He looked at her, but Lois was looking down at where Ed’s ring had been, her eyes dark with a mixture of fear and confusion.
Where Ed’s ring had been; where Ed’s ring still was. It lay exactly as it had lain, a glimmering gold circlet with HD-ED 8-5-87 inscribed around the inner arc.
Ralph felt an instant of dizzy disorientation and controlled it with an effort. He opened his hand, half-expecting the ring to be gone in spite of what his senses told him, but it still lay in the center of his palm, neatly enclosed within the fork where his loveline and his lifeline diverged, glimmering in the baleful red light of this nasty place. HD-ED 8-5-87.
The two rings were identical.
One in his hand; one on the floor; absolutely no difference. At least none that Ralph could see.
Lois reached for the ring which had replaced the one Ralph had picked up, hesitated, then grasped it. As they watched, ghost-gold glowed just above the chamber’s floor, then solidified into a third wedding band. Like the other two, HD-ED 8-5-87 was inscribed on the inner curve.
Ralph found himself thinking of yet another story-not Tolkien’s long tale of the Ring, but a story by Dr. Seuss which he had read one of Carolyn’s sister’s kids back in the fifties. That was a long time ago, but he had never completely forgotten the story, which had been richer and darker than Dr. Seuss’s usual jingle-jangle nonsense about rats and bats and troublesome cats. It was called The Five Hundred Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, and Ralph supposed it really wasn’t any wonder that the story had come to mind now.
Poor Bartholomew was a country hayseed who had the bad luck to be in the big city when the King happened by. You were supposed to take your hat off in the presence of that august personage, and Bartholomew had certainly tried, but without any luck; each time he took his hat off, another one, identical to the last, appeared beneath it.
[“Ralph, what’s happening? What does it mean?”]
a He shook his head without answering, eyes moving from the ring I on his palm to the one in Lois’s hand to the one on the floor, around and around and around. Three rings, all of them identical, just like the hats Bartholomew Cubbins had kept trying to take off. The poor kid had gone on trying to make his manners to the King, Ralph remembered, even as the executioner had led him up a curving flight of stairs to the place where he would be beheaded for the crime of disrespect…
Except that wasn’t right, because after awhile the hats on poor Bartholomew’s head did begin to change, to grow ever more fabulous and rococo.
And are the rings the same, Ralph? Are you sure?
No, he guessed he wasn’t. When he’d picked up the first one, he had felt a deep, momentary ache spread up his arm like rheumatism, but Lois had shown no signs of pain when she picked up the second one.
And the voices-I didn’t hear them shout when she picked up the one she has.
Ralph leaned forward and grasped the third ring. There was no jolt of pain and no shout from the objects which formed the walls of the room-they just kept singing softly. Meanwhile, a fourth ring materialized where the other three had. been, materialized exactly like another hat on the head of hapless Bartholomew Cubbins, but Ralph barely glanced at it. He looked at the first ring, lying between the fork of his lifeline and loveline on the palm of his right hand.
One Ring to rule them all, he thought. One Ring to hind them.
And I think that’s you, beautiful. I think the others are just clever counterfeits.
And maybe there was a way to check that. Ralph held the two rings to his ears. The one in his left hand was silent; the one in his right, the one that had been inside the deathbag when he cut it open, gave off a faint, chilling echo of the deathbag’s final scream.
The one in his right hand was alive.
[“Ralph?”
Her hand on his arm, cold and urgent. Ralph looked at her, then tossed the ring in his left hand away. He held the other up and gazed at Lois’s strained, strangely young face through it, as if through a telescope.
[“This is the one. The others are just place-holders, I think-like-e zeros in a big, complicated math problem.”]
[“You mean they don’t matter?”]
He hesitated, unsure of how to reply… because they did matter, that was the thing. He just didn’t know how to put his intuitive understanding of this into words. As long as the false rings kept appearing in this nasty little room, like hats on the head of Bartholomew Cubbins, the future represented by the deathbag around the Civic Center remained the one true future. But the first ring, the one which Atropos had actually stolen off Ed’s finger (perhaps as he lay sleeping next to Helen in the little Cape Cod house which was now standing empty), could change all that.
The replicas were tokens which preserved the shape of ka just as spokes radiating out from a hub preserved the shape of a wheel. The original, however…
Ralph thought the original was the hub: One Ring to bind them.
He gripped the gold band tightly, feeling its hard curve bite into his palm and fingers. Then he slipped it into his watchpocket.
There was one thing about ka they didn’t tell us, he thought.
It’s slippery. Slippery as some nasty oldfish that won’t come off the hook but just keeps flopping around in your hand.
