He saw their maple dining table. A glass pitcher stood in the center of it.
The pitcher had been filled with a choke of lurid red roses. Each seemed to have a face… a blood-red, gasping face…
But that’s wrong, he thought. All wrong. She never had roses in the house-she was allergic to most blooms, and roses were the worst.
She used to sneeze like crazy when she was around them.
The only thing I ever saw her put on the dining-room table was Indian Bouquet, and that wasn’t anything but autumn grasses. I see roses becauseHe looked back at the creature in the rocking chair, at red fingers which had now melted together into appendages that looked almost like fins. He regarded the scarlet mass which lay in the creature’s lap, and the scar along his arm began to tingle again.
What in God’s name is going on here?
But he knew, of course; he only had to look from the red thing in the rocking chair to the picture hanging on the wall, the picture of the scarlet-faced, malevolent Jesus watching the family eat their supper, to confirm it. He was not in his old house in Mary Mead, and he was not precisely in an aircraft over Derry, either.
He was in the Court of the Crimson King.
CHAPTER 29
Without thinking about why he was doing it, Ralph slipped a hand into his sweater pocket and loosely cupped one of Lois’s earrings.
His hand felt far away, something which belonged to someone else.
He was realizing an interesting thing: he had never been frightened in his life until now. Not once. He had thought he’d been frightened, of course, but it had been an illusion-the only time he’d even come close had been in the Derry Public Library, when Charlie Pickering stuck a knife into his armpit and said he was going to let Ralph’s guts out all over the floor. That, however, was nothing but a mild moment of discomfort next to what he was feeling now.
A green man came… He felt good, but I could be wrong.
He hoped she wasn’t; he most sincerely hoped she wasn’t. Because the green man was about all he had left now.
The green man, and Lois’s earrings.
[Ralph.” Stop ivoolgathering. Look at your mother when she’s talking to you.” Seventy years old and you still act like you were sixteen, with a bad case of pecker-rash.”
He turned back to the red-finned thing slumped in the rocker. It now bore only a passing resemblance to his late mother.
[“You’re not my mother, and I’m still in the airplane.
[You’re not, boy. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are.
Take one step out of my kitchen and you’re in for a very long fall.
[“You might as well stop now. I can see what you are.”] The thing spoke in a bubbly, choked voice that turned Ralph’s spine to a narrow line of ice.
[You don’t. You may think you do, hut you don’t. And you don’t want to. You don’t ever want to see me with my disguises laid aside.
Believe me, Ralph, you don’t.] He realized with mounting horror that the mother-thing had turned into an enormous female catfish, a hungry bottom-feeder with stubby teeth gleaming between its pendulous lips and whiskers which dangled almost to the collar of the dress it still wore.
The gills in its neck opened and closed like razor-cuts,"revealing troubled red inner flesh. Its eyes had grown round and purplish, and as Ralph watched, the sockets began to slide away from each other. This continued until the eyes bulged from the sides rather than the front of the creature’s scaly face.
[Don’t move so much as a single muscle, Ralph. You’ll probably die in the explosion no matter what level you’re on-the shockwaves travel here just as they do in any building-but that death will still be a great deal better than my death.] The catfish opened its mouth.
Its teeth ringed a blood-colored maw which looked full of strange guts and tumors. It seemed to be laughing at him.
[“Who are you? Are you the Crimson King?”
[That’s Ed’s name for me-we ought to have our own, don’t you think? Lets see. If you don’t want me to be Mom Roberts, why not call me the Kingfish? You remember the Kingfish from the radio, don’t you?] Yes, of course he did… but the real Kingfish had never been on Amos in’ Andy, and it hadn’t really been a kingfish at all. The real Kingfish had been a queenfish, and it had lived in the Barrens.
On a summer’s day during the year when Ralph Roberts was seven, He had hooked an enormous catfish out of the Kenduskeag while fishing with his brother, John-this had been when it was still possible to eat what you caught down in the Barrens. Ralph had asked his older brother to take the convulsively flopping thing off his hook for him and put it in the bucket of fresh water they kept on the bank beside them. Johnny had refused, loftily citing what he called the Fisherman’s Creed: good fishermen tie their own flies, dig thef’r own worms, and unhook their own catches. It was only later that Ralph realized Johnny might have been trying to hide his own fear of the huge and somehow alien creature his kid brother had reeled out of the Kenduskeag’s muddy, piss-warm water that day.
Ralph had at last brought himself to grasp the catfish’s pulsing body, which was at the same time slick, scaly, and prickly. As he did, Johnny had added to his terror by telling him, in a low and ominous voice, to look out for the whiskers. They’re poison, Bobb,lo Therriault told me if one of em sticks ya, you could get paralyse in Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. So be careful, Ralphie.
Ralph had twisted the creature this way and that, trying to free the hook from its dark, wet innards without getting his hand too near its whiskers (not believing Johnny about the poison and at the same time believing him completely), exquisitely aware of the gills, the eyes, the fishy smell that seemed to shimmer its way more deeply into his lungs each time he inhaled.
At last he’d heard a gristly ripping from deep within the catfish and felt the hook start to slide free. Fresh streamlets of blood trickled from the corners of its flexing, dying mouth. Ralph gave a little sigh of relief-prematurely, as it turned out. The catfish gave a tremendous flap of its tail as the hook came out. The hand Ralph had been using to free it slipped, and all at once the catfish’s bleeding mouth clamped shut on his first two fingers. How much pain had there been? A lot? Some? Maybe none at all? Ralph couldn’t remember.
What he did remember was Johnny’s completely unfeigned shriek of horror and his own surety that the catfish was going to make him pay for taking its life by eating two fingers off his right hand.
He remembered screaming himself, and shaking his hand, and begging Johnny to help him, but Johnny had been backing away, his face pale, his mouth a knotted line of revulsion. Ralph shook his hand in big, swooping arcs, but the cat hung on like death, whiskers (Poison whiskers put me in a wheelchair for the rest of my life) snapping and flapping against Ralph’s wrist, black eyes staring.
At last he’d struck it against a nearby tree, breaking its back.
It had dropped to the grass, still flopping, and Ralph had stamped on it with one foot, provoking the final horror. A spew of guts vomited from its mouth, and from the place where Ralph’s heel had smashed it open had come a gluey torrent of bloody eggs. That was when he had realized that the Kingfish had really been the Queenfish, and only a day or two from roeing.
Ralph had stared from this freakish mess to his own bloody, scaleencrusted hand, and then howled like a banshee. When Johnny touched his arm in an effort to calm him, Ralph had bolted. He hadn’t stopped running until he got home, and he’d refused to come out of his room for the rest of the day. It had been almost a year before he’d eaten another piece of fish, and he’d never had anything to do with catfish again.
Until now, that was.