Stephen King - Insomnia

To the left of the mirror was a stark sleeping accommodation which consisted of a filthy mattress and a burlap sack stuffed with straw or feathers. Both pillow and mattress glowed and raved with the nightsweats of the creature who used them. The dreams inside, that burlap pillow would drive me insane, Ralph thought.

Somewhere, God only knew how much farther under the earth, water was dripping hollowly.

On the far side of the apartment was another, higher arch, through which they could see a jumbled, surreal storage area. Ralph actually blinked two or three times to try to make sure he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing.

This is the place, all right, he thought. Whatever we came to find, it’s here.

Lois began to drift toward this second arch as if hypnotized. Her mouth was quivering with dismay, but her eyes were full of helpless curiosity-it was the expression, he was quite sure, that must have been on the face of Bluebeard’s wife when she had used the key which unlocked the door to her husband’s forbidden room. Ralph was suddenly sure that Atropos was lurking just inside that arch with his rusty scalpel poised. He hurried after Lois and stopped her just before she could step through. He grasped her upper arm, then put a finger to his lips and shook his head at her before she could speak.

He hunkered down with the fingers of one hand tented on the packed dirt floor, looking like a sprinter awaiting the crack of the starter’s gun. Then he launched himself through the arch (relishing the eager response of his body even at this moment), hitting on his shoulder and rolling. His feet struck a cardboard box and knocked it over, spilling out a jumble of stuff: mismatched gloves and socks, a couple of old paperbacks, a pair of Bermuda shorts, a screwdriver with smears of shaft.

Ralph got to his knees, looking back toward Lois, who was standing in the doorway and staring at him with her hands clasped under her chin. There was no one on either side of the archway, and really no room for anyone. More boxes were stacked on either side. Ralph read the printing on them with a kind of bemused wonder: jack Daniel’s, Gilbey’s, Smirnoff, J amp;B. Atropos, it seemed, was as fond of liquor cartons as anyone else who couldn’t bear to throw anything away.

[“Ralph? Is it safe?”] The word was a joke, but he nodded his head and held out his hand. She hurried toward him, giving her slip another sharp upward yank as she came and looking about herself in growing amazement.

Standing on the other side of the arch, in Atropos’s grim little apartment, this storage area had looked large. Now that they were actually in it, Ralph saw it went well beyond that; rooms this big were usually called warehouses. Aisles wandered among great, tottery piles of junk. Only the stuff by the door had actually been boxed; the rest had been piled any whichway, creating something which was two parts maze and three parts booby-trap. Ralph decided that even warehouse was too small a word-this was an underground suburb, and Atropos might be lurking anywhere within it… and if he was here, he was probably watching them.

Lois didn’t ask what they were looking at; he saw by her face that she already knew. When she did speak, it was in a dreamy tone that sent a chill scampering up Ralph’s back.

[“He must be so very old, Ralph.”] Yes. So very old.

Twenty yards into the room, which was lit with the same sunken, sourceless red glow as the stairway, Ralph could see a large spoked wheel lying atop a cane-backed chair which was, in turn, standing on top of a splintery old clothes press. Looking at that wheel brought a deeper chill; it was as if the metaphor his mind had seized to help grasp the concept of ka had become real. Then he noted the rusty ired iron strip which circled the wheel’s outer circumference and real it had probably come from one of those Gay Nineties bikes that looked like overgrown tricycles. all right, and it’s a hundred years old if it’s a day. It’s a bicycle whee, all ri -how day, he thought. That led him to wonder how many people many thousands or tens of thousands-had died in and around Derry since Atropos had somehow transported this wheel down here. And of those thousands, how many had been Random deaths?

And how far back does he go? How many hundreds of years?

No way of telling, of course; maybe all the way to the beginning, whenever or however that had been. And during that time, he had taken a little something from everyone he had fucked with… and here it all was.

Here it all was.

[“Ralph.”] He looked around and saw that Lois was holding out both hands.

In one was a Panama hat with a crescent bitten from the brim. In the other was a black nylon pocket-comb, the kind you could buy in any convenience store for a buck twenty-nine. A ghostly glimmer of orange-yellow still clung to it, which didn’t surprise Ralph much.

Each time the comb’s owner had used it, it must have picked up a little of that glow from both his aura and his balloon-string, like dandruff. It also didn’t surprise him that the comb should have been with

McGovern’s hat; the last time he’d seen those two things, they’d been together. He remembered Atropos’s sarcastic grin as he swept the Panama from his head and pretended to use the comb on his own bald dome.

And then he jumped up and clicked his heels together.

Lois was pointing at an old rocking chair with a broken runner.

[“The hat was right there, on the seat. The comb was underneath.

It’s Mr. Wyzer’s, isn’t it?”] [“Yes.] She held it out to him immediately.

[“You take it. I’m not as ditzy as Bill always thought, but sometimes I lose things. And if I lost this, I’d never forgive myself.”] He took the comb, started to put it into his back pocket, then thought how easily Atropos had plucked it from that same location.

Easy as falling off a log, it had been. He put it into his front pants pocket instead, then looked back at Lois, who was gazing at McGovern’s bitten hat with the sad wonder of Hamlet looking at the skull of his old pal Yorick. When she looked up, Ralph saw tears in her eyes.

[“He loved this hat. He thought he looked very dashing and debonair when he had it on. He didn’t just look like Bill-but he thought he looked good, and that’s the important part. Wouldn’t you say so, Ralph?”] [“Yes.”] She tossed the hat back into the seat of the old rocker and turned to examine a box of what looked like rummage-sale clothes. As soon as her back was to him, Ralph squatted down, peering beneath the chair, hoping to see a splintered double gleam in the darkness. If Bill’s hat and Joe’s comb were both here, then maybe Lois’s earringsThere was nothing beneath the rocker but dust and a pink knitted baby bootee.

Should have known that’d be too easy, Ralph thought, getting to his feet again. He suddenly felt exhausted. They had found Joe’s comb with no trouble at all, and that was good, absolutely great, but Ralph was afraid it had also been a spectacular case of beginner’s luck.

They still had Lois’s earrings to worry about… and doing whatever else it was they had been sent here to do, of course. And what was that? He didn’t know, and if someone from upstairs was sending instructions, he wasn’t receiving them.

[“Lois, do you have any idea what-“] [“Shhhh!” [“What is it?

Lois is it him?”] [“No.” Be quiet, Ralph.” Be quiet and listen!”] He listened. At first he heard nothing, and then the clenching sensation-the blink-came inside his head again. This time it was very slow, very cautious. He slipped upward a little farther, as lightly as a feather lifted in a draft of warm air. He became aware of a long, 6 low groaning sound, like an endlessly creaking door, There was something familiar about it-not in the sound itself, but in its associations. It was like-a burglar alarm, or maybe a smoke-detector.