by Stephen King
He heard Lois cry out and felt her grip on his hand tighten. Ralph closed his eyes instinctively and waited for the approaching gurney to flatten his skull.
Clotho: [Be calm! Please, be calm! Remember that these things exist on a different level of reality from the one where you are now!]
Ralph opened his eyes. The gurney was gone, although he could hear its receding wheels. The sound was coming from behind him now. The gurney, like McGovern's friend, had passed right through him. The four of them were now levitating slowly into the corridor of what had to be the pediatrics wing - fairy-tale creatures pranced and gambolled up and down the walls, and characters from Disney's Aladdin and The Little Mermaid were decaled onto the windows of a large, brightly lighted play area. A doctor and a nurse strolled toward them, discussing a case.
'- further tests seem indicated, but only if we can make at least ninety per cent sure that--'
The doctor walked through Ralph and as he did Ralph understood that he had started smoking again on the sly after five years off the weed and was feeling guilty as hell about it. Then they were gone. Ralph looked down just in time to see his feet emerge from the tiled floor. He turned to Lois, smiling tentatively.
['It sure beats the elevator, doesn't it?']
She nodded. Her grip on his hand was still very tight.
They rose through the fifth floor, surfaced in a doctor's lounge on the sixth (two doctors - the full-sized kind - present, one watching an old F Troop rerun and the other snoring on the hideous Swedish Modern sofa), and then they were on the roof.
The night was clear, moonless, gorgeous. Stars glittered across the arc of the sky in an extravagant, misty sprawl of light. The wind was blowing hard, and he thought of Mrs Perrine saying Indian summer was over, he could mark her words. Ralph could hear the wind but not feel it . . . although he had an idea he could feel it, if he wanted to. It was just a matter of concentrating in the right way . . .
Even as this thought came, he sensed some minor, momentary change in his body, something that felt like a blink. Suddenly his hair was blowing back from his forehead, and he could hear his pants cuffs flapping around his shins. He shivered. Mrs Perrine's back had been right about the weather changing. Ralph gave another interior blink and the push of the wind was gone. He looked over at Lachesis.
['Can I let go of your hand now?']
Lachesis nodded and dropped his own grip. Clotho released Lois's hand. Ralph looked across town to the west and saw the pulsing blue runway lights of the airport. Beyond them was the gridwork of orange arc sodiums that marked Cape Green, one of the new housing developments on the far side of the Barrens. And someplace, in the sprinkle of lights just east of the airport, was Harris Avenue.
['It's beautiful, isn't it, Ralph?']
He nodded and thought that standing there and seeing the city spread out in the dark like this was worth everything he had been through since the insomnia had started. Everything and then some. But that wasn't a thought he entirely trusted.
He turned to Lachesis and Clotho.
['All right, explain. Who are you, who is he, and what do you want us to do?']
The two bald docs were standing between two rapidly turning heat ventilators which were spraying brownish-purple fans of effluent into the air. They glanced nervously at each other, and Lachesis gave Clotho an almost imperceptible nod. Clotho stepped forward, looked from Ralph to Lois, and seemed to gather his thoughts.
[Very well. First, you must understand that the things which are happening, while unexpected and distressing, are not precisely unnatural. My colleague and I do what we were made to do; Atropos does what he was made to do; and you, my Short-Time friends, will do what you were made to do.]
Ralph favored him with a bright, bitter smile.
['There goes freedom of choice, I guess.']
Lachesis: [You mustn't think so! It's simply that what you call freedom of choice is part of what we call ka, the great wheel of being.]
Lois: ['We see now through a glass darkly . . . is that what you mean?']
Clotho, smiling his somehow youthful smile: [The Bible, I believe. And a very good way of putting it.]
Ralph: ['Also pretty convenient for guys like you, but let's pass on that for now. We have a saying that isn't from the Bible, gentlemen, but it's a pretty good one, just the same: Don't gild the lily. I hope you'll keep it in mind.']
Ralph had an idea, however, that that might be a little too much to ask.
