Pay attention to your mother . . . mind me, now. Those words had pretty well summed up Bertha Roberts's views on the art and science of child-rearing, hadn't they? Whether it was an order to wait an hour after eating before taking a swim or to make sure that old thief Butch Bowers didn't put a lot of rotten potatoes at the bottom of the peck basket she'd sent you to fetch, the prologue (Pay attention to your mother) and the epilogue (Mind me, now) were always the same. And if you failed to pay attention, if you failed to mind her, you had to face the Wrath of Mother, and God help you then.
She picked up the needles and began to knit again, running off scarlet stitches with fingers that looked faintly red themselves. Ralph supposed that was just an illusion. Or maybe the dye wasn't completely colorfast, and some of it was coming off on his fingers.
His fingers? What a silly mistake that was. Her fingers.
Except . . .
Well, there were little bunches of whiskers at the corners of her mouth. Long ones. Nasty, somehow. And unfamiliar. Ralph could remember a fine down on her upper lip, but whiskers? No way. Those were new.
New? New? What are you thinking about? She died two days after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, so what in the name of God can be new about her?
Two converging walls had bloomed on either side of Bertha Roberts, creating the kitchen corner where she had spent so much time. On one of them was a painting Ralph remembered well. It showed a family at supper - Dad, Mom, two kids. They were passing the potatoes and the corn, and looked like they were discussing their respective days. None of them noticed that there was a fifth person in the room - a white-robed man with a sandy beard and long hair. He was standing in the corner and watching them. CHRIST, THE UNSEEN VISITOR, the plaque beneath this painting read. Except the Christ Ralph remembered had looked both kind and a little embarrassed to be eaves-dropping. This version, however, looked coldly thoughtful . . . evaluative . . . judgemental, perhaps. And his color was very high, almost choleric, as if he had heard something which had made him furious.
['Mom? Are you--']
She put the needles down again on the red blanket - that oddly shiny red blanket - and raised a hand to stop him.
[Mom me no Moms, Ralph - just pay attention and mind. Stay out of this! It's too late for your muddling and meddling. You can only make things worse.]
The voice was right, but the face was wrong and becoming wronger. Mostly it was her skin. Smooth and unlined, her skin had been Bertha Roberts's only vanity. The skin of the creature in the rocker was rough . . . more than rough, in fact. It was scaly. And there were two growths (or perhaps they were sores?) on the sides of her neck. At the sight of them, some terrible memory (get it off me Johnny oh please GET IT OFF) stirred far down in his mind. And--
Well, her aura. Where was her aura?
[Never mind my aura and never mind about that fat old whore you've been running around with . . . although I'll bet Carolyn is just rolling in her grave.]
The mouth of the woman (not a woman that thing is not a woman) in the rocker was no longer small. The lower lip had spread, puffed outward and downward. The mouth itself had developed a drooping sneer. A strangely familiar drooping sneer.
(Johnny it's biting me it's BITING ME! ) Something horridly familiar about the bunches of whiskers bristling at the corners of the mouth, too.
(Johnny please its eyes its black eyes) [Johnny can't help you, boy. He didn't help you then and he can't help you now.]
Of course he couldn't. His older brother Johnny had died six years ago. Ralph had been a pallbearer at his funeral. Johnny had died of a heart attack, possibly as Random as the one which had felled Bill McGovern, and--
Ralph looked to the left, but the pilot's side of the cockpit had also disappeared, and Ed Deepneau with it. Ralph saw the old combination gas and woodstove on which his mother had cooked in the house on Richmond Street (a job she had resented bitterly and done badly all her life) and the arch leading into the dining room. He saw their maple dining table. A glass pitcher stood in the center of it. The pitcher had been filled with a choke of lurid red roses. Each seemed to have a face . . . a blood-red, gasping face . . .
But that's wrong, he thought. All wrong. She never had roses in the house - she was allergic to most blooms, and roses were the worst. She used to sneeze like crazy when she was around them. The only thing I ever saw her put on the dining room table was Indian Bouquet, and that wasn't anything but autumn grasses. I see roses because--
He looked back at the creature in the rocking chair, at red fingers which had now melted together into appendages that looked almost like fins. He regarded the scarlet mass which lay in the creature's lap, and the scar along his arm began to tingle again.
