Who, Ralph? If who was here?
Clotho. Lachesis. And Atropos.
All at once the pieces began to fly together in his mind, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had looked a great deal more complicated than it actually was.
Ralph, whispering: [“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.”]
Six days later, Ralph awoke at quarter past three in the morning and knew that the time of the promise had come.
“I think I’ll walk upstreet to the Red Apple and get an ice-cream bar,” Ralph said. It was almost ten o’clock. His heart was beating much too fast, and his thoughts were hard to find under the constant white noise of terror which now filled him. He had never felt less like ice cream in his entire life, but it was a reasonable enough excuse for a trip to the Red Apple; it was the first week of August, and the weatherman had said the mercury would probably top ninety by early afternoon, with thunderstorms to follow in the early evening.
Ralph thought he needn’t worry about the thunderstorms.
A bookcase stood on a spread of newspapers by the kitchen door.
Lois had been painting it barn-red. Now she got to her feet, put her hands into the small of her back, and stretched. Ralph could hear the minute crackling sounds of her spine. “I’ll go with you. My head’Il ache tonight if I don’t get away from that paint for awhile. I don’t know why I wanted to paint on such a muggy day in the first place.”
The last thing on earth Ralph wanted was to be accompanied up to the Red Apple by Lois. “You don’t have to, honey; I’ll bring you back one of those coconut Popsicles you like. I wasn’t even planning on taking Rosalie, it’s so humid. Go sit on the back porch, why don’t you?”
“Any Popsicle you carry back from the store on a day like this will be falling off the stick by the time you get it here,” she said “Come on, let’s go while there’s still shade on this side of the She trailed off. The little smile she’d been wearing slipped off her face.
It was replaced by a look of dismay, and the gray of her aura, which had only darkened slightly during the years Ralph hadn’t been able to see it, now began to glow with flocks of reddish-pink embers.
“Ralph, what’s wrong? What are you really going to do?”
“Nothing,” he said, but the scar was glowing inside his arm and the tick of the deathwatch was everywhere, loud and everywhere. It was telling him he had an appointment to keep. A promise to keep.
“Yes, there is, and it’s been wrong for the last two or three months, maybe longer. I’m a foolish woman-I knew something was happening, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at it dead-on. Because I was afraid. And I was right to be afraid, wasn’t I? I was right.”
“Lois-” She was suddenly crossing the room to him, crossing fast, almost leaping, the old back injury not slowing her down in the least, and before he could stop her, she had seized his right arm and was holding it out, looking at it fixedly.
The scar was glowing a fierce bright red.
Ralph had a moment to hope that it was strictly an aural glow and she wouldn’t be able to see it. Then she looked up, her eyes round and full of terror. Terror, and something else. Ralph thought that something else was recognition.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “The men in the park. The ones with the funny names… Clothes and Lashes, something like that… and one of them cut you. Oh Ralph, oh my God, what are you supposed to do?”
“Now, Lois, don’t take on-”
“Don’t you dare tell me not to take on.” she shrieked into his face.
“Don’t you dare.” Don’t you DARE.I” Hurry, the interior voice whispered. You don’t have time to stand around and discuss this,somewhere it’s already begun to happen, and the deathwatch you hear may not be ticking just for you.
“I have to go.” He turned and blundered toward the door. In his agitation he did not notice a certain Sherlock Holmesian circumstance attending this scene: a dog which should have barked-a dog which always barked her stern disapproval when voices were raised in this house-but did not. Rosalie was missing from her usual place by the screen door… and the door itself was standing ajar.
Rosalie was the furthest thing from Ralph’s mind at that moment.
He felt knee-deep in molasses, and thought he would be doing well just to make the porch, let alone the Red Apple up the street. His heart thumped and skidded in his chest; his eyes were burning.
“No!” Lois screamed. “No, Ralph, please! Please don’t leave me!” She ran after him, clutched his arm. She was still holding her paintbrush, and the fine red droplets which splattered his shirt looked like blood. Now she was crying, and her expression of utter, abject sorrow nearly broke his heart. He didn’t want to leave her like this; wasn’t sure he could leave her like this.
He turned and took her by her forearms. “Lois, I have to go.”
“You haven’t been sleeping,” she babbled, “I knew that, and I knew it meant something was wrong, but it doesn’t matter, we’ll go away, we can leave right now, this minute, we’ll just take Rosalie and our toothbrushes and go-” He squeezed her arms and she stopped, looking up at him with her wet eyes. Her lips were trembling.
“Lois, listen to me. I have to do this.”
“I lost Paul, I can’t lose you, too!” she wailed. “I couldn’t stand it! Oh Ralph, I couldn’t stand it!”
You’ll be able to, he thought. Short-Timers are a lot tougher that, they look. They have to be.
Ralph felt a couple of tears trickle down his cheeks. He suspected their source was more weariness than grief. If he could make her see that all this changed nothing, only made what he had to do harder…
He held her at arm’s length. The scar on his arm was throbbing more fiercely than ever, and the feeling of time slipping relentlessly away had become overwhelming.
