The old trainyards

The old trainyards occupy a stretch of waste ground where Neibolt Street dead-ends, a semicircle of rusting siding tracks, sunflowers, and broken glass. The main line, abandoned since 1963, is now a pair of rusty, overgrown steel rails leading nowhere, most of its crossties long since burned as campfires by winos or transients. This is the Derry of the Damned, a place where the city's forgotten and its most dangerous secrets converge. It was here, after following Atropos's trail of pinkish-red spoor across the racetrack and down the brushy slope, that Ralph and Lois momentarily lost the track, standing by a sawhorse blocking an ancient cellar-hole that was once the passenger depot. The graffiti on the old diesel shed—"SUZY SUCKT MY BIG FAT ONE" within a border of swastikas—announces the territory's lawless character.

The Trail and the Wino

Ralph and Lois's search was interrupted by a familiar figure: the wino who had approached Ralph and Bill McGovern in Strawford Park months earlier, still spinning the same story about an uncle in Dexter and a job at the mill. His aura, a healthy green, betrayed the lie of his tale. Ralph recognized him and, needing to replenish his depleted energy after the ordeal at High Ridge, drew a bright green ray from the man's aura, tasting Boone's Farm Apple Wine. Lois followed suit, taking her own share of the man's life-force before giving him a twenty-dollar bill. The wino, startled by a sound he mistook for a jet breaking the sound barrier, accepted the money, his suspicion giving way to a large, winning smile. This encounter, a transaction of energy for cash, underscored the new, vampiric powers the insomnia had granted them and the moral ambiguity of their mission.

The Path to Atropos's Den

Re-energized, Ralph and Lois followed the trail of Atropos's spoor along the abandoned rail line as it curved past the Municipal Golf Course. The trail grew fresher and more disturbing; the corrosive substance had eaten away rust on the rails and killed the weeds it touched. It led them to a dead oak tree, its bark split by a lightning strike, its roots yanked from the ground, pulling a section of the airport's Cyclone fence upward and outward. The tree's exposed roots formed a crude staircase into a hole beneath it, from which a sickening, rotten smell emanated. This was the entrance to Atropos's underground lair, a place Ralph recognized as being only a stone's throw from where Ed Deepneau had crashed into the West Side Gardeners' pickup truck in the summer of 1992. The journey from the trainyards to this spot completed a loop, returning them to the very edge of the airport where their strange odyssey had begun.

The Descent and the Storeroom

Sliding beneath the tree, Ralph and Lois descended a narrow staircase into a realm of red-tinged darkness and overwhelming stench. They passed through Atropos's squalid living quarters—a chamber with a barrel-head table, a filthy mattress, and a mirror—into a vast, surreal storeroom. This was a warehouse of the Random dead, filled with the possessions of people Atropos had killed: a child's Flexible Flyer sled, a majorette's baton, a cameo brooch, a Boy Scout's compass. Each object sang with the faint, sorrowing voice of its owner, still alive in some sense within this profane church of grief. The room was a maze of aisles, and at its heart, in a small alcove, they found the source of the buzzing sound that had guided them: a black deathbag, the apotheosis of all deathbags, pulsing with malevolent life. Inside it lay Ed Deepneau's wedding ring, the token that bound the fate of the two thousand people at the Civic Center. Ralph, using scissors of pure aura created from his own life-force, cut the deathbag open and retrieved the ring, a victory that came at a terrible cost, leaving him drained and the scar on his arm burning with the promise of a future sacrifice.