['Oh no, Lois - the change didn't happen when I started to see the auras. I think a lot of people catch a glimpse into the Long-Time world of auras every now and again, and nothing bad happens to them. I don't think I got knocked out of my nice safe place in the Purpose until we started to talk to these two fine fellows. What do you say, fine fellows? You did everything but leave a trail of breadcrumbs, even though you knew perfectly well what was going to happen. Isn't that about the size of it?']
They looked down at their feet, then slowly, reluctantly, back up at Ralph. It was Lachesis who answered.
[Yes, Ralph. We drew you to us even though we knew it would alter your ka. It's unfortunate, but the situation demanded it.]
Now Lois will ask about herself, Ralph thought. Now she must ask.
But she didn't. She only looked at the two little bald doctors with an inscrutable expression completely unlike any of her usual Our Lois looks. Ralph wondered again how much she knew or guessed, marvelled again that he didn't have the slightest clue . . . and then these speculations were swallowed in a fresh wave of anger.
['You guys . . . man oh man, you guys . . .']
He didn't finish, although he might have, if Lois hadn't been standing beside him: You guys have done quite a bit more than just mess with our sleep, haven't you? I don't know about Lois, but I had a nice little niche in the Purpose . . . which means that you deliberately made me an exception to the very rules you've spent your whole lives upholding. In a way, I've become as much a blank as this guy we're supposed to find. How did Clotho put it? 'All bets are off.' How very fucking true.
Lois: ['You talked about using our powers. What powers?']
Lachesis turned to her, clearly delighted at the change of subject. He pressed his hands together, palm to palm, then opened them in a curiously Oriental gesture. What appeared between them were two swift images: Ralph's hand producing a bolt of cold blue fire as it cut the air in a karate chop, and Lois's forefinger producing bright blue-gray pellets of light that looked like nuclear cough-drops.
Ralph: ['Yes, all right, we have something, but it isn't reliable. It's like--']
He concentrated and created an image of his own: hands opening the back of a radio and removing a pair of AA batteries encrusted with blue-gray crud. Clotho and Lachesis frowned at him, not getting it.
Lois: ['He's trying to say we can't always do that, and when we can, we can't do it for long. Our batteries go flat, you see.']
Understanding mixed with amused incredulity broke over their features.
Ralph: ['What's so damned funny?']
Clotho: [Nothing . . . everything. You have no concept of how strange you and Lois seem to us - incredibly wise and perceptive at one moment, incredibly naive at the next. Your batteries, as you call them, need never go flat, because the two of you are standing next to a bottomless reservoir of power. We assumed that, since you have both already drunk from it, you must surely know about it.]
Ralph: ['What in the world are you talking about?']
Lachesis made that curiously Oriental hand-opening gesture again. This time Ralph saw Mrs Perrine, walking stiffly upright within an aura the color of a West Pointer's dress uniform. Saw a shaft of gray brilliance, as thin and straight as the quill of a porcupine, poke out of this aura.
This image was overlaid by one of a skinny woman encased in a smoggy brown aura. She was looking out a car window. A voice - Lois's - spoke: Oooh, Mina, isn't that the dearest little house? A moment later there was a soft, indrawn whistle and a narrow ray of the woman's aura poked out from behind her neck.
This was followed by a third image, brief but strong: Ralph reaching through the slot in the bottom of the information booth and gripping the wrist of the woman with the brambly orange aura . . . except that all at once the aura around her left arm no longer was orange. All at once it was the faded turquoise he now thought of as Ralph Roberts Blue.
The image faded. Lachesis and Clotho stared at Ralph and Lois; they stared back, shocked.
Lois: ['Oh, no! We can't do that! It's like--']
Image: Two men in striped prison suits and little black masks tiptoeing out of a bank vault, carrying bulging sacks with the $ symbol printed on the sides.
