by Stephen King
Ralph got to his knees, looking back toward Lois, who was standing in the doorway and staring at him with her hands clasped under her chin. There was no one on either side of the archway, and really no room for anyone. More boxes were stacked on either side. Ralph read the printing on them with a kind of bemused wonder: Jack Daniel's, Gilbey's, Smirnoff, J&B. Atropos, it seemed, was as fond of liquor cartons as anyone else who couldn't bear to throw anything away.
['Ralph? Is it safe?']
The word was a joke, but he nodded his head and held out his hand. She hurried toward him, giving her slip another sharp upward yank as she came and looking about herself in growing amazement.
Standing on the other side of the arch, in Atropos's grim little apartment, this storage area had looked large. Now that they were actually in it, Ralph saw it went well beyond that; rooms this big were usually called warehouses. Aisles wandered among great, tottery piles of junk. Only the stuff by the door had actually been boxed; the rest had been piled any whichway, creating something which was two parts maze and three parts booby-trap. Ralph decided that even warehouse was too small a word - this was an underground suburb, and Atropos might be lurking anywhere within it . . . and if he was here, he was probably watching them.
Lois didn't ask what they were looking at; he saw by her face that she already knew. When she did speak, it was in a dreamy tone that sent a chill scampering up Ralph's back.
['He must be so very old, Ralph.']
Yes. So very old.
Twenty yards into the room, which was lit with the same sunken, sourceless red glow as the stairway, Ralph could see a large spoked wheel lying atop a cane-backed chair which was, in turn, standing on top of a splintery old clothes press. Looking at that wheel brought a deeper chill; it was as if the metaphor his mind had seized to help grasp the concept of ka had become real. Then he noted the rusty iron strip which circled the wheel's outer circumference and realized it had probably come from one of those Gay Nineties bikes that looked like overgrown tricycles.
It's a bicycle wheel, all right, and it's a hundred years old if it's a day, he thought. That led him to wonder how many people - how many thousands or tens of thousands - had died in and around Derry since Atropos had somehow transported this wheel down here. And of those thousands, how many had been Random deaths?
And how far back does he go? How many hundreds of years?
No way of telling, of course; maybe all the way to the beginning, whenever or however that had been. And during that time, he had taken a little something from everyone he had fucked with . . . and here it all was.
Here it all was.
['Ralph!']
He looked around and saw that Lois was holding out both hands. In one was a Panama hat with a crescent bitten from the brim. In the other was a black nylon pocket-comb, the kind you could buy in any convenience store for a buck twenty-nine. A ghostly glimmer of orange-yellow still clung to it, which didn't surprise Ralph much. Each time the comb's owner had used it, it must have picked up a little of that glow from both his aura and his balloon-string, like dandruff. It also didn't surprise him that the comb should have been with McGovern's hat; the last time he'd seen those two things, they'd been together. He remembered Atropos's sarcastic grin as he swept the Panama from his head and pretended to use the comb on his own bald dome.
And then he jumped up and clicked his heels together.
Lois was pointing at an old rocking chair with a broken runner.
['The hat was right there, on the seat. The comb was underneath. It's Mr Wyzer's, isn't it?']
['Yes.']
She held it out to him immediately.
['You take it. I'm not as ditzy as Bill always thought, but sometimes I lose things. And if I lost this, I'd never forgive myself.']
He took the comb, started to put it into his back pocket, then thought how easily Atropos had plucked it from that same location. Easy as falling off a log, it had been. He put it into his front pants pocket instead, then looked back at Lois, who was gazing at McGovern's bitten hat with the sad wonder of Hamlet looking at the skull of his old pal Yorick. When she looked up, Ralph saw tears in her eyes.
['He loved this hat. He thought he looked very dashing and debonair when he had it on. He didn't - he just looked like Bill - but he thought he looked good, and that's the important part. Wouldn't you say so, Ralph?']
['Yes.']
She tossed the hat back into the seat of the old rocker and turned to examine a box of what looked like rummage-sale clothes. As soon as her back was to him, Ralph squatted down, peering beneath the chair, hoping to see a splintered double gleam in the darkness. If Bill's hat and Joe's comb were both here, then maybe Lois's earrings -
There was nothing beneath the rocker but dust and a pink knitted baby bootee.
Should have known that'd be too easy, Ralph thought, getting to his feet again. He suddenly felt exhausted. They had found Joe's comb with no trouble at all, and that was good, absolutely great, but Ralph was afraid it had also been a spectacular case of beginner's luck. They still had Lois's earrings to worry about . . . and doing whatever else it was they had been sent here to do, of course. And what was that? He didn't know, and if someone from upstairs was sending instructions, he wasn't receiving them.
['Lois, do you have any idea what--']
['Shhhh!']
['What is it? Lois, is it him?']
['No! Be quiet, Ralph! Be quiet and listen!']
He listened. At first he heard nothing, and then the clenching sensation - the blink - came inside his head again. This time it was very slow, very cautious. He slipped upward a little further, as lightly as a feather lifted in a draft of warm air. He became aware of a long, low groaning sound, like an endlessly creaking door. There was something familiar about it - not in the sound itself, but in its associations. It was like--
- a burglar alarm, or maybe a smoke-detector. It's telling us where it is. It's calling us.
