You, baby, nobody but you.”

Christ, he’s nuttier than a fruitcake.

This is news, sweetheart?

Ralph supposed it wasn’t. He walked around to the door of the Portosan and opened it. Now he could also hear the distant, waspy buzz of an airplane engine, but there was nothing to see that he hadn’t seen dozens of times before: the cracked toilet seat resting askew over the hole in the seat, a roll of toilet paper with a strange and somehow ominous swelled look, and, to -the left, a urinal that looked like a plastic teardrop. The walls were tangles of graffiti. The largest-and most exuberant-had been printed in foot-high red letters above the urinal: TONY BOYNTON HAS GOT THE TIGHTEST LITTLE BUNS IN DERRY! A cloying pine-scented deodorizer overlay the smells of shit, piss, and lingering wino-farts like makeup on the face of a corpse. The voice he was hearing seemed to come from the hole in the center of the Portosan’s bench seat, or perhaps it was seeping out of the very walls: “From the time I fall asleep Until the mornting comes I dream about you, baby, nobody but you.

Where is he? Ralph wondered. And how the hell do I get to him?

Ralph felt sudden heat against his hip; it was as if someone had slipped a warm coal into his watchpocket. He began to frown, then remembered what was in there. He reached into the scrap of a pocket with one finger, touched the gold band he had stowed there, and hooked it out. He laid it on his palm over the place where his loveline and lifeline diverged and poked at it gingerly. It had cooled again.

Ralph found he wasn’t very surprised.

“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to bind them,” Ralph murmured, and slipped Ed’s wedding band onto the third finger of his own left hand. It was a perfect fit. He pushed it up until it clinked softly against the wedding ring Carolyn had put onto his own finger some forty-five years ago. Then he looked up and saw that the back wall of the Portosan had disappeared.

What he saw, framed by the walls which did remain, was a just-pastsunset sky and a swatch of Maine countryside fading into a bluegray twilight haze. He estimated that he was looking out from a height of about ten thousand feet. He could see glimmering lakes and ponds and vast stretches of dark green woodland scrolling down toward the Portosan’s bench seat and then disappearing. Far ahead-up toward the roof of the toilet cubicle-Ralph could see a glimmering nest of lights. That was probably Derry, now no more than ten minutes away.

In the lower left quadrant of this vision Ralph could see part of an instrument panel. Taped over the altimeter was a small color photograph that stopped his breath. It was Helen, looking impossibly happy and impossibly beautiful. Cradled in her arms was the Exalted amp; Revered Baby, fast asleep and no more than four months old.

He wants them to be the last thing he sees in this world, Ralph thought. He’s been turned into a monster, but I guess even monsters don’t forget how to love.

Something on the instrument panel began to beep. A hand came into view and flicked a switch. Before it disappeared, Ralph could see the white indentation on the third finger of that hand, faint but still visible, where the wedding ring had rested for at least six years.

He saw something else, as well-the aura surrounding the hand was the same as the one which had surrounded the thunderstruck baby in the hospital elevator, a turbulent, rapidly moving membrane that seemed as alien as the atmosphere of a gas giant.

Ralph looked back once and raised his hand. Clotho and Lachesis raised theirs in return. Lois blew him a kiss. Ralph made a catching gesture, then turned and stepped into the Portosan.

He hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do about the bench seat, then remembered the oncoming hospital gurney, which should have crushed their skulls but hadn’t, and walked toward the back of the cubicle. He clenched his teeth, preparing to bark his shinwhat you knew was one thing, what you believed after seventy years of bumping into stuff quite another-and then stepped through the bench seat as if it were made of smoke… or as if he were.

There was a scary sensation of weightlessness and vertigo, and for a moment he was sure he was going to vomit. This was accompanied by a feeling of drain, as if much of the power he had taken in from Lois was now being siphoned off. He supposed it was. This was a form of teleportation, after all, fabulous science-fiction stuff, and something like that had to use up a lot of energy.

The vertigo passed, but it was replaced by a perception that was even worse-a feeling that he had been split at the neck somehow.

He realized he now had a completely unobstructed view of a whole sprawling section of the world.

Jesus Christ, what’s happened to me? What’s wrong?

His senses reluctantly reported back that there was nothing wrong, exactly, it was just that he had achieved a position which should have been impossible. He was seventy-three inches tall; the cockpit of the plane was sixty inches from floor to ceiling. This meant that any pilot much bigger than Clotho and Lachesis had to slouch his way to his seat. Ralph, however, had entered the plane not only while it was in flight but while he was standing up, and he was still standing up, between and slightly behind the two seats in the cockpit.

The reason his view was unobstructed was both simple and horrible: his head was sticking out of the top of the plane.

Ralph had a nightmare image of his old dog, Rex, who’d liked to ride with his head out the passenger window and his raggedy ears blowing back in the slipstream. He closed his eyes.

What if I fall? If I can stick my head out through the damned roof, what’s to keep me from sliding right down through the floor and falling all the way to the ground? Or maybe through the ground, and then through the very earth itself?

But that wasn’t happening, and nothing like it would happen, not on this level-all he had to do was remember the effortless way they’d risen through the floors of the hospital and the ease with which they’d stood on the roof. If he kept those things in mind, he would be okay.

Ralph tried to center on that idea, and when he felt quite sure he had himself under control, he opened his eyes again.

Sloping out just below him was the plane’s windshield. Beyond it was the nose, tipped with a quicksilver blur of propeller. The nestle of lights he had observed from the door of the Portosan was closer now.

Ralph bent his knees, and his head slid smoothly through the ceiling of the cockpit. For a moment he could taste oil in his mouth and the tiny hairs in his nose seemed to bristle as if with an electric shock, and then he was kneeling between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats.

He didn’t know what he had expected to feel, seeing Ed again after all this time and under such extravagantly weird circumstances, but the pang of regret-not just pity but regret-which came was a surprise. As on the day in the summer of ’92 when Ed had run into the West Side Gardeners truck, he was wearing an old tee-shirt instead of an Oxford or Arrow with buttons up the front and a fruitloop on the back. He had lost a lot of weight-Ralph thought perhaps as much as forty pounds-and it had had an extraordinary effect, making him look not emaciated but somehow heroic, in a gothic/romantic way; Ralph was forcefully reminded of Carolyn’s favorite poem, “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes. Ed’s skin was as pale as paper, his green eyes both dark and light (like emeralds in moonlight, Ralph thought) behind the small round John Lennon spectacles, his lips so red they looked as if they had been rouged.

He had tied the white silk scarf with its red Japanese characters around his forehead so that the fringed ends trailed down his back.