And now he could feel that thing in his mind again, not a blink this time but a muscle-an immensely powerful one-slowly flexing. He looked fixedly down at his fingers and made the shears in his mind open and close. As they did, he slowly opened and closed his fingers, creating a V that widened and narrowed.
Now he could feel the energy he had taken from Nirvana Boy and the bum out at the trainyards, first gathering in his head and then moving down his right arm to his fingers like a cramp.
The aura surrounding the extended first and second fingers of his right hand began to thicken… and to lengthen. To take on the slim shape of blades. Ralph waited until they had extended themselves about five inches out from his nails and then worked his fingers back and forth again. The blades opened and closed.
[“Go, Ralph.” Do it!”] Yes-he couldn’t afford to wait around and run experiments. He felt like a car battery that had been called on to crank a motor much too big for it. He could feel all his energy-the stuff he’d taken as well as his own-running down his right arm and into those blades.
It wouldn’t last long.
He leaned forward, fingers pressed together in a pointing gesture, and sank the tip of the scissors into the deathbag. He had been concentrating so hard on first creating and then maintaining the scissors that he had stopped hearing that steady, hoarse buzz-at least with his conscious mind-but when the scissors-point sank into its black skin, the deathbag suddenly cycled up to a new, shrieking pitch of mingled pain and alarm. Ralph saw dribbles of thick, dark goo running out of the bag and across the floor. It looked like diseased snot. At the same time he felt the power-drain inside him roughly double. He could see it, he realized: his own aura running down his right arm and across the back of his hand in slow, peristaltic waves. And he could sense it dimming around the rest of his body as its essential protection of him thinned out.
[“Hurry, Ralph! Hurry!”] He made a tremendous effort and tore his fingers open. The shimmering blue blades also opened, making a small slit in the black egg.
It screamed, and two bright, jagged flashes of red light raced across its surface. Ralph brought his fingers together and watched the shears growing from their tips snap shut, cutting through dense black stuff that was part shell and part flesh. He cried out. It was not pain he felt, exactly, but a sense of awful weariness. This is what bleeding to death must feel like, he thought.
Something inside the bag gleamed bright gold.
Ralph gathered all his strength and attempted to open his fingers for another cut. At first he didn’t think he was going to be able to do it-they felt as if they had been stuck -together with Krazy Glue-and then they drew apart, widening the slit. Now he could almost see the object inside, something small and round and shiny.
Really only one thing it can be, he thought, and then his heart suddenly fluttered in his chest. The blue blades flickered.
[“Lois.” Help me!”] She seized his wrist. Ralph felt strength roar into him in big fresh volts. He watched, bemused, as the shears solidified again. Now only one of the blades was blue. The other was a pearly gray.
Lois, screaming inside his head: [“Cut it. Cut it now!”] He brought his fingers together again, and this time the blades cut the deathbag wide open. It uttered one last wavering shriek, turned entirely red, and disappeared. The shears growing from the tips of Ralph’s fingers flickered out of existence. He closed his eyes for a moment, suddenly aware that big warm drops of sweat were running down his cheeks like tears. In the dark field behind his eyelids he could see crazy afterimages that looked like dancing scissors-blades.
[“Lois? Are you okay?”] [“Yes… but drained. I don’t have the slightest idea bott, I’m supposed to get back to those stairs under the tree, let alone climb them. I’m not sure I can even stand UP.”] Ralph opened his eyes, put his hands on his thighs above the knees, and leaned forward again. Lying on the floor where the deathbag had been was a man’s wedding ring. He could easily read what had been engraved on the wide inner curve: He-ED 8-5-87.
Helen Deepneau and Edward Deepneau-Married on August 5th, 1987.
It was what they had come for. It was Ed’s token. All that remained now was to pick it up… slip it into the watchpocket of his pants… find Lois’s earrings… and get the hell out of here.
As he reached for the ring, a flicker of verse slipped through his mind-not Stephen Dobyns this time but J. R. R. Tolkien, who had invented the hobbits Ralph had last thought of in Lois’s cozy, picture-filled living room. It had been almost thirty years since he had read Tolkien’s story of Frodo and Gandalf and Sauron, the Dark Lord-a story which contained a token very similar to this one, now that he thought about it-but the lines were momentarily as clear as the scissors-blades had been only moments before: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
I won’t be able to pick it up, he thought. It will be as tightly bound to the wheel of ka as Lois and I are, and I won’t be able to pick it up. Either that, or it will be like grasping a live high-tension wire, and I’ll be dead before I know it’s happening.
Except he didn’t really believe either of those things was going to happen. If the ring was not his for the taking, why had it been protected by the deathbag? If the ring was not his for the taking, why had the forces which stood behind Clotho and Lachesis-and Dorrance, he couldn’t forget Dorrance-set him and Lois upon this journey in the first place?
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, Ralph thought, and closed his fingers around Ed’s wedding ring. For a moment he felt a deep, glassy pain in his hand and wrist and forearm; at the same moment, the softly singing voices of the objects which Atropos had hoarded here rose in a great, harmonic shout.
Ralph made a sound-perhaps a scream, perhaps only a moanand lifted the ring up, clenched tightly in his right hand. A sense of victory sang in his veins like wine, or like[“Ralph.
He looked at her, but Lois was looking down at where Ed’s ring had been, her eyes dark with a mixture of fear and confusion.
Where Ed’s ring had been; where Ed’s ring still was. It lay exactly as it had lain, a glimmering gold circlet with HD-ED 8-5-87 inscribed around the inner arc.
Ralph felt an instant of dizzy disorientation and controlled it with an effort. He opened his hand, half-expecting the ring to be gone in spite of what his senses told him, but it still lay in the center of his palm, neatly enclosed within the fork where his loveline and his lifeline diverged, glimmering in the baleful red light of this nasty place. HD-ED 8-5-87.
The two rings were identical.
One in his hand; one on the floor; absolutely no difference. At least none that Ralph could see.
Lois reached for the ring which had replaced the one Ralph had picked up, hesitated, then grasped it. As they watched, ghost-gold glowed just above the chamber’s floor, then solidified into a third wedding band. Like the other two, HD-ED 8-5-87 was inscribed on the inner curve.
Ralph found himself thinking of yet another story-not Tolkien’s long tale of the Ring, but a story by Dr. Seuss which he had read one of Carolyn’s sister’s kids back in the fifties. That was a long time ago, but he had never completely forgotten the story, which had been richer and darker than Dr. Seuss’s usual jingle-jangle nonsense about rats and bats and troublesome cats. It was called The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, and Ralph supposed it really wasn’t any wonder that the story had come to mind now.
Poor Bartholomew was a country hayseed who had the bad luck to be in the big city when the King happened by. You were supposed to take your hat off in the presence of that august personage, and Bartholomew had certainly tried, but without any luck; each time he took his hat off, another one, identical to the last, appeared beneath it.