5
Clotho began to speak then, and he went on for a fair length of time. Ralph had no idea how long, exactly, because time was different on this level - compressed, somehow. At times there were no words at all in what he said; verbal terms were replaced with simple bright images like those in a child's rebus puzzle. Ralph supposed this was telepathy, and thus pretty amazing, but while it was happening it felt as natural as breath.
Sometimes both words and images were lost, interrupted by puzzling breaks [- - - - - - - - - - - -]
in communication. Yet even then Ralph was usually able to get some idea of what Clotho was trying to convey, and he had an idea Lois was understanding what was hidden in those lapses even more clearly than he was himself.
[First, know that there are only four constants in that area of existence where your lives and ours, the lives of the [- - - - - - - - - -
[overlap. These four constants are Life, Death, the Purpose, and the Random. All these words have meaning for you, but you now have a slightly different concept of Life and Death, do you not?]
Ralph and Lois nodded hesitantly.
[Lachesis and I are agents of Death. This makes us figures of dread to most Short-Timers; even those who pretend to accept us and our function are usually afraid. In pictures we are sometimes shown as a fearsome skeleton or a hooded figure whose face cannot be seen.]
Clotho put his tiny hands on his white-clad shoulders and pretended to shudder. The burlesque was good enough to make Ralph grin.
[But we are not only agents of death, Ralph and Lois; we are also agents of the Purpose. And now you must listen closely, for I would not be misunderstood. There are those of your kind who feel that everything happens by design, and there are those who feel all events are simply a matter of luck or chance. The truth is that life is both random and on purpose, although not in equal measure. Life is like]
Here Clotho formed a circle with his arms, like a small child trying to show the shape of the earth, and within it Ralph saw a brilliant and evocative image: thousands (or perhaps it was millions) of playing cards fanned out in a flickering rainbow of hearts and spades and clubs and diamonds. He also saw a great many jokers in this huge pack; not so many as to make up a suit of their own, but clearly a lot more, proportionally speaking, than the two or three found in the usual deck. Every one of them was grinning, and every one was wearing a battered Panama with a crescent bitten out of the brim.
Every one carried a rusty scalpel.
Ralph looked at Clotho with widening eyes. Clotho nodded.
[Yes. I don't know exactly what you saw, but I know you saw what I was trying to convey. Lois? What about you?]
Lois, who loved playing cards nodded palely.
['Atropos is the joker in the deck - that's what you mean.']
[He is an agent of the Random. We, Lachesis and I, serve that other force, the one which accounts for most events in both individual lives and in life's wider stream. On your level of the building, Ralph and Lois, every creature is a Short-Time creature, and has an appointed span. This isn't to say that a child pops out of its mother's womb with a sign around its neck reading CUT CORD@84 YEARS, 11 MONTHS, 9 DAYS, 6 HOURS, 4 MINUTES, AND 21 SECONDS. That idea is ridiculous. Yet time passages are usually set, and as both of you have seen, one of the many functions the Short-Time aura serves is as a clock.]
Lois stirred, and as Ralph turned to look at her, he saw an amazing thing: the sky overhead was growing pale. He guessed it must be five in the morning. They had arrived at the
hospital at around nine o'clock on Tuesday evening, and now all at once it was Wednesday, October 6th. Ralph had heard of time flying, but this was ridiculous.
Lois: ['Your job is what we call natural death, isn't it?']
Her aura flickered with confused, incomplete images. A man (the late Mr Chasse, Ralph was quite sure) lying in an oxygen tent. Jimmy V opening his eyes to look at Ralph and Lois in the instant before Clotho cut his balloon-string. The obituary page from the Derry News, peppered with photographs, most not much bigger than postage stamps, of the weekly harvest from the local hospitals and nursing homes.
Both Clotho and Lachesis shook their heads.
Lachesis: [There is no such thing as natural death, not really. Our job is purposeful death. We take the old and the sick, but we take others, as well. Just yesterday, for instance, we took a young man of twenty-eight. A carpenter. Two Short-Time weeks ago, he fell from a scaffold and fractured his skull. During those two weeks his aura was]
Ralph got a fractured image of a thunderstruck aura like the one which had surrounded the baby in the elevator.
Clotho: [At last the change came - the turning of the aura. We knew it would come, but not when it would come. When it did, we went to him and sent him on.]
