Insomnia (88 page)

Lachesis wrapped one hand around Ralph’s wrist, more to steady the arm (or so it seemed to Lois) than to actually hold it immobile. He reminded her of a nurse attending a patient who must receive a painful injection. Then he looked at his partner with frightened eyes and nodded. Clotho nodded back, took a breath, and then bent over Ralph’s upturned forearm with its ghostly tree of blue veins glowing beneath the skin. He paused for a moment, then slowly opened the jaws of the scissors with which he and his old friend traded life for death.

Lois staggered to her feet and stood swaying back and forth on legs that felt like lumber. She meant to break the paralysis which had locked her in such a cruel silence, to shout at Ralph and tell him to stop – tell him he didn’t know what they meant to
do
to him.

Except he did. It was in the pallor of his face, his half-closed eyes, his painfully thinned lips. Most of all it was in the blotches of red and black which were flashing across his aura like meteors, and in the aura itself, which had tightened down to a hard blue shell.

Ralph nodded at Clotho, who brought the lower scissorblade down until it was touching Ralph’s forearm just below the fold of the elbow. For a moment the skin only dimpled, and then a smooth dark blister of blood formed where the dimple had been. The blade slid into this blister. When Clotho squeezed his fingers, bringing the razor-sharp blades together, the skin on either side of the lengthwise cut snapped back with the suddenness of windowshades. Subcutaneous fat glimmered like melting ice in the fierce blue glow of Ralph’s aura. Lachesis tightened his hold on Ralph’s wrist, but so far as Lois could tell, Ralph did not make even a first instinctive effort to pull back, only lowered his head and clenched his left fist in the air like a man giving a Black Power salute. She could see the cords in his neck standing out like cables. Not a single sound escaped him.

Now that this terrible business was actually begun, Clotho proceeded with a speed which was both brutal and merciful. He cut rapidly down the middle of Ralph’s forearm to his wrist, using the scissors the way a man will to open a parcel which has been heavily taped, guiding the blades with the fingers and bearing down with the thumb. Inside Ralph’s arm, tendons gleamed like cuts of flank steak. Blood ran in freshets, and there was a fine scarlet spray each time an artery or a vein was severed. Soon fans of backspatter decorated the white tunics of the two small men, making them look more like little doctors than ever.

When his blades had at last severed the Bracelets of Fortune at Ralph’s wrist (the ‘operation’ took less than three seconds but seemed to last forever to Lois), Clotho removed the dripping scissors and handed them to Lachesis. Ralph’s upturned arm had been cut open from elbow to wrist in a dark furrow. Clotho clamped his hands over this furrow at its point of origination and Lois thought:
Now the other one will pick up Ralph’s sweater and use it as a tourniquet
. But Lachesis made no move to do that; he merely held the scissors and watched.

For a moment the blood went on flowing between Clotho’s grasping fingers, and then it stopped. He slowly drew his hands down Ralph’s arm, and the flesh which emerged from his grip was whole and firm, although seamed with a thick white ridge of scar-tissue.

[
Lois . . . Lo-isssss . . .
]

This
voice was not coming from inside her head, nor from down the hill; it had come from behind her. A soft voice, almost cajoling. Atropos? No, not at all. She looked down and saw green and somehow sunken light flowing all around her – it rayed through the spaces between her arms and her body, between her legs, even between her fingers. It rippled her shadow ahead of her, scrawny and somehow twisted, like the shadow of a hanged woman. It caressed her with heatless fingers the color of Spanish moss.

[
Turn around, Lo-isss . . .
]

At that moment the last thing on earth Lois Chasse wanted to do was turn around and look at the source of that green light.

[
Turn around, Lo-isss . . . see me, Lo-isss . . . come into the light, Lo-isss . . . come into the light . . . see me and come into the light . . .
]

It was not a voice which could be disobeyed. Lois turned as slowly as a toy ballerina whose cogs have grown rusty, and her eyes seemed to fill up with Saint Elmo’s fire.

Lois came into the light.

