The Waste Lands

1

FOUR DAYS AFTER EDDIE had yanked him through the doorway between worlds, minus his original pair of pants and his sneakers but still in possession of his pack and his life, Jake awoke with something warm and wet nuzzling at his face.

If he had come around to such a sensation on any of the three previous mornings, he undoubtedly would have wakened his companions with his screams, for he had been feverish and his sleep had been haunted by nightmares of the plaster-man. In these dreams his pants did not slide free, the doorkeeper kept its grip, and it tucked him into its unspeakable mouth, where its teeth came down like the bars guarding a castle keep. Jake awoke from these dreams shuddering and moaning helplessly.

The fever had been caused by the spider-bite on the back of his neck. When Roland examined it on the second day and found it worse instead of better, he had conferred briefly with Eddie and had then given Jake a pink pill. “You’ll want to take four of these every day for at least a week,” he said.

Jake had gazed at it doubtfully. “What is it?”

“Cheflet,” Roland said, then looked disgustedly at Eddie. “You tell him. I still can’t say it.”

“Keflex. You can trust it, Jake; it came from a government-approved pharmacy in good old New York. Roland swallowed a bunch of it, and he’s as healthy as a horse. Looks a little like one, too, as you can see.”

Jake was astonished. “How did you get medicine in New York?”

“That’s a long story,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll hear all of it in time, but for now just take the pill.”

Jake did. The response was both quick and satisfying. The angry red swelling around the bite began to fade in twenty-four hours, and now the fever was gone as well.

The warm thing nuzzled again and Jake sat up with a jerk, his eyes flying open.

The creature which had been licking his cheek took two hasty steps backward. It was a billy-bumbler, but Jake didn’t know that; he had never seen one before now. It was skinnier than the ones Roland’s party had seen earlier, and its black- and gray-striped fur was matted and mangy. There was a clot of old dried blood on one flank. Its gold-ringed black eyes looked at Jake anxiously; its hindquarters switched hopefully back and forth. Jake relaxed. He supposed there were exceptions to the rule, but he had an idea that something wagging its tail-or trying to-was probably not too dangerous.

It was just past first light, probably around five-thirty in the morning. Jake could peg it no closer than that because his digital Seiko no longer worked… or rather, was working in an extremely eccentric way. When he had first glanced at it after coming through, the Seiko claimed it was 98:71:65, a time which did not, so far as Jake knew, exist. A longer look showed him that the watch was now running backward. If it had been doing this at a steady rate, he supposed it might still have been of some use, but it wasn’t. It would unwind its numbers at what seemed like the right speed for awhile (Jake verified this by saying the word “Mississippi” between each number), and then the readout would either stop entirely for ten or twenty seconds-making him think the watch had finally given up the ghost-or a bunch of numbers would blur by all at once.

He had mentioned this odd behavior to Roland and had shown him the watch, thinking it would amaze him, but Roland examined it closely for only a moment or two before nodding in a dismissive way and telling Jake it was an interesting clock, but as a rule no timepiece did very good work these days. So the Seiko was useless, but Jake still found himself loath to throw it away… because, he supposed, it was a piece of his old life, and there were only a few of those left.

Right now the Seiko claimed it was sixty-two minutes past forty on a Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday in both December and March.

The morning was extremely foggy; beyond a radius of fifty or sixty feet, the world simply disappeared. If this day was like the previous three, the sun would show up as a faint white circle in another two hours or so, and by nine-thirty the day would be clear and hot. Jake looked around and saw his travelling companions (he didn’t quite dare call them friends, at least not yet) asleep beneath their hide blankets-Roland close by, Eddie and Susannah a larger hump on the far side of the dead campfire.

He once more turned his attention to the animal which had awakened him. It looked like a combination raccoon and woodchuck, with a dash of dachshund thrown in for good measure.

“How you doin, boy?” he asked softly.

“Oy!” the billy-bumbler replied at once, still looking at him anxiously. Its voice was low and deep, almost a bark; the voice of an English footballer with a bad cold in his throat.

Jake recoiled, surprised. The billy-bumbler, startled by the quick movement, took several further steps backward, seemed about to flee, and then held its ground. Its hindquarters wagged back and forth more strenuously than ever, and its gold-black eyes continued to regard Jake nervously. The whiskers on its snout trembled.

“This one remembers men,” a voice remarked at Jake’s shoulder. He looked around and saw Roland squatting just behind him with his forearms resting on his thighs and his long hands dangling between his knees. He was looking at the animal with a great deal more interest than he had shown in Jake’s watch.

“What is it?” Jake asked softly. He did not want to startle it away; he was enchanted. “Its eyes are beautiful!”

“Billy-bumbler,” Roland said.

“Umber!” the creature ejaculated, and retreated another step.

“It talks!”

“Not really. Bumblers just repeat what they hear-or used to. I haven’t heard one do it in years. This fellow looks almost starved. Probably came to forage.”

“He was licking my face. Can I feed it?”

“We’ll never get rid of it if you do,” Roland said, then smiled a little and snapped his fingers. “Hey! Billy!”

The creature mimicked the sound of the snapping fingers somehow; it sounded as if it were clucking its tongue against the roof of its mouth. “Ay!” it called in its hoarse voice. “Ay, Illy!” Now its ragged hindquarters were positively gagging back and forth.

“Go ahead and give it a bite. I knew an old groom once who said a good bumbler is good luck. This looks like a good one.”

“Yes,” Jake agreed. “It does.”

“Once they were tame, and every barony had half a dozen roaming around the castle or manor-house. They weren’t good for much except amusing the children and keeping the rat population down. They can be quite faithful-or were in the old days-although I never heard of one that would remain as loyal as a good dog. The wild ones are scavengers. Not dangerous, but a pain in the ass.”

“Ass!” cried the bumbler. Its anxious eyes continued to flick back and forth between Jake and the gunslinger.

Jake reached into his pack, slowly, afraid to startle the creature, and drew out the remains of a gunslinger burrito. He tossed it toward the billy-bumbler. The bumbler flinched back and then turned with a small, childlike cry, exposing its furry corkscrew tail. Jake felt sure it would run, but it stopped, looking doubtfully back over its shoulder.

“Come on,” Jake said. “Eat it, boy.”

“Oy,” the bumbler muttered, but it didn’t move.

“Give it time,” Roland said. “It’ll come, I think.”

The bumbler stretched forward, revealing a long and surprisingly graceful neck. Its slender black nose twitched as it sniffed the food. At last it trotted forward, and Jake noticed it was limping a little. The bumbler sniffed the burrito, then used one paw to separate the chunk of deermeat from the leaf. It carried out this operation with a delicacy that was oddly solemn. Once the meat was clear of the leaf, the bumbler wolfed it in a single bite, then looked up at Jake. “Oy!” it said, and when Jake laughed, it shrank away again.

“That’s a skinny one,” Eddie said sleepily from behind them. At the sound of his voice, the bumbler immediately turned and was gone into the mist.

“You scared it away!” Jake accused.

“Jeez, I’m sorry,” Eddie said. He ran a hand through his sleep-corkscrewed hair. “If I’d known it was one of your close personal friends, Jake, I would have dragged out the goddam coffee-cake.”

Roland clapped Jake briefly on the shoulder. “It’ll be back.”

“Are you sure?”

“If something doesn’t kill it, yes. We fed it, didn’t we?”

Before Jake could reply, the sound of the drums began again. This was the third morning they had heard them, and twice the sound had come to them as afternoon slipped down toward evening: a faint, toneless thudding from the direction of the city. The sound was clearer this morning, if no more comprehensible. Jake hated it. It was as if, somewhere out in that thick and featureless blanket of morning mist, the heart of some big animal was beating.

“You still don’t have any idea what that is, Roland?” Susannah asked. She had slipped on her shift, tied back her hair, and was now folding the blankets beneath which she and Eddie had slept.

“No. But I’m sure vve’ll find out.”

“How reassuring,” Eddie said sourly.

Roland got to his feet. “Come on. Let’s not waste the day."

2

THE FOG BEGAN TO unravel after they had been on the road for an hour or so. They took turns pushing Susannah’s chair, and it jolted unhappily along, for the road was now mined with large, rough cobblestones. By midmorning the day was fair, hot, and cloudless; the city skyline stood out clearly on the southeastern horizon. To Jake it didn’t look much different from the skyline of New York, although he thought these buildings might not be as high. If the place had fallen apart, as most things in Roland’s world apparently had, you certainly couldn’t tell it from here. Like Eddie, Jake had begun to entertain the unspoken hope that they might find help there… or at least a good hot meal.

To their left, thirty or forty miles away, they could see the broad sweep of the Send River. Birds circled above it in large flocks. Every now and then one would fold its wings and drop like a stone, probably on a fishing expedition. The road and the river were moving slowly toward one another, although the junction point could not yet be seen.

They could see more buildings ahead. Most looked like farms, and all appeared deserted. Some of them had fallen down, but these wrecks seemed to be the work of time rather than violence, furthering Eddie’s and Jake’s hopes of what they might find in the city-hopes each had kept strictly within himself, lest the others scoff. Small herds of shaggy beasts grazed their way across the plains. They kept well away from the road except to cross, and this they did quickly, at a gallop, like packs of small children afraid of traffic. They looked like bison to Jake… except he saw several which had two heads. He mentioned this to the gunslinger and Roland nodded.

“Muties.”

“Like under the mountains?” Jake heard the fear in his own voice and knew the gunslinger must, also, but he was helpless to keep it out. He remembered that endless nightmare journey on the handcart very well.

“I think that here the mutant strains are being bred out. The things we found under the mountains were still getting worse.”

“What about up there?” Jake pointed toward the city. “Will there be mutants there, or-” He found it was as close as he could come to voicing his hope.

Roland shrugged. “I don’t know, Jake. I’d tell you if I did.”

They were passing an empty building-almost surely a farmhouse- that had been partially burnt. But that amid have been lighting, Jake thought, and wondered which it was he was trying to do-explain to himself or fool himself.

Roland, perhaps reading his mind, put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “No use even trying to guess, Jake,” he said. “Whatever happened here happened long ago.” He pointed. “That over there was probably a corral. Now it’s just a few sticks poking out of the grass.”

“The world has moved on, right?”

Roland nodded.

“What about the people? Did they go to the city, do you think?”

“Some may have,” Roland said. “Some are still around.”

“What?” Susannah jerked around to look at him, startled.

Roland nodded. “We’ve been watched the last couple of days. There aren’t a lot of folk denning in these old buildings, but there are some. There’ll be more as we get closer to civilization.” He paused. “Or what used to be civilization.”

“How do you know they’re there?” Jake asked.

“Smelled them. Seen a few gardens hidden behind banks of weeds grown purposely to hide the crops. And at least one working windmill way back in a grove of trees. Mostly, though, it’s just a feeling… like shade on your face instead of sunshine. It’ll come to you three in time, I imagine.”

“Do you think they’re dangerous?” Susannah asked. They were approaching a large, ramshackle building that might once have been a storage shed or an abandoned country market, and she eyed it uneasily, her hand dropping to the butt of the gun she wore on her chest.

“Will a strange dog bite?” the gunslinger countered.

“What’s that mean?” Eddie asked. “I hate it when you start up with your Zen Buddhist shit, Roland.”

“It means I don’t know,” Roland said. “Who is this man Zen Buddhist? Is he wise like me?”

Eddie looked at Roland for a long, long time before deciding the gunslinger was making one of his rare jokes. “Ah, get outta here,” he said. He saw one corner of Roland’s mouth twitch before he turned away. As Eddie started to push Susannah’s chair again, something else caught his eye. “Hey, Jake!” he called. “I think you made a friend!”

Jake looked around, and a big grin overspread his face. Forty yards to the rear, the scrawny billy-bumbler was limping industriously after them, sniffing at the weeds which grew between the crumbling cobbles of the Great Road.

3

SOME HOURS LATER ROLAND called a halt and told them to be ready.

“For what?” Eddie asked.

Roland glanced at him. “Anything.”

It was perhaps three o’clock in the afternoon. They were standing at a point where the Great Road crested a long, rolling drumlin which ran diagonally across the plain like a wrinkle in the world’s biggest bedspread. Below and beyond, the road ran through the first real town they had seen. It looked deserted, but Eddie had not forgotten the conversation that morning. Roland’s question-Will a strange dog bite?-no longer seemed quite so Zenny.

“Jake?”

“What?”

Eddie nodded to the butt of the Ruger, which protruded from the waistband of Jake’s bluejeans-the extra pair he had tucked into his pack before leaving home. “Do you want me to carry that?”

Jake glanced at Roland. The gunslinger only shrugged, as if to say It’s your choice.

“Okay.” Jake handed it over. He unshouldered his pack, rummaged through it, and brought out the loaded clip. He could remember reaching behind the hanging files in one of his father’s desk drawers to get it, but all that seemed to have occurred a long, long time ago. These days, thinking about his life in New York and his career as a student at Piper was like looking into the wrong end of a telescope.

Eddie took the clip, examined it, rammed it home, checked the safety, then stuck the Ruger in his own belt.

“Listen closely and heed me well,” Roland said. “If there are people, they’ll likely be old and much more frightened of us than we are of them. The younger folk will be long gone. It’s unlikely that those left will have firearms-in fact, ours may be the first guns many of them have ever seen, except maybe for a picture or two in the old books. Make no threatening gestures. And the childhood rule is a good one: speak only when spoken to.”

“What about bows and arrows?” Susannah asked.

“Yes, they may have those. Spears and clubs, as well.”

“Don’t forget rocks,” Eddie said bleakly, looking down at the cluster of wooden buildings. The place looked like a ghost-town, but who knew for sure? “And if they’re hard up for rocks, there’s always the cobbles from the road.”

“Yes, there’s always something,” Roland agreed. “But we’ll start no trouble ourselves-is that clear?”

They nodded.

“Maybe it would be easier to detour around.” Susannah said.

Roland nodded, eyes never leaving the simple geography ahead. Another road crossed the Great Road at the center of the town, making the dilapidated buildings look like a target centered in the telescopic sight of a high-powered rifle. “It would, but we won’t. Detouring’s a bad habit that’s easy to get into. It’s always better to go straight on, unless there’s a good visible reason not to. I see no reason not to here. And if there are people, well, that might be a good thing. We could do with a little palaver.”

Susannah reflected that Roland seemed different now, and she didn’t think it was simply because the voices in his mind had ceased. This is the way he was when he still had wars to fight and men to lead and his old friends around him, she thought. How he was before the world moved on and he moved on with it, chasing that man Walter. This is how he was before the Big Empty turned him inward on himself and made him strange.

“They might know what those drum sounds are,” Jake suggested.

Roland nodded again. “Anything they know-particularly about the city-would come in handy, but there’s no need to think ahead too much about people who may not even be there.”

“Tell you what,” Susannah said, “I wouldn’t come out if I saw us. Four people, three of them armed? We probably look like a gang of those old-time outlaws in your stories, Roland-what do you call them?”

“Harriers.” His left hand dropped to the sandalwood grip of his remaining revolver and he pulled it a little way out of the holster. “But no harrier ever born carried one of these, and if there are old-timers in yon village, they’ll know it. Let’s go.”

Jake glanced behind them and saw the bumbler lying in the road with his muzzle between his short front paws, watching them closely. “Oy!” Jake called.

“Oy!” the bumbler echoed, and scrambled to its feet at once.

They started down the shallow knoll toward the town with Oy trotting along behind them.

4

Two BUILDINGS ON THE outskirts had been burned; the rest of the town appeared dusty but intact. They passed an abandoned livery stable on the left, a building that might have been a market on the right, and then they were in the town proper-such as it was. There were perhaps a dozen rickety buildings standing on either side of the road. Alleys ran between some of them. The other road, this one a dirt track mostly overgrown with plains grass, ran northeast to southwest.

Susannah looked at its northeast arm and thought: Once there were barges on the river, and somewhere down that road there was a landing, and probably another shacky little town, mostly saloons and cribs, built up around it. That was the last point of trade before the barges went on down to the city. The wagons came through this place going to that place and then back again. How long ago was that?

She didn’t know-but a long time, from the look of this place.

Somewhere a rusty hinge squalled monotonously. Somewhere else one shutter clapped lonesomely to and fro in the plains wind.

There were hitching rails, most of them broken, in front of the buildings. Once there had been board sidewalks, but now most of the boards were gone and grass grew up through the holes where they had been. The signs on the buildings were faded, but some were still readable, written in a bastardized form of English which was, she supposed, what Roland called the low speech. FOOD AND GRAIN, one said, and she guessed that might mean feed and grain. On the false front next to it, below a crude drawing of a plains-buffalo lying in the grass, were the words REST EAT DRINK. Under the sign, batwing doors hung crookedly, moving a little in the wind.

“Is that a saloon?” She didn’t know exactly why she was whispering, only that she couldn’t have spoken in a normal tone of voice. It would have been like playing “Clinch Mountain Breakdown” on the banjo at a funeral.

“It was,” Roland said. He didn’t whisper, but his voice was low-pitched and thoughtful. Jake was walking close by his side, looking around nervously. Behind them, Oy had closed up his distance to ten yards. He trotted quickly, head swinging from side to side like a pendulum as he examined the buildings.

Now Susannah began to feel it: that sensation of being watched. It was exactly as Roland had said it would be, a feeling sunshine had been replaced by shade.

“There are people, aren’t there?” she whispered.

Roland nodded.

Standing on the northeast corner of the crossroads was a building with another sign she recognized: HOSTEL, it said, and COTTS. Except for a church with a tilted steeple up ahead, it was the tallest building in town-three stories. She glanced up in time to see a white blur, surely a face, draw away from one of the glassless windows. Suddenly she wanted to get out of here. Roland was setting a slow, deliberate pace, however, and she supposed she knew why. Hurrying might give the watchers the impression that they were scared… and that they could be taken. All the same-

At the crossroads the intersecting streets widened out, creating a town square which had been overrun by grass and weeds. In the center was an eroded stone marker. Above it, a metal box hung on a sagging length of rusty cable.

Roland, with Jake by his side, walked toward the marker. Eddie pushed Susannah’s chair after. Grass whispered in its spokes and the wind tickled a lock of hair against her cheek. Further along the street, the shutter banged and the hinge squealed. She shivered and brushed the hair away.

“I wish he’d hurry up,” Eddie said in a low voice. “This place gives me the creeps.”

Susannah nodded. She looked around the square and again she could almost see how it must have been on market-day-the sidewalks thronged with people, a few of them town ladies with their baskets over their arms, most of them waggoners and roughly-dressed bargemen (she did not know why she was so sure of the barges and bargemen, but she was); the wagons passing through the town square, the ones on the unpaved road raising choking clouds of yellow dust as the drivers flogged their carthorses

(oxen they were oxen)

along. She could see those carts, dusty swatches of canvas tied down over bales of cloth on some and pyramids of tarred barrels on others; could see the oxen, double-yoked and straining patiently, flicking their ears at the flies buzzing around their huge heads; could hear voices, and laughter, and the piano in the saloon pounding out a lively tune like “Buffalo Gals” or “Darlin’ Katy.”

It’s as if I lived here in another life, she thought.

The gunslinger bent over the inscription on the marker. “Great Road,” he read. “Lud, one hundred and sixty wheels.”

“Wheels?” Jake asked.

“An old form of measurement.”

“Have you heard of Lud?” Eddie asked.

“Perhaps,” the gunslinger said. “When I was very small.”

“It rhymes with crud,” Eddie said. “Maybe not such a good sign.”

Jake was examining the east side of the stone. “River Road. It’s written funny, but that’s what it says.”

Eddie looked at the west side of the marker. “It says Jimtown, forty wheels. Isn’t that the birthplace of Wayne Newton, Roland?”

Roland looked at him blankly.

“Shet ma mouf,” Eddie said, and rolled his eyes.

On the southwest corner of the square was the town’s only stone building-a squat, dusty cube with rusty bars on the windows. Combination county jail and courthouse, Susannah thought. She had seen similar ones down south; add a few slant parking spaces in front and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Something had been daubed across the facade of the building in fading yellow paint. She could read it, and although she couldn’t understand it, it made her more anxious than ever to get out of this town. PUBES DIE, it said.

“Roland!” When she had his attention, she pointed at the graffito. “What does that mean?”

He read it, then shook his head. “Don’t know.”

She looked around again. The square now seemed smaller, and the buildings seemed to be leaning over them. “Can we get out of here?”

“Soon.” He bent down and pried a small chunk of cobble out of the roadbed. He bounced it thoughtfully in his left hand as he looked up at the metal box which hung over the marker. He cocked his arm and Susannah realized, an instant too late, what he meant to do.

“No, Roland!” she cried, then cringed back at the sound of her own horrified voice.

He took no notice of her but fired the stone upward. His aim was as true as ever, and it struck the box dead center with a hollow, metallic bang. There was a whir of clockwork from within, and a rusty green flag unfolded from a slot in the side. When it locked in place, a bell rang briskly. Written in large black letters on the side of the flag was the word GO.

“I’ll be damned,” Eddie said. “It’s a Keystone Kops traffic-light. If you hit it again, does it say STOP?”

“We have company,” Roland said quietly, and pointed toward the building Susannah thought of as the county courthouse. A man and a woman had emerged from it and were descending the stone steps. You win the kewpie doll, Roland, Susannah thought. They’re older n God, the both of em.

The man was wearing bib overalls and a huge straw sombrero. The woman walked with one hand clamped on his naked sunburned shoulder. She wore homespun and a poke bonnet, and as they drew closer to the marker, Susannah saw she was blind, and that the accident which had taken her sight must have been exceedingly horrible. Where her eyes had been there were now only two shallow sockets filled with scar-tissue. She looked both terrified and confused.

“Be they harriers, Si?” she cried in a cracked, quavering voice. “You’ll have us killed yet, I’ll warrant!”

“Shut up, Mercy,” he replied. Like the woman, he spoke with a thick accent Susannah could barely understand. “They ain’t harriers, not these. There’s a Pube with em, I told you that-ain’t no harrier ever been travellin’ with a Pube.”

Blind or not, she tried to pull away from him. He cursed and caught her arm. “Quit it, Mercy! Quit it, I say! You’ll fall down and do y’self evil, dammit!”

“We mean you no harm,” the gunslinger called. He used the High Speech, and at the sound of it the man’s eyes lit up with incredulity. The woman turned back, swinging her blind face in their direction.

“A gunslinger!” the man cried. His voice cracked and wavered with excitement. “Fore God! I knew it were! I knew!””He began to run across the square toward them, pulling the woman after. She stumbled along helplessly, and Susannah waited for the inevitable moment when she must fall. But the man fell first, going heavily to his knees, and she sprawled painfully beside him on the cobbles of the Great Road.

5

JAKE FELT SOMETHING FURRY against his ankle and looked down. Oy was crouched beside him, looking more anxious than ever. Jake reached down and cautiously stroked his head, as much to receive comfort as to give it. Its fur was silky, incredibly soft. For a moment he thought the bumbler was going to run, but it only looked up at him, licked his hand, and then looked back at the two new people. The man was trying to help the woman to her feet and not succeeding very well. Her head craned this way and that in avid confusion.

The man named Si had cut his palms on the cobblestones, but he took no notice. He gave up trying to help the woman, swept off his sombrero, and held it over his chest. To Jake the hat looked as big as a bushel basket. “We bid ye welcome, gunslinger!” he cried. “Welcome indeed! I thought all your land had perished from the earth, so I did!”

“I thank you for your welcome,” Roland said in the High Speech. He put his hands gently on the blind woman’s upper arms. She cringed for a moment, then relaxed and allowed him to help her up. “Put on your hat, old-timer. The sun is hot.”

He did, then just stood there, looking at Roland with shining eyes. After a moment or two, Jake realized what that shine was. Si was crying.

“A gunslinger! I told you, Mercy! I seen the shooting-iron and told you!”

“No harriers?” she asked, as if unable to believe it. “Are you sure they ain’t harriers, Si?”

Roland turned to Eddie. “Make sure of the safety and then give her Jake’s gun.”

Eddie pulled the Ruger from his waistband, checked the safety, and then put it gingerly in the blind woman’s hands. She gasped, almost dropped it, then ran her hands over it wonderingly. She turned the empty sockets where her eyes had been up to the man. “A gun!” she whispered. “My sainted hat!”

“Ay, some kind,” the old man replied dismissively, taking it from her and giving it back to Eddie, “but the gunslinger’s got a real one, and there’s a woman got another. She’s got a brown skin, too, like my da’ said the people of Garlan had.”

Oy gave his shrill, whistling bark. Jake turned and saw more people coming up the street-five or six in all. Like Si and Mercy, they were all old, and one of them, a woman hobbling over a cane like a witch in a fairy-tale, looked positively ancient. As they neared, Jake realized that two of the men were identical twins. Long white hair spilled over the shoulders of their patched homespun shirts. Their skin was as white as fine linen, and their eyes were pink. Albinos, he thought.

The crone appeared to be their leader. She hobbled toward Roland’s party on her cane, staring at them with gimlet eyes as green as emeralds. Her toothless mouth was tucked deeply into itself. The hem of the old shawl she wore fluttered in the prairie breeze. Her eyes settled upon Roland.

“Hail, gunslinger! Well met!” She spoke the High Speech herself, and, like Eddie and Susannah, Jake understood the words perfectly, although he guessed they would have been gibberish to him in his own world. “Welcome to River Crossing!”

The gunslinger had removed his own hat, and now he bowed to her, tapping his throat three times, rapidly, with his diminished right hand. “Thankee-sai, Old Mother.”

She cackled freely at this and Eddie suddenly realized Roland had at the same time made a joke and paid a compliment. The thought which had already occurred to Susannah now came to him: This is how he was… and this is what he did. Part of it, anyway.

“Gunslinger ye may be, but below your clothes you’re but another foolish man,” she said, lapsing into low speech.

Roland bowed again. “Beauty has always made me foolish, mother.”

This time she positively cawed laughter. Oy shrank against Jake’s leg. One of the albino twins rushed forward to catch the ancient as she rocked backward within her dusty cracked shoes. She caught her balance on her own, however, and made an imperious shooing gesture with one hand. The albino retreated.

