Quotes from Insomnia

A note on Auras on the Short-Time plane:
-[He is an agent of the Random. We, Lachesis and I, serve that other force, the one which accounts for most events in both individual lives and in life’s wider stream. On your level of the building, Ralph and Lois, every creature is a Short-Time creature, and has an appointed span. This isn’t to say that a child pops out of its mother’s womb with a sign around its neck reading CUT CORD@84 YEARS, 11 MONTHS, 9 DAYS, 6 HOURS, 4 MINUTES, AND 21 SECONDS. That idea is ridiculous. Yet time passages are usually set, and as both of you have seen, one of the many functions the Short-Time aura serves is as a clock.]
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Description on the planes of existence:
-Clotho: [Be content with this: beyond the Short-Time levels of existence and the Long-Time levels on which Lachesis, Atropos, and I exist, there are yet other levels. These are inhabited by creatures we could call All-Timers, beings which are either eternal or so close to it as to make no difference. Short-Timers and Long-Timers live in overlapping spheres of existence – on connected floors of the same building, if you like – ruled by the Random and the Purpose. Above these floors, inaccessible to us but very much a part of the same tower of existence, live other beings. Some of them are marvellous and wonderful; others are hideous beyond our ability to comprehend, let alone yours. These beings might be called the Higher Purpose and the Higher Random . . . or perhaps there is no Random beyond a certain level; we suspect that may be the case, but we have no real way of telling. We do know that it is something from one of these higher levels that has interested itself in Ed, and that something else from up there made a countermove. That countermove is you, Ralph and Lois.]
Lois gave Ralph a dismayed look that he hardly noticed. The idea that something was moving them around like chess-pieces in Faye Chapin’s beloved Runway 3 Classic – an idea that would have infuriated him under other circumstances – went right by him for the time being. He was remembering the night Ed had called him on the telephone. You’re drifting into deep water, he’d said, and there are things swimming around in the undertow you can’t even conceive of.
Entities, in other words.
Beings too hideous to comprehend, according to Mr C, and Mr C was a gentleman who dealt death for a living.
They haven’t really noticed you yet, Ed had told him that night, but if you keep fooling with me, they will. And you don’t want that. Believe me, you don’t.
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The Bald Little Doctors can alter "Short-Time auras":
-Lois: [‘How did you get us up to this level in the first place? It was the insomnia, wasn’t it?’]
Lachesis, cautiously: [Essentially, yes. We’re able to make certain small changes in Short-Time auras. These adjustments caused a rather special form of insomnia that altered the way you dream and the way you perceive the waking world. Adjusting Short-Time auras is delicate, frightening work. Madness is always a danger.]
Clotho: [At times you may have felt that you were going mad, but neither of you was ever even close. You’re much tougher, both of you, than you give yourself credit for.]
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The Doctors can cut a person's "life-cord", or as Ralph tends to think of them, a "balloon-string" that's attached to said person's aura:
-She looked at him, not understanding. Ralph made frantic wood-chopping gestures with his right hand, but before Lois could respond, Rosalie gave a dreadful lost howl. The bald doc raised the scalpel and brought it down, but it wasn’t Rosalie’s throat he cut.
He cut her balloon-string.

A thread emerged from each of Rosalie’s nostrils and floated upward. They twined together about six inches above her snout, making a delicate pigtail, and it was at this point that Baldy #3’s scalpel did its work. Ralph watched, frozen with horror, as the severed pigtail rose into the sky like the string of a released helium balloon. It was unravelling as it went. He thought it would tangle in the branches of the old pine, but it didn’t. When the ascending balloon-string finally did meet one of the branches, it simply passed through.
Of course, Ralph thought. The same way this guy’s buddies walked through May Locher’s locked front door after they finished doing the same thing to her.
This idea was followed by a thought too simple and gruesomely logical not to be believed: not space-aliens, not little bald doctors, but Centurions. Ed Deepneau’s Centurions. They didn’t look like the Roman soldiers you saw in tin-pants epics like Spartacus and Ben Hur, true, but they had to be Centurions . . . didn’t they?
