bums were voted in. It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.
In the early fall of 1996, Ralph became convinced he had colon cancer, He had begun to see more than trace amounts of blood in his stool, and when he finally went to see Dr. Pickard or. Litchfield’s cheerful, rumpled replacement), he did so with visions of hospital beds and chemotherapy IV-drips dancing bleakly in his head.
Instead of cancer, the problem turned out to be a hemorrhoid which had, in Dr. Pickard’s memorable phrase, “popped its top.” He wrote Ralph a prescription for suppositories, which Ralph took to the Rite Aid down the street. Joe Wyzer read it, then grinned cheerfully at Ralph. “Lousy,” he said, “but it beats the hell out of colon cancer, don’t you think?”
repliee stiffly. MY mind,” Ralph One da dury ing the winter of 1997, Lois took it into her head to slide dow her favorite hill in Strawford Park on Nat Deepneau’ n plastic flying-saucer sled. She went down “fstern a Pig in a greaseds chute” (this was Don Veazie’s phrase; he just happened to be there that day, watching the actio) and crashed into the side of the Portosan marked WOMEN. She sprained her knee and twisted her back, and although Ralph knew he had no business doing so-it was unsympathetic, to say the least-he laughed hilariously most of the way to the emergency room. The fact that Lois was also howling with laughter despite the pain did nothing to help Ralph regain control.
He laughed until tears poured from his eyes and he thought he might have a stroke. She had just looked so goddamned Our LOIS going down the hill on that thing, spinning around and around with her legs crossed like one of those yogis from the mysterious East, and she had almost knocked the Portosan over when she hit it. She was completely recovered by the time spring rolled around, although that knee always ached on rainy nights and she did get tired of Don Veazie asking, almost every time he saw her, if she’d slid into any shithouses lately. -first life, going on as it always does-which is to say mostly between the lines and outside the margins. It’s what happens while we’re making other plans, according exceptionally going to some sage or other, and if life was od to Ralph Roberts during those years, itlmight have been because he had no other plans to make. He maintained friendships with Toe Wyzer and during those years was his lohn Leydecker, but his best friend Is wife. They went almost everywhere together, had no secrets, and fought so seldom one might just as well have said never. He also had Rosalie the beagle, the rocker that had once been Mr. Chasse’s and was now his, and almost daily visits from Natalie (who had begun calling them Ralph and Lois instead of Wall and Roiss, a change neither of them found to be an improvement). And he was healthy, which was maybe the best thing of all. It was just life, full of Short-Time rewards and setbacks, and Ralph lived it with’enjoyment and serenity until mid-March of 1998, when he awoke one morning, glanced at the digital clock beside his bed, and saw it was 5:49 a.m.
He lay quietly beside Lois, not wanting to disturb her by getting up, and wondering what had awakened him.
You know what, Ralph.
No I don’t.
Yes, you do. Listen.
So he listened. He listened very carefully. And after awhile he began to hear it in the walls: the low, soft ticking of the deathwatch.
Ralph awoke at 5:47 the following morning, and at 5:44 the morning after that. His sleep was whittled away, minute by minute, as winter slowly loosened its grip on Derry and allowed spring to find its way back in. By May he was hearing the tick of the deathwatch everywhere, but understood it was all coming from one place and simply projecting itself, as a good ventriloquist can project his voice. Before, it had been coming from Carolyn. Now it was coming from him.
He felt none of the terror that had gripped him when he’d been so sure he had developed cancer, and none of the desperation he vaguely remembered from his previous bout of insomnia. He tired more easily and began to find it more difficult to concentrate and remember even simple things, but he accepted What was happening calmly.
“Are you sleeping all right, Ralph?” Lois asked him one day.
“You’re getting these big dark circles under your eyes.”
“It’s the dope I take,” Ralph said.
“Very funny, you old poop.”
He took her in his arms and hugged her. “Don’t worry about me, sweetheart-I’m getting all the sleep I need.”
He awoke one morning a week later at 4:02 a.m. with a line of deep heat throbbing in his arm-throbbing in perfect sync with the sound of the deathwatch, which was, of course, nothing more or less than the beat of his own heart. But this new thing wasn’t his heart, or at least Ralph didn’t think it was; it felt as if an electric filament had been embedded in the flesh of his forearm.
It’s the scar, he thought, and then: No, it’s the promise. The time of the promise is almost here.
What promise, Ralph? What promise? He didn’t know.
One day in early June, Helen and Nat blew in to visit and tell Ralph and Lois about the trip they had taken to Boston with “Aunt Melanie, a bank teller with whom Helen had become close friends.
Helen and Aunt Melanie had gone to some sort of feminist convention while Natalie networked with about a billion new kids in the day-care center, and then Aunt Melanie had left to do some more feminist things in New York and Washington. Helen and Nat had stayed on in Boston for a couple of days, just sightseein “We went to see a movie cartoon,” Natalie said. “It was about animals in the woods.
They talked!” She pronounced this last word with Shakespearian grandiosity-talked.
“Movies where animals talk are neat, aren’t they?” Lois asked.
“Yes! Also I got this new dress!”
“And a very pretty dress it is,” Lois said.
