Insomnia by Stephen King

Ralph : [Why doesn't Faye (or other people) see us? Why didn't Bill and his friend see us, for that matter? And how could that man walk right through me? Or did I just imagine that?]

Clotho smiled.

Clotho : [You didn't imagine it. 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, 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.

Then it was gone.

Clotho : [You and Lois and all other Short-Time creatures live on the first two floors of this structure. Of course there are elevators - ]

No, Ralph thought. Not in the tower I saw in your mind, my little friend. In that building –if such a building actually exists- there are no elevators, only a narrow staircase festooned with cobwebs and doorways leading to God knows what.

Lachesis was looking at him with a strange, almost suspicious curiosity, and Ralph decided he didn't much care for that look. He turned back to Clotho and motioned for him to go on.

Clotho : [As I was saying, there are elevators, but Short-Timers are not allowed to use them under ordinary circumstances. You are not

[ready] [prepared] [---------------------]

The last explanation was clearly the best, but it danced away from Ralph just before he could grasp it. He looked at Lois, who shook her head, and then back at Clotho and Lachesis again. He was beginning to feel angrier than ever. All the long, endless nights sitting in the wing-chair and waiting for dawn; all the days he'd spent feeling like a ghost inside his own skin; the inability to remember a sentence unless he read it three times; the phone numbers, once carried in his head, which he now had to look up---

A memory came then, one which simultaneously summed up and justified the anger he felt as he looked at these bald creatures with their darkly golden eyes and almost blinding auras. He saw himself peering into the cupboard over his kitchen counter, looking for the powdered soup his tired, overstrained mind insisted must be in there someplace. He saw himself poking, pausing, then poking some more. He saw the expression on his face --- a look of distant perplexity that could easily have been mistaken for mild mental retardation but which was really simple exhaustion. Then he saw himself drop his hands and simply stand there, as if he expected the packet to jump out on its own.

Not until now, at this moment and this memory, did he realize how totally horrible the last few months had been. Looking back at them was like looking into a wasteland painted in desolate maroons and grays.

Ralph : [So you took us onto the elevator...or maybe that wasn't good enough for the likes of us and you just trotted us up the fire stairs. Got us acclimated a little at a time so we wouldn't strip our gears completely, I imagine. And it was easy. All you had to do was rob us of our sleep until we were half-crazy. Lois's son and daughter-in-law want to put her in a theme park for geriatrics, did you know that? And my friend Bill McGovern thinks I'm ready for Juniper Hill. Meanwhile, you little angels...]

Clotho offered a trace of his former wide smile.

Clotho : [We're no angels, Ralph.]

Lois : [Ralph, please don't shout at them.]

Yes, he had been shouting, and at least some of it seemed to have gotten through to Faye; he had closed his chess book, stopped picking his nose, and was now sitting bolt-upright in his chair, looking uneasily about the room.

Ralph looked from Clotho (who took a step backward, losing what was left of his smile) to Lachesis.

Ralph : [Your friend says you're not angels. So where are they? Playing poker six or eight floors farther up? And I suppose God's in the penthouse and the devil's stoking coal in the boiler-room.]

Clotho : [Very well. First, you must understand that the things which are happening, while unexpected and distressing, are not precisely unnatural. My colleague and I do what we were made to do; Atropos does what he was made to do; and you, my Short-Time friends, will do what you were made to do.]

Ralph favored him with a bright, bitter smile.

Ralph : [There goes freedom of choice, I guess.]

Lachesis : [You mustn't think so! It's simply that what you call freedom of choice is part of what we call ka, the great wheel of being.]

Lois : [We see as through a glass darkly....is that what you mean?]

Clotho smiling his somehow youthful smile : [The Bible, I believe. And a very good way of putting it.]