Insomnia (77 page)

Nearby, Connie Chung was scribbling her name on the back of Lois’s light-bill for September. Ralph looked at that slaggy residue on the cement apron in front of the doors, hunting for a trace of Atropos, something which might register more as smell than sight, a nasty, meaty aroma like the alley which used to run behind Mr Huston’s butcher shop when Ralph was a kid.

‘Thank you!’ Lois was burbling. ‘I said to Norton, “She looks just like she does on TV, just like a little China doll.” Those were my exact words.’

‘Very welcome, I’m sure,’ Chung said, ‘but I really have to get back to work.’

‘Of course you do. Say hello to Dan Rather for me, won’t you? Tell him I said “Courage!”’

‘I certainly will.’ Chung smiled and nodded as she handed the pen back to Rosenberg. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse us—’

If it’s here, it’s higher up than I am,
Ralph thought.
I’ll have to slide up a little bit farther.

Yes, but he’d have to be careful, and not just because time had become an extremely valuable commodity. The simple fact was that if he went up too high, he would disappear from the Short-Time world, and that was the sort of occurrence which might even distract these news-people from the impending pro-choice rally . . . at least for awhile.

Ralph concentrated, but when the painless spasm inside his head happened this time, it didn’t come as a blink but as the soft lowering of a lash. Color bloomed silently into the world; everything stood forth with exclamatory brilliance. Yet the strongest of these colors, the oppressive key-chord, was the black of the deathbag, and it was a negation of all the others. Depression and that sense of debilitating weakness fell on him again, sinking into his heart like the pointed ends of a clawhammer. He realized that if he had business to do up here, he had better do it quickly and scoot back down to the Short-Time level before he was stripped clean of life-force.

He looked at the doors again. For a moment there was still nothing but the fading auras of Short-Timers like himself . . . and then what he was looking for suddenly came clear, rising into his view as a message which has been written in lemon juice rises into sight when it is held close to a candle-flame.

He had expected something which would look and smell like the rotting guts in the bins behind Mr Huston’s knacker’s shop, but the reality was even worse, possibly because it was so unexpected. There were fans of a bloody, mucusy substance on the doors themselves – marks made by Atropos’s restless fingers, perhaps – and a revoltingly large puddle of the same stuff sinking into the hardened residue in front of the doors. There was something so terrible about this stuff – so alien – that it made the color-bugs look almost normal by comparison. It was like a pool of vomit left by a dog suffering from some new and dangerous strain of rabies. A trail of this stuff led away from the puddle, first in drying clots and splashes, then in smaller drips like spilled paint.

Of course,
Ralph thought.
That’s why we had to come here. The little bastard can’t stay away from the place. It’s like cocaine to a dope-addict.

He could imagine Atropos standing right here where he, Ralph, was standing now, looking . . . grinning . . . then stepping forward and putting his hands on the doors. Caressing them. Creating those filthy, filmy marks. Could imagine Atropos drawing strength and energy from the very blackness which was robbing Ralph of his own vitality.

Lois tugged his sleeve from behind and he turned to her. She was still smiling, but the feverish intensity in her eyes made the expression on her lips look suspiciously like a scream. Behind her, Connie Chung and Rosenberg were strolling back toward the building.

‘You’ve got to get me out of here,’ Lois whispered. ‘I can’t stand it anymore. I feel like I’m losing my mind.’

[
‘Okay – no problem.’
]

‘I can’t hear you, Ralph – and I think I can see the sun shining through you. Jesus, I’m
sure
I can!’

[
‘Oh – wait—’
]

He concentrated, and felt the world slide slightly around him. The colors faded; Lois’s aura seemed to disappear back inside her skin.

‘Better?’

‘Well,
solider,
anyway.’

He smiled briefly. ‘Good. Come on.’

He took her by the elbow and began guiding her back toward where Joe Wyzer had dropped them off. It was the same direction in which the bloody splashes led.

‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

‘Yes.’