“Walk with me at least partway, if you want,” he said. “Maybe you can even help me do what I have to do. I’ve had my life, Lois, and a fine one it was. But she hasn’t really had anything yet, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let that son of a bitch have her just because He’s got a score to settle with me.”
“What son of a bitch? Ralph, what in the world are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Natalie Deepneau. She’s supposed to die this morning, only I’m not going to let that happen.”
“Nat? Ralph, why would anyone want to hurt Nat?”
She looked very bewildered, very Our Lois… but wasn’t there something else beneath that daffy exterior? Something careful and calculating? Ralph thought the answer was yes. Ralph had an idea Lois wasn’t half as bewildered as she was pretending to be. She had fooled Bill McGovern for years with that act-him, too, at least part of the time-and this was just another (and rather brilliant) variation of the same old scam.
What she was really trying to do was hold him here. She loved Nat deeply, but to Lois, a choice between her husband and the little girl who lived up the lane was no choice at all. She didn’t consider either age or questions of fairness to have any bearing on the situation.
Ralph was her man, and to Lois, that was all that mattered.
“It won’t work,” he said, not unkindly. He disengaged himself and started for the door again. “I made a promise, and I’m all out of time.”
“Break it, then!” she cried, and the mixture of terror and rage in her voice stunned him. “I don’t remember much about that time, but I remember we got involved with things that almost got us killed, and for reasons we couldn’t even understand. So break it, Ralph!
Better your promise than my heart!”
“And what about the kid? What about Helen, for that matter?
Nat’s all she lives for. Doesn’t Helen deserve something better from me than a broken promise?”
“I don’t care what she deserves! What any of them deserve!” she shouted, and then her face crumpled. “Yes, all right, I suppose I do.
But what about us, Ralph? Don’t we count?” Her eyes, those dark and eloquent Spanish eyes of hers, pleaded with him. If he looked into them too long, it would become all too easy to cry it off, so Ralph looked away.
“I mean to do it, honey. Nat’s going to get what you and I have already had-another seventy years or so of days and nights.”
She looked at him helplessly, but made no attempt to stop him again. Instead she began to cry. “Foolish old man!” she whispered.
“Foolish, willful old man!”
“Yes, I suppose,” he said, and lifted her chin. “But I’m a foolish, willful old man of my word. Come with me. I’d like that.”
“All right, Ralph.” She could hardly hear her own voice, and her skin was as cold as clay. Her aura had gone almost completely red.
“What is it? What’s going to happen to her?”
“She’s going to be hit by a green Ford sedan. Unless I take her place, she’s going to be splashed all over Harris Avenue… and Helen’s going to see it happen.”
As they walked up the hill toward the Red Apple (at first Lois kept falling behind, then trotting to catch up, but she quit when she saw she could not slow him with such a simple trick), Ralph told her what little more he could. She had some memory of being under the lightning-struck tree out by the Extension-a memory she had believed, at least until this morning, to be the memory of a dreambut of course she hadn’t been there during Ralph’s final confrontation with Atropos.
Ralph told her of it now-of the random death Atropos intended Natalie to suffer if Ralph continued standing in the way of his plans.
He told her of how he’d extracted a promise from Clotho and Lachesis that Atropos might in this case be overruled, and Nat saved.
“I have an idea that… the decision was made… very near the top of this crazy building… this Tower… they kept talking about.
Maybe… at the very top.” He was panting out the words and his heart was beating more rapidly than ever, but he thought most of that could be attributed to the fast walk and the torrid day; his fear had subsided somewhat. Talking to Lois had done that much.
Now he could see the Red Apple. Mrs. Perrine was at the bus stop half a block farther up, standing straight as a general reviewing troops. Her net shopping bag hung over her arm. There was a bus shelter nearby, and it was shady inside, but Mrs. Perrine stolidly ignored its existence. Even in the dazzling sunlight he could see that her aura was the same West Point gray as it had been on that October evening in 1993. Of Helen and Nat there was as yet no sign.
“Of course I knew who he was, “Esther Perrine later tells the reporter from the Derry News. “Do I look incompetent to you, young man?
Or senile? I’ve known Ralph Roberts for over twenty years. A good man. Not cut from the same cloth as his first wife, of course-Carolynn was a Satterttaite, from the Bangor Satter aites-but a very fine all, just the same. I recognized the driver of that green Ford auto, too, right away. Pete Sullivan delivered my paper for six years, and he did a good job. The new one, the Morrison boy, always throws it in the flowerbeds or up on the porch roof Pete was driving with his mother, on his learner’s permit, I understand. I hope he won’t take on too much about what happened, for he’s a good lad, and it really wasn’t his fault. I saw the whole thing, and I’ll take my oath on it.
“I suppose you think I’m rambling. Don’t bother denying it,-I can read your face just like it was your own newspaper, Never mind, though-I’ve said most of
