cherokee hitting and then the plastique exploding. There was a flash of white light and the toilet’s blue walls bulged outward, as if some giant had hammered them with his fists.

A second later they heard the explosion all over again; this time it came rolling across the open air. The second version was fainter, but somehow more real.

Lois’s feet stuttered and she thumped to the grass of the lower hillside with a cry which was partly relief. Ralph landed beside her, then pushed himself up to a sitting position. He stared unbelievingly at the Civic Center, where a fist of fire was now clenched on the horizon. A purple lump the size of a doorknob was rising on his forehead, where Ed had hit him. His left side still throbbed, but he thought maybe the ribs in there were only sprung, not broken.

[“Lois, are you all right?” She looked at him uncomprehendingly for a moment, then began to feel at her face and neck and shoulders.

There was something so perfectly, sweetly Our Lois about this examination that Ralph laughed. He couldn’t help it. Lois smiled tentatively back at him.

[“I think I’m fine. In fact, I’m quite sure I am.”] [“What were you doing there? You could have been killed."’] Lois, appearing somewhat rejuvenated (Ralph guessed that the handy wino had had something to do with that) looked him in the eye.

[“I may be old-fashioned, Ralph, but if you think I’m going to spend the next twenty years or so far’ntting and fluttering like the heroine’s best friend in those Regency romances my friend was always reading, you better pick another woman to chum around with.”] He gaped for a moment, then pulled her to her feet and hugged her. Lois hugged back. She was incredibly warm, incredibly there, Ralph reflected for a moment on the similarities between loneliness and insomnia-how they were both insidious, cumulative, and divisive, the friends of despair and the enemies of love-and then he pushed those thoughts aside and kissed her.

Clotho and Lachesis, who had been standing at the top of the hill and looking as anxious as workmen who have wagered their Christmas bonuses on a prizefight underdog, now rushed down to where Ralph and Lois stood with their foreheads once more pressed together, looking into each other’s eyes like lovestruck teenagers.

From the far side of the Barrens, the sound of sirens rose like voices heard in uneasy dreams. The pillar of fire which marked the grave of Ed Deepneau’s obsession was now too bright to look at without squinting. Ralph could hear the faint sound of cars exploding, and he thought of his car, sitting abandoned somewhere out in the williwags.

He decided that was okay. He was too old to drive.

Clotho: [Are you both all right?]

Ralph: [“We’re fine, Lois reeled me in. She saved my life.”]

Lachesis: [yes. We saw her go in. It was very brave.] Also very perplexing, right, Mr. L.? Ralph thought. You saw it and you admire it… but I don’t think you have any idea of how or why she could bring herself to do it. I think that, to you and your friend, the concept Of rescue must seem almost as foreign as the idea of love.

For the first time, Ralph felt a kind of pity for the little bald doctors, and understood the central irony of their lives: they were aware that the Short-Timers whose existences they had been sent to prune lived powerful inner lives, but they did not in the least comprehend the reality of those lives, the emotions which drove them, which of the actions-sometimes noble, sometimes foolish suited-Mr. C. and Mr. L. had studied their Short-Time charges as certain rich but timid Englishmen had studied the maps brought back by the explorers of the Victorian Age, explorers who had in many cases been funded by these same rich but timid men. With their clipped nails and soft fingers the philanthropists had traced paper rivers upon which they would never ride and paper jungles through which they would never safari. They lived in fearful perplexity and passed it off as imagination.

Clotho and Lachesis had drafted them, and had used them with a certain crude effectiveness, hut they understood neither the joy of risk nor the sorrow of loss-the best they had been able to manage in the way of emotion was a nagging fear that Ralph and Lois would try to take on the Crimson King’s pet research chemist directly and be swatted like elderly flies for their pains. The little bald doctors lived long lives, but Ralph suspected that, brilliant dragonfly auras notwithstanding, they were gray lives. He looked at their unlined, oddly childish faces from the safe haven of Lois’s arms and remembered how terrified of them he had been when he had first seen them coming out of May Locher’s house in the early hours of the morning. Terror, he had since discovered, could not survive mere acquaintanceship, let alone knowledge, and now he had some of both.

Clotho and Lachesis returned his gaze with an uneasiness Ralph found he had absolutely no urge to allay. It seemed very right to him, somehow, that they should feel the way they were feeling.

Ralph: [“Yes, she’s very brave and I love her very much and I think we’ll make each other very happy until-“] He broke off, and Lois stirred in his arms. He realized with a mixture of amusement and relief that she had been half-asleep.

[“Until what, Ralph?”] [“Until you name it. I guess that there’s always an until when you’re a Short-Timer, and maybe that’s okay.”] Lachesis: [Well, I guess this is goodbye.] Ralph grinned in spite of himself, reminded of The Lone Ranger radio program, where almost every episode had ended with some version of that line. He reached out toward Lachesis and was sourly amused to see the little man recoil from him.

Ralph: [“Wait a minute… let’s not be so hasty, fellas.] Clotho, with a tinge of apprehension: [Is something wrong?] [“I don’t think so, but after getting popped in the head, popped in the ribs, and damned near roasted alive, I think I have a right to make sure that it’s really over. Is it? Is your boy safe?”] Clotho, smiling and clearly relieved: [Yes. Can’t you feel it?

Eighteen years from now,. just before his death, the boy is going to save the lives of two men who would otherwise die… and one of those men must of die, if the balance between the Random and the Purpose is to be maintained.] Lois: [“Never mind all that. I just want to know if we can go back to being regular Short-Timers again.”] Lachesis: [Not only can, Lois, but must. If you and Ralph were to stay up here much longer, you wouldn’t be able to go back down.] Ralph felt Lois press more tightly against him.

[“I wouldn’t like that.”] Clotho and Lachesis turned toward each other and a subtle, perplexed glance-How could anybody not like it up here? their eyes asked-passed between them before they turned back to Ralph and Lois.

Lachesis: [We really must be going. I’m sorry, but-Ralph: [“Hold on, neighbors-you’re not going anywhere yet.”] They looked at him apprehensively while Ralph slowly pushed up the sleeve of his sweater-the cuff was now stiff with some fluid, perhaps catfish ichor, that he found he did not want to think about-and showed them the white, knotted line of scar on his forearm.

[“Put away the constipated looks, guys. I just want to remind you that you gave me your word. Don’t forget that part of it.] Clotho, with obvious relief: [You can depend on it, Ralph. What was your weapon is now our bond. The promise will not be forgotten-Ralph was beginning to believe it really was over. And, crazy as it seemed, part of him regretted it. Now it was real life-life as it went on on the floors below this level-that seemed almost like a mirage, and he understood what Lachesis had meant when he told them that they would never be able to return to their normal lives if they stayed up here much longer.

Lachesis: [We really must go. Fare you well, Ralph and Lois. We will never forget the service you have rendered us.] Ralph: [“Did we ever have a choice? Did we really?”] Lachesis, very softly: [We told you so, didn’t we? For Short-Timers there is always a choice. We find that frightening… but we also find it beautiful.] Ralph: [“Say-do you fellows ever shake hands?”] Clotho and Lachesis glanced at each other, startled, and Ralph sensed some quick dialogue flashing between them in a kind of telepathic shorthand. When they looked back at Ralph, they wore identical nervous smiles-the smiles of teenage boys who have decided that if they can’t find enough courage to ride the big rollercoaster at the amusement park this summer, they will never truly be men.

Clotho: [We have observed this custom many times, of course, but no-we have never shaken hands.] Ralph looked at Lois and saw she was smiling… but he thought he saw a shimmer of tears in her eyes, as well.

He offered his hand to Lachesis first, because Mr. L. seemed marginally less jumpy than his colleague.

[“Put ’er there, Mr. L. “I Lachesis looked at Ralph’s hand for so long that Ralph began to think he wasn’t going to be able to actually do it, although he clearly wanted to. Then, timidly, he put out his own small hand and allowed Ralph’s larger one to close over it. There was a tingling vibration in Ralph’s flesh as their auras first mingled, then merged… and in that merging he saw a series of swift, beautiful silver patterns. They reminded him of the Japanese characters on Ed’s scarf.

He pumped Lachesis’s hand twice, slowly and formally, then released it. Lachesis’s look of apprehension had been replaced by a large goony smile. He turned to his partner.

[His force is almost completely unguarded during this ceremoni.”

felt it.” It’s quite wonderful.ll Clotho inched his own hand out to meet Ralph’s, and in the instant before they touched, Mr. C. closed his eyes like a man expecting a painful injection.

Lachesis, meanwhile, was shaking hands with Lois and grinning like a vaudeville hoofer taking an encore.

Clotho appeared to steel himself, then seized Ralph’s hand. He flagged it once, firmly. Ralph grinned.

[“Take her easy, Mr. C.] Clotho withdrew his hand. He seemed to be searching for the proper response.

[Thank you, Ralph. I will take her any way I can get her.

Correct?] Ralph burst out laughing. Clotho, now turning to shake hands with Lois, gave him a puzzled smile, and Ralph clapped him on the back.

[“You got it right, Mr. C. -absolutely right-“He slipped his arm around Lois and gave the little bald doctors a final curious look.

[“I’ll be seeing you fellows again, won’t I?”] Clotho: [Yes, Ralph.] Ralph: [“Well, that’s fine. About seventy years from now would be good for me” why don’t you boys)just put it down on your calendar?”] They responded with the smiles of politicians, which didn’t surprise him much. Ralph gave them a little bow, then put his arms around Lois’s shoulders and watched as Mr, C. and Mr. L. walked slowly down the hill. Lachesis opened the door of the slightly warped Portosan marked MEN; Clotho stood in the open doorway of WOMEN.

