'Never better,' he said. 'I was just thinking how cute you two look in those caps. Did you get them at Fenway Park?'
Both Helen and Nat were wearing Boston Red Sox caps. These were common enough in New England during warm weather ('common as catdirt,' Lois would have said), but the sight of them on the heads of these two people filled Ralph with some deep, resonant feeling . . . and it was tied to a specific image, one he did not in the least understand: the front of the Red Apple Store.
Helen, meantime, had taken off her hat and was examining it. 'Yes,' she said. 'We went, but we only stayed for three innings. Men hitting balls and catching balls. I guess I just don't have much patience for men and their balls these days . . . but we like our nifty Bosox hats, don't we, Natalie?'
'Yes!' Nat agreed smartly, and when Ralph awoke the next morning at 4:01, the scar throbbed its thin line of heat inside his arm and the deathwatch seemed almost to have gained a voice, one which whispered a strange, foreign-sounding name over and over: Atropos . . . Atropos . . . Atropos.
I know that name.
Do you, Ralph?
Yes, he was the one with the rusty scalpel and the nasty disposition, the one who called me Shorts, the one who took . . . took . . .
Took what, Ralph?
He was getting used to these silent discussions; they seemed to come to him on some mental radio band, a pirate frequency that operated only during the little hours, the ones when he lay awake beside his sleeping wife, waiting for the sun to come up.
Took what? Do you remember?
He didn't expect to; the questions that voice asked him almost always went unanswered, but this time, unexpectedly, an answer came.
Bill McGovern's hat, of course. Atropos took Bill's hat, and once I made him so mad he actually took a bite out of the brim.
Who is he? Who is Atropos?
Of this he was not so sure. He only knew that Atropos had something to do with Helen, who now owned a Boston Red Sox cap of which she seemed very fond, and that he had a rusty scalpel.
Soon, thought Ralph Roberts as he lay in the dark, listening to the soft, steady tick of the deathwatch in the walls. I'll know soon.
11
During the third week of that baking hot June, Ralph began to see the auras again.
12
As June slipped into July, Ralph found himself bursting into tears often, usually for no discernible reason at all. It was strange; he had no sense of depression or discontent, but sometimes he would look at something - maybe only a bird winging its solitary way across the sky - and his heart would vibrate with sorrow and loss.
It's almost over, the inside voice said. It no longer belonged to Carolyn or Bill or even his own younger self; it was all its own now, the voice of a stranger, although not necessarily an unkind one. That's why you're sad, Ralph. It's perfectly normal to be sad as things start to wind down.
Nothing's almost over! he cried back. Why should it be? At my last checkup, Dr Pickard said I was sound as a drum! I'm fine! Never better!
Silence from the voice inside. But it was a knowing silence.
13
'Okay,' Ralph said out loud one hot afternoon near the end of July. He was sitting on a bench not far from the place where the Derry Standpipe had stood until 1985, when the big storm had come along and knocked it down. At the base of the hill, near the birdbath, a young man (a serious birdwatcher, from the binoculars he wore and the thick stack of paperbacks on the grass beside him) was making careful notes in what looked like some sort of journal. 'Okay, tell me why it's almost over. Just tell me that.'
There was no immediate answer, but that was all right; Ralph was willing to wait. It had been quite a stroll over here, the day was hot, and he was tired. He was now waking around three-thirty every morning. He had begun taking long walks again, but not in any hope they would help him sleep better or longer; he thought he was making pilgrimages, visiting all his favorite spots in Derry one last time. Saying goodbye.
Because the time of the promise has almost come, the voice answered, and the scar began to throb with its deep, narrow heat again. The one that was made to you, and the one you made in return.
'What was it?' he asked, agitated. 'Please, if I made a promise, why can't I remember what it was?'
The serious birdwatcher heard that and looked up the hill. What he saw was a man sitting on a park bench and apparently having a conversation with himself. The corners of the serious birdwatcher's mouth turned down in disgust and he thought, I hope I die before I get that old. I really do. Then he turned back to the birdbath and began making notes again.
