[“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. “I She looked at the screaming black thing with horror and loathing.
[“That thing is sucking the life out of all the 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 place dow 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 kno how that can be but somehow it is. But they’re 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 are they so faint?” 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. Give me my bay-ee… gih me Natalie.
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.
[“Lois, Atropos has taken this stuff from the people who’ll be at the Civic Center tonight. Hasn’t he?”] [“Yes. I’m sure that’s right.”] He pointed at the black cocoon shrieking on the floor, almost drowning out the songs all around it… drowning them out as it fed on them.
[“And whatever’s inside that deathbag has something to do with what Clotho and Lachesis called the master-cord. It’s the thing that ties all these different objects-all these different lives-together.”] [“That makes them ka-tet. Yes.”] Ralph handed the sneaker back to Lois.
[“This goes with us when we go. It’s Helen’s.”] [“I know.”] Lois looked at it for a moment, then did something Ralph thought extremely clever: pulled out two eyelets’ worth of lacing and tied the sneaker to her left wrist like a bracelet.
He crawled closer to the small deathbag and then bent over it.
Getting close was hard, and staying close was harder-it was like placing your ear next to the motor-housing of a power drill shrieking at full volume or looking into a bright light without squinting. This time there seemed to be actual words buried within that buzzing, the same ones they’d heard as they approached the edge of the deathbag around the Civic Center: Geddout. Fucoff Beedit.
Ralph placed his hands over his ears for a moment, but of course that did no good. The sounds weren’t coming from the outside, not really. He let his hands drop again and looked at Lois.
[“What do you think? Any ideas on what we should do next?”] He didn’t know exactly what he had expected of her, but it wasn’t the quick, positive response he got.
[“Cut it open and take out what’s inside-and do it right away.
That thing’s dangerous. Also, it might be calling Atropos, have you thought of that? Tattling just like the hen tattled on jack in the story about the magic beanstalk.” Ralph actually had considered this possibility, although not in such vivid terms. All right, he thought.
Cut open the bag and take the prize. Except just how are we supposed to do that?
He remembered the bolt of lightning he’d sent at Atropos when the little bald creep had been trying to lure Rosalie across the street.
A good trick, but something like that might do more harm than good here; what if he vaporized the thing they were supposed to take?
“I don’t think you can do that.
All right, fair enough, as a matter of fact he didn’t think he could do it, either… but when you were surrounded by the possessions of people who could all be dead when the sun came up tomorrow, taking chances seemed like a very bad idea. An insane idea.
What I need isn’t lightning but a nice sharp pair of scissors, like the ones Clotho and Lachesis use toHe stared at Lois, startled by the clarity of the image.
[“I don’t know what you just thought of, but hurry up and do it, whatever it is.”] Ralph looked down at his right hand-a hand from which the wrinkles and the first twists of arthritis had now disappeared, a hand which lay inside a bright blue corona of light.
Feeling a little foolish, he folded his last two fingers against his palm and extended the first two, thinking of a game they’d played as kids-rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock.
Be scissors, he thought. I need a pair of scissors. Help me out.
Nothing. He glanced at Lois and saw her looking at him with a serene calm which was somehow terrifying. Oh Lois, if you only knew, he thought, and then swept that out of his mind. Because he had felt something, hadn’t he? Yes. Something.
This time he didn’t make words in his mind but a Picture: not the scissors Clotho had used to send on Jimmy V but the stainless-steel I shears from his mother’s sewing basket-long, slim blades tapering to a point almost as sharp as the tip of a knife. As he deepened h, is concentration, he could even see the two tiny words engraved on the metal just south of the pivot-point: SHEFFIELD STEEL.