Lachesis smiled and waved. Clotho lifted the long-bladed scissors in a queer sort of salute.

Ralph and Lois waved back.

The bald doctors stepped inside and closed the doors.

Lois wiped her streaming eyes and turned to Ralph.

[“Is that it? It is, isn’t it?”] Ralph nodded.

[“What do we do now?”] He held out his arm.

[“May I see you home, madam?”]

Smiling, she clasped his forearm just below the elbow.

[“Thank you, sir. You may.”] They left Strawford Park that way, returning to the Short-Time level as they came out on Harris Avenue, slipping back down to their normal place in the scheme of things with no fuss or botherwithout, in fact, even being aware they were doing it until it was done.

Derry groaned with panic and sweated with excitement. Sirens wailed, people shouted from second-storey windows to friends on the sidewalks below, and on every street-corner people had clustered to watch the fire on the other side of the valle, Ralph and Lois paid no attention to the tumult and hooraw. They walked slowly up Up-Mile Hill, increasingly aware of their exhaustion; it seemed to come piling into them like softly thrown bags of sand. The pool of white light marking the Red Apple Store’s parking lot seemed an impossible distance away, although Ralph knew it was only three blocks, and short ones, at that.

To make matters worse, the temperature had dropped a good fifteen degrees since that morning, the wind was blowing hard, and neither of them was dressed for the weather. Ralph suspected this might be the leading edge of autumn’s first big gale, and that in Derry, Indian summer was over.

Faye Chapin, Don Veazie, and Stan Eberly came hurrying do-,n the hill toward them, obviously bound for Strawford Park. The fieldglasses Old Dor sometimes used to watch planes taxi, land, and take off were bouncing around Faye’s neck. With Don, who was balding and heavyset, in the middle, their resemblance to a more famous trio was inescapable.

The Three Stooges of the Apocalypse, Ralph thought, and grinned.

“Ralph!” Faye exclaimed. He was breathing fast, almost panting.

The wind blew his hair into his eyes and he raked it back impatiently.

“Goddam Civic Center blew up! Someone bombed it from a light plane! We heard there’s a thousand people dead “I heard about the same,” Ralph agreed gravely. “In fact, Lois and I have just been down at the park, having a look. You can see straight across the valley from there, you know.”

“Christ, I know that, I’ve lived here all my damn life, haven’t I?

Where do you think we’re going? Come on back with us!”

“Lois and I were just headed up to her house to see what they’ve got about it on TV. Maybe we’ll join you later.”

“Okay, we-jeepers-creepers, Ralph, what’d you do milo your head?

“For a moment Ralph drew a blank-what had he done to his head?-and then, in an instant of nightmarish recall, he saw Ed’s snarling mouth and mad eyes. Oh no, don’t, Ed had screamed at him.

You’ll spoil everything.

“We were running to get a better look and Ralph ran into a tree,” Lois said. “He’s lucky not to be in the hospital.”

Don laughed at that, but in the half-distracted manner of a fellow who has bigger fish to fry. Faye wasn’t paying attention to them at all. Stan Eberly was, however, and Stan didn’t laugh. He was looking at them with close, puzzled curiosity.

“Lois,” he said.

“What?”

“Did you know you’ve got a sneaker tied to your wrist?”

She looked down at it. Ralph looked down at it. Then Lois looked up and gave Stan a dazzling, eye-frying smile. “Yes!” she said.

“It’s an interesting look, isn’t it? Sort of a… a life-sized charm bracelet!”

“Yeah,” Stan said. “Sure.” But he wasn’t looking at the sneaker anymore; now he was looking at Lois’s face. Ralph wondered how in hell they were going to explain how they looked tomorrow, when there were no shadows between the streetlights to hide them.

“Come on!” Faye cried impatiently. “Let’s get going!”

They hurried off (Stan gave them one last doubtful glance over his shoulder as they went). Ralph listened after them, almost expecting Don Veazie to give out a nyuck-nyuck or two.

“Boy, that sounded so dumb,” Lois said, “but I had to say something, didn’t I?”

“You did fine.”

“Well, when I open my mouth, something always seems to fall out,” she said. “It’s one of my two great talents, the other being the ability to clean out an entire Whitman’s Sampler during a two-hour TV movie.” She untied Helen’s sneaker and looked at it. “She’s safe, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” Ralph agreed, and reached for the sneaker. As he did, he realized he already had something in his left hand. The fingers had been clamped down so long that they were creaky and reluctant to open.

When they finally did, he saw the marks of his nails pressed into the flesh of his palm. The first thing he was aware of was that, while his own wedding ring was still in its accustomed place, Ed’s was gone.

It had seemed a perfect fit, but apparently it had slipped off his finger at some point during the last half an hour, just the same, Maybe not, a voice whispered, and Ralph was amused to realize that it wasn’t Carolyn’s this time. This time the voice in his had belonged to Bill McGovern. Maybe it just disappeared. You know, poof But he didn’t think so. He had an idea that Ed’s wedding band might have been invested with powers that hadn’t necessarily died with Ed. The Ring Bilbo Baggins had found and reluctantly given up to his grandson, Frodo, had had a way of going where it wanted to… and when. Perhaps Ed’s ring wasn’t all that different.

Before he could consider this idea further, Lois traded Helen’s sneaker for the thing in his hand: a small stiff crumple of paper. She smoothed it out and looked at it. Her curiosity slowly changed to solemnity.

“I remember this picture, “she said. “The big one was on the mantel in their living room, in a fancy gold frame. It had pride of place.”

Ralph nodded. “This must have been the one he carried in his wallet.

It was taped to the instrument panel of the plane. Until I took it, he was beating me, and not even breathing hard while he did it. Grabbing his picture was all I could think of to do. When I did, his focus switched from the Civic Center to them. The last thing I heard him say was ’Give them back, they’re mine.”

“And was he talking to you when he said it?”

Ralph stuck the sneaker into his back pocket and shook his head.

“Nope. Don’t think so.”

“Helen was at the Civic Center tonight, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.” Ralph thought of how she had looked out at High Ridge -her pale face and smoke-reddened, watering eyes. If they stop us now, they win, she’d said. Don’t you see that?

And now he did see.

He took the picture from Lois’s hand, crumpled it up again, and walked over to the litter-basket which stood on the corner of Harris Avenue and Kossuth Lane. “We’ll get another picture of them somesometime, one we can keep on our own mantel.

Something not quite so formal. This one, though… I don’t want it.”

He tossed the little ball of paper at the litter-basket, an easy shot, two feet at the most, but the wind picked that moment to gust and the crumpled photo of Helen and Natalie which had been taped above the altimeter of Ed’s plane flew away on its cold breath. The two of them watched it whirl up into the sky, almost hypnotized. It was Lois who looked away first. She glanced at Ralph with a trace of a smile curving her lips.

“Did I hear a backhand proposal of marriage from you, or am I just tired?” she asked.

He opened his mouth to reply and another gust of wind struck them, this one so hard it made them both wince their eyes shut.

When he opened his, Lois had already started up the hill again.

“Anything’s possible, Lois,” he said. “I know that now.”

Five minutes later, Lois’s key rattled in the lock of her front door.

She led Ralph inside and shut it firmly behind them, closing out the windy, contentious night. He followed her into the living room and would have stopped there, but Lois never hesitated. Still holding his hand, not quite pulling him along (but perhaps meaning to do so if he began to lag), she showed him into her bedroom.

He looked at her. Lois looked calmly back… and suddenly he felt the blink happen again. He watched her aura bloom around her like a gray rose. It was still diminished, but it was already coming back, re-knitting itself, healing itself.

[“Lois, are you sure this is what you want?”] [“Of course it I’s.”

Did you think I was going to give you a pat on the head and send you home after all we’ve been through?” Suddenly she smiled-a wickedly mischievous smile.

[“Besides, Ralph-do you really feel like getting up to dickens tonight? Tell me the truth. Better still, don’t flatter me.”] He considered it, then laughed and drew her into his arms. Her mouth was sweet and slightly moist, like the skin of a ripe peach, That kiss seemed to tingle through his entire body, but the sensation was most concentrated in his mouth, where it felt almost like an electric shock.

When their lips parted, he felt more excited than ever… but he also felt queerly drained.

[“What if I say I do, Lois? What if I say I do want to get up to dickens?” She stood back and looked at him critically, as if trying to decide whether he meant what he said or if it was just the usual male bluff and brag. At the same time her hands went to the buttons of her dress. As she began to slip them free, Ralph noticed a wonderful thing: she looked younger again. Not forty by any stretch of the imagination, but surely no more than fifty… and a young fifty. It had been the kiss, of course, and the really amusing thing was he didn’t think she had the slightest idea that she had added a helping of Ralph to her earlier helping of wino. And what was wrong with that?

She finished her inspection, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek, [“I think that there’ll be plenty of time for getting up to dickens later, Ralph-tonight’sfor sleeping.”] He supposed she was right. Five minutes ago he had been more than willing-he had always loved the act of physical love, and it had been a long time. For now, however, the spark was gone. Ralph didn’t regret that in the least. He knew, after all, where it had gone.

[“Okay, Lois-tonight’s for sleeping.

She went into the bathroom and the shower went on. A few minutes later, Ralph heard her brushing her teeth. It was nice to know she still had them. During the ten minutes she was gone he managed to do a certain amount of undressing, although his throbbing ribs made it slow work. He finally succeeded in wriggling McGovern’s sweater off and pushing out of his shoes. His shirt came next, and he was fumbling ineffectually with the buckle of his belt when Lois came out with her hair tied back and her face shining.