She brightened at once. ‘That’s great! I saw you go up, you know – it was very odd, like watching you turn into a sepia-toned photograph. And then . . . thinking I could see the sun shining through you . . . that was
very
peculiar.’ She looked at him severely.

‘Bad, huh?’

‘No . . . not
bad,
exactly. Just peculiar. Those bugs, now . . .
they
were bad. Ugh!’

‘I know what you mean. But I think they’re all back there.’

‘Maybe, but we’re still a long way from being out of the woods, aren’t we?’

‘Yeah – a long way from Eden, Carol would have said.’

‘Just stick with me, Ralph Roberts, and don’t get lost.’

‘Ralph Roberts? Never heard of him. Norton’s the name.’

And that, he was happy to see, made her laugh.

They walked slowly across the asphalt parking lot with its gridwork of spray-painted yellow lines. Tonight, Ralph knew, most of these spaces would be filled. Come, look, listen, be seen . . . and, most importantly, show your city and a whole watching country beyond it that you cannot be intimidated by the Charlie Pickerings of the world. Even the minority kept away by fear would be replaced by the morbidly curious.

As they approached the racetrack, they also approached the edge of the deathbag. It was thicker here, and Ralph could see slow, swirling movement, as if the deathbag were made up of tiny specks of charred matter. It looked a bit like the air over an open incinerator, shimmering with heat and fragments of burnt paper.

And he could hear two sounds, one overlaying the other. The top one was a silvery sighing. The wind might make a sound like that, Ralph thought, if it learned how to weep. It was a creepy sound, but the one beneath it was actively unpleasant – a slobbery chewing noise, as if a gigantic toothless mouth were ingesting large amounts of soft food somewhere close by.

Lois stopped as they approached the deathbag’s dark, particle-flecked skin and turned frightened, apologetic eyes up to Ralph. When she spoke, it was in a little girl’s voice: ‘I don’t think I can go through that.’ She paused, struggled, and at last brought out the rest. ‘It’s alive, you know. The whole thing. It sees them’ – Lois jerked a thumb back over her shoulder to indicate both the people in the parking lot and the news crews closer in to the building – ‘and that’s bad, but it also sees
us,
and that’s worse . . . because it knows that
we
see
it
. It doesn’t like being seen.
Felt,
maybe, but not seen.’

Now the lower-pitched sound – the slobbery eating sound – seemed almost to be articulating words, and the longer Ralph listened, the more sure he became that that was actually the case.

[
Geddout. Fucoff. Beedit.
]

‘Ralph,’ Lois whispered. ‘Do you hear it?’

[
Hatechew. Killyew. Eeechew.
]

He nodded and took her by the elbow again. ‘Come on, Lois.’

‘Come –?
Where?
’

‘Down. All the way.’

For a moment she only looked at him, not understanding; then the light dawned and she nodded. Ralph felt the blink happen inside him – a little stronger than the eyelash-flutter of a few moments ago – and suddenly the day around him cleared. The swirling, smoggy barrier ahead of them melted away and was gone. Nevertheless, they closed their eyes and held their breath as they approached the place where they knew the edge of the deathbag lay. Ralph felt Lois’s hand tighten on his as she hurried through the invisible barrier, and as he passed through himself, a dark node of tangled memories – the slow death of his wife, the loss of a favorite dog as a child, the sight of Bill McGovern leaning over with one hand pressed against his chest – seemed to first lightly surround his mind and then clamp down on it like a cruel hand. His ears filled with that silvery sobbing sound, so constant and so chillingly vacuous; the weeping voice of a congenital idiot.

Then they were through.

As soon as they had passed beneath the wooden arch on the far side of the parking lot (
WE
’
RE OFF TO THE RACES AT BASSEY PARK
! was printed along its curve), Ralph drew Lois over to a bench and made her sit down, although she insisted vehemently that she was just fine.

‘Good, but I need a second or two to get myself back together.’

She brushed a lock of hair off his temple and planted a gentle kiss in the hollow beneath. ‘Take all the time you need, dear heart.’

