Ding-dong, Avon calling.
Break those wires, Ralph.” Break them!
An excellent idea with only one drawback: he couldn’t break so much as a strand of cobweb while he was on this level. That meant dropping back down to Short-Time country, and he was preparing to do just that when a soft, familiar voice on his right spoke his name.
[Ralph.] To his right? That was impossible. There was nothing on his right but the copilot’s seat, the side of the aircraft, and leagues of twilit New England air.
The scar along his arm had begun to tingle like a filament in an electric heater.
[Ralph!]
Don’t look. Don’t pay any attention at all. Ignore it.
But he couldn’t. Some great, bricklike force had come to bear on him, and his head began to turn. He fought it, aware that the airplane’s angle of descent was growing steeper, but it did no good.
[Ralph, look at me-don’t be afraid.] He made one last effort to disobey the voice and was unable. His head went on turning, and Ralph suddenly found himself looking at his mother, who had died of lung cancer twenty-five years ago.
Bertha Roberts sat in her bentwood rocker about five feet beyond where the sidewall of the Cherokee’s cockpit had been, knitting and rocking back and forth on thin air a mile or more above the ground.
The slippers Ralph had given her for her fiftieth birthday-lined with real mink, they had been, how goofy-were on her feet. A pink shawl was thrown around her shoulders. An old political buttonWIN WITH WILLKIE! it said-held the shawl closed.
That’s right, Ralph thought. She wore them as jewelry-it was her little affectation. I’d forgotten that.
The only thing that struck a wrong note (other than that she was dead and currently rocking at six thousand feet) was the bright red piece of afghan in her lap. Ralph had never seen his mother knit, wasn’t even sure she knew how, but she was knitting furiously just the same. The needles gleamed and winked as they shuttled through the stitches.
[“Mother? Mom? Is it really you?”]
The needles paused as she looked up from the crimson blanket in her lap. Yes, it was his mother-the version Ralph remembered from his teens, anyway. Narrow face, high scholar’s brow, brown eyes, and a bun of salt-and-pepper hair rolled tightly at the nape of the neck. It was her small mouth, which looked mean and ungenerous… until it smiled, that was.
[Why, Ralph Roberts! I’m surprised that you even have to ask!]
That’s not really an answer, though, is it? Ralph thought. He opened his mouth to say so and then decided it might be wiser for the time being, at least-to keep quiet. A milky shape was now swimming in the air to her right. Whelp Ralph looked at it, it darkened and solidified into the cherry-stained magazine stand he had made her in woodshop during his sophomore year at Derry High. It was filled with Reader’s Digests and Life magazines. And now the ground far below her began to disappear into a pattern of brown and dark-red squares that spread out from the rocker in a widening ring, like a pond-ripple.
Ralph recognized it at once-the kitchen linoleum of the house on Richmond Street in Mary Mead, the one where he’d grown up. At first he could see the ground through it, geometries of farmland and, not far ahead, the Kenduskeag flowing through Derry, and then it solidified. A ghostly shape like a big milkweed puff became his mom’s old Angora cat, Futzy, curled up on the windowsill and looking out at the gulls circling above the old dump in the Barrens. Futzy had died around the time Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had stopped making movies together.
[That old man was right, boy. You’ve no business messing into Long-Time affairs. Pay attention to your mother and stay out of what doesn’t concern you. Mind me, now,] Pay attention to your mother… mind me, now. Those words had pretty well summed up Bertha Roberts’s views on the art and science of child-rearing, hadn’t they?
Whether it was an order to wait an hour after eating before taking a swim or to make sure that old thief Butch Bowers didn’t put a lot of rotten potatoes at the bottom of the peck basket she’d sent you to fetch, the prologue (Pay attention to your mother) and the epilogue (Mind me, now-) were always the same. And if you failed to pay attention, if you failed to mind her, you had to face the Wrath of Mother, and God help you then.
She picked up the needles and began to knit again, running off scarlet stitches with fingers that looked faintly red themselves.
Ralph supposed that was just an illusion. Or maybe the dye wasn’t completely colorfast, and some of it was coming off on his fingers.
His fingers? What a silly mistake that was. Her fingers.
Except…
Well, there were little bunches of whiskers at the corners of her mouth. Long ones. Nasty, somehow. And unfamiliar. Ralph could remember a fine down on her upper lip, but whiskers? No way.
Those were new.
New? New? What are you thinking about? She died two days after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, so what in the name, of God can be new about her?
Two converging walls had bloomed on either side of Bertha Roberts, creating the kitchen corner where she had spent so much time, On one of them was a painting Ralph remembered well. It showed a family at supper-Dad, Mom, two kids. They were passing the potatoes and the corn, and looked like they were discussing their respective days. None of them noticed that there was a fifth person in the room-a white-robed man with a sandy beard and long hair.
He was standing in the corner and watching them. CHRIST, THE UNSEEN VISITOR, the plaque beneath this painting read. Except the Christ Ralph remembered had looked both kind and a little embarrassed to be eavesdropping. This version, however, looked coldly thoughtful.
… evaluative… judgmental, perhaps. And his color was very high, almost choleric, as if he had heard something which had made him furious.
[“Mom? Are you-”]
She put the needles down again on the red blanket-that oddly shiny red blanket-and raised a hand to stop him.
[Mom me no Moms, Ralph-just pay attention and mind. Stay out of this! It’s too late for your muddling and meddling. You can only make things worse.] The voice was right, but the face was wrong and becoming wronger. Mostly it was her skin. Smooth and unlined, her skin had been Bertha Roberts’s only vanity. The skin of the creature in the rocker was rough… more than rough, in fact. It was scaly. And there were two growths (or perhaps they were sores?) on the sides of her neck. At the sight of them, some terrible memory (get it off me Johnny oh please GET IT OFF) stirred far down in his mind. AndWell, her aura. Where was her aura?
[Never mind my aura and never mind about that fat old whore you’ve been running around with… although I’ll bet Carolyn is just rolling in her grave.] The mouth of the woman (not a woman that thing is not a woman) in the rocker was no longer small. The lower lip had spread, n puffed outward and downward. The mouth itself had developed a drooping sneer. A strangelyfamiliar drooping sneer.
(Johnny it’s biting me it’s BITING ME.) Something horridly familiar about the bunches of whiskers bristling at the corners of the mouth, too.
(Johnny please its eyes its black eyes)
[Johnny can’t help you, boy. He didn’t help you then and he can’t help you now.] Of course he couldn’t. His older brother Johnny had died six years ago. Ralph had been a pallbearer at his funeral.
Johnny had died of a heart-attack, possibly as Random as the one which had felled Bill McGovern, andRalph looked to the left, but the pilot’s side of the cockpit had also disappeared, and Ed Deepneau with it.
Ralph saw the old combination gas-and-woodstove on which his mother had cooked in the house on Richmond Street (a job she had resented bitterly and done badly all her life) and the arch leading into the dining room.