Jake Puckett’s Reviews > Insomnia > Status Update

In Derry- Girls and boys fell in love, drunks fell out of cars, short skirts fell out of favor. People reshingled their roofs and repaved their driveways. Old bums were voted out of office; new bums were voted in. It was life, often un-satisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in awhile exhilarating. The fundamental things continued to apply as time went by.

Because ka was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn't want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.

"Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else.”

From their vantage point atop the hospital, Derry looked like a town whose heart had been pierced by a narrow green dagger... except in the darkness, the dagger was black.

CONT: ... 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 sometbing 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.]

CONT: 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

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,

[Try to think of life as a kind of building,Ralph-what you would call a skyscraper.]Except that wasn't quite what Clotho was thinking of,Ralph discovered.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.

"Dear Jesus, I'm a vampire."
But was that the right word? he wondered suddenly. Wasn't it at least possible that, in the world of auras, a life-stealer was called a Centurion?
Ed's pallid, frantic face rose before him like a ghost which returns to accuse its murderer, and Ralph, suddenly terrified, wrapped his arms around his knees and lowered his head to rest upon them.

He suspected he had glimpsed the leading edge of a force so huge and so vital that it made all the nuclear weapons created since 1945 seem about as powerful as a child's cap-pistol fired into an empty peach can. Enough force to destroy the universe, perhaps... or to create a new one.