Insomnia (85 page)

[
‘Lois. Say her name. Lois.’
]

[
Yeah, yeah, her – Lois Chasse! I agree to stay away from her, and Deepneau, too. From all of you, just as long as you don’t cut me anymore. Are you satisfied? Is it good enough, God damn you?
]

Ralph decided he
was
satisfied . . . or as satisfied as any man can be when he is deeply sickened by his own methods and actions. He didn’t believe there were any trapdoors hidden in Atropos’s promise; the little bald man knew he might pay a high price later for giving in now, but in the end that hadn’t been able to offset the pain and terror Ralph had inflicted on him.

[
‘Yes, Mr A, I think it’s good enough.’
]

Ralph slid off his small victim with his stomach rolling and a sensation – it had to be false, didn’t it? – that his throat was opening and closing like the valve of a clam. He looked at the blood-spattered scalpel for a moment, then cocked his arm back and threw it as hard as he could. It flew end-for-end through the arch and disappeared into the storeroom beyond.

Good riddance,
Ralph thought. At least I didn’t get much on myself. There’s that. He no longer felt like vomiting. Now he felt like crying.

Atropos got slowly to his knees and looked around with the dazed eyes of a man who has survived a killer storm. He saw his ear lying on the floor and picked it up. He turned it over in his small hands and looked at the strands of gristle trailing out from the back side. Then he looked up at Ralph. His eyes swam with tears of pain and humiliation, but there was something else in them as well – a rage so deep and deadly that Ralph recoiled from it. All his precautions seemed flimsy and foolish in the face of that rage. He took a blundering step backward and pointed at Atropos with an unsteady finger.

[
‘Remember your promise!’
]

Atropos bared his teeth in a gruesome grin. The dangling flap of skin on the side of his face swung back and forth like a slack sail, and the raw flesh beneath it oozed and trickled.

[
Of course I’ll remember it – how could I forget? In fact, I’d like to make you another. Two for the price of one, you might say.
]

Atropos made a gesture Ralph remembered well from the hospital roof, spreading the first two fingers of his right hand in a V and then flicking them upward, creating a red arc in the air. Within it, Ralph saw a human figure. Beyond it, dimly glimpsed, as if seen though a mist of blood, was the Red Apple Store. He started to ask who that was standing in the foreground, on the curb of Harris Avenue . . . and then, suddenly, he knew. He looked up at Atropos with shocked eyes.

[
‘Jesus, no! No, you can’t!’
]

The grin on Atropos’s face continued to widen.

[
You know, that’s what I kept thinking about you, Short-Time. Only I was wrong. You are, too. Watch.
]

Atropos moved his spread fingers slightly wider. Ralph saw someone wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap come out of the Red Apple, and this time Ralph knew immediately whom he was looking at. This person called to the one across the street, and then something terrible began to happen. Ralph turned away, sickened, from the bloody arc of the future between Atropos’s small fingers.

But he heard it when it happened.

[
The one I showed you first belongs to the Random, Shorts – to me, in other words. And here’s my promise to you: if you go on getting in my way, what I’ve just shown you is going to happen. There’s nothing you can do, no warning you can give, that will stop it from happening. But if you leave off now – if you and the woman simply stand aside and let events take their course – then I will stay my hand.
]

The vulgarities which formed so large a part of Atropos’s usual discourse had been left behind like a discarded costume, and for the first time Ralph had some clear sense of how truly old and malevolently wise this being was.

[
Remember what the junkies say, Shorts: dying is easy, living is hard. It’s a true saying. If anyone should know, it’s me. So what do you think? Having any second thoughts?
]

Ralph stood in the filthy chamber with his head down and his fists clenched. Lois’s earrings burned in one of them like small hot coals. Ed’s ring also seemed to burn against him, and he knew there wasn’t a thing in the world to stop him from taking it out of his pocket and throwing it into the other room after the scalpel. He remembered a story he’d read in school about a thousand years ago. ‘The Lady or the Tiger?’ it had been called, and now he understood what it was to be given such a terrible power . . . and such a terrible choice. On the surface it seemed easy enough; what, after all, was one life against a thousand?

