But he heard it when it happened.

[The one I showed you-first belongs to the Random Shorts-to me. another words. And here’s my promise to you: if you go on getting in my way, what I’ve just shown you is going to happen. There’s nothing you can do, no warning you can give, that will stop it from happening.

But if you leave off now-if you and the woman simply stand aside and let events take their course-then I will stay my hand.] The vulgarities which formed so large a part of Atropos’s usual discourse had been left behind like a discarded costume, and for the first time Ralph had some clear sense of how truly old and malevolently wise this being was.

[Remember what the junkies say, Shorts.-dying is easy, living is hard. It’s a true saying. If anyone should know, it’s me. So what do you think? Having any second thoughts?] Ralph stood in the filthy chamber with his head down and his fists clenched. Lois’s earrings burned in one of them like small hot coals.

Ed’s ring also seemed to burn against him, and he knew there wasn’t a thing in the world to stop him from taking it out of his pocket and throwing it into the other room after the scalpel. He remembered a story he’d read in school about a thousand years ago.

“The Lady or the Tiger?” it had been called, and now he understood what it was to be given such a terrible power… and such a terrible choice. On the surface it seemed easy enough; what, after all, was one life against two thousand?

But that one life-!

Yet really it isn’t as if anyone would ever have to know, he thought coldly. No one except maybe for Lois… and Lois would accept my decision. Carolyn might not have done, hut they’re very different women.

Yes, but did he have the right?

Atropos also read this in his aura-it was spooky, how much the creature saw.

[Of course you do, Ralph-that’s what these matters of life and death are really about: who has the right. This time it’s you. So what do you say?] [“I don’t know what I say. I don’t know what I think. All I know is that I wish all three of you had LEFT ME THE FUCK ALONE!”] Ralph

Roberts raised his head toward the root-riddled ceiling of Atropos’s den and screamed.

Five minutes later, Ralph’s head poked out of the shadows beneath the old, leaning oak. He saw Lois at once. She was kneeling in front of him, peering anxiously through the tangle of roots at his upturned face. He raised a grimy, blood-streaked hand and she took it firmly, holding him steady as he made his way up the last few stepsgnarled roots that were actually more like ladder-rungs.

Ralph wriggled his way out from under the tree and turned over onto his back, taking the sweet air in great long pulls of breath. The thought air had never in his whole life tasted so good. In spite of everything else, he was enormously grateful to be out. To be free.

[“Ralph? Are you all right?”] He turned her hand over, kissed her palm, then put her earrings where his lips had been.

[“Yes. Fine. These are yours.”] She looked at them curiously, as if she had never seen earrings, these or any others-before, and then put them in her dress pocket.

CHAPTER 27

[“You saw them in the mirror, didn’t you, Lois?”] [“Yes, and it made me angry… hut I don’t think I was really surprised, not down deep.

[“Because you knew.”] [“Yes. I guess I did. maybe from when we first saw Atropos wearing Bill’s hat. I just kept it… you know… in the hack of my mind.

She was looking at him carefully, assessingly.

[“Never mind my earrings right now-what happened down there.) How did you get away?”] Ralph was afraid if she looked at him in that careful way for too long, she would see too much. He also had an idea that if he didn’t get moving soon, he might never move again; his weariness was now so large it was like some great encrusted object-a long-sunken ocean liner, perhaps-lying inside him, calling to him, trying to drag him down. He got to his feet. He couldn’t allow eitherof them to be dragged down, not now. The news the sky told wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it was bad enough-it was six o’clock at least. All over Derry, people who didn’t give a shit one way or the other about the abortion issue (the vast majority, in other words) were sitting down to hot dinners. At the Civic Center the doors would now be open; 10-K TV lights would be bathing them, and Minicams would be transmitting live shots of early-arriving pro-choice advocates driving past Dan Dalton and his sign-waving Friends of Life. Not far from here, people were chanting that old Ed Deepneau favorite, the one that went Hey, hey, Susan Day, how many kids did you kill today?

Whatever he and Lois did, they would have to do it in the next sixty to ninety minutes. The clock was ticking.

[“Come on, Lois. We have to get moving.

[“Are we going back to the Civic Center?”] [“No, not to start with. I think that to start with, we ought to… Ralph discovered that he simply couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say. Where did he think they ought to go to start with? Back to Derry Home? The Red Apple? His house? Where did you go when you needed to find a couple of well-meaning but far from allknowing fellows who had gotten you and your few close friends into a world of hurt and trouble? Or could you reasonably expect them to find you?

They might not want to find you, sweetheart. In fact, they might actually be hiding from You.

[“Ralph, are you sure you reHe suddenly thought of Rosalie, and knew.

[“The park, Lois. Strawford Park. That’s where we have to go.

But we need to make a stop on the way.”] He led her along the Cyclone fence, and soon they heard the lazy sound of interwoven voices.

Ralph could smell roasting hotdogs as well, and after the fetid stench of Atropos’s den, the smell was ambrosial. A minute or two later, he and Lois stepped to the edge of the little picnic area near Runway 3.

Dorrance was there, standing at the heart of his amazing, multicolored aura and watching as a light plane drifted down toward the runway. Behind him Faye Chapin and Don Veazie were sitting at one of the picnic tables with a chessboard between them and a half finished bottle of Blue Nun near to hand. Stan and Georgina Eberly were drinking beer and twiddling forks with hotdogs impaled upon them in the heat-shimmer-to Ralph that shimmer was a strangely dry pink, like coral-colored sand-above the picnic area’s barbecue pit.

For a moment Ralph simply stood where he was, struck dumb by their beauty-the ephemeral, powerful beauty that was, he supposed, what Short-Time life was mostly about. A snatch of song, something at least twenty-five years old, occurred to him: We are stardust, we are golden.

Dorrance’s aura was different-fabulously different-but even the most prosaic of the others glittered like rare and infinitely desirable gemstones.

[“Oh, Ralph, do you see? Do you see how beautiful they are?”] [“Yes. “I

[“What a shame they don’t know."’]

But was it? In light of all that had happened, Ralph wasn’t so sure.

And he had an idea-a vague but strong intuition he could never have put into words-that perhaps real beauty was something unrecognized by the conscious self, a work that was always in progress, a thing of being rather than seeing.

“Come on, dumbwit, make your move,” a voice said. Ralph jerked, first thinking the voice was speaking to him, but it was Faye, talking to Don Veazie. “You’re slower’n old creepin Jesus-.”

“Never mind,” Don said. “I’m thinking.”

“Think till hell freezes over, Slick, and it’s still gonna be mate in six moves.”

Don poured some wine into a paper cup and rolled his eyes. “oh boogersnot! “he cried. “I didn’t realize I was playin chess with Boris Spassky! I thought it was just plain old Faye Chapin! I apologize all to hell and gone!”