“Be ye on a quest, gunslinger?” Her green eyes gleamed shrewdly at him; the puckered pocket of her mouth worked in and out.

“Ay,” Roland said. “We go in search of the Dark Tower.”

The others only looked puzzled, but the old woman recoiled and forked the sign of the evil eye-not at them, Jake realized, but to the southeast, along the path of the Beam.

“I’m sorry to hear it!” she cried. “For no one who ever went in search of that black dog ever came back! So said my grandfather, and his grandfather before him! Not ary one!”

“Ka,” the gunslinger said patiently, as if this explained everything… and, Jake was coming to realize, to Roland it did.

“Ay,” she agreed, “black dog ka! Well-a-well; ye’ll do as ye’re called, and live along your path, and die when it comes to the clearing in the trees. Will ye break bread with us before you push on, gunslinger? You and your band of knights?”

Roland bowed again. “It has been long and long since we have broken bread in company other than our own, Old Mother. We cannot stay long, but yes-we’ll eat your food with thanks and pleasure.”

The old woman turned to the others. She spoke in a cracked and ringing voice-yet it was the words she spoke and not the tone in which they were spoken that sent chills racing down Jake’s back: “Behold ye, the return of the White! After evil ways and evil days, the White comes again! Be of good heart and hold up your heads, for ye have lived to see the wheel of ka begin to turn once more!”

6

THE OLD WOMAN, WHOSE name was Aunt Talitha, led them through the town square and to the church with the leaning spire-it was The Church of the Blood Everlasting, according to the faded board on the run-to-riot lawn. Written over the words, in green paint that had faded to a ghost, was another message: DEATH TO GRAYS.

She led them through the ruined church, hobbling rapidly along the center aisle past the splintered and overturned pews, down a short flight of stairs, and into a kitchen so different from the ruin above that Susannah blinked in surprise. Here everything was neat as a pin. The wooden floor was very old, but it had been faithfully oiled and glowed with its own serene inner light. The black cookstove took up one whole corner. It was immaculate, and the wood stacked in the brick alcove next to it looked both well-chosen and well-seasoned.

Their party had been joined by three more senior citizens, two women and a man who limped along on a crutch and a wooden leg. Two of the women went to the cupboards and began to make themselves busy; a third opened the belly of the stove and struck a long sulphur match to the wood already laid neatly within; a fourth opened another door and went down a short set of narrow steps into what looked like a cold-pantry. Aunt Talitha, meanwhile, led the rest of them into a spacious entry at the rear of the church building. She waved her cane at two trestle tables which had been stored there under a clean but ragged dropcoth, and the two elderly albinos immediately went over and began to wrestle with one of them.

“Come on, Jake,” Eddie said. “Let’s lend a hand.”

“Nawp!” Aunt Talitha said briskly. “We may be old, but we don’t need comp’ny to lend a hand! Not yet, youngster!”

“Leave them be,” Roland said.

“Old fools’ll rupture themselves,” Eddie muttered, but he followed the others, leaving the old men to their chosen table.

Susannah gasped as Eddie lifted her from her chair and carried her through the back door. This wasn’t a lawn but a showplace, with beds of flowers blazing like torches in the soft green grass. She saw some she recognized-marigolds and zinnias and phlox-but many others were strange to her. As she watched, a horsefly landed on a bright blue petal… which at once folded over it and rolled up tight.

“Wow!” Eddie said, staring around. “Busch Gardens!”

Si said, “This is the one place we keep the way it was in the old days, before the world moved on. And we keep it hidden from those who ride through-Pubes, Grays, harriers. They’d bum it if they knew… and kill us for keeping such a place. They hate anything nice-all of em. It’s the one thing all those bastards have in common.”

The blind woman tugged his arm to shush him.

“No riders these days,” the old man with the wooden leg said. “Not for a long time now. They keep closer in to the city. Guess they find all they need to keep em well right there.”

The albino twins struggled out with the table. One of the old women followed them, urging them to hurry up and get the hell out of her way. She held a stoneware pitcher in each hand.

“Sit ye down, gunslinger!” Aunt Talitha cried, sweeping her hand at the grass. “Sit ye down, all!”

Susannah could smell a hundred conflicting perfumes. They made her feel dazed and unreal, as if this was a dream she was having. She could hardly believe this strange little pocket of Eden, carefully hidden behind the crumbling facade of the dead town.

Another woman came out with a tray of glasses. They were mismatched but spotless, twinkling in the sun like fine crystal. She held the tray out first to Roland, then to Aunt Talitha, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake at the last. As each took a glass, the first woman poured a dark golden liquid into it.

Roland leaned over to Jake, who was sitting tailor-fashion near an oval bed of bright green flowers with Oy at his side. He murmured: “Drink only enough to be polite, Jake, or we’ll be carrying you out of town-this is graf-strong apple-beer.”

Jake nodded.

Talitha held up her glass, and when Roland followed suit, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake did the same.

“What about the others?” Eddie whispered to Roland.

“They’ll be served after the voluntary. Now be quiet.”

“Will ye set us on with a word, gunslinger?” Aunt Talitha asked.

The gunslinger got to his feet, his glass upraised in his hand. He lowered his head, as if in thought. The few remaining residents of River Crossing watched him respectfully and, Jake thought, a little fearfully. At last he raised his head again. “Will you drink to the earth, and to the days which have passed upon it?” he asked. His voice was hoarse,’ trembling with emotion. “Will you drink to the fullness which was, and to friends who have passed on? Will you drink to good company, well met? Will these things set us on, Old Mother?”

She was weeping, Jake saw, but her face broke into a smile of radiant happiness all the same… and for a moment she was almost young. Jake looked at her with wonder and sudden, dawning happiness. For the first time since Eddie had hauled him through the door, he felt the shadow of the doorkeeper truly leave his heart.

“Ay, gunslinger!” she said. “Fair spoken! They’ll set us on by the league, so they shall!” She tilted her glass up and drank it at a draught. When the glass was empty, Roland emptied his own. Eddie and Susannah also drank, although less deeply.

Jake tasted his own drink, and was surprised to find he liked it- the brew was not bitter, as he had expected, but both sweet and tart, like cider. He could feel the effects almost at once, however, and he put the glass carefully aside. Oy sniffed at it, then drew back, and dropped his muzzle on Jake’s ankle.

Around them, the little company of old people-the last residents of River Crossing-were applauding. Most, like Aunt Talitha, were weeping openly. And now other glasses-not so fine but wholly serviceable-were passed around. The party began, and a fine party it was on that long summer’s afternoon beneath the wide prairie sky.

7

EDDIE THOUGHT THE MEAL, he ate that day was the best he had had since the mythic birthday feasts of his childhood, when his mother had made it her business to serve everything he liked-meatloaf and roasted potatoes and corn on the cob and devil’s food cake with vanilla ice cream on the side.

The sheer variety of the edibles put before them-especially after the months they had spent eating nothing but lobster meat, deer meat, and the few bitter greens which Roland pronounced safe-undoubtedly had something to do with the pleasure he took in the food, but Eddie didn’t think that was the sole answer; he noticed that the kid was packing it away by the plateful (and feeding a chunk of something to the bumbler crouched at his feet every couple of minutes), and Jake hadn’t been here a week yet.

There were bowls of stew (chunks of buffalo meat floating in a rich brown gravy loaded with vegetables), platters of fresh biscuits, crocks of sweet white butter, and bowls of leaves that looked like spinach but weren’t… exactly. Eddie had never been crazy about greens, but at the first taste of these, some deprived part of him awoke and cried for them. He ate well of everything, but his need for the green stuff approached greed, and he saw Susannah was also helping herself to them again and again. Among the four of them, the travellers emptied three bowls of the leaves.

The dinner dishes were swept away by the old women and the albino twins. They returned with chunks of cake piled high on two thick white plates and a bowl of whipped cream. The cake gave off a sweetly fragrant smell that made Eddie feel as if he had died and gone to heaven.

“Only buffaler cream,” Aunt Talitha said dismissively. “No more cows-last one croaked thirty year ago. Buffaler cream ain’t no prizewinner, but better’n nothin, by Daisy!”

The cake turned out to be loaded with blueberries. Eddie thought it beat by a country mile any cake he’d ever had. He finished three pieces, leaned back, and belched ringingly before he could clap a hand over his mouth. He looked around guiltily.

Mercy, the blind woman, cackled. “I heard that! Someone be thankin’ the cook, Auntie!”

“Ay,” Aunt Talitha said, laughing herself. “So he do.”

The two women who had served the food were returning yet again. One carried a steaming jug; the other had a number of thick ceramic cups balanced precariously on her tray.

Aunt Talitha was sitting at the head of the table with Roland by her right hand. Now he leaned over and murmured something in her ear. She listened, her smile fading a little, then nodded.

“Si, Bill, and Till,” she said. “You three stay. We are going to have us a little palaver with this gunslinger and his friends, on account of they mean to move along this very afternoon. The rest of you take your coffee in the kitchen and so cut down the babble. Mind you make your manners before you go!”

Bill and Till, the albino twins, remained sitting at the foot of the table. The others formed a line and moved slowly past the travellers. Each of them shook hands with Eddie and Susannah, then kissed Jake on the cheek. The boy accepted this with good grace, but Eddie could see he was both surprised and embarrassed.

When they reached Roland, they knelt before him and touched the sandalwood butt of the revolver which jutted from the holster he wore on his left hip. He put his hands on their shoulders and kissed their old brows. Mercy was the last; she flung her arms around Roland’s waist and baptized his cheek with a wet, ringing kiss.

“Gods bless and keep ye, gunslinger! If only I could see ye!”

“Mind your manners, Mercy!” Aunt Talitha said sharply, but Roland ignored her and bent over the blind woman.

He took her hands gently but firmly in his own, and raised them to his face. “See me with these, beauty,” he said, and closed his eyes as her fingers, wrinkled and misshapen with arthritis, patted gently over his brow, his cheeks, his lips and chin.

“Ay, gunslinger!” she breathed, lifting the sightless sockets of her eyes to his faded blue ones. “I see you very well! ’tis a good face, but full of sadness and care. I fear for you and yours.”

“Yet we are well met, are we not?” he asked, and planted a gentle kiss on the smooth, worn skin of her forehead.

“Ay-so we are. So we are. Thank’ee for your kiss, gunslinger. From my heart I thank’ee.”

“Go on, Mercy,” Aunt Talitha said in a gentler voice. “Get your coffee.”

Mercy rose to her feet. The old man with the crutch and peg leg guided her hand to the waistband of his pants. She seized it and, with a final salute to Roland and his band, allowed him to lead her away.

Eddie wiped at his eyes, which were wet. “Who blinded her?” he asked hoarsely.

“Harriers,” Aunt Talitha said. “Did it with a branding-iron, they did. Said it was because she was looking at em pert. Twenty-five years agone, that was. Drink your coffee, now, all of you! It’s nasty when it’s hot, but it ain’t nothin but roadmud once it’s cold.”

Eddie lifted the cup to his mouth and sipped experimentally. He wouldn’t have gone so fur us to call it roadmud, hut it wasn’t exactly Blue Mountain Blend, either.

Susannah tasted hers and looked amazed. “Why, this is chicory!” Talitha glanced at her. “I know it not. Dockey is all I know, and dockey-coffee’s all we’ve had since I had the woman’s curse-and that curse was lifted from me long, long ago.”

“How old are you, ma’am?” Jake asked suddenly.

Aunt Talitha looked at him, surprised, then cackled. “In truth, lad, I disremember. I recall sitting in this same place and having a party to celebrate my eighty, but there were over fifty people settin out on this lawn that day, and Mercy still had her eyes.” Her own eyes dropped to the humbler lying at Jake’s feet. Oy didn’t remove his muzzle from Jake’s ankle, but he raised his gold-ringed eyes to gaze at her. “A billy-bumbler, by Daisy! It’s been long and long since I’ve seen a humbler in company with people… seems they have lost the memory of the days when they walked with men.”

One of the albino twins bent down to pat Oy. Oy pulled away from him.

“Once they used to herd sheep,” Bill (or perhaps it was Till) said to Jake. “Did ye know that, youngster?”

Jake shook his head.

“Do he talk?” the albino asked. “Some did, in the old days.”

“Yes, he does.” He looked down at the humbler, who had returned his head to Jake’s ankle as soon as the strange hand left his general area. “Say your name, Oy.”

Oy only looked up at him.

“Oy!” Jake urged, but Oy was silent. Jake looked at Aunt Talitha and the twins, mildly chagrined. “Well, he does… but I guess he only does it when he wants to.”

“That boy doesn’t look as if he belongs here,” Aunt Talitha said to Roland. “His clothes are strange… and his eyes are strange, as well.”

“He hasn’t been here long.” Roland smiled at Jake, and Jake smiled uncertainly back. “In a month or two, no one will be able to see his strangeness.”

“Ay? I wonder, so I do. And where does he come from?”

“Far from here,” the gunslinger said. “Very far.”

She nodded. “And when will he go back?” ^

“Never,” Jake said. “This is my home now.”

“Gods pity you, then,” she said, “for the sun is going down on the world. It’s going down forever.”

At that Susannah stirred uneasily; one hand went to her belly, as if her stomach was upset.

“Suze?” Eddie asked. “You all right?”

She tried to smile, but it was a weak effort; her normal confidence and self-possession seemed to have temporarily deserted her. “Yes, of course. A goose walked over my grave, that’s all.”

Aunt Talitha gave her a long, assessing look that seemed to make Susannah uncomfortable… and then smiled. “A goose on my grave’- ha! I haven’t heard that one in donkey’s years.””“My dad used to say it all the time.” Susannah smiled at Eddie-a stronger smile this time. “And anyway, whatever it was is gone now. I’m fine.”

“What do you know about the city, and the lands between here and there?” Roland asked, picking up his coffee cup and sipping. “Are there harriers? And who are these others? These Grays and Pubes?”

Aunt Talitha sighed deeply.

8

“YE’D HEAR MUCH, GUNSLINGER, and we know but little. One thing I do know is this: the city’s an evil place, especially for this youngster. Any youngster. Is there any way you can steer around it as you go your course?”

Roland looked up and observed the now familiar shape of the clouds as they flowed along the path of the Beam. In this wide plains sky, that shape, like a river in the sky, was impossible to miss.

“Perhaps,” he said at last, but his voice was oddly reluctant. “I suppose we could skirt around Lud to the southwest and pick up the Beam on the far side.”

“It’s the Beam ye follow,” she said. “Ay, I thought so.”

Eddie found his own consideration of the city colored by the steadily strengthening hope that when and if they got there, they would find help-abandoned goodies which would aid them in their quest, or maybe even some people who could tell them a little more about the Dark Tower and what they were supposed to do when they got there. The ones called the Grays, for instance-they sounded like the sort of wise old elves he kept imagining.

The drums were creepy, true enough, reminding him of a hundred low-budget jungle epics (mostly watched on TV with Henry by his side and a bowl of popcorn between them) where the fabulous lost cities the explorers had come looking for were in ruins and the natives had degenerated into tribes of blood-thirsty cannibals, but Eddie found it impossible to believe something like that could have happened in a city that looked, at least from a distance, so much like New York. If there were not wise old elves or abandoned goodies, there would surely be books, at least; he had listened to Roland talk about how rare paper was here, hut every city Eddie had ever been in was absolutely drowning in books. They might even find some working transportation; the equivalent of a Land Rover would be nice. That was probably just a silly dream, but when you had thousands of miles of unknown territory to cover, a few silly dreams were undoubtedly in order, if only to keep your spirits up. And weren’t those things at least possible, damn it?

He opened his mouth to say some of these things, but Jake spoke before he could.

“I don’t think we can go around,” he said, then blushed a little when they all turned to look at him. Oy shifted at his feet.

“No?” Aunt Talitha said. “And why do ye think that, pray tell?”

“Do you know about trains?” Jake asked.

There was a long silence. Bill and Till exchanged an uneasy glance. Aunt Talitha only looked at Jake steadily. Jake did not drop his eyes.

“I heard of one,” she said. “Mayhap even saw it. Over there.” She pointed in the direction of the Send. “Long ago, when I was but a child and the world hadn’t moved on… or at least not s’far’s it has now. Is it Blaine ye speak of, boy?”

Jake’s eyes flashed in surprise and recognition. “Yes! Blaine!” Roland was studying Jake closely.

“And how would ye know of Blaine the Mono?” Aunt Talitha asked.

“Mono?” Jake looked blank.

“Ay, so it was called. How would you know of that old lay?”

Jake looked helplessly at Roland, then back at Aunt Talitha. “I don’t know how I know.”

And that’s the truth, Eddie thought suddenly, but it’s not all the truth. He knows more than he wants to tell here… and I think he’s scared.

“This is our business, I think,” Roland said in a dry, brisk administrator’s voice. “You must let us work it out for ourselves, Old Mother.”

“Ay,” she agreed quickly. “You’ll keep your own counsel. Best that such as us not know.”

“What of the city?” Roland prompted. “What do you know of Lud?”

“Little now, but what we know, ye shall hear.” And she poured herself another cup of coffee.

9

IT WAS THE TWINS, Bill and Till, who actually did most of the talking, one taking up the tale smoothly whenever the other left off. Every now and then Aunt Talitha would add something or correct something, and the twins would wait respectfully until they were sure she was done. Si didn’t speak at all-merely sat with his untouched coffee in front of him, plucking at the pieces of straw which bristled up from the wide brim of his sombrero.

They knew little, indeed, Roland realized quickly, even about the history of their own town (nor did this surprise him; in these latter days, memories faded rapidly and all but the most recent past seemed not to exist), but what they did know was disturbing. Roland was not surprised by this, either.

In the days of their great-great-grandparents, River Crossing had been much the town Susannah had imagined: a trade-stop at the Great Road, modestly prosperous, a place where goods were sometimes sold but more often exchanged. It had been at least nominally part of River Barony, although even then such things as Baronies and Estates o’ Land had been passing.

There had been buffalo-hunters in those days, although the trade had been dying out; the herds were small and badly mutated. The meat of these mutant beasts was not poison, but it had been rank and bitter. Yet River Crossing, located between a place they simply called The Landing and the village of Jimtown, had been a place of some note. It was on the Great Road and only six days travel from the city by land and three by barge. “Unless the river were low,” one of the twins said. “Then it took longer, and my gran’da said there was times when there was barges grounded all the way upriver to Tom’s Neck.”

The old people knew nothing of the city’s original residents, of course, or the technologies they had used to build the towers and turrets; these were the Great Old Ones, and their history had been lost in the furthest reaches of the past even when Aunt Talitha’s great-great-grandfather had been a boy.

“The buildings are still standing,” Eddie said. “I wonder if the machines the Great Golden Oldies used to build them still run.”

“Mayhap,” one of the twins said. “If so, young fella, there don’t be ary man or woman that lives there now who’d still know how to run em… or so I believe, so I do.”

“Nay,” his brother said argumentatively, “I doubt the old ways are entirely lost to the Grays ’n Pubes, even now.” He looked at Eddie. “Our da’ said there was once electric candles in the city. There are those who say they mought still burn.”

“Imagine that,” Eddie replied wonderingly, and Susannah pinched his leg, hard, under the table.

“Yes,” the other twin said. He spoke seriously, unaware of Eddie’s sarcasm. “You pushed a button and they came on-bright, heatless candles with ary wicks or reservoirs for oil. And I’ve heard it said that once, in the old days, Quick, the outlaw prince, actually Hew up into the sky in a mechanical bird. But one of its wings broke and he died in a great fall, like Icarus.”

Susannah’s mouth dropped open. “You know the story of Icarus?”

“Ay, lady,” he said, clearly surprised she should find this strange. “He of the beeswax wings.”

“Children’s stories, both of them,” Aunt Talitha said with a sniff. “I know the story of the endless lights is true, for I saw them with my own eyes when I was but a green girl, and they may still glow from time to time, ay; there are those I trust who say they’ve seen diem on clear nights, although it’s been long years since I have myself. But no man ever flew, not even the Great Old Ones.”

Nonetheless, there were strange machines in the city, built to do peculiar and sometimes dangerous things. Many of them might still run, but the elderly twins reckoned that none now in the city knew how to start them up, for they hadn’t been heard in years.

Maybe that could change, though, Eddie thought, his eyes gleaming. If, that is, an enterprising, travel-minded young man with a little knowledge of strange machinery and endless lights came along. It could be just a matter of finding the ON switches. I mean, it really could be that simple. Or maybe they just blew a bunch of fuses-think of that, friends and neighbors! Just replace half a dozen 400-amp Busses and light the whole place up like a Reno Saturday night!

Susannah elbowed him and asked, in a low voice, what was so funny. Eddie shook his head and put a finger to his lips, earning an irritated look from the love of his life. The albinos, meanwhile, were continuing their story, handing its thread back and forth with the unconscious ease which probably nothing but lifetime twinship can provide.

Four or five generations ago, they said, the city had still been quite heavily populated and reasonably civilized, although the residents drove wagons and buckboards along the wide boulevards the Great Old Ones had constructed for their fabulous horseless vehicles. The city-dwellers were artisans and what the twins called “manufactories,” and trade both on the river and over it had been brisk.

“Over it?” Roland asked.

“The bridge over the Send still stands,” Aunt Talitha said, “or did twenty year ago.”

“Ay, old Bill Muffin and his boy saw it not ten year agone,” Si agreed, making his first contribution to the conversation.

“What sort of bridge?” the gunslinger asked.

“A great thing of steel cables,” one of the twins said. “It stands in the sky like the web of some great spider.” He added shyly: “I should like to see it again before I die.”

“Probably fallen in by now,” Aunt Talitha said dismissively, “and good riddance. Devil’s work.” She turned to the twins. “Tell them what’s happened since, and why the city’s so dangerous now-apart from any haunts that may den there, that is, and I’ll warrant there’s a power of em. These folks want to get on, and the sun’s on the wester."

10

THE REST OF THE story was but another version of a tale Roland of Gilead had heard many times and had, in some measure, lived through himself. It was fragmentary and incomplete, undoubtedly shot through with myth and misinformation, its linear progress distorted by the odd changes-both temporal and directional-which were now taking place in the world, and it could be summed up in a single compound sentence: Once there was a world we knew, but that world has moved on.

These old people of River Crossing knew of Gilead no more than Roland knew of the River Barony, and the name of John Parson, the man who had brought ruin and anarchy on Roland’s land, meant nothing to them, but all stories of the old world’s passing were similar… too similar, Roland thought, to be coincidence.

A great civil war-perhaps in Garlan, perhaps in a more distant land called Porla-had erupted three, perhaps even four hundred years ago. Its ripples had spread slowly outward, pushing anarchy and dissension ahead of them. Few if any kingdoms had been able to stand against those slow waves, and anarchy had come to this part of the world as surely as night follows sunset. At one time, whole armies had been on the roads, sometimes in advance, sometimes in retreat, always confused and without long-term goals. As time passed, they crumbled into smaller groups, and these degenerated into roving bands of harriers. Trade faltered, then broke down entirely. Travel went from a matter of inconvenience to one of danger. In the end, it became almost impossible. Communication with the city thinned steadily and had all but ceased a hundred and twenty years ago.

Like a hundred other towns Roland had ridden through-first with Cuthbert and the other gunslingers cast out of Gilead, then alone, in pursuit of the man in black-River Crossing had been cut off and thrown on its own resources.

At this point Si roused himself, and his voice captured the travellers at once. He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales-one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops of dew.

“We last sent tribute to the Barony castle in the time of my greatgran’da,” he said. “Twenty-six men went with a wagon of hides-there was no hard coin anymore by then, o’ course, and ’twas the best they could do. It was a long and dangerous journey of almost eighty wheels, and six died on the way. Half fell to harriers bound for the war in the city; the other half died either of disease or devilgrass.

“When they finally arrived, they found the castle deserted but for the rooks and black-birds. The walls had been broken; weeds o’ergrew the Court o’ State. There had been a great slaughter on the fields to the west; it were white with bones and red with rusty armor, so my da’s gran’da said, and the voices of demons cried out like the east wind from the jawbones o’ those who’d fallen there. The village beyond the castle had been burned to the ground and a thousand or more skulls were posted along the walls of the keep. Our folk left their bounty o’ hides without the shattered barbican gate-for none would venture inside that place of ghosts and moaning voices-and began the homeward way again. Ten more fell on that journey, so that of the six-and-twenty who left only ten returned, my great-gran’da one of them… but he picked up a ringworm on his neck and bosom that never left until the day he died. It were the radiation sickness, or so they said. After that, gunslinger, none left the town. We were on our own.”

They grew used to the depredations of the harriers, Si continued in his cracked but melodious voice. Watches were posted; when bands of riders were seen approaching-almost always moving southeast along the Great Road and the path of the Beam, going to the war which raged endlessly in Lud-the townspeople hid in a large shelter they had dug beneath the church. Casual damages to the town were not repaired, lest they make those roving bands curious. Most were beyond curiosity; they only rode through at a gallop, bows or battle-axes slung over their shoulders, bound for the killing-zones.

“What war is it that you speak of?” Roland asked.

“Yes,” Eddie said, “and what about that drumming sound?”

The twins again exchanged a quick, almost superstitious glance.

“We know not of the god-drums,” Si told them. “Ary word or watch. The war of the city, now…”

The war had originally been the harriers and outlaws against a loose confederation of artisans and “manufactories” who lived in the city. The residents had decided to fight instead of allowing the harriers to loot them, burn their shops, and then turn the survivors out into the Big Empty, where they would almost certainly die. And for some years they had successfully defended Lud against the vicious but badly organized groups of raiders which tried to storm across the bridge or invade by boat and barge.

“The city-folk used the old weapons,” one of the twins said, “and though their numbers were small, the harriers could not stand against such things with their bows and maces and battle-axes.”

“Do you mean the city-people used guns?” Eddie asked.

One of the albinos nodded. “Ay, guns, but not just guns. There were things that hurled the firebangs over a mile or more. Explosions like dynamite, only more powerful. The outlaws-who are now the Grays, as you must ken-could do nothing but lay siege beyond the river, and that was what they did.”