Ralph: ['No, even worse. It's like--']
Image: A bat flies in through an open casement window, makes two swooping circles in a silvery shaft of moonlight, then turns into Ralph Lugosi in a cape and old-fashioned tuxedo. He approaches a sleeping woman - not a young, rosy virgin but old Mrs Perrine in a sensible flannel nightgown - and bends over to suck her aura.
When Ralph looked back at Clotho and Lachesis, both of them were shaking their heads vehemently.
Lachesis: [No! No, no, no! You couldn't be more wrong! Have you not wondered why you are Short-Timers, marking the spans of your lives in decades rather than in centuries? Your lives are short because you burn like bonfires! When you draw energy from your fellow Short-Timers, it's like--]
Image: A child at the seashore, a lovely little girl with golden ringlets bouncing on her shoulders, runs down the beach to where the waves break. In one hand she carries a red plastic bucket. She kneels and fills it from the vast gray-blue Atlantic.
Clotho: [You are like that child, Ralph and Lois - your fellow Short-Timers are like the sea. Do you understand now?]
Ralph: ['There's really that much of this aural energy in the human race?']
Lachesis: [You still don't understand. That's how much there is--]
Lois broke in. Her voice was trembling, although whether with fear or ecstasy, Ralph could not tell.
['That's how much there is in each one of us, Ralph. That's how much there is in every human being on the face of the earth!']
Ralph whistled softly and looked from Lachesis to Clotho. They were nodding confirmation.
['You're saying we can stock up on this energy from whoever happens to be handy? That it's safe for the people we take it from?']
Clotho: [Yes. You could no more hurt them than you could empty the Atlantic with a child's beach-pail.]
Ralph hoped that was so, because he had an idea that he and Lois had been unconsciously borrowing energy like mad - it was the only explanation he could think of for all the compliments he had been getting. People telling him that he looked great. People telling him that he must be over his insomnia, had to be, because he looked so rested and healthy. That he looked younger.
Hell, he thought, I am younger.
The moon had set again, and Ralph realized with a start that the sun would soon be coming up on Friday morning. It was high time they got back to the central issue of this discussion.
['Let's cut to the chase here, fellows. Why have you gone to all this trouble? What is it we're supposed to stop?']
And then, before either of them could reply, he was struck by a flash of insight too strong and bright to be questioned or denied.
['It's Susan Day, isn't it? He means to kill Susan Day. To assassinate her.']
Clotho: [Yes, but--]
Lachesis: [- but that isn't what matters--]
Ralph: ['Come on, you guys - don't you think the time has come to lay the rest of your cards on the table?']
Lachesis: [Yes, Ralph. That time has come.]
There had been little or no touching among them since they had formed the circle and risen through the intervening hospital floors to the roof, but now Lachesis put a gentle, feather-light arm around Ralph's shoulders and Clotho took Lois by the arm, as a gentleman of a bygone age might have led a lady onto a dance-floor.
Scent of apples, taste of honey, texture of wool . . . but this time Ralph's delight in that mingled sensory input could not mask the deep disquiet he felt as Lachesis turned him to the left and then walked with him toward the edge of the flat hospital roof.
Like many larger and more important cities, Derry seemed to have been built in the most geographically unsuitable place the original settlers could find. The downtown area existed on the steep sides of a valley; the Kendus
keag River flowed sluggishly through the over-grown tangle of the Barrens at this valley's lowest level. From their vantage point atop the hospital, Derry looked like a town whose heart had been pierced by a narrow green dagger . . . except in the darkness, the dagger was black.
One side of the valley was Old Cape, site of a seedy postwar housing development and a glossy, flossy new mall. The other side contained most of what people meant when they talked about 'downtown'. Derry's downtown centered around Up-Mile Hill. Witcham Street took the most direct course up this hill, rising steeply before branching off into the tangle of streets (Harris Avenue was one of them) that made up the west side. Main Street diverged from Witcham halfway up the hill and headed southwest along the valley's shallower side. This area of town was known both as Main Street Hill and as Bassey Park. And, near the very top of Main Street's rise--
Lois, almost moaning: ['Dear God, what is it?']