Ralph was stunned by her beauty, and suddenly felt much too big and stupid (not to mention old) for his own good. She was wearing a long rose-colored silk nightgown and he could smell the lotion she had used on her hands. It was a good smell.

“Let me do that,” she said, and had his belt unbuckled before he could say much, one way or the other. There was nothing erotic about it; she moved with the efficiency of a woman who had often helped her husband dress and undress during the last year of his life.

“We’re down again,” he said. “This time I didn’t even feel it happening.”

“I did, while I was in the shower. I was glad, actually.

Trying to wash your hair through an aura is very distracting.”

The wind gusted outside, shaking the house and blowing a long, shivering note across the mouth of a downspout. They looked toward the window, and although he was back down on the SbortTime level, Ralph was suddenly sure that Lois was sharing his own thought: Atropos was out there somewhere right now, no doubt disappointed by the way things had gone but by no means crushed, bloody but unbowed, down but not out.

From now on they can call him Old One-Ear, Ralph thought, and shivered. He imagined Atropos swinging erratically through the scared, excited populace of the city like a rogue asteroid, peering and hiding, stealing souvenirs and slashing balloon-strings… taking solace in his work, in other words. ing Ralph found it almost impossible to believe that he had been sitt’ f that creature and slashing at him with his own scalpel not on top so very long ago. How did I ever find the courage?

he wondered, but he supposed he knew. The diamond earrings the little monster had been wearing had provided most of it. Did Atropos know those earrings had been his biggest mistake? Probably not. In his way, Doc #3 had proved even more ignorant of Short-Time motivations than Clotho and Lachesis.

He turned to Lois and ras ed her hands. “I lost your earrings again.

This time they’re gone for good, I think. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. They were already lost, remember? And I’m not worried about Harold and Jan anymore, because now I’ve got a friend to help me when people don’t treat me right, or when I just get scared. Don’t I?”

“Yes. You most certainly do.”

She kissed him, ugged him tightly, and kissed him again. Lois had apparently not forgotten a single thing she’d ever learned about kissing, and it seemed to Ralph that she’d learned quite a lot. “Go on and hop in the shower.” He started to say that he thought he’d fall asleep the moment he got his head under a stream of warm water, but then she added something which changed his mind in a hurry: “Don’t take offense, but there’s a funny smell on you, especially on your hands.

It’s the way my brother Vic used to smell after he’d spent the day cleaning fish.”

Ralph was in the shower two minutes later, and in soapsuds up to his elbows.

10 Only When he came out, Lois was buried beneath two puffy quilts her face showed, and that was visible only from the nose up. Ralph crossed the room quickly, wearing only his undershorts and painfully conscious of his spindly legs and potbelly.

He tossed back the covers and slid in quickly, gasping a little as the cool sheets slid along his warm skin.

Lois slipped over to his side of the bed at once and put her arms around him. He put his face in her hair and let himself relax against her. It was very good, being with Lois under the quilts while the wind shrieked and gusted outside, sometimes hard enough to rattle the storm windows in their frames. It was, in fact, heaven.

“Thank God there’s a man in my bed,” Lois said sleepily.

“Thank God it’s me,” Ralph replied, and she laughed.

“Are your ribs okay? Do you want me to find you an aspirin”

“Nope. I’m sure they’ll hurt again in the morning, but right now the hot water seems to have loosened everything up.” The subject of what might or might not happen in the morning raised a question in his mind-one that had probably been waiting there all along.

“Lois?”

“Mmmmm?”

In his mind’s eye Ralph could see himself snapping awake in the dark, deeply tired but not at all sleepy (it was surely one of the world’s cruelest paradoxes), as the numbers on the digital clock turned wearily over from 3:47 a.m. to 3:48. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, when every hour was long enough to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

“Do you think we’ll sleep through?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said unhesitatingly. “I think we’ll sleep just fine.”

A moment later, Lois was doing just that.

Ralph stayed awake for perhaps five minutes longer, holding her in his arms, smelling the wonderful interwoven scents rising from her warm skin, luxuriating in the smooth, sensuous glide of the silk under his hands, marvelling at where he was even more than the events which had brought him here. He was filled with some deep and simple emotion, one he recognized but could not immediately name, perhaps because it had been gone from his life too long.

The wind gusted and moaned outside, producing that hollow hooting sound over the top of the drainpipe again-like the world’s biggest Nirvana Boy blowing over the mouth of the world’s biggest pop-bottle-and it occurred to Ralph that maybe nothing in life was better than lying deep in a soft bed with a sleeping woman in your arms while the fall wind screamed outside your safe haven.

Except there was something better-one thing, at least-and that was the feeling of falling asleep, of going gently into that good night, slipping out into the currents of unknowing the way a canoe slips away from a dock and slides into the current of a wide, slow river on a bright summer day.

Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best, Ralph thought.

The wind gusted again outside (the sound of it now seeming to come from a great distance) and as he felt the tug of that great river take him, he was finally able to identify the emotion he had been feeling ever since Lois had put her arms around him and fallen asleep as easily and as trustingly as a child. It went under many different names-peace, serenity, fulfillment-but now, as the wind blew and Lois made some dark sound of sleeping contentment far back in her throat, it seemed to Ralph that it was one of those rare things which are krown but essentially unnameable: a texture, an aura, perhaps a whole level of being in that column of existence. It was the smooth russet color of rest; it was the silence which follows the completion of some arduous but necessary task.

When the wind gusted again, bringing the sound of distant sirens with it, Ralph didn’t hear it. He was asleep. Once he dreamed that he got up to use the bathroom, and he supposed that might not have been a dream. At another time he dreamed that he and Lois made slow, sweet love, and that might not have been a dream, either. If there were other dreams or moments of waking, he did not remember them, and this time there was no snapping awake at three or four o’clock in the morning. They slept-sometimes apart but mostly together-until just past seven o’clock on Saturday evening; about twenty-two hours, all told.

Lois made them breakfast at sunset-splendidly puffy waffles, bacon, home fries. While she cooked, Ralph tried to flex that muscle buried deep in his mind-to create that sensation of blink, He couldn’t do it. When Lois tried, she was also unable, although Ralph could have sworn that just for a moment she flickered, and he could see the stove right through her.

“Just as well, she said, bringing their plates to the table.

“I suppose,” Ralph agreed, but he still felt as he would have if he had lost the ring Carolyn had given him instead of the one he had taken from Atropos-as if some small but essential object had gone rolling out of his life with a wink and a gleam. harder to believe what he did know. There was the scar between the elbow and wrist of his right arm, of course, but he even began to wonder if that wasn’t something he had acquired long ago, during those years of his life when there had been no white in his hair and he had still believed, deep in his heart, that old age was a myth, or a dream, or a thing reserved for people not as special as he was.

Following two more nights of sound, unbroken sleep, the auras had begun to fade, as well. By the following week they were gone, and Ralph began to wonder if perhaps the whole thing hadn’t been some strange dream. He knew that wasn’t so, but it became harder and Winding the Deathwatch Glancing over my shoulder I see its shape and so move forward, as someone in the woods at night might hear the sound of approaching feet and stop to listen; then, instead of silence he hears some creature trying to be silent.

What else can he do but run? Rushing blindly down the path, stumbling, struck in the face by sticks; the other ever closer, yet not really hurrying or out of breath, teasing its kill.

-Stephen Dobyns, “Pursuit”

If I had some wings, I’d fly you all around;

If I had some money, I’d buy you the goddam town;

If I had the strength, then maybe I coulda pulled you through;

If I had a lantern, I’d light the way for you, If I had a lantern, I’d light the way for you.

-Michael McDermott, “Lantern”

On January 2, 1994, Lois Chasse became Lois Roberts.

Her son, Harold, gave her away. Harold’s wife did not attend the ceremony; she was up in Bangor with what Ralph considered a highly suspect case of bronchitis. He kept his suspicions to himself, however, being far from disappointed at Jan Chasse’s failure to appear.

The groom’s best man was Detective John Leydecker, who still wore a cast on his right arm but otherwise showed no signs of the assignment which had nearly killed him. He had spent four days in a coma, but Leydecker knew how lucky he was; in addition to the State Trooper who had been standing beside him at the time of the explosion, six cops had died, two of them members of Leydecker’s handpicked team.

The bride’s maid of honor was her friend Simone Castonguav, and at the reception, the first toast was made by a fellow who liked to say he used to be Joe Wyze but was now older and Wyzer. Trigger Vachon delivered a fractured but heartfelt follow-up, concluding with the wish that “Dese two people gonna live to a hunnert and fifty and never know a day of the rheumatiz or constipations!”

When Ralph and Lois left the reception hall, their hair still full of rice thrown for the most part by Faye Chapin and the rest of the Harris Avenue Old Crocks, an old man with a book in his hand and a fine cloud of white hair floating around his head came walking up to them.

He had a wide smile on his face.

“Congratulations, Ralph,” he said. “Congratulations, Lois.”

“Thanks, Dor,” Ralph said.

“We missed you,” Lois told him. “Didn’t you get your invitation?

Faye said he’d give it to you.”

“Oh, he gave it to me. Yes, oh yes, he did, but I don’t go to those things if they’re inside. Too stuffy. Funerals are even worse.

Here, this is for you. I didn’t wrap it, because the arthritis is in my fingers too bad for stuff like that now.”

Ralph took it. It was a book of poems called Concurring Beasts.

