['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 to--
He 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.']
6
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 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 his 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 how 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: HD - ED 5-8-87.
Helen Deepneau and Edward Deepneau. Marrie
d 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.
7
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 were 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 moan - and 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 5-8-87 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 5-8-87.
The two rings were identical.
8
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 5-8-87 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?']
He shook his head without answering, eyes moving from the ring 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 bind 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 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 old fish 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 ka 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 pow
er 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.
['Ralph?']
['One Ring to rule them all, Lois - One Ring to bind 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 reknitting 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.
9
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.']