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.
Within the thunderbolt swirls of his aura, Ed’s intelligent, mobile face was filled with terrible regret and fierce determination.
He was beautiful-beautiful-and Ralph felt a sense of deja vu twist through him. Now he knew what he had glimpsed on the day he’d stepped between Ed and the man from West Side Gardeners; he was seeing it again. Looking at Ed, lost inside a typhoon aura from which no balloon-string floated, was like looking at a priceless Ming vase which had been thrown against a wall and shattered.
At least he can’t see me, not on this level. At least, I don’t think he can.
As if in response to this thought, Ed turned and glanced directly at Ralph. His eyes were wide and full of mad caution; the corners of his finely moulded mouth quivered and gleamed with buds of saliva.
Ralph recoiled, momentarily positive that he was being seen, but Ed didn’t react to Ralph’s sudden backward movement.
He threw a suspicious glance into the empty four-seat passenger cabin behind him instead, as if he had heard the stealthy movements of a stowaway. At the same time he reached past Ralph and put his right hand on a cardboard carton which had been seatbelted into the copilot’s chair. The hand caressed the box briefly, then went to his forehead and made some tiny adjustment to the scarf serving him as a headband.
That done, he resumed singing… only this time it was a different song, one that sent a tremor zigzagging up Ralph’s back: “One pill makes you bigger, One pill makes you small, And the ones that Mother gives you Don’t do anything at all.
Right, Ralph thought. Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.
His heart was triphammering in his chest-having Ed suddenly turn around like that had scared him in a way even finding himself riding along at ten thousand feet with his head sticking out of the top of the plane hadn’t been able to do. Ed didn’t see him, Ralph was almost positive of that, but whoever had said that the senses of lunatics were more acute than those of the sane must have known what he was talking about, because Ed sure had an idea that something had changed.
The radio squawked, making both men jump. “This is for the Cherokee over South Haven. You are on the edge of Derry airspace at an altitude which requires a filed flight-plan. Repeat, you are about to enter controlled airspace over a municipal area. Get your hot-dogging butt up to 16,000 feet, Cherokee, and come to 170, that’s one-seven- oh.
While you’re doing it, please identify yourself an'i state-“Ed closed his hand into a fist and began to hammer the radio with it.
Glass flew; soon blood also began to fly. It spattered the instrument panel, the picture of Helen and Natalie, and Ed’s clean gray tee-shirt.
He went on hammering until the voice on the radio first began to fade into a rising roar of static and then quit altogether.
“Good,” he said in the low, sighing voice of a man who talks to himself a lot. “Lots better. I hate all those questions. They just-” He caught sight of his bloody hand and broke off. He held it up, looked at it more closely, and then rolled it into a fist again. A large sliver of glass was sticking out of his pinky just below the third knuckle. Ed pulled it free with his teeth, spat it casually aside, then did something which chilled Ralph’s heart: drew the side of his bloody fist first down his left cheek and then his right, leaving a pair of red marks. He reached into the elasticized pocket built into the wall on his left, pulled out a hand-mirror, and used it to check his makeshift warpaint. What he saw seemed to please him, because he smiled and nodded before returning the mirror to the pocket.
“Just remember what the dormouse said,” Ed advised himself in his low, sighing voice, and then pushed in on the control wheel. The Cherokee’s nose dropped and the altimeter slowly began to unwind.
Ralph could see Derry straight ahead now. The city looked like a handful of opals scattered across dark-blue velvet.
There was a hole in the side of the carton in the copilot’s seat.
Two wires came out of it. They led into the back of a doorbell taped to the arm of Ed’s seat. Ralph supposed that as soon as he had a visual on the Civic Center and actually began his kamikaze run, Ed would settle one finger on the raised white button in the middle of the plastic rectangle. And just before the plane hit, he would push it.
Ding-dong, Avon calling.
Break those wires, Ralph.” Break them!
An excellent idea with only one drawback: he couldn’t break so much as a strand of cobweb while he was on this level. That meant dropping back down to Short-Time country, and he was preparing to do just that when a soft, familiar voice on his right spoke his name.
[Ralph.] To his right? That was impossible. There was nothing on his right but the copilot’s seat, the side of the aircraft, and leagues of twilit New England air.
The scar along his arm had begun to tingle like a filament in an electric heater.
[Ralph!]
Don’t look. Don’t pay any attention at all. Ignore it.
But he couldn’t. Some great, bricklike force had come to bear on him, and his head began to turn. He fought it, aware that the airplane’s angle of descent was growing steeper, but it did no good.
[Ralph, look at me-don’t be afraid.] He made one last effort to disobey the voice and was unable. His head went on turning, and Ralph suddenly found himself looking at his mother, who had died of lung cancer twenty-five years ago.
Bertha Roberts sat in her bentwood rocker about five feet beyond where the sidewall of the Cherokee’s cockpit had been, knitting and rocking back and forth on thin air a mile or more above the ground.
The slippers Ralph had given her for her fiftieth birthday-lined with real mink, they had been, how goofy-were on her feet. A pink shawl was thrown around her shoulders. An old political buttonWIN WITH WILLKIE! it said-held the shawl closed.
That’s right, Ralph thought. She wore them as jewelry-it was her little affectation. I’d forgotten that.
The only thing that struck a wrong note (other than that she was dead and currently rocking at six thousand feet) was the bright red piece of afghan in her lap. Ralph had never seen his mother knit, wasn’t even sure she knew how, but she was knitting furiously just the same. The needles gleamed and winked as they shuttled through the stitches.
[“Mother? Mom? Is it really you?”]
The needles paused as she looked up from the crimson blanket in her lap. Yes, it was his mother-the version Ralph remembered from his teens, anyway. Narrow face, high scholar’s brow, brown eyes, and a bun of salt-and-pepper hair rolled tightly at the nape of the neck. It was her small mouth, which looked mean and ungenerous… until it smiled, that was.
[Why, Ralph Roberts! I’m surprised that you even have to ask!]
That’s not really an answer, though, is it? Ralph thought. He opened his mouth to say so and then decided it might be wiser for the time being, at least-to keep quiet. A milky shape was now swimming in the air to her right. Whelp Ralph looked at it, it darkened and solidified into the cherry-stained magazine stand he had made her in woodshop during his sophomore year at Derry High. It was filled with Reader’s Digests and Life magazines. And now the ground far below her began to disappear into a pattern of brown and dark-red squares that spread out from the rocker in a widening ring, like a pond-ripple.
Ralph recognized it at once-the kitchen linoleum of the house on Richmond Street in Mary Mead, the one where he’d grown up. At first he could see the ground through it, geometries of farmland and, not far ahead, the Kenduskeag flowing through Derry, and then it solidified. A ghostly shape like a big milkweed puff became his mom’s old Angora cat, Futzy, curled up on the windowsill and looking out at the gulls circling above the old dump in the Barrens. Futzy had died around the time Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had stopped making movies together.
[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?