Sixteen or twenty feet above the ground, Rosalie’s balloon-string simply faded away to nothingness.

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-‘We can’t do it anymore,’ he said. ‘Because it really might be addictive. Anything that feels that good just about has to be addictive, don’t you think? We’ve got to try and build up some safeguards against doing it unconsciously, too. Because I think I have been. That could be why—’
A scream of brakes and sliding, wailing tires cut him off. They stared at each other, wide-eyed, as outside on the street that sound went on and on, grief seeming to search for a point of impact.
There was a muffled thud from the street as the scream of the brakes and tires silenced. It was followed by a brief cry uttered by either a woman or a child, Ralph could not tell which. Someone else shouted, ‘What happened?’ and then, ‘Oh, cripe!’ There was a rattle of running footsteps on pavement.
‘Stay on the couch,’ Ralph said, and hurried to the living room window. When he ran up the shade Lois was standing right beside him, and Ralph felt a flash of approval. It was what Carolyn would have done under similar circumstances.
They looked out on a night-time world that pulsed with strange color and fabulous motion. Ralph knew it was Bill they were going to see, knew it – Bill hit by a car and lying dead in the street, his Panama with the crescent bitten out of the brim lying near one outstretched hand. He slipped an arm around Lois and she gripped his hand.
But it wasn’t McGovern in the fan of headlights thrown by the Ford which was slued around in the middle of Harris Avenue; it was Rosalie. Her early-morning shopping expeditions were at an end. She lay on her side in a spreading pool of blood, her back bunched and twisted in several places. As the driver of the car which had struck her knelt beside the old stray, the pitiless glare of the nearest streetlamp illuminated his face. It was Joe Wyzer, the Rite Aid druggist, his orange-yellow aura now swirling with confused eddies of red and blue. He stroked the old dog’s side, and each time his hand slipped into the vile black aura which clung to Rosalie, it disappeared.
Dreams of terror washed through Ralph, dropping his temperature and shrivelling his testicles until they felt like hard little peach-pits. Suddenly it was July of 1992 again, Carolyn dying, the deathwatch ticking, and something weird had happened to Ed Deepneau. Ed had freaked out, and Ralph had found himself trying to keep Helen’s normally good-natured husband from springing at the man in the West Side Gardeners cap and attempting to rip his throat out. Then – the cherry on the Charlotte russe, Carol would have said – Dorrance Marstellar had arrived. Old Dor. And what had he said?
I wouldn’t touch him anymore . . . I can’t see your hands.
I can’t see your hands.
‘Oh my God,’ Ralph whispered.

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-[I hear your anger, Ralph, but it is not justified. You do not believe that now, but perhaps you may. For the time being, we must set your questions and our answers – such answers as we may give – aside.]
[‘Why?’]
[Because the time of severing has come for this man. Watch closely, that you may learn and know.]
Clotho stepped to the left side of the bed. Lachesis approached from the right, walking through Faye Chapin as he went. Faye bent over, afflicted with a sudden coughing-fit, and then opened his book of chess problems again as it eased.
[‘Ralph, I can’t watch this! I can’t watch them do it!’]
But Ralph thought she would. He thought they both would. He held her tighter as Clotho and Lachesis bent over Jimmy V. Their faces were lit with love and caring and gentleness; they made Ralph think of the faces he had once seen in a Rembrandt painting – The Night Watch, he thought it had been called. Their auras mingled and overlapped above Jimmy’s chest, and suddenly the man in the bed opened his eyes. He looked through the two little bald doctors at the ceiling for a moment, his expression vague and puzzled, and then his gaze shifted toward the door and he smiled.
‘Hey! Look who’s here!’ Jimmy V exclaimed. His voice was rusty and choked, but Ralph could still hear his South Boston wiseguy accent, where here came out heah. Faye jumped. The book of chess problems tumbled out of his lap and fell on the floor. He leaned over and took Jimmy’s hand, but Jimmy ignored him and kept looking across the room at Ralph and Lois. ‘It’s Ralph Roberts! And Paul Chasse’s wife widdim! Say, Ralphie, do you remember the day we tried to get into that tent revival so we could hear em sing “Amazing Grace”?’