But that one life—!

Yet really, it isn’t as if anyone would ever have to know,
he thought coldly.
No one except maybe for Lois . . . and Lois would accept my decision. Carolyn might not have done, but they’re very different women
.

Yes, but did he have the right?

Atropos also read this in his aura – it was spooky, how much the creature saw.

[
Of course you do, Ralph – that’s what these matters of life and death are really about: who has the right. This time it’s you. So what do you say?
]

[
‘I don’t know what I say. I don’t know what I think. All I know is that I wish all three of you had
LEFT ME THE FUCK ALONE
!’
]

Ralph Roberts raised his head toward the root-riddled ceiling of Atropos’s den and screamed.

Five minutes later, Ralph’s head poked out of the shadows beneath the old, leaning oak. He saw Lois at once. She was kneeling in front of him, peering anxiously through the tangle of roots at his upturned face. He raised a grimy, blood-streaked hand and she took it firmly, holding him steady as he made his way up the last few steps – gnarled roots that were actually more like ladder-rungs.

Ralph wriggled his way out from under the tree and turned over on his back, taking the sweet air in great long pulls of breath. He thought air had never in his whole life tasted so good. In spite of everything else, he was enormously grateful to be out. To be free.

[
‘Ralph? Are you all right?’
]

He turned her hand over, kissed her palm, then put her earrings where his lips had been.

[
‘Yes. Fine. These are yours.’
]

She looked at them curiously, as if she had never seen earrings – these or any others – before, and then put them in her dress pocket.

[
‘You saw them in the mirror, didn’t you, Lois?’
]

[
‘Yes, and it made me angry . . . but I don’t think I was really surprised, not down deep.’
]

[
‘Because you knew.’
]

[
‘Yes. I guess I did. Maybe from when we first saw Atropos wearing Bill’s hat. I just kept it . . . you know . . . in the back of my mind.’
]

She was looking at him carefully, assessingly.

[
‘Never mind my earrings right now – what happened down there? How did you get away?’
]

Ralph was afraid if she looked at him in that careful way for too long, she would see too much. He also had an idea that if he didn’t get moving soon, he might never move again; his weariness was now so large it was like some great encrusted object – a long-sunken ocean liner, perhaps – lying inside him, calling to him, trying to drag him down. He got to his feet. He couldn’t allow either of them to be dragged down, not now. The news the sky told wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it was bad enough – it was six o’clock at least. All over Derry, people who didn’t give a shit one way or the other about the abortion issue (the vast majority, in other words) were sitting down to hot dinners. At the Civic Center the doors would now be open; 10-K TV lights would be bathing them, and Minicams would be transmitting live shots of early arriving pro-choice advocates driving past Dan Dalton and his sign-waving Friends of Life. Not far from here, people were chanting that old Ed Deepneau favorite, the one that went
Hey, hey, Susan Day, how many kids did you kill today?
Whatever he and Lois did, they would have to do it in the next sixty to ninety minutes. The clock was ticking.

[
‘Come on, Lois. We have to get moving.’
]

[
‘Are we going back to the Civic Center?’
]

[
‘No, not to start with. I think that to start with, we ought to . . .’
]

Ralph discovered that he simply couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say. Where
did
he think they ought to go to start with? Back to Derry Home? The Red Apple? His house? Where did you go when you needed to find a couple of well-meaning but far from all-knowing fellows who had gotten you and your few close friends into a world of hurt and trouble? Or could you reasonably expect
them
to find
you
?

They might not
want
to find you, sweetheart. In fact, they might actually be hiding from you.

[
‘Ralph, are you sure you’re—’
]

He suddenly thought of Rosalie, and knew.

[
‘The park, Lois. Strawford Park. That’s where we have to go. But we need to make a stop on the way.’
]

He led her along the Cyclone fence, and soon they heard the lazy sound of interwoven voices. Ralph could smell roasting hotdogs as well, and after the fetid stench of Atropos’s den, the smell was ambrosial. A minute or two later, he and Lois stepped to the edge of the little picnic area near Runway 3.

