Insomnia (71 page)

Lois was staring at the dead women in horror. Tears slipped down her cheeks. The spectral gray light which rose from the tracks they left behind looked like vapor rising from dry ice. Ralph walked her across the parlor toward the closed double doors on the far side, paused before them long enough to take a deep breath, then put his arm around Lois’s waist and stepped into the wood.

There was a moment of darkness in which not just his nose but his entire body seemed suffused with the sweet aroma of sawdust, and then they were in the room beyond, the northernmost room in the house. It had perhaps once been a study, but had since been converted into a group therapy room. In the center, a dozen or so folding chairs had been set up in a circle. The walls were hung with plaques saying things like
I CANNOT EXPECT RESPECT FROM ANYONE ELSE UNTIL I RESPECT MYSELF
. On a blackboard at one end of the room someone had printed
WE ARE FAMILY, I
’
VE GOT ALL MY SISTERS WITH ME
in capital letters. Crouched beside it at one of the east-facing windows that overlooked the porch, wearing his own Kevlar vest over a Snoopy sweatshirt Ralph would have recognized anywhere, was Charlie Pickering.

‘
Barbecue all Godless women!
’ he screamed. A bullet whined past his shoulder; another buried itself in the windowframe to his right and flicked a splinter against one of the lenses of his hornrimmed glasses. The idea that he was being protected returned to Ralph, this time with the force of a conviction. ‘
Lesbian cookout! Give em a taste of their own medicine! Teach em how it feels!
’

[
‘Stay up, Lois – right up where you are now.’
]

[
‘What are you going to do?’
]

[
‘Take care of him.’
]

[
‘Don’t kill him, Ralph! Please don’t kill him!’
]

Why not?
Ralph thought bitterly.
I’d be doing the world a favor
. That was undoubtedly true, but this was no time to argue.

[
‘All right, I won’t kill him! Now stay put, Lois – there’s too many goddam bullets flying around for both of us to risk going down.’
]

Before she could reply, Ralph concentrated, summoned the blink, and dropped back to the Short-Time level. It happened so fast and hard this time that it left him feeling winded, as if he had jumped out of a second-storey window onto a hard patch of concrete. Some of the color drained out of the world and noise fell in to replace it: the crackle of fire, no longer muffled but sharp and close; the crump of a shotgun blast; the crack of pistol-shots fired in rapid succession. The air tasted of soot, and the room was sweltering. Something that sounded like an insect droned past Ralph’s ear. He had an idea it was a .45-caliber bug.

Better hurry up, sweetheart,
Carolyn advised.
When bullets hit you on this level they kill you, remember?

He remembered.

Ralph ran bent-over toward Pickering’s turned back. His feet crunched on slivers of glass and scatters of splinters, but Pickering did not turn. In addition to the automatic weapon in his hands, there was a revolver on his hip and a small green duffle-bag by his left foot. The bag was unzipped, and Ralph saw a number of wine bottles inside. Their open mouths had been stuffed with wet rags.

‘
Kill the bitches!
’ Pickering screamed, spraying the yard with another burst of fire. He popped the clip and raised his sweatshirt, exposing three or four more tucked under his belt. Ralph reached into the open duffel-bag, seized one of the gasoline-filled wine bottles by the neck, and swung it at the side of Pickering’s head. As he did, he saw the reason Pickering hadn’t heard his approach: the man was wearing shooter’s plugs. Before Ralph had time to reflect upon the irony of a man on a suicide mission taking pains to protect his hearing, the bottle shattered against Pickering’s temple, dousing him with amber liquid and green glass. He staggered backward, one hand going to his scalp, which was cut open in two places. Blood poured through his long fingers –
fingers that should have belonged to a pianist or a painter,
Ralph thought – and down his neck. He turned, his eyes wide and shocked behind the smeary lenses of his spectacles, his hair reaching for the sky and making him look like a cartoon of a man who has just received a huge jolt of electricity.

‘
You!
’ he cried. ‘Devil-sent Centurion! Godless baby-killer!’

