[JUST WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU’re DOING?] [“I don’t know,-maybe ljust want to give your whiskers a tug. See for myself if they’re real.”] And, exerting all of his willpower to keep from shrieking and fleeing, he reached out with his right hand. Lois’s earring felt like a small, warm pebble closed within his fist. Lois herself seemed very close, and Ralph decided that wasn’t surprising, considering how’ much of her aura he’d taken on. Perhaps she was even a part of him now.
The feeling of her presence was deeply comforting.
[No, you don’t dare! You’ll be paralyzed!] [“Catfish aren’t poisonous-that was the story of a ten-year-old boy who might have been even more scared than I was. “] Ralph reached for the whiskers with the hand concealing the metal thorn, and the massive, scaly head flinched away, as some part of him had known it would. It began to ripple and change, and its fearful red aura began to seep through. If sickness and palor had a color, Ralph thought, that would be it. And before the change could go any further, before that man he could now see-tall and coldly handsome with his blond hair and glaring red eyes-could step through the shimmer of the illusion it had cast, Ralph drove the sharp point of the earring into one black and bulging fisheye.
It made a terrible buzzing sound-like a cicada, Ralph thoughtand tried to draw back. Its rapidly flipping tall produced a sound like a fan with a piece of paper caught in the blades. It slid down in the rocker, which was now changing into something that looked like a throne carved from dull orange rock. And then the tail was gone, the Queenfish was gone, and it was the Crimson King sitting there, his handsome face twisted into a snarl of pain and amazement.
One of his eyes glared as red as the eye of a lynx in firelight; the other was filled with the fierce, splintered glow of diamonds.
Ralph reached into the blanket of eggs ’With his left hand, ripped it away, and saw nothing but blackness on the other side of the abortion. The other side of the deathbag. The way out.
[You were warned, you Short-Time son of a bitch You think you can pull my whiskers? Well, let’s see, shall we? Let’s just see!] The Crimson
King leaned forward again on its throne, its mouth yawning, its remaining eye blazing with red light. Ralph fought the urge to yank his now-empty right hand away. Instead he pistoned it forward toward the mouth of the Crimson King, which yawned wide to engulf it, as that long-ago catfish had done that day in the Barrens.
Things-not flesh-first squirmed and jostled against his hand, then began to bite like horseflies. At the same time Ralph felt real teeth-no, fangs-sink into his arm. In a moment, two at the most, the Crimson King would bite through his wrist and swallow his hand whole.
Ralph closed his eyes and was at once able to find that pattern of thought and concentration which allowed movement between the levels-his pain and his fear were no bar to that. Only this time his purpose was not to move but to trigger Clotho and Lachesis had planted a booby-trap inside his arm, and the time had come to set it off.
Ralph felt that sensation of blink inside his head. The scar on his arm immediately went white-hot and critical. That heat didn’t burn Ralph but flew out from him in an expanding ripple of energy. He was aware of a titanic green flash, so bright that for one moment it was as if the Emerald City of Oz had exploded all around him.
Something or someone was screaming. That high, jagged sound would have driven him mad if it had gone on for long, but it didn’t.
It was followed by a vast, hollow bang that made Ralph think of the time he had lit an M-80 firecracker and tossed it into a steel culvert.
A sudden rush of force blew past him in a fan of wind and fading green light. He caught a strange, skewed glimpse of the Crimson King, no longer handsome and no longer young but ancient and twisted and less human than the strangest creature to ever flop or hop its way along the Short-Time level of existence. Then something above them opened, revealing darkness shot through with conflicting swirls and rays of color. The wind seemed to blow the Crimson King up toward it, like a leaf in a chimney-flue. The colors began to brighten, and Ralph turned his face away, raising one hand to shield his eyes. He understood that a conduit had opened between the level where he was and the unimaginable levels stacked above it; he also understood that if he looked for long into that brightening glow, those (deadlights) swirling colors, then death would be not the worst thing that could happen to him but the best. He did not just squeeze his eyes shut; he squeezed his mind shut.
A moment later everything was gone-the creature which had identified itself to Ed as the Crimson King, the kitchen in the old house on Richmond Street, his mother’s rocking chair. Ralph was kneeling on thin air about six feet to the right of the Cherokee’s nose, his hands upraised as an oft-beaten child might raise his hands before the approach of a cruel parent, and when he looked between his knees, he saw the Civic Center and the adjacent parking lot directly below him. At first he thought his eyes were being fooled by an optical illusion, because the arc-sodiums in the parking lot seemed to be spreading apart. They almost looked like a crowd of very tall, very skinny people which is starting to break up because the excitement, whatever it was, is over. And the lot itself seemed to be… well… expanding.
Not expanding but getting closer, Ralph thought coldly. He’s going down. He’s started his kamikaze run.
For a moment Ralph was frozen in place, enchanted by the simple wonder of his position. He had become a mythical in-between creature, clearly no god (no god could be as tired and terrified as he was right now) but clearly no such earthbound creature as a man, either.
This was what it was really like to fly; to see the earth from above, with no border around it. This [“RALPH!”] Her scream was like a shotgun fired beside his ear. Ralph flinched from it, and the moment his gaze left the hypnotic sight of the ground swelling up toward him, he was able to move. He rose to his feet and walked back to the plane.
He did this as easily and normally as a man walking down a hallway in his own home. No wind buffeted his face or blew his hair back from his brow, and when his left shoulder passed through the Cherokee’s propeller, the whirling blade harmed him no more than it would have harmed smoke.
For a moment he saw Ed’s pallid, handsome face-the face of the highwayman who’d come riding up to the old inn door in the poem which had always made Carolyn cry-and his previous feeling of mingled pity and regret was replaced by anger. It was difficult to become really infuriated with Ed-he was, after all, just another chess-piece being moved across the board-and yet the building he had aimed his airplane at was full of real people. Innocent people.
Ralph saw something balky, childish, and willful about the dopey expression of disassociation on Ed’s face, and as he passed through the thin skin of the cockpit wall, Ralph thought, I think that on some level, Ed, you knew the devil had come in. I think you might even have been able to put him out again… didn’t Mr. C. and Mr. L. say there’s always a choice? If there is, you have to own a piece of this goddam you.
For a moment Ralph’s head poked through the ceiling as it had done before, and he knelt again. Now the Civic Center filled the entire windshield of the plane and he understood that it was too late to stop Ed from doing something.
He had pulled the doorbell free of the tape. He was holding it in his hand.
Ralph reached into his pocket and gripped the remaining earring, once again holding it between his fingers with the prong sticking out.
He curled his other hand into a tube around the wires running between the cardboard carton and the doorbell. Then he closed his eyes and concentrated, creating that flexing sensation in the middle of his head again. There was a sudden hollow, fluttery sensation in his stomach, and he had time to think Whoa! This is the expr(,-V elevator.” Then he was down on the Short-Time level where there were no gods or devils, no bald doctors with magic scissors and scalpels, no auras. Down where passing through walls and walking away from plane-crashes was an impossibility. Down on the Short-Time level where he could be seen… and Ed, Ralph realized, was doing just that.