['Sent him on to where?']
It was Lois who asked the question, broaching the touchy subject of the afterlife almost by accident. Ralph grabbed for his mental safety belt, almost hoping for one of those peculiar blanks, but when their overlapped answers came, they were perfectly clear.
Clotho: [To everywhere.]
Lachesis: [To other worlds than these.]
Ralph felt a mixture of relief and disappointment.
['That sounds very poetic, but I think what it means - correct me if I'm wrong - is that the afterlife is as much a mystery to you guys as it is to us.']
Lachesis, sounding a bit stiff: [On another occasion we might have time to discuss such things, but not now - as you have no doubt already noticed, time passes faster on this level of the building.]
Ralph looked around and saw the morning had already brightened considerably.
['Sorry.']
Clotho, smiling: [Not at all - we enjoy your questions, and find them refreshing. Curiosity exists everywhere along life's continuum, but nowhere is it as abundant as here. But what you call the afterlife has no place in the four constants - Life and Death, the Random and the Purpose - which concern us now.
[The approach of almost every death which serves the Purpose takes a course with which we are very familiar. The auras of those who will die Purposeful deaths turn gray as the time of finishing approaches. This gray deepens steadily to black. We are called when the aura [- - - - - - - - - - - -,
[and we come exactly as you saw last night. We give release to those who suffer, peace to those in terror, rest to those who cannot find rest. Most Purposeful deaths are expected, even welcomed, but not all. We are sometimes called to take men, women, and children who are in the best of health . . . yet their auras turn suddenly and their time of finishing has come.]
Ralph remembered the young man in the sleeveless Celtics jersey he'd seen bopping into the Red Apple yesterday afternoon. He had been the picture of health and vitality . . . except for the spectral oil-slick surrounding him, that was.
Ralph opened his mouth, perhaps to mention this young man (or to ask about his fate), then closed it again. The sun was directly overhead now, and a bizarre certainty suddenly came to him: that he and Lois had become the subject of lecherous discussion in the secret city of the Old Crocks.
Anybody seen em? . . . No? . . . Think they run off together? . . . Eloped, maybe? . . . Naw, not at their age, but they might be shacked up . . . I dunno if Ralphie's got any live rounds left in the old ammo dump, but she's always looked like a hot ticket to me . . . Yeah, walks like she knows what to do with it, don't she?
The image of his oversized rustbucket waiting patiently behind one of the ivy-covered units of the Derry Cabins while the springs boinged and sproinged salaciously inside came to Ralph, and he grinned. He couldn't help it. A moment later the alarming idea that he might be broadcasting his thoughts on his aura came to him, and he slammed the door on the picture at once. Yet wasn't Lois looking at him with a certain amused speculation?
Ralph turned his attention hastily back to Clotho.
[Atropos serves the Random. Not all deaths of the sort Short-Timers call 'senseless' and 'unnecessary' and 'tragic' are his work, but most are. When a dozen old men and women die in a fire at a retirement hotel, the chances are good that Atropos has been there, taking souvenirs and cutting cords. When an infant dies in his crib for no apparent reason, the cause, more often than not, is Atropos and his rusty scalpel. When a dog - yes, even a dog, for the destinies of almost all living things in the Short-Time world fall among either the Random or the Purpose - is run over in the road because the driver of the car that hit him picked the wrong moment to glance at his watch--]
Lois: ['Is that what happened to Rosalie?']
Clotho: [Atropos is what happened to Rosalie. Ralph's friend Joe Wyzer was only what we call 'fulfilling circumstance'.]
Lachesis: [And Atropos is also what happened to your friend, the late Mr McGovern.]
Lois looked the way Ralph felt: dismayed but not really surprised. It was now late afternoon, perhaps as many as eighteen Short-Time hours had passed since they had last seen Bill, and Ralph had known the man's time was extremely short even last night. Lois, who had inadvertently put her hand inside him, probably knew it even better.
Ralph: ['When did it happen? How long after we saw him?']