Lud became, in effect, the last fortress-refuge of the latter world. The brightest and most able travelled there from the surrounding countryside by ones and twos. When it came to intelligence tests, sneaking through the tangled encampments and front lines of the besiegers was the newcomers’ final exam. Most came unarmed across the no-man’s-land of the bridge, and those who made it that far were let through. Some were found wanting and sent packing again, of course, but those who had a trade or a skill (or brains enough to learn one) were allowed to stay. Farming skills were particularly prized; according to the stories, every large park in Lud had been turned into a vegetable garden. With the countryside cut off, it was grow food in the city or starve amid the glass towers and metal alleys. The Great Old Ones were gone, their machines were a mystery, and the silent wonders which remained were inedible.

Little by little, the character of the war began to change. The balance of power had shifted to the besieging Grays-so called because they were, on average, much older than the city-dwellers. Those latter were also growing older, of course. They were still known as Pubes, but in most cases their puberty was long behind them. And they eventually either forgot how the old weapons worked or used them up.

“Probably both,” Roland grunted.

Some ninety years ago-within the lifetimes of Si and Aunt Talitha- a final band of outlaws had appeared, one so large that the outriders had gone galloping through River Crossing at dawn and the drogues did not pass until almost sundown. It was the last army these parts had ever seen, and it was led by a warrior prince named David Quick-the same fellow who supposedly later fell to his death from the sky. He had organized the raggle-taggle remnants of the outlaw bands which still hung about the city, killing anyone who showed opposition to his plans. Quick’s army of Grays used neither boat nor bridge to attempt entry into the city, but instead built a pontoon bridge twelve miles below it and attacked on the flank.

“Since then the war has guttered like a chimney-fire,” Aunt Talitha finished. “We hear reports every now and then from someone who has managed to leave, ay, so we do. These come a little more often now, for the bridge, they say, is undefended and I think the fire is almost out. Within the city, the Pubes and Grays squabble over the remaining spoils, only I reckon that the descendents of the harriers who followed Quick over the pontoon bridge are the real Pubes now, although they are still called Grays. The descendents of the original city-dwellers must now be almost as old as we are, although there are still some younkers who go to be among them, drawn by the old stories and the lure of the knowledge which may still remain there.

“These two sides still keep up their old enmity, gunslinger, and both would desire this young man you call Eddie. If the dark-skinned woman is fertile, they would not kill her even though her legs are short-ended; they would keep her to bear children, for children are fewer now, and although the old sicknesses are passing, some are still born strange.”

At this, Susannah stirred, seemed about to say something, then only drank the last of her coffee and settled back into her former listening position.

“But if they would desire the young man and woman, gunslinger, I think they would lust for the boy.”

Jake bent and began to stroke Oy’s fur again. Roland saw his face and knew what he was thinking: it was the passage under the mountains all over again, just another version of the Slow Mutants.

“You they’d just as soon kill,” Aunt Talitha said, “for you are a gunslinger, a man out of his own time and place, neither fish nor fowl, and no use to either side. But a boy can be taken, used, schooled to remember some things and to forget all the others. They’ve all forgotten whatever it was they had to fight about in the first place; the world has moved on since then. Now they just fight to the sound of them awful drumbeats, some few still young, most of them old enough for the rocking chair, like us here, all of them stupid grots who only live to kill and kill to live.” She paused. “Now that you’ve heard us old cullies to the end, are ye sure it would not be best to go around, and leave them to their business?”

Before Roland could reply, Jake spoke up in a clear, firm voice. “Tell what you know about Blaine the Mono,” he said. “Tell about Blaine and Engineer Bob."

11

“ENGINEER WHO?” EDDIE ASKED, but Jake only went on looking at the old people.

“Track lies over yonder,” Si answered at last. He pointed toward the river. “One track only, set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their streets and walls.”

“A monorail!” Susannah exclaimed. “Blaine the Monorail!”

“Blaine is a pain,” Jake muttered.

Roland glanced at him but said nothing.

“Does this train run now?” Eddie asked Si.

Si shook his head slowly. His face was troubled and uneasy. “No, young sir-but in my lifetime and Auntie’s, it did. When we were green and the war of the city still went forrad briskly. We’d hear it before we saw it-a low humming noise, a sound like ye sometimes hear when a bad summer storm’s on the way-one that’s full of lightning.”

“Ay,” Aunt Talitha said. Her face was lost and dreaming.

“Then it’d come-Blaine the Mono, twinkling in the sun, with a nose like one of the bullets in your revolver, gunslinger. Maybe two wheels long. I know that sounds like it couldn’t be, and maybe it wasn’t (we were green, ye must remember, and that makes a difference), but I still think it was, for when it came, it seemed to run along the whole horizon. Fast, low, and gone before you could even see it proper!

“Sometimes, on days when the weather were foul and the air low, it’d shriek like a harpy as it came out of the west. Sometimes it’d come in the night with a long white light spread out before it, and that shriek would wake all of us. It were like the trumpet they say will raise the dead from their graves at the end of the world, so it was.”

“Tell em about the bang, Si!” Bill or Till said in a voice which trembled with awe. “Tell em about the godless bang what always came after!”

“Ay, I was just getting to that,” Si answered with a touch of annoyance. “After it passed by, there would be quiet for a few seconds… sometimes as long as a minute, maybe… and then there’d come an explosion that rattled die boards and knocked cups off the shelves and sometimes even broke the glass in the window-panes. But never did anyone see ary flash nor fire. It was like an explosion in the world of spirits.”

Eddie tapped Susannah on the shoulder, and when she turned to him he mouthed two words: Sonic boom. It was nuts-no train he had ever heard of travelled faster than the speed of sound-but it was also the only thing that made sense.

She nodded and turned back to Si.

“It’s the only one of the machines the Great Old Ones made that I’ve ever seen running with my own eyes,” he said in a soft voice, “and if it weren’t the devil’s work, there be no devil. The last time I saw it was the spring I married Mercy, and that must have been sixty year agone.”

“Seventy,” Aunt Talitha said with authority.

“And this train went into the city,” Rolund said. “From back the way we came… from the west… from the forest.”

“Ay,” a new voice said unexpectedly, “but there was another… one that went out from the city… and mayhap that one still runs.”

12

THEY TURNED. MERCY STOOD by a bed of flowers between the back of the church and the table where they sat. She was walking slowly toward the sound of their voices, with her hands spread out before her.

Si got clumsily to his feet, hurried to her as best he could, and took her hand. She slipped an arm about his waist and they stood there looking like the world’s oldest wedding couple.

“Auntie told you to take your coffee inside!” he said.

“Finished my coffee long ago,” Mercy said. “It’s a bitter brew and I hate it. Besides-I wanted to hear the palaver.” She raised a trembling finger and pointed it in Roland’s direction. “I wanted to hear his voice. It’s fair and light, so it is.”

“I cry your pardon, Auntie,” Si said, looking at the ancient woman a little fearfully. “She was never one to mind, and the years have made her no better.”

Aunt Talitha glanced at Roland. He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Let her come forward and join us,” she said.

Si led her over to the table, scolding all the while. Mercy only looked over his shoulder with her sightless eyes, her mouth set in an intractable line.

When Si had gotten her seated, Aunt Talitha leaned forward on her forearms and said, “Now do you have something to say, old sister-sai, or were you just beating your gums?”

“I hear what I hear. My ears are as sharp as they ever were, Talitha-sharper!”

Roland’s hand dropped to his belt for a moment. When he brought it back to the table, he was holding a cartridge in his fingers. He tossed it to Susannah, who caught it. “Do you, sai?” he asked.

“Well enough,” she said, turning in his direction, “to know that you just threw something. To your woman, I think-the one with the brown skin. Something small. What was it, gunslinger? A biscuit?”

“Close enough,” he said, smiling. “You hear as well as you say. Now tell us what you meant.”

“There is another mono,” she said, “unless ’tis the same one, running a different course. Either way, a different course was run by some mono… until seven or eight year ago, anyways. I used to hear it leaving the city and going out into the waste lands beyond.”

“Dungheap!” one of the albino twins ejaculated. “Nothing goes to the waste lands! Nothing can live there!”

She turned her face to him. “Is a train alive, Till Tudbury?” she asked. “Does a machine fall sick with sores and puking?”

Well, Eddie thought of saying, there was this bear…

He thought it over a little more and decided it might be better to keep his silence.

“We would have heard it,” the other twin was insisting hotly. “A noise like the one Si always tells of-”

“This one didn’t make no bang,” she admitted, “but I heard that other sound, that humming noise like the one you hear sometimes after lightning has struck somewhere close. When the wind was strong, blowing out from the city, I heard it.” She thrust out her chin and added: “I did hear the bang once, too. From far, far out. The night Big Charlie Wind came and almost blew the steeple off the church. Must have been two hundred wheels from here. Maybe two hundred and fifty.”

“Bulldink!” the twin cried. “You been chewing the weed!”

“I’ll chew on you, Bill Tudbury, if you don’t shut up your honkin. You’ve no business sayin bulldink to a lady, either. Why-”

“Stop it, Mercy!” Si hissed, but Eddie was barely listening to this exchange of rural pleasantries. What the blind woman had said made sense to him. Of course there would be no sonic boom, not from a train which started its run in Lud; he couldn’t remember exactly what the speed of sound was, but he thought it was somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred and fifty miles an hour. A train starting from a dead stop would take some time getting up to that speed, and by the time it reached it, it would be out of earshot… unless the listening conditions happened to be just right, as Mercy claimed they had been on the night when the Big Charlie Wind-whatever that was-had come.

And there were possibilities here. Blaine the Mono was no Land Rover, but maybe… maybe…

“You haven’t heard the sound of this other train for seven or eight years, sai?” Roland asked. “Are you sure it wasn’t much longer?”

“Couldn’t have been,” she said, “for the last time was the year old Bill Muffin took blood-sick. Poor Bill!”

“That’s almost ten year agone,” Aunt Talitha said, and her voice was queerly gentle.

“Why did you never say you heard such a thing?” Si asked. He looked at the gunslinger. “You can’t believe everything she says, lord- always longing to be in the middle of the stage is my Mercy.”

“Why, you old slumgullion!” she cried, and slapped his arm. “I didn’t say because I didn’t want to o’ertop the story you’re so proud of, but now that it matters what I heard, I’m bound to tell!”

“I believe you, sai,” Roland said, “but are you sure you haven’t heard the sounds of the mono since then?”

“Nay, not since then. I imagine it’s finally reached the end of its path.”

“I wonder,” Roland said. “Indeed, I wonder very much.” He looked down at the table, brooding, suddenly far away from all of them,

Choo-choo, Jake thought, and shivered.

13

HALF AN HOUR LATER they were in the town square again, Susannah in her wheelchair, Jake adjusting the straps of his pack while Oy sat at his heel, watching him attentively. Only the town elders had attended the dinner-party in the little Eden behind the Church of the Blood Everlasting, it seemed, because when they returned to the square, another dozen people were waiting. They glanced at Susannah and looked a bit longer at Jake (his youth apparently more interesting to them than her dark skin), but it was clearly Roland they had come to see; their wondering eyes were full of ancient awe.

He’s a living remnant of a past they only know from stories, Susannah thought. They look at him the way religious people would look at one of the saints-Peter or Paul or Matthew-if he decided to drop by the Saturday night bean supper and tell them stories of how it was, traipsing around the Sea of Galilee with Jesus the Carpenter.

The ritual which had ended the meal was now repeated, only this time everyone left in River Crossing participated. They shuffled forward in a line, shaking hands with Eddie and Susannah, kissing Jake on the cheek or forehead, then kneeling in front of Roland for his touch and his blessing. Mercy threw her arms about him and pressed her blind face against his stomach. Roland hugged her back and thanked her for her news.

“Will ye not stay the night with us, gunslinger? Sunset comes on apace, and it’s been long since you and yours spent the night beneath a roof, I’ll warrant.”

“It has been, but it’s best we go on. Thankee-sai.”

“Will ye come again if ye may, gunslinger?”

“Yes,” Roland said, but Eddie did not need to look into his strange friend’s face to know the chances were small. “If we can.”

“Ay.” She Imaged him a final time, then passed on with her hand resting on Si’s sunburned shoulder. “Fare ye well.”

Aunt Talitha came last. When she began to kneel, Roland caught her by the shoulders. “No, sai. You shall not do.” And before Eddie’s amazed eyes, Roland knelt before her in the dust of the town square. “Will you bless me, Old Mother? Will you bless all of us as we go our course?”

“Ay,” she said. There was no surprise in her voice, no tears in her eyes, but her voice throbbed with deep feeling, all the same. “I see your heart is true, gunslinger, and that you hold to the old ways of your kind; ay, you hold to them very well. I bless you and yours and will pray that no harm will come to you. Now take this, if you will.” She reached into the bodice of her faded dress and removed a silver cross at the end of a fine-link silver chain. She took it off

Now it was Roland’s turn to be surprised. “Are you sure? I did not come to take what belongs to you and yours, Old Mother.”

“I’m sure as sure can be. I’ve worn this day and night for over a hundred years, gunslinger. Now you shall wear it, and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower, and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth.” She slipped the chain over his head. The cross dropped into the open neck of his deerskin shirt as if it belonged there. “Go now. We have broken bread, we have held palaver, we have your blessing, and you have ours. Go your course in safety. Stand and be true.” Her voice trembled and broke on the last word.

Roland rose to his feet, then bowed and tapped his throat three times. “Thankee-sai.”

She bowed back, but did not speak. Now there were tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Ready?” Roland asked.

Eddie nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

“All right,” Roland said. “Let’s go.”

They walked down what remained of the town’s high street, Jake pushing Susannah’s wheelchair. As they passed the last building (TRADE amp; CHANGE, the faded sign read), he looked back. The old people were still gathered about the stone marker, a forlorn cluster of humanity in the middle of this wide, empty plain. Jake raised his hand. Up to this point he had managed to hold himself in, but when several of the old folks-Si, Bill, and Till among them-raised their own hands in return, Jake burst into tears himself.

Eddie put an arm around his shoulders. “Just keep walking, sport,” he said in an uneasy voice. “That’s the only way to do it.”

“They’re so old!” Jake sobbed. “How can we just leave them like this? It’s not right!”

“It’s ka,” Eddie said without thinking.

“Is it? Well ka suh-suh-sucks!”

“Yeah, hard,” Eddie agreed… but he kept walking. So did Jake, and he didn’t look back again. He was afraid they would still be there, standing at the center of their forgotten town, watching until Roland and his friends were out of view. And he would have been right.

14

THEY HAD MADE LESS than seven miles before the sky began to darken and sunset colored the western horizon blaze orange. There was a grove of Susannah’s eucalyptus trees nearby; Jake and Eddie foraged there for wood.

“I just don’t see why we didn’t stay,” Jake said. “The blind lady invited us, and we didn’t get very far, anyway. I’m still so full I’m practically waddling.”

Eddie smiled. “Me, too. And I can tell you something else: your good friend Edward Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and leisurely squat in this grove of trees first thing tomorrow morning. You wouldn’t believe how tired I am of eating deermeat and crapping rabbit-turds. If you’d told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point of my day, I would have laughed in your face.”

“Is your middle name really Cantor?”

“Yes, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around.”

“I won’t. Why didn’t we stay, Eddie?”

Eddie sighed. “Because we would have found out they needed firewood.”

“Huh?”

“And after we got the firewood, we would’ve found they also needed fresh meat, because they served us the last of what they had. And we’d be real creeps not to replace what we ate, right? Especially when we’re packing guns and the best they can probably do is a bunch of bows and arrows fifty or a hundred years old. So we would have gone hunting for them. By then it would be night again, and when we got up the next day, Susannah would be saying we ought to at least make a few repairs before we moved on-oh, not to the front of the town, that’d be dangerous, but maybe in the hotel or wherever it is they live. Only a few days, and what’s a few days, right?”

Roland materialized out of the gloom. He moved as quietly as ever, but he looked tired and preoccupied. “I thought maybe you two fell into a quickpit,” he said.

“Nope. I’ve just been telling Jake the facts as I see them.”

“So what would have been wrong with that?” Jake- asked. “This Dark Tower thingy has been wherever it is for a long time, right? It’s not going anywhere, is it?”

“A few days, then a few more, then a few more.” Eddie looked at the branch he had just picked up and threw it aside disgustedly. I’m starting to sound just like him, he thought. And yet he knew that he was only speaking the truth. “Maybe we’d see that their spring is getting silted up, and it wouldn’t be polite to go until we’d dug it out for them. But why stop there when we could take another couple of weeks and build a jackleg waterwheel, right? They’re old, and have no more foot.” He glanced at Roland, and his voice was tinged with reproach. “I tell you what-when I think of Bill and Till there stalking a herd of wild buffalo, I get the shivers.”

“They’ve been doing it a long time,” Roland said, “and I imagine they could show us a thing or two. They’ll manage. Meantime, let’s get that wood-it’s going to be a chilly night.”

But Jake wasn’t done with it yet. He was looking closely-almost sternly-at Eddie. “You’re saying we could never do enough for them, aren’t you?”

Eddie stuck out his lower lip and blew hair off his forehead. “Not exactly. I’m saving it would never be any easier to leave than it was today. Harder, maybe, but no easier.”

“It still doesn’t seem right.”

They reached the place that would become, once the fire was lit, just another campsite on the road to the Dark Tower. Susannah had eased herself out of her chair and was lying on her back with her hands behind her head, looking up at the stars. Now she sat up and began to arrange the wood in the way Roland had shown her months ago.

“Right is what all this is about,” Roland said. “But if you look too long at the small rights, Jake-the ones that lie close at hand- it’s easy to lose sight of the big ones that stand farther off. Things are out of joint-going wrong and getting worse. We see it all around us, but the answers are still ahead. While we were helping the twenty or thirty people left in River Crossing, twenty or thirty thousand more might be suffering or dying somewhere else. And if there is any place in the universe where these things can be set right, it’s at the Dark Tower.”

“Why? How?” Jake asked. “What is this Tower, anyway?”

Roland squatted beside the fire Susannah had built, produced his flint and steel, and began to flash sparks into the kindling. Soon small flames were growing amid the twigs and dried handfuls of grass. “I can’t answer those questions,” he said. “I wish I could.”

That, Eddie thought, was an exceedingly clever reply. Roland had said I can’t answer… but that wasn’t the same thing as I don’t know. Far from it.

15

SUPPER CONSISTED OF WATER and greens. They were all still recovering from the heavy meal they’d eaten in River Crossing; even Oy refused the scraps Jake offered him after the first one or two.

“How come you wouldn’t talk back there?” Jake scolded the bum-bier. “You made me look like an idiot!”

“Id-yit!” Oy said, and put his muzzle on Jake’s ankle.

“He’s talking better all the time,” Roland remarked. “He’s even starting to sound like you, Jake.”

“Ake,” Oy agreed, not lifting his muzzle. Jake was fascinated by the gold rings in Oy’s eyes; in the flickering light of the fire, they seemed to revolve slowly.

“But he wouldn’t talk to the old people.”

“Bumblers are choosy about that sort of thing,” Roland said. “They’re odd creatures. If I had to guess, I’d say this one was driven away by its own pack.”

“Why do you think so?”

Roland pointed at Oy’s flank. Jake had cleaned off the blood (Oy hadn’t enjoyed this, but had stood for it) and the bite was healing, although the bumbler still limped a little. “I’d bet an eagle that’s the bite of another bumbler.”

“But why would his own pack-”

“Maybe they got tired of his chatter,” Eddie said. He had lain down beside Susannah and put an arm about her shoulders.

“Maybe they did,” Roland said, “especially if he was the only one of them who was still trying to talk. The others might have decided he was too bright-or too uppity-for their taste. Animals don’t know as much about jealousy as people, but they’re not ignorant of it, either.”

The object of this discussion closed his eyes and appeared to go to sleep… but Jake noticed his ears began twitching when the talk resumed.

“How bright are they?” Jake asked.

Roland shrugged. “The old groom I told you about-the one who said a good bumbler is good luck-swore he had one in his youth that could add. He said it told sums either by scratching on the stable floor or pushing stones together with its muzzle.” He grinned. It lit his whole face, chasing away the gloomy shadows which had lain there ever since they left River Crossing. “Of course, grooms and fishermen are born to lie.”

A companionable silence fell among them, and Jake could feel drowsiness stealing over him. He thought he would sleep soon, and that was fine by him. Then the drums began, coming out of the southeast in rhythmic pulses, and he sat back up. They listened without speaking.

“That’s a rock and roll backbeat,” Eddie said suddenly. “I know it is. Take away the guitars and that’s what you’ve got left. In fact, it sounds quite a lot like Z.Z. Top.”

“Z.Z. who?” Susannah asked.

Eddie grinned. “They didn’t exist in your when,” he said. “I mean, they probably did, but in ’63 they would have been just a bunch of kids going to school down in Texas.” He listened. “I’ll be goddamned if that doesn’t sound just like the backbeat to something like ’sharp-Dressed Man’ or ’Velcro Fly.’”

“Velcro Fly’?” Jake said. “That’s a stupid name for a song.”

“Pretty funny, though,” Eddie said. “You missed it by ten years or so, sport.”

“We’d better roll over,” Roland said. “Morning comes early.”

“I can’t sleep with that shit going on,” Eddie said. He hesitated, then said something which had been on his mind ever since the morning when they had pulled Jake, whitefaced and shrieking, through the doorway and into this world. “Don’t you think it’s about time we exchanged stories, Roland? We might find out we know more than we think.”

“Yes, it’s almost time for that. But not in the dark.” Roland rolled onto his side, pulled up a blanket, and appeared to go to sleep.

“Jesus,” Eddie said. “Just like that.” He blew a disgusted little whistle between his teeth.

“He’s right,” Susannah said. “Come on, Eddie-go to sleep.”

He grinned and kissed the tip of her nose. “Yes, Mummy.”

Five minutes later he and Susannah were dead to the world, drums or no drums. Jake found that his own sleepiness had stolen away, however. He lay looking up at die strange stars and listening to that steady, rhythmic throbbing coming out of the darkness. Maybe it was the Pubes, boogying madly to a song called “Velcro Fly” while they worked themselves into a sacrificial killing frenzy.

He thought of Blaine the Mono, a train so fast that it travelled across the huge, haunted world trailing a sonic boom behind it, and that led him naturally enough to thoughts of Charlie the Choo-Choo, who had been retired to a forgotten siding when the new Burlington Zephyr arrived, rendering him obsolete. He thought of the expression on Charlie’s face, the one that was supposed to be cheery and pleasant but somehow wasn’t. He thought about The Mid-World Railway Company, and the empty lands between St. Louis and Topeka. He thought about how Charlie had been all ready to go when Mr. Martin needed him, and how Charlie could blow his own whistle and feed his own firebox. He wondered again if Engineer Bob had sabotaged the Burlington Zephyr in order to give his beloved Charlie a second chance.

At last-and as suddenly as it had begun-the rhythmic drumming stopped, and Jake drifted off to sleep.

16

HE DREAMED, BUT NOT of the plaster-man.

He dreamed instead that he was standing on a stretch of blacktop highway somewhere in the Big Empty of western Missouri. Oy was with him. Railroad warning signals-white X-shapes with red lights in their centers-flanked the road. The lights were flashing and bells were ringing.

Now a humming noise began to rise out of the southeast getting steadily louder. It sounded like lightning in a bottle.

Here it comes, he told Oy.

Urns! Oy agreed.

And suddenly a vast pink shape two wheels long was slicing across the plain toward them. It was low and bullet-shaped, and when Jake saw it, a terrible fear filled his heart. The two big windows flashing in the sun at the front of the train looked like eyes.

Don’t ask it silly questions, Jake told Oy. It won’t play silly games. It’s just an awful choo-choo train, and its name is Blaine the Pain.

Suddenly Oy leaped onto the tracks and crouched there with his ears flattened back. His golden eyes were blazing. His teeth were bared in a desperate snarl.

No! Jake screamed. No, Oy!

But Oy paid no attention. The pink bullet was bearing down on the1 tiny, defiant shape of the billy-bumbler now, and that humming seemed to be crawling all over Jake’s skin, making his nose bleed and shattering the fillings in his teeth.

He leaped for Oy, Blaine the Mono (or was it Charlie the Choo-Choo?) bore down on them, and he woke up suddenly, shivering, bathed in sweat. The night seemed to be pressing down upon him like a physical weight. He rolled over and felt frantically for Oy. For a terrible moment he thought the bumbler was gone, and then his fingers found the silky fur. Oy uttered a squeak and looked at him with sleepy curiosity.

“That’s all right,” Jake whispered in a dry voice. “There’s no train. It was just a dream. Go back to sleep, boy.”

“Oy,” the humbler agreed, and closed his eyes again.

Jake rolled over on his back and lay looking up at the stars. Blaine is more than a pain, he thought. It’s dangerous. Very dangerous.

Yes, perhaps.

No perhaps about it! his mind insisted frantically.

All right, Blaine was a pain-given. But his Final Essay had had something else to say on the subject of Blaine, hadn’t it?

Blaine is the truth. Blaine is the truth. Blaine is the truth.

“Oh Jeez, what a mess,” Jake whispered. He closed his eyes and was asleep again in seconds. This time his sleep was dreamless.

17

AROUND NOON THE NEXT day they reached the top of another drumlin and saw the bridge for the first time. It crossed the Send at a point where the river narrowed, bent due south, and passed in front of the city.

“Holy Jesus,” Eddie said softly. “Does that look familiar to you, Suze?”

“Yes.”

“Jake?”

“Yes-it looks like the George Washington Bridge.”

“It sure does,” Eddie agreed.

“But what’s the GWB doing in Missouri?” Jake asked.

Eddie looked at him. “Say what, sport?”

Jake looked confused. “Mid-World, I mean. You know.”

Eddie was looking at him harder than ever. “How do you know this is Mid-World? You weren’t with us when we came to that marker.”

Jake stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked down at his moccasins. “Dreamed it,” he said briefly. “You don’t think I booked this trip with my dad’s travel-agent, do you?”

Roland touched Eddie’s shoulder. “Let it alone for now.” Eddie glanced briefly at Roland and nodded.