[‘I remember, Jimmy.’]
Jimmy appeared to smile, and then his eyes slipped closed again. Lachesis placed his hands against the dying man’s cheeks and moved his head a bit, like a barber getting ready to shave a customer. At the same moment Clotho leaned even closer, opened his scissors, and slid them forward so that the long blades held Jimmy V’s black balloon-string. As Clotho closed the scissors, Lachesis leaned forward and kissed Jimmy’s forehead.
[Go in peace, friend.]
There was a small, unimportant snick! sound. The segment of the balloon-string above the scissors drifted up toward the ceiling and disappeared. The deathbag in which Jimmy V lay turned a momentary bright white, then winked out of existence just as Rosalie’s had done earlier that evening. Jimmy opened his eyes again and looked at Faye. He started to smile, Ralph thought, and then his gaze turned fixed and distant. The dimples which had begun to form at the corners of his mouth smoothed out.
‘Jimmy?’ Faye shook Jimmy V’s shoulder, running his hand through Lachesis’s side to do it. ‘You all right, Jimmy? . . . Oh shit.’
Faye got up and left the room, not quite running.
Clotho: [Do you see and understand that what we do we do with love and respect? That we are, in fact, the physicians of last resort? It is vital to our dealings with you, Ralph and Lois, that you understand that.]

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-Ralph closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and opened them again. ‘I guess we’re here to find the other two bald guys. The ones I saw coming out of May Locher’s. If anyone can explain what’s going on, it’ll be them.’
‘What makes you think you’ll find them here?’
‘I think they’ve got work to do . . . two men, Jimmy V and Bill’s friend, dying side by side. I should have known what the bald doctors are – what they do – from the minute I saw the ambulance guys bring Mrs Locher out strapped to a stretcher and with a sheet over her face. I would have known, if I hadn’t been so damned tired. The scissors should have been enough. Instead, it took me until this afternoon, and I only got it then because of something Mr Polhurst’s niece said.’
‘What was it?’
‘That death was stupid. That if an obstetrician took as much time cutting the umbilical cord, he’d be sued for malpractice. It made me think of a myth I read when I was in grade-school and couldn’t get enough of gods and goddesses and Trojan horses. The story was about three sisters – the Greek Sisters, maybe, or maybe it was the Weird Sisters. Shit, don’t ask me; I can’t even remember to use my damned turnblinkers half the time. Anyway, these sisters were responsible for the course of all human life. One of them spun the thread, one of them decided how long it would be . . . is any of this ringing a bell, Lois?’
‘Of course it is!’ she nearly shouted. ‘The balloon-strings!’
Ralph nodded. ‘Yes. The balloon-strings. I don’t remember the names of the first two sisters, but I never forgot the name of the last one – Atropos. And according to the story, her job is to cut the thread the first one spins and the second one measures. You could argue with her, you could beg, but it never made any difference. When she decided it was time to cut, she cut.’
Lois was nodding. ‘Yes, I remember that story. I don’t know if I read it or someone told it to me when I was a kid. You believe it’s actually true, Ralph, don’t you? Only it turns out to be the Bald Brothers instead of the Weird Sisters.’
‘Yes and no. As I remember the story, the sisters were all on the same side – a team. And that’s the feeling I got about the two men who came out of Mrs Locher’s house, that they were long-time partners with immense respect for each other. But the other guy, the one we saw again tonight, isn’t like them. I think Doc #3’s a rogue.’
Lois shivered, a theatrical gesture that became real at the last moment. ‘He’s awful, Ralph. I hate him.’
‘I don’t blame you.’
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-[Atropos serves the Random. Not all deaths of the sort Short-Timers call ‘senseless’ and ‘unnecessary’ and ‘tragic’ are his work, but most are. When a dozen old men and women die in a fire at a retirement hotel, the chances are good that Atropos has been there, taking souvenirs and cutting cords. When an infant dies in his crib for no apparent reason, the cause, more often than not, is Atropos and his rusty scalpel. When a dog – yes, even a dog, for the destinies of almost all living things in the Short-Time world fall among either the Random or the Purpose – is run over in the road because the driver of the car that hit him picked the wrong moment to glance at his watch—]
Lois: [‘Is that what happened to Rosalie?’]
