Insomnia (81 page)

But the corridor did not dead-end; on the left there was a crawlspace beneath a dining room table piled high with dishes and stacks of green paper and . . .

Green paper? No, not quite. Stacks of
bills
. Tens, twenties, and fifties were piled up in random profusion on the dishes. There was a choke of hundreds in a cracked gravy-boat, and a rolled-up five hundred dollar bill poking drunkenly out of a dusty wineglass.

[
‘Ralph! My God, it’s a fortune!’
]

She wasn’t looking at the table but at the other wall of the passageway. The last five feet had been constructed of banded gray-green bricks of currency. They were in an alleyway which was literally made of money, and Ralph realized he could now answer another of the questions that had been troubling him: where Ed had been getting his dough. Atropos was rolling in it . . . but Ralph had an idea that the little bald-headed sonofabitch still had trouble getting dates.

He bent down a little to get a better look into the crawlspace underneath the table. There appeared to be yet another chamber on the other side, this one very small. A slow red glow waxed and waned in there like the beating of a heart. It cast uneasy pulses of light on their shoes.

Ralph pointed, then looked at Lois. She nodded. He dropped to his knees and crawled beneath the money-laden table, and into the shrine Atropos had created around the thing which lay in the middle of the floor. It
was
what they had been sent to find, he hadn’t a single doubt about it, but he still had no idea what it was. The object, not much bigger than the sort of marbles children call croakers, was wrapped in a deathbag as impenetrable as the center of a black hole.

[
‘Ralph! Do you hear singing? It’s very faint.’
]

He looked at her dubiously, then glanced around. He had already come to hate this cramped space, and although he was not claustrophobic by nature, he now felt a panicky desire to get away squeezing into his thoughts. A very distinct voice spoke up in his head.
It’s not just what I want, Ralph; it’s what I need. I’ll do my best to hang in with you, but if you don’t finish whatever the hell it is you’re supposed to be doing in here soon, it won’t make any difference what either of us want – I’m just going to take over and run like hell
.

The controlled terror in that voice didn’t surprise him, because this really was a horrible place – not a room at all but the bottom of a deep shaft whose circular walls were constructed of rickrack and stolen goods: toasters, footstools, clock-radios, cameras, books, crates, shoes, rakes. Dangling almost right in front of Ralph’s eyes was a battered saxophone on a frayed strap with the word
JAKE
printed on it in dust-dulled rhinestones. Ralph reached out to grab it, wanting to get the damned thing out of his face. Then he imagined the removal of this one object starting a landslide that would bring the walls down on them, burying them alive. He pulled his hand back. At the same time he opened his mind and senses as fully as he could. For a moment he thought he
did
hear something – a faint sigh, like the whisper of the ocean in a seashell – but then it was gone.

[
‘If there are voices in here, I can’t hear them, Lois – that damned thing is drowning them out.’
]

He pointed at the object in the middle of the circle – black beyond any previously held conception of black, a deathbag which was the apotheosis of all deathbags. But Lois was shaking her head.

[
‘No, not drowning them out. Sucking them dry.’
]

She looked at the screaming black thing with horror and loathing.

[
‘That thing is sucking the life out of all this stuff piled up around it . . . and it’s trying to suck the life out of us, too.’
]

Yes, of course it was. Now that Lois had actually said it out loud, Ralph could feel the deathbag – or the object inside it – pulling at something far down in his head, yanking at it, twisting at it, shoving at it . . . trying to pull it out like a tooth from its pink socket of gum.

Trying to suck the life out of them? Close, but no cigar. Ralph didn’t think it was their lives the thing inside the deathbag wanted, nor their souls . . . at least, not exactly. It was their life-force it wanted. Their
ka
.

Lois’s eyes widened as she picked up this thought . . . and then they shifted to a place just beyond his right shoulder. She leaned forward on her knees and reached out.

[
‘Lois, I wouldn’t do that – you could bring the whole place down around our—’
]

Too late. She yanked something free, looked at it with horrified understanding, and then held it out to him.

[
‘It’s still alive
– everything
that’s in here is still alive. I don’t know how that can be, but it is . . . somehow it is. But they’re faint. Why are they so faint?’
]

What she was holding out to him was a small white sneaker that belonged to a woman or a child. As Ralph took it, he heard it singing softly in a distant voice. The sound was as lonely as November wind on an overcast afternoon, but incredibly sweet, as well – an antidote to the endless bray of the black thing on the floor.

And it was a voice he knew. He was sure it was.

There was a maroon splatter on the sneaker’s toe. Ralph at first thought it was chocolate milk, then recognized it for what it really was: dried blood. In that instant he was outside the Red Apple again, grabbing Nat before Helen could drop her. He remembered how Helen’s feet had tangled together; how she had stumbled backward, leaning against the Red Apple’s door like a drunk against a lamppost, holding out her hands to him.
Gih me my bay-ee . . . Gih me Nah-lie
.

He knew the voice because it was Helen’s voice. This sneaker had been on her foot that day, and the drops of blood on the toe had come either from Helen’s smashed nose or from Helen’s lacerated cheek.

It sang and sang, its voice not quite buried beneath the buzz of the thing in the deathbag, and now that Ralph’s ears – or whatever passed for ears in the world of auras – were all the way open, he could hear all the other voices of all the other objects. They sang like a lost choir.

Alive. Singing.

They
could
sing, all the things lining these walls
could
sing, because their
owners
could still sing.

Their owners were still alive.

Ralph looked up again, this time noting that while some of the objects he saw were old – the battered alto sax, for instance – a great many of them were new; there were no wheels from Gay Nineties bicycles in this little alcove. He saw three clock-radios, all of them digital. A shaving kit that looked as if it had hardly been used. A lipstick that still had a Rite Aid pricetag on it.

