Insomnia (82 page)

Something inside the bag gleamed bright gold.

Ralph gathered all his strength and attempted to open his fingers for another cut. At first he didn’t think he was going to be able to do it – they felt as if they had been stuck together with Krazy Glue – and then they drew apart, widening the slit. Now he could almost see the object inside, something small and round and shiny.
Really only one thing it can be,
he thought, and then his heart suddenly fluttered in his chest. The blue blades flickered.

[
‘Lois! Help me!’
]

She seized his wrist. Ralph felt strength roar into him in big fresh volts. He watched, bemused, as the shears solidified again. Now only one of the blades was blue. The other was a pearly gray.

Lois, screaming inside his head: [
‘Cut it! Cut it now!’
]

He brought his fingers together again, and this time the blades cut the deathbag wide open. It uttered one last wavering shriek, turned entirely red, and disappeared. The shears growing from the tips of Ralph’s fingers flickered out of existence. He closed his eyes for a moment, suddenly aware that big warm drops of sweat were running down his cheeks like tears. In the dark field behind his eyelids he could see crazy afterimages that looked like dancing scissors-blades.

[
‘Lois? Are you okay?’
]

[
‘Yes . . . but drained. I don’t have the slightest idea how I’m supposed to get back to those stairs under the tree, let alone climb them. I’m not sure I can even stand up.’
]

Ralph opened his eyes, put his hands on his thighs above the knees, and leaned forward again. Lying on the floor where the deathbag had been was a man’s wedding ring. He could easily read what had been engraved on the wide inner curve:
HD
–
ED
5–8–87.

Helen Deepneau and Edward Deepneau. Married on August 5th, 1987.

It was what they had come for. It was Ed’s token. All that remained now was to pick it up . . . slip it into the watchpocket of his pants . . . find Lois’s earrings . . . and get the hell out of here.

As he reached for the ring, a flicker of verse slipped through his mind – not Stephen Dobyns this time but J. R. R. Tolkien, who had invented the hobbits Ralph had last thought of in Lois’s cozy, picture-filled living room. It had been almost thirty years since he had read Tolkien’s story of Frodo and Gandalf and Sauron, the Dark Lord – a story which contained a token very similar to this one, now that he thought about it – but the lines were momentarily as clear as the scissors-blades had been only moments before:

I won’t be able to pick it up,
he thought.
It will be as tightly bound to the wheel of
ka
as Lois and I are, and I won’t be able to pick it up. Either that, or it will be like grasping a live high-tension wire, and I’ll be dead before I know it’s happening.

Except he didn’t really believe either of those things were going to happen. If the ring was not his for the taking, why had it been protected by the deathbag? If the ring was not his for the taking, why had the forces which stood behind Clotho and Lachesis – and Dorrance, he couldn’t forget Dorrance – set him and Lois upon this journey in the first place?

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
Ralph thought, and closed his fingers around Ed’s wedding ring. For a moment he felt a deep, glassy pain in his hand and wrist and forearm; at the same moment, the softly singing voices of the objects which Atropos had hoarded here rose in a great, harmonic shout.

Ralph made a sound – perhaps a scream, perhaps only a moan – and lifted the ring up, clenched tightly in his right hand. A sense of victory sang in his veins like wine, or like—

[
‘Ralph.’
]

He looked at her, but Lois was looking down at where Ed’s ring had been, her eyes dark with a mixture of fear and confusion.

Where Ed’s ring had been; where Ed’s ring still was. It lay exactly as it had lain, a glimmering gold circlet with
HD
–
ED
5–8–87 inscribed around the inner arc.

Ralph felt an instant of dizzy disorientation and controlled it with an effort. He opened his hand, half expecting the ring to be gone in spite of what his senses told him, but it still lay in the center of his palm, neatly enclosed within the fork where his loveline and his lifeline diverged, glimmering in the baleful red light of this nasty place.
HD
–
ED
5–8–87.

The two rings were identical.

One in his hand; one on the floor; absolutely no difference. At least none that Ralph could see.

Lois reached for the ring which had replaced the one Ralph had picked up, hesitated, then grasped it. As they watched, ghost-gold glowed just above the chamber’s floor, then solidified into a third wedding band. Like the other two,
HD
–
ED
5–8–87 was inscribed on the inner curve.

Ralph found himself thinking of yet another story – not Tolkien’s long tale of the Ring, but a story by Dr Seuss which he had read one of Carolyn’s sister’s kids back in the fifties. That was a long time ago, but he had never completely forgotten the story, which had been richer and darker than Dr Seuss’s usual jingle-jangle nonsense about rats and bats and troublesome cats. It was called
The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins,
and Ralph supposed it really wasn’t any wonder that the story had come to mind now.

Poor Bartholomew was a country hayseed who had the bad luck to be in the big city when the King happened by. You were supposed to take your hat off in the presence of that august personage, and Bartholomew had certainly tried, but without any luck; each time he took his hat off, another one, identical to the last, appeared beneath it.

[
‘Ralph, what’s happening? What does it mean?’
]

He shook his head without answering, eyes moving from the ring on his palm to the one in Lois’s hand to the one on the floor, around and around and around. Three rings, all of them identical, just like the hats Bartholomew Cubbins had kept trying to take off. The poor kid had gone on trying to make his manners to the King, Ralph remembered, even as the executioner had led him up a curving flight of stairs to the place where he would be beheaded for the crime of disrespect . . .

Except that wasn’t right, because after awhile the hats on poor Bartholomew’s head
did
begin to change, to grow ever more fabulous and rococo.

No, he guessed he wasn’t. When he’d picked up the first one, he had felt a deep, momentary ache spread up his arm like rheumatism, but Lois had shown no signs of pain when she picked up the second one.