Ralph thought of the two women in the other room and was once more overwhelmed with anger . . . except that anger was too mild a word, much too mild. He felt as if his nerves were burning inside his skin. And the thought that drummed at his mind was
one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer, one of them was pregnant so who’s the baby-killer
.

Another high-caliber bug droned past his face. Ralph didn’t notice. Pickering was trying to lift the rifle with which he had undoubtedly killed Gretchen Tillbury and her pregnant friend. Ralph snatched it from his hands and turned it on him. Pickering shrieked with fear. The sound of it maddened Ralph even more, and he forgot the promise he had made to Lois. He raised the rifle, fully meaning to empty it into the man who was now cringing abjectly against the wall (in the heat of the moment it occurred to neither of them that there was currently no clip in the gun), but before he could pull the trigger he was distracted by a brilliant swarm of light bleeding into the air beside him. At first it was without shape, a fabulous kaleidoscope whose colors had somehow escaped the tube which was supposed to contain them, and then it took on the form of a woman with a long, gauzy gray ribbon rising from her head.

[
‘Don’t kill him
]

Ralph, please don’t kill him!’

For a moment he could see the blackboard and read the quote chalked on it right through her, and then the colors became her clothes and hair and skin as she came all the way down. Pickering stared at her in cross-eyed terror. He shrieked again, and the crotch of his army fatigue pants darkened. He stuck his fingers into his mouth, as if to stifle the sound he was making. ‘
A ghose!
’ he screamed through his mouthful of fingers.
‘A Hennurion anna ghose!’

Lois ignored him and grabbed the barrel of the rifle. ‘Don’t kill him, Ralph! Don’t!’

Ralph was suddenly furious with her, too. ‘Don’t you understand, Lois? Don’t you get it? He understood what he was doing! On some level, he
did
understand –
I saw it in his goddam aura!
’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, still holding the barrel of the rifle down so it pointed at the floor. ‘It doesn’t matter what he did or didn’t understand. We mustn’t do what they do. We mustn’t be what they are.’

‘But—’

‘Ralph, I want to let go of this gun-barrel. It’s hot. It’s burning my fingers.’

‘All right,’ he said, and let go at the same instant she did. The gun fell to the floor between them, and Pickering, who had been sliding slowly down the wall with his fingers still in his mouth and his shining, glazed eyes still fixed on Lois, lunged for it with the speed of a striking rattlesnake.

What Ralph did then he did without forethought and certainly without anger – he acted purely on instinct, reaching out for Pickering with both hands and grasping the sides of his face. Something flashed brightly inside his mind as he did it, something that felt like the lens of a powerful magnifying glass. He slammed back up through the levels, for a split second going higher than either of them had yet been. At the height of his ascent, he felt a terrible force flash in his head and explode down his arms. Then, as he dropped back down,
he
heard the bang, a hollow but emphatic sound which was entirely different from the guns still firing outside.

Pickering’s body jerked galvanically, and his legs shot out with such force that one of his shoes flew off. His buttocks rose and then thumped down. His teeth clamped shut on his lower lip, and blood squirted out of his mouth. For a moment Ralph was almost sure he saw tiny blue sparks snapping from the ends of his zany hair. Then they were gone and Pickering slumped back against the wall. He stared at Ralph and Lois with eyes from which all concern had fled.

Lois screamed. At first Ralph thought she was screaming because of what he had done to Pickering, and then he saw she was beating at the top of her head. A piece of burning wallpaper had landed there and her hair was on fire.

He swept an arm around her, beat at the flames with his own hand, then covered her body with his as a fresh gust of rifle- and shotgun-fire hit the north wing. Ralph’s free hand was splayed out against the wall, and he saw a bullet-hole appear between the third and fourth fingers like a magic trick.

[
right now!’
]

They went up together, turning to colored smoke before Charlie Pickering’s empty eyes . . . and then disappearing.

[
‘What did you do to him, Ralph? For a second you were gone – you were up – and then . . . then he . . . what did you do?’
]

She was looking at Charlie Pickering with stunned horror. Pickering was sitting against the wall in almost exactly the same position as the two dead women in the next room. As Ralph watched, a large pinkish spit-bubble appeared between his slack lips, grew, then popped.