The poet’s name, Stephen Dobyns, gave him a funny little chill, but he wasn’t quite sure why.

4 “Thanks,” he told Dorrance.

“Not as good as some of his later work, but good. Dobyns is very good.”

“We’ll read them to each other on our honeymoon,” Lois said.

“That’s a good time to read poetry,” Dorrance said. “Maybe the best time. I’m sure you’ll be very happy together.”

He started off, then looked back.

“You did a great thing. The Long-Timers are very pleased.”

He walked away.

Lois looked at Ralph. “What was he talking about? Do you know?

“Ralph shook his head. He didn’t, not for sure, although he felt as if he should know. The scar on his arm had begun to tingle as it 7 sometimes did, a feeling which was almost like a deep-seated itch.

“Long-Timers,” she mused. “Maybe he meant us, Ralph-after all, we’re hardly spring chickens these days, are we?”

“That’s probably just what he did mean,” Ralph agreed, but he knew better… and her eyes said that, somewhere deep down, so did she.

On that same day, and just as Ralph and Lois were saying their I do’s, a certain wino with a bright green aura-one who actually did have an uncle in Dexter, although the uncle hadn’t seen this the’erdo-well nephew for five years or more-was tramping across Strawford Park, slitting his eyes against the formidable glare of sun on snow. He was looking for returnable cans and bottles. Enough to buy a pint of whiskey would be great, but a pint of Night Train wine would do.

Not far from the Portosan marked MEN, he saw a bright gleam of metal.

It was probably just the sun reflecting off a bottle-cap, but such things needed to be checked out. It might be a dime… although to the wino, it actually seemed to have a goldy sort of gleam. It"Holy Judas!” he cried, snatching up the wedding ring which lay mysteriously on top of the snow. It was a broad band, almost certainly gold. He tilted it to read the engraving on the inside:

A pint? Hell, no. This little baby was going to secure him a quart.

Several quarts. Possibly a week’s worth of quarts.

Hurrying across the intersection of Witcham and.fackson, the one where Ralph Roberts had once almost fainted, the wino never saw him put on his brakes, but the bus struck a patch of ice.

The wino never knew what hit him. At one moment he was debating between Old Crow and Old Grand-Dad; at the next he had passed into the darkness which awaits us all. The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way-an often unpleasant one-of turning up.

Ralph and Lois didn’t live happily ever after.

There really are no evers in the Short-Time world, happy or otherwise, a fact which Clotho and Lachesis undoubtedly knew well.

They did live happily for quite some time, though. Neither of them liked to come right out and say these were the happiest years of all, because both remembered their first partners in marriage with love and affection, but in their hearts, both did consider them the happiest. Ralph wasn’t sure that autumn love was the richest love, but he came firmly to believe that it was the kindest, and the most fulfilling.

Our LoiS, he often said, and laughed. Lois pretended to be irritated at this, but pretending was all it ever was; she saw the look in his eyes when he said it.

On their first Christmas Morning as man and wife (they had moved into Lois’s tidy little house and put his own white rhino up for sale), Lois gave him a beagle puppy.” Do you like her?” she asked apprehensively.

“I almost didn’t get her, Dear Abby says you should never give pets as presents, but she looked so sweet in the petshop window… and so sad… if you don’t like her, or don’t 756 want to spend the rest of the winter trying to housebreak a puppy, just say so. We’ll find someone-”

“Lois,” he said, giving his eyebrow what he hoped was that that special Bill McGovern lift, you’re babbling.”

“I am?”

“You am. It’s something you do when you’re nervous, but you can stop being nervous right now. I’m crazy ’bout dis lady.” Nor was that an exaggeration; he fell in love with the black-and-tan beagle bitch almost at once.

“What will you name her?” Lois asked. “Any idea?”

“Sure,” Ralph said. “Rosalie.”

The next four years were happy ones for Helen and Nat Deepneau, as well.

They lived frugally in an apartment on the east side of town for awhile, getting along on Helen’s librarian’s salary but not doing much more than that. The little Cape Cod up the street from Ralph’s place had sold, but that money had gone to pay outstanding bills. Then, in June of 1994, Helen received an insurance windfall… only the wind that blew it her way was fohn Leydecker.

The Great Eastern Insurance Company had originally refused to pay off on Ed Deepneau’s life insurance policy, claiming he had taken his own life. Then, after a great deal of harrumphing and muttering under their corporate breath, they had offered a substantial settlement.

They were persuaded to do this by a poker-buddy of John Leydecker’s named Howard Hayman. When he wasn’t playing lowball, five-card stud, and three-card draw, Hayman was a laxvyer who employed lunching on insurance companies.

Leydecker had re-met Helen at Ralph and Lois’s in February of 1994, had fallen head over heels in fascination with her (“It was never quite love,” he told Ralph and Lois later, “which was probably just as well, considering how things turned out”), and had introduced her to Hayman because he thought the insurance company was trying to screw her. “He was not suicidal,” Leydecker said, and stuck to that long after Helen had handed him his hat and shown him the door.

After being faced with a suit in which Howard Hayman threatened to make Great Eastern look like Snidely Whiplash tying Little a Nell to the railroad tracks, Helen had received a check for seventy thousand dollars. In the late fall of 1994 she had used most of this money to build a house on Harris Avenue, just three doors up from her old place and right across from Harriet Bennigan’s.

“I was never really happy on the east side,” she told Lois one day in November of that year. They were on their way back from the park, and Natalie had been sitting slumped and fast asleep in her stroller, her presence little more than a p k os 1 in n e-tip and a fog of cold breath below a large ski-hat which Lois had knitted herself. “I used to dream about Harris Avenue. Isn’t that crazy?”

“I don’t think dreams are ever crazy,” Lois replied.

Helen and John Leydecker dated for most of that summer, but neither Ralph nor Lois was particularly surprised when the courtship abruptly ended after Labor Day, or when Helen began to wear a discreet pink triangle pin on her prim, high-necked librarian’s blouses.

Perhaps they were not surprised because they were old enough to have seen everything at least once, or perhaps on some deep level they were still glimpsing the auras which surround thinls.

I creating a bright gateway opening on a secret city of hidden meanings, concealed motives, and camouflaged agendas.

Ralph and Lois babysat Natalie frequently after Helen moved back to Harris Avenue, and they enjoyed these stints tremendously. Nat was the child their marriage might have produced if it had happened thirty years sooner, and the coldest, most overcast winter day warmed and brightened when Natalie came toddling in, looking like a midget version of the Goodyear blimp in her pink quilted snowsuit with the mittens hanging from the cuffs, and yelled exuberantly: “Hi, I miss! I come to bizzit you!”

In June of 1995, Helen bought a reconditioned Volvo. On the back she put a sticker which read A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE. This sentiment did not particularly surprise Ralph, either, but glimpsing that sticker always made him feel unhappy. He sometimes thought Ed’s meanest legacy to his widow was summed up in its brittle, not-quite-funny sentiment, aind when he saw it, Ralph often remembered how Ed had looked on that summer afternoon when he had walked up from the Red Apple Store to confront him. How Ed had been sitting, shirtless, in the spray thrown by the sprinkler. How there had been a drop of blood on one lens of his glasses. How he had leaned forward, looking at Ralph with his earnest, intelligent eyes, and said that once stupidity reached a certain level, it became hard to live with.

And after that, stuff started to ha sometimes think. just what stuff was something he could no longer remember, though, and probably that was just as well. But his lapse of memory (if that was what it was) did not change his belief that Helen had been cheated in some obscure fashion… that some bad-tempered fate had tied a can to her tail, and she didn’t even know it.

A month after Helen bought her Volvo, Faye Chapin suffered a heart-attack while drafting a preliminary list of seeds for that fall’s Runway 3 Classic. He was taken to Derry Home Hospital, where he died seven hours later. Ralph visited him shortly before the end, and when he saw the numbers on the door-315-a fierce sense of deja vu washed over him. At first he thought it was because Carolyn had finished her last illness jus up the hall, and then he remembered that jimmy V. had died in this very room. He and Lois had visited jimmy just before the end, and Ralph thought jimmy had recognized them both, although he couldn’t be sure; his memories of the time when he had first begun to really notice Lois were mixed up and hazy in his mind. He supposed some of that was love, and probably some of it had to do with getting on in years, but probably most of it had been the insomnia-he’d gone through a really bad patch of that in the months after Carolyn’s death, although it had eventually cured itself, as such things sometimes did.

Still, it seemed to him that something ([hello woman hello man we’ve been waiting for you]) far out of the ordinary had happened in this room, and as he took Faye’s dry, strengthless hand and smiled into Faye’s frightened, confused eyes, a strange thought came to him: They’re standing right over there in the corner and watching us.

He looked over. There was no one at all in the corner, of course, but for a moment… for just a moment…

Life in the years between 1993 and 1998 went on as life in places like Derry always does: the buds of April became the brittle, blowing leaves of October; Christmas trees were brought into homes in midDecember and hauled off in the backs of Dumpsters with strands of tinsel still hanging sadly from their boughs during the first week of January; babies came in through the in door and old folks went out through the out door. Sometimes people in the prime of their lives went out through the out door, too.

In Derry there were five years of haircuts and permanents, storms and senior proms, coffee and cigarettes, steak dinners at Parker’s Cove and hotdogs at the Little League field. Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.

In the early fall of 1996, Ralph became convinced he had colon cancer, He had begun to see more than trace amounts of blood in his stool, and when he finally went to see Dr. Pickard or. Litchfield’s cheerful, rumpled replacement), he did so with visions of hospital beds and chemotherapy IV-drips dancing bleakly in his head.