Ralph tried to say something comforting and produced nothing but a feeble croak. Near the top of Main Street Hill, a huge black umbrella-shape floated above the ground, blotting out stars which had begun to pale toward morning. Ralph tried to tell himself at first that it was only smoke, that one of the warehouses out that way had caught on fire . . . perhaps even the abandoned railroad depot at the end of Neibolt Street. But the warehouses were farther south, the old depot was farther west, and if that evil-looking toadstool had really been smoke, the prevailing wind would be driving it across the sky in plumes and banners. That wasn't happening. Instead of dissipating, the silent blotch in the sky simply hung there, darker than the darkness.
And no one sees it, Ralph thought. No one but me . . . and Lois . . . and the little bald doctors. The goddam little bald doctors.
He squinted to make out the shape within the giant deathbag, although he didn't really need to; he had lived in Derry most of his life, and could almost have navigated its streets with his eyes closed (as long as he did not have to do so behind the wheel of his car, that was). Nevertheless, he could make out the building inside the deathbag, especially now that daylight was beginning to seep over the horizon. The flat circular roof which sat atop the curving glass-and-brick facade was a dead giveaway. This throwback to the 1950s, designed very much tongue-in-cheek by the famous architect (and one-time Derry resident) Benjamin Hanscom, was the new Derry Civic Center, a replacement for the one destroyed in the flood of '85.
Clotho turned Ralph to look at him.
[You see, Ralph, you were right - he does mean to assassinate Susan Day . . . but not just Susan Day.]
He paused, glanced at Lois, then turned his grave face back to Ralph.
[That cloud - what you two quite correctly call a death bag - means that in a sense he has already done what Atropos has set him on to do. There will be more than two thousand people there tonight . . . and Ed Deepneau means to kill them all. If the course of events is not changed, he will kill them all.]
Lachesis stepped forward to join his colleague.
[You, Ralph and Lois, are the only ones who can stop that from happening.]
3
In his mind's eye Ralph saw the poster of Susan Day which had been propped in the empty storefront between the Rite Aid Pharmacy and Day Break, Sun Down. He remembered the words written in the dust on the outside of the window: KILL THIS CUNT. And something like that might well happen in Derry, that was the thing. Derry was not precisely like other places. It seemed to Ralph that the city's atmosphere had improved a great deal since the big flood eight years before, but it was still not precisely like other places. There was a mean streak in Derry, and when its residents got wrought up, they had been known to do some exceedingly ugly things.
He wiped at his lips and was momentarily distracted by the silky, distant feel of his hand on his mouth. He kept being reminded in different ways that his state of being had changed radically.
Lois, horrified: ['How are we supposed to do it? If we can't go near Atropos or Ed, how are we supposed to stop it from happening?']
Ralph realized he could see her face quite clearly now; the day was brightening with the speed of stop-motion photography in an old Disney nature film.
['We'll phone in a bomb-threat, Lois. That should work.']
Clotho looked dismayed at this; Lachesis actually smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand before glancing nervously at the brightening sky. When he looked back at Ralph, his small face was full of something that might have been carefully muzzled panic.
[That won't work, Ralph. Now listen to me, both of you, and listen carefully: whatever you do in the next fourteen hours or so, you must not underestimate the power of the forces Atropos unleashed when he first discovered Ed and then slashed his life-cord.]
Ralph: ['Why won't it work?']
Lachesis, sounding both angry and frightened: [We can't just go on and on answering your questions, Ralph - from here on you're going to have to take things on trust. You know how fast time passes on this level; if we stay up here much longer, your chance to stop what is going to happen tonight at the Civic Center will be lost. You and Lois must step down again. You must!]
Clotho held up a hand to his colleague, then turned back to Ralph and Lois.
