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 planning on taking Rosalie, it's so humid. Go sit on the back porch, why don't you?"
"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