Lois seized his hand with fingers that were as cold as ice.
['That's it, Ralph - that's what we're looking for. Do you hear it?']
Yes, of course he did. But whatever that sound was, it had nothing to do with Lois's earrings . . . and without Lois's earrings, he wasn't leaving this place.
['Come on, Ralph! Come on! We have to find it!']
He let her lead him deeper into the room. Atropos's souvenirs were piled at least three feet higher than their heads in most places. How a shrimp like him had managed this trick Ralph didn't know - levitation, maybe - but the result was that he quickly lost all sense of direction as they twisted, turned, and occasionally seemed to double back. All he knew for sure was that low groaning sound kept getting louder in his ears; as they began to draw near its source, it became an insectile buzzing which Ralph found increasingly unpleasant. He kept expecting to round a corner and find a giant locust staring at him with dull brownish-black eyes as big as grapefruits.
Although the separate auras of the objects which filled the storage vault had faded like the scent of flower-petals pressed between the pages of a book, they were still there beneath Atropos's stench - and at this level of perception, with all their senses exquisitely awake and attuned, it was impossible not to sense those auras and be affected by them. These mute reminders of the Random dead were both terrible and pathetic. The place was more than a museum or a packrat's lair, Ralph realized; it was a profane church where Atropos took his own version of Communion - grief for bread, tears for wine.
Their stumbling course through the narrow zigzag rows was a gruesome, almost shattering experience. Each not-quite-aimless turn presented a hundred more objects Ralph wished he had never seen and would not have to remember; each voiced its own small cry of pain and bewilderment. He did not have to wonder if Lois shared his feelings - she was sobbing steadily and quietly beside him.
Here was a child's battered Flexible Flyer sled with the knotted towrope still draped over the steering bar. The boy to whom it had belonged had died of c
onvulsions on a crisp January day in 1953.
Here was a majorette's baton with its shaft wrapped in purple and white spirals of crepe - the colors of Grant Academy. She had been raped and bludgeoned to death with a rock in the fall of 1967. Her killer, who had never been caught, had stuffed her body into a small cave where her bones - along with the bones of two other unlucky victims - still lay.
Here was the cameo brooch of a woman who had been struck by a falling brick while walking down Main Street to buy the new issue of Vogue; if she had left her home thirty seconds earlier or later, she would have been fine.
Here was the buck knife of a man who had been killed in a hunting accident in 1937.
Here was the compass of a Boy Scout who had fallen and broken his neck while hiking on Mount Katahdin.
The sneaker of a little boy named Gage Creed, run down by a speeding tanker-truck on Route 15 in Ludlow.
Rings and magazines; key-chains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random . . . and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.
Lois, sobbing: ['I hate him! I hate him so much!']
He knew what she meant. It was one thing to hear Clotho and Lachesis say that Atropos was also part of the big picture, that he might even serve some higher purpose himself, and quite another to see the faded Boston Bruins cap of a little boy who had fallen into an overgrown cellar-hole and died in the dark, died in agony, died with no voice left after six hours spent screaming for his mother.
Ralph reached out and briefly touched the cap. Its owner's name had been Billy Weatherbee. His final thought had been of ice-cream.
Ralph's hand tightened over Lois's.
['Ralph, what is it? I can hear you thinking - I'm sure I can - but it's like listening to someone whisper under his breath.']
['I was thinking that I want to bust that little bastard's chops for him, Lois. Maybe we could teach him what it's like to lie awake at night. What do you think?']
Her grip on his hand tightened. She nodded.
5
They reached a place where the narrow corridor they'd been following branched into diverging paths. That low, steady buzz was coming from the lefthand one, and not very far up it, either, by the sound. It was now impossible for them to walk side by side, and as they worked their way toward the end, the passage grew narrower still. Ralph was finally obliged to begin sidling along.
The reddish exudate Atropos left behind was very thick here, dripping down the jumbled stacks of souvenirs and making little puddles on the dirt floor. Lois was holding his hand with painful tightness now, but Ralph didn't complain.
['It's like the Civic Center, Ralph - he spends a lot of time here.']
Ralph nodded. The question was, what did Mr A come down this aisle to commune with? They were coming to the end now - it was blocked by a solid wall of junk - and he still couldn't see what was making that buzzing sound. It was now starting to drive him crazy; it was like having a horsefly trapped in the middle of your head. As they approached the end of the passage, he became more and more sure that what they were looking for was on the other side of the wall of junk which blocked it - they would either have to retrace their steps and try to find a way around, or break through. Either choice might consume more time than they could afford. Ralph felt nibbles of desperation at the back of his mind.
But the corridor did not dead-end; on the left there was a crawlspace beneath a dining room table piled high with dishes and stacks of green paper and . . .
Green paper? No, not quite. Stacks of bills. Tens, twenties, and fifties were piled up in random profusion on the dishes. There was a choke of hundreds in a cracked gravy-boat, and a rolled-up five hundred dollar bill poking drunkenly out of a dusty wineglass.
['Ralph! My God, it's a fortune!']