Instead of cancer, the problem turned out to be a hemorrhoid which had, in Dr. Pickard’s memorable phrase, “popped its top.” He wrote Ralph a prescription for suppositories, which Ralph took to the Rite Aid down the street. Joe Wyzer read it, then grinned cheerfully at Ralph. “Lousy,” he said, “but it beats the hell out of colon cancer, don’t you think?”

repliee stiffly. MY mind,” Ralph One da dury ing the winter of 1997, Lois took it into her head to slide dow her favorite hill in Strawford Park on Nat Deepneau’ n plastic flying-saucer sled. She went down “fstern a Pig in a greaseds chute” (this was Don Veazie’s phrase; he just happened to be there that day, watching the actio) and crashed into the side of the Portosan marked WOMEN. She sprained her knee and twisted her back, and although Ralph knew he had no business doing so-it was unsympathetic, to say the least-he laughed hilariously most of the way to the emergency room. The fact that Lois was also howling with laughter despite the pain did nothing to help Ralph regain control.

He laughed until tears poured from his eyes and he thought he might have a stroke. She had just looked so goddamned Our LOIS going down the hill on that thing, spinning around and around with her legs crossed like one of those yogis from the mysterious East, and she had almost knocked the Portosan over when she hit it. She was completely recovered by the time spring rolled around, although that knee always ached on rainy nights and she did get tired of Don Veazie asking, almost every time he saw her, if she’d slid into any shithouses lately. -first life, going on as it always does-which is to say mostly between the lines and outside the margins. It’s what happens while we’re making other plans, according exceptionally going to some sage or other, and if life was od to Ralph Roberts during those years, itlmight have been because he had no other plans to make. He maintained friendships with Toe Wyzer and during those years was his lohn Leydecker, but his best friend Is wife. They went almost everywhere together, had no secrets, and fought so seldom one might just as well have said never. He also had Rosalie the beagle, the rocker that had once been Mr. Chasse’s and was now his, and almost daily visits from Natalie (who had begun calling them Ralph and Lois instead of Wall and Roiss, a change neither of them found to be an improvement). And he was healthy, which was maybe the best thing of all. It was just life, full of Short-Time rewards and setbacks, and Ralph lived it with’enjoyment and serenity until mid-March of 1998, when he awoke one morning, glanced at the digital clock beside his bed, and saw it was 5:49 a.m.

He lay quietly beside Lois, not wanting to disturb her by getting up, and wondering what had awakened him.

You know what, Ralph.

No I don’t.

Yes, you do. Listen.

So he listened. He listened very carefully. And after awhile he began to hear it in the walls: the low, soft ticking of the deathwatch.

Ralph awoke at 5:47 the following morning, and at 5:44 the morning after that. His sleep was whittled away, minute by minute, as winter slowly loosened its grip on Derry and allowed spring to find its way back in. By May he was hearing the tick of the deathwatch everywhere, but understood it was all coming from one place and simply projecting itself, as a good ventriloquist can project his voice. Before, it had been coming from Carolyn. Now it was coming from him.

He felt none of the terror that had gripped him when he’d been so sure he had developed cancer, and none of the desperation he vaguely remembered from his previous bout of insomnia. He tired more easily and began to find it more difficult to concentrate and remember even simple things, but he accepted What was happening calmly.

“Are you sleeping all right, Ralph?” Lois asked him one day.

“You’re getting these big dark circles under your eyes.”

“It’s the dope I take,” Ralph said.

“Very funny, you old poop.”

He took her in his arms and hugged her. “Don’t worry about me, sweetheart-I’m getting all the sleep I need.”

He awoke one morning a week later at 4:02 a.m. with a line of deep heat throbbing in his arm-throbbing in perfect sync with the sound of the deathwatch, which was, of course, nothing more or less than the beat of his own heart. But this new thing wasn’t his heart, or at least Ralph didn’t think it was; it felt as if an electric filament had been embedded in the flesh of his forearm.

It’s the scar, he thought, and then: No, it’s the promise. The time of the promise is almost here.

What promise, Ralph? What promise? He didn’t know.

One day in early June, Helen and Nat blew in to visit and tell Ralph and Lois about the trip they had taken to Boston with “Aunt Melanie, a bank teller with whom Helen had become close friends.

Helen and Aunt Melanie had gone to some sort of feminist convention while Natalie networked with about a billion new kids in the day-care center, and then Aunt Melanie had left to do some more feminist things in New York and Washington. Helen and Nat had stayed on in Boston for a couple of days, just sightseein “We went to see a movie cartoon,” Natalie said. “It was about animals in the woods.

They talked!” She pronounced this last word with Shakespearian grandiosity-talked.

“Movies where animals talk are neat, aren’t they?” Lois asked.

“Yes! Also I got this new dress!”

“And a very pretty dress it is,” Lois said.

Helen was looking at Ralph. “Are you okay, old chum? You look pale, and you haven’t said boo.”

“Never better,” he said. “I was just thinking how cute you two look in those caps. Did you get them at Fenway Park?”

Both Helen and Nat were wearing Boston Red Sox caps. These were common enough in New England during warm weather (“common as catdirt,” Lois would have said), but the sight of them on the heads of these two people filled Ralph with some deep, resonant feeling… and it was tied to a specific image, one he did, at least, understand: the front of the Red Apple Store. Helen, meantime, had taken off her hat and was examining it. “Yes,” she said. “We went, but we only stayed for three innings.

Men hitting balls and catching balls. I guess I just don’t have much patience for men and their balls these days… but we like our nifty Bosox hats, don’t we, Natalie?”

“Yes! “Nat agreed smartly, and when Ralph awoke the next morning at 4:01, the scar throbbed its thin line of heat inside his arm and the deathwatch seemed almost to have gained a voice, one which whispered a strange, foreign-sounding name over and over: Atropos… Atropos…

Atropos-I know that name.

Do you, Ralph? Yes, he was the one with the rusty scalpel and the nasty disposition, the one who called me Shorts, the one who took… took… Took what, Ralph?

He was getting used to these silent discussions; they seemed to come to him on some mental radio band, a pirate frequency that operated only during the little hours, the ones when he lay awake beside his sleeping wife, waiting for the sun to come up.

Took what? Do you remember?

He didn’t expect to; the questions that voice asked him almost always went unanswered, but this time, unexpectedly, an answer came.

Bill McGovern’s hat, of course. Atropos took Bill’s hat, and once I made him so mad he actually took a bite out of the brim.

Who is he? Who is Atropos?

Of this he was not so sure. He only knew that Atropos had something to do with Helen, who now owned a Boston Red Sox cap of which she seemed very fond, and that he had a rusty scalpel.

Soon, thought Ralph Roberts as he lay in the dark, listening to the soft, steady tick of the deathwatch in the walls. I’ll know sooll.

During the third week of that baking-hot June, Ralph began to see the auras again.

As June slipped into July, Ralph found himself bursting into tears often, usually for no discernible reason at all. It was strange; he had no sense of depression or discontent, but sometimes he would look at something-maybe only a bird winging its solitary way across the sky-and his heart would vibrate with sorrow and loss.

It’s almost over, the inside voice said. It no longer belonged to

Carolyn or Bill or even his own younger self, it was all its own now, the voice of a stranger, although not necessarily an unkind one.

That’s why you’re sad, Ralph. It’s perfectly normal to be sad as things start to wind down.

Nothing ’ g’s almost over he cried back. Why should it be? At my last checkup, Dr. Pickard said I was sound as a drum.” I’m fine!

Never better.”

Silence from the voice inside. But it was a knowing silence.

“Okay,” Ralph said out loud one hot afternoon near the end of July. was sitting on a bench not far from the place where the Derry Standpipe had stood until 1985, when the big storm had come along and knocked it down. At the base of the hill, near the birdbath, a young man (a serious birdwatcher, from the binoculars he wore and the thick stack of paperbacks on the grass beside him) was making careful notes in what looked like some sort of journal. “Okay, tell me why it’s almost over. just tell me that.”

There was no immediate answer, but that was all right; Ralph was willing to wait. It had been quite a stroll over here, the day was hot, and he was tired. He was now waking around three-thirty every morning. He had begun taking long walks again, but not in any hope they would help him sleep better or longer; he thought he was making pilgrimages, visiting all his favorite spots in Derry one last time.

Saying goodbyeBecause the time of the promise has almost come, the voice answered, and the scar began to throb with its deep, narrow heat again.

The one that was made to you, and the one you made ’ “return.

“What was it?” he asked, agitated. “Please, if I made a promise, why can’t I remember what it was.mill The serious birdwatcher heard that and looked up the hill. What he saw was a man sitting on a park bench and apparently having a conversation with himself. The corners of the serious birdwatcher’s mouth turned down in disgust and he thought, I hope I die before I get that old. I really do. Then he turned back to the birdbath and began making notes again.

Deep inside Ralph’s head, the clenching sensation-that feeling of blink-suddenly came again, and although he didn’t stir from the bench, Ralph felt himself propelled rapidly upward nonetheless… faster and farther than ever before.

Not at all, the voice said. Once you were much higher than this, Ralph-Lois, too. But you’re getting there. You’ll be ready soon.

The birdwatcher, who lived all unknowing in the center of a gorgeous spun-gold aura, looked around cautiously, perhaps wanting to make sure that the senile old man on the bench at the top of the hill wasn’t creeping up on him with a blunt instrument. What he saw caused the tight, prissy line of his mouth to soften in astonishment. His eyes widened. Ralph observed sudden radiating spokes of indigo in the serious birdwatcher’s aura and realized he was looking at shock.

