Lois’s thoughts, meanwhile, had gone on in a different, marginally safer, direction. without meeting him, he’ll know some[“Even if we get in and out one was there, won’t he? He’ll probably know who it was, too.”] Ralph couldn’t deny it, but didn’t see that it mattered much; their options had been narrowed to just this one, at least temporarily.
They would take it a step at a time and just keep hoping that when the sun came up tomorrow morning, they would be around to see it.
Although, given a choice, I’d probably opt to sleep in, Ralph thought, and a small, wistful grin touched the corners of his mouth.
God, it feels like years since I slept in. His mind flashed from there to Carolyn’s favorite saying, the one about how it was a long walk back to Eden. It seemed to him right now that Eden might simply be sleeping until noon… or maybe a little past.
He took Lois’s hand and they started forward along Atropos’s trail again.
Forty feet east of the Cyclone fence marking the edge of the airport, the rusty tracks petered out. Atropos’s trail pushed on, however, although not for long; Ralph was quite sure he could see the spot where it ended, and the image of the two of them roped to the spokes of a big wheel recurred. If he was right, Atropos’s den was only a stone’s throw from where Ed had run into the fat man with the barrels of fertilizer in the back of his pickup truck.
The wind gusted, bringing them a sick, rotten smell from close by, and, from a little farther away, the voice of Faye Chapin, haranguing someone on his favorite subject: “… what I always say!
Mali-jongg is like chess, chess is like life, so if you can play either of those games-” The wind dropped again. Ralph could still hear Faye’s voice if he strained his ears, but he had lost the individual words. That was all right, though; he had heard the lecture often enough to know pretty much how it went.
[“Ralph, that stink is awful! It’s him, isn’t it?”] He nodded, but didn’t think Lois saw him. She held his hand tightly in hers, looking straight ahead with wide eyes. The splotchy track which had begun at the doors of the Civic Center ended at the base of a drunkenly leaning dead oak tree two hundred feet away. The cause of both the tree’s death and its final leaning position was clear: one side of the venerable relic had been peeled like a banana by a glancing stroke of lightning. The cracks and crenellations and bulges of its gray bark seemed to make the shapes of halfburied, silently screaming faces, and the tree spread its nude branches against the sky like grim ideograms… ones which boreat least in Ralph’s imagination-an uncomfortable resemblance to the Japanese ideograms which meant kamikaze. The bolt which had killed the tree hadn’t succeeded in knocking it over, but it had certainly done its best. The part of its extensive root-system which faced the airport had been yanked right out of the ground. These roots had extended beneath the chainlink fence and pulled a section of it upward and outward in a bell shape that made Ralph think, for the first time in years, of a childhood acquaintance named Charles Engstrom"Don’t you play with Chuckle,” Ralph’s mother used to tell him.
“He’s a dirty boy.” Ralph didn’t know if Chuckle was a dirty boy or not, but he was fruitcrackers, no question about that. Chuckle Engstrom liked to hide behind the tree in his front yard with a long tree-branch which he called his Peekle Wand. When a woman in a full skirt passed, Chuckle would tiptoe after her, extending the Peekie Wand under the hem and then lifting. Quite often he got to check out the color of the woman’s underwear (the color of ladies’ underwear held great fascination for Chuckle) before she realized is what was going on and chased the wildly cackling lad back to his house, threatening to tell his mother. The airport fence, pulled out and up by the old oak’s roots, reminded Ralph of the way the skirts of Chuckle’s victims had looked when he started to raise them with the Peekie Wand.
[“Ralph?”] He looked at her.
[“who is Piggyjuan? And why are you thinking about him now?”
Ralph burst out laughing.
[“Did -you see that in my aura?”] [“I guess so-I don’t really know anymore. Who is he?”] [“Tell you another time. Come on.” He took her hand and they walked slowly toward the oak tree where Atropos’s trail ended, into the thickening odor of wild decay that was his scent.
CHAPTER 25
They stood at the base of the oak, looking down. Lois was gnawing obsessively on her lower lip.
[“Do we have to go down there, Ralph? Do we really?”] E “Yes. “I [“But why? What are we supposed to do? Take something he stole?
Kill him? What?”] Other than retrieve Joe’s comb and Lois’s earrings, he didn’t know… but he felt certain he would know, that they both would, when the time came.
“I think for now we better just keep moving, Lois.”
The lightning had acted like a strong hand, shoving the tree violently toward the east and opening a large hole at the bottom on its western side. To a man or woman with Short-Time vision, that hole would undoubtedly look dark-and maybe a little scary, with its crumbly sides and barely glimpsed roots squirming in the deep shadows like snakes-but otherwise not very unusual.
A kid with a good imagination might see more, Ralph thought.
That dark space at the bottom of the tree might make him think of pirate treasure… outlaw hideouts… troll-holes…
But Ralph didn’t think even an imaginative Short-Time kid would have been able to see the dim red glow filtering up from beneath the tree, or realize that those squirming roots were actually rough rungs leading down to some unknown (and undoubtedly unpleasant) place.
No-even an imaginative kid wouldn’t see those things… but he or she might sense them.
Right. And after doing so, one with any brains would turn and run as if all the demons of hell were in hot pursuit. As would he and Lois, if they had any sense at all. Except for Lois’s earrings Except for Joe Wyzer’s comb. Except for his own lost place in the Purpose.
And, of course, except for Helen (and possibly Nat) and the two thousand other people who were going to be at the Civic Center tonight.
Lois was right. They were supposed to do something, and if they backed out now, it was a something that would remain forever done-bun-undone.
And those are the ropes, he thought. The ropes the powers-that-be use to the’e us poor, muddled Short-Time creatures to their wheel.
He now visualized Clotho and Lachesis through a bright lens of hate, and he thought that if the two of them had been here right now, they would have exchanged one of their uneasy looks and then taken a quick step or two away.
And they would be right to do that, he thought. Very right.
[“Ralph? What’s wrong? Why are you so angry?”] He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it.
[“It’s nothing. Come on. Let’s go before we lose our nerve.”]
She looked at him a moment longer, then nodded. And when Ralph sat down and poked his legs into the gaping, root-lined mouth at the foot of the tree, she was right beside him.
Ralph slid beneath the tree on his back, holding his free hand over his face to keep dirt from crumbling into his open eyes. He tried not to flinch as root-knuckles caressed the side of his neck and prodded the small of his back. The smell under the tree was a revolting monkeyhouse aroma that made his gorge rise. He was able to go on kidding himself that he would get used to it until he was all the way into the hole under the oak, and then the kidding stopped. He raised himself on one elbow, feeling smaller roots digging at his scalp and dangling flaps of bark tickling his cheeks, and ejected as much of his breakfast as still remained in the holding-tank. He could hear Lois doing the same thing on his left.
A terrible, woozy faintness went rolling through his head like a breaking wave. The stench was so thick he was almost he could see the red stuff they had followed to this t eating it, and nightmare place under the tree all over his hands and arms. Just looking at this stuff had been bad; now he found himself taking a bath in it, for God’s sake.