They stood looking at the bridge a little longer. They’d had time to get used to the city skyline, but this was something new. It dreamed in the distance, a faint shape sketched against the blue midmorning sky. Roland could make out four sets of impossibly tall metal towers-one set at each end of the bridge and two in the middle. Between them, gigantic cables swooped through the air in long arcs. Between these arcs and the base of the bridge were many vertical lines-either more cables or metal beams, he could not tell which. But he also saw gaps, and realized after a long time that the bridge was no longer perfectly level.

“Yonder bridge is going to be in the river soon, I think,” Roland said.

“Well, maybe,” Eddie said reluctantly, “but it doesn’t really look that bad to me.”

Roland sighed. “Don’t hope for too much, Eddie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eddie heard the touchiness in his voice, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

“It means that I want you to believe your eyes, Eddie-that’s all. There was a saying when I was growing up: ’Only a fool believes he’s dreaming before he wakes up.’ Do you understand?”

Eddie felt a sarcastic reply on his tongue and banished it after a brief struggle. It was just that Roland had a way-it was unintentional, he was sure, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with-of making him feel like such a kid.

“I guess I do,” he said at last. “It means the same thing as my mother’s favorite saying.”

“And what was that?”

“Hope for the best and expect the worst,” Eddie said sourly.

Roland’s face lightened in a smile. “I think I like your mother’s saying better.”

“But it is still standing!” Eddie burst out. “I agree it’s not in such fantastic shape-probably nobody’s done a really thorough maintenance check on it for a thousand years or so-but it is still there. The whole city is! Is it so wrong to hope we might find some things that’ll help us there? Or some people that’ll feed us and talk to us, like the old folks back in River Crossing, instead of shooting at us? Is it so wrong to hope our luck might be turning?”

In the silence which followed, Eddie realized with embarrassment that he had been making a speech.

“No.” There was a kindness in Roland’s voice-that kindness which always surprised Eddie when it came. “It’s never wrong to hope.” He looked around at Eddie and the others like a man coming out of a deep dream. “We’re done travelling for today. It’s time we had our own palaver, I think, and it’s going to take awhile.”

The gunslinger left the road and walked into the high grass without looking back. After a moment, the other three followed.

18

UNTIL THEY MET THE old people in River Crossing, Susannah had seen Roland strictly in terms of television shows she rarely watched: Cheyenne, The Rifleman, and, of course, the archetype of them all, Gunsmoke. That was one she had sometimes listened to on tin- radio with her father before it came on TV (she thought of how foreign the idea of radio drama would be to Eddie and Jake and smiled-Roland’s was not the only world which had moved on). She could still remember what the narrator said at the beginning of every one of those radio playlets: “It makes a man watchful… and a little lonely.”

Until River Crossing, that had summed Roland up perfectly for her. He was not broad-shouldered, as Marshal Dillon had been, nor anywhere near as tall, and his face seemed to her more that of a tired poet than a wild-west lawman, but she had still seen him as an existential version of that make-believe Kansas peace officer, whose only mission in life (other than an occasional drink in The Longbranch with his friends Doc and Kitty) had been to Clean Up Dodge.

Now she understood that Roland had once been much more than a cop riding a Daliesque range at the end of the world. He had been a diplomat; a mediator; perhaps even a teacher. Most of all, he had been a soldier of what these people called “the white,” by which she guessed they meant the civilizing forces that kept people from killing each other enough of the time to allow some sort of progress. In his time he had been more wandering knight-errant than bounty hunter. And in many ways, this still was his time; the people of River Crossing had certainly thought so. Why else would they have knelt in the dust to receive his blessing?

In light of this new perception, Susannah could see how cleverly the gunslinger had managed them since that awful morning in the speaking ring, Each time they had begun a line of conversation which would lead to the comparing of notes-and what could be more natural, given the cataclysmic and inexplicable “drawing” each of them had experienced?- Roland had been there, stepping in quickly and turning the conversation into other channels so smoothly that none of them (even she, who had spent almost four years up to her neck in the civil-rights movement) had noticed what he was doing.

Susannah thought she understood why-he had done it in order to give Jake time to heal. But understanding his motives didn’t change her own feelings-astonishment, amusement, chagrin-about how neatly he had handled them. She remembered something Andrew, her chauffeur, had said shortly before Roland had drawn her into this world. Something about President Kennedy being the last gunslinger of the western world. She had scoffed then, but now she thought she understood. There was a lot more JFK than Matt Dillon in Roland. She suspected that Roland possessed little of Kennedy’s imagination, but when it came to romance… dedication… charisma…

And guile, she thought. Don’t forget guile.

She surprised herself by suddenly bursting into laughter.

Roland had seated himself cross-legged. Now he turned toward her, raising his eyebrows. “Something funny?”

“Very. Tell me something-how many languages can you speak?”

The gunslinger thought it over. “Five,” he said at last. “I used to speak the Sellian dialects fairly well, but I believe I’ve forgotten everything but the curses.”

Susannah laughed again. It was a cheerful, delighted sound. “You a fox, Roland,” she said. “Indeed you are.”

Jake looked interested. “Say a swear in Strelleran,” he said.

“Sellian,” Roland corrected. He thought a minute, then said something very fast and greasy-to Eddie it sounded a little as if he was gargling with some very thick liquid. Week-old coffee, say. Roland grinned as he said it.

Jake grinned back. “What does it mean?”

Roland put an arm around the boy’s shoulders for a moment. “That we have a lot of things to talk about."

19

“WE ARE KA-TET,” ROLAND began, “which means a group of people bound together by fate. The philosophers of my land said a ka-tet could only be broken by death or treachery. My great teacher, Cort, said that since death and treachery are also spokes on the wheel of ka, such a binding can never be broken. As the years pass and I see more, I come more and more to Cort’s way of looking at it.

“Each member of a ka-tet is like a piece in a puzzle. Taken by itself, each piece is a mystery, but when they are put together, they make a picture… or part of a picture. It may take a great many ka-tets to finish one picture. You mustn’t be surprised if you discover your lives have been touching in ways you haven’t seen until now. For one thing, each of you three is capable of knowing each other’s thoughts-”

“What?” Eddie cried.

“It’s true. You share your thoughts so naturally that you haven’t even been aware it’s happening, but it has been. It’s easier for me to see, no doubt, because I am not a full member of this ka-tet-possibly because I am not from your world-and so cannot take part completely in the thought-sharing ability. But I can send. Susannah… do you remember when we were in the circle?”

“Yes. You told me to let the demon go when you told me. But you didn’t say that out loud.”

“Eddie… do you remember when we were in the bear’s clearing, and the mechanical bat came at you?”

“Yes. You told me to get down.”

“He never opened his mouth, Eddie,” Susannah said.

“Yes, you did! You yelled! I heard you, man!”

“I yelled, all right, but I did it with my mind.” The gunslinger turned to Jake. “Do you remember? In the house?”

“When the board I was pulling on wouldn’t come up, you told me to pull on the other one. But if you can’t read my mind, Roland, how did you know what land of trouble I was in?”

“I saw. I heard nothing, but I saw-just a little, as if through a dirty window.” His eyes surveyed them. “This closeness and sharing of minds is called khef, a word that means many other things in the original tongue of the Old World-water, birth, and life-force are only three of them. Be aware of it. For now, that’s all I want.”

“Can you be aware of something you don’t believe in?” Eddie asked.

Roland smiled. “Just keep an open mind.”

“That I can do.”

“Roland?” It was Jake. “Do you think Oy might be part of our ka-tet?”

Susannah smiled. Roland didn’t. “I’m not prepared to even guess right now, but I’ll tell you this, Jake-I’ve been thinking about your furry friend a good deal. Ka does not rule all, and coincidences still happen… but the sudden appearance of a billy-bumbler that still remembers people doesn’t seem completely coincidental to me.”

He glanced around at them.

“I’ll begin. Eddie will speak next, taking up from the place where I leave off. Then Susannah. Jake, you’ll speak last. All right?”

They nodded.

“Fine,” Roland said. “We are ka-tet-one from many. Let the palaver begin.”

20

THE TALK WENT ON until sundown, stopping only long enough for them to eat a cold meal, and by the time it was over, Eddie felt as if he had gone twelve hard rounds with Sugar Ray Leonard. He no longer doubted that they had been “sharing khef,” as Roland put it; he and Jake actually seemed to have been living each other’s life in their dreams, as if they were two halves of the same whole.

Roland began with what had happened under the mountains, where Jake’s first life in this world had ended. He told of his own palaver with the man in black, and Walter’s veiled words about a Beast and someone he called the Ageless Stranger. He told of the strange, daunting dream which had come to him, a dream in which the whole universe had been swallowed in a beam of fantastic white light. And how, at the end of that dream, there had been a single blade of purple grass.

Eddie glanced sideways at Jake and was stunned by the knowledge- the recognition-in the boy’s eyes.

21

ROLAND HAD BABBLED PARTS of this story to Eddie in his time of delirium, but it was entirely new to Susannah, and she listened with wide eyes. As Roland repeated the things Walter had told him, she caught glints of her own world, like reflections in a smashed mirror: automobiles, cancer, rockets to the moon, artificial insemination. She had no idea who the Beast might be, but she recognized the name of the Ageless Stranger as a variation upon the name of Merlin, the magician who had supposedly orchestrated the career of King Arthur. Curiouser and curiouser.

Roland told of how he had awakened to find Walter long years dead-time had somehow slipped forward, perhaps a hundred years, perhaps five hundred. Jake listened in fascinated silence as the gunslinger told of reaching the edge of the Western Sea, of how he had lost two of the fingers on his right hand, and how he had drawn Eddie and Susannah before encountering Jack Mort, the dark third.

The gunslinger motioned to Eddie, who took up the tale with the coming of the great bear.

“Shardik?” Jake interjected. “But that’s the name of a book! A book in our world! It was written by the man who wrote that famous book about the rabbits-”

“Richard Adams!” Eddie shouted. “And the book about the bunnies was Watership Down! I knew I knew that name! But how can that be, Roland? How is it that the people in your world know about things in ours?”

“There are doors, aren’t there?” Roland responded. “Haven’t we seen four of them already? Do you think they never existed before, or never will again?”

“But-”

“All of us have seen the leavings of your world in mine, and when I was in your city of New York, I saw the marks of my world in yours. I saw gunslingers. Most were lax and slow, but they were gunslingers all the same, clearly members of their own ancient ka-tet.”

“Roland, they were just cops. You ran rings around them.”

“Not the last one. When Jack Mort and I were in the underground railway station, that one almost took me down. Except for blind luck- Mort’s flint-and-steel-he would have done. That one… I saw his eyes. He knew the face of his father. I believe he knew it very well. And then… do you remember the name of Balazar’s nightclub?”

“Sure,” Eddie said uneasily. “The Leaning Tower. But it could have been coincidence; you yourself said ka doesn’t rule everything.”

Roland nodded. “You really are like Cuthbert-I remember something he said when we were boys. We were planning a midnight lark in the cemetery, but Alain wouldn’t go. He said he was afraid of offending the shades of his fathers and mothers. Cuthbert laughed at him. He said he wouldn’t believe in ghosts until he caught one in his teeth.”

“Good for him!” Eddie exclaimed. “Bravo!”

Roland smiled. “I thought you’d like that. At any rate, let’s leave this ghost for now. Go on with your story.”

Eddie told of the vision which had come to him when Roland threw the jawbone into the fire-the vision of the key and the rose. He told of his dream, and how he had walked through the door of Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli and into the field of roses which was dominated by the tall, soot-colored Tower. He told of the blackness which had issued from its windows, forming a shape in the sky overhead, speaking directly to Jake now, because Jake was listening with hungry concentration and growing wonder. He tried to convey some sense of the exaltation and terror which had permeated the dream, and saw from their eyes-Jake’s most of all- that he was either doing a better job of that than he could have hoped for… or that they’d had dreams of their own.

He told of following Shardik’s backtrail to the Portal of the Bear, and how, when he put his head against it, he’d found himself remembering the day he had talked his brother into taking him to Dutch Hill, so he could see The Mansion. He told about die cup and the needle, and how the pointing needle had become unnecessary once they realized they could see the Beam at work in everything it touched, even the birds in the sky.

Susannah took up the tale at this point. As she spoke, telling of how Eddie had begun to carve his own version of the key, Jake lay back, laced his hands together behind his head, and watched the clouds run slowly toward the city on their straight southeasterly course. The orderly shape they made showed the presence of the Beam as clearly as smoke leaving a chimney shows die direction of the wind.

She finished with the story of how they had finally hauled Jake into this world, closing the split track of his and Roland’s memories as suddenly and as completely as Eddie had closed the door in the speaking ring. The only fact she left out was really not a fact at all-at least, not yet. She’d had no morning sickness, after all, and a single missed period meant nothing by itself. As Roland himself might have said, that was a tale best left for another day.

Yet as she finished, she found herself wishing she could forget what Aunt Talitha had said when Jake told her this was his home now: Gods pity you, then, for the sun is going down on this world. It’s going down forever.

“And now it’s your turn, Jake,” Roland said.

Jake sat up and looked toward Lud, where the windows of the west-em towers reflected back the late afternoon light in golden sheets. “It’s all crazy,” he murmured, “but it almost makes sense. Like a dream when you wake up.”

“Maybe we can help you make sense of it,” Susannah said.

“Maybe you can. At least you can help me think about the train. I’m tired of trying to make sense of Blaine by myself.” He sighed. “You know what Roland went through, living two lives at the same time, so I can skip that part. I’m not sure I could ever explain how it felt, anyway, and I don’t want to. It was gross. I guess I better start with my Final Essay, because that’s when I finally stopped thinking that the whole thing might just go away.” He looked around at them somberly. “That was when I gave up."

22

JAKE TALKED THE SUN down.

He told them everything he could remember, beginning with My Understanding of Truth and ending with the monstrous doorkeeper which had literally come out of the woodwork to attack him. The other three listened without a single interruption.

When he was finished, Roland turned to Eddie, his eyes bright with a mixture of emotions Eddie initially took for wonder. Then he realized he was looking at powerful excitement… and deep fear. His mouth went dry. Because if Roland was afraid-

“Do you still doubt that our worlds overlap each other, Eddie?”

He shook his head. “Of course not. I walked down the same street, and I did it in his clothes! But… Jake, can I see that book? Charlie the Choo-Choo?”

Jake reached for his pack, but Roland stayed his hand. “Not yet,” he said. “Go back to the vacant lot, Jake. Tell that part once more. Try to remember everything.”

“Maybe you should hypnotize me,” Jake said hesitantly. “Like you did before, at the way station.”

Roland shook his head. “There’s no need. What happened to you in that lot was the most important thing ever to happen in your life, Jake. In all our lives. You can remember everything.”

So Jake went through it again. It was clear to all of them that his experience in the vacant lot where Tom and Gerry’s once had stood was the secret heart of the ka-tet they shared. In Eddie’s dream, the Artistic Deli had still been standing; in Jake’s reality it had been torn down, but in both cases it was a place of enormous, talismanic power. Nor did Roland doubt that the vacant lot with its broken bricks and shattered glass was another version of what Susannah knew as the Drawers and the place he had seen at the end of his vision in the place of bones.

As he told this part of his story for the second time, speaking very slowly now, Jake found that what the gunslinger had said was true: he could remember everything. His recall improved until he almost seemed to be reliving the experience. He told them of the sign which said that a building called Turtle Bay Condominiums was slated to stand on the spot where Tom and Gerry’s had once stood. He even remembered the little poem which had been spray-painted on the fence, and recited it for them:"See the TURTLE of enormous girth! On his shell he holds the earth. If you want to run and play, Come along the BEAM today."Susannah murmured, “His thought is slow but always kind; He holds us all within his mind… isn’t that how it went, Roland?”

“What?” Jake asked. “How what went?”

“A poem I learned as a child,” Roland said. “It’s another connection, one that really tells us something, although I’m not sure it’s anything we need to know… still, one never knows when a little understanding may come in handy.”

“Twelve portals connected by six Beams,” Eddie said. “We started at the Bear. We’re only going as far as the middle-to the Tower-but if we went all the way to the other end, we’d come to the Portal of the Turtle, wouldn’t we?”

Roland nodded. “I’m sure we would.”

“Portal of the Turtle,” Jake said thoughtfully, rolling the words in his mouth, seeming to taste them. Then he finished by telling them again about the gorgeous voice of the choir, his realization that there were faces and stories and histories everywhere, and his growing belief that he had stumbled on something very like the core of all existence. Last of all, he told them again about finding the key and seeing the rose. In the totality of his recall, Jake began to weep, although he seemed unaware of it.

“When it opened,” he said, “I saw the middle was the brightest yellow you ever saw in your life. At first I thought it was pollen and it only looked bright because everything in that lot looked bright. Even looking at the old candy-wrappers and beer-bottles was like looking at the greatest paintings you ever saw. Only then I realized it was a sun. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what it was. Only it was more than one. It was-”

“It was all suns,” Roland murmured. “It was everything real.” “Yes! And it was right-but it was wrong, too. I can’t explain how it was wrong, but it was. It was like two heartbeats, one inside of the other, and the one inside had a disease. Or an infection. And then I fainted.”

23

“You SAW THE SAME thing at the end of your dream, Roland, didn’t you?” Susannah asked. Her voice was soft with awe. “The blade of grass you saw near the end of it… you thought that blade was purple because it was splattered with paint.”

“You don’t understand,” Jake said. “It really was purple. When I was seeing it the way it really was, it was purple. Like no grass I ever saw before. The paint was just camouflage. The way the doorkeeper camouflaged itself to look like an old deserted house.”

The sun had reached the horizon. Roland asked Jake if he would now show them Charlie the Choo-Choo and then read it to them. Jake handed the book around. Both Eddie and Susannah looked at the cover for a long time.

“I had this book when I was a little lad,” Eddie said at last. He spoke in the flat tones of utter surety. “Then we moved from Queens to Brooklyn-I wasn’t even four years old-and I lost it. But I remember the picture on the cover. And I felt the same way you do, Jake. I didn’t like it. I didn’t trust it.”

Susannah raised her eyes to look at Eddie. “I had it, too-how could I ever forget the little girl with my name… although of course it was my middle name back in those days. And I felt the same way about the train. I didn’t like it and I didn’t trust it.” She tapped the front of the book with her finger before passing it on to Roland. “I thought that smile was a great big fake.”

Roland gave it only a cursory glance before returning his eyes to Susannah. “Did you lose yours, too?”

“Yes.”

“And I’ll bet I know when,” Eddie said.

Susannah nodded. “I’ll bet you do. It was after that man dropped the brick on my head. I had it when we went north to my Aunt Blue’s wedding. I had it on the train. I remember, because I kept asking my dad if Charlie the Choo-Choo was pulling us. I didn’t want it to be Charlie, because we were supposed to go to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and I thought Charlie might take us anywhere. Didn’t he end up pulling folks around a toy village or something like that, Jake?”

“An amusement park.”

“Yes, of course it was. There’s a picture of him hauling kids around that place at the end, isn’t there? They’re all smiling and laughing, except I always thought they looked like they were screaming to be let off.”

“Yes!” Jake cried. “Yes, that’s right! That’s just right!”

“I thought Charlie might take us to his place-wherever he lived- instead of to my Aunt’s wedding, and never let us go home again.”

“You can’t go home again,” Eddie muttered, and ran his hands nervously through his hair.

“All the time we were on that train I wouldn’t let go of the book. I even remember thinking, ’If he tries to steal us, I’ll rip out his pages until he quits.’ But of course we arrived right where we were supposed to, and on time, too. Daddy even took me up front, so I could see the engine. It was a diesel, not a steam engine, and I remember that made me happy. Then, after the wedding, that man Mort dropped the brick on me and I was in a coma for a long time. I never saw Charlie the Choo-Choo after that. Not until now.” She hesitated, then added: “This could be my copy, for all I know-or Eddie’s.”

“Yeah, and probably is,” Eddie said. His face was pale and solemn… and then he grinned like a lad.” ‘see the TURTLE, ain’t he keen? All things serve the fuckin Beam.’”

Roland glanced west. “The sun’s going down. Read the story before we lose the light, Jake.”

Jake turned to the first page, showed them the picture of Engineer Bob in Charlie’s cab, and began: “Bob Brooks was an engineer for The Mid-World Railway Company, on the St. Louis to Topeka run…”

24

“… AND EVERY NOW AND then the children hear him singing his old song in his soft, gruff voice,” Jake finished. He showed them the last picture-the happy children who might actually have been screaming- and then closed the book. The sun had gone down; the sky was purple.”“Well, it’s not a perfect fit,” Eddie said, “more like a dream where the water sometimes runs uphill-but it fits well enough to scare me silly. This is Mid-World-Charlie’s territory. Only his name over here isn’t Charlie at all. Over here it’s Blaine the Mono.”

Roland was looking at Jake. “What do you think?” he asked. “Should we go around the city? Stay away from this train?”

Jake thought it over, head down, hands working distractedly through Oy’s thick, silky fur. “I’d like to,” he said at last, “but if I’ve got this stuff about ka right, I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

Roland nodded. “If it’s ka, questions of what we’re supposed to or not supposed to do aren’t even in it; if we tried to go around, we’d find circumstances forcing us back. In such cases it’s better to give in to the inevitable promptly instead of putting it off. What do you think, Eddie?”

Eddie thought as long and as carefully as Jake had done. He didn’t want anything to do with a talking train that ran by itself, and whether you called it Charlie the Choo-Choo or Blaine the Mono, everything Jake had told them and read them suggested that it might be a very nasty piece of work. But they had a tremendous distance to cross, and somewhere, at the end of it, was the thing they had come to find. And with that thought, Eddie was amazed to discover he knew exactly what he thought, and what he wanted. He raised his head and for almost the first time since he had come to this world, he fixed Roland’s faded blue eyes firmly with his hazel ones.

“I want to stand in that field of roses, and I want to see the Tower that stands there. I don’t know what comes next. Mourners please omit flowers, probably, and for all of us. But I don’t care. I want to stand there. I guess I don’t care if Blaine’s the devil and the train runs through hell itself on the way to the Tower. I vote we go.”

Roland nodded and turned to Susannah.

“Well, I didn’t have any dreams about the Dark Tower,” she said, “so I can deal with the question on that level-the level of desire, I suppose you’d say. But I’ve come to believe in ka, and I’m not so numb that I can’t feel it when someone starts rapping on my head with his knuckles and saying, ’That way, idiot.’ What about you, Roland? What do you think?”

“I think there’s been enough talk for one day, and it’s time to let it go until tomorrow.”

“What about Riddle-De-Dum!-” Jake asked, “do you want to look at that?”

“There’ll be time enough for that another day,” Roland said. “Let’s get some sleep."

25

BUT THE GUNSLINGER LAY long awake, and when the rhythmic drumming began again, he got up and walked back to the road. He stood looking toward the bridge and the city. He was every inch the diplomat Susannah had suspected, and he had known the train was the next step on the road they must travel almost from the moment he had heard of it… but he’d felt it would be unwise to say so. Eddie in particular hated to feel pushed; when he sensed that was being done, he simply lowered his head, planted his feet, made his silly jokes, and balked like a mule. This time he wanted what Roland wanted, but he was still apt to say day if Roland said night, and night if Roland said day. It was safer to walk softly, and surer to ask instead of telling.

He turned to go back… and his hand dropped to his gun as he saw a dark shape standing on the edge of the road, looking at him. He didn’t draw, but it was a near thing.

“I wondered if you’d be able to sleep after that little performance,” Eddie said. “Guess the answer’s no.”

“I didn’t hear you at all, Eddie. You’re learning… only this time you almost got a bullet in the gut for your pains.”

“You didn’t hear me because you have a lot on your mind.” Eddie joined him, and even by starlight, Roland saw he hadn’t fooled Eddie a bit. His respect for Eddie continued to grow. It was Cuthbert Eddie reminded him of, but in many ways he had already surpassed Cuthbert.

If I underestimate him, Roland thought, I’m apt to come away with a bloody paw. And if I let him down, or do something that looks to him like a double-cross, he’ll probably try to kill me.

“What’s on your mind, Eddie?”

“You. Us. I want you to know something. I guess until tonight I just assumed that you knew already. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Tell me, then.” He thought again: How like Cuthbert he is!

“We’re with you because we have to be-that’s your goddamned ka. But we’re also with you because we want to be. I know that’s true of me and Susannah, and I’m pretty sure it’s true of Jake, too. You’ve got a good brain, me old khef-mate, but I think you must keep it in a bombshelter, because it’s bitchin hard to get through sometimes. I want to see it, Roland. Can you dig what I’m telling you? I want to see the Tower.” He looked closely into Roland’s face, apparently did not see what he’d hoped to find there, and raised his hands in exasperation. “What I mean is I want you to let go of my ears.”

“Let go of your ears?”

“Yeah. Because you don’t have to drag me anymore. I’m coming of my own accord. We’re coming of our own accord. If you died in your sleep tonight, we’d bury you and then go on. We probably wouldn’t last long, but we’d die in the path of the Beam. Now do you understand?”

“Yes. Now I do.”

“You say you understand me, and I think you do… but do you believe me, as well?”

Of course, he thought. Where else do you have to go, Eddie, in this world that’s so strange to you? And what else could you do? You’d make a piss-poor farmer.

But that was mean and unfair, and he knew it. Denigrating free will by confusing it with ka was worse than blasphemy; it was tiresome and stupid. “Yes,” he said. “I believe you. Upon my soul, I do.”

“Then stop behaving like we’re a bunch of sheep and you’re the shepherd walking along behind us, waving a crook to make sure we don’t trot our stupid selves off the road and into a quicksand bog. Open your mind to us. If we’re going to die in the city or on that train, I want to die knowing I was more than a marker on your game-board.”

Roland felt anger heat his cheeks, but he had never been much good at self-deception. He wasn’t angry because Eddie was wrong but because Eddie had seen through him. Roland had watched him come steadily forward, leaving his prison further and further behind-and Susannah, too, for she had also been imprisoned-and yet his heart had never quite accepted the evidence of his senses. His heart apparently wanted to go on seeing them as different, lesser creatures.

