He managed to pull his left hand free of his right, and that seemed to break some sort of circuit; he was able to step back from her. Lois swayed on her feet and would have fallen, but Clotho and Lachesis, looking quite a bit like Lilliputians from Gulliver's Travels, grabbed her arms and lowered her carefully to the bench again.
Ralph dropped to one knee before her. He was frantic with fear and guilt, and at the same time filled with a sense of power so great that he felt as if a single hard jolt might cause him to explode, like a bottle filled with nitroglycerine. He could knock down a building with that karate-chop gesture now - maybe a whole row of them.
Still, he had hurt Lois. Perhaps badly.
['Lois! Lois, can you hear me? I'm sorry!']
She looked up at him dazedly, a woman who had blasted forward from forty to sixty in a matter of seconds . . . and then right past it and into her seventies, like a rocket overshooting its intended target. She tried a smile that didn't work very well.
['Lois, I'm sorry. I didn't know, and once I did, I couldn't stop.']
Lachesis: [If you're to have any chance at all, Ralph, you must go now. He's almost here.]
Lois was nodding agreement.
['Go on, Ralph - I'm just weak, that's all. I'll be fine. I'm just going to sit here until my strength comes back.']
Her eyes shifted to the left, and Ralph followed her gaze. He saw the wino they'd frightened away earlier. He had returned to inspect the litter-baskets at the top of the hill for returnable cans and bottles, and although his aura did not look as healthy as that of the fellow they had met out by the old trainyards earlier, Ralph reckoned he would do in a pinch . . . which, for Lois, this definitely was.
Clotho: [We'll see that he wanders over this way, Ralph - we don't have much power over the physical aspects of the Short-Time world, but I think we can manage that much.]
['You're sure?']
[Yes.]
['Okay. Good.']
Ralph took a quick look at the two little men, noted their anxious, frightened eyes, and nodded. Then he bent and kissed Lois's cool, wrinkled cheek. She gave him the smile of a tired old grandmother.
I did that to her, he thought. Me.
Then you better make sure you didn't do it for nothing, Carolyn's voice responded tartly.
Ralph gave the three of them - Clotho and Lachesis were now flanking Lois protectively on the bench - a final glance, and then began to walk down the hill again.
When he reached the toilets, he stood between them for a moment, then leaned his head against the one marked WOMEN. He heard nothing. When he tipped his head against the blue plastic wall of MEN, however, he heard a faint, droning voice raised in song: Who believes that my wildest dreams And my craziest schemes will come true?
You, baby, nobody but you.
Christ, he's nuttier than a fruitcake.
This is news, sweetheart?
Ralph supposed it wasn't. He walked around to the door of the Portosan and opened it. Now he could also hear the distant, waspy buzz of an airplane engine, but there was nothing to see that he hadn't seen dozens of times before: the cracked toilet seat resting askew over the hole in the seat, a roll of toilet paper with a strange and somehow ominous swelled look, and, to the left, a urinal that looked like a plastic teardrop. The walls were tangles of graffiti. The largest - and most exuberant - had been printed in foot-high red letters above the urinal: TONY BOYNTON HAS GOT THE TIGHTEST LITTLE BUNS IN DERRY! A cloying pine-scented deodorizer overlay the smells of shit, piss, and lingering wino-farts like makeup on the face of a corpse. The voice he was hearing seemed to come from the hole in the center of the Portosan's bench seat, or perhaps it was seeping out of the very walls: From the time I fall asleep Until the morning comes I dream about you, baby, nobody but you.
Where is he? Ralph wondered. And how the hell do I get to him?
Ralph felt sudden heat against his hip; it was as if someone had slipped a warm coal into his watchpocket. He began to frown, then remembered what was in there. He reached into the scrap of a pocket with one finger, touched the gold band he had stowed there, and hooked it out. He laid it on his palm over the place where his loveline and lifeline diverged and poked at it gingerly. It had cooled again. Ralph found he wasn't very surprised.
HD - ED 5-8-87.