Ralph leaned forward and grasped the third ring. There was no jolt of pain and no shout from the objects which formed the walls of the room – they just kept singing softly. Meanwhile, a fourth ring materialized where the other three had been, materialized exactly like another hat on the head of hapless Bartholomew Cubbins, but Ralph barely glanced at it. He looked at the first ring, lying between the fork of his lifeline and loveline on the palm of his right hand.

One Ring to rule them all,
he thought.
One Ring to bind them. And I think that’s you, beautiful. I think the others are just clever counterfeits.

And maybe there was a way to check that. Ralph held the two rings to his ears. The one in his left hand was silent; the one in his right, the one that had been inside the deathbag when he cut it open, gave off a faint, chilling echo of the deathbag’s final scream.

The one in his right hand was alive.

[
‘Ralph?’
]

Her hand on his arm, cold and urgent. Ralph looked at her, then tossed the ring in his left hand away. He held the other up and gazed at Lois’s strained, strangely young face through it, as if through a telescope.

[
‘This is the one. The others are just place-holders, I think – like zeros in a big, complicated math problem.’
]

[
‘You mean they don’t matter?’
]

He hesitated, unsure of how to reply . . . because they
did
matter, that was the thing. He just didn’t know how to put his intuitive understanding of this into words. As long as the false rings kept appearing in this nasty little room, like hats on the head of Bartholomew Cubbins, the future represented by the deathbag around the Civic Center remained the one true future. But the first ring, the one which Atropos had actually stolen off Ed’s finger (perhaps as he lay sleeping next to Helen in the little Cape Cod house which was now standing empty), could change all that.

The replicas were tokens which preserved the shape of
ka
just as spokes radiating out from a hub preserved the shape of a wheel. The original, however . . .

Ralph thought the original
was
the hub: One Ring to bind them.

He gripped the gold band tightly, feeling its hard curve bite into his palm and fingers. Then he slipped it into his watchpocket.

There was one thing about
ka
they didn’t tell us,
he thought.
It’s slippery. Slippery as some nasty old fish that won’t come off the hook but just keeps flopping around in your hand
.

And it was like climbing a sand dune, too – you slid one step back for every two you managed to lunge forward. They had gone out to High Ridge and accomplished
something
– just what Ralph didn’t know, but Dorrance had assured them it was true; according to him, they had fulfilled their task there. Now they had come here and taken Ed’s token, but it
still
wasn’t enough, and why? Because
ka
was like a fish,
ka
was like a sand dune,
ka
was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.

But most of all, perhaps,
ka
was like a ring.

Like a wedding ring.

He suddenly understood what all the talk on the hospital roof and all of Dorrance’s efforts to explain hadn’t been able to convey: Ed’s undesignated status, coupled with Atropos’s discovery of the poor, confused man, had conveyed a tremendous power upon him. A door had opened, and a demon called the Crimson King had strolled through, one that was stronger than Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, any of them. And it didn’t intend to be stopped by a Derry Old Crock like Ralph Roberts.

[
‘Ralph?’
]

[
‘One Ring to rule them all, Lois – One Ring to bind them.’
]

[
‘What are you talking about? What do you mean?’
]

He patted his watchpocket, feeling the small yet momentous bulge that was Ed’s ring. Then he reached out and grasped her shoulders.

[
‘The replacements – the false rings – are spokes, but this one is the hub. Take away the hub, and a wheel can’t turn.’
]

[
‘Are you sure?’
]

He was sure, all right. He just didn’t know how to do it.

[
‘Yes. Now come on – let’s get out of here while we still can.’
]

Ralph sent her beneath the overloaded dining room table first, then dropped to his knees and followed. He paused halfway under and looked back over his shoulder. He saw a strange and terrible thing: although the buzzing sound had not returned, the deathbag was reknitting itself around the replacement wedding ring. Already the bright gold had dimmed to a ghostly circlet.

He stared at it for several seconds, fascinated, almost hypnotized, then tore his eyes away with an effort and began to crawl after Lois.

Ralph was afraid they would lose valuable time trying to navigate their way back through the maze of corridors which crisscrossed Atropos’s storehouse of keepsakes, but that turned out not to be a problem. Their own footprints, fading but still visible, were there to guide them.

He began to feel a little stronger as they put the terrible little room behind them, but Lois was now flagging badly. By the time they reached the archway between the storehouse and Atropos’s filthy apartment, she was leaning on him. He asked if she was all right. Lois managed a shrug and a small, tired smile.

[
‘Most of my problem is being in this place. It doesn’t really matter how high up we go, it’s still foul and I hate it. Once I get some fresh air, I think I’ll be fine. Honestly.’
]

Ralph hoped she was right. As he ducked under the arch into Atropos’s apartment, he was trying to think of a pretext by which he could send Lois on ahead of him. That would give him an opportunity to give the place a quick search. If that didn’t turn up the earrings, he would have to assume that Atropos was still wearing them.

He noticed her slip was hanging below the hem of her dress again, opened his mouth to tell her, and saw a flicker of movement from the tail of his left eye. He realized they had been a lot less cautious on the return trip – partly because they were worn out – and now they might have to pay a high price for dropping their guard.

[
‘Lois, look out!’
]

Too late. Ralph felt her arm jerked away as the snarling creature in the dirty tunic seized her about the waist and dragged her backward. Atropos’s head only came to her armpit, but that was enough to allow him to hold his rusty blade over her. When Ralph made an instinctive lunge at him, Atropos brought the straight-razor down until it was touching the pearl-gray cord which drifted up from the crown of her head. He bared his teeth at Ralph in an unspeakable grin.