He felt around with his other foot, very aware that if he fell, he was probably going to end up in a place far beyond the reach of Derry Rescue. Just above his eyes, a reddish worm poked out of the earth, dribbling little crumbles of dirt down on Ralph’s forehead.
For what seemed like an eternity he felt nothing, and then his foot found smooth wood-not a root this time, but something like a real step.
He slid down, still holding Lois around the waist, and waited to see if the thing he was standing on would hold or snap under their combined weight.
It held, and it was wide enough for both of them. Ralph looked down and saw that it was the top step of a narrow staircase which curved down into the red-tinged dark. It had been built for-and perhaps by-a creature that was a lot shorter than they were, making it necessary for them to hunch, but it was still better than the nightmare of the last few moments.
Ralph looked at the ragged wedge of daylight above them, his eyes gazing out of his dirt-and sweat-streaked face with an expression of dumb longing. Daylight had never looked so sweet or so distant. He turned back to Lois and nodded to her. She squeezed his hand Itlci nodded back. Bending over, cringing each time a dangling root touched their necks or backs, they started down the staircase.
The descent seemed endless. The red light grew brighter, the stench of Atropos grew thicker, and Ralph was aware that they were both,going up” as they went down; it was either that or be flattened by the smell.
He continued telling himself that they were doing what they had to do, and that there must be a timekeeper on an operation this big-someone who would give them a poke if and when the schedule got too tight for comfort-but he kept worrying, just the same. Because there might not be a timekeeper, or an jump, or a team of refs in zebra-striped shirts. All bets are off, Clotho had said. just as Ralph was starting to wonder if the stairs went all the way down into hell itself, they ended. A short stone-lined corridor, no more than forty inches high and twenty feet long, led to an arched doorway. Beyond it, that red glow pulsed and flared like the reflected glow of an open oven.
[“Come on, Lois, but be ready for anything. Be ready for him.”]
She nodded, hitched at her wayward slip again, then walked beside him up the narrow passage. Ralph kicked something that wasn’t a stone and bent over to pick it up. It was a red plastic cylinder, wider at one end than at the other. After a moment he realized what it was: a jumprope handle. Three-six-nine, lion, the goose drank wine.
Don’t butt into what doesn’t concern you, Short-Time, Atropos had said, but he had butted in, and not just because of what the little bald doctors called ka, either. He had gotten involved because what Atropos was up to was his concern, whatever the little creep might think to the contrary. Derry was his town, Lois Chasse was his friend, and Ralph found within himself a sincere desire to make Doc #3 sorry he’d ever seen Lois’s diamond earrings.
He flipped the jumprope handle away and started walking again.
A moment later he and Lois passed under the arch and simply stood there, staring into Atropos’s underground apartment.
With their wide eyes and linked hands, they looked more like children in a fairy-tale than ever-not Peter Pan and Wendy now but Hansel and Gretel, coming upon the witch’s candy house after days spent wandering in the trackless forest.
[“Oh, Ralph. Oh my God, Ralph… do you see?”] [“shhh, Lois. shhh.” Directly ahead of them was a small, mean chamber which seemed to be a combination kitchen and bedroom. The room was simultaneously sordid and creepy. Standing in the center was a low round table which Ralph thought was the amputated top half of a barrel.
The remains of a meal-some gray, rancid gruel that looked like liquefied brains congealing in a chipped soup tureen-stood on it.
There was a single dirty folding chair. To the right of the table was a primitive commode which consisted of a rusty steel drum with a toilet-seat balanced on top of it. The smell rising from this was incredibly foul. The room’s only decoration was a full-length brassbordered mirror on one wall, its reflective surface so age-darkened that the Ralph and Lois captured within it looked as if they might have been floating in ten or twelve feet of water.
To the left of the mirror was a stark sleeping accommodation which consisted of a filthy mattress and a burlap sack stuffed with straw or feathers. Both pillow and mattress glowed and raved with the nightsweats of the creature who used them. The dreams inside, that burlap pillow would drive me insane, Ralph thought.
Somewhere, God only knew how much farther under the earth, water was dripping hollowly.
On the far side of the apartment was another, higher arch, through which they could see a jumbled, surreal storage area. Ralph actually blinked two or three times to try to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.
This is the place, all right, he thought. Whatever we came to find, it’s here.
Lois began to drift toward this second arch as if hypnotized. Her mouth was quivering with dismay, but her eyes were full of helpless curiosity-it was the expression, he was quite sure, that must have been on the face of Bluebeard’s wife when she had used the key which unlocked the door to her husband’s forbidden room. Ralph was suddenly sure that Atropos was lurking just inside that arch with his rusty scalpel poised. He hurried after Lois and stopped her just before she could step through. He grasped her upper arm, then put a finger to his lips and shook his head at her before she could speak.
He hunkered down with the fingers of one hand tented on the packed dirt floor, looking like a sprinter awaiting the crack of the starter’s gun. Then he launched himself through the arch (relishing the eager response of his body even at this moment), hitting on his shoulder and rolling. His feet struck a cardboard box and knocked it over, spilling out a jumble of stuff: mismatched gloves and socks, a couple of old paperbacks, a pair of Bermuda shorts, a screwdriver with smears of shaft.
Ralph got to his knees, looking back toward Lois, who was standing in the doorway and staring at him with her hands clasped under her chin. There was no one on either side of the archway, and really no room for anyone. More boxes were stacked on either side. Ralph read the printing on them with a kind of bemused wonder: jack Daniel’s, Gilbey’s, Smirnoff, J amp;B. Atropos, it seemed, was as fond of liquor cartons as anyone else who couldn’t bear to throw anything away.
[“Ralph? Is it safe?”] The word was a joke, but he nodded his head and held out his hand. She hurried toward him, giving her slip another sharp upward yank as she came and looking about herself in growing amazement.
Standing on the other side of the arch, in Atropos’s grim little apartment, this storage area had looked large. Now that they were actually in it, Ralph saw it went well beyond that; rooms this big were usually called warehouses. Aisles wandered among great, tottery piles of junk. Only the stuff by the door had actually been boxed; the rest had been piled any whichway, creating something which was two parts maze and three parts booby-trap. Ralph decided that even warehouse was too small a word-this was an underground suburb, and Atropos might be lurking anywhere within it… and if he was here, he was probably watching them.
Lois didn’t ask what they were looking at; he saw by her face that she already knew. When she did speak, it was in a dreamy tone that sent a chill scampering up Ralph’s back.
[“He must be so very old, Ralph.”] Yes. So very old.
Twenty yards into the room, which was lit with the same sunken, sourceless red glow as the stairway, Ralph could see a large spoked wheel lying atop a cane-backed chair which was, in turn, standing on top of a splintery old clothes press. Looking at that wheel brought a deeper chill; it was as if the metaphor his mind had seized to help grasp the concept of ka had become real. Then he noted the rusty ired iron strip which circled the wheel’s outer circumference and real it had probably come from one of those Gay Nineties bikes that looked like overgrown tricycles. all right, and it’s a hundred years old if it’s a day. It’s a bicycle whee, all ri -how day, he thought. That led him to wonder how many people many thousands or tens of thousands-had died in and around Derry since Atropos had somehow transported this wheel down here. And of those thousands, how many had been Random deaths?