Ralph’s hand tightened over Lois’s.

[“Ralph, what is it? I can hear you thinking-I’m sure I can-but it’s like listening to someone whisper under his breath.”] [“I was thinking that I want to bust that little bastard’s chops for him, Lois.

Maybe we could teach him what it’s like to lie awake at night.

What do you think?” Her grip on his hand tightened. She nodded.

They reached a place where the narrow corridor they’d been following branched into diverging paths. That low, steady buzz was coming from the left hand one, and not very far up it, either, by the sound.

It was now impossible for them to walk side by side, and as they worked their way toward the end, the passage grew narrower still.

Ralph was finally obliged to begin sidling along.

The reddish exudate Atropos left behind was very thick here, dripping down the jumbled stacks of souvenirs and making little puddles on the dirt floor. Lois was holding his hand with painful tightness now, but Ralph didn’t complain.

[“It’s like the Civic Center, Ralph-he spends a lot of time here.”] Ralph nodded. The question was, what did Mr. A. come donx,n this aisle to commune with? They were coming to the end now, it was blocked by a solid wall of junk, and he still couldn’t see what was making that buzzing sound. It was now starting to drive him crazy; it was like having a horsefly trapped in the middle Of Your head. As they approached the end of the passage, he became more and more sure that what they were looking for was on the other side of the wall of junk which blocked it-they would either have to retrace their steps and try to find a way around, or break through.

Either choice might consume more time than they could afford.

Ralph felt nibbles of desperation at the back of his mind.

But the corridor did not dead-end; on the left there was a crawlspace beneath a dining-room table piled high with dishes and stacks of green paper and…

Green paper? No, not quite. Stacks of bills. Tens, twenties, and fifties were piled up in random profusion on the dishes. There was a choke of hundreds in a cracked gravy-boat, and a rolled-up five-hundred-dollar bill poking drunkenly out of a dusty wineglass.

[“Ralph! My God, it’s a fortune!”]

She wasn’t looking at the table but at the other wall of the passageway. The last five feet had been constructed of banded gray-green bricks of currency. They were in an alleyway which was literally made of money, and Ralph realized he could now answer another of the questions that had been troubling him: where Ed had been getting his dough. Atropos was rolling in it… but Ralph had an idea that the little bald-headed sonofabitch still had trouble getting dates.

He bent down a little to get a better look into the crawlspace underneath the table. There appeared to be yet another chamber on the other side, this one very small. A slow red glow waxed and waned in there like the beating of a heart. It cast uneasy pulses of light on their shoes.

Ralph pointed, then looked at Lois. She nodded. He dropped to his knees and crawled beneath the money-laden table, and into the shrine Atropos had created around the thing which lay in the middle of the floor. It was what they had been sent to find, he hadn’t a single doubt about it, but he still had no idea what it was. The object, not much bigger than the sort of marbles children call croakers, was wrapped in a deathbag as impenetrable as the center of a black hole.

Oh, great-lovely. Now what?

[“Ralph.” Do you hear someting? It’s very faint.

He looked at her dubiously, then glanced around. He had already come to hate this cramped space, and although he was not claustrophobic by nature, he now felt a panicky desire to get away squeezing into his thoughts. A very distinct voice spoke up in his head. It’s not j I just what I want, Ralph,-it’s what I need. I’ll do my best to hang in with you, hut if you don’t finish whatever the hell it is you’re supposed to be doing in here soon, it won’t make any difference what either of us want-I’m just going to take over and run like hell.

The controlled terror in that voice didn’t surprise him, because this really was a horrible place-not a room at all but the bottom of a deep shaft whose circular walls were constructed of rickrack and stolen goods: toasters, footstools, clock-radios, cameras, books, crates, shoes, rakes. Dangling almost right in front of Ralph’s eyes was a battered saxophone on a frayed strap with the word JAKE printed on it in dust-dulled rhinestones. Ralph reached out to grab it, wanting to get the damned thing out of his face. Then he imagined the removal of this one object starting a landslide that would bring the walls down on them, burying them alive. He pulled his hand back. At the same time he opened his mind and senses as fully as he could. For a moment he thought he did hear something-a faint sigh, like the whisper of the ocean in a seashell-but then it was gone.

[“If there are voices in here, I can’t hear them, Lois-that damned thing is drowning them out.”] He pointed at the object in the middle of the circle-black beyond any previously held conception of black, a deathbag which was the apotheosis of all deathbags. But Lois was shaking her head.

[“No, not drowning them out. Sucking them dry. “I She looked at the screaming black thing with horror and loathing.

[“That thing is sucking the life out of all the stuff piled up around it… and it’s trying to suck the life out of us, too.”] Yes, of course it was. Now that Lois had actually said it out loud, Ralph could feel the deathbag-or the object inside it-pulling at something far down in his head, yanking at it, twisting at it, shoving at it…

. trying to pull it out like a tooth from its pink socket of gum.

Trying to suck the life out of them? Close, but no cigar. Ralph didn’t think it was their lives the thing inside the deathbag wanted, nor their souls… at least, not exactly. It was their life-force it wanted. Their ka.

Lois’s eyes widened as she picked up this thought… and then they shifted to a place just beyond his right shoulder. She leaned forward on her knees and reached out.

[“Lois, I wouldn’t do that-you could bring the whole place dow around our-”] Too late. She yanked something free, looked at it with horrified understanding, and then held it out to him.

[“It’s still alive-everything that’s ’ in here is still alive. I don’t kno how that can be but somehow it is. But they’re faint. What she was holding out to him was a small white sneaker that belonged to a woman or a child. As Ralph took it, he heard it singing softly in a distant voice. The sound was as lonely as November wind are they so faint?” on an overcast afternoon, but incredibly sweet, as well-an antidote to the endless bray of the black thing on the floor.

And it was a voice he knew. He was sure it was.

There was a maroon splatter on the sneaker’s toe. Ralph at first thought it was chocolate milk, then recognized it for what it really was: dried blood. In that instant he was outside the Red Apple again, grabbing Nat before Helen could drop her. He remembered how Helen’s feet had tangled together; how she had stumbled backward, leaning against the Red Apple’s door like a drunk against a lamppost, holding out her hands to him. Give me my bay-ee… gih me Natalie.

He knew the voice because it was Helen’s voice. This sneaker had been on her foot that day, and the drops of blood on the toe had come either from Helen’s smashed nose or from Helen’s lacerated cheek.

It sang and sang, its voice not quite buried beneath the buzz of the thing in the deathbag, and now that Ralph’s ears-or whatever passed for ears in the world of auras-were all the way open, he could hear all the other voices of all the other.objects. They sang like a lost choir.

Alive. Singing.

They could sing, all the things lining these walls could sing, because their owners could still sing.