Stephen King - Insomnia

It’s telling us here it is. It’s calling us.

Lois seized his hand with fingers that were as cold as ice.

[“That’s it, Ralph-that’s what we’re looking for. Do you hear it?”] Yes, of course he did. But whatever that sound was, it had nothing to

???? do with Lois’s earrings… and without Lois’s earrings, he wasn’t

???? leaving this place.

???? [“Come on, Ralph! Come on! We have to find it!”]

????

He let her lead him deeper into the room. Atropos’s souvenirs were piled at least three feet higher than their heads in most places.

How a shrimp like him had managed this trick Ralph didn’t know -levitation, maybe-but the result was that he quickly lost all sense of direction as they twisted, turned, and occasionally seemed to double back. All he knew for sure was that low groaning sound kept getting louder in his ears; as they began to draw near its source, it became an insectile buzzing which Ralph found increasingly unpleasant. He kept expecting to round a corner and find a giant locust staring at him with dull brownish-black eyes as big as grapefruit.

Although the separate auras of the objects which filled the storage vault had faded like the scent of flower-petals pressed between the pages of a book, they were still there beneath Atropos’s stenchand at this level of perception, with all their senses exquisitely awake and attuned, it was impossible not to sense those auras and be affected by them. These mute reminders of the Random dead were both terrible and pathetic. The place was more than a museum or a packrat’s lair, Ralph realized; it was a profane church where Atropos took his own version of Communion-grief for bread, tears for wine.

Their stumbling course through the narrow zigzag rows was a gruesome, almost shattering experience. Each not-quite-aimless turn I n presented a hundred more objects Ralph wished he had never seen and would not have to remember; each voiced its own small cry of pain and bewilderment. He did not have to wonder if Lois shared his feelings-she was sobbing steadily and quietly beside him.

Here was a child’s battered Flexible Flyer sled with the knotted towrope still draped over the steering bar. The boy to whom it had belonged had died of convulsions on a crisp January day in 1953, Here was a majorette’s baton with its shaft wrapped in purpleand-white spirals of crepe-the colors of Grant Academy. She had been raped and bludgeoned to death with a rock in the fall of 1967.

Her killer, who had never been caught, had stuffed her body into a small cave where her bones-along with the bones of two other unlucky victims-still lay.

Here was the cameo brooch of a woman who had been struck by a falling brick while walking down Main Street to buy the new issue of Vogue,-if she had left her home thirty seconds earlier or later, she would have been fine.

Here was the buck knife of a man who had been killed in a hunting accident in 1937.

Here was the compass of a Boy Scout who had fallen and broken his neck while hiking on Mount Katahdin.

The sneaker of a little boy named Gage Creed, run down by a speeding tanker-truck on Route 15 in Ludlow.

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random… and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.

Lois, sobbing: [“I hate him! I hate him so much."’] He knew what she meant. It was one thing to hear Clotho and Lachesis say that Atropos was also part of the big picture, that he might even serve some Higher Purpose himself, and quite another to see the faded Boston Bruins cap of a little boy who had fallen into an overgrown cellar-hole and died in the dark, died in agony, died with no voice left after six hours spent screaming for his mother.

Ralph reached out and briefly touched the cap. Its owner’s name had been Billy Weatherbee. His final thought had been of ice cream.

Ralph’s hand tightened over Lois’s.

[“Ralph, what is it? I can hear you thinking-I’m sure I can-but it’s like listening to someone whisper under his breath.”] [“I was thinking that I want to bust that little bastard’s chops for him, Lois.

Maybe we could teach him what it’s like to lie awake at night.

What do you think?” Her grip on his hand tightened. She nodded.

They reached a place where the narrow corridor they’d been following branched into diverging paths. That low, steady buzz was coming from the left hand one, and not very far up it, either, by the sound.

It was now impossible for them to walk side by side, and as they worked their way toward the end, the passage grew narrower still.

Ralph was finally obliged to begin sidling along.

The reddish exudate Atropos left behind was very thick here, dripping down the jumbled stacks of souvenirs and making little puddles on the dirt floor. Lois was holding his hand with painful tightness now, but Ralph didn’t complain.

[“It’s like the Civic Center, Ralph-he spends a lot of time here.”] Ralph nodded. The question was, what did Mr. A. come donx,n this aisle to commune with? They were coming to the end now, it was blocked by a solid wall of junk, and he still couldn’t see what was making that buzzing sound. It was now starting to drive him crazy; it was like having a horsefly trapped in the middle Of Your head. As they approached the end of the passage, he became more and more sure that what they were looking for was on the other side of the wall of junk which blocked it-they would either have to retrace their steps and try to find a way around, or break through.

Either choice might consume more time than they could afford.

Ralph felt nibbles of desperation at the back of his mind.

But the corridor did not dead-end; on the left there was a crawlspace beneath a dining-room table piled high with dishes and stacks of green paper and…

Green paper? No, not quite. Stacks of bills. Tens, twenties, and fifties were piled up in random profusion on the dishes. There was a choke of hundreds in a cracked gravy-boat, and a rolled-up five-hundred-dollar bill poking drunkenly out of a dusty wineglass.

[“Ralph! My God, it’s a fortune!”]

She wasn’t looking at the table but at the other wall of the passageway. The last five feet had been constructed of banded gray-green bricks of currency. They were in an alleyway which was literally made of money, and Ralph realized he could now answer another of the questions that had been troubling him: where Ed had been getting his dough. Atropos was rolling in it… but Ralph had an idea that the little bald-headed sonofabitch still had trouble getting dates.

He bent down a little to get a better look into the crawlspace underneath the table. There appeared to be yet another chamber on the other side, this one very small. A slow red glow waxed and waned in there like the beating of a heart. It cast uneasy pulses of light on their shoes.

Ralph pointed, then looked at Lois. She nodded. He dropped to his knees and crawled beneath the money-laden table, and into the shrine Atropos had created around the thing which lay in the middle of the floor. It was what they had been sent to find, he hadn’t a single doubt about it, but he still had no idea what it was. The object, not much bigger than the sort of marbles children call croakers, was wrapped in a deathbag as impenetrable as the center of a black hole.