Insomnia (91 page)

Until now, that was.

[
‘Ralph!’
]

That was Lois’s voice . . . but distant! So distant!

[
‘You have to do something
right away!
Don’t let it stop you!’
]

Ralph now realized that what he’d taken for an afghan in his mother’s lap was actually a mat of bloody eggs in the lap of the Crimson King. It was leaning toward him over this throbbing blanket, its thick lips quivering in a parody of concern.

[
Something wrong, Ralphie? Where does it hurt? Tell Mother.
]

[
‘You’re not my mother.’
]

[
No – I be the Queenfish! I be loud and I be proud! I got the walk and I got the talk! Actually, I can be whatever I want. You may not know it, but shape-changing is a time-honored custom in Derry.
]

[
‘Do you know the green man Lois saw?’
]

[
Of course! I know all the neighborhood folks!
]

But Ralph sensed momentary puzzlement on that scaly face.

The heat along his forearm cranked up another notch, and Ralph had a sudden realization: if Lois were here now, she would hardly be able to see him. The Queenfish was putting out a pulsing, ever-brightening glow, and it was gradually surrounding him. The glow was red instead of black, but it was still a deathbag, and now he knew what it was like to be on the inside, caught in a web woven from your sickest fears and most traumatic experiences. There was no way to retreat from it, and no way to cut through it, as he had cut through the deathbag which had surrounded Ed’s wedding ring.

If I’m going to escape,
Ralph thought,
I’m going to have to do it by running forward so hard and fast I rip right out the other side
.

The earring was still in his hand. Now he shifted it so that the naked prong at the back was sticking out between the two fingers a catfish had tried to swallow sixty-three years ago. Then he said a brief prayer, not to God but to Lois’s green man.

The catfish leaned further forward, a cartoon leer spreading across its noseless face. The teeth inside that flabby grin looked longer and sharper now. Ralph saw drops of colorless fluid beading the ends of the whiskers and thought,
Poison. Spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair. Man, I’m so scared. Scared to fucking
death.

Lois, screaming far away: [
‘Hurry, Ralph!
YOU HAVE TO HURRY
!’
]

A little boy was screaming from somewhere a lot closer; screaming and waving his right hand, waving the fish clinging to the fingers buried inside the gullet of a pregnant monster that would not let go.

The catfish leaned closer yet. The dress it wore rustled. Ralph could smell his mother’s perfume, Saint Elena, mixing obscenely with the fishy, garbagey aroma of bottom-feeder.

[
I intend Ed Deepneau’s errand to end in success, Ralph; I intend that the boy your friends told you about should die in his mother’s arms, and I want to see it happen. I’ve worked very hard here in Derry, and I don’t feel that’s too much to ask, but it means I have to finish with you right now. I—
]

Ralph took a step deeper into the thing’s garbagey stink. And now he began to see a shape behind the shape of Mother, behind the shape of the Queenfish. He began to see a bright man, a
red
man with cold eyes and a merciless mouth. This man resembled the Christ he had seen only moments ago . . . but not the one which had really hung in his mother’s kitchen corner.

An expression of surprise came into the lidless black eyes of the Queenfish . . . and into the cold eyes of the red man beneath.

[
What do you think you’re doing? Get away from me! Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?
]

[
‘I can think of worse things, pal – my days of playing first base are pretty definitely over.’
]

The voice rose, becoming the voice of his mother when she was angry.

[
Pay attention to me, boy! Pay attention and mind me!
]

For a moment the old commands, given in a voice so eerily like his mother’s, made him hesitate. Then he came on again. The Queenfish shrank back in the rocker, its tail flipping up and down below the hem of the old housedress.

[
JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU
’
RE DOING
?
]

[
‘I don’t know; maybe I just want to give your whiskers a tug. See for myself if they’re real.’
]

And, exerting all of his willpower to keep from shrieking and fleeing, he reached out with his right hand. Lois’s earring felt like a small, warm pebble closed within his fist. Lois herself seemed very close, and Ralph decided that wasn’t surprising, considering how much of her aura he’d taken on. Perhaps she was even a part of him now. The feeling of her presence was deeply comforting.