Roland drew in deep air. “Gunslinger, I cry your pardon.”

Eddie nodded. “We’re running into a whole hurricane of trouble here… I feel it, and I’m scared to death. But it’s not your trouble, it’s our trouble. Okay?”

“Yes.”

“How bad do you think it can get in the city?”

“I don’t know. I only know that we have to try and protect Jake, because the old auntie said both sides would want him. Some of it depends on how long it takes us to find this train. A lot more depends on what happens when we find it. If we had two more in our party, I’d put Jake in a moving box with guns on every side of him. Since we don’t, we’ll move in column-me first, Jake pushing Susannah behind, and you on drogue.”

“How much trouble, Roland? Make a guess.”

“I can’t.”

“I think you can. You don’t know the city, but you know how the people in your world have been behaving since things started to fall apart. How much trouble?”

Roland turned toward the steady sound of the drumbeats and thought it over. “Maybe not too much. I’d guess the fighting men who are still there are old and demoralized. It may he that yon have the straight of it, and some will even offer to help us on our way, as the River Crossing ka-tet did. Mayhap we won’t see them at all-they’ll see MS, see we’re packing iron, and just put their heads down and let us go our way. If that fails, I’m hoping that they’ll scatter like rats if we gun a few.”

“And if they decide to make a fight of it?”

Roland smiled grimly. “Then, Eddie, we’ll all remember the faces of our fathers.”

Eddie’s eyes gleamed in the darkness, and Roland was once more reminded forcibly of Cuthbert-Cuthbert who had once said he would believe in ghosts when he could catch one in his teeth, Cuthbert with whom he had once scattered breadcrumbs beneath the hangman’s gibbet.

“Have I answered all your questions?”

“Nope-but I think you played straight with me this time.”

“Then goodnight, Eddie.”

“Goodnight.”

Eddie turned and walked away. Roland watched him go. Now that he was listening, he could hear him… but just barely. He started back himself, then turned toward the darkness where the city of Lud was.

He’s what the old woman called a Pube. She said both sides would want him.

You won’t let me drop this time?

No. Not this time, not ever again.

But he knew something none of the others did. Perhaps, after the talk he’d just had with Eddie, he should tell them… yet he thought he would keep the knowledge to himself a little while longer.

In the old tongue which had once been his world’s lingua franca, most words, like khef and ka, had many meanings. The word char, however-char as in Charlie the Choo-Choo-had only one.

Char meant death.

1

THEY CAME UPON THE downed airplane three days later.

Jake pointed it out first at midmorning-a flash of light about ten miles away, as if a mirror lay in the grass. As they drew closer, they saw a large dark object at the side of the Great Road.

“It looks like a dead bird,” Roland said. “A big one.”

“That’s no bird,” Eddie said. “That’s an airplane. I’m pretty sure the glare is sunlight bouncing off the canopy.”

An hour later they stood silently at the edge of the road, looking at the ancient wreck. Three plump crows stood on the tattered skin of the fuselage, staring insolently at the newcomers. Jake pried a cobble from the edge of the road and shied it at them. The crows lumbered into the air, cawing indignantly.

One wing had broken off in the crash and lay thirty yards away, a shadow like a diving board in the tall grass. The rest of the plane was pretty much intact. The canopy had cracked in a starburst pattern where the pilot’s head had struck it. There was a large, rust-colored stain there.

Oy trotted over to where three rusty propeller blades rose from the grass, sniffed at them, then returned hastily to Jake.

The man in the cockpit was u dust-dry mummy wearing a padded leather vest and a helmet with a spike on top. His lips were gone, his teeth exposed in a final desperate grimace. Fingers which had once been as large as sausages but were now only skin-covered bones clutched the wheel. His skull was caved in where it had hit the canopy, and Roland guessed that the greenish-gray scales which coated the left side of his face were all that remained of his brains. The dead man’s head was tilted back, as if he had been sure, even at the moment of his death, that he could regain the sky again. The plane’s remaining wing still jutted from the encroaching grass. On it was a fading insignia which depicted a fist holding a thunderbolt.

“Looks like Aunt Talitha was wrong and the old albino man had the right of it, after all,” Susannah said in an awed voice. “That must be David Quick, the outlaw prince. Look at the size of him, Roland-they must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!”

Roland nodded. The heat and the years had wasted the man in the mechanical bird to no more than a skeleton wrapped in dry hide, but he could still see how broad the shoulders had been, and the misshapen head was massive. “So fell Lord Perth,” he said, “and the countryside did shake with that thunder.”

Jake looked at him questioningly.

“It’s from an old poem. Lord Perth was a giant who went forth to war with a thousand men, but he was still in his own country when a little boy threw a stone at him and hit him in the knee. He stumbled, the weight of his armor bore him down, and he broke his neck in the fall.”

Jake said, “Like our story of David and Goliath.”

“There was no fire,” Eddie said. “I bet he just ran out of gas and tried a dead-stick landing on the road. He might have been an outlaw and a barbarian, but he had a yard of guts.”

Roland nodded, and looked at Jake. “You all right with this?”

“Yes. If the guy was still, you know, runny, I might not be.” Jake looked from the dead man in the airplane to the city. Lud was much closer and clearer now, and although they could see many broken windows in the towers, he, like Eddie, had not entirely given up hope of finding some sort of help there. “I bet things sort of fell apart in the city once he was gone.”

“I think you’d win that bet,” Roland said.

“You know something?” Jake was studying the plane again. “The people who built that city might have made their own airplanes, but I’m pretty sure this is one of ours. I did a school paper on air combat when I was in the fifth grade, and I think I recognize it. Roland, can I take a closer look?”

Roland nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

Together they walked over to the plane with the high grass swishing at their pants. “Look,” Jake said. “See the machine-gun under the wing? That’s an air-cooled German model, and this is a Focke-Wulf from just before World War II. I’m sure it is. So what’s it doing here?”

“Lots of planes disappear,” Eddie said. “Take the Bermuda Triangle, for instance. That’s a place over one of our oceans, Roland. It’s supposed to be jinxed. Maybe it’s a great big doorway between our worlds-one that’s almost always open.” Eddie hunched his shoulders and essayed a bad Rod Serling imitation. “Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for turbulence: you’re flying into… the Roland Zone!”

Jake and Roland, who were now standing beneath the plane’s remaining wing, ignored him.

“Boost me up, Roland.”

Roland shook his head. “That wing looks solid, but it’s not-this thing has been here a long time, Jake. You’d fall.”

“Make a step, then.”

Eddie said, “I’ll do it, Roland.”

Roland studied his diminished right hand for a moment, shrugged, then laced his hands together. “This’ll do. He’s light.”

Jake shook off his moccasin and then stepped lightly into the stirrup Roland had made. Oy began to bark shrilly, though whether in excitement or alarm, Roland couldn’t tell.

Jake’s chest was now pressing against one of the airplane’s rusty flaps, and he was looking right at the fist-and-thunderbolt design. It had peeled up a little from the surface of the wing along one edge. He seized this flap and pulled. It came off the wing so easily that he would have fallen backward if Eddie, standing directly behind him, hadn’t steadied him with a hand on the butt.

“I knew it,” Jake said. There was another symbol beneath the fist-and-thunderbolt, and now it was almost totally revealed. It was a swastika. “I just wanted to see it. You can put me down now.”

They started out again, but they could see the tail of the plane every time they looked back that afternoon, looming out of the high grass like Lord Perth’s burial monument.

2

IT WAS JAKE’s TURN to make the fire that night. When the wood was laid to the gunslinger’s satisfaction, he handed Jake his flint and steel. “Let’s see how you do.”

Eddie and Susannah were sitting off to one side, their arms linked companionably about each other’s waist. Toward the end of the day, Eddie had found a bright yellow flower beside the road and had picked it for her. Tonight Susannah was wearing it in her hair, and every time she looked at Eddie, her lips curved in a small smile and her eyes filled with light. Roland had noted these things, and they pleased him. Their love was deepening, strengthening. That was good. It would have to be deep and strong indeed if it was to survive the months and years ahead.

Jake struck a spark, but it flashed inches away from the kindling.

“Move your flint in closer,” Roland said, “and hold it steady. And don’t hit it with the steel, Jake; scrape it.”

Jake tried again, and this time the spark flashed directly into the kindling. There was a little tendril of smoke but no fire.

“I don’t think I’m very good at this.”

“You’ll get it. Meantime, think on this. What’s dressed when night falls and undressed when day breaks?”

“Huh?”

Roland moved Jake’s hands even closer to the little pile of kindling. “I guess that one’s not in your book.”

“Oh, it’s a riddle!” Jake struck another spark. This time a small flame glowed in the kindling before dying out. “You know some of those, too?”

Roland nodded. “Not just some-a lot. As a boy, I must have known a thousand. They were part of my studies.”

“Really? Why would anyone study riddles?”

“Vannay, my tutor, said a boy who could answer a riddle was a boy who could think around corners. We had riddling contests every Friday noon, and the boy or girl who won could leave school early.”

“Did you get to leave early often, Roland?” Susannah asked.

He shook his head, smiling a little himself. “I enjoyed riddling, but I was never very good at it. Vannay said it was because I thought too deeply. My father said it was because I had too little imagination. I think they were both right… but I think my father had a little more of the truth. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, and shoot straighter, but I’ve never been much good at thinking around corners.”

Susannah, who had watched closely as Roland dealt with the old people of River Crossing, thought the gunslinger was underrating himself, but she said nothing.

“Sometimes, on winter nights, there would be riddling competitions in the great hall. When it was just the younkers, Alain always won. When the grownups played as well, it was always Cort. He’d forgotten more riddles than the rest of us ever knew, and after the Fair-Day Riddling, Cort always carried home the goose. Riddles have great power, and everyone knows one or two.”

“Even me,” Eddie said. “For instance, why did the dead baby cross the road?”

“That’s dumb, Eddie,” Susannah said, but she was smiling.

“Because it was stapled to the chicken!” Eddie yelled, and grinned when Jake burst into laughter, knocking his little pile of kindling apart. “Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk, I got a million of em, folks!”

Roland, however, didn’t laugh. He looked, in fact, a trifle offended. “Pardon me for saying so, Eddie, but that is rather silly.”

“Jesus, Roland, I’m sorry,” Eddie said. He was still smiling, but he sounded slightly peeved. “I keep forgetting you got your sense of humor shot off in the Children’s Crusade, or whatever it was.”

“It’s just that I take riddling seriously. I was taught that the ability to solve them indicates a sane and rational mind.”

“Well, they’re never going to replace the works of Shakespeare or the Quadratic Equation,” Eddie said. “I mean, let’s not get carried away.”

Jake was looking at Roland thoughtfully. “My book said riddling is the oldest game people still play. In our world, I mean. And riddles used to be really serious business, not just jokes. People used to get killed over them.”

Roland was looking out into the growing darkness. “Yes. I’ve seen it happen.” He was remembering a Fair-Day Riddling which had ended not with the giving of the prize goose but with a cross-eyed man in a cap of bells dying in the dirt with a dagger in his chest. Cort’s dagger. The man had been a wandering singer and acrobat who had attempted to cheat Cort by stealing the judge’s pocket-book, in which the answers were kept on small scraps of bark.

“Well, excyooose me” Eddie said.

Susannah was looking at Jake. “I forgot all about the book of riddles you carried over. May I look at it now?”

“Sure. It’s in my pack. The answers are gone, though. Maybe that’s why Mr. Tower gave it to me for fr-”

His shoulder was suddenly seized, and with painful force.

“What was his name?” Roland asked.

“Mr. Tower,” Jake said. “Calvin Tower. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“No.” Roland slowly relaxed his grip on Jake’s shoulder. “But now that I hear it, I suppose I’m not surprised.”

Eddie had opened Jake’s pack and found Riddle-De-Dum! He tossed it to Susannah. “You know,” he said, “I always thought that dead-baby joke was pretty good. Tasteless, maybe, but pretty good.”

“I don’t care about taste,” Roland said. “It’s senseless and unsolvable, and that’s what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.”

“Jesus! You guys did take this stuff seriously, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

Jake, meanwhile, had been restacking the kindling and mulling over the riddle which had started the discussion. Now he suddenly smiled. “A fire. That’s the answer, right? Dress it at night, undress it in the morning. If you change ’dress’ to ’build,’ it’s simple.”

“That’s it.” Roland returned Jake’s smile, but his eyes were on Susannah, watching as she thumbed through the small, tattered book. He thought, looking at her studious frown and the absent way she readjusted the yellow flower in her hair when it tried to slip free, that she alone might sense that the tattered book of riddles could be as important as Charlie the Choo-Choo… maybe more important. He looked from her to Eddie and felt a recurrence of his irritation at Eddie’s foolish riddle. The young man bore another resemblance to Cuthbert, this one rather unfortunate: Roland sometimes felt like shaking him until his nose bled and his teeth fell out.

Soft, gunslinger-soft! Cort’s voice, not quite laughing, spoke up in his head, and Roland resolutely put his emotions at arm’s length. It was easier to do that when he remembered that Eddie couldn’t help his occasional forays into nonsense; character was also at least partly formed by ka, and Roland knew well that there was more to Eddie than nonsense. Anytime he started to make the mistake of thinking that wasn’t so, he would do well to remember their conversation by the side of the road three nights before, when Eddie had accused him of using them as markers on his own private game-board. That had angered him… but it had been close enough to the truth to shame him, as well.

Blissfully unaware of these long thoughts, Eddie now inquired: “What’s green, weighs a hundred tons, and lives at the bottom of the ocean?”

“I know,” Jake said. “Moby Snot, the Great Green Whale.”

“Idiocy,” Roland muttered.

“Yeah-but that’s what’s supposed to make it funny,” Eddie said. “Jokes are supposed to make you think around comers, too. You see…” He looked at Roland’s face, laughed, and threw up his hands. “Never mind. I give up. You wouldn’t understand. Not in a million years. Let’s look at the damned book. I’ll even try to take it seriously… if we can eat a little supper first, that is.”

“Watch Me,” the gunslinger said with a flicker of a smile.

“Huh?”

“That means you have a deal.”

Jake scraped the steel across the flint. A spark jumped, and this time the kindling caught fire. He sat back contentedly and watched the flames spread, one arm slung around Oy’s neck. He felt well pleased with himself. He had started the evening fire… and he had guessed the answer to Roland’s riddle.

3

“I’ve GOT ONE,” JAKE said as they ate their evening burritos.

“Is it a foolish one?” Roland asked.

“Nah. It’s a real one.”

“Then try me with it.”

“Okay. What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never talks, has a bed but never sleeps, has a head but never weeps?”

“A good one,” Roland said kindly, “but an old one. A river.”

Jake was a little crestfallen. “You really are hard to stump.”

Roland tossed the last bite of his burrito to Oy, who accepted it eagerly. “Not me. I’m what Eddie calls an overpush. You should have seen Alain. He collected riddles the way a lady collects fans.”

“That’s pushover, Roland, old buddy,” Eddie said.

“Thank you. Try this one: What lies in bed, and stands in bed?/ First white, then red/ The plumper it gets/ The better the old woman likes it?”

Eddie burst out laughing. “A dork!” he yelled. “Crude, Roland! But I like it! I liyyyke it!”

Roland shook his head. “Your answer is wrong. A good riddle is sometimes a puzzle in words, like Jake’s about the river, but sometimes it’s more like a magician’s trick, making you look in one direction while it’s going somewhere else.”

“It’s a double,” Jake said. He explained what Aaron Deepneau had said about the Riddle of Samson. Roland nodded.

“Is it a strawberry?” Susannah asked, then answered her own question. “Of course it is. It’s like the fire-riddle. There’s a metaphor hidden inside it. Once you understand the metaphor, you can solve the riddle.”

“I metaphor sex, but she slapped my face and walked away when I asked,” Eddie told them sadly. They all ignored him.

“If you change ’gets’ to ’grows,” Susannah went on, “it’s easy. First white, then red. Plumper it grows, the better the old woman likes it.” She looked pleased with herself.

Roland nodded. “The answer I always heard was a wenberry, but I’m sure both answers mean the same thing.”

Eddie picked up Riddle-De-Dum! and began flipping through it. “How about this one, Roland? When is a door not a door?”

Roland frowned. “Is it another piece of your stupidity? Because my patience-”

“No. I promised to take it seriously, and I am-I’m trying, at least. It’s in this book, and I just happen to know the answer. I heard it when I was a kid.”

Jake, who also knew the answer, winked at Eddie. Eddie winked back, and was amused to see Oy also trying to wink. The humbler kept shutting both eyes, and eventually gave up.

Roland and Susannah, meanwhile, were puzzling over the question. “It must have something to do with love,” Roland said. “A door, adore. When is adore not adore… hmmm…”

“Hmmm,” Oy said. His imitation of Roland’s thoughtful tone was perfect. Eddie winked at Jake again. Jake covered his mouth to hide a smile.

“Is the answer false love?” Roland asked at last.

“Nope.”

“Window,” Susannah said suddenly and decisively. “When is a door not a door? When it’s a window.”

“Nope.” Eddie was grinning broadly now, but Jake was struck by how far from the real answer both of them had wandered. There was magic at work here, he thought. Pretty common stuff, as magic went, no flying carpets or disappearing elephants, but magic, all the same. He suddenly saw what they were doing-a simple game of riddles around a campfire-in an entirely new light. It was like playing blind-man’s bluff, only in this game the blindfold was made of words.

“I give up,” Susannah said.

“Yes,” Roland said. “Tell if you know.”

“The answer is a jar. A door is not a door when it’s ajar. Get it?” Eddie watched as comprehension dawned on Roland’s face and asked, a little apprehensively, “Is it a bad one? I was trying to be serious this time, Roland-really.”

“Not bad at all. On the contrary, it’s quite good. Cort would have gotten it, I’m sure… probably Alain, too, it’s still very clever. I did what I always used to do in the schoolroom: made it more complicated than it really was and shot right past the answer.”

“There really is something to it, isn’t there?” Eddie mused. Roland nodded, but Eddie didn’t see; he was looking into the depths of the fire, where dozens of roses bloomed and faded in the coals.

Roland said, “One more, and we’ll turn in. Only from tonight on, we’ll stand a watch. You first, Eddie, then Susannah. I’ll take the last one.”

“What about me?” Jake asked.

“Later on you may have to take a rum. Right now it’s more important for you to get your sleep.”

“Do you really think sentry-duty is necessary?” Susannah asked.

“I don’t know. And that’s the best reason of all to do it. Jake, choose us a riddle from your book.”

Eddie handed Riddle-De-Dum! to Jake, who thumbed through the pages and finally stopped near the back. “Whoa! This one’s a killer.”

“Let’s hear it,” Eddie said. “If I don’t get it, Suze will. We’re known at Fair-Days all across the land as Eddie Dean and His Riddling Queen.”

“We’re witty tonight, ain’t we?” Susannah said. “Let’s see how witty you are after settin by the side o’ the road until midnight or so, honeychild.”

Jake read: “There is a thing that nothing is, and yet it has a name. It’s sometimes tall and sometimes short, joins our talks, joins our sport, and plays at every game.”They discussed this riddle for almost fifteen minutes, but none of them could even hazard an answer.

“Maybe it’ll come to one of us while we’re asleep,” Jake said. “That’s how I got the one about the river.”

“Cheap book, with the answers torn out,” Eddie said. He stood up and wrapped a hide blanket around his shoulders like a cloak.

“Well, it was cheap. Mr. Tower gave it to me for free.”

“What am I looking for, Roland?” Eddie asked.

Roland shrugged as he lay down. “I don’t know, but I think you’ll know it if you see it or hear it.”

“Wake me up when you start feeling sleepy,” Susannah said.

“You better believe it."

4

A GRASSY DITCH RAN along the side of the road and Eddie sat on the far side of it with his blanket around his shoulders. A thin scud of clouds had veiled the sky tonight, dimming the starshow. A strong west wind was blowing. When Eddie turned his face in that direction, he could clearly smell the buffalo which now owned these plains-a mixed perfume of hot fur and fresh dung. The clarity which had returned to his senses in these last few months was amazing,.. and, at times like these, a little spooky, as well.

Very faintly, he could hear a buffalo calf bawling.

He turned toward the city, and after a while he began to think he might be seeing distant sparks of light there-the electric candles of the twins’ story-but he was well aware that he might be seeing nothing more than his own wishful thinking.

You’re a long way from Forty-second Street, sweetheart-hope is a great thing, no matter what anyone says, but don’t hope so hard you lose sight of that one thought: you’re a long way from Forty-second Street. That’s not New York up ahead, no matter how much you might wish it was. That’s Lud, and it’ll be whatever it is. And if you keep that in mind, maybe you’ll be okay.

He passed his time on watch trying to think of an answer to the last riddle of the evening. The scolding Roland had given him about his dead-baby joke had left him feeling disgruntled, and it would please him to be able to start off the morning by giving them a good answer. Of course they wouldn’t be able to check any answer against the back of the book, but he had an idea that with good riddles a good answer was usually self-evident.

Sometimes tall and sometimes short. He thought that was the key and all the rest was probably just misdirection. What was sometimes tall and sometimes short? Pants? No. Pants were sometimes short and sometimes long, but he had never heard of tall pants. Tales? Like pants, it only fit snugly one way. Drinks were sometimes both tall and short-

“Order,” he murmured, and thought for a moment that he must have stumbled across the solution-both adjectives fit the noun glove-tight. A tall order was a big job; a short order was something you got on the quick in a restaurant-a hamburger or a tuna melt. Except that tall orders and tuna melts didn’t join our talk or play at every game.

He felt a rush of frustration and had to smile at himself, getting all wound up about a harmless word-game in a kid’s book. All the same, he found it a little easier to believe that people might really kill each other over riddles… if the stakes were high enough and cheating was involved.

Let it go-you’re doing exactly what Roland said, thinking right past it.

Still, what else did he have to think about?

Then the drumming from the city began again, and he did have something else. There was no build-up; at one moment it wasn’t there, and at the next it was going full force, as if a switch had been turned. Eddie walked to the edge of the road, turned toward the city, and listened. After a few moments he looked around to see if the drums had awakened the others, but he was still alone. He turned toward Lud again and cupped his ears forward with the sides of his hands.

Bump… ba-bump… ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.

Bump… ba-bump… ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.

Eddie became more and more sure that he had been right about what it was; that he had, at least, solved this riddle.

Bump… ba-bump… ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.

The idea that he was standing by a deserted road in an almost empty world, standing some one hundred and seventy miles from a city which had been built by some fabulous lost civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line… that was crazy, but was it any crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s?

Eddie sang the words to the Z.Z. Top song in a whisper:

“You need just enough of that sticky stuff

To hold the seam on your fine blue-jeans

I say yeah, yeah…”

They fit the beat perfectly. It was the disco-pulse percussion of “Velcro Fly.” Eddie was sure of it.

A short time later the sound ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he could hear only the wind, and, more faintly, the Send River, which had a bed but never slept.

5

THE NEXT FOUR DAYS were uneventful. They walked; they watched the bridge and the city grow larger and define themselves more clearly; they camped; they ate; they riddled; they kept watch turn and turn about (Jake had pestered Roland into letting him keep a short watch in the two hours just before dawn); they slept. The only remarkable incident had to do with the bees.

Around noon on the third day after the discovery of the downed plane, a buzzing sound came to them, growing louder and louder until it dominated the day. At last Roland stopped. “There,” he said, and pointed toward a grove of eucalyptus trees.

“It sounds like bees,” Susannah said.

Roland’s faded blue eyes gleamed. “Could be we’ll have a little dessert tonight.”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Roland,” Eddie said, “but I have this aversion to being stung.”

“Don’t we all,” Roland agreed, “but the day is windless. I think we can smoke them to sleep and steal their comb right out from under them without setting half the world on fire. Let’s have a look.”

He carried Susannah, who was as eager for the adventure as the gunslinger himself, toward the grove. Eddie and Jake lagged behind, and Oy, apparently having decided that discretion was the better part of valor, remained sitting at the edge of the Great Road, panting like a dog and watching them carefully.

Roland paused at the edge of the trees. “Stay where you are,” he told Eddie and Jake, speaking softly. “We’re going to have a look. I’ll give you a come-on if all’s well.” He carried Susannah into the dappled shadows of the grove while Eddie and Jake remained in the sunshine, peering after them.

It was cooler in the shade. The buzzing of the bees was a steady, hypnotic drone. “There are too many,” Roland murmured. “This is late summer; they should be out working. I don’t-”

He caught sight of the hive, bulging tumorously from the hollow of a tree in the center of the clearing, and broke off.

“What’s the matter with them?” Susannah asked in a soft, horrified voice. “Roland, what’s the matter with them?”

A bee, as plump and slow-moving as a horsefly in October, droned past her head. Susannah flinched away from it.

Roland motioned for the others to join them. They did, and stood looking at the hive without speaking. The chambers weren’t neat hexagons but random holes of all shapes and sizes; the beehive itself looked queerly melted, as if someone had turned a blowtorch on it. The bees which crawled sluggishly over it were as white as snow.

“No honey tonight,” Roland said. “What we took from yonder comb might taste sweet, but it would poison us as surely as night follows day.”

One of the grotesque white bees lumbered heavily past Jake’s head. He ducked away with an expression of loathing.

“What did it?” Eddie asked. “What did it to them, Roland?”

“The same thing that has emptied this whole land; the thing that’s still causing many of the buffalo to be born as sterile freaks. I’ve heard it called the Old War, the Great Fire, the Cataclysm, and the Great Poisoning. Whatever it was, it was the start of all our troubles and it happened long ago, a thousand years before the great-great-grandfathers of the River Crossing folk were born. The physical effects-the two-headed buffalo and the white bees and such-have grown less as time passes. I have seen this for myself. The other changes are greater, if harder to see, and they are still going on.”

They watched the white bees crawl, dazed and almost completely helpless, about their hive. Some were apparently trying to work; most simply wandered about, butting heads and crawling over one another. Eddie found himself remembering a newsclip he’d seen once. It had shown a crowd of survivors leaving the area where a gas-main had exploded, flattening almost a whole city block in some California town. These bees reminded him of those dazed, shellshocked survivors.

