Lois staggered to her feet and stood swaying back and forth on legs that felt like lumber. She meant to break the paralysis which had locked her in such a cruel silence, to shout at Ralph and tell him to stop-tell him he didn’t know what they meant to do to him.
Except he did. It was in the pallor of his face, his half-closed eyes, his painfully thinned lips. Most of all it was in the blotches of red and black which were flashing across his aura like meteors, and in the aura itself, which had tightened down to a hard blue shell.
Ralph nodded at Clotho, who brought the lower scissor-blade down until it was touching Ralph’s forearm just below the fold of the elbow.
For a moment the skin only dimpled, and then a smooth dark blister of blood formed where the dimple had been. The blade slid into this blister. When Clotho squeezed his fingers, bringing the razor-sharp blades together, the skin on either side of the lengthwise cut snapped back with the suddenness of windowshades-Subcutaneous fat glimmered like melting ice in the fierce blue glow of Ralph’s aura. Lachesis tightened his hold on Ralph’s wrist, but so far as Lois could tell, Ralph did not make even a first instinctive effort to pull back, only lowered his head and clenched his left fist in the air like a man giving a Black Power salute. She could see the cords in his neck standing out like cables. Not a single sound escaped him.
Now that this terrible business was actually begun, Clotho proceeded with a speed which was both brutal and merciful. He cut rapidly down the middle of Ralph’s forearm to his wrist, using the scissors the way a man will to open a parcel which has been heavily taped, guiding the blades with the fingers and bearing down with the thumb. Inside Ralph’s arm, tendons gleamed like cuts of flank steak.
Blood ran in freshets, and there was a fine scarlet spray each time an artery or a vein was severed. Soon fans of backspatter decorated the white tunics of the two small men, making them look more like little doctors than ever.
When his blades had at last severed the Bracelets of Fortune at Ralph’s wrist (the “operation” took less than three seconds but seemed to last forever to Lois), Clotho removed the dripping scissors and handed them to Lachesis. Ralph’s upturned arm had been cut open from elbow to wrist in a dark furrow.
Clotho clamped his hands over this furrow at its point of origination and Lois thought: Now the other one will pick up ralph’s sweater and use it as a tourniquet. But Lachesis made no move to do that; he merely held the scissors and watched.
For a moment the blood went on flowing between Clotho’s grasping fingers, and then it stopped. He slowly drew his hands down Ralph’s arm, and the flesh which emerged from his grip was whole and firm, although seamed with a thick white ridge of scar-tissue.
[Lois… Lo-isssss… I This voice was not coming from inside her head, nor from down the hill; it had come from behind her. A soft voice, almost cajoling.
Atropos? No, not at all. She looked down and saw green and somehow sunken light flowing all around her-it rayed through the spaces between her arms and her body, between her legs, even between her fingers. It rippled her shadow ahead of her, scrawny and somehow twisted, like the shadow of a hanged woman. It caressed her with heatless fingers the color of Spanish moss.
[Turn around, Lo-isss…] At that moment the last thing on earth Lois Chasse wanted to do was turn around and look at the source of that green light.
[Turn around, Lo-isss… see me, Lo-isss… come into the light, Lo-isss… come into the light… see me and come into the light…] It was not a voice which could be disobeyed. Lois turned as slowly as a toy ballerina whose cogs have grown rusty, and her eyes seemed to fill up with Saint Elmo’s fire.
Lois came into the light.
CHAPTER 28
Clotho: [You have your visible sign, Ralph-are you satisfied?] Ralph looked down at his arm. Already the agony, which had swallowed him as the whale had swallowed jonah, seemed like a dream to him, or a mirage.
He supposed it was this same sort of distancing which allowed women to have lots of babies, forgetting the stark physical pain and effort of delivery each time the act was successfully accomplished.
The scar looked like a length of ragged white string rippling its way over the bulges of his scant muscles.
[“Yes. You were brave, and very quick. I thank you for both.”] Clotho smiled but said nothing.
Lachesis: [Ralph, are you ready? Time is now very short.] [“Yes, I’m-“]
[“Ralph! Ralph!”]
It was Lois, standing at the top of the hill and waving to him. for a moment he thought her aura had changed from its usual dove-gray to some other, darker color, and then the idea, undoubtedly caused by shock and weariness, assed. He trudged up the hill to where she stood.
Lois’s eyes were distant and dazed, as if she had just heard some amazing, life-changing word.
[“Lois, what is it? What’s wrong? is it my arm? Because if that’s it, don’t worry. Look.” Good as new."’] He held it out so she could see for herself, but Lois didn’t look.
She looked at him instead, and he saw the depth of her shock.
[“Ralph, a green man came.”] A green man? He reached out and took her hands, instantly concerned.
[“Green? Are you sure? It wasn’t Atropos or-”] He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to.
Lois shook her head slowly.
[“It was a green man. If there are sides in.this, I don’t know which one this… this person… I’s on. He felt good, hut I could be wrong.
I couldn’t see him. His aura was too bright. He told me to give these back to you. “I She held out her hand to him and tipped two small, glittering objects from her palm to his: her earrings. He could see a maroon speck on one, and supposed it was Atropos’s blood. He started to close his hand over them, then winced at a tiny prick of pain.
[“You forgot the backs, Lois.”] She spoke in the slow, unthoughtful tones of a woman in a dream.
[“No, I didn’t.] threw them away. The green man said to. Be careful. He felt… warm… but I don’t really know, do I?
Mr. Chasse always said I was the most gullible woman alive, always willing to believe the best of everybody. Of anybody.”] She reached out slowly and grasped his wrists, looking earnestly into his face all the while.
“I just don’t know.”
Vocalizing the thought seemed to wake her up, and she stood blinking at him. Ralph supposed it was possible-just barely-that she actually had been asleep, that she had dreamed this so-called green man, But perhaps it would be wiser to just take the earrings.
They might mean nothing, but then again, having Lois’s earrings in his pocket couldn’t hurt… unless he poked himself with them, that was.
Lachesis: [Ralph, what is it? Is something wrong?] He and Clotho had lagged behind, and so had missed Ralph’s conversation with Lois.
Ralph shook his head, turning his hand to hide the earrings from them.
Clotho had picked up McGovern’s sweater and brushed away the few bright leaves which had been clinging to it. Now he held it out to Ralph, who unobtrusively slipped Lois’s no-back earrings into one of its pockets before putting it on again.
Time to get going, and the line of warmth up the middle of his right arm-along the scar-told him how he was supposed to begin.
[“Lois?”] [“Yes, dear?”] [“I need to take from your aura, and I need to take a lot. Do you understand?”] [“Yes.”] [“Is it all right?”] [“Yes, of course.”] [“Be brave-it won’t take long.”] He put his arms on her shoulders and clasped his hands behind her neck. She copied the gesture, and they slowly leaned together until their foreheads were touching and their lips less than two inches apart. He could smell some perfume still lingering about her-coming perhaps from the dark, sweet hollows behind her ears.