[Yes, Ralph. We drew you to us even though we knew it would alter your ka. It’s unfortunate, but the situation demands it.] Now Lois will ask about herself, Ralph thought. Now she must ask.
But she didn’t. She only looked at the two little bald doctors with an inscrutable expression completely unlike any of her usual Our Lois looks. Ralph wondered again how much she knew or guessed, marvelled again that he didn’t have the slightest clue… and then these speculations were swallowed in a fresh wave of anger.
[“You guys… man oh man, you guys… “He didn’t finish, although he might have, if Lois hadn’t been standing beside him: You guys have done quite a bit more than just mess with our sleep, haven’t you? I don’t know about Lois, but I had a nice little niche in the Purpose… which means that you deliberately made me an exception to the very rules you’ve spent your whole lives upholding. In a way, I’ve become as much a blank as this guy we’re supposed to find. How did Clotho put it? “All bets are off “How very fucking true.
Lois: [“You talked about using our powers. What powers?”] Lachesis turned to her, clearly delighted at the change of subject.
He pressed his hands together, palm to palm, then opened them in a curiously Oriental gesture. What appeared between them were two swift images: Ralph’s hand producing a bolt of cold blue fire as it cut the air in a karate chop, and Lois’s forefinger producing bright blue-gray pellets of light that looked like nuclear cough-drops.
Ralph: [“Yes, all right, we have something, but it isn’t reliable.
It’s like-”] He concentrated and created an image of his own: hands opening the back of a radio and removing a pair of AA batteries encrusted with blue-gray crud. Clotho and Lachesis frowned at him, not getting it.
Lois: [“He’s trying to say we can’t always do that, and when we can, we can’t do it for long. Our batteries go flat, you see.”] Understanding mixed with amused incredulity broke over their features.
Ralph: [“What’s so damned funny?”
Clotho: [Nothing… everything. you have no concept of both strange you and Lois seem to us-incredible, wise and perceptive at one moment, incredibly naie at the next, Your batteries, as you call them, need never go flat, because the two of you are standing next to a bottomless reservoir of power. We assumed that, since you have both already drunk from it, you must surely know about it.] Ralph: [“What in the world are you talking about?”] Lachesis made that curiously Oriental hand-opening gesture again.
This time Ralph saw Mrs. Perrine, walking stiffly upright within an aura the color of a West Pointer’s dress uniform. Saw a shaft of gray brilliance, as thin and straight as the quill of a porcupine, poke out of this aura.
This image was overlaid by one of a skinny woman encased in a smoggy brown aura. She was looking out a car window. A voiceLois’s-spoke: Oooh, Mina, isn’t that the dearest little house? A moment later there was a soft, indrawn whistle and a narrow ray of the woman’s aura poked out from behind her neck.
This was followed by a third image, brief but strong: Ralph reaching through the slot in the bottom of the information booth and gripping the wrist of the woman with the brambly orange aura… except that all at once the aura around her left arm no longer was orange. All at once it was the faded turquoise he now thought of as Ralph Roberts Blue.
The image faded. Lachesis and Clotho stared at Ralph and Lois; they stared back, shocked.
Lois: [“Oh, no! We can’t do that! it’s like-”]
Image: Two men in striped prison suits and little black masks tiptoeing out of a bank vault, carrying bulging sacks with the $ symbol printed on the sides.
Ralph: [“No, even worse. It’s like-”] Image: A bat flies in through an open casement window, makes two swooping circles in a silvery shaft of moonlight, then turns into Ralph Lugosi in a cape and old-fashioned tuxedo. He approaches t sleeping woman-not a young, rosy virgin but old Mrs. Perrine in a sensible flannel nightgown-and bends over to suck her aura.
When Ralph looked back at Clotho and Lachesis, both of them were shaking their heads vehemently.
Lachesis: [No No, no, no! You couldn’t be more wrong! Have you not wondered why you are Short-Timers, marking the spans of your lives in decades rather than in centuries? Your lives are short because you burn like bonfires! When you draw energy from yourfellow Short-Timers, it’s like-” Image: A child at the seashore, a lovely little girl with golden ringlets bouncing on her shoulders, runs down the beach to where the waves break. In one hand she carries a red plastic bucket. She kneels and fills it from the vast gray-blue Atlantic.
Clotho: [You are like that child, Ralph and Lois-your fellow Short-Timers are like the sea. Do you understand now?] Ralph: [“There’s really that much of this aural energy in the human race?”] Lachesis: [You still don’t understand. That’s how much there is-I Lois broke in. Her voice was trembling, although whether with fear or ecstasy, Ralph could not tell.
[“That’s how much there is in each one of us, Ralph. That’s how much there is in every human being on the face of the earth!”] Ralph whistled softly and looked from Lachesis to Clotho. They were nodding confirmation.
[“You’re saying we can stock up on this energy from whoever happens to be handy? That it’s safe for the people we take it from?”] Clotho: [Yes. You could no more hurt them than you could empty the Atlantic with a child’s beach-pat’ll Ralph hoped that was so, because he had an idea that he and Lois had been unconsciously borrowing energy like mad-it was the only explanation he could think of for all the compliments he had been getting. People telling him that he looked great.
People telling him that he must be over his insomnia, had to be, because he looked so rested and healthy. That he looked younger.
Hell, he thought, I am younger.
The moon had set again, and Ralph realized with a start that the sun would soon be coming up on Friday morning. It was high time they got back to the central issue of this discussion.
[“Let’s cut to the chase here, fellows. Why have you gone to all this trouble? What is it we’re supposed to stop?”] And then, before either of them could reply, he was struck by a flash of insight too strong and bright to be questioned or denied.
[“It’s Susan Day, isn’t it? He means to kill Susan Day. To assassinate her.”] Clotho: [Yes, but-I Lachesis: [-but that isn’t what matters-”
Ralph: [“Come on, you guys-don’t you think the time has come to lay the rest of your cards on the table?”] Lachesis: [Yes, Ralph, That time has come.] There had been little or no touching among them since they had formed the circle and risen through the intervening hospital floors to the roof, but now Lachesis put a gentle, feather-light arm around Ralph’s shoulders and Clotho took Lois by the arm, as a gentleman of a bygone age might have led a lady onto a dance-floor.
Scent of apples, taste of honey, texture of wool… but this time Ralph’s delight in that mingled sensory input could not mask the deep disquiet he felt as Lachesis turned him to the left and then walked with him toward the edge of the flat hospital roof.
Like many larger and more important cities, Derry seemed to have been built in the most geographically unsuitable place the original settlers could find. The downtown area existed on the steep sides of a valley; the Kenduskeag River flowed sluggishly through the overgrown tangle of the Barrens at this valley’s lowest level. From their vantage point atop the hospital, Derry looked like a town whose heart had been pierced by a narrow green dagger… except in the darkness, the dagger was black.
One side of the valley was Old Cape, site of a seedy postwar housing development and a glossy, flossy new mall. The other side contained most of what people meant when they talked about “downtown.”