For a moment she continued to see nothing but that brilliant blue cross and thought she had indeed been blinded. Then, as dim as a developing photograph at first, the world began to resurface. She saw Ralph, Clotho, and Lachesis lowering their own hands and peering around with the blind bewilderment of a nest of moles turned up by the blade of a harrow.
Lachesis was looking at the scissors in his colleague’s hands as if he had never seen them before, and Lois was willing to bet he never had seen them as they were now. The blades were still shining, shedding eldritch fairy-glimmers of light in misty droplets.
Lachesis: [Ralph! That was…] She lost the rest of it, but his tone was that of a common peasant who answers a knock at the door of his hut and finds that the Pope has stopped by for a spot of prayer and a little confession.
Clotho was still staring at the blades of the scissors. Ralph was also looking, but at last he lifted his gaze to the bald doctors.
Ralph: [“… the hurt?”] Lachesis, speaking like a man emerging from a deep dream: Yes… won’t last long, but… agony will be intense… change your mind, Ralph?] Lois was suddenly afraid of those shining scissors. She wanted to cry out to Ralph, tell him to never mind his one, to just give them their one, their little boy. She wanted to tell him to do whatever it took to get them to hide those scissors again.
But no words came from either her mouth or her mind.
Ralph: [“… in the least… Just wanted to know what to expect, Clotho: [… ready?… must be…
Tell them no, Ralph! she thought at him. Tell them NO!
Ralph: [“… ready.”] Lachesis: [Understand… terms he has… and the price?] Ralph, impatient now: [“Yes, yes. Can we please just… “I Clotho, with immense gravity: [Very well, Ralph. It may be so.] Lachesis put an arm around Ralph’s shoulders; he and Clotho led him a little farther down the hill, to the place where the younger children started their downhill sled-runs in the winter. There was a small flat area there, circular in shape, about the size of a nightclub stage. When they reached it, Lachesis stopped Ralph, then turned him so he and Clotho were facing each other.
Lois suddenly wanted to shut her eyes and found she couldn’t.
She could only watch and pray that Ralph knew what he was doing.
Clotho murmured to him. Ralph nodded and slipped out of McGovern’s sweater. He folded it and laid it neatly on the leafstrewn grass. When he straightened again, Clotho took his right wrist and held his arm out straight. He then nodded to Lachesis, who unbuttoned the cuff of Ralph’s shirt and rolled the sleeve to the elbow in three quick turns. With that done, Clotho rotated Ralph’s arm so it was wrist-up. The fine tracery of blue veins Just beneath the skin of his forearm was poignantly clear, highlighted in delicate strokes of aura.
All of this was horribly familiar to Lois: it was like watching a patient on a TV doctor-show being prepped for an operation.
Except this wasn’t TV.
Lachesis leaned forward and spoke again. Although she still couldn’t hear the words, Lois knew he was telling Ralph this was his last chance.
Ralph nodded, and although his aura now told her that he was terrified of what was coming, he somehow even managed a smile.
When he turned to Clotho and spoke, he did not seem to be seeking reassurance but rather offering a word of comfort, Clotho tried to return Ralph’s smile, but without success.
Lachesis wrapped one hand around Ralph’s wrist, more to steady the arm (or so it seemed to Lois) than to actually hold it immobile.
He reminded her of a nurse attending a patient who must receive a painful injection. Then he looked at his partner with frightened eyes and nodded. Clotho nodded back, took a breath, and then bent over Ralph’s upturned forearm with its ghostly tree of blue veins glowing beneath the skin. He paused for a moment, then slowly opened the jaws of the scissors with which he and his old friend traded life for death.
Lois staggered to her feet and stood swaying back and forth on legs that felt like lumber. She meant to break the paralysis which had locked her in such a cruel silence, to shout at Ralph and tell him to stop-tell him he didn’t know what they meant to do to him.
Except he did. It was in the pallor of his face, his half-closed eyes, his painfully thinned lips. Most of all it was in the blotches of red and black which were flashing across his aura like meteors, and in the aura itself, which had tightened down to a hard blue shell.
Ralph nodded at Clotho, who brought the lower scissor-blade down until it was touching Ralph’s forearm just below the fold of the elbow.
For a moment the skin only dimpled, and then a smooth dark blister of blood formed where the dimple had been. The blade slid into this blister. When Clotho squeezed his fingers, bringing the razor-sharp blades together, the skin on either side of the lengthwise cut snapped back with the suddenness of windowshades-Subcutaneous fat glimmered like melting ice in the fierce blue glow of Ralph’s aura. Lachesis tightened his hold on Ralph’s wrist, but so far as Lois could tell, Ralph did not make even a first instinctive effort to pull back, only lowered his head and clenched his left fist in the air like a man giving a Black Power salute. She could see the cords in his neck standing out like cables. Not a single sound escaped him.
Now that this terrible business was actually begun, Clotho proceeded with a speed which was both brutal and merciful. He cut rapidly down the middle of Ralph’s forearm to his wrist, using the scissors the way a man will to open a parcel which has been heavily taped, guiding the blades with the fingers and bearing down with the thumb. Inside Ralph’s arm, tendons gleamed like cuts of flank steak.
Blood ran in freshets, and there was a fine scarlet spray each time an artery or a vein was severed. Soon fans of backspatter decorated the white tunics of the two small men, making them look more like little doctors than ever.
When his blades had at last severed the Bracelets of Fortune at Ralph’s wrist (the “operation” took less than three seconds but seemed to last forever to Lois), Clotho removed the dripping scissors and handed them to Lachesis. Ralph’s upturned arm had been cut open from elbow to wrist in a dark furrow.
Clotho clamped his hands over this furrow at its point of origination and Lois thought: Now the other one will pick up ralph’s sweater and use it as a tourniquet. But Lachesis made no move to do that; he merely held the scissors and watched.
For a moment the blood went on flowing between Clotho’s grasping fingers, and then it stopped. He slowly drew his hands down Ralph’s arm, and the flesh which emerged from his grip was whole and firm, although seamed with a thick white ridge of scar-tissue.
[Lois… Lo-isssss… I This voice was not coming from inside her head, nor from down the hill; it had come from behind her. A soft voice, almost cajoling.
Atropos? No, not at all. She looked down and saw green and somehow sunken light flowing all around her-it rayed through the spaces between her arms and her body, between her legs, even between her fingers. It rippled her shadow ahead of her, scrawny and somehow twisted, like the shadow of a hanged woman. It caressed her with heatless fingers the color of Spanish moss.
[Turn around, Lo-isss…] At that moment the last thing on earth Lois Chasse wanted to do was turn around and look at the source of that green light.
[Turn around, Lo-isss… see me, Lo-isss… come into the light, Lo-isss… come into the light… see me and come into the light…] It was not a voice which could be disobeyed. Lois turned as slowly as a toy ballerina whose cogs have grown rusty, and her eyes seemed to fill up with Saint Elmo’s fire.
Lois came into the light.