She wasn't looking at the table but at the other wall of the passageway. The last five feet had been constructed of banded gray-green bricks of currency. They were in an alleyway which was literally made of money, and Ralph realized he could now answer another of the questions that had been troubling him: where Ed had been getting his dough. Atropos was rolling in it . . . but Ralph had an idea that the little bald-headed sonofabitch still had trouble getting dates.
He bent down a little to get a better look into the crawlspace underneath the table. There appeared to be yet another chamber on the other side, this one very small. A slow red glow waxed and waned in there like the beating of a heart. It cast uneasy pulses of light on their shoes.
Ralph pointed, then looked at Lois. She nodded. He dropped to his knees and crawled beneath the money-laden table, and into the shrine Atropos had created around the thing which lay in the middle of the floor. It was what they had been sent to find, he hadn't a single doubt about it, but he still had no idea what it was. The object, not much bigger than the sort of marbles children call croakers, was wrapped in a deathbag as impenetrable as the center of a black hole.
Oh, great - lovely. Now what?
['Ralph! Do you hear singing? It's very faint.']
He looked at her dubiously, then glanced around. He had already come to hate this cramped space, and although he was not claustrophobic by nature, he now felt a panicky desire to get away squeezing into his thoughts. A very distinct voice spoke up in his head. It's not just what I want, Ralph; it's what I need. I'll do my best to hang in with you, but if you don't finish whatever the hell it is you're supposed to be doing in here soon, it won't make any difference what either of us want - I'm just going to take over and run like hell.
The controlled terror in that voice didn't surprise him, because this really was a horrible place - not a room at all but the bottom of a deep shaft whose circular walls were constructed of rickrack and stolen goods: toasters, footstools, clock-radios, cameras, books, crates, shoes, rakes. Dangling almost right in front of Ralph's eyes was a battered saxophone on a frayed strap with the word JAKE printed on it in dust-dulled rhinestones. Ralph reached out to grab it, wanting to get the damned thing out of his face. Then he imagined the removal of this one object starting a landslide that would bring the walls down on them, burying them alive. He pulled his hand back. At the same time he opened his mind and senses as fully as he could. For a moment he thought he did hear something - a faint sigh, like the whisper of the ocean in a seashell - but then it was gone.
['If there are voices in here, I can't hear them, Lois - that damned thing is drowning them out.']
He pointed at the object in the middle of the circle - black beyond any previously held conception of black, a deathbag which was the apotheosis of all deathbags. But Lois was shaking her head.
['No, not drowning them out. Sucking them dry.']
She looked at the screaming black thing with horror and loathing.
['That thing is sucking the life out of all this stuff piled up around it . . . and it's trying to suck the life out of us, too.']
Yes, of course it was. Now that Lois had actually said it out loud, Ralph could feel the deathbag - or the object inside it - pulling at something far down in his head, yanking at it, twisting at it, shoving at it . . . trying to pull it out like a tooth from its pink socket of gum.
Trying to suck the life out of them? Close, but no cigar. Ralph didn't think it was their lives the thing inside the deathbag wanted, nor their souls . . . at least, not exactly. It was their life-force it wanted. Their ka.
Lois's eyes widened as she picked up this thought . . . and then they shifted to a place just beyond his right shoulder. She leaned forward on her knees and reached out.
['Lois, I wouldn't do that - you could bring the whole pla
ce down around our--']
Too late. She yanked something free, looked at it with horrified understanding, and then held it out to him.
['It's still alive - everything that's in here is still alive. I don't know how that can be, but it is . . . somehow it is. But they're faint. Why are they so faint?']
What she was holding out to him was a small white sneaker that belonged to a woman or a child. As Ralph took it, he heard it singing softly in a distant voice. The sound was as lonely as November wind on an overcast afternoon, but incredibly sweet, as well - an antidote to the endless bray of the black thing on the floor.
And it was a voice he knew. He was sure it was.
There was a maroon splatter on the sneaker's toe. Ralph at first thought it was chocolate milk, then recognized it for what it really was: dried blood. In that instant he was outside the Red Apple again, grabbing Nat before Helen could drop her. He remembered how Helen's feet had tangled together; how she had stumbled backward, leaning against the Red Apple's door like a drunk against a lamppost, holding out her hands to him. Gih me my bay-ee . . . Gih me Nah-lie.
He knew the voice because it was Helen's voice. This sneaker had been on her foot that day, and the drops of blood on the toe had come either from Helen's smashed nose or from Helen's lacerated cheek.
It sang and sang, its voice not quite buried beneath the buzz of the thing in the deathbag, and now that Ralph's ears - or whatever passed for ears in the world of auras - were all the way open, he could hear all the other voices of all the other objects. They sang like a lost choir.
Alive. Singing.
They could sing, all the things lining these walls could sing, because their owners could still sing.
Their owners were still alive.
Ralph looked up again, this time noting that while some of the objects he saw were old - the battered alto sax, for instance - a great many of them were new; there were no wheels from Gay Nineties bicycles in this little alcove. He saw three clock-radios, all of them digital. A shaving kit that looked as if it had hardly been used. A lipstick that still had a Rite Aid pricetag on it.
