We speak to Short-Timers so infrequently that we forget how, I didn’t mean to hurt you, Ralph and Lois.] Lois told him it was all right, that she quite understood, but tears were trickling down her cheeks, and Ralph felt them burning in his own eyes. The idea that Bill could be gone-that the little shithead in the dirty smock had gotten him-was hard to grasp. Was he to believe McGovern would never hoist that satiric, bristly eyebrow of his again? Never bitch about how cruddy it was to get old again-?
Impossible, He turned suddenly to Clotho.
[“Show us.”] Clotho, surprised, almost dithering: [I… I don’t think-] Ralph: [“Seeing is believing to us Short-Time schmoes. Didn’t you guys ever hear that one?”] Lois spoke up unexpectedly.
[“Yes-show us. But only enough so we can know it and accept it.
Try not to make us feel any worse than we already do.”] Clotho and Lachesis looked at each other, then seemed to shrug without actually moving their narrow shoulders. Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating a blue-green peacock’s fan of light.
In it Ralph saw a small, eerily perfect representation of the I.C.U. corridor. A nurse pushing a pharmacy cart came into this arc and crossed it. At the far side of the viewing area, she actually seemed to curve for a moment before passing out of view.
Lois, delighted in spite of the circumstances: [“It’s like watching a movie in a soapbubble!” Now McGovern and Mr. Plum stepped out of Bob Polhurst’s room. McGovern had put on. an old Derry High letter sweater and his friend was zipping up a jacket; they were clearly giving up the deathwatch for another night. McGovern was walking slowly, lagging behind Mr. Plum. Ralph could see that his downstairs neighbor and sometime friend didn’t look good at all.
He felt Lois’s hand slip onto his upper arm and grip hard. He put his hand over hers.
Halfway to the elevator, McGovern stopped, braced himself against the wall with one hand, and lowered his head. He looked like a totally blown runner at the end of a marathon. For a moment Mr. Plum went on walking. Ralph could see his mouth moving and thought, He doesn’t know he’s talking to thin air-not yet, at least.
Suddenly Ralph didn’t want to see any more.
Inside the blue-green arc, McGovern put one hand to his chest.
The other went to his throat and began to rub, as if he were checking for wattles. Ralph couldn’t tell for sure, but he thought his downstairs neighbor’s eyes looked frightened. He remembered the grimace of hate on Doc #3’s face when he realized a Short-Timer had presumed to step into his business with one of the local strays. What had he said?
[I’ll fuck you over, Shorts. I’ll fuck you over big-time. And I’ll fuck your friends over. Do you get me?] A terrible idea, almost a certainty, dawned in Ralph’s mind as he watched Bill McGovern crumple slowly to the floor.
Lois: [“Make it go away-please make it go away!” She buried her face against Ralph’s shoulder. Clotho and Lachesis exchanged uneasy looks, and Ralph realized he had already begun to revise his mental picture of them as omniscient and all-poNN,erfLil.
They might be supernatural creatures, but Dr. Joyce Brothers then, were not. He had an idea they weren’t much shakes at predicting the future, either; fellows with really efficient crystal balls probably wouldn’t have a look like that in their entire repertoire. they’re feeling their way along, just like the rest of us, Ralph thought, and he felt a certain reluctant sympathy for Mr. C. and Mr. L.
The blue-green arc of light floating in front of Lachesis-and the images trapped inside it-suddenly disappeared, Clotho, sounding defensive: [Please remember that it was your choice to see, Ralph and Lois. We did not show you that milli gli.] Ralph barely heard this.
His terrible idea was still developing, like a photograph one does not wish to see but cannot turn away from.
He was thinking of Bill’s hat… Rosalie’s faded blue bandanna. and Lois’s missing diamond earrings.
[I’ll fuck your friends over, Shorts-do you get me? I hope so.
I most certainly do.] He looked from Clotho to Lachesis, his sympathy for them disappearing. What replaced it was a dull pulse of anger.
Lachesis had said there was no such thing as accidental death, and that included McGovern’s. Ralph had no doubt that Atropos had taken McGovern when he had for one simple reason: he’d wanted to hurt Ralph, to punish Ralph for messing into… what had Dorrance called it.Long-time business.
Old Dor had suggested he not do that-a good policy, no doubt, but he, Ralph, had really had no choice… because these two bald half-pints had messed in with him. They had, in a very real sense, gotten Bill McGovern killed.
Clotho and Lachesis saw his anger and took a step backward although they seemed to do it without actually moving their feet), their faces becoming more uneasy than ever.
[“You two are the reason Bill McGovern’s dead. That’s the truth of it, isn’t it?”] Clotho: [Please… if you’ll just let us finish explaiming-I Lois was staring at Ralph, worried and scared.
[“Ralph? What’s wrong? Why are you angry?”] [“Don’t you get it?
This little setup of theirs cost Bill McGovern his life. We’re here because Atropos has either done something these guys don’t like or is getting ready to-“] Lachesis: [You’re jumping to conclusions, Ralph-” [“-but there’s one very basic problem: he knows we see him!
Atropos KNOWS we see him!” Lois’s eyes widened with terror… and with understanding.
CHAPTER 18
A small white hand fell on Ralph’s shoulder and lay there like smoke.
[Please… if you’ll only let us explain-] He felt that change-that blink-happen in his body even before he was fully aware he had willed it. He could feel the wind again, coming out of the dark like the blade of a cold knife, and shivered.
The touch of Clotho’s hand was now no more than a phantom vibration just below the surface of his skin. He could see all three of them, but now they were milky and faint. Now they were ghosts.
I’ve stepped down. Not all the way back down to where we started, but at least down to a level where they can have almost no physical contact with me. My aura, my balloon-string… yes, I’m sure they could get at those things, but the physical part of me that lives my real life in the Short-Time world? No way, jose.
Lois’s voice, as distant as a fading echo: [“Ralph What are you He looked at the ghostly images of Clotho and Lachesis, Now they looked not just uneasy or slightly guilty but downright scared.
Their faces were distorted and hard to see, but their fear was nonetheless unmistakable.
Clotho, his voice distant but audible: [Come back, Ralph.”
Please come back.”
“If I do, will you quit playing games and be straight with us?”
Lachesis, fading, disappearing: [Yes! Yes.”
Ralph made that interior blink happen again. The three of them came back into focus. At the same time, color once more filled up the spaces of the world and time resumed its former sprint-he observed the waning moon sliding down the far side of the sky like a dollop of glowing mercury. Lois threw her arms around his neck, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if she was hugging him or trying to strangle him.
[“Thank God! I thought you were going to leave me.”] Ralph kissed her and for a moment his head was filled with a pleasant jumble of sensory input: the taste of fresh honey, a texture like combed wool, and the smell of apples. A thought blipped across his mind (what would it be like to make love up here?) and he banished it at once. He needed to think and speak very carefully in the next few (minutes?
hours? days?) and thinking about stuff like that would only make it that much harder. He turned to the little bald doctors and measured them with his eyes.