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.
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.