“You had a nuclear war, didn’t you?” he asked-almost accused. “These Great Old Ones you like to talk about… they blew their great old asses straight to hell. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t know what happened. No one knows. The records of those times are lost, and the few stories are confused and conflicting.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Jake said in a trembling voice. “Looking at those things makes me sick.”

“I’m with you, sugar,” Susannah said.

So they left the bees to their aimless, shattered life in the grove of ancient trees, and there was no honey that night.

6

“WHEN ARE YOU GOING to tell us what you do know?” Eddie asked the next morning. The day was bright and blue, but there was a bite in the air; their first autumn in this world was almost upon them.

Roland glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

“I’d like to hear your whole story, from beginning to end, starting with Gilead. How you grew up there and what happened to end it all. I want to know how you found out about the Dark Tower and why you started chasing after it in the first place. I want to know about your first bunch of friends, too. And what happened to them.”

Roland removed his hat, armed sweat from his brow, then replaced it. “You have the right to know all those things, I suppose, and I’ll tell them to you… but not now. It’s a very long story. I never expected to tell it to anyone, and I’ll only tell it once.”

“When?” Eddie persisted.

“When the time is right,” Roland said, and with that they had to be content.

7

ROLAND CAME AWAKE THE moment before Jake began to shake him. He sat up and looked around, but Eddie and Susannah were still fast asleep and in the first faint light of morning, he could see nothing amiss.

“What is it?” he asked Jake in a low voice.

“I don’t know. Fighting, maybe. Come and listen.”

Roland threw his blanket aside and followed Jake out to the road. He reckoned they were now only three days’ walk from the place where the Send passed in front of the city, and the bridge-built squarely along the path of the Beam-dominated the horizon. Its pronounced tilt was more clearly visible than ever, and he could see at least a dozen gaps where over-stressed cables had snapped like the strings of a lyre.

Tonight the wind blew directly into their faces as they looked toward the city, and the sounds it carried to them were faint but clear.

“Is it fighting?” Jake asked.

Roland nodded and held a finger to his lips.

He heard faint shouts, a crash that sounded like some huge object falling, and-of course-the drums. Now there was another crash, this one more musical: the sound of breaking glass.

“Jeepers,” Jake whispered, and moved closer to the gunslinger.

Then came the sounds which Roland had hoped not to hear: a fast, sandy rattle of small-arms fire followed by a loud hollow bang-clearly an explosion of some land. It rolled across the flatlands toward them like an invisible bowling ball. After that, the shouts, thuds, and sounds of breakage quickly sank below the level of the drums, and when the drums quit a few minutes later with their usual unsettling suddenness, the city was silent again. But now that silence had an unpleasant waiting quality.

Roland put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Still not too late to detour around,” he said.

Jake glanced up at him. “We can’t.”

“Because of the train?”

Jake nodded and singsonged: “Blaine is a pain, but we have to take the train. And the city’s the only place where we can get on.”

Roland looked thoughtfully at Jake. “Why do you say we have to? Is it ka? Because, Jake, you have to understand that you don’t know much about ka yet-it’s the sort of subject men study all their lives.”

“I don’t know if it’s ka or not, but I do know that we can’t go into the waste lands unless we’re protected, and that means Blaine. Without him we’ll die, like those bees we saw are going to die when winter comes. We have to be protected. Because the waste lands are poison.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I don’t know!” Jake said, almost angrily. “I just do.”

“All right,” Roland said mildly. He looked toward Lud again. “But we’ll have to be damned careful. It’s unlucky that they still have gunpowder. If they have that, they may have things that are even more powerful. I doubt if they know how to use them, but that only increases the danger. They could get excited and blow us all to hell.”

“Ell,” a grave voice said from behind them. They glanced around and saw Oy sitting by the side of the road, watching them.

8

LATER THAT DAY THEY came to a new road which swept toward them out of the west and joined their own way. Beyond this point, the Great Road-now much wider and split down the middle by a median divider of some polished dark stone-began to sink, and the crumbling concrete embankments which rose on either side of them gave the pilgrims a claustrophobic trapped feeling. They stopped at a point where one of these concrete dikes had born broken open, affording a comforting line of sight to the open land beyond, and ate a light, unsatisfying meal.

“Why do you think they dropped the road down like this, Eddie?” Jake asked. “I mean, someone did do it this way on purpose, didn’t they?”

Eddie looked through the break in the concrete, where the flatlands stretched on as smoothly as ever, and nodded.

“Then why?”

“Dunno, champ,” Eddie said, but he thought he did. He glanced at Roland and guessed that he knew, too. The sunken road leading to the bridge had been a defensive measure. Troops placed atop the concrete slopes were in control of two carefully engineered redoubts. If the defenders didn’t like the look of the folks approaching Lud along the Great Road, they could rain destruction down on them.

“You sure you don’t know?” Jake asked.

Eddie smiled at Jake and tried to stop imagining that there was some nut up there right now, getting ready to roll a large, rusty bomb down one of those decayed concrete ramps. “No idea,” he said.

Susannah whistled disgustedly between her teeth. “This road’s goin to hell, Roland. I was hoping we were done with that damn harness, but you better get it out again.” He nodded and rummaged in his purse for it without a word.

The condition of the Great Road deteriorated as other, smaller roads joined it like tributaries joining a great river. As they neared the bridge, the cobbles were replaced with a surface Roland thought of as metal and the rest of them thought of as asphalt or hot-top. It had not held up as well as the cobbles. Time had done some damage; the passage of countless horses and wagons since the last repairs were made had done more. The surface had been chewed into treacherous rubble. Foot travel would be difficult, and the idea of pushing Susannah’s wheelchair over that crumbled surface was ridiculous.

The banks oh either side had grown steadily steeper, and now, at their tops, they could see slim, pointed shapes looming against the sky. Roland thought of arrowheads-huge ones, weapons made by a tribe of giants. To his companions, they looked like rockets or guided missiles. Susannah thought of Redstones fired from Cape Canaveral; Eddie thought about SAMs, some built to be fired from the backs of flatbed trucks, stored all over Europe; Jake thought of ICBMs hiding in reinforced concrete silos under the plains of Kansas and the unpopulated mountains of Nevada, programmed to hit back at China or the USSR in the event of nuclear armageddon. All of them felt as if they had passed into a dark and woeful zone of shadow, or into a countryside laboring under some old but still powerful curse.

Some hours after they entered this area- Jake called it The Gauntlet-the concrete embankments ended at a place where half a dozen access roads drew together, like the strands of a spiderweb, and here the land opened out again… a fact which relieved all of them, although none of them said so out loud. Another traffic-light swung over the junction. This one was more familiar to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake; it had once had lenses on its four faces, although the glass had been broken out long ago.

“I’ll bet this road was the eighth wonder of the world, once upon a time,” Susannah said, “and look at it now. It’s a minefield.”

“Old ways are sometimes the best ways,” Roland agreed.

Eddie was pointing west. “Look.”

Now that the high concrete barriers were gone, they could see exactly what old Si had described to them over cups of bitter coffee in River Crossing. “One track only,” he had said, “set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their streets and walls.” The track raced toward them out of the west in a slim, straight line, then flowed across the Send and into the city on a narrow golden trestle. It was a simple, elegant construction-and the only one they had seen so far which was totally without rust-but it was badly marred, all the same. Halfway across, a large piece of the trestle had fallen into the rushing river below. What remained were two long, jutting piers that pointed at each other like accusing fingers. Jutting out of the water below the hole was a streamlined tube of metal. Once it had been bright blue, but now the color had been dimmed by spreading scales of rust. It looked very small from this distance.

“So much for Blaine,” Eddie said. “No wonder they stopped hearing it. The supports finally gave way while it was crossing the river and it fell in the drink. It must have been decelerating when it happened, or it would have carried straight across and all we’d see would be a big hole like a bomb-crater in the far bank. Well, it was a great idea while it lasted.”

“Mercy said there was another one,” Susannah reminded him.

“Yeah. She also said she hadn’t heard it in seven or eight years, and Aunt Talitha said it was more like ten. What do you think, Jake… Jake? Earth to Jake, Earth to Jake, come in, little buddy.”

Jake, who had been staring intently at the remains of the train in the river, only shrugged.

“You’re a big help, Jake,” Eddie said. “Valuable input-that’s why I love you. Why we all love you.”

Jake paid no attention. He knew what he was seeing, and it wasn’t Blaine. The remains of the mono sticking out of the river were blue. In his dream, Blaine had been the dusty, sugary pink of the bubblegum you got with baseball trading cards.

Roland, meanwhile, had cinched the straps of Susannah’s carry-harness across his chest. “Eddie, boost your lady into this contraption. It’s time we moved on and saw for ourselves.”

Jake now shifted his gaze, looking nervously toward the bridge looming ahead. He could hear a high, ghostly humming noise in the distance- the sound of the wind playing in the decayed steel hangers which connected the overhead cables to the concrete deck below.

“Do you think it’ll be safe to cross?” Jake asked.

“We’ll find out tomorrow,” Roland replied.

9

THE NEXT MORNING, ROLAND’s band of travellers stood at the end of the long, rusty bridge, gazing across at Lud. Eddie’s dreams of wise old elves who had preserved a working technology on which the pilgrims could draw were disappearing. Now that they were this close, he could see holes in the city-scape where whole blocks of buildings appeared to have been either burned or blasted. The skyline reminded him of a diseased jaw from which many teeth have already fallen.

It was true that most of the buildings were still standing, but they had a dreary, disused look that filled Eddie with an uncharacteristic gloom, and the bridge between the travellers and that shuttered maze of steel and concrete looked anything but solid and eternal. The vertical hangers on the left sagged slackly; the ones remaining on the right almost screamed with tension. The deck had been constructed of hollow concrete boxes shaped like trapezoids. Some of these had buckled upward, displaying empty black interiors; others had slipped askew. Many of these latter had merely cracked, but others were badly broken, leaving gaps big enough to drop trucks-big trucks-into. In places where the bottoms of the box-sections as well as the tops had shattered, they could see the muddy riverbank and the gray-green water of the Send beyond it. Eddie put the distance between the deck and the water as three hundred feet at the center of the bridge. And that was probably a conservative estimate.

Eddie peered at the huge concrete caissons to which the main cables were anchored and thought the one on the right side of the bridge looked as if it had been pulled partway out of the earth. He decided he might do well not to mention this fact to the others; it was bad enough that the bridge was swaying slowly but perceptibly back and forth. Just looking at it made him feel seasick. “Well?” he asked Roland. “What do you think?”

Roland pointed to the right side of the bridge. Here was a canted walkway about five feet wide. It had been constructed atop a series of smaller concrete boxes and was, in effect, a separate deck. This segmented deck appeared to be supported by an undercable-or perhaps it was a thick steel rod-anchored to the main support cables by huge bow-clamps. Eddie inspected the closest one with the avid interest of a man who may soon be entrusting his life to the object he is studying. The bow-clamp appeared rusty but still sound. The words LaMERK FOUNDRY had been stamped into its metal. Eddie was fascinated to realize he no longer knew if the words were in the High Speech or in English.

“I think we can use that,” Roland said. “There’s only one bad place. Do you see it?”

“Yeah-it’s land of hard to miss.”

The bridge, which had to be at least three quarters of a mile long, might not have had any proper maintenance for over a thousand years, but Roland guessed that the real destruction might have been going on for only the last fifty or so. As the hangers on the right snapped, the bridge had listed farther and farther to the left. The greatest twist had occurred in the center of the bridge, between the two four-hundred-foot cable-towers. At the place where the pressure of the twist was the greatest, a gaping, eye-shaped hole ran across the deck. The break in the walkway was narrower, but even so, at least two adjoining concrete box-sections had fallen into the Send, leaving a gap at least twenty or thirty feet wide. Where these boxes had been, they could clearly see the rusty steel rod or cable which supported the walkway. They would have to use it to get across the gap.

“I think we can cross,” Roland said, calmly pointing. “The gap is inconvenient, but the side-rail is still there, so we’ll have something to hold onto.”

Eddie nodded, but he could feel his heart pounding hard. The exposed walkway support looked like a big pipe made of jointed steel, and was probably four feet across at the top. In his mind’s eye he could see how they would have to edge across, feet on the broad, slightly curved back of the support, hands clutching the rail, while the bridge swayed slowly like a ship in a mild swell.

“Jesus,” he said. He tried to spit, but nothing came out. His mouth was too dry. “You sure, Roland?”

“So far as I can see, it’s the only way.” Roland pointed downriver and Eddie saw a second bridge. This one had fallen into the Send long ago. The remains stuck out of the water in a rusted tangle of ancient steel.

“What about you, Jake?” Susannah asked.

“Hey, no problem,” Jake said at once. He was actually smiling.

“I hate you, kid,” Eddie said.

Roland was looking at Eddie with some concern. “If you feel you can’t do it, say so now. Don’t get halfway across and then freeze up.”

Eddie looked along the twisted surface of the bridge for a long time, then nodded. “I guess I can handle it. Heights have never been my favorite thing, but I’ll manage.”

“Good.” Roland surveyed them. “Soonest begun, soonest done. I’ll go first, with Susannah. Then Jake, and Eddie’s drogue. Can you handle the wheelchair?”

“Hey, no problem,” Eddie said giddily.

“Let’s go, then."

10

As SOON AS HE stepped onto the walkway, fear filled up Eddie’s hollow places like cold water and he began to wonder if he hadn’t made a very dangerous mistake. From solid ground, the bridge seemed to be swaying only a little, but once he was actually on it, he felt as if he were standing on the pendulum of the world’s biggest grandfather clock. The movement was very slow, but it was regular, and the length of the swings was much longer than he had anticipated. The walkway’s surface was badly cracked and canted at least ten degrees to the left. His feet gritted in loose piles of powdery concrete, and the low squealing sound of the box-segments grinding together was constant. Beyond the bridge, the city skyline tilted slowly back and forth like the artificial horizon of the world’s slowest-moving video game.

Overhead, the wind hummed constantly in the taut hangers. Below, the ground fell away sharply to the muddy northwest bank of the river. He was thirty feet up… then sixty… then a hundred and ten. Soon he would be over the water. The wheelchair banged against his left leg with every step.

Something furry brushed between his feet and he clutched madly for the rusty handrail with his right hand, barely holding in a scream. Oy went trotting past him with a brief upward glance, as if to say Excuse me-just passing.

“Fucking dumb animal,” Eddie said through gritted teeth.

He discovered that, although he didn’t like looking down, he had an even greater aversion to looking at the hangers which were still managing to hold the deck and the overhead cables together. They were sleeved with rust and Eddie could see snarls of metal thread poking out of most-these snarls looked like metallic puffs of cotton. He knew from his Uncle Reg, who had worked on both the George Washington and Triborough bridges as a painter, that the hangers and overhead cables were “spun” from thousands of steel threads. On this bridge, the spin was finally letting go. The hangers were quite literally becoming unravelled, and as they did, the threads were snapping, one interwoven strand at a time.

It’s held this long, it’ll hold a little longer. You think this thing’s going to fall into the river just because you’re crossing it? Don’t flatter yourself.

He wasn’t comforted, however. For all Eddie knew, they might be the first people to attempt the crossing in decades. And the bridge, after all, would have to collapse sometime, and from the look of things, it was going to be soon. Their combined weight might be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

His moccasin struck a chunk of concrete and Eddie watched, sickened but helpless to look away, as the chunk fell down and down and down, turning over as it went. There was a small-very small-splash when it hit the river. The freshening wind gusted and stuck his shirt against his sweaty skin. The bridge groaned and swayed. Eddie tried to remove his hands from the side-rail, but they seemed frozen to the pitted metal in a deathgrip.

He closed his eyes for a moment. You’re not going to freeze. You’re not. I… I forbid it. If you need something to look at, make it long tall and ugly. Eddie opened his eyes again, fixed them on the gunslinger, forced his hands to open, and began to move forward again.

11

ROLAND REACHED THE GAP and looked back. Jake was five feet behind him. Oy was at his heels. The bumbler was crouched down with his neck stretched forward. The wind was much stronger over the river-cut, and Roland could see it rippling Oy’s silky fur. Eddie was about twenty-five feet behind Jake. His face was tightly drawn, but he was still shuffling grimly along with Susannah’s collapsed wheelchair in his left hand. His right was clutching the rail like grim death.

“Susannah?”

“Yes,” she responded at once. “Fine.”

“Jake?”

Jake looked up. He was still grinning, and the gunslinger saw there was going to be no problem there. The boy was having the time of his life. His hair blew back from his finely made brow in waves, and his eyes sparkled. He jerked one thumb up. Roland smiled and returned the gesture.

“Eddie?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

Eddie appeared to be looking at Roland, but the gunslinger decided he was really looking past him, at the windowless brick buildings which crowded the riverbank at the far end of the bridge. That was all right; given his obvious fear of heights, it was probably the best thing he could do to keep his head.

“All right, I won’t,” Roland murmured. “We’re going to cross the hole now, Susannah. Sit easy. No quick movements. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“If you want to adjust your position, do it now.”

“I’m fine, Roland,” she said calmly. “I just hope Eddie will be all right.”

“Eddie’s a gunslinger now. He’ll behave like one.”

Roland turned to the right, so he was facing directly downriver, and grasped the handrail. Then he began to edge out across the hole, shuffling his boots along the rusty cable.

12

JAKE WAITED UNTIL ROLAND and Susannah were part of the way across the gap and then started himself. The wind gusted and the bridge swayed back and forth, but he felt no alarm at all. He was, in fact, totally buzzed. Unlike Eddie, he’d never had any fear of heights; he liked being up here where he could see the river spread out like a steel ribbon under a sky which was beginning to cloud over.

Halfway across the hole in the bridge (Roland and Susannah had reached the place where the uneven walkway resumed and were watching the others), Jake looked back and his heart sank. They had forgotten one member of the party when they were discussing how to cross. Oy was crouched, frozen and clearly terrified, on the far side of the hole in the walkway. He was sniffing at the place where the concrete ended and the rusty, curved support took over.

“Come on, Oy!” Jake called.

“Oy!” the bumbler called back, and the tremble in his hoarse voice was almost human. He stretched his long neck forward toward Jake but didn’t move. His gold-ringed eyes were huge and dismayed.

Another gust of wind struck the bridge, making it sway and squall. Something twanged beside Jake’s head-the sound of a guitar string which has been tightened until it snaps. A steel thread had popped out of the nearest vertical hanger, almost scratching his cheek. Ten feet away, Oy crouched miserably with his eyes fixed on Jake.

“Come on!” Roland shouted. “Wind’s freshening! Come on, Jake!”

“Not without Oy!”

Jake began to shuffle back the way he had come. Before he had gone more than two steps, Oy stepped gingerly onto the support rod. The claws at the ends of his stiffly braced legs scratched at the rounded metal surface. Eddie stood behind the bumbler now, feeling helpless and scared to death.

“That’s it, Oy!” Jake encouraged. “Come to me!”

“Oy-Oy! Ake-Ake!” the bumbler cried, and trotted rapidly along the rod. He had almost reached Jake when the traitorous wind gusted again. The bridge swung. Oy’s claws scratched madly at the support rod for purchase, but there was none. His hindquarters slued off the edge and into space. He tried to cling with his forepaws, but there was nothing to cling to. His rear legs ran wildly in midair.

Jake let go of the rail and dived for him, aware of nothing but Oy’s gold-ringed eyes.

“No, Jake!” Roland and Eddie bellowed together, each from his own side of the gap, each too far away to do anything but watch.

Jake hit the cable on his chest and belly. His pack bounced against his shoulderblades and he heard his teeth click together in his head with the sound of a cueball breaking a tight rack. The wind gusted again. He went with it, looping his right hand around the support rod and reaching for Oy with his left as he swayed out into space. The bumbler began to fall, and clamped his jaws on Jake’s reaching hand as he did. The pain was immediate and excruciating. Jake screamed but held on, head down, right arm clasping the rod, knees pressing hard against its wretchedly smooth surface. Oy dangled from his left hand like a circus acrobat, staring up with his gold-ringed eyes, and Jake could now see his own blood flowing along the sides of the bumbler’s head in thin streams.

Then the wind gusted again and Jake began to slip outward.

13

EDDIE’s FEAR LEFT HIM in its place came that strange yet welcome coldness. He dropped Susannah’s wheelchair to the cracked cement with a clatter and raced nimbly out along the support cable, not even bothering with the handrail. Jake hung head-down over the gap with Oy swinging at the end of his left hand like a furry pendulum. And the boy’s right hand was slipping.

Eddie opened his legs and seat-dropped to a sitting position. His undefended balls smashed painfully up into his crotch, but for the moment even this exquisite pain was news from a distant country. He seized Jake by the hair with one hand and one strap of his pack with the other. He felt himself beginning to tilt outward, and for a nightmarish moment he thought all three of them were going to go over in a daisy-chain.

He let go of Jake’s hair and tightened his grip on the packstrap, praying the lad hadn’t bought the pack at one of the cheap discount outlets. He flailed above his head for the handrail with his free hand. After an interminable moment in which their combined outward slide continued, he found it and seized it.

“ROLAND!” he bawled. “I COULD USE A LITTLE HELP HERE!”

But Roland was already there, with Susannah still perched on his back. When he bent, she locked her arms around his neck so she wouldn’t drop headfirst from the sling. The gunslinger wrapped an arm around Jake’s chest and pulled him up. When his feet were on the support rod again, Jake put his right arm around Oy’s trembling body. His left hand was an agony of fire and ice.

“Let go, Oy,” he gasped. “You can let go now we’re-safe.”

For a terrible moment he didn’t think the billy-bumbler would. Then, slowly, Oy’s jaws relaxed and Jake was able to pull his hand free. It was covered with blood and dotted with a ring of dark holes.

“Oy,” the bumbler said feebly, and Eddie saw with wonder that the animal’s strange eyes were full of tears. He stretched his neck and licked Jake’s face with his bloody tongue.

“That’s okay,” Jake said, pressing his face into the warm fur. He was crying himself, his face a mask of shock and pain. “Don’t worry, that’s okay. You couldn’t help it and I don’t mind.”

Eddie was getting slowly to his feet. His face was dirty gray, and he felt as if someone had driven a bowling ball into his guts. His left hand stole slowly to his crotch and investigated the damage there.

“Cheap fucking vasectomy,” he said hoarsely.

“Are you going to faint, Eddie?” Roland asked. A fresh gust of wind flipped his hat from his head and into Susannah’s face. She grabbed it and jammed it down all the way to his ears, giving Roland the look of a half-crazed hillbilly.

“No,” Eddie said. “I almost wish I could, but-”

“Take a look at Jake,” Susannah said. “He’s really bleeding.”

“I’m fine,” Jake said, and tried to hide his hand. Roland took it gently in his own hands before he could. Jake had sustained at least a dozen puncture-wounds in the back of his hand, his palm, and his fingers.

Most of them were deep. It would be impossible to tell if bones had been broken or tendons severed until Jake tried to flex the hand, and this wasn’t the time or place for such experiments.

Roland looked at Oy. The billy-bumbler looked back, his expressive eyes sad and frightened. He had made no effort to lick Jake’s blood from his chops, although it would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to have done so.

“Leave him alone,” Jake said, and wrapped the encircling arm more tightly about Oy’s body. “It wasn’t his fault. It was my fault for forgetting him. The wind blew him off.”

“I’m not going to hurt him,” Roland said. He was positive the billy-bumbler wasn’t rabid, but he still did not intend for Oy to taste any more of Jake’s blood than he already had. As for any other diseases Oy might be carrying in his blood… well, ka would decide, as, in the end, it always did. Roland pulled his neckerchief free and wiped Oy’s lips and muzzle. “There,” he said. “Good fellow. Good boy.”

“Oy,” the billy-bumbler said feebly, and Susannah, who was watching over Roland’s shoulder, could have sworn she heard gratitude in that voice.

Another gust of wind struck them. The weather was turning dirty, and fast. “Eddie, we have to get off the bridge. Can you walk?”

“No, massa; I’sa gwinter shuffle.” The pain in his groin and the pit of his stomach was still bad, but not quite so bad as it had been a minute ago.

“All right. Let’s move. Fast as we can.”

Roland turned, began to take a step, and stopped. A man was now standing on the far side of the gap, watching them expressionlessly.

The newcomer had approached while their attention was focused on Jake and Oy. A crossbow was slung across his back. He wore a bright yellow scarf around his head; the ends streamed out like banners in the freshening wind. Gold hoops with crosses in their centers dangled from his ears. One eye was covered with a white silk patch. His face was blotched with purple sores, some of them open and festering. He might have been thirty, forty, or sixty. He held one hand high over his head. In it was something Roland could not make out, except that its shape was too regular to be a stone.

Behind this apparition, the city loomed with a kind of weird clarity in the darkening day. As Eddie looked past the huddles of brick buildings on the other shore-warehouses long since scooped empty by looters, he had no doubt-and into those shadowy canyons and stone mazes, he understood for the first time how terribly mistaken, how terribly foolish, his dreams of hope and help had been. Now he saw the shattered facades and broken roofs; now he saw the shaggy birds’ nests on cornices and in glassless, gaping windows; now hr allowed himself to actually smell the city, and that odor was not of fabulous spices and savory foods of the sort his mother had sometimes brought home from Zabar’s but rather the stink of a mattress that has caught fire, smoldered awhile, and then been put out with sewer-water. He suddenly understood Lud, understood it completely. The grinning pirate who had appeared while their attention was elsewhere was probably as close to a wise old elf as this broken, dying place could provide.

Roland pulled his revolver.

“Put it away, my cully,” the man in the yellow scarf said in an accent so thick that the sense of his words was almost lost. “Put it away, my dear heart. Ye’re a fierce trim, ay, that’s clear, but this time you’re outmatched."

14

THE NEWCOMER’s PANTS WERE patched green velvet, and as he stood on the edge of the hole in the bridge, he looked like a buccaneer at the end of his days of plunder: sick, ragged, and still dangerous.

“Suppose I choose not to?” Roland asked. “Suppose I choose to simply put a bullet through your scrofulous head?”