Lachesis: [Not long. While he was leaving the hospital. I'm sorry for your loss, and for giving you the news in such clumsy fashion. We speak to Short-Timers so infrequently that we forget how. I didn't mean to hurt you, Ralph and Lois.]
Lois told him it was all right, that she quite understood, but tears were trickling down her cheeks, and Ralph felt them burning in his own eyes. The idea that Bill could be gone - that the little shithead in the dirty smock had gotten him - was hard to grasp. Was he to believe McGovern would never hoist that satiric, bristly eyebrow of his again? Never bitch about how cruddy it was to get old again? Impossible. He turned suddenly to Clotho.
['Show us.']
Clotho, surprised, almost dithering: [I . . . I don't think--]
Ralph: ['Seeing is believing to us Short-Time schmoes. Didn't you guys ever hear that one?']
Lois spoke up unexpectedly.
['Yes - show us. But only enough so we can know it and accept it. Try not to make us feel any worse than we already do.']
Clotho and Lachesis looked at each other, then seemed to shrug without actually moving their narrow shoulders. Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating a blue-green peacock's fan of light. In it Ralph saw a small, eerily perfect representation of the ICU corridor. A nurse pushing a pharmacy cart came into this arc and crossed it. At the far side of the viewing area, she actually seemed to curve for a moment before passing out of view.
Lois, delighted in spite of the circumstances: ['It's like watching a movie in a soapbubble!']
Now McGovern and Mr Plum stepped out of Bob Polhurst's room. McGovern had put on an old Derry High letter sweater and his friend was zipping up a jacket; they were clearly giving up the deathwatch for another night. McGovern was walking slowly, lagging behind Mr Plum. Ralph could see that his downstairs neighbor and sometime friend didn't look good at all.
He felt Lois's hand slip into his upper arm and grip hard. He put his hand over hers.
Halfway to the elevator, McGovern stopped, braced himself against the wall with one hand, and lowered his head. He looked like a totally blown runner at the end of a marathon. For a moment Mr Plum went on walking. Ralph could see his mouth moving and thought, He doesn't know he's talking to thin air - not yet, at least.
Suddenly Ralph didn't want to see any more.
Inside the blue-green arc, McGov
ern put one hand to his chest. The other went to his throat and began to rub, as if he were checking for wattles. Ralph couldn't tell for sure, but he thought his downstairs neighbor's eyes looked frightened. He remembered the grimace of hate on Doc #3's face when he realized a Short-Timer had presumed to step into his business with one of the local strays. What had he said?
[I'll fuck you over, Shorts. I'll fuck you over big-time. And I'll fuck your friends over. Do you get me?]
A terrible idea, almost a certainty, dawned in Ralph's mind as he watched Bill McGovern crumple slowly to the floor.
Lois: ['Make it go away - please make it go away!']
She buried her face against Ralph's shoulder. Clotho and Lachesis exchanged uneasy looks, and Ralph realized he had already begun to revise his mental picture of them as omniscient and all-powerful. They might be supernatural creatures, but Dr Joyce Brothers they were not. He had an idea they weren't much shakes at predicting the future, either; fellows with really efficient crystal balls probably wouldn't have a look like that in their entire repertoire.
They're feeling their way along, just like the rest of us, Ralph thought, and he felt a certain reluctant sympathy for Mr C and Mr L.
The blue-green arc of light floating in front of Lachesis - and the images trapped inside it - suddenly disappeared.
Clotho, sounding defensive: [Please remember that it was your choice to see, Ralph and Lois. We did not show you that willingly.]
Ralph barely heard this. His terrible idea was still developing, like a photograph one does not wish to see but cannot turn away from. He was thinking of Bill's hat . . . Rosalie's faded blue bandanna . . . and Lois's missing diamond earrings.
[I'll fuck your friends over, Shorts - do you get me? I hope so. I most certainly do.]
He looked from Clotho to Lachesis, his sympathy for them disappearing. What replaced it was a dull pulse of anger. Lachesis had said there was no such thing as accidental death, and that included McGovern's. Ralph had no doubt that Atropos had taken McGovern when he had for one simple reason: he'd wanted to hurt Ralph, to punish Ralph for messing into . . . what had Dorrance called it? Long-time business.