What’s the matter with him? What does he see?

But that was wrong. It wasn’t what the birdwatcher saw,-it was what he didn’t see. He didn’t see Ralph, because Ralph had gone up high enough to disappear from this level-had become the visual equivalent of a note blown on a dog-whistle.

If they were here now, I could see them easily.

Who, Ralph? If who was here?

Clotho. Lachesis. And Atropos.

All at once the pieces began to fly together in his mind, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had looked a great deal more complicated than it actually was.

Ralph, whispering: [“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”]

Six days later, Ralph awoke at quarter past three in the morning and knew that the time of the promise had come.

“I think I’ll walk upstreet to the Red Apple and get an ice-cream bar,” Ralph said. It was almost ten o’clock. His heart was beating much too fast, and his thoughts were hard to find under the constant white noise of terror which now filled him. He had never felt less like ice cream in his entire life, but it was a reasonable enough excuse for a trip to the Red Apple; it was the first week of August, and the weatherman had said the mercury would probably top ninety by early afternoon, with thunderstorms to follow in the early evening.

Ralph thought he needn’t worry about the thunderstorms.

A bookcase stood on a spread of newspapers by the kitchen door.

Lois had been painting it barn-red. Now she got to her feet, put her hands into the small of her back, and stretched. Ralph could hear the minute crackling sounds of her spine. “I’ll go with you. My head’Il ache tonight if I don’t get away from that paint for awhile. I don’t know why I wanted to paint on such a muggy day in the first place.”

The last thing on earth Ralph wanted was to be accompanied up to the Red Apple by Lois. “You don’t have to, honey; I’ll bring you back one of those coconut Popsicles you like. I wasn’t even planning on taking Rosalie, it’s so humid. Go sit on the back porch, why don’t you?”

“Any Popsicle you carry back from the store on a day like this will be falling off the stick by the time you get it here,” she said “Come on, let’s go while there’s still shade on this side of the She trailed off. The little smile she’d been wearing slipped off her face.

It was replaced by a look of dismay, and the gray of her aura, which had only darkened slightly during the years Ralph hadn’t been able to see it, now began to glow with flocks of reddish-pink embers.

“Ralph, what’s wrong? What are you really going to do?”

“Nothing,” he said, but the scar was glowing inside his arm and the tick of the deathwatch was everywhere, loud and everywhere. It was telling him he had an appointment to keep. A promise to keep.

“Yes, there is, and it’s been wrong for the last two or three months, maybe longer. I’m a foolish woman-I knew something was happening, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it dead-on. Because I was afraid. And I was right to be afraid, wasn’t I? I was right.”

“Lois-” She was suddenly crossing the room to him, crossing fast, almost leaping, the old back injury not slowing her down in the least, and before he could stop her, she had seized his right arm and was holding it out, looking at it fixedly.

The scar was glowing a fierce bright red.

Ralph had a moment to hope that it was strictly an aural glow and she wouldn’t be able to see it. Then she looked up, her eyes round and full of terror. Terror, and something else. Ralph thought that something else was recognition.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “The men in the park. The ones with the funny names… Clothes and Lashes, something like that… and one of them cut you. Oh Ralph, oh my God, what are you supposed to do?”

“Now, Lois, don’t take on-”

“Don’t you dare tell me not to take on.” she shrieked into his face.

“Don’t you dare.” Don’t you DARE.I” Hurry, the interior voice whispered. You don’t have time to stand around and discuss this,somewhere it’s already begun to happen, and the deathwatch you hear may not be ticking just for you.

“I have to go.” He turned and blundered toward the door. In his agitation he did not notice a certain Sherlock Holmesian circumstance attending this scene: a dog which should have barked-a dog which always barked her stern disapproval when voices were raised in this house-but did not. Rosalie was missing from her usual place by the screen door… and the door itself was standing ajar.

Rosalie was the furthest thing from Ralph’s mind at that moment.

He felt knee-deep in molasses, and thought he would be doing well just to make the porch, let alone the Red Apple up the street. His heart thumped and skidded in his chest; his eyes were burning.

“No!” Lois screamed. “No, Ralph, please! Please don’t leave me!” She ran after him, clutched his arm. She was still holding her paintbrush, and the fine red droplets which splattered his shirt looked like blood. Now she was crying, and her expression of utter, abject sorrow nearly broke his heart. He didn’t want to leave her like this; wasn’t sure he could leave her like this.

He turned and took her by her forearms. “Lois, I have to go.”

“You haven’t been sleeping,” she babbled, “I knew that, and I knew it meant something was wrong, but it doesn’t matter, we’ll go away, we can leave right now, this minute, we’ll just take Rosalie and our toothbrushes and go-” He squeezed her arms and she stopped, looking up at him with her wet eyes. Her lips were trembling.

“Lois, listen to me. I have to do this.”

“I lost Paul, I can’t lose you, too!” she wailed. “I couldn’t stand it! Oh Ralph, I couldn’t stand it!”

You’ll be able to, he thought. Short-Timers are a lot tougher that, they look. They have to be.

Ralph felt a couple of tears trickle down his cheeks. He suspected their source was more weariness than grief. If he could make her see that all this changed nothing, only made what he had to do harder…

He held her at arm’s length. The scar on his arm was throbbing more fiercely than ever, and the feeling of time slipping relentlessly away had become overwhelming.

“Walk with me at least partway, if you want,” he said. “Maybe you can even help me do what I have to do. I’ve had my life, Lois, and a fine one it was. But she hasn’t really had anything yet, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let that son of a bitch have her just because He’s got a score to settle with me.”

“What son of a bitch? Ralph, what in the world are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Natalie Deepneau. She’s supposed to die this morning, only I’m not going to let that happen.”

“Nat? Ralph, why would anyone want to hurt Nat?”

She looked very bewildered, very Our Lois… but wasn’t there something else beneath that daffy exterior? Something careful and calculating? Ralph thought the answer was yes. Ralph had an idea Lois wasn’t half as bewildered as she was pretending to be. She had fooled Bill McGovern for years with that act-him, too, at least part of the time-and this was just another (and rather brilliant) variation of the same old scam.

What she was really trying to do was hold him here. She loved Nat deeply, but to Lois, a choice between her husband and the little girl who lived up the lane was no choice at all. She didn’t consider either age or questions of fairness to have any bearing on the situation.

Ralph was her man, and to Lois, that was all that mattered.

“It won’t work,” he said, not unkindly. He disengaged himself and started for the door again. “I made a promise, and I’m all out of time.”

“Break it, then!” she cried, and the mixture of terror and rage in her voice stunned him. “I don’t remember much about that time, but I remember we got involved with things that almost got us killed, and for reasons we couldn’t even understand. So break it, Ralph!

Better your promise than my heart!”

“And what about the kid? What about Helen, for that matter?

Nat’s all she lives for. Doesn’t Helen deserve something better from me than a broken promise?”

“I don’t care what she deserves! What any of them deserve!” she shouted, and then her face crumpled. “Yes, all right, I suppose I do.

But what about us, Ralph? Don’t we count?” Her eyes, those dark and eloquent Spanish eyes of hers, pleaded with him. If he looked into them too long, it would become all too easy to cry it off, so Ralph looked away.

“I mean to do it, honey. Nat’s going to get what you and I have already had-another seventy years or so of days and nights.”

She looked at him helplessly, but made no attempt to stop him again. Instead she began to cry. “Foolish old man!” she whispered.

“Foolish, willful old man!”

“Yes, I suppose,” he said, and lifted her chin. “But I’m a foolish, willful old man of my word. Come with me. I’d like that.”

“All right, Ralph.” She could hardly hear her own voice, and her skin was as cold as clay. Her aura had gone almost completely red.

“What is it? What’s going to happen to her?”

“She’s going to be hit by a green Ford sedan. Unless I take her place, she’s going to be splashed all over Harris Avenue… and Helen’s going to see it happen.”

As they walked up the hill toward the Red Apple (at first Lois kept falling behind, then trotting to catch up, but she quit when she saw she could not slow him with such a simple trick), Ralph told her what little more he could. She had some memory of being under the lightning-struck tree out by the Extension-a memory she had believed, at least until this morning, to be the memory of a dreambut of course she hadn’t been there during Ralph’s final confrontation with Atropos.

Ralph told her of it now-of the random death Atropos intended Natalie to suffer if Ralph continued standing in the way of his plans.

He told her of how he’d extracted a promise from Clotho and Lachesis that Atropos might in this case be overruled, and Nat saved.

“I have an idea that… the decision was made… very near the top of this crazy building… this Tower… they kept talking about.

Maybe… at the very top.” He was panting out the words and his heart was beating more rapidly than ever, but he thought most of that could be attributed to the fast walk and the torrid day; his fear had subsided somewhat. Talking to Lois had done that much.

Now he could see the Red Apple. Mrs. Perrine was at the bus stop half a block farther up, standing straight as a general reviewing troops. Her net shopping bag hung over her arm. There was a bus shelter nearby, and it was shady inside, but Mrs. Perrine stolidly ignored its existence. Even in the dazzling sunlight he could see that her aura was the same West Point gray as it had been on that October evening in 1993. Of Helen and Nat there was as yet no sign.

“Of course I knew who he was, “Esther Perrine later tells the reporter from the Derry News. “Do I look incompetent to you, young man?