[
‘Lois, Atropos has taken this stuff from the people who’ll be at the Civic Center tonight. Hasn’t he?’
]

[
‘Yes. I’m sure that’s right.’
]

He pointed at the black cocoon shrieking on the floor, almost drowning out the songs all around it . . . drowning them out as it fed on them.

[
‘And whatever’s inside that deathbag has something to do with what Clotho and Lachesis called the master-cord. It’s the thing that ties all these different objects – all these different
lives –
together.’
]

[
‘That makes them
ka-tet.
Yes.’
]

Ralph handed the sneaker back to Lois.

[
‘This goes with us when we go. It’s Helen’s.’
]

[
‘I know.’
]

Lois looked at it for a moment, then did something Ralph thought extremely clever: pulled out two eyelets’ worth of lacing and tied the sneaker to her left wrist like a bracelet.

He crawled closer to the small deathbag and then bent over it. Getting close was hard, and staying close was harder – it was like placing your ear next to the motor-housing of a power drill shrieking at full volume or looking into a bright light without squinting. This time there seemed to be actual words buried within that buzzing, the same ones they’d heard as they approached the edge of the deathbag around the Civic Center:
Geddout. Fucoff. Beedit.

Ralph placed his hands over his ears for a moment, but of course that did no good. The sounds weren’t coming from the outside, not really. He let his hands drop again and looked at Lois.

[
‘What do you think? Any ideas on what we should do next?’
]

He didn’t know exactly what he had expected of her, but it wasn’t the quick, positive response he got.

[
‘Cut it open and take out what’s inside – and do it right away. That thing’s dangerous. Also, it might be calling Atropos, have you thought of that? Tattling just like the hen tattled on Jack in the story about the magic beanstalk.’
]

Ralph actually
had
considered this possibility, although not in such vivid terms.
All right,
he thought.
Cut open the bag and take the prize. Except just how are we supposed to do that?

He remembered the bolt of lightning he’d sent at Atropos when the little bald creep had been trying to lure Rosalie across the street. A good trick, but something like that might do more harm than good here; what if he vaporized the thing they were supposed to take?

All right, fair enough, as a matter of fact
he
didn’t think he could do it, either . . . but when you were surrounded by the possessions of people who could all be dead when the sun came up tomorrow, taking chances seemed like a very bad idea. An
insane
idea.

He stared at Lois, startled by the clarity of the image.

[
‘I don’t know what you just thought of, but hurry up and do it, whatever it is.’
]

Ralph looked down at his right hand – a hand from which the wrinkles and the first twists of arthritis had now disappeared, a hand which lay inside a bright blue corona of light. Feeling a little foolish, he folded his last two fingers against his palm and extended the first two, thinking of a game they’d played as kids – rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock.

Be scissors,
he thought.
I need a pair of scissors. Help me out.

Nothing. He glanced at Lois and saw her looking at him with a serene calm which was somehow terrifying.
Oh Lois, if you only knew,
he thought, and then swept that out of his mind. Because he had felt something, hadn’t he? Yes.
Something
.

This time he didn’t make words in his mind but a picture: not the scissors Clotho had used to send on Jimmy V but the stainless-steel shears from his mother’s sewing basket – long, slim blades tapering to a point almost as sharp as the tip of a knife. As he deepened his concentration, he could even see the two tiny words engraved on the metal just south of the pivot-point:
SHEFFIELD STEEL
. And now he could feel that thing in his mind again, not a blink this time but a muscle – an immensely powerful one – slowly flexing. He looked fixedly down at his fingers and made the shears in his mind open and close. As they did, he slowly opened and closed his fingers, creating a V that widened and narrowed.

Now he could feel the energy he had taken from Nirvana Boy and the bum out at the trainyards, first gathering in his head and then moving down his right arm to his fingers like a cramp.

The aura surrounding the extended first and second fingers of his right hand began to thicken . . . and to lengthen. To take on the slim shape of blades. Ralph waited until they had extended themselves about five inches out from his nails and then worked his fingers back and forth again. The blades opened and closed.

[
‘Go, Ralph! Do it!’
]

Yes – he couldn’t afford to wait around and run experiments. He felt like a car battery that had been called on to crank a motor much too big for it. He could feel all his energy – the stuff he’d taken as well as his own – running down his right arm and into those blades. It wouldn’t last long.

He leaned forward, fingers pressed together in a pointing gesture, and sank the tip of the scissors into the deathbag. He had been concentrating so hard on first creating and then maintaining the scissors that he had stopped hearing that steady, hoarse buzz – at least with his conscious mind – but when the scissors-point sank into its black skin, the deathbag suddenly cycled up to a new, shrieking pitch of mingled pain and alarm. Ralph saw dribbles of thick, dark goo running out of the bag and across the floor. It looked like diseased snot. At the same time he felt the power-drain inside him roughly double. He could
see
it, he realized: his own aura running down his right arm and across the back of his hand in slow, peristaltic waves. And he could sense it dimming around the rest of his body as its essential protection of him thinned out.

[
‘Hurry, Ralph! Hurry!’
]

He made a tremendous effort and tore his fingers open. The shimmering blue blades also opened, making a small slit in the black egg. It screamed, and two bright, jagged flashes of red light raced across its surface. Ralph brought his fingers together and watched the shears growing from their tips snap shut, cutting through dense black stuff that was part shell and part flesh. He cried out. It was not pain he felt, exactly, but a sense of awful weariness.
This is what bleeding to death must feel like,
he thought.