[“Ready, dear?”]
He found what came in return both odd and comforting.
[“Yes, Ralph. See me. Come into the light. Come into the light an take the light.” Ralph pursed his lips and began to inhale.
A band of smoky brilliance began to flow from her mouth and nose and into him. His aura began to brighten at once, and it continued to do so until it had become a dazzling, cloudy corona around him. And still he went on inhaling, breathing with something that was beyond breath, feeling the scar on his arm grow hotter and hotter until it was like an electric filament buried in his flesh. He could not have stopped even if he had wanted to… and he didn’t.
She staggered once. He saw her eyes lose focus and felt her hands loosen for a moment on the back of his neck. Then her eyes, large and bright and full of trust, returned to his, and her grip firmed again.
At last, as that titanic intake of breath finally began to crest, Ralph realized her aura had grown so pale he could hardly see it.
Her cheeks were milk-white and the gray. had come back into her hair, so much that the black was now almost gone. He had to stop it, had to, or he was going to kill her.
He managed to pull his left hand free of his right, and that seemed to break some sort of circuit; he was able to step back from her.
Lois swayed on her feet and would have fallen, but Clotho and Lachesis, looking quite a bit like Lilliputians from Gulliver’s Travels, grabbed her arms and lowered her carefully to the bench again.
Ralph dropped to one knee before her. He was frantic with fear and guilt, and at the same time filled with a sense of power so great that he felt as if a single hard jolt might cause him to explode, like a bottle filled with nitroglycerine. He could knock down a building with that karate-chop gesture now-maybe a whole row of them.
Still, he had hurt Lois. Perhaps badly.
[“Lois.” Lois, can you hear me? I’m sorry."’] She looked up at him dazedly, a woman who had blasted forward from forty to sixty in a matter of seconds… and then right past it and into her seventies, like a rocket overshooting its intended target.
She tried a smile that didn’t work very well.
[“Lois, I’m sorry. I didn’t know, and once I did, I couldn’t stop. “I Lachesis: [If you’re to have any chance at all, Ralph, you must go now. He’s almost here.]
Lois was nodding agreement.
[“Go on, Ralph-I’m just weak, that’s all. I’ll hefine. I’mjust going to sit here until my strength comes back.”] Her eyes shifted to the left, and Ralph followed her gaze. He saw the wino they’d frightened away earlier. He had returned to inspect the litter-baskets at the top of the hill for returnable cans and bottles, and although his aura did not look as healthy as that of the fellow they had met out by the old trainyards earlier, Ralph reckoned he would do in a pinch… which, for Lois, this definitely was.
Clotho: [We’ll see that he wanders over this way, Ralph-we don’t have much power over the physical aspects of the Short-Time world, but I think we can manage that much.] [“You’re sure?”] [Yes. I [“Okay.
Good.”] Ralph took a quick look at the two little men, noted their anxious, frightened eyes, and nodded. Then he bent and kissed Lois’s cool, wrinkled cheek. She gave him the smile of a tired old grandmother.
I did that to her, he thought. Me.
Then you better make sure you didn’t do it for nothing, Carolyn’s voice responded tartly.
Ralph gave the three of them-Clotho and Lachesis were now flanking Lois protectively on the bench-a final glance, and then began to walk down the hill again.
When He reached the toilets, he stood between them for a moment, then leaned his head against the one marked WOMEN. He heard nothing.
When he tipped his head against the blue plastic wall of MEN, however, he heard a faint, droning voice raised in song: “Who believes that my wildest dreams And my craziest schemes will come true.
You, baby, nobody but you.”
Christ, he’s nuttier than a fruitcake.
This is news, sweetheart?
Ralph supposed it wasn’t. He walked around to the door of the Portosan and opened it. Now he could also hear the distant, waspy buzz of an airplane engine, but there was nothing to see that he hadn’t seen dozens of times before: the cracked toilet seat resting askew over the hole in the seat, a roll of toilet paper with a strange and somehow ominous swelled look, and, to -the left, a urinal that looked like a plastic teardrop. The walls were tangles of graffiti. The largest-and most exuberant-had been printed in foot-high red letters above the urinaclass="underline" TONY BOYNTON HAS GOT THE TIGHTEST LITTLE BUNS IN DERRY! A cloying pine-scented deodorizer overlay the smells of shit, piss, and lingering wino-farts like makeup on the face of a corpse. The voice he was hearing seemed to come from the hole in the center of the Portosan’s bench seat, or perhaps it was seeping out of the very walls: “From the time I fall asleep Until the mornting comes I dream about you, baby, nobody but you.
Where is he? Ralph wondered. And how the hell do I get to him?
Ralph felt sudden heat against his hip; it was as if someone had slipped a warm coal into his watchpocket. He began to frown, then remembered what was in there. He reached into the scrap of a pocket with one finger, touched the gold band he had stowed there, and hooked it out. He laid it on his palm over the place where his loveline and lifeline diverged and poked at it gingerly. It had cooled again.
Ralph found he wasn’t very surprised.
“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to bind them,” Ralph murmured, and slipped Ed’s wedding band onto the third finger of his own left hand. It was a perfect fit. He pushed it up until it clinked softly against the wedding ring Carolyn had put onto his own finger some forty-five years ago. Then he looked up and saw that the back wall of the Portosan had disappeared.
What he saw, framed by the walls which did remain, was a just-pastsunset sky and a swatch of Maine countryside fading into a bluegray twilight haze. He estimated that he was looking out from a height of about ten thousand feet. He could see glimmering lakes and ponds and vast stretches of dark green woodland scrolling down toward the Portosan’s bench seat and then disappearing. Far ahead-up toward the roof of the toilet cubicle-Ralph could see a glimmering nest of lights. That was probably Derry, now no more than ten minutes away.
In the lower left quadrant of this vision Ralph could see part of an instrument panel. Taped over the altimeter was a small color photograph that stopped his breath. It was Helen, looking impossibly happy and impossibly beautiful. Cradled in her arms was the Exalted amp; Revered Baby, fast asleep and no more than four months old.
He wants them to be the last thing he sees in this world, Ralph thought. He’s been turned into a monster, but I guess even monsters don’t forget how to love.
Something on the instrument panel began to beep. A hand came into view and flicked a switch. Before it disappeared, Ralph could see the white indentation on the third finger of that hand, faint but still visible, where the wedding ring had rested for at least six years.
He saw something else, as well-the aura surrounding the hand was the same as the one which had surrounded the thunderstruck baby in the hospital elevator, a turbulent, rapidly moving membrane that seemed as alien as the atmosphere of a gas giant.
Ralph looked back once and raised his hand. Clotho and Lachesis raised theirs in return. Lois blew him a kiss. Ralph made a catching gesture, then turned and stepped into the Portosan.
He hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do about the bench seat, then remembered the oncoming hospital gurney, which should have crushed their skulls but hadn’t, and walked toward the back of the cubicle. He clenched his teeth, preparing to bark his shinwhat you knew was one thing, what you believed after seventy years of bumping into stuff quite another-and then stepped through the bench seat as if it were made of smoke… or as if he were.