“Then I’ll get to hell just enough ahead of ye to hold the door,” the man in the yellow scarf said, and chuckled chummily. He wiggled the hand he held in the air. “It’s all the same jolly fakement to me, one way or t’other.”

Roland guessed that was the truth. The man looked as if he might have a year to live at most… and the last few months of that year would probably be very unpleasant. The oozing sores on his face had nothing to do with radiation; unless Roland was badly deceived, this man was in the late stages of what the doctors called mandrus and everyone else called whore’s blossoms. Facing a dangerous man was always a bad business, but at least one could calculate the odds in such an encounter. When you were facing the dead, however, everything changed.

“Do yer know what I’ve got here, my dear ones?” the pirate asked. “Do yer ken whatcher old friend Gasher just happens to have laid his hands on? It’s a grenado, something pretty the Old Folks left behind, and I’ve already tipped its cap-for to wear one’s cap before the introductin’ is complete would be wery bad manners, so it would!”

He cackled happily for a moment, and then his face grew still and grave once more. All humor left it, as if a switch had been turned somewhere in his degenerating brains.

“My finger is all that’s holdin the pin now, dearie. If you shoot me, there’s going to be a wery big bang. You and the cunt-monkey on yer back will be vaporized. The squint, too, I reckon. The young buck standing behind you and pointing that toy pistol in my face might live, but only until he hits the water… and hit it he would, because this bridge has been hangin by a thread these last forty year, and all it’d take to finish it is one little push. So do ye want to put away your iron, or shall we all toddle off to hell on the same handcart?”

Roland briefly considered trying to shoot the object Gasher called a grenado out of his hand, saw how tightly the man was gripping it, and bolstered his gun.

“Ah, good!” Gasher cried, cheerful once more. “I knew ye was a trig cove, just lookin at yer! Oh yes! So I did!”

“What do you want?” Roland asked, although he thought he already knew this, too.

Gasher raised his free hand and pointed a dirty finger at Jake. “The squint. Gimme the squint and the rest of you go free.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Susannah said at once.

“Why not?” the pirate cackled. “Gimme a chunk of mirror and I’ll rip it right off and stick it right in-why not, for all the good it’s a-doin me these days? Why, I can’t even run water through it without it burns me all the way to the top of my gullywash!” His eyes, which were a strange calm shade of gray, never left Roland’s face. “What do you say, my good old mate?”

“What happens to the rest of us if I hand over the boy?”

“Why, you go on yer way without no trouble from us!” the man in the yellow headscarf returned promptly. “You have the Tick-Tock Man’s word on that. It comes from his lips to my lips to your ears, so it does, and Tick-Tock’s a trig cove, too, what don’t break his word once it’s been given. I can’t say ary word nor watch about any Pubies you might run into, but you’ll have no trouble with the Tick-Tock Man’s Grays.”

“What the fuck are you saying, Roland?” Eddie roared. “You’re not really thinking about doing it, are you?”

Roland didn’t look down at Jake, and his lips didn’t move as he murmured: “I’ll keep my promise.”

“Yes-I know you will.” Then Jake raised his voice and said: “Put the gun away, Eddie. I’ll decide.”

“Jake, you’re out of your mind!”

The pirate cackled cheerily. “Not at all, cully! You’re the one who’s lost his mind if you disbelieve me. At the wery least, he’ll be safe from the drums with us, won’t he? And just think-if I didn’t mean what I say, I would have told you to toss your guns overside first thing! Easiest thing in the world! But did I? Nay!”

Susannah had heard the exchange between Jake and Roland. She had also had a chance to realize how bleak their options were as things now stood. “Put it away, Eddie.”

“How do we know you won’t toss the grenade at us once you have the lad?” Eddie called.

“I’ll shoot it out of the air if he tries,” Roland said. “I can do it, and he knows I can do it.”

“Mayhap I do. You’ve got a cosy look about you, indeed ye do.”

“If he’s telling the truth,” Roland went on, “he’d be burned even if I missed his toy, because the bridge would collapse and we’d all go down together.”

“Wery clever, my dear old son!” Gasher said. “You are a cosy one, ain’t you?” He cawed laughter, then grew serious and confiding. “The talking’s done, old mate of mine. Decide. Will you give me the boy, or do we all march to the end of the path together?”

Before Roland could say a word, Jake had slipped past him on the support rod. He still held Oy curled in his right arm. He held his bloody left hand stiffly out in front of him.

“Jake, no!” Eddie shouted desperately.

“I’ll come for you,” Roland said in the same low voice.

“I know,” Jake repeated. The wind gusted again. The bridge swayed and groaned. The Send was now speckled with whitecaps, and water boiled whitely around the wreck of the blue mono jutting from the river on the upstream side.

“Ay, my cully!” Gasher crooned. His lips spread wide, revealing a few remaining teeth that jutted from his white gums like decayed tombstones. “Ay, my fine young squint! Just keep coming.”

“Roland, he could be bluffing!” Eddie yelled. “That thing could be a dud!”

The gunslinger made no reply.

As Jake neared the other side of the hole in the walkway, Oy bared his own teeth and began to snarl at Gasher.

“Toss that talking bag of guts overside,” Gasher said.

“Fuck you,” Jake replied in the same calm voice.

The pirate looked surprised for a moment, then nodded. “Tender of him, are you? Wery well.” He took two steps backward. “Put him down the second you reach the concrete, then. And if he runs at me, I promise to lack his brains right out his tender little asshole.”

“Asshole,” Oy said through his bared teeth.

“Shut up, Oy,” Jake muttered. He reached the concrete just as the strongest gust of wind yet struck the bridge. This time the twanging sound of parting cable-strands seemed to come from everywhere. Jake glanced back and saw Roland and Eddie clinging to the rail. Susannah was watching him from over Roland’s shoulder, her tight cap of curls rippling and shaking in the wind. Jake raised his hand to them. Roland raised his in return.

You won’t let me drop this time? he had asked. No-not ever again, Roland had replied. Jake believed him… but he was very much afraid of what might happen before Roland arrived. He put Oy down. Gasher rushed forward the moment he did, kicking out at the small animal. Oy skittered aside, avoiding the booted foot.

“Run!” Jake shouted. Oy did, shooting past them and loping toward the Lud end of the bridge with his head down, swerving to avoid the holes and leaping across the cracks in the pavement. He didn’t look back. A moment later Gasher had his arm around Jake’s neck. He stank of dirt and decaying flesh, the two odors combining to create a single deep stench, crusty and thick. It made Jake’s gorge rise.

He bumped his crotch into Jake’s buttocks. “Maybe I ain’t quite s’far gone’s I thought. Don’t they say youth’s the wine what makes old men drunk? We’ll have us a time, won’t we, my sweet little squint? Ay, we’ll have a time such as will make the angels sing.”

Oh Jesus, Jake thought.

Gasher raised his voice again. “We’re leaving now, my hardcase friend-we have grand things to do and grand people to see, so we do, but I keep my word. As for you, you’ll stand right where you are for a good fifteen minutes, if you’re wise. If I see you start to move, we’re all going to ride the handsome. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

“Do you believe me when I say I have nothing to lose?”

“Yes.”

“That’s wery well, then. Move, boy! Hup!”

Gasher’s hold tightened on Jake’s throat until he could hardly breathe. At the same time he was pulled backward. They retreated that way, facing the gap where Roland stood with Susannah on his back and Eddie just behind him, still holding the Ruger which Gasher had called a toy pistol. Jake could feel Gasher’s breath puffing against his ear in hot little blurts. Worse, he could smell it.

“Don’t try a thing,” Gasher whispered, “or I’ll rip off yer sweetmeats and stuff em up your bung. And it would be sad to lose em before you ever got a chance to use em, wouldn’t it? Wery sad indeed.”

They reached the end of the bridge. Jake stiffened, believing Gasher would throw the grenade anyway, but he didn’t… at least not immediately. He backed Jake through a narrow alley between two small cubicles which had probably served as tollbooths, once upon a time. Beyond them, the brick warehouses loomed like prison cellblocks.

“Now, cully, I’m going to let go of your neck, or how would’je ever have wind to run with? But I’ll be holdin yer arm, and if ye don’t run like the wind, I promise I’ll rip it right off and use it for a club to beat you with. Do you understand?”

Jake nodded, and suddenly the terrible, stifling pressure was gone from his windpipe. As soon as it was, he became aware of his hand again-it felt hot and swollen and full of fire. Then Gasher seized his bicep with fingers like bands of iron, and he forgot all about his hand.

“Toodle-doo!” Gasher called in a grotesquely cheery falsetto. He waggled the grenado at the others. “Bye-bye, dears!” Then he growled to Jake: “Now run, you whoring little squint! Run!”

Jake was first whirled and then yanked into a run. The two of them went flying down a curved ramp to street level. Jake’s first confused thought was that this was what the East River Drive would look like two or three hundred years after some weird brain-plague had killed all the sane people in the world.

The ancient, rusty hulks of what had once surely been automobiles stood at intervals along both curbs. Most were bubble-shaped roadsters that looked like no cars Jake had ever seen before (except, maybe, for the ones the white-gloved creations of Walt Disney drove in the comic books), but among them he saw an old Volkswagen Beetle, a car that might have been a Chevrolet Corvair, and something he believed was a Model A Ford. There were no tires on any of these eerie hulks; they either had been stolen or had rotted away to dust long since. And all the glass had been broken, as if the remaining denizens of this city abhorred anything which might show them their own reflections, even accidentally.

Beneath and between the abandoned cars, the gutters were filled with drifts of unidentifiable metal junk and bright glints of glass. Trees had been planted at intervals along the sidewalks in some long-gone, happier time, but they were now so emphatically dead that they looked like stark metal sculptures against the cloudy sky. Some of the warehouses had either been bombed or had collapsed on their own, and beyond the jumbled heaps of bricks which was all that remained of them Jake could see the river and the rusty, sagging underpinnings of the Send Bridge. That smell of wet decay-a smell that seemed almost to snarl in the nose-was stronger than ever.

The street headed due east, diverging from the path of the Beam, and Jake could see it became more and more choked with rubble and rickrack as it went. Six or seven blocks down it appeared to be entirely plugged, but it was in this direction that Gasher pulled him. At first he kept up, but Gasher was setting a fearsome pace. Jake began to pant and fell a step behind. Gasher almost jerked him off his feet as he dragged Jake toward the barrier of junk and concrete and rusty steel beams which lay ahead. The plug-which looked like a deliberate construction to Jake-lay between two broad buildings with dusty marble facades. In front of the one on the left was a statue Jake recognized at once: it was the woman called Blind Justice, and that almost surely made the building she guarded a courthouse. But he only had a moment to look; Gasher was dragging him relentlessly toward the barricade, and he wasn’t slowing down.

He’ll kill us if he tries to take us through there! Jake thought, but Gasher-who ran like the wind in spite of the disease which advertised itself on his face-simply buried his fingers deeper in Jake’s upper arm and swept him along. And now Jake saw a narrow alley in the not-quite-haphazard pile of concrete, splintered furniture, rusted plumbing fixtures, and chunks of trucks and automobiles. He suddenly understood. This maze would hold Roland up for hours… but it was Gasher’s back yard, and he knew exactly where he was going.

The small dark opening to the alley was on the left side of the tottery pile of junk. As they reached it, Gasher tossed the green object back over his shoulder. “Better duck, dearie!” he cried, and voiced a series of shrill, hysterical giggles. A moment later a huge, crumping explosion shook the street. One of the bubble-shaped cars jumped twenty feet into the air and then came down on its roof. A hail of bricks whistled over Jake’s head, and something thumped him hard on the left shoulder-blade. He stumbled and would have fallen if Gasher hadn’t yanked him upright and pulled him into the narrow opening in the rubble. Once they were in the passageway which lay beyond, gloomy shadows reached out eagerly and enfolded them.

When they were gone, a small, furry shape crept out from behind a concrete boulder. It was Oy. He stood at the mouth of the passage for a moment, neck stretched forward, eyes gleaming. Then he followed after, nose low to the ground and sniffing carefully.

15

“COME ON,” ROLAND SAID as soon as Gasher had turned tail.

“How could you do it?” Eddie asked. “How could you let that freak have him?”

“Because I had no choice. Bring the wheelchair. We’re going to need it.”

They had reached the concrete on the far side of the gap when an explosion shook the bridge, spraying rubble into the darkening sky.

“Christ!” Eddie said, and turned his white, dismayed face to Roland.

“Don’t worry yet,” Roland said calmly. “Fellows like Gasher rarely get careless with their high-explosive toys.” They reached the tollbooths at the end of the bridge. Roland stopped just beyond, at the top of the curving ramp.

“You knew the guy wasn’t just bluffing, didn’t you?” Eddie said. “I mean, you weren’t guessing-you knew.”

“He’s a walking dead man, and such men don’t need to bluff.” Roland’s voice was calm enough, but there was a deep undertone of bitterness and pain in it. “I knew something like this could happen, and if we’d seen the fellow earlier, while we were still beyond the range of his exploding egg, we could have stood him off. But then Jake fell and he got too close. I imagine he thinks our real reason for bringing a boy in the first place was to pay for safe conduct through the city. Damn! Damn the luck!” Roland struck his fist against his leg.

“Well, let’s go get him!”

Roland shook his head. “This is where we split up. We can’t take Susannah where the bastard’s gone, and we can’t leave her alone.”

“But-”

“Listen and don’t argue-not if you want to save Jake. The longer we stand here, the colder his trail gets. Cold trails are hard to follow. You’ve got your own job to do. If there’s another Blaine, and I am sure Jake believes there is, then you and Susannah must find it. There must be a station, or what was once called a cradle in the far lands. Do you understand?”

For once, blessedly, Eddie didn’t argue. “Yeah. We’ll find it. What then?”

“Fire a shot every half hour or so. When I get Jake, I’ll come.”

“Shots may attract other people as well,” Susannah said. Eddie had helped her out of the sling and she was seated in her chair again.

Roland surveyed them coldly. “Handle them.”

“Okay.” Eddie stuck out his hand and Roland took it briefly. “Find him, Roland.”

“Oh, I’ll find him. Just pray to your gods that I find him soon enough. And remember the faces of your fathers, both of you.”

Susannah nodded. “We’ll try.”

Roland turned and ran light-footed down the ramp. When he was out of sight, Eddie looked at Susannah and was not very surprised to see she was crying. He felt like crying himself. Half an hour ago they had been a tight little band of friends. Their comfortable fellowship had been smashed to bits in the space of just a few minutes-Jake abducted, Roland gone after him. Even Oy had run away. Eddie had never felt so lonely in his life.

“I have a feeling we’re never going to see either of them again,” Susannah said.

“Of course we will!” Eddie said roughly, but he knew what she meant, because he felt the same way. The premonition that their quest was all over before it was fairly begun lay heavy on his heart. “In a fight with Attila the Hun, I’d give you three-to-two odds on Roland the Barbarian. Come on, Suze-we’ve got a train to catch.”

“But where?” she asked forlornly.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should just find the nearest wise old elf and ask him, huh?”

“What are you talking about, Edward Dean?”

“Nothing,” he said, and because that was so goddam true he thought he might burst into tears, he grasped the handles of her wheelchair and began to push it down the cracked and glass-littered ramp that led into the city of Lud.

16

JAKE QUICKLY DESCENDED INTO a foggy world where the only landmarks were pain: his throbbing hand, the place on his upper arm where Gasher’s fingers dug in like steel pegs, his burning lungs. Before they had gone far, these pains were first joined and then overmatched by a deep, burning stitch in his left side. He wondered if Roland was following after them yet. He also wondered how long Oy would be able to live in this world which was so unlike the plains and forest which were all he had known until now. Then Gasher clouted him across the face, bloodying his nose, and thought was lost in a red wash of pain.

“Come on, yer little bastard! Move yer sweet cheeks!”

“Running… as fast as I can,” Jake gasped, and just managed to dodge a thick shard of glass which jutted like a long transparent tooth from the wall of junk to his left.

“You better not be, because I’ll knock yer cold and drag yer along by the hair o’ yer head if y’are! Now hup, you little barstard!”

Jake somehow forced himself to run faster. He’d gone into the alley with the idea that they must shortly re-emerge onto the avenue, but he now reluctantly realized that wasn’t going to happen. This was more than an alley; it was a camouflaged and fortified road leading ever deeper into the country of the Grays. The tall, tottery walls which pressed in on them had been built from an exotic array of materials: cars which had been partially or completely flattened by the chunks of granite and steel placed on top of them; marble pillars; unknown factory machines which were dull red with rust wherever they weren’t still black with grease; a chrome-and-crystal fish as big as a private plane with one cryptic word of the High Speech-DELIGHT-carefully incised into its scaly gleaming side; crisscrossing chains, each link as big as Jake’s head, wrapped around mad jumbles of furniture that appeared to balance above them as precariously as circus elephants do on their tiny steel platforms.

They came to a place where this lunatic path branched, and Gasher chose the left fork without hesitation. A little further along, three more alleyways, these so narrow they were almost tunnels, spoked off in various directions. This time Gasher chose the right-hand branching. The new path, which seemed to be formed by banks of rotting boxes and huge blocks of old paper-paper that might once have been books or magazines-was too narrow for them to run in side by side. Gasher shoved Jake into the lead and began beating him relentlessly on the back to make him go faster. This is how a steer must feel when it’s driven down the chute to the slaughtering pen, Jake thought, and vowed that if he got out of this alive, he would never eat steak again.

“Run, my sweet little boycunt! Run!”

Jake soon lost all track of the twistings and turnings they made, and as Gasher drove him deeper and deeper into this jumble of torn steel, broken furniture, and castoff machinery, he began to give up hope of rescue. Not even Roland would be able to find him now. If the gunslinger tried, he would become lost himself, and wander the choked paths of this nightmare world until he died.

Now they were going downhill, and the walls of tightly packed paper had given way to ramparts of filing cabinets, jumbles of adding machines, and piles of computer gear. It was like running through some nightmarish Radio Shack warehouse. For almost a full minute the wall flowing past on Jake’s left appeared to be constructed solely of either TV sets or carelessly stacked video display terminals. They stared at him like the glazed eyes of dead men. And as the pavement beneath their feet continued to descend, Jake realized that they were in a tunnel. The strip of cloudy sky overhead narrowed to a band, the band narrowed to a ribbon, and the ribbon became a thread. They were in a gloomy netherworld, scurrying like rats through a gigantic trash-midden.

What if it all comes down on us? Jake wondered, but in his current state of aching exhaustion, this possibility did not frighten him much. If the roof fell in, he would at least be able to rest.

Gasher drove him as a farmer would a mule, striking his left shoulder to indicate a left turn and his right to indicate a right turn. When the course was straight on, he thumped Jake on the back of the head. Jake tried to dodge a jutting pipe and didn’t quite succeed. It whacked into one hip and sent him flailing across the narrow passage toward a snarl of glass and jagged boards. Gasher caught him and shoved him forward again. “Run, you clumsy squint! Can’t you run? If it wasn’t for the Tick-Tock Man, I’d bugger you right here and cut yer throat while I did it, ay, so I would!”

Jake ran in a red daze where there was only pain and the frequent thud of Gusher’s fists coming down on his shoulders or the hack of his head. At last, when he was sure he could run no longer, Gasher grabbed him by the neck and yanked him to a stop so fiercely that Jake crashed into him with a strangled squawk.

“Here’s a tricky little bit!” Gasher panted jovially. “Look straight ahead and you’ll see two wires what cross in an X low to the ground. Do yer see em?”

At first Jake didn’t. It was very gloomy here; heaps of huge copper kettles were piled up to the left, and to the right were stacks of steel tanks that looked like scuba-diving gear. Jake thought he could turn these latter into an avalanche with one strong breath. He swiped his forearm across his eyes, brushing away tangles of hair, and tried not to think about how he’d look with about sixteen tons of those tanks piled on top of him. He squinted in the direction Gasher was pointing. Yes, he could make out-barely-two thin, silvery lines that looked like guitar or banjo strings. They came down from opposite sides of the passageway and crossed about two feet above the pavement.

“Crawl under, dear heart. And be ever so careful, for if you so much as twang one of those wires, harf the steel and cement puke in the city’ll come down on your dear little head. Mine, too, although I doubt if that’d disturb you much, would it? Now crawl!”

Jake shrugged out of his pack, lay down, and pushed it through the gap ahead of him. And as he eased his way under the thin, taut wires, he discovered that he wanted to live a little longer after all. It seemed that he could actually feel all those tons of carefully balanced junk waiting to come down on him. These wires are probably holding a couple of carefully chosen keystones in place, he thought. If one of them breaks… ashes, ashes, we all fall down. His back brushed one of the wires, and high overhead, something creaked.

“Careful, cully!” Gasher almost moaned. “Be oh so careful!”

Jake pushed himself beneath the crisscrossing wires, using his feet and his elbows. His stinking, sweat-clogged hair fell in his eyes again, but he did not dare brush it away.

“You’re clear,” Gasher grunted at last, and slipped beneath the tripwires himself with the ease of long practice. He stood up and snatched Jake’s pack before Jake could reshoulder it. “What’s in here, cully?” he asked, undoing the straps and peering in. “Got any treats for yer old pal? For the Gasherman loves his treaties, so he does!”

“There’s nothing in there but-”

Gasher’s hand flashed out and rocked Jake’s head back with a hard slap that sent a fresh spray of bloody froth flying from the boy’s nose.

“What did you do that for?” Jake cried, hurt and outraged.

“For tellin me what my own beshitted eyes can see!” Gasher yelled, and cast Jake’s pack aside. He bared his remaining teeth at the boy in a dangerous, terrible grin. “And fer almost bringin the whole beshitted works down on us!” He paused, then added in a quieter voice: “And because I felt like it-I must admit that. Your stupid sheep’s face puts me wery much in a slappin temper, so it does.” The grin widened, revealing his oozing whitish gums, a sight Jake could have done without. “If your hardcase friend follows us this far, he’ll have a surprise when he runs into those wires, won’t he?” Gasher looked up, still grinning. “There’s a city bus balanced up there someplace, as I remember.”

Jake began to weep-tired, hopeless tears that cut through the dirt on his cheeks in narrow channels.

Gasher raised an open, threatening hand. “Get moving, cully, before I start cryin myself… for a wery sentermental fellow is yer old pal, so he is, and when he starts to grieve and mourn, a little slappin is the only thing to put a smile on his face again. Run!”

They ran. Gasher chose pathways leading deeper into the smelly, creaking maze seemingly at random, indicating his choices with hard whacks to the shoulders. At some point the sound of the drums began. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and for Jake it was the final straw. He gave up hope and thought alike, and allowed himself to descend wholly into the nightmare.

17

ROLAND HALTED IN FRONT of the barricade which choked the street from side to side and top to bottom. Unlike Jake, he had no hopes of emerging into the open on the other side. The buildings lying east of this point would be sentry-occupied islands emerging from an inland sea of trash, tools, artifacts… and booby-traps, he had no doubt. Some of these leavings undoubtedly still remained where they had fallen five hundred or seven hundred or a thousand years ago, but Roland thought most of it had been dragged here by the Grays a piece at a time. The eastern portion of Lud had become, in effect, the castle of the Grays, and Roland was now standing outside its wall.

He walked forward slowly and saw the mouth of a passageway half-hidden behind a ragged cement boulder. There were footprints in the powdery dust-two sets, one big, one small. Roland started to get up, looked again, and squatted on his hunkers once more. Not two sets but three, the third marking the paws of a small animal.

“Oy?” Roland called softly. For a moment there was no response, and then a single soft bark came from the shadows. Roland stepped into the passageway and saw gold-ringed eyes peering at him from around the first crooked corner. Roland trotted down to the humbler. Oy, who still didn’t like to come really close to anyone but Jake, backed up a step and then held his ground, looking anxiously up at the gunslinger.

“Do you want to help me?” Roland asked. He could feel the dry red curtain that was battle fever at the edge of his consciousness, but this was not the time for it. The time would come, but for now he must not allow himself that inexpressible relief. “Help me find Jake?”

“Ake!” Oy barked, still watching Roland with his anxious eyes.

“Go on, then. Find him.”

Oy turned away at once and ran rapidly down the alley, nose skimming the ground. Roland followed, his eyes only occasionally flicking up to glance at Oy. Mostly he kept his gaze fixed on the ancient pavement, looking for sign.

18

“JESUS,” EDDIE SAID. “WHAT land of people are these guys?”

They had followed the avenue at the base of the ramp for a couple of blocks, had seen the barricade (missing Roland’s entry into the partially hidden passageway by less than a minute) which lay ahead, and had turned north onto a broad thoroughfare which reminded Eddie of Fifth Avenue. He hadn’t dared to tell Susannah that; he was still too bitterly disappointed with this stinking, littered ruin of a city to articulate anything hopeful.

“Fifth Avenue” led them into an area of large white stone buildings that reminded Eddie of the way Rome looked in the gladiator movies he’d watched on TV as a kid. They were austere and, for the most part, still in good shape. He was pretty sure they had been public buildings of some sort-galleries, libraries, maybe museums. One, with a big domed roof that had cracked like a granite egg, might have been an observatory, although Eddie had read someplace that astronomers liked to be away from big cities, because all the electric lights fucked up their star-gazing.

There were open areas between these imposing edifices, and although the grass and flowers which had once grown there had been choked off by weeds and tangles of underbrush, the area still had a stately feel, and Eddie wondered if it had once been the center of Lud’s cultural life. Those days were long gone, of course; Eddie doubted if Gasher and his pals were very interested in ballet or chamber music.

He and Susannah had come to a major intersection from which four more broad avenues radiated outward like spokes on a wheel. At the hub of the wheel was a large paved square. Ringing it were loudspeakers on forty-foot steel posts. In the center of the square was a pedestal with the remains of a statue upon it-a mighty copper war-horse, green with verdigris, pawing its forelegs at the air. The warrior who had once ridden this charger lay off to the side on one corroded shoulder, waving what looked like a machine-gun in one hand and a sword in the other. His legs were still bowed around the shape of the horse he had once ridden, hut his boots remained welded to the sides of his metal mount. GRAYS DIE! was written across the pedestal in fading orange letters.