Deep inside Ralph's head, the clenching sensation - that feeling of blink - suddenly came again, and although he didn't stir from the bench, Ralph felt himself propelled rapidly upward none the less . . . faster and further than ever before.
Not at all, the voice said. Once you were much higher than this, Ralph - Lois, too. But you're getting there. You'll be ready soon.
The birdwatcher, who lived all unknowing in the center of a gorgeous spun-gold aura, looked around cautiously, perhaps wanting to make sure that the senile old man on the bench at the top of the hill wasn't creeping up on him with a blunt instrument. What he saw caused the tight, prissy line of his mouth to soften in astonishment. His eyes widened. Ralph observed sudden radiating spokes of indigo in the serious birdwatcher's aura and realized he was looking at shock.
What's the matter with him? What does he see?
But that was wrong. It wasn't what the birdwatcher saw; it was what he didn't see. He didn't see Ralph, because Ralph had gone up high enough to disappear from this level - had become the visual equivalent of a note blown on a dog-whistle.
If they were here now, I could see them easily.
Who, Ralph? If who was here?
Clotho. Lachesis. And Atropos.
All at once the pieces began to fly together in his mind, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had looked a great deal more complicated than it actually was.
Ralph, whispering: ['Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.']
14
Six days later, Ralph awoke at quarter past three in the morning and knew that the time of the promise had come.
15
'I think I'll walk upstreet to the Red Apple and get an ice-cream bar,' Ralph said. It was almost ten o'clock. His heart was beating much too fast, and his thoughts were hard to find under the constant white noise of terror which now filled him. He had never felt less like ice-cream in his entire life, but it was a reasonable enough excuse for a trip to the Red Apple; it was the first week of August, and the weatherman had said the mercury would probably top ninety by early afternoon, with thunderstorms to follow in the early evening.
Ralph thought he needn't worry about the thunderstorms.
A bookcase stood on a spread of newspapers by the kitchen door. Lois had been painting it barn-red. Now she got to her feet, put her hands into the small of her back, and stretched. Ralph could hear the minute crackling sounds of her spine. 'I'll go with you. My head'll ache tonight if I don't get away from that paint for awhile. I don't know why I wanted to paint on such a muggy day in the first place.'
The last thing on earth Ralph wanted was to be accompanied up to the Red Apple by Lois. 'You don't have to, honey; I'll bring you back one of those coconut Popsicles you like. I wasn't even planning on taking Rosalie, it's so humid. Go sit on the back porch, why don't you?'
'Any Popsicle you carry back from the store on a day like this will be falling off the stick by the time you get it here,' she said. 'Come on, let's go while there's still shade on this side of the . . .'
She trailed off. The little smile she'd been wearing slipped off her face. It was replaced by a look of dismay, and the gray of her aura, which had only darkened slightly during the years Ralph hadn't been able to see it, now began to glow with flocks of reddish-pink embers.
'Ralph, what's wrong? What are you really going to do?'
'Nothing,' he said, but the s
car was glowing inside his arm and the tick of the deathwatch was everywhere, loud and everywhere. It was telling him he had an appointment to keep. A promise to keep.
'Yes, there is, and it's been wrong for the last two or three months, maybe longer. I'm a foolish woman - I knew something was happening, but I couldn't bring myself to look at it dead-on. Because I was afraid. And I was right to be afraid, wasn't I? I was right.'
'Lois--'
She was suddenly crossing the room to him, crossing fast, almost leaping, the old back injury not slowing her down in the least, and before he could stop her, she had seized his right arm and was holding it out, looking at it fixedly.
The scar was glowing a fierce bright red.
Ralph had a moment to hope that it was strictly an aural glow and she wouldn't be able to see it. Then she looked up, her eyes round and full of terror. Terror, and something else. Ralph thought that something else was recognition.
'Oh my God,' she whispered. 'The men in the park. The ones with the funny names . . . Clothes and Lashes, something like that . . . and one of them cut you. Oh Ralph, oh my God, what are you supposed to do?'