[I'll answer this one last question, although I'm sure that with a little thought you could answer it yourself. There have already been twenty-three bomb-threats regarding Susan Day's speech tonight. The police have explosives-sniffing dogs at the Civic Center, for the last forty-eight hours they have been X-raying all packages and deliveries which have come into the building, and they have been conducting spot searches, as well. They expected bomb-threats, and they take them seriously, but their assumption in this case is that they are being made by pro-life advocates who are trying to keep Ms Day from speaking.]
Lois, dully: ['Oh God - the little boy who cried wolf.']
Clotho: [Correct, Lois.]
Ralph: ['Has he planted a bomb? He has, hasn't he?']
Bright light washed across the roof, stretching the shadows of the twirling heat-ventilators like taffy. Clotho and Lachesis looked at these shadows and then to the east, where the sun's top arc had broken over the horizon, with identical expressions of dismay.
Lachesis: [We don't know, and it doesn't matter. You must stop the speech from happening, and there is only one way to do that: you must convince the women in charge to cancel Susan Day's appearance. Do you understand? She must not appear in the Civic Center tonight! You can't stop Ed, and you daren't try to approach Atropos, so you must stop Susan Day.]
Ralph: ['But--']
It wasn't the strengthening sunlight that shut his mouth, or the growing look of harried fear on the faces of the little bald docs. It was Lois. She put a hand on his cheek and gave a small but decisive shake of the head.
['No more. We have to go down, Ralph. Now.']
Questions were circling in his mind like mosquitoes, but if she said there was no more time, there was no more time. He glanced at the sun, saw it had entirely cleared the horizon, and nodded. He slipped his arm around her waist.
Clotho, anxiously: [Do not fail us, Ralph and Lois.]
Ralph: ['Save the pep-talk, short stuff. This isn't a football game.']
Before either of them could reply, Ralph closed his eyes and concentrated on dropping back down to the Short-Time world.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
1
There was that sensation of blink! and a chill morning breeze struck his face. Ralph opened his eyes and looked at the woman beside him. For just a moment he could see her aura wisping away behind her like the gauzy overskirt of a lady's ball-gown and then it was just Lois, looking twenty years younger than she had the week before . . . and also looking extremely out of place, in her light fall coat and good visiting-the-sick dress, here on the tar-and-gravel hospital roof.
Ralph hugged her tighter as she began to shiver. Of Lachesis and Clotho there was no sign.
Although they could be standing right beside us, Ralph thought.
Probably are, as a matter of fact.
He suddenly thought of that old carny pitchman's line again, the one about how you had to pay if you wanted to play, so step right up, gentlemen, and lay your money down. But more often than not you were played instead of playing. Played for what? A sucker, of course. And why did he have that feeling now?
Because there were a lot of things you never found out, Carolyn said from inside his head. They led you down a lot of interesting sidetracks and kept you away from the main point until it was too late for you to ask the questions they might not have wanted to answer . . . and I don't think something like that happens by accident, do you?
No. He didn't.
That feeling of being pushed by invisible hands into some dark tunnel where anything might be waiting was stronger now. That sense of being manipulated. He felt small . . . and vulnerable . . . and pissed off.
'W-Well, we're b-b-back,' Lois said through her briskly chattering teeth. 'What time is it, do you think?'
It felt like about six o'clock, but when Ralph glanced down at his watch, he wasn't surprised to see it had stopped. He couldn't remember when he had last wound it. Tuesday morning, probably.
He followed Lois's gaze to the southwest and saw the Civic Center standing like an island in the middle of a parking-lot ocean. With the early morning sunlight kicking bright sheets of reflection from its curved banks of windows, it looked like an oversized version of the office building George Jetson worked in. The vast deathbag which had surrounded it only moments before was gone.
Oh, no it's not. Don't kid yourself, buddy. You may not be able to see it right now, but it's there, all right.
'Early,' he said, pulling her more tightly against him as the wind gusted, blowing his hair - hair that now had almost as much black in it as white - back from his forehead. 'But it's going to get late fast, I think.'