[
No, you don’t dare! You’ll be paralyzed!
]

[
‘Catfish aren’t poisonous – that was the story of a ten-year-old boy who might have been even more scared than I was.’
]

Ralph reached for the whiskers with the hand concealing the metal thorn, and the massive, scaly head flinched away, as some part of him had known it would. It began to ripple and change, and its fearful red aura began to seep through.
If sickness and pain had a color,
Ralph thought,
that would be it
. And before the change could go any further, before that man he could now see – tall and coldly handsome with his blond hair and glaring red eyes – could step through the shimmer of the illusion it had cast, Ralph drove the sharp point of the earring into one black and bulging fisheye.

It made a terrible buzzing sound – like a cicada, Ralph thought – and tried to draw back. Its rapidly flipping tail produced a sound like a fan with a piece of paper caught in the blades. It slid down in the rocker, which was now changing into something that looked like a throne carved from dull orange rock. And then the tail was gone, the Queenfish was gone, and it was the Crimson King sitting there, his handsome face twisted into a snarl of pain and amazement. One of his eyes glared as red as the eye of a lynx in firelight; the other was filled with the fierce, splintered glow of diamonds.

Ralph reached into the blanket of eggs with his left hand, ripped it away, and saw nothing but blackness on the other side of the abortion. The other side of the deathbag. The way out.

[
You were warned, you Short-Time son of a bitch! You think you can pull my whiskers? Well, let’s see, shall we? Let’s just see!
]

The Crimson King leaned forward again on its throne, its mouth yawning, its remaining eye blazing with red light. Ralph fought the urge to yank his now-empty right hand away. Instead he pistoned it forward toward the mouth of the Crimson King, which yawned wide to engulf it, as that long-ago catfish had done that day in the Barrens.

Things – not flesh – first squirmed and jostled against his hand, then began to bite like horseflies. At the same time Ralph felt real teeth – no,
fangs
– sink into his arm. In a moment, two at the most, the Crimson King would bite through his wrist and swallow his hand whole.

Ralph closed his eyes and was at once able to find that pattern of thought and concentration which allowed movement between the levels – his pain and his fear were no bar to that. Only this time his purpose was not to
move
but to
trigger
. Clotho and Lachesis had planted a booby-trap inside his arm, and the time had come to set it off.

Ralph felt that sensation of
blink
inside his head. The scar on his arm immediately went white-hot and critical. That heat didn’t burn Ralph but flew out from him in an expanding ripple of energy. He was aware of a titanic green flash, so bright that for one moment it was as if the Emerald City of Oz had exploded all around him. Something or someone was screaming. That high, jagged sound would have driven him mad if it had gone on for long, but it didn’t. It was followed by a vast, hollow bang that made Ralph think of the time he had lit an M-80 firecracker and tossed it into a steel culvert.

A sudden rush of force blew past him in a fan of wind and fading green light. He caught a strange, skewed glimpse of the Crimson King, no longer handsome and no longer young but ancient and twisted and less human than the strangest creature to ever flop or hop its way along the Short-Time level of existence. Then something above them opened, revealing darkness shot through with conflicting swirls and rays of color. The wind seemed to blow the Crimson King up toward it, like a leaf in a chimney-flue. The colors began to brighten, and Ralph turned his face away, raising one hand to shield his eyes. He understood that a conduit had opened between the level where he was and the unimaginable levels stacked above it; he also understood that if he looked for long into that brightening glow, those

(
deadlights
)

swirling colors, then death would be not the worst thing that could happen to him but the best. He did not just squeeze his eyes shut; he squeezed his
mind
shut.

