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.
6
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 express 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.
7
'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 co-pilot'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 Ralph's 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! Lachesis! 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 seconds--
He launched himself at Ed again, ignoring the thr
ob 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 THEM BACK!' Ed screamed. He forgot about the control wheel 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!' 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. 'GIVE THEM BACK, THEY'RE 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 THIRTY
* * *
1
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.
2
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 half-slip. 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 RIGHT 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.
3
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.
4
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 Boot-Scootin' 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 ov
er 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 blue jeans. 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-Doh 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.