and then held it out to him.
[“It’s still alive-everything that’s ’ in here is still alive. I don’t kno how that can be but somehow it is. But they’re faint. What she was holding out to him was a small white sneaker that belonged to a woman or a child. As Ralph took it, he heard it singing softly in a distant voice. The sound was as lonely as November wind are they so faint?” on an overcast afternoon, but incredibly sweet, as well-an antidote to the endless bray of the black thing on the floor.
And it was a voice he knew. He was sure it was.
There was a maroon splatter on the sneaker’s toe. Ralph at first thought it was chocolate milk, then recognized it for what it really was: dried blood. In that instant he was outside the Red Apple again, grabbing Nat before Helen could drop her. He remembered how Helen’s feet had tangled together; how she had stumbled backward, leaning against the Red Apple’s door like a drunk against a lamppost, holding out her hands to him. Give me my bay-ee… gih me Natalie.
He knew the voice because it was Helen’s voice. This sneaker had been on her foot that day, and the drops of blood on the toe had come either from Helen’s smashed nose or from Helen’s lacerated cheek.
It sang and sang, its voice not quite buried beneath the buzz of the thing in the deathbag, and now that Ralph’s ears-or whatever passed for ears in the world of auras-were all the way open, he could hear all the other voices of all the other.objects. They sang like a lost choir.
Alive. Singing.
They could sing, all the things lining these walls could sing, because their owners could still sing.
Their owners were still alive.
Ralph looked up again, this time noting that while some of the objects he saw were old-the battered alto sax, for instance-a great many of them were new; there were no wheels from Gay Nineties bicycles in this little alcove. He saw three clock-radios, all of them digital.
A shaving kit that looked as if it had hardly been used. A lipstick that still had a Rite Aid pricetag on it.
[“Lois, Atropos has taken this stuff from the people who’ll be at the Civic Center tonight. Hasn’t he?”] [“Yes. I’m sure that’s right.”] He pointed at the black cocoon shrieking on the floor, almost drowning out the songs all around it… drowning them out as it fed on them.
[“And whatever’s inside that deathbag has something to do with what Clotho and Lachesis called the master-cord. It’s the thing that ties all these different objects-all these different lives-together.”] [“That makes them ka-tet. Yes.”] Ralph handed the sneaker back to Lois.
[“This goes with us when we go. It’s Helen’s.”] [“I know.”] Lois looked at it for a moment, then did something Ralph thought extremely clever: pulled out two eyelets’ worth of lacing and tied the sneaker to her left wrist like a bracelet.
He crawled closer to the small deathbag and then bent over it.
Getting close was hard, and staying close was harder-it was like placing your ear next to the motor-housing of a power drill shrieking at full volume or looking into a bright light without squinting. This time there seemed to be actual words buried within that buzzing, the same ones they’d heard as they approached the edge of the deathbag around the Civic Center: Geddout. Fucoff Beedit.
Ralph placed his hands over his ears for a moment, but of course that did no good. The sounds weren’t coming from the outside, not really. He let his hands drop again and looked at Lois.
[“What do you think? Any ideas on what we should do next?”] He didn’t know exactly what he had expected of her, but it wasn’t the quick, positive response he got.
[“Cut it open and take out what’s inside-and do it right away.
That thing’s dangerous. Also, it might be calling Atropos, have you thought of that? Tattling just like the hen tattled on jack in the story about the magic beanstalk.” Ralph actually had considered this possibility, although not in such vivid terms. All right, he thought.
Cut open the bag and take the prize. Except just how are we supposed to do that?
He remembered the bolt of lightning he’d sent at Atropos when the little bald creep had been trying to lure Rosalie across the street.
A good trick, but something like that might do more harm than good here; what if he vaporized the thing they were supposed to take?
“I don’t think you can do that.
All right, fair enough, as a matter of fact he didn’t think he could do it, either… but when you were surrounded by the possessions of people who could all be dead when the sun came up tomorrow, taking chances seemed like a very bad idea. An insane idea.
What I need isn’t lightning but a nice sharp pair of scissors, like the ones Clotho and Lachesis use toHe stared at Lois, startled by the clarity of the image.
[“I don’t know what you just thought of, but hurry up and do it, whatever it is.”] Ralph looked down at his right hand-a hand from which the wrinkles and the first twists of arthritis had now disappeared, a hand which lay inside a bright blue corona of light.
Feeling a little foolish, he folded his last two fingers against his palm and extended the first two, thinking of a game they’d played as kids-rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock.
Be scissors, he thought. I need a pair of scissors. Help me out.
Nothing. He glanced at Lois and saw her looking at him with a serene calm which was somehow terrifying. Oh Lois, if you only knew, he thought, and then swept that out of his mind. Because he had felt something, hadn’t he? Yes. Something.
This time he didn’t make words in his mind but a Picture: not the scissors Clotho had used to send on Jimmy V but the stainless-steel I shears from his mother’s sewing basket-long, slim blades tapering to a point almost as sharp as the tip of a knife. As he deepened h, is concentration, he could even see the two tiny words engraved on the metal just south of the pivot-point: SHEFFIELD STEEL.
