[“Lois? Are you okay?”] [“Yes… but drained. I don’t have the slightest idea bott, I’m supposed to get back to those stairs under the tree, let alone climb them. I’m not sure I can even stand UP.”] Ralph opened his eyes, put his hands on his thighs above the knees, and leaned forward again. Lying on the floor where the deathbag had been was a man’s wedding ring. He could easily read what had been engraved on the wide inner curve: He-ED 8-5-87.
Helen Deepneau and Edward Deepneau-Married on August 5th, 1987.
It was what they had come for. It was Ed’s token. All that remained now was to pick it up… slip it into the watchpocket of his pants… find Lois’s earrings… and get the hell out of here.
As he reached for the ring, a flicker of verse slipped through his mind-not Stephen Dobyns this time but J. R. R. Tolkien, who had invented the hobbits Ralph had last thought of in Lois’s cozy, picture-filled living room. It had been almost thirty years since he had read Tolkien’s story of Frodo and Gandalf and Sauron, the Dark Lord-a story which contained a token very similar to this one, now that he thought about it-but the lines were momentarily as clear as the scissors-blades had been only moments before: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
I won’t be able to pick it up, he thought. It will be as tightly bound to the wheel of ka as Lois and I are, and I won’t be able to pick it up. Either that, or it will be like grasping a live high-tension wire, and I’ll be dead before I know it’s happening.
Except he didn’t really believe either of those things was going to happen. If the ring was not his for the taking, why had it been protected by the deathbag? If the ring was not his for the taking, why had the forces which stood behind Clotho and Lachesis-and Dorrance, he couldn’t forget Dorrance-set him and Lois upon this journey in the first place?
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, Ralph thought, and closed his fingers around Ed’s wedding ring. For a moment he felt a deep, glassy pain in his hand and wrist and forearm; at the same moment, the softly singing voices of the objects which Atropos had hoarded here rose in a great, harmonic shout.
Ralph made a sound-perhaps a scream, perhaps only a moanand lifted the ring up, clenched tightly in his right hand. A sense of victory sang in his veins like wine, or like[“Ralph.
He looked at her, but Lois was looking down at where Ed’s ring had been, her eyes dark with a mixture of fear and confusion.
Where Ed’s ring had been; where Ed’s ring still was. It lay exactly as it had lain, a glimmering gold circlet with HD-ED 8-5-87 inscribed around the inner arc.
Ralph felt an instant of dizzy disorientation and controlled it with an effort. He opened his hand, half-expecting the ring to be gone in spite of what his senses told him, but it still lay in the center of his palm, neatly enclosed within the fork where his loveline and his lifeline diverged, glimmering in the baleful red light of this nasty place. HD-ED 8-5-87.
The two rings were identical.
One in his hand; one on the floor; absolutely no difference. At least none that Ralph could see.
Lois reached for the ring which had replaced the one Ralph had picked up, hesitated, then grasped it. As they watched, ghost-gold glowed just above the chamber’s floor, then solidified into a third wedding band. Like the other two, HD-ED 8-5-87 was inscribed on the inner curve.
Ralph found himself thinking of yet another story-not Tolkien’s long tale of the Ring, but a story by Dr. Seuss which he had read one of Carolyn’s sister’s kids back in the fifties. That was a long time ago, but he had never completely forgotten the story, which had been richer and darker than Dr. Seuss’s usual jingle-jangle nonsense about rats and bats and troublesome cats. It was called The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, and Ralph supposed it really wasn’t any wonder that the story had come to mind now.
Poor Bartholomew was a country hayseed who had the bad luck to be in the big city when the King happened by. You were supposed to take your hat off in the presence of that august personage, and Bartholomew had certainly tried, but without any luck; each time he took his hat off, another one, identical to the last, appeared beneath it.
[“Ralph, what’s happening? What does it mean?”]
a He shook his head without answering, eyes moving from the ring I on his palm to the one in Lois’s hand to the one on the floor, around and around and around. Three rings, all of them identical, just like the hats Bartholomew Cubbins had kept trying to take off. The poor kid had gone on trying to make his manners to the King, Ralph remembered, even as the executioner had led him up a curving flight of stairs to the place where he would be beheaded for the crime of disrespect…
Except that wasn’t right, because after awhile the hats on poor Bartholomew’s head did begin to change, to grow ever more fabulous and rococo.
And are the rings the same, Ralph? Are you sure?
No, he guessed he wasn’t. When he’d picked up the first one, he had felt a deep, momentary ache spread up his arm like rheumatism, but Lois had shown no signs of pain when she picked up the second one.
And the voices-I didn’t hear them shout when she picked up the one she has.
Ralph leaned forward and grasped the third ring. There was no jolt of pain and no shout from the objects which formed the walls of the room-they just kept singing softly. Meanwhile, a fourth ring materialized where the other three had. been, materialized exactly like another hat on the head of hapless Bartholomew Cubbins, but Ralph barely glanced at it. He looked at the first ring, lying between the fork of his lifeline and loveline on the palm of his right hand.
One Ring to rule them all, he thought. One Ring to hind them.
And I think that’s you, beautiful. I think the others are just clever counterfeits.
And maybe there was a way to check that. Ralph held the two rings to his ears. The one in his left hand was silent; the one in his right, the one that had been inside the deathbag when he cut it open, gave off a faint, chilling echo of the deathbag’s final scream.
The one in his right hand was alive.
[“Ralph?”
Her hand on his arm, cold and urgent. Ralph looked at her, then tossed the ring in his left hand away. He held the other up and gazed at Lois’s strained, strangely young face through it, as if through a telescope.
[“This is the one. The others are just place-holders, I think-like-e zeros in a big, complicated math problem.”]
[“You mean they don’t matter?”]
He hesitated, unsure of how to reply… because they did matter, that was the thing. He just didn’t know how to put his intuitive understanding of this into words. As long as the false rings kept appearing in this nasty little room, like hats on the head of Bartholomew Cubbins, the future represented by the deathbag around the Civic Center remained the one true future. But the first ring, the one which Atropos had actually stolen off Ed’s finger (perhaps as he lay sleeping next to Helen in the little Cape Cod house which was now standing empty), could change all that.
The replicas were tokens which preserved the shape of ka just as spokes radiating out from a hub preserved the shape of a wheel. The original, however…
Ralph thought the original was the hub: One Ring to bind them.
He gripped the gold band tightly, feeling its hard curve bite into his palm and fingers. Then he slipped it into his watchpocket.
There was one thing about ka they didn’t tell us, he thought.
It’s slippery. Slippery as some nasty oldfish that won’t come off the hook but just keeps flopping around in your hand.
And it was like climbing a sand dune, too-you slid one step back for every two you managed to lunge forward. They had gone out to High Ridge and accomplished something-just what, Ralph didn’t know, but Dorrance had assured them it was true; according to him, they had fulfilled their task there. Now they had come here and taken Ed’s token, but it still wasn’t enough, and why? Because k,i was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.