'Now, Lois, don't take on--'
'Don't you dare tell me not to take on!' she shrieked into his face. 'Don't you dare! Don't you DARE!'
Hurry, the interior voice whispered. You don't have time to stand around and discuss this; somewhere it's already begun to happen, and the deathwatch you hear may not be ticking just for you.
'I have to go.' He turned and blundered toward the door. In his agitation he did not notice a certain Sherlock Holmesian circumstance attending this scene: a dog which should have barked - a dog which always barked her stern disapproval when voices were raised in this house - but did not. Rosalie was missing from her usual place by the screen door . . . and the door itself was standing ajar.
Rosalie was the furthest thing from Ralph's mind at that moment. He felt knee-deep in molasses, and thought he would be doing well just to make the porch, let alone the Red Apple up the street. His heart thumped and skidded in his chest; his eyes were burning.
'No!' Lois screamed. 'No, Ralph, please! Please don't leave me!'
She ran after him, clutched his arm. She was still holding her paintbrush, and the fine red droplets which splattered his shirt looked like blood. Now she was crying, and her expression of utter, abject sorrow nearly broke his heart. He didn't want to leave her like this; wasn't sure he could leave her like this.
He turned and took her by her forearms. 'Lois, I have to go.'
'You haven't been sleeping,' she babbled,'I knew that, and I knew it meant something was wrong, but it doesn't matter, we'll go away, we can leave right now, this minute, we'll just take Rosalie and our toothbrushes and go--'
He squeezed her arms and she stopped, looking up at him with her wet eyes. Her lips were trembling.
'Lois, listen to me. I have to do this.'
'I lost Paul, I can't lose you, too!' she wailed. 'I couldn't stand it! Oh Ralph, I couldn't stand it!'
You'll be able to, he thought. Short-Timers are a lot tougher than they look. They have to be.
Ralph felt a couple of tears trickle down his cheeks. He suspected their source was more weariness than grief. If he could make her see that all this changed nothing, only made what he had to do harder . . .
He held her at arm's length. The scar on his arm was throbbing more fiercely than ever, and the feeling of time slipping relentlessly away had become overwhelming.
'Walk with me at least partway, if you want,' he said. 'Maybe you can even help me do what I have to do. I've had my life, Lois, and a fine one it was. But she hasn't really had anything yet, and I'll be damned if I'll let that son of a bitch have her just because he's got a score to settle with me.'
'What son of a bitch? Ralph, what in the world are you talking about?'
'I'm talking about Natalie Deepneau. She's supposed to die this morning, only I'm not going to let that happen.'
'Nat? Ralph, why would anyone want to hurt Nat?'
She looked very bewildered, very our Lois . . . but wasn't there something else beneath that daffy exterior? Something careful and calculating? Ralph thought the answer was yes. Ralph had an idea Lois wasn't half as bewildered as she was pretending to be. She had fooled Bill McGovern for years with that act - him, too, at least part of the time - and this was just another (and rather brilliant) variation of the same old scam.
What she was really trying to do was hold him here. She loved Nat deeply, but to Lois, a choice between her husband and the little girl who lived up the lane was no choice at all. She didn't consider either age or questions of fairness to have any bearing on the situation. Ralph was her man, and to Lois, that was all that mattered.
'It won't work,' he said, not unkindly. He disengaged himself and started for the door again. 'I made a promise, and I'm all out of time.'
'Break it, then!' she cried, and the mixture of terror and rage in her voice stunned him. 'I don't remember much about that time, but I remember we got involved with things that almost got us killed, and for reasons we couldn't even understand. So break it, Ralph! Better your promise than my heart!'
'And what about the kid? What about Helen, for that matter? Nat's all she lives for. Doesn't Helen deserve something better from me than a broken promise?'
'I don't care what she deserves! What any of them deserve!' she shouted, and then her face crumpled. 'Yes, all right, I suppose I do. But what about us, Ralph? Don't we count?' Her eyes, those dark and eloquent Spanish eyes of hers, pleaded with him. If he looked into them too long, it would become all too easy to cry it off, so Ralph looked away.