'One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to bind them,' Ralph murmured, and slipped Ed's wedding band onto the third finger of his own left hand. It was a perfect fit. He pushed it up until it clinked softly against the wedding ring Carolyn had put onto his own finger some forty-five years ago. Then he looked up and saw that the back wall of the Portosan had disappeared.
2
What he saw, framed by the walls which did remain, was a just-past-sunset sky and a swatch of Maine countryside fading into a blue-gray twilight haze. He estimated that he was looking out from a height of about ten thousand feet. He could see glimmering lakes and ponds and vast stretches of dark green woodland scrolling down toward the Portosan's bench seat and then disappearing. Far ahead - up toward the roof of the toilet cubicle - Ralph could see a glimmering nest of lights. That was probably Derry, now no more than ten minutes away. In the lower left quadrant of this vision Ralph could see part of an instrument panel. Taped over the altimeter was a small color photograph that stopped his breath. It was Helen, looking impossibly happy and impossibly beautiful. Cradled in her arms was the Exalted & Revered Baby, fast asleep and no more than four months old.
He wants them to be the last thing he sees in this world, Ralph thought. He's been turned into a monster, but I guess even monsters don't forget how to love.
Something on the instrument panel began to beep. A hand came into view and flicked a switch. Before it disappeared, Ralph could see the white indentation on the third finger of that hand, faint but still visible, where the wedding ring had rested for at least six years. He saw something else, as well - the aura surrounding the hand was the same as the one which had surrounded the thunderstruck baby in the hospital elevator, a turbulent, rapidly moving membrane that seemed as alien as the atmosphere of a gas giant.
Ralph looked back once and raised his hand. Clotho and Lachesis raised theirs in return. Lois blew him a kiss. Ralph made a catching gesture, then turned and stepped into the Portosan.
3
He hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do about the bench seat, then remembered the oncoming hospital gurney, which should have crushed their skulls but hadn't, and walked toward the back of the cubicle. He clenched his teeth, preparing to bark his shin - what you knew was one thing, what you believed after seventy years of bumping into stuff quite another - and then stepped through the bench seat as if it were made of smoke . . . or as if he were.
There was a scary sensation of weightlessness and vertigo, and for a moment he was sure he was going to vomit. This was accompanied by a feeling of drain, as if much of the power he had taken in from Lois was now being siphoned off. He supposed it was. This was a form of teleportation, after all, fabulous science fiction stuff, and something like that had to use up a lot of energy.
The vertigo passed, but it was replaced by a perception that was even worse - a feeling that he had been split at the neck somehow. He realized he now had a completely unobstructed view of a whole sprawling section of the world.
Jesus Christ, what's happened to me? What's wrong?
His senses reluctantly reported back that there was nothing wrong, exactly, it was just that he had achieved a position which should have been impossible. He was seventy-three inches tall; the cockpit of the plane was sixty inches from floor to ceiling. This meant that any pilot much bigger than Clotho and Lachesis had to slouch his way to his seat. Ralph, however, had entered the plane not only while it was in flight but while he was standing up, and he was still standing up, between and slightly behind the two seats in the cockpit. The reason his view was unobstructed was both simple and horrible: his head was sticking out of the top of the plane.
Ralph had a nightmare i
mage of his old dog, Rex, who'd liked to ride with his head out the passenger window and his raggedy ears blowing back in the slipstream. He closed his eyes.
What if I fall? If I can stick my head out through the damned roof, what's to keep me from sliding right down through the floor and falling all the way to the ground? Or maybe through the ground, and then through the very earth itself?
But that wasn't happening, and nothing like it would happen, not on this level - all he had to do was remember the effortless way they'd risen through the floors of the hospital and the ease with which they'd stood on the roof. If he kept those things in mind, he would be okay. Ralph tried to center on that idea, and when he felt quite sure he had himself under control, he opened his eyes again.
Sloping out just below him was the plane's windshield. Beyond it was the nose, tipped with a quicksilver blur of propeller. The nestle of lights he had observed from the door of the Portosan was closer now.
