'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, Ms Susan Day!' 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. Him's a King, too.
5
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 self-righteous 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.
6
Across town, in Strawford Park, the door of the Portosan marked MEN blew open. Lois Chasse and Ralph Roberts came flying out backwards 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 fainting and fluttering like the heroine's best friend in those Regency romances my friend Mina's 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.
7
Clotho: [Are you both all right?]
Ralph: ['We're fine. Lois reeled me in. She saved my life.']
Lachesi
s: [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, or the actions - sometimes noble, sometimes foolish - which resulted. 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, but 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 then 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 not 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.']
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 ceremony! I felt it! It's quite wonderful!]
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 watche
d 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 bother - without, in fact, even being aware they were doing it until it was done.
8
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 valley.
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 down the hill toward them, obviously bound for Strawford Park. The field-glasses Old Dor sometimes used to watch planes taxi, land, and take off were bouncing around Faye's neck. With Don, who was balding and heavy set, 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!'