Insomnia (80 page)

To the left of the mirror was a stark sleeping accommodation which consisted of a filthy mattress and a burlap sack stuffed with straw or feathers. Both pillow and mattress glowed and raved with the nightsweats of the creature who used them.
The dreams inside that burlap pillow would drive me insane,
Ralph thought.

Somewhere, God only knew how much further under the earth, water was dripping hollowly.

On the far side of the apartment was another, higher arch, through which they could see a jumbled, surreal storage area. Ralph actually blinked two or three times to try to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

This is the place, all right
, he thought.
Whatever we came to find, it’s here.

Lois began to drift toward this second arch as if hypnotized. Her mouth was quivering with dismay, but her eyes were full of helpless curiosity – it was the expression, he was quite sure, that must have been on the face of Bluebeard’s wife when she had used the key which unlocked the door to her husband’s forbidden room. Ralph was suddenly sure that Atropos was lurking just inside that arch with his rusty scalpel poised. He hurried after Lois and stopped her just before she could step through. He grasped her upper arm, then put a finger to his lips and shook his head at her before she could speak.

He hunkered down with the fingers of one hand tented on the packed dirt floor, looking like a sprinter awaiting the crack of the starter’s gun. Then he launched himself through the arch (relishing the eager response of his body even at this moment), hitting on his shoulder and rolling. His feet struck a cardboard box and knocked it over, spilling out a jumble of stuff: mismatched gloves and socks, a couple of old paperbacks, a pair of Bermuda shorts, a screwdriver with smears of maroon stuff – maybe paint, maybe blood – on its steel shaft.

Ralph got to his knees, looking back toward Lois, who was standing in the doorway and staring at him with her hands clasped under her chin. There was no one on either side of the archway, and really no room for anyone. More boxes were stacked on either side. Ralph read the printing on them with a kind of bemused wonder: Jack Daniel’s, Gilbey’s, Smirnoff, J&B. Atropos, it seemed, was as fond of liquor cartons as anyone else who couldn’t bear to throw anything away.

[
‘Ralph? Is it safe?’
]

The word was a joke, but he nodded his head and held out his hand. She hurried toward him, giving her slip another sharp upward yank as she came and looking about herself in growing amazement.

Standing on the other side of the arch, in Atropos’s grim little apartment, this storage area had looked large. Now that they were actually in it, Ralph saw it went well beyond that; rooms this big were usually called warehouses. Aisles wandered among great, tottery piles of junk. Only the stuff by the door had actually been boxed; the rest had been piled any whichway, creating something which was two parts maze and three parts booby-trap. Ralph decided that even
warehouse
was too small a word – this was an underground suburb, and Atropos might be lurking anywhere within it . . . and if he was here, he was probably watching them.

Lois didn’t ask what they were looking at; he saw by her face that she already knew. When she did speak, it was in a dreamy tone that sent a chill scampering up Ralph’s back.

[
‘He must be so very old, Ralph.’
]

Yes. So very old.

Twenty yards into the room, which was lit with the same sunken, sourceless red glow as the stairway, Ralph could see a large spoked wheel lying atop a cane-backed chair which was, in turn, standing on top of a splintery old clothes press. Looking at that wheel brought a deeper chill; it was as if the metaphor his mind had seized to help grasp the concept of
ka
had become real. Then he noted the rusty iron strip which circled the wheel’s outer circumference and realized it had probably come from one of those Gay Nineties bikes that looked like overgrown tricycles.

It’s a bicycle wheel, all right, and it’s a hundred years old if it’s a day,
he thought. That led him to wonder how many people – how many thousands or tens of thousands – had died in and around Derry since Atropos had somehow transported this wheel down here. And of those thousands, how many had been Random deaths?

No way of telling, of course; maybe all the way to the beginning, whenever or however that had been. And during that time, he had taken a little something from everyone he had fucked with . . . and here it all was.

Here it all was.