Helen was looking at Ralph. “Are you okay, old chum? You look pale, and you haven’t said boo.”
“Never better,” he said. “I was just thinking how cute you two look in those caps. Did you get them at Fenway Park?”
Both Helen and Nat were wearing Boston Red Sox caps. These were common enough in New England during warm weather (“common as catdirt,” Lois would have said), but the sight of them on the heads of these two people filled Ralph with some deep, resonant feeling… and it was tied to a specific image, one he did, at least, understand: the front of the Red Apple Store. Helen, meantime, had taken off her hat and was examining it. “Yes,” she said. “We went, but we only stayed for three innings.
Men hitting balls and catching balls. I guess I just don’t have much patience for men and their balls these days… but we like our nifty Bosox hats, don’t we, Natalie?”
“Yes! “Nat agreed smartly, and when Ralph awoke the next morning at 4:01, the scar throbbed its thin line of heat inside his arm and the deathwatch seemed almost to have gained a voice, one which whispered a strange, foreign-sounding name over and over: Atropos… Atropos…
Atropos-I know that name.
Do you, Ralph? Yes, he was the one with the rusty scalpel and the nasty disposition, the one who called me Shorts, the one who took… took… Took what, Ralph?
He was getting used to these silent discussions; they seemed to come to him on some mental radio band, a pirate frequency that operated only during the little hours, the ones when he lay awake beside his sleeping wife, waiting for the sun to come up.
Took what? Do you remember?
He didn’t expect to; the questions that voice asked him almost always went unanswered, but this time, unexpectedly, an answer came.
Bill McGovern’s hat, of course. Atropos took Bill’s hat, and once I made him so mad he actually took a bite out of the brim.
Who is he? Who is Atropos?
Of this he was not so sure. He only knew that Atropos had something to do with Helen, who now owned a Boston Red Sox cap of which she seemed very fond, and that he had a rusty scalpel.
Soon, thought Ralph Roberts as he lay in the dark, listening to the soft, steady tick of the deathwatch in the walls. I’ll know sooll.
During the third week of that baking-hot June, Ralph began to see the auras again.
As June slipped into July, Ralph found himself bursting into tears often, usually for no discernible reason at all. It was strange; he had no sense of depression or discontent, but sometimes he would look at something-maybe only a bird winging its solitary way across the sky-and his heart would vibrate with sorrow and loss.
It’s almost over, the inside voice said. It no longer belonged to
Carolyn or Bill or even his own younger self, it was all its own now, the voice of a stranger, although not necessarily an unkind one.
That’s why you’re sad, Ralph. It’s perfectly normal to be sad as things start to wind down.
Nothing ’ g’s almost over he cried back. Why should it be? At my last checkup, Dr. Pickard said I was sound as a drum.” I’m fine!
Never better.”
Silence from the voice inside. But it was a knowing silence.
“Okay,” Ralph said out loud one hot afternoon near the end of July. was sitting on a bench not far from the place where the Derry Standpipe had stood until 1985, when the big storm had come along and knocked it down. At the base of the hill, near the birdbath, a young man (a serious birdwatcher, from the binoculars he wore and the thick stack of paperbacks on the grass beside him) was making careful notes in what looked like some sort of journal. “Okay, tell me why it’s almost over. just tell me that.”
There was no immediate answer, but that was all right; Ralph was willing to wait. It had been quite a stroll over here, the day was hot, and he was tired. He was now waking around three-thirty every morning. He had begun taking long walks again, but not in any hope they would help him sleep better or longer; he thought he was making pilgrimages, visiting all his favorite spots in Derry one last time.
Saying goodbyeBecause the time of the promise has almost come, the voice answered, and the scar began to throb with its deep, narrow heat again.
The one that was made to you, and the one you made ’ “return.
“What was it?” he asked, agitated. “Please, if I made a promise, why can’t I remember what it was.mill The serious birdwatcher heard that and looked up the hill. What he saw was a man sitting on a park bench and apparently having a conversation with himself. The corners of the serious birdwatcher’s mouth turned down in disgust and he thought, I hope I die before I get that old. I really do. Then he turned back to the birdbath and began making notes again.
Deep inside Ralph’s head, the clenching sensation-that feeling of blink-suddenly came again, and although he didn’t stir from the bench, Ralph felt himself propelled rapidly upward nonetheless… faster and farther than ever before.
Not at all, the voice said. Once you were much higher than this, Ralph-Lois, too. But you’re getting there. You’ll be ready soon.
The birdwatcher, who lived all unknowing in the center of a gorgeous spun-gold aura, looked around cautiously, perhaps wanting to make sure that the senile old man on the bench at the top of the hill wasn’t creeping up on him with a blunt instrument. What he saw caused the tight, prissy line of his mouth to soften in astonishment. His eyes widened. Ralph observed sudden radiating spokes of indigo in the serious birdwatcher’s aura and realized he was looking at shock.
What’s the matter with him? What does he see?
But that was wrong. It wasn’t what the birdwatcher saw,-it was what he didn’t see. He didn’t see Ralph, because Ralph had gone up high enough to disappear from this level-had become the visual equivalent of a note blown on a dog-whistle.
If they were here now, I could see them easily.