Dorrance was there, standing at the heart of his amazing, multicolored aura and watching as a light plane drifted down toward the runway. Behind him, Faye Chapin and Don Veazie were sitting at one of the picnic tables with a chessboard between them and a half-finished bottle of Blue Nun near to hand. Stan and Georgina Eberly were drinking beer and twiddling forks with hotdogs impaled upon them in the heat-shimmer – to Ralph that shimmer was a strangely dry pink, like coral-colored sand – above the picnic area’s barbecue pit.

For a moment Ralph simply stood where he was, struck dumb by their beauty – the ephemeral, powerful beauty that was, he supposed, what Short-Time life was mostly about. A snatch of song, something at least twenty-five years old, occurred to him:
We are stardust, we are golden
. Dorrance’s aura was different – fabulously different – but even the most prosaic of the others glittered like rare and infinitely desirable gemstones.

[
‘Oh, Ralph, do you see? Do you see how beautiful they are?’
]

[
‘Yes.’
]

[
‘What a shame they don’t know!’
]

But was it? In light of all that had happened, Ralph wasn’t so sure. And he had an idea – a vague but strong intuition he could never have put into words – that perhaps real beauty was something unrecognized by the conscious self, a work that was always in progress, a thing of being rather than seeing.

‘Come on, dumbwit, make your move,’ a voice said. Ralph jerked, first thinking the voice was speaking to him, but it was Faye, talking to Don Veazie. ‘You’re slower’n old creepin Jesus.’

‘Never mind,’ Don said. ‘I’m thinkin.’

‘Think till hell freezes over, Slick, and it’s still gonna be mate in six moves.’

Don poured some wine into a paper cup and rolled his eyes. ‘Oh boogersnot!’ he cried. ‘I didn’t realize I was playin chess with Boris Spassky! I thought it was just plain old Faye Chapin! I apologize all to hell and gone!’

‘That’s a riot, Don. An act like that, you could take it on the road and make a million dollars. You won’t have to wait long to do it, either – you can start just six moves from now.’

‘Ain’t you smart,’ Don said. ‘You just don’t know when to—’

‘
Hush!
’ Georgina Eberly said in a sharp tone. ‘What was that? It sounded like something blew up!’

‘That’ was Lois, sucking a flood of vibrant rainforest green from Georgina’s aura.

Ralph raised his right hand, curled it into a tube around his lips, and began to inhale a similar stream of bright blue light from Stan Eberly’s aura. He felt fresh energy fill him at once; it was as if fluorescent lights were going on in his brain. But that vast sunken ship, which was really no more or less than four months’ worth of mostly sleepless nights, was still there, and still trying to suck him down to the place where it was.

The decision was still right there, too – not yet made one way or the other, but only deferred.

Stan was also looking around. No matter how much of his aura Ralph took (and he had drawn off a great deal, it seemed to him), the source remained as densely bright as ever. Apparently what they had been told about the all-but-endless reservoirs of energy surrounding each human being had been the exact, literal truth.

‘Well,’ Stan said, ‘I did hear
somethin
—’

‘
I
didn’t,’ Faye said.

‘Coss not, you’re deaf as dirt,’ Stan replied. ‘Stop interruptin for just one minute, can’tcha? I started to say it wasn’t a fuel-tank, because there ain’t no fire or smoke. Can’t be that Don farted, either, cause there ain’t no squirrels droppin dead out of the trees with their fur burnt off. I guess it musta been one of those big Air National Guard trucks backfirin. Don’t worry, darlin, I’ll pertect ya.’

‘Pertect this,’ Georgina said, slapping one hand into the crook of her elbow and curling her fist at him. She was smiling, however.

‘Oh boy,’ Faye said. ‘Take a peek at Old Dor.’

They all looked at Dorrance, who was smiling and waving in the direction of the Harris Avenue Extension.