[
‘Ralph!’
]

He looked around and saw that Lois was holding out both hands. In one was a Panama hat with a crescent bitten from the brim. In the other was a black nylon pocket-comb, the kind you could buy in any convenience store for a buck twenty-nine. A ghostly glimmer of orange-yellow still clung to it, which didn’t surprise Ralph much. Each time the comb’s owner had used it, it must have picked up a little of that glow from both his aura and his balloon-string, like dandruff. It also didn’t surprise him that the comb should have been with McGovern’s hat; the last time he’d seen those two things, they’d been together. He remembered Atropos’s sarcastic grin as he swept the Panama from his head and pretended to use the comb on his own bald dome.

Lois was pointing at an old rocking chair with a broken runner.

[
‘The hat was right there, on the seat. The comb was underneath. It’s Mr Wyzer’s, isn’t it?’
]

[
‘Yes.’
]

She held it out to him immediately.

[
‘You take it. I’m not as ditzy as Bill always thought, but sometimes I lose things. And if I lost this, I’d never forgive myself.’
]

He took the comb, started to put it into his back pocket, then thought how easily Atropos had plucked it from that same location. Easy as falling off a log, it had been. He put it into his front pants pocket instead, then looked back at Lois, who was gazing at McGovern’s bitten hat with the sad wonder of Hamlet looking at the skull of his old pal Yorick. When she looked up, Ralph saw tears in her eyes.

[
‘He loved this hat. He thought he looked very dashing and debonair when he had it on. He didn’t – he just looked like Bill – but he thought he looked good, and that’s the important part. Wouldn’t you say so, Ralph?’
]

[
‘Yes.’
]

She tossed the hat back into the seat of the old rocker and turned to examine a box of what looked like rummage-sale clothes. As soon as her back was to him, Ralph squatted down, peering beneath the chair, hoping to see a splintered double gleam in the darkness. If Bill’s hat and Joe’s comb were both here, then maybe Lois’s earrings –

There was nothing beneath the rocker but dust and a pink knitted baby bootee.

Should have known that’d be too easy,
Ralph thought, getting to his feet again. He suddenly felt exhausted. They had found Joe’s comb with no trouble at all, and that was good, absolutely great, but Ralph was afraid it had also been a spectacular case of beginner’s luck. They still had Lois’s earrings to worry about . . . and doing whatever else it was they had been sent here to do, of course. And what was that? He didn’t know, and if someone from upstairs was sending instructions, he wasn’t receiving them.

[
‘Lois, do you have any idea what—’
]

[
‘Shhhh!’
]

[
‘What is it? Lois, is it him?’
]

[
‘No! Be quiet, Ralph! Be quiet and listen!’
]

He listened. At first he heard nothing, and then the clenching sensation – the blink – came inside his head again. This time it was very slow, very cautious. He slipped upward a little further, as lightly as a feather lifted in a draft of warm air. He became aware of a long, low groaning sound, like an endlessly creaking door. There was something familiar about it – not in the sound itself, but in its associations. It was like—

– a burglar alarm, or maybe a smoke-detector. It’s telling us where it is. It’s
calling
us
.

Lois seized his hand with fingers that were as cold as ice.

[
‘That’s it, Ralph – that’s what we’re looking for. Do you hear it?’
]

Yes, of course he did. But whatever that sound was, it had nothing to do with Lois’s earrings . . . and without Lois’s earrings, he wasn’t leaving this place.

[
‘Come on, Ralph! Come on! We have to find it!’
]

He let her lead him deeper into the room. Atropos’s souvenirs were piled at least three feet higher than their heads in most places. How a shrimp like him had managed this trick Ralph didn’t know – levitation, maybe – but the result was that he quickly lost all sense of direction as they twisted, turned, and occasionally seemed to double back. All he knew for sure was that low groaning sound kept getting louder in his ears; as they began to draw near its source, it became an insectile buzzing which Ralph found increasingly unpleasant. He kept expecting to round a corner and find a giant locust staring at him with dull brownish-black eyes as big as grapefruits.

