'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 to 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 nyucknyuck 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 head 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 sometime, 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.'
9
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, reknitting itself, healing itself.
['Lois, are you sure this is what you want?']
['Of course it is! 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's for 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 brus
hing 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 Short-Time 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. Ralph found it almost impossible to believe that he had been sitting on top of that creature and slashing at him with his own scalpel not 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 grasped 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 put her arms around him, hugged 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
When he came out, Lois was buried beneath two puffy quilts. Only 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.
11
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 known 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.
12
Following two more nights of sound, unbroken sleep, the au
ras 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 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.
EPILOGUE
WINDING THE
DEATHWATCH (II)
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'
1
On January 2nd, 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.