Little bastard's used to hurting other people, but not being hurt himself. Maybe he's never been hurt himself. Well say hello to how the other half lives, pal.
[Stop it! Stop it! You can't do this to me!]
['I've got a newsflash for you, buddy . . . I am doing it. Now why don't you just get with the program?']
[What do you think you're going to accomplish by this, Shorts? It'll happen anyway, you know. All those people at the Civic Center are going to go bye-bye, and taking the ring won't stop it.]
Don't I know it, Ralph thought.
Atropos was still panting, but he had stopped thrashing. Ralph felt able to look away from him for a moment and send his eyes on a quick tour of the room. He supposed what he was really looking for was inspiration - even a small bolt would do.
['Can I make a suggestion, Mr A? As your new little pal and playmate? I know you're busy, but you ought to find time to do something about this place. I'm not talking about getting it in House Beautiful or anything like that, but sheesh! What a sty!']
Atropos, simultaneously sulky and wary: [Do you think I give a fuck what you think, Shorts?]
He could only think of one way to proceed. He didn't like it, but he was going to go ahead, just the same. He had to go ahead; there was a picture in his mind that guaranteed it. It was a picture of Ed Deepneau flying toward Derry from the coast in a light plane, one with either a crate of high explosive or a tank of nerve-gas stowed in the nose.
['What can I do with you, Mr A? Any ideas?']
The response was immediate and unequivocal.
[Let me go. That's the answer. The only answer. I'll leave you alone, both of you. Leave you for the Purpose. You'll live another ten years. Hell, maybe another twenty, it's not impossible. All you and the little lady have to do is butt out. Go home. And when the big bang comes, watch it on the TV news.]
Ralph tried to sound as if he were honestly considering this.
['And you'd leave us alone? You'd promise to leave us alone?']
[Yes!]
Atropos's face had taken on a hopeful look, and Ralph could see the first traces of an aura springing up around the little creep. It was the same low and nasty red as the pulsing glow which lit the apartment.
['Do you know something, Mr A?']
Atropos, looking more hopeful than ever: [No, what?]
Ralph shot one hand forward, grabbed Atropos's left wrist, and twisted it hard. Atropos shrieked in agony. His fingers loosened on the handle of the scalpel, and Ralph plucked it free with the ease of a veteran pickpocket lifting a wallet.
['I believe you.']
2
[Give it back! Give it back! Give it back! Give it--]
In his hysteria, Atropos might have gone on shrieking this for hours, so Ralph put a stop to it in the most direct way he knew. He leaned forward and slashed a shallow vertical cut down the back of the big bald head poking out of the hole in Lois's half-slip. No invisible hand tried to repel him, and his own hand moved with no trouble at all. Blood - a shocking amount of it - welled out of the line-cut. The aura around Atropos had now gone to the dark and baleful red of an infected wound. He shrieked again.
Ralph rocked forward and spoke chummily into his ear.
['Maybe I can't kill you, but I can certainly fuck you up, can't I? And I don't need to be loaded with psychic juice to do it, either. This little honey will do just fine.']
He used the scalpel to cross the first cut he'd made, making a lower-case t on the back of Atropos's head. Atropos shrieked and began to flail wildly. Ralph was disgusted to discover that part of him - the capering gremlin - was enjoying this enormously.
['If you want me to go on cutting you, go on struggling. If you want me to stop, then you stop.']
Atropos became still at once.
['Okay. Now I'm going to ask you a few questions. I think you'll find it in your best interest to answer them.']
[Ask me anything! Whatever you want! Just don't cut me anymore!]
['That's a pretty good attitude, pally, but I think there's always room for improvement, don't you? Let's see.']
Ralph sliced down again, this time opening a long gash in the side of Atropos's skull. A flap of skin peeled loose like badly glued wallpaper. Atropos howled. Ralph felt a cramp of revulsion in the pit of his stomach and was actually relieved . . . but when he spoke/thought at Atropos, he took great pains not to let that feeling show.
['Okay, that's my motivational lecture, doc. If I have to repeat it, you'll need Krazy Glue to keep the top of your head from flying off in a high wind. Do you understand me?']
[Yes! Yes!]
['And do you believe me?']
[Yes! Rotten old white-hair, YES!]
['Okay, that's good. Here's my question, Mr A: if you make a promise, are you bound by it?']
Atropos was slow in answering, an encouraging sign. Ralph laid the flat of the scalpel's blade against his cheek to hurry him up. He was rewarded with another scream and instant cooperation.
[Yes! Yes! Just don't cut me again! Please don't cut me again!]
Ralph took the scalpel away. The outline of the blade burned on the little creature's unlined cheek like a birthmark.
['Okay, sunshine, listen up. I want you to promise you'll leave me and Lois alone until the rally at the Civic Center is over. No more chasing, no more slashing, no more bullshit. Promise me that.']
[Fuck you! Take your promise and shove it up your ass!]
Ralph was not put out of temper by this; his smile, in fact, widened. Because Atropos hadn't said I won't, and even more important, Atropos hadn't said I can't. He had just said no. Just a little backsliding, in other words, and easily remedied.
Steeling himself, Ralph ran the scalpel straight down the middle of Atropos's back. The slip split, the dirty white tunic beneath it split, and so did the flesh beneath the tunic. Blood poured out in a sickening flood, and Atropos's tortured, wailing shriek beat at Ralph's ears.
He leaned over and murmured into the small ear again, grimacing and avoiding the blood as best he could.
['I don't like doing this anymore, Chumley - in fact, about two more cuts and I'm going to throw up again - but I want you to know that I can do it and I'm going to keep on doing it until you either give me the promise I want or until the force that stopped me from choking you stops me again. I think if you wait for that to happen, you're going to be one hurting unit. So what do you say? Do you want to promise, or do you want me to peel you like a grape?']
Atropos was blubbering. It was a nauseating, horrible sound.
[You don't understand! If you succeed in stopping what's been started - the chances are slim, but it's possible that you might - I will be punished by the creature you call the Crimson King!]
Ralph clamped his teeth together and slashed down again, his lips pressed so tightly together that his mouth looked like a long-healed scar. There was a faint tug as the scalpel's blade slid through gristle, and then Atropos's left ear tumbled to the floor. Blood poured out of the hole on the side of his bald head, and his scream this time was loud enough to hurt Ralph's ears.
They're sure a long way from being gods, aren't they? Ralph thought. He felt sick with horror and dismay. The only real difference between them and us is that they live longer and they're a little harder to see. And I guess I'm not much of a soldier - just looking at all that blood makes me feel like passing out. Shit.
[All right, I promise! Just stop cutting me! No more! Please, no more!]
['That's a start, but you're going to have to be more specific. I want to hear you say that you promise to stay away from me and Lois, and Ed, too, until the rally at the Civic Center is over.']
He expected more wiggling and weaseling, but Atropos surprised him.
[I promise! I promise to stay away from you, and from the bitch you're running around with--]
['Lois. Say her name. Lois.']
[Yeah, yeah, her - Lois Chasse! I agree to stay away from her, and Deepneau, too. From all of yo
u, 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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
* * *
1
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.'