Or senile? I’ve known Ralph Roberts for over twenty years. A good man. Not cut from the same cloth as his first wife, of course-Carolynn was a Satterttaite, from the Bangor Satter aites-but a very fine all, just the same. I recognized the driver of that green Ford auto, too, right away. Pete Sullivan delivered my paper for six years, and he did a good job. The new one, the Morrison boy, always throws it in the flowerbeds or up on the porch roof Pete was driving with his mother, on his learner’s permit, I understand. I hope he won’t take on too much about what happened, for he’s a good lad, and it really wasn’t his fault. I saw the whole thing, and I’ll take my oath on it.

“I suppose you think I’m rambling. Don’t bother denying it,-I can read your face just like it was your own newspaper, Never mind, though-I’ve said most of what I have to say. I knew it was Ralph right away, but here’s something you’ll get wrong even if you Put it in your story… which you probably won’t. He came from nowhere to save that little girl.

Esther Perrine fixes the respectfully silent young reporter with a formidable glance-fixes him as a lepidopterist might fix a butterfly on a pin after administering the chloroform.

“I don’t mean it was like he came from nowhere, young man, although I bet that’s what you’ll print.” She leans toward the reporter, her eyes never leaving his face, and says it again. “He came from nowhere to save that little girl Do you follow me?

From nowhere.”

The accident made the front page of the following day’s Derry News.

Esther Perrine was sufficiently colorful in her remarks to warrant a sidebar of her own, and staff photographer Tom Matthews got a picture to go with it that made her look like Ma load in The Grapes Of Wrath.

The headline of the sidebar read: “IT WAS LIKE HE CAME FROM NOWHERE,” WITNESS TO THE TRAGEDY SAYS.

When she read it, Mrs. Perrine was not at all surprised.

“in the end I got what I wanted,” Ralph said, “but only because Clotho and Lachesis-and whoever it is they work for on the upper levels-were desperate to stop Ed.”

“Upper levels? What, upper levels? What building?”

“Never mind. You’ve forgotten, but remembering wouldn’t change anything. The point is just this, Lois: they didn’t want to stop Ed because thousands of people would have died if he’d hit the Civic Center dead-on. They wanted to stop him because there was one person whose life needed to be preserved at any cost… in their reckoning, any"way. When I was finally able to make them see that I felt the same about my kid as they did about theirs, arrangements were made.”

“That’s when they cut you, wasn’t it? And when you made the promise.

The one you used to talk about in your sleep.”

He shot her a wide-eyed, startled, and heartbreakingly boyish glance.

She only looked back.

“Yes,” he said, and wiped his forehead. “I guess so.” The air lay in his lungs like metal shavings. “A life for a life, that was the dealNatalie’s in exchange for mine. And-” [Hell.” Quit trying to wiggle away. Quit it, Rover, or I’ll kick your asshole square.”

Ralph broke off at the sound of that shrill, hectoring, horridly familiar voice-a voice no human being on Harris Avenue but him could hear-and looked across the street.

“Ralph? What-”

“Shhh! right hedge in front of the He pulled her back against the Applebaums’ summer house. He wasn’t doing anything so polite as perspiring now; his whole body was crawling with a stinking sweat as heavy as engine oil, and he could feel every gland in his body dumping a hot load into his blood. His underwear was trying to crawl up into the crack of his ass and disappear. His tongue tasted like a blown fuse.

Lois followed the direction of his gaze. “Rosalie!” she cried.

“Rosalie, you bad dogi What are you doing over there?”

The black-and-tan beagle she had given Ralph on their first Christmas was across the street, standing (except cringing was actually the word for what she was doing) on the sidewalk in front of the house where Helen and Nat had lived until Ed had popped his wig.

For the first time in the years they’d had her, the beagle reminded Lois of Rosalie #1. Rosalie #2 appeared to be all alone over there, but that did not allay Lois’s sudden terror.

Oh, what have I done? she thought. What have I done?

“Rosalie!” she screamed. “Rosalie, get over here!” The dog heard, Lois could see that she did, but she didn’t move.

“Ralph? What’s happening over there?”

“Shhhh!” he said again, and then, just a little farther up the street, unstated Lois saw something which stopped her breath Her last, hope that all this was happening only in Ralph’s head, that it was a kind of flashback to their previous experience, disappeared, because now their dog had company.

Holding a skip-rope looped over her right arm, six-year-old Nat Deepneau came to the end of her walk and looked down the street toward a house she didn’t remember ever living in, toward a lawn where her shirtless father, an undesignated player named Ed Deepneau, had once sat among intersecting rainbows, listening to the Jefferson Airplane as a single spot of blood dried on his John Lennon spectacles. Natalie looked down the street and smiled happily at Rosalie, who was panting and watching her with miserable, frightened eyes.

Atropos doesn’t see me, Ralph thought. He’s concentrating on Rosie… and on Natalie, of course… and he doesn’t see me.

Everything had come around with a sort of hideous perfection.

The house was there, Rosalie was there, and Atropos was there, too, wearing a hat cocked back on his head and looking like a wiseacre news reporter in a 1950s B-picture-something directed by Ida Lupino, perhaps. Only this time it wasn’t a Panama with a bite gone from the brim; this time it was a Boston Red Sox cap and it was too small even for Atropos because the adjustable band in the back had been pulled all the way over to the last hole. It had to be, in order to fit the head of the little girl who owned it.

All we need now is Pete the paperboy and the show would be perfect, Ralph thought. The final scene of Insomnia, or, Short-Time Life on Harris Avenue, a Tragi-Comedy in Three Acts. Everyone takes a how and then exits stage right.

This dog was afraid of Atropos, just as Rosalie #1 had been, and the main reason the little bald doc hadn’t seen Ralph and Lois was that he was trying to keep her from running off before he was ready.

And here came Nat, headed down the sidewalk toward her favorite dog in the whole world, Ralph and Lois’s Rosie. Her jumprope (three-six-nine lion the goose drank wine) was slung over her arm.

She looked impossibly beautiful and impossibly fragile in her sailor shirt and bine shorts. Her pigtails bounced. fast, Ralph thought. Everything Is happening it’s happening too much too fast.

[Not at all, Ralph! You did splendidly five ’wears ago,-’you’ll do splendidly now.] it sounded like Clotho, but there was no time to look.

A green car was coming slowly down Harris Avenue from the direction of the airport, moving with the sort of agonized care which usually meant a driver who was very old or very young. Agonized care or not, it was unquestionably the car; a dirty membrane hung I over it like a shroud.

Life is a wheel, Ralph thought, and it occurred to him that this was not the first time the idea had occurred to him. Sooner or later everything you thought you’d left behind comes around again ’ n-Forgood or ill, it comes around again -n. ortive lunge for freedom, and as Atropos Rosie made another ah yanked her back, losing his hat, Nat knelt before her and patted her “Are you lost, girl? Did you get out by yourself? That’s okay, ’ I’ll take you home.” She gave Rosie a hug, her small arms passing through Atropos’s arms, her small, beautiful face only inches from his ugly, grinning one. Then she got up. “Come on, Rosie! Come on, sugarpie.”

Rosalie started down the sidewalk at Nat’s heel, looking back once at the grinning little man and whining uneasily. On the other side of Harris Avenue, Helen came out of the Red Apple, and the last condition of the vision Atropos had shown Ralph was fulfilled. Helen had a loaf of bread in one hand. Her Red Sox hat was on her head.

Ralph swept Lois into his arms and kissed her fiercely. “I love you with all my heart,” he said. “Remember that, Lois.”

“I know you do,” she said calmly. “And I love you. That’s why I can’t let you do it.”

She seized him around the neck, her arms like bands of iron, and he felt her breasts push against him hard as she drew in all the breath her lungs would hold.

“Go away, you rotten bastard.” she screamed. “I can’t see you, but I know you’re there.” Go away.” Go away and leave us alone.” Natalie stopped dead in her tracks and looked at Lois with wide-eyed surprise. Rosalie stopped beside her, ears pricking.

“Don’t go into the street, Nat.” Lois screamed at her.

“Don’tThen her hands, which had been laced together at the back of Ralph’s neck, were holding nothing; her arms, which had been locked about his shoulders in a deathgrip, were empty.

He was gone like smoke.

Atropos looked toward the cry of alarm and saw Ralph and Lois standing on the other side of Harris Avenue. More important, he saw Ralph seeing him. His eyes widened; his lips parted in a hateful snarl. One hand flew to his bald pate-it was crisscrossed with old scars, the remnants of wounds made with his own scalpel-in an instinctive gesture of defense that was five years too late.

[Fuck you, Shorts This little bitch is mine.] Ralph saw Nat, looking at Lois with uncertainty and surprise. He heard Lois shrieking at her, telling her not to go into the street.

Then it was Lachesis he heard, speaking from someplace close by.

[Come up, Ralph.” As far as you can! Quickly.”

He felt the clench in the center of his head, felt that brief swoop of vertigo in his stomach, and suddenly the whole world brightened and filled with color. He half-saw and half-felt Lois’s arms and locked hands collapse inward, through the place where his body had been a moment before, and then he was drawing away from her no, being carried away from her. He felt the pull of something great if there was such a current and understood, in a vague way, that as a Higher Purpose, he had joined it and would soon be swept down river with it.

Natalie and Rosalie were now standing directly in front of the house which ralph had once shared with Bill McGovern before selling out and moving into Lois’s house. Nat glanced doubtfully at Lois, then waved tentatively. “She’s okay, Lois-see, she’s right here.” She patted Rosalie’s head. “I’ll cross her safe, don’t worry.”

Then, as she started into the street, she called to her mother.

“I can’t find my baseball cap! I think somebody stoled it!”