A moment later everything was gone – the creature which had identified itself to Ed as the Crimson King, the kitchen in the old house on Richmond Street, his mother’s rocking chair. Ralph was kneeling on thin air about six feet to the right of the Cherokee’s nose, his hands upraised as an oft-beaten child might raise his hands before the approach of a cruel parent, and when he looked between his knees, he saw the Civic Center and the adjacent parking lot directly below him. At first he thought his eyes were being fooled by an optical illusion, because the arc-sodiums in the parking lot seemed to be spreading apart. They almost looked like a crowd of very tall, very skinny people which is starting to break up because the excitement, whatever it was, is over. And the lot itself seemed to be . . . well . . .
expanding
.

Not expanding but getting closer,
Ralph thought coldly.
He’s going down. He’s started his kamikaze run
.

For a moment Ralph was frozen in place, enchanted by the simple wonder of his position. He had become a mythical in-between creature, clearly no god (no god could be as tired and terrified as he was right now) but clearly no such earthbound creature as a man, either. This was what it was really like to fly; to see the earth from above, with no border around it. This—

[
‘
RALPH
!’
]

Her scream was like a shotgun fired beside his ear. Ralph flinched from it, and the moment his gaze left the hypnotic sight of the ground swelling up toward him, he was able to move. He rose to his feet and walked back to the plane. He did this as easily and normally as a man walking down a hallway in his own home. No wind buffeted his face or blew his hair back from his brow, and when his left shoulder passed through the Cherokee’s propeller, the whirling blade harmed him no more than it would have harmed smoke.

For a moment he saw Ed’s pallid, handsome face – the face of the highwayman who’d come riding up to the old inn door in the poem which had always made Carolyn cry – and his previous feeling of mingled pity and regret was replaced by anger. It was difficult to become
really
infuriated with Ed – he was, after all, just another chess-piece being moved across the board – and yet the building he had aimed his airplane at was full of real people.
Innocent
people. Ralph saw something balky, childish, and willful about the dopey expression of disassociation on Ed’s face, and as he passed through the thin skin of the cockpit wall, Ralph thought,
I think that on some level, Ed, you knew the devil had come in. I think you might even have been able to put him out again . . . didn’t Mr C and Mr L say there’s always a choice? If there is, you have to own a piece of this, goddam you
.

For a moment Ralph’s head poked through the ceiling as it had done before, and he knelt again. Now the Civic Center filled the entire windshield of the plane and he understood that it was too late to stop Ed from doing
something
.

He had pulled the doorbell free of the tape. He was holding it in his hand.

Ralph reached into his pocket and gripped the remaining earring, once again holding it between his fingers with the prong sticking out. He curled his other hand into a tube around the wires running between the cardboard carton and the doorbell. Then he closed his eyes and concentrated, creating that flexing sensation in the middle of his head again. There was a sudden hollow, fluttery sensation in his stomach, and he had time to think
Whoa! This is the express elevator!

Then he was down on the Short-Time level where there were no gods or devils, no bald doctors with magic scissors and scalpels, no auras. Down where passing through walls and walking away from plane-crashes was an impossibility. Down on the Short-Time level where he could be seen . . . and Ed, Ralph realized, was doing just that.

‘Ralph?’ It was the drugged voice of a man just waking from his life’s soundest sleep. ‘Ralph Roberts? What are
you
doing here?’

‘Oh, I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop in,’ Ralph said. ‘Drag up a rock, so to speak.’ And with that, he closed his curled hand into a fist and tore the wires out of the box.

‘
No!
’ Ed shrieked. ‘
Oh no, don’t, you’ll spoil everything!’

Yes indeed,
Ralph thought, then reached over Ed’s lap to grab the Cherokee’s control-wheel. The Civic Center was now no more than twelve hundred feet below them, perhaps less. Ralph still didn’t know for sure what was in the box strapped to the co-pilot’s chair, but he had an idea it was probably the
plastique
stuff the terrorists always used in the martial arts movies starring Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal. It was supposed to be fairly stable – not like the nitro in Clouzot’s
Wages of Fear,
certainly – but this was hardly the time to put his trust in the Gospel of Movieland. And even a stable explosive might go off without a detonator when dropped from a height of almost two miles.