He turned to Lois, took her by the arms just above the elbows, and made a picture in his mind: the circuit-breaker box in the basement of his house on Harris Avenue. Hands opened the box, then quickly flipped all the switches from
ON
to
OFF
. He wasn’t sure that this was right – it had all happened too fast for him to be sure of anything – but he thought it was close.

Lois’s eyes widened a little, and then she nodded. She looked at Pickering, then at Ralph.

[
‘He brought it on himself, didn’t he? You didn’t do it on purpose.’
]

Ralph nodded, and then fresh screams came up from below their feet, screams he was quite sure he was not hearing with his ears.

[
‘Lois?’
]

[
‘Yes, Ralph – right now.’
]

He slipped his hands down her arms and gripped her hands, as the four of them had held hands in the hospital, only this time they went down instead of up, sliding into the plank floor as if it were a pool of water. Ralph was once again aware of a knife-edge of darkness crossing his vision, and then they were in the cellar, sinking slowly down to a dirty cement floor. He saw shadowy furnace-pipes, grimy with dust, a snowblower covered with a large sheet of dirty transparent plastic, gardening equipment lined up to one side of a dim cylinder that was probably the water heater, and cartons stacked against one brick wall – soup, beans, spaghetti sauce, coffee, garbage bags, toilet-tissue. All of these things looked slightly hallucinatory, not quite there, and at first Ralph thought this was a new side-effect of having gone to the next level. Then he realized it was just smoke – the cellar was filling up with it rapidly.

There were eighteen or twenty people clustered at one end of the long, shadowy room, most of them women. Ralph also saw a little boy of about four clinging to his mother’s knees (Mommy’s face showed the fading bruises of what might have been an accident but was probably on purpose), a little girl a year or two older with her face pressed against her mother’s stomach . . . and he saw Helen. She was holding Natalie in her arms and blowing into the baby’s face, as if she could keep the air around her clear of smoke that way. Nat was coughing and screaming in choked, desperate whoops. Behind the women and children, Ralph could make out a dusty set of steps climbing up into darkness.

[
‘Ralph? We have to go down now, don’t we?’
]

He nodded, made that blink inside his head, and suddenly he was also coughing as he pulled acrid smoke into his lungs. They materialized directly in front of the group at the foot of the stairs, but only the little boy with his arms around his mother’s knees reacted. In that moment, Ralph was positive he had seen this kid somewhere before, but he had no idea where – the day near the end of summer when he’d seen him playing roll-toss with his mother in Strawford Park was the furthest thing from his mind at that moment.

‘Look, Mama!’ the boy said, pointing and coughing. ‘Angels!’

Inside his head Ralph heard Clotho saying
We’re no angels, Ralph,
and then he pushed forward toward Helen through the thickening smoke, still holding Lois’s hand. His eyes were stinging and tearing already, and he could hear Lois coughing. Helen was looking at him with dazed unrecognition – looking at him the way she had on that day in August when Ed had beaten her so badly.

‘Helen!’

‘Those stairs, Helen! Where do they go?’

‘What are you doing here, Ralph? How did you get h –’ She broke into a coughing spasm and doubled over. Natalie almost tumbled out of her arms and Lois took the screaming child before Helen could drop her.

Ralph looked at the woman to Helen’s left, saw she seemed even less aware of what was going on, then grabbed Helen again and shook her.
‘Where do the stairs go?’

She glanced over her shoulder at them. ‘Cellar bulkhead,’ she told him. ‘But that’s no good. It’s –’ She bent over, coughing dryly. The sound was weirdly like the chatter of Charlie Pickering’s automatic weapon. ‘It’s locked,’ Helen finished. ‘The fat woman locked it. She had the lock in her pocket. I saw her put it on. Why did she do that, Ralph? How did she know we’d come down here?’

Where else did you have to go?
Ralph thought bitterly, then turned to Lois. ‘See what you can do, will you?’