[That old man was right, boy. You’ve no business messing into Long-Time affairs. Pay attention to your mother and stay out of what doesn’t concern you. Mind me, now,] Pay attention to your mother… mind me, now. Those words had pretty well summed up Bertha Roberts’s views on the art and science of child-rearing, hadn’t they?

Whether it was an order to wait an hour after eating before taking a swim or to make sure that old thief Butch Bowers didn’t put a lot of rotten potatoes at the bottom of the peck basket she’d sent you to fetch, the prologue (Pay attention to your mother) and the epilogue (Mind me, now-) were always the same. And if you failed to pay attention, if you failed to mind her, you had to face the Wrath of Mother, and God help you then.

She picked up the needles and began to knit again, running off scarlet stitches with fingers that looked faintly red themselves.

Ralph supposed that was just an illusion. Or maybe the dye wasn’t completely colorfast, and some of it was coming off on his fingers.

His fingers? What a silly mistake that was. Her fingers.

Except…

Well, there were little bunches of whiskers at the corners of her mouth. Long ones. Nasty, somehow. And unfamiliar. Ralph could remember a fine down on her upper lip, but whiskers? No way.

Those were new.

New? New? What are you thinking about? She died two days after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, so what in the name, of God can be new about her?

Two converging walls had bloomed on either side of Bertha Roberts, creating the kitchen corner where she had spent so much time, On one of them was a painting Ralph remembered well. It showed a family at supper-Dad, Mom, two kids. They were passing the potatoes and the corn, and looked like they were discussing their respective days. None of them noticed that there was a fifth person in the room-a white-robed man with a sandy beard and long hair.

He was standing in the corner and watching them. CHRIST, THE UNSEEN VISITOR, the plaque beneath this painting read. Except the Christ Ralph remembered had looked both kind and a little embarrassed to be eavesdropping. This version, however, looked coldly thoughtful.

… evaluative… judgmental, perhaps. And his color was very high, almost choleric, as if he had heard something which had made him furious.

[“Mom? Are you-”]

She put the needles down again on the red blanket-that oddly shiny red blanket-and raised a hand to stop him.

[Mom me no Moms, Ralph-just pay attention and mind. Stay out of this! It’s too late for your muddling and meddling. You can only make things worse.] The voice was right, but the face was wrong and becoming wronger. Mostly it was her skin. Smooth and unlined, her skin had been Bertha Roberts’s only vanity. The skin of the creature in the rocker was rough… more than rough, in fact. It was scaly. And there were two growths (or perhaps they were sores?) on the sides of her neck. At the sight of them, some terrible memory (get it off me Johnny oh please GET IT OFF) stirred far down in his mind. AndWell, her aura. Where was her aura?

[Never mind my aura and never mind about that fat old whore you’ve been running around with… although I’ll bet Carolyn is just rolling in her grave.] The mouth of the woman (not a woman that thing is not a woman) in the rocker was no longer small. The lower lip had spread, n puffed outward and downward. The mouth itself had developed a drooping sneer. A strangelyfamiliar drooping sneer.

(Johnny it’s biting me it’s BITING ME.) Something horridly familiar about the bunches of whiskers bristling at the corners of the mouth, too.

(Johnny please its eyes its black eyes)

[Johnny can’t help you, boy. He didn’t help you then and he can’t help you now.] Of course he couldn’t. His older brother Johnny had died six years ago. Ralph had been a pallbearer at his funeral.

Johnny had died of a heart-attack, possibly as Random as the one which had felled Bill McGovern, andRalph looked to the left, but the pilot’s side of the cockpit had also disappeared, and Ed Deepneau with it.

Ralph saw the old combination gas-and-woodstove on which his mother had cooked in the house on Richmond Street (a job she had resented bitterly and done badly all her life) and the arch leading into the dining room.

He saw their maple dining table. A glass pitcher stood in the center of it.

The pitcher had been filled with a choke of lurid red roses. Each seemed to have a face… a blood-red, gasping face…

But that’s wrong, he thought. All wrong. She never had roses in the house-she was allergic to most blooms, and roses were the worst.

She used to sneeze like crazy when she was around them.

The only thing I ever saw her put on the dining-room table was Indian Bouquet, and that wasn’t anything but autumn grasses. I see roses becauseHe looked back at the creature in the rocking chair, at red fingers which had now melted together into appendages that looked almost like fins. He regarded the scarlet mass which lay in the creature’s lap, and the scar along his arm began to tingle again.

What in God’s name is going on here?

But he knew, of course; he only had to look from the red thing in the rocking chair to the picture hanging on the wall, the picture of the scarlet-faced, malevolent Jesus watching the family eat their supper, to confirm it. He was not in his old house in Mary Mead, and he was not precisely in an aircraft over Derry, either.

He was in the Court of the Crimson King.

CHAPTER 29

Without thinking about why he was doing it, Ralph slipped a hand into his sweater pocket and loosely cupped one of Lois’s earrings.

His hand felt far away, something which belonged to someone else.

He was realizing an interesting thing: he had never been frightened in his life until now. Not once. He had thought he’d been frightened, of course, but it had been an illusion-the only time he’d even come close had been in the Derry Public Library, when Charlie Pickering stuck a knife into his armpit and said he was going to let Ralph’s guts out all over the floor. That, however, was nothing but a mild moment of discomfort next to what he was feeling now.

A green man came… He felt good, but I could be wrong.

He hoped she wasn’t; he most sincerely hoped she wasn’t. Because the green man was about all he had left now.

The green man, and Lois’s earrings.

[Ralph.” Stop ivoolgathering. Look at your mother when she’s talking to you.” Seventy years old and you still act like you were sixteen, with a bad case of pecker-rash.”

He turned back to the red-finned thing slumped in the rocker. It now bore only a passing resemblance to his late mother.

[“You’re not my mother, and I’m still in the airplane.

[You’re not, boy. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you are.

Take one step out of my kitchen and you’re in for a very long fall.

[“You might as well stop now. I can see what you are.”] The thing spoke in a bubbly, choked voice that turned Ralph’s spine to a narrow line of ice.

[You don’t. You may think you do, hut you don’t. And you don’t want to. You don’t ever want to see me with my disguises laid aside.

Believe me, Ralph, you don’t.] He realized with mounting horror that the mother-thing had turned into an enormous female catfish, a hungry bottom-feeder with stubby teeth gleaming between its pendulous lips and whiskers which dangled almost to the collar of the dress it still wore.

The gills in its neck opened and closed like razor-cuts,"revealing troubled red inner flesh. Its eyes had grown round and purplish, and as Ralph watched, the sockets began to slide away from each other. This continued until the eyes bulged from the sides rather than the front of the creature’s scaly face.

[Don’t move so much as a single muscle, Ralph. You’ll probably die in the explosion no matter what level you’re on-the shockwaves travel here just as they do in any building-but that death will still be a great deal better than my death.] The catfish opened its mouth.