Ralph bent his knees, and his head slid smoothly through the ceiling of the cockpit. For a moment he could taste oil in his mouth and the tiny hairs in his nose seemed to bristle as if with an electric shock, and then he was kneeling between the pilot's and co-pilot's seats.
He didn't know what he had expected to feel, seeing Ed again after all this time and under such extravagantly weird circumstances, but the pang of regret - not just pity but regret - which came was a surprise. As on the day in the summer of '92 when Ed had run into the West Side Gardeners truck, he was wearing an old tee-shirt instead of an Oxford or Arrow with buttons up the front and a fruit-loop on the back. He had lost a lot of weight - Ralph thought perhaps as much as forty pounds - and it had had an extraordinary effect, making him look not emaciated but somehow heroic, in a gothic/romantic way; Ralph was forcefully reminded of Carolyn's favorite poem, 'The Highwayman', by Alfred Noyes. Ed's skin was as pale as paper, his green eyes both dark and light (like emeralds in moonlight, Ralph thought) behind the small round John Lennon spectacles, his lips so red they looked as if they had been rouged. He had tied the white silk scarf with its red Japanese characters around his forehead so that the fringed ends trailed down his back. Within the thunderbolt swirls of his aura, Ed's intelligent, mobile face was filled with terrible regret and fierce determination. He was beautiful - beautiful - and Ralph felt a sense of deja vu twist through him. Now he knew what he had glimpsed on the day he'd stepped between Ed and the man from West Side Gardeners; he was seeing it again. Looking at Ed, lost inside a typhoon aura from which no balloon-string floated, was like looking at a priceless Ming vase which had been thrown against a wall and shattered.
At least he can't see me, not on this level. At least, I don't think he can.
As if in response to this thought, Ed turned and glanced directly at Ralph. His eyes were wide and full of mad caution; the corners of his finely molded mouth quivered and gleamed with buds of saliva. Ralph recoiled, momentarily positive that he was being seen, but Ed didn't react to Ralph's sudden backward movement. He threw a suspicious glance into the empty four-seat passenger cabin behind him instead, as if he had heard the stealthy movements of a stowaway. At the same time he reached past Ralph and put his right hand on a cardboard carton which had been seatbelted into the co-pilot's chair. The hand caressed the box briefly, then went to his forehead and made some tiny adjustment to the scarf serving him as a headband. That done, he resumed singing . . . only this time it was a different song, one that sent a tremor zigzagging up Ralph's back: One pill makes you bigger, One pill makes you small, And the ones that Mother gives you Don't do anything at all . . .
Right, Ralph thought. Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall.
His heart was trip-hammering in his chest - having Ed suddenly turn around like that had scared him in a way even finding himself riding along at ten thousand feet with his head sticking out of the top of the plane hadn't been able to do. Ed didn't see him, Ralph was almost positive of that, but whoever had said that the senses of lunatics were more acute than those of the sane must have known what he was talking about, because Ed sure had an idea that something had changed.
The radio squawked, making both men jump. 'This is for the Cherokee over South Haven. You are on the edge of Derry airspace at an altitude which requires a filed flight-plan. Repeat, you are about to enter controlled airspace over a municipal area. Get your hot-dogging butt up to sixteen thousand feet, Cherokee, and come to one seventy, that's one-seven-oh. While you're doing it, please identify yourself and state--'
Ed closed his hand into a fist and began to hammer the radio with it. Glass flew; soon blood also began to fly. It spattered the instrument panel, the picture of Helen and Natalie, and Ed's clean gray tee-shirt. He went on hammering until the voice on the radio first began to fade into a rising roar of static and then quit altogether.
'Good,' he said in the low, sighing voice of a man who talks to himself a lot. 'Lots better. I hate all those questions. They just--'
He caught sight of his bloody hand and broke off. He held it up, looked at it more closely, and then rolled it into a fist again. A large sliver of glass was sticking out of his pinky just below the third knuckle. Ed pulled it free with his teeth, spat it casually aside, then did something which chilled Ralph's heart: drew the side of his bloody fist first down his left cheek and then his right, leaving a pair of red marks. He reached into the elasticized pocket built into the wall on his left, pulled out a hand-mirror, and used it to check his makeshift warpaint. What he saw seemed to please him, because he smiled and nodded before returning the mirror to the pocket.