Clotho: [Atropos is what happened to Rosalie. Ralph’s friend Joe Wyzer was only what we call ‘fulfilling circumstance’.]
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-Lachesis: [Under ordinary circumstances, we don’t interfere with Atropos, nor he with us. We couldn’t interfere with him even if we wanted to; the Random and the Purpose are like the red and black squares on a checkerboard, defining each other by contrast. But Atropos does want to interfere with the way things operate – interfering is, in a very real sense, what he was made to do – and on rare occasions, the opportunity to do so in a really big way presents itself. Efforts to stop his meddling are rare—]
Clotho: [The truth is actually a little stronger, Ralph and Lois; never in our experience has an effort been made to check or bar him.]
Lachesis: [– and are made only if the situation into which he intends to meddle is a very delicate one, where many serious matters are balanced and counterbalanced. This is one of those situations. Atropos has severed a life-cord he would have done well to leave alone. This will cause terrible problems on all levels, not to mention a serious imbalance between the Random and the Purpose, unless the situation is rectified. We cannot deal with what’s happening; the situation has passed far beyond our skills. We can no longer see clearly, let alone act. Yet in this case our inability to see hardly matters, because in the end, only Short-Timers can oppose the will of Atropos. That is why you two are here.]
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The Crimson King can protect someone whose life-cord has been cut, preventing them from dying at any point until he chooses:
-Ralph: [‘Are you saying that Atropos cut the cord of someone who was supposed to die a natural death . . . or a Purposeful death?’]
Clotho: [Not exactly. Some lives – a very few – bear no clear designation. When Atropos touches such lives, trouble is always likely. ‘All bets are off,’ you say. Such undesignated lives are like—]
Clotho drew his hands apart and an image – playing cards again – flashed between them. A row of seven cards that were swiftly turned over, one after another, by an unseen hand. An ace; a deuce; a joker; a trey; a seven; a queen. The last card the invisible hand flipped over was blank.
Clotho: [Does this picture help?]
Ralph’s brow furrowed. He didn’t know if it did or not. Somewhere out there was a person who was neither a regular playing card nor a joker in the deck. A person who was perfectly blank, up for grabs by either side. Atropos had slashed this guy’s metaphysical air-hose, and now somebody – or something – had called a time-out.
Lois: [‘It’s Ed you’re talking about, isn’t it?’]
Ralph wheeled around and stared at her sharply, but she was looking at Lachesis.
[‘Ed Deepneau is the blank card.’]
Lachesis was nodding.
[‘How did you know that, Lois?’]
[‘Who else could it be?’]
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-Ralph: [‘All you have to do is tell the truth, boys.’]
Lachesis, as plaintively as a child: [We have been!]
Ralph: [‘The whole truth.’]
Lachesis: [All right; the whole truth. Yes, it is Ed Deepneau’s cord Atropos cut. We don’t know this because we have seen it – we’ve passed beyond our ability to see clearly, as I said – but because it is the only logical conclusion. Deepneau is undesignated, neither of the Random nor of the Purpose, that we do know, and his must have been some sort of master-cord to have caused all this uproar and concern. The very fact that he has lived so long after his life-cord was severed indicates his power and importance. When Atropos severed this cord, he set a terrible chain of events in motion.]
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-[‘Last summer, after he beat his wife up, Ed spoke to me of a being he called the Crimson King. Does that mean anything to you fellows?’]
Clotho and Lachesis exchanged another look, one which Ralph at first mistook for solemnity.
Clotho: [Ralph, you must remember that Ed is insane, existing in a delusional state—]
[‘Yeah, tell me about it.’]
[– but we believe that his ‘Crimson King’ does exist in one form or another, and that when Atropos cut his life-cord, Ed Deepneau fell directly under this being’s influence.]