Although the separate auras of the objects which filled the storage vault had faded like the scent of flower-petals pressed between the pages of a book, they were still there beneath Atropos’s stench – and at this level of perception, with all their senses exquisitely awake and attuned, it was impossible not to sense those auras and be affected by them. These mute reminders of the Random dead were both terrible and pathetic. The place was more than a museum or a packrat’s lair, Ralph realized; it was a profane church where Atropos took his own version of Communion – grief for bread, tears for wine.

Their stumbling course through the narrow zigzag rows was a gruesome, almost shattering experience. Each not-quite-aimless turn presented a hundred more objects Ralph wished he had never seen and would not have to remember; each voiced its own small cry of pain and bewilderment. He did not have to wonder if Lois shared his feelings – she was sobbing steadily and quietly beside him.

Here was a child’s battered Flexible Flyer sled with the knotted towrope still draped over the steering bar. The boy to whom it had belonged had died of convulsions on a crisp January day in 1953.

Here was a majorette’s baton with its shaft wrapped in purple and white spirals of crepe – the colors of Grant Academy. She had been raped and bludgeoned to death with a rock in the fall of 1967. Her killer, who had never been caught, had stuffed her body into a small cave where her bones – along with the bones of two other unlucky victims – still lay.

Here was the cameo brooch of a woman who had been struck by a falling brick while walking down Main Street to buy the new issue of
Vogue
; if she had left her home thirty seconds earlier or later, she would have been fine.

Here was the buck knife of a man who had been killed in a hunting accident in 1937.

Here was the compass of a Boy Scout who had fallen and broken his neck while hiking on Mount Katahdin.

The sneaker of a little boy named Gage Creed, run down by a speeding tanker-truck on Route 15 in Ludlow.

Rings and magazines; key-chains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random . . . and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

Lois, sobbing: [
‘I hate him! I hate him so much!’
]

He knew what she meant. It was one thing to hear Clotho and Lachesis say that Atropos was also part of the big picture, that he might even serve some higher purpose himself, and quite another to see the faded Boston Bruins cap of a little boy who had fallen into an overgrown cellar-hole and died in the dark, died in agony, died with no voice left after six hours spent screaming for his mother.

Ralph reached out and briefly touched the cap. Its owner’s name had been Billy Weatherbee. His final thought had been of ice-cream.

Ralph’s hand tightened over Lois’s.

[
‘Ralph, what is it? I can hear you thinking – I’m sure I can – but it’s like listening to someone whisper under his breath.’
]

[
‘I was thinking that I want to bust that little bastard’s chops for him, Lois. Maybe we could teach him what it’s like to lie awake at night. What do you think?’
]

Her grip on his hand tightened. She nodded.

They reached a place where the narrow corridor they’d been following branched into diverging paths. That low, steady buzz was coming from the lefthand one, and not very far up it, either, by the sound. It was now impossible for them to walk side by side, and as they worked their way toward the end, the passage grew narrower still. Ralph was finally obliged to begin sidling along.

The reddish exudate Atropos left behind was very thick here, dripping down the jumbled stacks of souvenirs and making little puddles on the dirt floor. Lois was holding his hand with painful tightness now, but Ralph didn’t complain.

[
‘It’s like the Civic Center, Ralph – he spends a lot of time here.’
]

Ralph nodded. The question was, what did Mr A come down this aisle to commune with? They were coming to the end now – it was blocked by a solid wall of junk – and he still couldn’t see what was making that buzzing sound. It was now starting to drive him crazy; it was like having a horsefly trapped in the middle of your head. As they approached the end of the passage, he became more and more sure that what they were looking for was on the other side of the wall of junk which blocked it – they would either have to retrace their steps and try to find a way around, or break through. Either choice might consume more time than they could afford. Ralph felt nibbles of desperation at the back of his mind.