Insomnia

That’s why you’re sad, Ralph. It’s perfectly normal to be sad as things start to wind down.

Nothing ’ g’s almost over he cried back. Why should it be? At my last checkup, Dr. Pickard said I was sound as a drum.” I’m fine!

Never better.”

Silence from the voice inside. But it was a knowing silence.

“Okay,” Ralph said out loud one hot afternoon near the end of July. was sitting on a bench not far from the place where the Derry Standpipe had stood until 1985, when the big storm had come along and knocked it down. At the base of the hill, near the birdbath, a young man (a serious birdwatcher, from the binoculars he wore and the thick stack of paperbacks on the grass beside him) was making careful notes in what looked like some sort of journal. “Okay, tell me why it’s almost over. just tell me that.”

There was no immediate answer, but that was all right; Ralph was willing to wait. It had been quite a stroll over here, the day was hot, and he was tired. He was now waking around three-thirty every morning. He had begun taking long walks again, but not in any hope they would help him sleep better or longer; he thought he was making pilgrimages, visiting all his favorite spots in Derry one last time.

Saying goodbyeBecause the time of the promise has almost come, the voice answered, and the scar began to throb with its deep, narrow heat again.

The one that was made to you, and the one you made ’ “return.

“What was it?” he asked, agitated. “Please, if I made a promise, why can’t I remember what it was.mill The serious birdwatcher heard that and looked up the hill. What he saw was a man sitting on a park bench and apparently having a conversation with himself. The corners of the serious birdwatcher’s mouth turned down in disgust and he thought, I hope I die before I get that old. I really do. Then he turned back to the birdbath and began making notes again.

Deep inside Ralph’s head, the clenching sensation-that feeling of blink-suddenly came again, and although he didn’t stir from the bench, Ralph felt himself propelled rapidly upward nonetheless… faster and farther than ever before.

Not at all, the voice said. Once you were much higher than this, Ralph-Lois, too. But you’re getting there. You’ll be ready soon.

The birdwatcher, who lived all unknowing in the center of a gorgeous spun-gold aura, looked around cautiously, perhaps wanting to make sure that the senile old man on the bench at the top of the hill wasn’t creeping up on him with a blunt instrument. What he saw caused the tight, prissy line of his mouth to soften in astonishment. His eyes widened. Ralph observed sudden radiating spokes of indigo in the serious birdwatcher’s aura and realized he was looking at shock.

What’s the matter with him? What does he see?

But that was wrong. It wasn’t what the birdwatcher saw,-it was what he didn’t see. He didn’t see Ralph, because Ralph had gone up high enough to disappear from this level-had become the visual equivalent of a note blown on a dog-whistle.

If they were here now, I could see them easily.

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 pla

“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 fu

“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.