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-Clotho: [You must not approach Atropos directly, either. I cannot emphasize that enough. He has been surrounded by forces much greater than himself, forces that are malignant and powerful, forces that are conscious and will stop at nothing to stop you. Yet we think that, if you stay away from Atropos, you may be able to block the terrible thing which is about to happen . . . which is, in a very real sense, happening already.]
Ralph didn’t much care for the unspoken assumption that he and Lois were going to do whatever it was these two happy gauchos wanted, but this didn’t seem like exactly the right time to say so.
Lois: [‘What is about to happen? What is it you want from us? Are we supposed to find Ed and talk him out of doing something bad?’]
Clotho and Lachesis looked at her with identical expressions of shocked horror.
[Haven’t you been listening to—]
[– you mustn’t even think of—]
They stopped, and Clotho motioned Lachesis to go ahead.
[If you didn’t hear us before, Lois, hear us now: stay away from Ed Deepneau! Like Atropos, this unusual situation has temporarily invested him with great power. To even go near him would be to risk a visit from the entity he thinks of as the Crimson King . . . and besides, he is no longer in Derry.]
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-Two uniformed figures, looking more like pro football linemen than cops in their bulky Kevlar vests, charged from behind one of the cruisers, running flat-out for the porch with their riot guns held at port arms. As they crossed the dooryard on a diagonal, Charlie Pickering leaned out of his window, still laughing wildly, his gray hair zanier than ever. The volume of fire directed at him was enormous, showering him with splinters from the sides of the window and actually knocking down the rusty gutter above his head – it struck the porch with a hollow bonk – but not a single bullet touched him.
How can they not be hitting him? Ralph thought as he and Lois mounted the porch toward the lime-colored flames which were now billowing through the open front door. Christ Jesus, it’s almost point-blank range, how can they possibly not be hitting him?
But he knew how . . . and why. Clotho had told them that both Atropos and Ed Deepneau had been surrounded by forces which were malignant yet protective. Was it not likely that those same forces were now taking care of Charlie Pickering, much as Ralph himself had taken care of Leydecker when he’d left the protection of the police car to drag his dying colleague back to cover?
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Ralph Roberts has the ability to place shields around a person's aura, effectively protecting them from being harmed:
-Leydecker lunged out from behind the police car, and as his fingers disappeared into the black membrane surrounding Chris Nell, Ralph heard Old Dor say, I wouldn’t touch him anymore if I were you, Ralph – I can’t see your hands.
Lois: [‘Don’t! Don’t, he’s dead, he’s already dead!’]
The gun poking out of the window had started to move to the right. Now it swivelled unhurriedly back toward Leydecker, the man behind it undeterred – and apparently unhurt – by the hail of bullets directed at him from the other police. Ralph raised his right hand and brought it down in the karate-chop gesture again, but this time instead of a wedge of light, his fingertips produced something that looked like a large blue teardrop. It spread across Leydecker’s lemon-colored aura just as the rifle sticking out of the window opened fire. Ralph saw two slugs strike the tree just to Leydecker’s right, sending chips of bark flying into the air and making black holes in the fir’s yellowish-white undersurface. A third struck the blue covering which had coated Leydecker’s aura – Ralph saw a momentary flicker of dark red just to the left of the detective’s temple and heard a low whine as the bullet either richocheted or skipped, the way a flat stone will skip across the surface of a pond.

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There are four constants; Life, Death, the Purpose and the Random:
-Sometimes both words and images were lost, interrupted by puzzling breaks
[- - - - - - - - - - - -]
in communication. Yet even then Ralph was usually able to get some idea of what Clotho was trying to convey, and he had an idea Lois was understanding what was hidden in those lapses even more clearly than he was himself.
[First, know that there are only four constants in that area of existence where your lives and ours, the lives of the
[- - - - - - - - - -
[overlap. These four constants are Life, Death, the Purpose, and the Random. All these words have meaning for you, but you now have a slightly different concept of Life and Death, do you not?]
Ralph and Lois nodded hesitantly.
[Lachesis and I are agents of Death. This makes us figures of dread to most Short-Timers; even those who pretend to accept us and our function are usually afraid. In pictures we are sometimes shown as a fearsome skeleton or a hooded figure whose face cannot be seen.]

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