Clotho: [
You have your visible sign, Ralph – are you satisfied?
]

Ralph looked down at his arm. Already the agony, which had swallowed him as the whale had swallowed Jonah, seemed like a dream to him, or a mirage. He supposed it was this same sort of distancing which allowed women to have lots of babies, forgetting the stark physical pain and effort of delivery each time the act was successfully accom-plished. The scar looked like a length of ragged white string rippling its way over the bulges of his scant muscles.

[
‘Yes. You were brave, and very quick. I thank you for both.’
]

Clotho smiled but said nothing.

Lachesis: [
Ralph, are you ready? Time is now very short.
]

[
‘Yes, I’m—’
]

[
‘Ralph! Ralph!’
]

It was Lois, standing at the top of the hill and waving to him. For a moment he thought her aura had changed from its usual dove-gray to some other, darker color, and then the idea, undoubtedly caused by shock and weariness, passed. He trudged up the hill to where she stood.

Lois’s eyes were distant and dazed, as if she had just heard some amazing, life-changing word.

[
‘Lois, what is it? What’s wrong? Is it my arm? Because if that’s it, don’t worry. Look! Good as new!’
]

He held it out so she could see for herself, but Lois didn’t look. She looked at him instead, and he saw the depth of her shock.

[
‘Ralph, a green man came.’
]

A
green
man? He reached out and took her hands, instantly concerned.

[
‘Green? Are you sure? It wasn’t Atropos or—’
]

He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t have to.

Lois shook her head slowly.

[
‘It was a green man. If there are sides in this, I don’t know which one this . . . this person . . . is on. He felt good, but I could be wrong. I couldn’t see him. His aura was too bright. He told me to give these back to you.’
]

She held out her hand to him and tipped two small, glittering objects from her palm to his: her earrings. He could see a maroon speck on one, and supposed it was Atropos’s blood. He started to close his hand over them, then winced at a tiny prick of pain.

[
‘You forgot the backs, Lois.’
]

She spoke in the slow, unthoughtful tones of a woman in a dream.

[
‘No, I didn’t – I threw them away. The green man said to. Be careful. He felt . . . warm . . . but I don’t really know, do I? Mr Chasse always said I was the most gullible woman alive, always willing to believe the best of everybody. Of
anybody.’]

She reached out slowly and grasped his wrists, looking earnestly into his face all the while.

‘I just don’t know.’

Vocalizing the thought seemed to wake her up, and she stood blinking at him. Ralph supposed it was possible – just barely – that she actually
had
been asleep, that she had dreamed this so-called ‘green man’. But perhaps it would be wiser to just take the earrings. They might mean nothing, but then again, having Lois’s earrings in his pocket couldn’t hurt . . . unless he poked himself with them, that was.

Lachesis: [
Ralph, what is it? Is something wrong?
]

He and Clotho had lagged behind, and so had missed Ralph’s conversation with Lois. Ralph shook his head, turning his hand to hide the earrings from them. Clotho had picked up McGovern’s sweater and brushed away the few bright leaves which had been clinging to it. Now he held it out to Ralph, who unobtrusively slipped Lois’s no-back earrings into one of its pockets before putting it on again.

Time to get going, and the line of warmth up the middle of his right arm – along the scar – told him how he was supposed to begin.

[
‘Lois?’
]

[
‘Yes, dear?’
]

[
‘I need to take from your aura, and I need to take a lot. Do you understand?’
]

[
‘Yes.’
]

[
‘Is it all right?’
]

[
‘Yes, of course.’
]

[
‘Be brave – it won’t take long.’
]

He put his arms on her shoulders and clasped his hands behind her neck. She copied the gesture, and they slowly leaned together until their foreheads were touching and their lips less than two inches apart. He could smell some perfume still lingering about her – coming perhaps from the dark, sweet hollows behind her ears.

[
‘Ready, dear?’
]

He found what came in return both odd and comforting.

[
‘Yes, Ralph. See me. Come into the light. Come into the light and 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.’
]

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 be fine. I’m just 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.
]

[
‘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:

Christ, he’s nuttier than a fruitcake
.

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 urinal:
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: