Madi’s Reviews > Insomnia > Status Update

It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating

The ring rolled down the gutter and disappeared into a sewer grate, and there it remained for a long, long time. But not forever. In Derry, things that disappear into the sewer system have a way – an often unpleasant one – of turning up.

[‘One life means so much, then?’]

Lachesis: [Yes. If the child dies, the Tower of all existence will fall, and the consequences of such a fall are beyond your comprehension. And beyond ours, as well.]

Trying to suck the life out of them? Close, but no cigar. Ralph didn’t think it was their lives the thing inside the deathbag wanted, nor their souls . . . at least, not exactly. It was their life-force it wanted. Their ka.

Looking at that wheel brought a deeper chill; it was as if the metaphor his mind had seized to help grasp the concept of ka had become real.

“We are all bound together by the Purpose,’ Dorrance said abruptly. ‘That’s ka-tet, which means one made of many. The way that many rhymes make up a single poem. You see?’

‘No.’ Ralph, Lois, and Joe said it at the same time, in perfect, unrehearsed chorus, and then laughed nervously together. The Three Insomniacs of the Apocalypse, Ralph thought. Jesus save us.”

For one flickering moment he seemed to catch an image from the mind of the other, one he found both exciting and disturbing: an enormous tower constructed of dark and sooty stone, standing in a field of red roses. Slit windows twisted up its sides in a brooding spiral.

You were talking, in other words, about something that could foretell the future. The idea that he had been noticed by such a force frankly scared the hell out of him.

“Ralph . . . this . . . this is . . . oh my!’

‘Bigger than Michael Jackson at the SuperBowl, isn’t it?’

She laughed weakly. ‘Well, just . . . you know, just a little.’

‘There’s a name for what’s happening to us, Lois, and it’s not insomnia or senility or Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s hyper-reality.’

‘Hyper-reality,’ she murmured. ‘God, what an exotic word!”

In some ways – in a lot of ways, actually – Derry wasn’t like other places.