And it was like climbing a sand dune, too-you slid one step back for every two you managed to lunge forward. They had gone out to High Ridge and accomplished something-just what, Ralph didn’t know, but Dorrance had assured them it was true; according to him, they had fulfilled their task there. Now they had come here and taken Ed’s token, but it still wasn’t enough, and why? Because k,i was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.
But most of all, perhaps, ka was like a ring.
Like a wedding ring.
He suddenly understood what all the talk on the hospital roof and all of Dorrance’s efforts to explain hadn’t been able to convey: Ed’s undesignated status, coupled with Atropos’s discovery of the poor, confused man, had conveyed a tremendous power upon him. A door had opened, and a demon called the Crimson King had strolled through, one that was stronger than Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, any of them. And it didn’t intend to be stopped by a Derry Old Crock like Ralph Roberts.
E “Ralph?” I
[“One Ring to rule them all, Lois-one Ring to find them.
[“What are ’you talking about? What do you mean?”] He patted his watchpocket, feeling the small yet momentous bulge that was Ed’s ring.
Then he reached out and grasped her shoulders.
[“The replacements-the false rings-are spokes, but this one is the hub. Take away the hub, and a wheel can’t turn.
[“Are you sure?”] He was sure, all right. He just didn’t know how to do it.
[“Yes. Now come on-let’s get out of here while we still can.”] Ralph sent her beneath the overloaded dining-room table first, then dropped to his knees and followed. He paused halfway under and looked back over his shoulder. He saw a strange and terrible thing: although the buzzing sound had not returned, the deathbag was re-knitting itself around the replacement wedding ring. Already the bright gold had dimmed to a ghostly circlet.
He stared at it for several seconds, fascinated, almost hypnotized, then tore his eyes away with an effort and began to crawl after LOIS.
Ralph was afraid they would lose valuable time trying to navigate their way back through the maze of corridors which crisscrossed Atropos’s storehouse of keepsakes, but that turned out not to be a problem. Their own footprints, fading but still visible, were there to guide them.
He began to feel a little stronger as they put the terrible little room behind them, but Lois was now flagging badly. By the time they reached the archway between the storehouse and Atropos’s filthy apartment, she was leaning on him. He asked if she was all right.
Lois managed a shrug and a small, tired smile.
[“Most of my problem is being in this place. It doesn’t really matter how high up we go, it’s still foul and I hate it. Once I get some fresh air, I think I’ll be fine. Honestly.”],n Ralph hoped she was right. As he ducked under the arch ’ to Atropos’s apartment, he was trying to think of a pretext by which he could send Lois on ahead of him. That would give him an opportunity to give the place a quick search. If that didn’t turn up the ing earrings, he would have to assume that Atropos was still wearing them.
He noticed her slip was hanging below the hem of her dress again, opened his mouth to tell her, and saw a flicker of movement from the tail of his left eye. He realized they had been a lot less cautious on the return trip-partly because they were worn out-and now they might have to pay a high price for dropping their guard.
[“Lois, look out!”] Too late. Ralph felt her arm jerked away as the snarling creature in the dirty tunic seized her about the waist and dragged her backward.
Atropos’s head only came to her armpit, but that was enough to allow him to hold his rusty blade over her. When Ralph made an instinctive lunge at him, Atropos brought the straight-razor down until it was touching the pearl-gray cord which drifted up from the crown of her head. He bared his teeth at Ralph in an unspeakable grin.
[Not another step, Shorts… not one!] Well, he didn’t have to worry about Lois’s errant earrings anymore, at least. They glittered a murky, pinkish-red against the tiny lobes of Atropos’s ears. It was more the sight of them than the shout that stopped Ralph where he was.
The scalpel drew back a little… but only a little.
[Now, Shorts-you took something of mine just now, didn’t you?
Don’t try to deny it,-I know. And now you’re going to give it back.] The scalpel returned to Lois’s balloon-string; Atropos caressed it with the flat of the blade.
[You give it back or this bitch is going to die here in front of you-you can stand there and watch the sack turn black. So what do you say, Short Stuff? Hand it over.]
CHAPTER 26
Atropos’s smile shone out, full of repulsive triumph, and full ofFull of fear. He caught You flat-footed, he’s got his scalpel to Lois’s balloon-string and his ban around her throat, but He’s still scared to death. Why?
[Come on! Quit wasting time, shithead. Give me the ring!] Ralph reached slowly into his watchpocket and grasped the ring, wondering why Atropos hadn’t killed Lois outright. Surely he didn’t intend to let her-to let either of them-go.
He’s afraid I might hammer him with another one of those telepathic karate-chops. And that’s just for starters. I think He’s also afraid of screwing up. Afraid of the thing-the entity-that’s running him.
Afraid of the Crimson King. You’re scare of the boss, aren’t you, “/-l filthy little friend?