Rosalie was still on the sidewalk. Nat turned to her impatiently.

“Come on, girl!”

The green car was moving in the child’s direction, but very slowly.

It did not at first look like much of a danger to her. Ralph recognized the driver at once, and he did not doubt his senses or suspect he was having a hallucination. In that instant it seemed very right that the approaching sedan should be piloted by his old paperboy.

“Natalie!” Lois screamed. “Natalie, no!”

Atropos darted forward and slapped Rosalie #2 on the rump [Get outta here, mutt! G’wan.” Before I change my mind!] Atropos spared Ralph one final grimacing leer as Rosie yelped and darted into the street… and into the path of the Ford driven by sixteen-year-old Pete Sullivan.

Natalie didn’t see the car; she was looking at Lois, whose face was all red and scary. It had finally occurred to Nat that Lois wasn’t screaming about Rose at all, but something else entirely.

Pete registered the sprinting beagle; it was the little girl he didn’t see. He swerved to avoid Rosalie, a maneuver that ended with the Ford aimed directly at Natalie. Ralph could see two frightened faces behind the windshield as the car veered, and he thought Mrs. SulJI’var was screaming.

Atropos was leaping up and down, doing an obscenely joyful hornpipe.

[Yahh, Short-Time! Silly white-hair. Toldja I’dfix you.]

In slow motion Helen dropped the loaf of bread she was holding.

“Natalie, LOOK OUUUUUUTTT!” she shrieked.

Ralph ran. Again there was that clear sensation of moving by thought alone. And as he closed in on Nat, now diving forward with his hands stretched out, aware of the car looming just beyond her, kicking bright arrows of sun t ’ enough its dark deathbag and into his eyes, he clenched his mind again,, \bringing himself back down to the Short-Time world for the last time.

He fell into a landscape that rang with splintered screams: Helen’s mingled with Lois’s mingled with the ones being made by the tires of the Ford. Weaving its way through them like an outlaw vine was the sound of Atropos’s jeers. Ralph got a brief glimpse of Nat’s wide blue eyes, and then he shoved her in the chest and stomach as hard as he could, sending her flying backward with her hands and feet thrust out in front of her. She landed sitting up in the gutter, bruising her tailbone on the curb but breaking nothing. From some distant place, Ralph heard Atropos squawk in fury and disbelief.

Then two tons of Ford, still travelling at twenty miles an hour, struck Ralph and the soundtrack dropped dead. He was heaved upward and backward in a low, slow arc-it felt slow, anyway, from inside-and went with the Ford’s hood ornament imprinted on his cheek like a tattoo and one broken leg trailing behind him. There was time to see his shadow sliding along the pavement beneath him in a shape like an X; there was time to see a spray of red droplets in the air just above him and to think that Lois must have splattered more paint on him than he had thought at first. And there was time to see Natalie sitting at the side of the street, weeping but all right… and to sense Atropos on the sidewalk behind her, shaking his fists and dancing with rage.

I believe I did pretty damned goodfor an old geezer, Ralph thought, but now I think I could really, do with a nap. in Then he came back to earth with a terrible mortal smack and rolled-skull fracturing, back breaking, lungs punctured by brittle thorns of bone as his ribcage exploded, liver turning to pulp, intestines first coming unanchored and then rupturing.

And nothing hurt.

Nothing at all.

Lois never forgot the awful thud that was the sound of Ralph’s return to Harris Avenue, or the bloody splashmarks he left behind as he cartwheeled to a stop. She wanted to scream but dared not; some deep, true voice told her that if she did that, the combination of shock, horror, and summer heat would send her unconscious to the sidewalk, and when she came to again, Ralph would be beyond her.

She ran instead of screaming, losing one shoe, marginally aware that Pete Sullivan was getting out of the Ford, which had come to rest almost exactly where Joe Wyzer’s car-also a Ford-had come to rest after Joe had hit Rosalie #1 all those years ago. She was also marginally aware that Pete was screaming.

She reached Ralph and fell on her knees beside him, seeing that his shape had somehow been changed by the green Ford, that the body beneath the familiar chino pants and paint-splattered shirt was fundamentally different from the body which had been pressed against hers less than a minute ago. But his eyes were open, and they were bright and aware.

“Ralph?”

“Yes.” His voice was clear and strong, unmarked by either confusion or pain-“Yes, Lois, I hear you.”

She started to put her arms around him and hesitated, thinking about how you weren’t supposed to move people who had been badly injured because you might hurt them even worse or kill them.

Then she looked at him again, at the blood pouring from the sides of his mouth and the way his lower body seemed to have come unhinged from the upper part, and decided it would be impossible to hurt Ralph more than he had been hurt already. She hugged him, leaning close, leaning into the smells of disaster: blood and the sweetsour acetone odor of spent adrenaline on the outrush of his breath, “You did it this time-didn’t you?” Lois asked. She kissed his cheek, his blood-soaked eyebrows, his bloody forehead where the skin had been peeled away from his skull in a flap. She began to cry. “Look at you!

Shirt torn, pants torn… do you think clothes grow on trees?”

“Is he all right?” Helen asked from behind her. Lois didn’t turn around, but she saw the shadows on the street: Helen with her arm around her weeping daughter’s shoulders, and Rosie standing by Helen’s right leg. “He saved Nat’s life and I didn’t even see where he came from. Please, Lois, say he’s all r-” Then the shadows shifted as Helen moved to a place where she could actually see Ralph, and she pulled Nat’s face against her blouse and began to wail.

Lois leaned closer to Ralph, caressing his cheeks with the palms of her hands, wanting to tell him that she had meant to come with him-she had meant to, yes, but in the end he had been too quick for her. In the end he had left her behind.

“Love you, sweetheart,” Ralph said. He reached up and copied her gesture with his own palm. He tried to raise his left hand as well, but it would only lie on the pavement and twitch.

Lois took his hand and kissed it, “Love you, too, Ralph. Always.

So much.”

“I had to do it. You see?”

“Yes.” She didn’t know if she did see, didn’t know if she would ever see… but she knew he was dying. “Yes, I see.”

He sighed harshly-that sweet acetone smell wafted up to her again-and smiled.

“Miz Chasse? Miz Roberts, I mean?” It was Pete, speaking in hitching gasps. “Is Mr. Roberts okay? Please say I didn’t hurt him!

“Stay away, Pete,” she said without turning around. “Ralph is fine.

He just tore his pants and shirt a little… didn’t you, Ralph?”

“Yes,” he said. “You bet. You’ll just have to hosswhip me for-” He broke off and looked to her left. No one was there, but Ralph ’led anyway. “Lachesis!” he said. smi He put out his trembling, blood-grimy right hand, and as Lois,

Helen, and Pete Sullivan watched, it rose and fell twice in the empty air. Ralph’s eyes moved again, this time to the right. Slowly, very slowly, he moved his hand in that direction. When he spoke this time, his voice had begun to fade. “Hi, Clotho. Now remember: this… doesn’t… hurt. Right?” Ralph appeared to listen, and then smiled. “Yep,” he whispered, “any way you can get her.” His hand rose and fell again in the air, then dropped back to his chest.

He looked up at Lois with his fading blue eyes. “Listen,” he said, speaking with great effort. Yet his eyes blazed, would not let hers go. “Every day I woke up next to you was like waking up young and seeing… everything new.” He tried to raise his hand to her cheek again, and could not. “Every day, Lois.”

“It was like that for me, tool Ralph-like waking up young.”

“Lois?”

“What.”

“The ticking,” he said. He swallowed and then said it again, enunciating the words with great effort. “The ticking.”

“What ticking?”

“Never mind, is stopped,” he said, and smiled brilliantly. Then Ralph stopped, too. Clotho and Lachesis stood watching Lois weep over the man who lay dead in the street. In one hand Clotho held his scissors; he raised the other to eye-level and looked at it wonderingly.

It glowed and blazed with Ralph’s aura. Clotho: [He’s here… in here… how wonderful!] Lachesis raised his own right hand. Like Clotho’s left, it looked as if someone had pulled a blue mitten over the normal green-gold aura which swaddled it.

Lachesis: [Yes. He was a wonderful man.] Clotho: [Shall we give him to her?] Lachesis: [Can we?] Clotho: [There’s one way to find out.] They approached Lois. Each placed the hand Ralph had shaken on one side of Lois’s face.

“Mommy!” Natalie Deepneau cried. In her agitation, she had reverted to the patois of her babyhood. “Who those wittle men? Why they touchin Roliss?”

“Shh, honey, Helen said, and buried Nat’s head against her breast again. There were no men, little or otherwise, near Lois Roberts; she was kneeling alone in the street next to the man who had saved her daughter’s life.

Lois looked up suddenly, her eyes wide and surprised, her grief forgotten as a gorgeous feeling of (light blue light) calmness and peace filled her. For a moment Harris Avenue was gone. She was in a dark place filled with the sweet smells of hay and cows, a dark place that was split by a hundred brilliant seams of light. She never forgot the fierce joy that leaped up in her at that moment, nor the sure sense that she was seeing a representation of a universe that Ralph wanted her to see, a universe where there was couldn’t she see it through “Can you ever forgive me?” Pete was sobbing. “Oh my God, can you ever forgive me?”

“Oh yes, I think so,” Lois said calmly.

She passed her hand down Ralph’s face, closing his eyes, and then held his head in her lap and waited for the police to come. To Lois, Ralph looked as if he had gone to sleep. And, she saw, the long white scar on his right forearm was gone, dazzling light behind the darkness the cracks?

September 10, 1990-November 10, 1993