And now he could feel that thing in his mind again, not a blink this time but a muscle-an immensely powerful one-slowly flexing. He looked fixedly down at his fingers and made the shears in his mind open and close. As they did, he slowly opened and closed his fingers, creating a V that widened and narrowed.
Now he could feel the energy he had taken from Nirvana Boy and the bum out at the trainyards, first gathering in his head and then moving down his right arm to his fingers like a cramp.
The aura surrounding the extended first and second fingers of his right hand began to thicken… and to lengthen. To take on the slim shape of blades. Ralph waited until they had extended themselves about five inches out from his nails and then worked his fingers back and forth again. The blades opened and closed.
[“Go, Ralph.” Do it!”] Yes-he couldn’t afford to wait around and run experiments. He felt like a car battery that had been called on to crank a motor much too big for it. He could feel all his energy-the stuff he’d taken as well as his own-running down his right arm and into those blades.
It wouldn’t last long.
He leaned forward, fingers pressed together in a pointing gesture, and sank the tip of the scissors into the deathbag. He had been concentrating so hard on first creating and then maintaining the scissors that he had stopped hearing that steady, hoarse buzz-at least with his conscious mind-but when the scissors-point sank into its black skin, the deathbag suddenly cycled up to a new, shrieking pitch of mingled pain and alarm. Ralph saw dribbles of thick, dark goo running out of the bag and across the floor. It looked like diseased snot. At the same time he felt the power-drain inside him roughly double. He could see it, he realized: his own aura running down his right arm and across the back of his hand in slow, peristaltic waves. And he could sense it dimming around the rest of his body as its essential protection of him thinned out.
[“Hurry, Ralph! Hurry!”] He made a tremendous effort and tore his fingers open. The shimmering blue blades also opened, making a small slit in the black egg.
It screamed, and two bright, jagged flashes of red light raced across its surface. Ralph brought his fingers together and watched the shears growing from their tips snap shut, cutting through dense black stuff that was part shell and part flesh. He cried out. It was not pain he felt, exactly, but a sense of awful weariness. This is what bleeding to death must feel like, he thought.
Something inside the bag gleamed bright gold.
Ralph gathered all his strength and attempted to open his fingers for another cut. At first he didn’t think he was going to be able to do it-they felt as if they had been stuck -together with Krazy Glue-and then they drew apart, widening the slit. Now he could almost see the object inside, something small and round and shiny.
Really only one thing it can be, he thought, and then his heart suddenly fluttered in his chest. The blue blades flickered.
[“Lois.” Help me!”] She seized his wrist. Ralph felt strength roar into him in big fresh volts. He watched, bemused, as the shears solidified again. Now only one of the blades was blue. The other was a pearly gray.
Lois, screaming inside his head: [“Cut it. Cut it now!”] He brought his fingers together again, and this time the blades cut the deathbag wide open. It uttered one last wavering shriek, turned entirely red, and disappeared. The shears growing from the tips of Ralph’s fingers flickered out of existence. He closed his eyes for a moment, suddenly aware that big warm drops of sweat were running down his cheeks like tears. In the dark field behind his eyelids he could see crazy afterimages that looked like dancing scissors-blades.
[“Lois? Are you okay?”] [“Yes… but drained. I don’t have the slightest idea bott, I’m supposed to get back to those stairs under the tree, let alone climb them. I’m not sure I can even stand UP.”] Ralph opened his eyes, put his hands on his thighs above the knees, and leaned forward again. Lying on the floor where the deathbag had been was a man’s wedding ring. He could easily read what had been engraved on the wide inner curve: He-ED 8-5-87.
Helen Deepneau and Edward Deepneau-Married on August 5th, 1987.
It was what they had come for. It was Ed’s token. All that remained now was to pick it up… slip it into the watchpocket of his pants… find Lois’s earrings… and get the hell out of here.
As he reached for the ring, a flicker of verse slipped through his mind-not Stephen Dobyns this time but J. R. R. Tolkien, who had invented the hobbits Ralph had last thought of in Lois’s cozy, picture-filled living room. It had been almost thirty years since he had read Tolkien’s story of Frodo and Gandalf and Sauron, the Dark Lord-a story which contained a token very similar to this one, now that he thought about it-but the lines were momentarily as clear as the scissors-blades had been only moments before: One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them, In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
I won’t be able to pick it up, he thought. It will be as tightly bound to the wheel of ka as Lois and I are, and I won’t be able to pick it up. Either that, or it will be like grasping a live high-tension wire, and I’ll be dead before I know it’s happening.
Except he didn’t really believe either of those things was going to happen. If the ring was not his for the taking, why had it been protected by the deathbag? If the ring was not his for the taking, why had the forces which stood behind Clotho and Lachesis-and Dorrance, he couldn’t forget Dorrance-set him and Lois upon this journey in the first place?
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, Ralph thought, and closed his fingers around Ed’s wedding ring. For a moment he felt a deep, glassy pain in his hand and wrist and forearm; at the same moment, the softly singing voices of the objects which Atropos had hoarded here rose in a great, harmonic shout.
Ralph made a sound-perhaps a scream, perhaps only a moanand lifted the ring up, clenched tightly in his right hand. A sense of victory sang in his veins like wine, or like[“Ralph.