What in God's name is going on here?
But he knew, of course; he only had to look from the red thing in the rocking chair to the picture hanging on the wall, the picture of the scarlet-faced, malevolent Jesus watching the family eat their supper, to confirm it. He was not in his old house in Mary Mead, and he was not precisely in an aircraft over Derry, either.
He was in the Court of the Crimson King.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
* * *
1
Without thinking about why he was doing it, Ralph slipped a hand into his sweater pocket and loosely cupped one of Lois's earrings. His hand felt far away, something which belonged to someone else. He was realizing an interesting thing: he had never been frightened in his life until now. Not once. He had thought he'd been frightened, of course, but it had been an illusion - the only time he'd even come close had been in the Derry Public Library, when Charlie Pickering stuck a knife into his armpit and said he was going to let Ralph's guts out all over the floor. That, however, was nothing but a mild moment of discomfort next to what he was feeling now.
A green man came . . . he felt good, but I could be wrong.
He hoped she wasn't; he most sincerely hoped she wasn't. Because the green man was about all he had left now.
The green man, and Lois's earrings.
[Ralph! Stop woolgathering! Look at your mother when she's talking to you! Seventy years old and you still act like you were sixteen, with a bad case of pecker-rash!]
He turned back to the red-finned thing slumped in the rocker. It now bore only a passing resemblance to his late mother.
['You're not my mother, and I'm still in the airplane.']
[You're not, boy. Don't make the mistake of thinking you are. Take one step out of my kitchen and you're in for a very long fall.]
['You might as well stop now. I can see what you are.']
The thing spoke in a bubbly, choked voice that turned Ralph's spine to a narrow line of ice.
[You don't. You may think you do, but you don't. And you don't want to. You don't ever want to see me with my disguises laid aside. Believe me, Ralph, you don't.]
He realized with mounting horror that the mother-thing had turned into an enormous female catfish, a hungry bottom-feeder with stubby teeth gleaming between its pendulous lips and whiskers which dangled almost to the collar of the dress it still wore. The gills in its neck opened and closed like razor-cuts, revealing troubled red inner flesh. Its eyes had grown round and purplish, and as Ralph watched, the sockets began to slide away from each other. This continued until the eyes bulged from the sides rather than the front of the creature's scaly face.
[Don't move so much as a single muscle, Ralph. You'll probably die in the explosion no matter what level you're on - the shockwaves travel here just as they do in any building - but that death will still be a great deal better than my death.]
The catfish opened its mouth. Its teeth ringed a blood-colored maw which looked full of strange guts and tumors. It seemed to be laughing at him.
['Who are you? Are you the Crimson King?']
[That's Ed's name for me - we ought to have our own, don't you think? Let's see. If you don't want me to be Mom Roberts, why not call me the Kingfish? You remember the Kingfish from t
he radio, don't you?]
Yes, of course he did . . . but the real Kingfish had never been on Amos and Andy, and it hadn't really been a kingfish at all. The real Kingfish had been a queenfish, and it had lived in the Barrens.
2
On a summer's day during the year when Ralph Roberts was seven he had hooked an enormous catfish out of the Kenduskeag while fishing with his brother John - this had been when it was still possible to eat what you caught down in the Barrens. Ralph had asked his older brother to take the convulsively flopping thing off his hook for him and put it in the bucket of fresh water they kept on the bank beside them. Johnny had refused, loftily citing what he called the Fisherman's Creed: good fishermen tie their own flies, dig their own worms, and unhook their own catches. It was only later that Ralph realized Johnny might have been trying to hide his own fear of the huge and somehow alien creature his kid brother had reeled out of the Kenduskeag's muddy, piss-warm water that day.