'I mean to do it, honey. Nat's going to get what you and I have already had - another seventy years or so of days and nights.'
She looked at him helplessly, but made no attempt to stop him again. Instead, she began to cry. 'Foolish old man!' she whispered. 'Foolish, willful old man!'
'Yes, I suppose,' he said, and lifted her chin. 'But I'm a foolish, willful old man of my word. Come with me. I'd like that.'
'All right, Ralph.' She could hardly hear her own voice, and her skin was as cold as clay. Her aura had gone almost completely red. 'What is it? What's going to happen to her?'
'She's going to be hit by a green Ford sedan. Unless I take her place, she's going to be splashed all over Harris Avenue . . . and Helen's going to see it happen.'
16
As they walked up the hill toward the Red Apple (at first Lois kept falling behind, then trotting to catch up, but she quit when she saw she could not slow him with such a simple trick), Ralph told her what little more he could. She had some memory of being under the lightning-struck tree out by the Extension - a memory she had believed, at least until this morning, to be the memory of a dream - but of course she hadn't been there during Ralph's final confrontation with Atropos. Ralph told her of it now - of the random death Atropos intended Natalie to suffer if Ralph continued standing in the way of his plans. He told her of how he'd extracted a promise from Clotho and Lachesis that Atropos might in this case be overruled, and Nat saved.
'I have an idea that . . . the decision was made . . . very near the top of this crazy building . . . this Tower . . . they kept talking about. Maybe . . . at the very top.' He was panting out the words and his heart was beating more rapidly than ever, but he thought most of that could be attributed to the fast walk and the torrid day; his fear had subsided somewhat. Talking to Lois had done that much.
Now he could see the Red Apple. Mrs Perrine was at the bus stop half a block further up, standing straight as a general reviewing troops. Her net shopping bag hung over her arm. There was a bus shelter nearby, and it was shady inside, but Mrs Perrine stolidly ignored its existence. Even in the dazzling sunlight he could see that her aura was the same West Point gray as it had been on that October evening in 1993. Of Helen and Nat there was as yet no sign.
17
'Of course I knew who he was,' Esther Perrine later tells the rep
orter from the Derry News. 'Do I look incompetent to you, young man? Or senile? I've known Ralph Roberts for over twenty years. A good man. Not cut from the same cloth as his first wife, of course - Carolyn was a Satterwaite, from the Bangor Satterwaites - but a very fine man, just the same. I recognized the driver of that green Ford auto, too, right away. Pete Sullivan delivered my paper for six years, and he did a good job. The new one, the Morrison boy, always throws it in my flower-beds or up on the porch roof. Pete was driving with his mother, on his learner's permit, I understand. I hope he won't take on too much about what happened, for he's a good lad, and it really wasn't his fault. I saw the whole thing, and I'll take my oath on it.
'I suppose you think I'm rambling. Don't bother denying it; I can read your face just like it was your own newspaper. Never mind, though - I've said most of what I have to say. I knew it was Ralph right away, but here's something you'll get wrong even if you put it in your story . . . which you probably won't. He came from nowhere to save that little girl.'
Esther Perrine fixes the respectfully silent young reporter with a formidable glance - fixes him as a lepidopterist might fix a butterfly on a pin after administering the chloroform.
'I don't mean it was like he came from nowhere, young man, although I bet that's what you'll print.'
She leans toward the reporter, her eyes never leaving his face, and says it again.
'He came from nowhere to save that little girl. Do you follow me? From nowhere.'
18
The accident made the front page of the following day's Derry News. Esther Perrine was sufficiently colorful in her remarks to warrant a sidebar of her own, and staff photographer Tom Matthews got a picture to go with it that made her look like Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. The headline of the sidebar read: 'IT WAS LIKE HE CAME FROM NOWHERE,' EYEWITNESS TO TRAGEDY SAYS.
When she read it, Mrs Perrine was not at all surprised.
19
'In the end I got what I wanted,' Ralph said, 'but only because Clotho and Lachesis - and whoever it is they work for on the upper levels - were desperate to stop Ed.'