And how far back does he go? How many hundreds of years?

No way of telling, of course; maybe all the way to the beginning, whenever or however that had been. And during that time, he had taken a little something from everyone he had fucked with… and here it all was.

Here it all was.

[“Ralph.”] He looked around and saw that Lois was holding out both hands.

In one was a Panama hat with a crescent bitten from the brim. In the other was a black nylon pocket-comb, the kind you could buy in any convenience store for a buck twenty-nine. A ghostly glimmer of orange-yellow still clung to it, which didn’t surprise Ralph much.

Each time the comb’s owner had used it, it must have picked up a little of that glow from both his aura and his balloon-string, like dandruff. It also didn’t surprise him that the comb should have been with

McGovern’s hat; the last time he’d seen those two things, they’d been together. He remembered Atropos’s sarcastic grin as he swept the Panama from his head and pretended to use the comb on his own bald dome.

And then he jumped up and clicked his heels together.

Lois was pointing at an old rocking chair with a broken runner.

[“The hat was right there, on the seat. The comb was underneath.

It’s Mr. Wyzer’s, isn’t it?”] [“Yes.] She held it out to him immediately.

[“You take it. I’m not as ditzy as Bill always thought, but sometimes I lose things. And if I lost this, I’d never forgive myself.”] He took the comb, started to put it into his back pocket, then thought how easily Atropos had plucked it from that same location.

Easy as falling off a log, it had been. He put it into his front pants pocket instead, then looked back at Lois, who was gazing at McGovern’s bitten hat with the sad wonder of Hamlet looking at the skull of his old pal Yorick. When she looked up, Ralph saw tears in her eyes.

[“He loved this hat. He thought he looked very dashing and debonair when he had it on. He didn’t just look like Bill-but he thought he looked good, and that’s the important part. Wouldn’t you say so, Ralph?”] [“Yes.”] She tossed the hat back into the seat of the old rocker and turned to examine a box of what looked like rummage-sale clothes. As soon as her back was to him, Ralph squatted down, peering beneath the chair, hoping to see a splintered double gleam in the darkness. If Bill’s hat and Joe’s comb were both here, then maybe Lois’s earringsThere was nothing beneath the rocker but dust and a pink knitted baby bootee.

Should have known that’d be too easy, Ralph thought, getting to his feet again. He suddenly felt exhausted. They had found Joe’s comb with no trouble at all, and that was good, absolutely great, but Ralph was afraid it had also been a spectacular case of beginner’s luck.

They still had Lois’s earrings to worry about… and doing whatever else it was they had been sent here to do, of course. And what was that? He didn’t know, and if someone from upstairs was sending instructions, he wasn’t receiving them.

[“Lois, do you have any idea what-“] [“Shhhh!” [“What is it?

Lois is it him?”] [“No.” Be quiet, Ralph.” Be quiet and listen!”] He listened. At first he heard nothing, and then the clenching sensation-the blink-came inside his head again. This time it was very slow, very cautious. He slipped upward a little farther, as lightly as a feather lifted in a draft of warm air. He became aware of a long, 6 low groaning sound, like an endlessly creaking door, There was something familiar about it-not in the sound itself, but in its associations. It was like-a burglar alarm, or maybe a smoke-detector.

It’s telling us here it is. It’s calling us.

Lois seized his hand with fingers that were as cold as ice.

[“That’s it, Ralph-that’s what we’re looking for. Do you hear it?”] Yes, of course he did. But whatever that sound was, it had nothing to

???? do with Lois’s earrings… and without Lois’s earrings, he wasn’t

???? leaving this place.

???? [“Come on, Ralph! Come on! We have to find it!”]

????

He let her lead him deeper into the room. Atropos’s souvenirs were piled at least three feet higher than their heads in most places.

How a shrimp like him had managed this trick Ralph didn’t know -levitation, maybe-but the result was that he quickly lost all sense of direction as they twisted, turned, and occasionally seemed to double back. All he knew for sure was that low groaning sound kept getting louder in his ears; as they began to draw near its source, it became an insectile buzzing which Ralph found increasingly unpleasant. He kept expecting to round a corner and find a giant locust staring at him with dull brownish-black eyes as big as grapefruit.

Although the separate auras of the objects which filled the storage vault had faded like the scent of flower-petals pressed between the pages of a book, they were still there beneath Atropos’s stenchand at this level of perception, with all their senses exquisitely awake and attuned, it was impossible not to sense those auras and be affected by them. These mute reminders of the Random dead were both terrible and pathetic. The place was more than a museum or a packrat’s lair, Ralph realized; it was a profane church where Atropos took his own version of Communion-grief for bread, tears for wine.

Their stumbling course through the narrow zigzag rows was a gruesome, almost shattering experience. Each not-quite-aimless turn I n presented a hundred more objects Ralph wished he had never seen and would not have to remember; each voiced its own small cry of pain and bewilderment. He did not have to wonder if Lois shared his feelings-she was sobbing steadily and quietly beside him.

Here was a child’s battered Flexible Flyer sled with the knotted towrope still draped over the steering bar. The boy to whom it had belonged had died of convulsions on a crisp January day in 1953, Here was a majorette’s baton with its shaft wrapped in purpleand-white spirals of crepe-the colors of Grant Academy. She had been raped and bludgeoned to death with a rock in the fall of 1967.

Her killer, who had never been caught, had stuffed her body into a small cave where her bones-along with the bones of two other unlucky victims-still lay.

Here was the cameo brooch of a woman who had been struck by a falling brick while walking down Main Street to buy the new issue of Vogue,-if she had left her home thirty seconds earlier or later, she would have been fine.

Here was the buck knife of a man who had been killed in a hunting accident in 1937.

Here was the compass of a Boy Scout who had fallen and broken his neck while hiking on Mount Katahdin.

The sneaker of a little boy named Gage Creed, run down by a speeding tanker-truck on Route 15 in Ludlow.

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random… and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

Lois, sobbing: [“I hate him! I hate him so much."’] He knew what she meant. It was one thing to hear Clotho and Lachesis say that Atropos was also part of the big picture, that he might even serve some Higher Purpose himself, and quite another to see the faded Boston Bruins cap of a little boy who had fallen into an overgrown cellar-hole and died in the dark, died in agony, died with no voice left after six hours spent screaming for his mother.

Ralph reached out and briefly touched the cap. Its owner’s name had been Billy Weatherbee. His final thought had been of ice cream.