Ralph had at last brought himself to grasp the catfish's pulsing body, which was at the same time slick, scaly, and prickly. As he did, Johnny had added to his terror by telling him, in a low and ominous voice, to look out for the whiskers. They're poison. Bobby Therriault told me if one of em sticks inya, you could get paralyzed. Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. So be careful, Ralphie.
Ralph had twisted the creature this way and that, trying to free the hook from its dark, wet innards without getting his hand too near its whiskers (not believing Johnny about the poison and at the same time believing him completely), exquisitely aware of the gills, the eyes, the fishy smell that seemed to shimmer its way more deeply into his lungs each time he inhaled.
At last he'd heard a gristly ripping from deep within the catfish and felt the hook start to slide free. Fresh streamlets of blood trickled from the corners of its flexing, dying mouth. Ralph gave a little sigh of relief - prematurely, as it turned out. The catfish gave a tremendous flap of its tail as the hook came out. The hand Ralph had been using to free it slipped, and all at once the catfish's bleeding mouth clamped shut on his first two fingers. How much pain had there been? A lot? Some? Maybe none at all? Ralph couldn't remember. What he did remember was Johnny's completely unfeigned shriek of horror and his own surety that the catfish was going to make him pay for taking its life by eating two fingers off his right hand.
He remembered screaming himself, and shaking his hand, and begging Johnny to help him, but Johnny had been backing away, his face pale, his mouth a knotted line of revulsion. Ralph shook his hand in big, swooping arcs, but the catfish hung on like death, whiskers (poison whiskers put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life) snapping and flapping against Ralph's wrist, black eyes staring.
At last he'd struck it against a nearby tree, breaking its back. It had dropped to the grass, still flopping, and Ralph had stamped on it with one foot, provoking the final horror. A spew of guts vomited from its mouth, and from the place where Ralph's heel had smashed it open had come a gluey torrent of bloody eggs. That was when he had realized that the Kingfish had really been the Queenfish, and only a day or two from roeing.
Ralph had stared from this freakish mess to his own bloody, scale-encrusted hand, and then howled like a banshee. When Johnny touched his arm in an effort to calm him, Ralph had bolted. He hadn't stopped running until he got home, and he'd refused to come out of his room for the rest of the day. It had been almost a year before he'd eaten another piece of fish, and he'd never had anything to do with catfish again.
Until now, that was.
3
['Ralph!']
That was Lois's voice . . . but distant! So distant!
['You have to do something right away! Don't let it stop you!']
Ralph now realized that what he'd taken for an afghan in his mother's lap was actually a mat of bloody eggs in the lap of the Crimson King. It was leaning toward him over this throbbing blanket, its thick lips quivering in a parody of concern.
[Something wrong, Ralphie? Where does it hurt? Tell Mother.]
['You're not my mother.']
[No - I be the Queenfish! I be loud and I be proud! I got the walk and I got the talk! Actually, I can be whatever I want. You may not know it, but shape-changing is a time-honored custom in Derry.]
['Do you know the green man Lois saw?']
[Of course! I know all the neighborhood folks!]
But Ralph sensed momentary puzzlement on that scaly face.
The heat along his forearm cranked up another notch, and Ralph had a sudden realization: if Lois were here now, she would hardly be able to see him. The Queenfish was putting out a pulsing, ever-brightening glow, and it was gradually surrounding him. The glow was red instead of black, but it was still a deathbag, and now he knew what it was like to be on the inside, caught in a web woven from your sickest fears and most traumatic experiences. There was no way to retreat from it, and no way to cut through it, as he had cut through the deathbag which had surrounded Ed's wedding ring.
If I'm going to escape, Ralph thought, I'm going to have to do it by running forward so hard and fast I rip right out the other side.
The earring was still in his hand. Now he shifted it so that the naked prong at the back was sticking out between the two fingers a catfish had tried to swallow sixty-three years ago. Then he said a brief prayer, not to God but to Lois's green man.
4
The catfish leaned further forward, a cartoon leer spreading across its noseless face. The teeth inside that flabby grin looked longer and sharper now. Ralph saw drops of colorless fluid beading the ends of the whiskers and thought, Poison. Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. Man, I'm so scared. Scared to fucking death.