'Just remember what the dormouse said,' Ed advised himself in his low, sighing voice, and then pushed in on the control wheel. The Cherokee's nose dropped and the altimeter slowly began to unwind. Ralph could see Derry straight ahead now. The city looked like a handful of opals scattered across dark blue velvet.
There was a hole in the side of the carton in the co-pilot's seat. Two wires came out of it. They led into the back of a doorbell taped to the arm of Ed's seat. Ralph supposed that as soon as he had a visual on the Civic Center and actually began his kamikaze run, Ed would settle one finger on the raised white button in the middle of the plastic rectangle. And just before the plane hit, he would push it. Ding-dong, Avon calling.
Break those wires, Ralph! Break them!
An excellent idea with only one drawback: he couldn't break so much as a strand of cobweb while he was on this level. That meant dropping back down to Short-Time country, and he was preparing to do just that when a soft, familiar voice on his right spoke his name.
[Ralph.]
To his right? That was impossible. There was nothing on his right but the co-pilot's seat, the side of the aircraft, and leagues of twilit New England air.
The scar along his arm had begun to tingle like a filament in an electric heater.
[Ralph!]
Don't look. Don't pay any attention at all. Ignore it.
But he couldn't. Some great, bricklike force had come to bear on him, and his head began to turn. He fought it, aware that the airplane's angle of descent was growing steeper, but it did no good.
[Ralph, look at me - don't be afraid.]
He made one last effort to disobey the voice and was unable. His head went on turning, and Ralph suddenly found himself looking at his mother, who had died of lung cancer twenty-five years ago.
4
Bertha Roberts sat in her bentwood rocker about five feet beyond where the sidewall of the Cherokee's cockpit had been, knitting and rocking back and forth on thin air a mile or more above the ground. The slippers Ralph had given her for her fiftieth birthday - lined with real mink, they had been, how goofy - were on her feet. A pink shawl was thrown around her shoulders. An old political button - WIN WITH WILLKIE! it said - held the shawl closed.
That's right, Ralph thought. She wore them as jewelry - it was her little affectation. I'd forgotten that.
The only thing that struck a wrong note (other than that she was dead and currently r
ocking at six thousand feet) was the bright red piece of afghan in her lap. Ralph had never seen his mother knit, wasn't even sure she knew how, but she was knitting furiously just the same. The needles gleamed and winked as they shuttled through the stitches.
['Mother? Mom? Is it really you?']
The needles paused as she looked up from the crimson blanket in her lap. Yes, it was his mother - the version Ralph remembered from his teens, anyway. Narrow face, high scholar's brow, brown eyes, and a bun of salt-and-pepper hair rolled tightly at the nape of the neck. It was her small mouth, which looked mean and ungenerous . . . until it smiled, that was.
[Why, Ralph Roberts! I'm surprised that you even have to ask!]
That's not really an answer, though, is it? Ralph thought. He opened his mouth to say so and then decided it might be wiser - for the time being, at least - to keep quiet. A milky shape was now swimming in the air to her right. When Ralph looked at it, it darkened and solidified into the cherry-stained magazine stand he had made her in woodshop during his sophomore year at Derry High. It was filled with Reader's Digests and Life magazines. And now the ground far below her began to disappear into a pattern of brown and dark-red squares that spread out from the rocker in a widening ring, like a pond-ripple. Ralph recognized it at once - the kitchen linoleum of the house on Richmond Street in Mary Mead, the one where he'd grown up. At first he could see the ground through it, geometries of farmland and, not far ahead, the Kenduskeag flowing through Derry, and then it solidified. A ghostly shape like a big milkweed puff became his mom's old Angora cat, Futzy, curled up on the windowsill and looking out at the gulls circling above the old dump in the Barrens. Futzy had died around the time Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had stopped making movies together.
[That old man was right, boy. You've no business messing into Long-Time affairs. Pay attention to your mother and stay out of what doesn't concern you. Mind me, now.]