That turned out to be about five minutes. When he felt reasonably confident that he could stand up without coming unlocked at the knees, Ralph took her hand again and they stood up together.

‘Did you find it, Ralph? Did you find his trail?’

He nodded. ‘In order to see it, we have to go up about two jumps. I tried going up just enough to see the auras at first, because that doesn’t seem to speed everything up, but it didn’t work. It has to be a little more than that.’

‘All right.’

‘But we have to be careful. Because when we can see—’

‘We can be seen. Yes. We can’t lose track of the time, either.’

‘Absolutely not. Are you ready?’

‘Almost. I think I need another kiss first. Just a little one will do.’

Smiling, he gave it to her.

‘
Now
I’m ready.’

‘Okay – here we go.’

The reddish splotches of spoor led them across the packed-dirt area where the midway stood during County Fair week, then to the racetrack where the pacers ran from May to September. Lois stood at the chest-high slat fence for a moment, glanced around to make sure the grandstand was empty, and then boosted herself up. She moved with the sweet litheness of a young girl at first, but once she had swung a leg over the top and straddled the fence, she paused. On her face was an expression of mingled surprise and dismay.

[
‘Lois? Are you all right?’
]

[
‘Yes, fine. It’s my darned old underwear! I guess I’ve lost weight, because it just won’t stay where it belongs! For gosh sakes!’
]

Ralph realized he could see not just the frilly hem of Lois’s slip but three or four inches of pink nylon. He stifled a grin as she sat astride the broad plank top of the fence, yanking at the fabric. He thought of telling her she looked cuter than kitten-britches and decided that might not be such a good idea.

[
‘Turn your back while I get this damned slip fixed, Ralph. And wipe the smirk off your face while you’re at it.’
]

He turned his back on her and looked at the Civic Center. If there
had
been a smirk on his face (he thought it more likely that she had seen one in his aura), the sight of that dark, slowly swirling deathbag took care of it in a hurry.

[
‘Lois, you might be happier if you just took it off.’
]

[
‘Pardon me all to heck and back, Ralph Roberts, but I wasn’t raised to take off my underwear and leave it lying around on racetracks, and if you ever knew a girl who did do things like that, I hope it was before you met Carolyn. I only wish I had a—’
]

Vague image of a gleaming steel safety-pin in Ralph’s head.

[
‘I don’t suppose you have one, do you, Ralph?’
]

He shook his head and sent back an image of his own: sand running through an hourglass.

[
‘All right, all right, I get the message. I think I’ve fixed it so it’ll hold together at least a little longer. You can turn around now.’
]

He did. She was letting herself down the other side of the board fence, and doing it with easy confidence, but her aura had paled considerably, and Ralph could see dark circles under her eyes again. The Revolt of the Foundation Garments had been quelled, however, at least for the time being.

Ralph boosted himself up, swung a leg over the fence, and dropped down on the other side. He liked the way doing it felt – it seemed to wake old, long memories in his bones.

[
‘We’re going to need to power up again before long, Lois.’
]

Lois, nodding wearily: [
‘I know. Come on, let’s go.’
]

They followed the trail across the racetrack, climbed another board fence on the other side, then descended a brushy, overgrown slope to Neibolt Street. Ralph saw Lois grimly holding her slip up through the skirt of her dress as they struggled down the hill, thought again about asking if she wouldn’t be happier just ditching the damned thing, and decided again to mind his own business. If it became enough of a problem to her, she would do it without any further advice on the subject from him.

Ralph’s greatest worry – that Atropos’s trail would simply peter out on them – initially proved groundless. The dim pink blotches led directly down the crumbling, patched surface of Neibolt Street, between paintless tenements that should have been demolished years ago. Tattered laundry flapped on sagging lines; dirty children with snotty noses watched them pass from dusty front yards. A beautiful towheaded boy of about three gave Ralph and Lois a deeply suspicious look from his front step, then grabbed his crotch with one hand and used the other to flash them the bird.