Lois, screaming far away: ['Hurry, Ralph! YOU HAVE TO HURRY!']
A little boy was screaming from somewhere a lot closer; screaming and waving his right hand, waving the fish clinging to the fingers buried inside the gullet of a pregnant monster that would not let go.
The catfish leaned closer yet. The dress it wore rustled. Ralph could smell his mother's perfume, Saint Elena, mixing obscenely with the fishy, garbagey aroma of bottom-feeder.
[I intend Ed Deepneau's errand to end in success, Ralph; I intend that the boy your friends told you about should die in his mother's arms, and I want to see it happen. I've worked very hard here in Derry, and I don't feel that's too much to ask, but it means I have to finish with you right now. I--]
Ralph took a step deeper into the thing's garbagey stink. And now he began to see a shape behind the shape of Mother, behind the shape of the Queenfish. He began to see a bright man, a red man with cold eyes and a merciless mouth. This man resembled the Christ he had seen only moments ago . . . but not the one which had really hung in his mother's kitchen corner.
An expression of surprise came into the lidless black eyes of the Queenfish . . . and into the cold eyes of the red man beneath.
[What do you think you're doing? Get away from me! Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?]
['I can think of worse things, pal - my days of playing first base are pretty definitely over.']
The voice rose, becoming the voice of his mother when she was angry.
[Pay attention to me, boy! Pay attention and mind me!]
For a moment the old commands, given in a voice so eerily like his mother's, made him hesitate. Then he came on again. The Queenfish shrank back in the rocker, its tail flipping up and down below the hem of the old housedress.
[JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?]
['I don't know; maybe I just want to give your whiskers a tug. See for myself if they're real.']
And, exerting all of his willpower to keep from shrieking and fleeing, he reached out with his right hand. Lois's earring felt like a small, warm pebble closed within his fist. Lois herself seemed very close, and Ralph decided that wasn't surprising, considering how much of her aura he'd taken on. Perhaps she was even a part of him now. The feeling of her presence was deeply comforting.
&
nbsp; [No, you don't dare! You'll be paralyzed!]
['Catfish aren't poisonous - that was the story of a ten-year-old boy who might have been even more scared than I was.']
Ralph reached for the whiskers with the hand concealing the metal thorn, and the massive, scaly head flinched away, as some part of him had known it would. It began to ripple and change, and its fearful red aura began to seep through. If sickness and pain had a color, Ralph thought, that would be it. And before the change could go any further, before that man he could now see - tall and coldly handsome with his blond hair and glaring red eyes - could step through the shimmer of the illusion it had cast, Ralph drove the sharp point of the earring into one black and bulging fisheye.
5
It made a terrible buzzing sound - like a cicada, Ralph thought - and tried to draw back. Its rapidly flipping tail produced a sound like a fan with a piece of paper caught in the blades. It slid down in the rocker, which was now changing into something that looked like a throne carved from dull orange rock. And then the tail was gone, the Queenfish was gone, and it was the Crimson King sitting there, his handsome face twisted into a snarl of pain and amazement. One of his eyes glared as red as the eye of a lynx in firelight; the other was filled with the fierce, splintered glow of diamonds.
Ralph reached into the blanket of eggs with his left hand, ripped it away, and saw nothing but blackness on the other side of the abortion. The other side of the deathbag. The way out.
[You were warned, you Short-Time son of a bitch! You think you can pull my whiskers? Well, let's see, shall we? Let's just see!]
The Crimson King leaned forward again on its throne, its mouth yawning, its remaining eye blazing with red light. Ralph fought the urge to yank his now-empty right hand away. Instead he pistoned it forward toward the mouth of the Crimson King, which yawned wide to engulf it, as that long-ago catfish had done that day in the Barrens.
Things - not flesh - first squirmed and jostled against his hand, then began to bite like horseflies. At the same time Ralph felt real teeth - no, fangs - sink into his arm. In a moment, two at the most, the Crimson King would bite through his wrist and swallow his hand whole.