Glancing down the radiating streets, Eddie saw more of the speaker-poles. A few had fallen over, but most still stood, and each of these had been festooned with a grisly garland of corpses. As a result, the square into which “Fifth Avenue” emptied and the streets which led away were guarded by a small army of the dead.

“What kind of people are they?” Eddie asked again.

He didn’t expect an answer and Susannah didn’t give one… but she could have. She’d had insights into the past of Roland’s world before, but never one as clear and sure as this. All of her earlier insights, like those which had come to her in River Crossing, had had a haunting visionary quality, like dreams, but what came now arrived in a single flash, and it was like seeing the twisted face of a dangerous maniac illuminated by a stroke of lightning.

The speakers… the hanging bodies… the drums. She suddenly understood how they went together as clearly as she had understood that the heavy-laden wagons passing through River Crossing on their way to Jimtown had been pulled by oxen rather than mules or horses.

“Never mind this trash,” she said, and her voice only quivered a little. “It’s the train we want-which way is it, d’you think?”

Eddie glanced up at the darkening sky and easily picked out the path of the Beam in the rushing clouds. He looked back down and wasn’t much surprised to see that the entrance to the street corresponding most closely to the path of the Beam was guarded by a large stone turtle. Its reptilian head peered out from beneath the granite lip of its shell; its deepset eyes seemed to stare curiously at them. Eddie nodded toward it and managed a small dry smile. “See the turtle of enormous girth?”

Susannah took a brief look of her own and nodded. He pushed her across the city square and into The Street of the Turtle. The corpses which lined it gave off a dry, cinnamony smell that made Eddie’s stomach clench… not because it was bad but because it was actually rather pleasant-the sugar-spicy aroma of something a kid would enjoy shaking onto his morning toast.

The Street of the Turtle was mercifully broad, and most of the corpses hanging from the speaker-poles were little more than mummies, but Susannah saw a few which were relatively fresh, with flies still crawling busily across the blackening skin of their swollen faces and maggots still squirming out of their decaying eyes.

And below each speaker was a little drift of bones.

“There must be thousands,” Eddie said. “Men, women, and kids.”

“Yes.” Susannah’s calm voice sounded distant and strange to her own ears. “They’ve had a lot of time to kill. And they’ve used it to kill each other.”

“Bring on those wise fuckin elves!” Eddie said, and the laugh that followed sounded suspiciously like a sob. He thought he was at last beginning to fully understand what that innocuous phrase-the world has moved on-really meant. What a breadth of ignorance and evil it covered.

And what a depth.

The speakers were a wartime measure, Susannah thought. Of course they were. God only knows which war, or how long ago, but it must have been a doozy. The rulers of Lud used the speakers to make city-wide announcements from some central, bomb-proof location-a bunker like the one Hitler and his high command retreated to at the end of World War II.

And in her ears she could hear the voice of authority which had come rolling out of those speakers-could hear it as clearly as she had heard the creak of the wagons passing through River Crossing, as clearly as she had heard the crack of the whip above the backs of the straining oxen.

Ration centers A and D will be closed today; please proceed to centers B, C, E, and F with proper coupons.

Militia squads Nine, Ten, and Twelve report to Sendside.

Aerial bombardment is likely between the hours of eight and ten of the clock. All noncombatant residents should report to their designated shelters. Bring your gas masks. Repeat, bring your gas masks.

Announcements, yes… and some garbled version of the news-a propagandized, militant version George Orwell would have called doublespeak. And in between the news bulletins and the announcements, squalling military music and exhortations to respect the fallen by sending more men and women into the red throat of the abattoir.

Then the war had ended and silence had fallen… for a while. But at some point, the speakers had begun broadcasting again. How long ago? A hundred years? Fifty? Did it matter? Susannah thought not. What mattered was that when the speakers were reactivated, the only thing they broadcast was a single tape-loop… the loop with the drum-track on it. And the descendents of the city’s original residents had taken it for… what? The Voice of the Turtle? The Will of the Beam?

Susannah found herself remembering the time she had asked her father, a quiet hut deeply cynical man, if he believed there was a God in heaven who guided the course of human events. Well, he had said, I think it’s sort of half ’n half, Odetta. I’m sure there’s a God, but I don’t think He has much if anything to do with us these days; I believe that after we killed His son, He finally got it through His head that there wasn’t nothing to be done with the sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve, and He washed His hands of us. Wise fella.

She had responded to this (which she had fully expected; she was eleven at the time, and knew the turn of her father’s mind quite well) by showing him a squib on the Community Churches page of the local newspaper. It said that Rev. Murdock of the Grace Methodist Church would that Sunday elucidate on the topic “God Speaks to Each of Us Every Day”-with a text from First Corinthians. Her father had laughed over that so hard that tears had squirted from the corners of his eyes. Well, I guess each of us hears someone talking, he had said at last, and you can bet your bottom dollar on one thing, sweetie: each of us-including this here Reverend Murdock-hears that voice say just exactly what he wants to hear. It’s so convenient that way.

What these people had apparently wanted to hear in the recorded drum-track was an invitation to commit ritual murder. And now, when the drums began to throb through these hundreds or thousands of speakers-a hammering back-beat which was only the percussion to a Z.Z. Top song called “Velcro Fly,” if Eddie was right-it became their signal to unlimber the hangropes and run a few folks up the nearest speaker-posts.

How many? she wondered as Eddie rolled her along in her wheel-chair, its nicked and dented hard rubber tires crackling over broken glass and whispering through drifts of discarded paper. How many have been killed over the years because some electronic circuit under the city got the hiccups? Did it start because they recognized the essential alienness of the music, which came somehow-like us, and the airplane, and some of the cars along these streets-from another world?

She didn’t know, but she knew she had come around to her father’s cynical point of view on the subject of God and the chats He might or might not have with the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. These people had been looking for a reason to slaughter each other, that was all, and the drums had been as good a reason as any.

She found herself thinking of the hive they had found-the misshapen hive of white bees whose honey would have poisoned them if they had been foolish enough to eat of it. Here, on this side of the Send, was another dying hive; more mutated white bees whose sting would be no less deadly for their confusion, loss, and perplexity.

And how many more will have to die before the tape finally breaks?

As if her thoughts had caused it to happen, the speakers suddenly began to transmit the relentless, syncopated heartbeat of the drums. Eddie yelled in surprise. Susannah screamed and clapped both hands to her ears-but before she did, she could faintly hear the rest of the music: the track or tracks which had been muted decades ago when someone (probably quite by accident) had bumped the balance control, knocking it all the way to one side and burying both the guitars and the vocal.

Eddie continued to push her along The Street of the Turtle and the Path of the Beam, trying to look in all directions at once and trying not to smell the odor of putrefaction. Thank God for the wind, he thought.

He began to push the wheelchair faster, scanning the weedy gaps between the big white buildings for the graceful sweep of an overhead monorail track. He wanted to get out of this endless aisle of the dead. As he took yet another deep breath of that speciously sweet cinnamon smell, it seemed to him that he had never wanted anything so badly in his whole life.

19

JAKE’S DAZE WAS BROKEN abruptly when Gasher grabbed him by the collar and yanked with all the force of a cruel rider braking a galloping horse. He stuck one leg out at the same time and Jake went crashing backward over it. His head connected with the pavement and for a moment all the lights went out. Gasher, no humanitarian, brought him around quickly by seizing Jake’s lower lip and yanking it upward and outward.

Jake screamed and bolted to a sitting position, striking out blindly with his fists. Gasher dodged the blows easily, hooked his other hand into Jake’s armpit, and yanked him to his feet. Jake stood there, rocking drunkenly back and forth. He was beyond protest now; almost beyond understanding. All he knew for sure was that every muscle in his body felt sprung and his wounded hand was howling like an animal caught in a trap.

Gasher apparently needed a breather, and this time he was slower getting his wind back. He stood bent over with his hands planted on the knees of his green trousers, panting in fast little whistling breaths. His yellow headscarf had slipped askew. His good eye glittered like a trumpery diamond. The white silk eyepatch was now wrinkled, and curds of evil-looking yellow muck oozed onto his cheek from beneath it.

“Take a look over your head, cully, and you’ll see why I brung you up short. Get an eyeful!”

Jake tilted his head upward, and in the depths of his shock he was not at all surprised to see a marble fountain as big as a house-trailer dangling eighty feet above them. He and Gasher were almost below it. The fountain was held suspended by two rusty cables which were mostly hidden within huge, unsteady stacks of church pews. Even in his less-than-acute state, Jake saw that these cables were more seriously frayed than the remaining hangers on the bridge had been.

“See it?” Gasher asked, grinning. He raised his left hand to his covered eye, scooped a mass of the pussy material from beneath it, and flicked it indifferently aside. “Beauty, ain’t it? Oh, the Tick-Tock Man’s a trig cove, all right, and no mistake. (Where’s those goat-fucking drums? They should have started by now-if Copperhead’s forgot em, I’ll ram a stick so far up his arse he’ll taste bark.) Now look ahead of you, my delicious little squint.”

Jake did, and Gasher immediately clouted him so hard that he staggered backward and almost fell.

“Not across, idiot child! Down! See them two dark cobblestones?”

After a moment, Jake did. He nodded apathetically.

“Yer don’t wanter step on em, for that’d bring the whole works down on your head, cully, and anybody who wanted yer after that’d have to pick yer up with a blotter. Understand?”

Jake nodded again.

“Good.” Gasher took a final deep breath and slapped Jake’s shoulder. “Go on, then, whatcher waitin for? Hup!”

Jake stepped over the first of the discolored stones and saw it wasn’t really a cobblestone at all but a metal plate which had been rounded to look like one. The second was just ahead of it, cunningly placed so that if an unaware intruder happened to miss the first one, he or she would almost certainly step on the second.

Go ahead and do it, then, he thought. Why not? The gunslinger’s never going to find you in this maze, so go ahead and bring it down. It’s got to be cleaner than what Gasher and his friends have got planned for you. Quicker, too.

His dusty moccasin wavered in the air above the booby-trap.

Gasher hit him with a fist in the middle of the back, but not hard. “Thinkin about takin a ride on the handsome, are you, my little cull?” he asked. The laughing cruelty in his voice had been replaced by simple curiosity. If it was tinged with any other emotion, it wasn’t fear but amusement. “Well, go ahead, if it’s what yer mean to do, for I have my ticket already. Only be quick about it, gods blast your eyes.”

Jake’s foot came down beyond the trigger of the booby-trap. His decision to live a little longer was not based on any hope that Roland would find him; it was just that this was what Roland would do-go on until someone made him stop, and then a few yards farther still if he could.

If he did it now, he could take Gasher with him, but Gasher alone wasn’t sufficient-one look was enough to make it clear that he was telling the truth when he said he was dying already. If he went on, he might have a chance to take some of the Gasherman’s friends, too- maybe even the one he called the Tick-Tock Man.

If I’m going to ride what he calls the handsome, Jake thought, I’d just as soon go with plenty of company.

Roland would have understood.

20

JAKE WAS WRONG IN his assessment of the gunslinger’s ability to follow their path through the maze; Jake’s pack was only the most obvious bit of sign they left behind them, but Roland quickly realized he did not have to pause to look for sign. He only had to follow Oy.

He paused at several intersecting passages nevertheless, wanting to make sure, and each time he did, Oy looked back and uttered his low, impatient bark that seemed to say, Hurry up! Do you want to lose them? After the signs he saw-a track, a thread from Jake’s shirt, a scrap of bright yellow cloth from Gasher’s scarf-had three times confirmed the bumbler’s choices, Roland simply followed Oy. He did not give up looking for sign, but he quit making stops to hunt for it. Then the drums started up, and it was the drums-plus Gasher’s nosiness about what Jake might be carrying-that saved Roland’s life that afternoon.

He skidded to a halt in his dusty boots, and his gun was in his hand before he realized what the sound was. When he did realize, he dropped the revolver back into its holster with an impatient grunt. He was about to go on again when his eye happened first on Jake’s pack… and then on a pair of faint, gleaming streaks in midair just to the left of it. Roland narrowed his eyes and made out two thin wires which crisscrossed at knee level not three feet in front of him. Oy, who was built low to the ground, had scurried neatly through the inverted V formed by the wires, but if not for the drums and spotting Jake’s castoff pack, Roland would have run right into them. As his eyes moved upward, tracing the not-quite-random piles of junk poised on either side of the passageway at this point, Roland’s mouth tightened. It had been a close call, and only ka had saved him.

Oy barked impatiently.

Roland dropped to his belly and crawled beneath the wires, moving slowly and carefully-he was bigger than either Jake or Gasher, and he realized a really big man wouldn’t be able to get under here at all without triggering the carefully prepared avalanche. The drums pumped and thumped in his ears. I wonder if they’ve all gone mad, he thought. If I had to listen to that every day, I think I would have.

He got to the far side of the wires, picked up the pack, and looked inside. Jake’s books and a few items of clothing were still in there, so were the treasures he had picked up along the way-a rock which gleamed with yellow flecks that looked like gold but weren’t; an arrowhead, probably the leaving of the old forest folk, which Jake had found in a grove of trees the day after his drawing; some coins from his own world; his father’s sunglasses; a few other things which only a boy not yet in his teens could really love and understand. Things he would want back again… if, that was, Roland got to him before Gasher and his friends could change him, hurt him in ways that would cause him to lose interest in the innocent pursuits and curiosities of pre-adolescent boyhood.

Gasher’s grinning face swam into Roland’s mind like the face of a demon or a djinni from a bottle: the snaggle teeth, the vacant eyes, the mandrus crawling over the cheeks and spreading beneath the stubbly lines of the jaws. If you hurt him… he thought, and then forced his mind away, because that line of thought was a blind alley. If Gasher hurt the boy (Jake! his mind insisted fiercely-Not just the boy but Jake! Jake!), Roland would kill him, yes. But the act would mean nothing, for Gasher was a dead man already.

The gunslinger lengthened the straps of the pack, marvelling at the clever buckles which made this possible, slipped it onto his own back, and stood up again. Oy turned to be off, but Roland called his name and the bumbler looked back.

“To me, Oy.” Roland didn’t know if the bumbler could understand (or if he would obey even if he did), but it would be better-safer-if he stayed close. Where there was one booby-trap, there were apt to be more. Next time Oy might not be so lucky.

“Ake!” Oy barked, not moving. The bark was assertive, but Roland thought he saw more of the truth about how Oy felt in his eyes: they were dark with fear.

“Yes, but it’s dangerous,” Roland said. “To me, Oy.”

Back the way they had come, there was a thud as something heavy fell, probably dislodged by the punishing vibration of the drums. Roland could now see speaker-poles here and there, poking out of the wreckage like strange long-necked animals.

Oy trotted back to him and looked up, panting.

“Stay close.”

“Ake! Ake-Ake!”

“Yes. Jake.” He began to run again, and Oy ran beside him, heeling as neatly as any dog Roland had ever seen.

21

FOR EDDIE, IT WAS, as some wise man had once said, deja vu all over again: he was running with the wheelchair, racing time. The beach had been replaced by The Street of the Turtle, but somehow everything else was the same. Oh, there was one other relevant difference: now it was a railway station (or a cradle) he was looking for, not a free-standing door.

Susannah was sitting bolt upright with her hair blowing out behind her and Roland’s revolver in her right hand, its barrel pointed up at the cloudy, troubled sky. The drums thudded and pounded, bludgeoning them with sound. A gigantic, dish-shaped object lay in the street just ahead, and Eddie’s overstrained mind, perhaps cued by the classical buildings on either side of them, produced an image of Jove and Thor playing Frisbee. Jove throws one wide and Thor lets it fall through a cloud-what the hell, it’s Miller Time on Olympus, anyway.

Frisbees of the gods, he thought, swerving Susannah between two crumbling, rusty cars, what a concept.

He bumped the chair up on the sidewalk to get around the artifact, which looked like some sort of telecommunications dish now that he was really close to it. He was easing the wheelchair over the curb and back into the street again-the sidewalk was too littered with crap to make any real time-when the drums suddenly cut out. The echoes rolled away into a new silence, except it wasn’t really silent at all, Eddie realized. Up ahead, the arched entrance to a marble building stood at the intersection of The Street of the Turtle and another avenue. This building had been overgrown by vines and some straggly green stuff that looked like cypress beards, but it was still magnificent and somehow dignified. Beyond it, around the corner, a crowd was babbling excitedly.

“Don’t stop!” Susannah snapped. “We haven’t got time to-”

A hysterical shriek drilled through the babble. It was accompanied by yells of approval, and, incredibly, the sort of applause Eddie had heard in Atlantic City hotel-casinos after some lounge act had finished doing its thing. The shriek was choked into a long, dying gargle that sounded like the buzz of a cicada. Eddie felt the hair on the nape of his neck coming to attention. He glanced at the corpses hanging from the nearest speaker-pole and understood that the fun-loving Pubes of Lud were holding another public execution.

Marvellous, he thought. Now if they only had Tony Orlando and Dawn to sing “Knock Three Times,” they could all die happy.

Eddie looked curiously at the stone pile on the corner. This close, the vines which overgrew it had a powerful herbal smell. That smell was eye-wateringly bitter, but he still liked it better than the cinnamon-sweet odor of the mummified corpses. The beards of greenery growing from the vines drooped in ratty sheaves, creating waterfalls of vegetation where once there had been a series of arched entrances. A figure suddenly barrelled out through one of these waterfalls and hurried toward them. It was a kid, Eddie realized, and not that many years out of diapers, judging by the size. He was wearing a weird little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, complete with ruffled white shirt and velveteen short pants. There were ribbons in his hair. Eddie felt a sudden mad urge to wave his hands above his head and scream But-wheat say, “Lud is o-tay!”

“Come on!” the kid cried in a high, piping voice. Several sprays of the green stuff had gotten caught in his hair; he brushed absently at these with his left hand as he ran. “They’re gonna do Spankers! It’s the Spankerman’s turn to go to the land of the drums! Come on or you’ll miss the whole fakement, gods cuss it!”

Susannah was equally stunned by the child’s appearance, but as he got closer, it struck her that there was something extremely odd and awkward about the way he was brushing at the crumbles and strands of greenery which had gotten caught in his beribboned hair: he kept using just that one hand. His other had been behind his back when he ran out through the weedy waterfall, and there it remained.

How awkward that must be! she thought, and then a tape-player turned on in her mind and she heard Roland speaking at the end of the bridge. I knew something like this could happen… if we’d seen the fellow earlier, while we were still beyond the range of his exploding egg… Damn the luck!

She levelled Roland’s gun at the child, who had leaped from the curb and was running straight for them. “Hold it!” she screamed. “Stand still, you!”

“Suze, what are you doing?” Eddie yelled.

Susannah ignored him. In a very real sense, Susannah Dean was no longer even here; it was Detta Walker in the chair now, and her eyes were glittering with feverish suspicion. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Little Lord Fauntleroy might have been deaf for all the effect her warning had. “Hoss it!” he shouted jubilantly. “Yer gointer miss the whole show! Spanker’s gointer-”

His right hand finally began to come out from behind his back. As it did, Eddie realized they weren’t looking at a kid but at a misshapen dwarf whose childhood was many years past. The expression Eddie had at first taken for childish glee was actually a chilly mixture of hate and rage. The dwarf’s cheeks and brow were covered with the oozing, discolored patches Roland called whore’s blossoms.

Susannah never saw his face. Her attention was fixed on the emerging right hand, and the dull green sphere it held. That was all she needed to see. Roland’s gun crashed. The dwarf was hammered backward. A shrill cry of pain and rage rose from his tiny mouth as he landed on the sidewalk. The grenade bounced out of his hand and rolled back into the same arch through which he had emerged.

Detta was gone like a dream, and Susannah looked from the smoking gun to the tiny, sprawled figure on the sidewalk with surprise, horror, and dismay. “Oh, my Jesus! I shot him! Eddie, I shot him!”

“Grays… die!”

Little Lord Fauntleroy tried to scream these words defiantly, but they came out in a bubbling choke of blood that drenched the few remaining white patches on his frilly shirt. There was a muffled explosion from inside the overgrown plaza of the corner building, and the shaggy carpets of green stuff hanging in front of the arches billowed outward like flags in a brisk gale. With them came clouds of choking, acrid smoke. Eddie flung himself on top of Susannah to shield her, and felt a gritty shower of concrete fragments-all small ones, luckily-patter down on his back, his neck, and the crown of his head. There was a series of unpleasantly wet smacking sounds to his left. He opened his eyes a crack, looked in that direction, and saw Little Lord Fauntleroy’s head just coming to a stop in the gutter. The dwarf’s eyes were still open, his mouth still fixed in its final snarl.

Now there were other voices, some shrieking, some yelling, all furious. Eddie rolled off Susannah’s chair-it tottered on one wheel before deciding to stay up-and stared in the direction from which the dwarf had come. A ragged mob of about twenty men and women had appeared, some coming from around the corner, others pushing through the mats of foliage which obscured the corner building’s arches, materializing from the smoke of the dwarf’s grenade like evil spirits. Most were wearing blue headscarves and all were carrying weapons-a varied (and somehow pitiful) assortment of them which included rusty swords, dull knives, and splintery clubs. Eddie saw one man defiantly waving a hammer. Pubes, Eddie thought. We interrupted their necktie party, and they’re pissed as hell about it.

A tangle of shouts-Kill the Grays! Kill them both! They’ve done for Luster, God kill their eyes!-arose from this charming group as they caught sight of Susannah in her wheelchair and Eddie, who was now crouched on one knee before it. The man in the forefront was wearing a kilt-like wrap and waving a cutlass. He brandished this wildly (he would have decapitated the heavyset woman standing close behind him, had she not ducked) and then charged. The others followed, yelling happily.

Roland’s gun pounded its bright thunder into the windy, overcast day, and the top of the kilt-wearing Pube’s head lifted off. The sallow skin of the woman who had almost been decapitated by his cutlass was suddenly stippled with red rain and she voiced a sound of barking dismay. The others came on past the woman and the dead man, raving and wild-eyed.

“Eddie!” Susannah screamed, and fired again. A man wearing a silk-lined cape and knee-boots collapsed into the street.

Eddie groped for the’ Ruger and had one panicky moment when he thought he had lost it. The butt of the gun had somehow slipped down inside the waistband of his pants. He wrapped his hand around it and yanked hard. The fucking thing wouldn’t come. The sight at the end of the barrel had somehow gotten stuck in his underwear.

Susannah fired three closely spaced shots. Each found a target, but the oncoming Pubes didn’t slow.

“Eddie, help me!”

Eddie tore his pants open, feeling like some cut-rate version of Superman, and finally managed to free the Ruger. He hit the safety with the heel of his left palm, placed his elbow on his leg just above the knee, and began to fire. There was no need to think-no need to even aim. Roland had told them that in battle a gunslinger’s hands worked on their own, and Eddie now discovered it was true. It would have been hard for a blind man to miss at this range, anyway. Susannah had cut the numbers of the charging Pubes to no more than fifteen; Eddie went through the remainder like a storm wind in a wheatfield, dropping four in less than two seconds.

Now the single face of the mob, that look of glazed and mindless eagerness, began to break apart. The man with the hammer abruptly tossed his weapon aside and ran for it, limping extravagantly on a pair of arthritis-twisted legs. He was followed by two others. The rest of them milled uncertainly in the street.

“Come on, you deucies!” a relatively young man snarled. He wore his blue scarf around his throat like a rally-racer’s ascot. He was bald except for two fluffs of frizzy red hair, one on each side of his head. To Susannah, this fellow looked like Clarabell the Clown; to Eddie he looked like Ronald McDonald; to both of them he looked like trouble. He threw a home-made spear that might have started life as a steel tableleg. It clattered harmlessly into the street to Eddie and Susannah’s right. “Come on, I say! We can get em if we all stick togeth-”

“Sorry, guy,” Eddie murmured, and shot him in the chest.

Clarabell/Ronald staggered backward, one hand going to his shirt.

He stared at Eddie with huge eyes that told his tale with heartbreaking clarity: this wasn’t supposed to happen. The hand dropped heavily to the young man’s side. A single runlet of blood, incredibly bright in the gray day, slipped from the comer of his mouth. The few remaining Pubes stared at him mutely as he slipped to his knees, and one of them turned to run.

“Not at all,” Eddie said. “Stay put, my retarded friend, or you’re going to get a good look at the clearing where your path ends.” He raised his voice. “Drop em, boys and girls! All of em! Now!”

“You…” the dying man whispered. “You… gunslinger?”

“That’s right,” Eddie said. His eyes surveyed the remaining Pubes grimly.

“Cry your… pardon,” the man with the frizzy red hair gasped, and then he fell forward onto his face.

“Gunslingers?” one of the others asked. His tone was one of dawning horror and realization.

“Well, you’re stupid, but you ain’t deaf,” Susannah said, “and that’s somethin, anyway.” She waggled the barrel of the gun, which Eddie was quite sure was empty. For that matter, how many rounds could be left in the Ruger? He realized he didn’t have any idea how many rounds the clip held, and cursed himself for a fool… but had he really believed it could come to something like this? He didn’t think so. “You heard him, folks. Drop em. Recess is over.”

One by one, they complied. The woman who was wearing a pint or so of Mr. Sword-and-Kilt’s blood on her face said, “You shouldn’t’ve killed Winston, missus-’twas his birthday, so it was.”

“Well, I guess he should have stayed home and eaten some more birthday cake,” Eddie said. Given the overall quality of this experience, he didn’t find either the woman’s comment or his own response at all surreal.

There was one other woman among the remaining Pubes, a scrawny thing whose long blonde hair was coming out in big patches, as if she had the mange. Eddie observed her sidling toward the dead dwarf-and the potential safety of the overgrown arches beyond him-and put a bullet into the cracked cement close by her foot. He had no idea what he wanted with her, but what he didn’t want was one of them giving the rest of them ideas. For one thing, he was afraid of what his hands might do if the sickly, sullen people before him tried to run. Whatever his head thought about this gunslinging business, his hands had discovered they liked it just fine.

“Stand where you are, beautiful. Officer Friendly says play it safe.” He glanced at Susannah and was disturbed by the grayish quality of her complexion. “Suze, you all right?” he asked in a lower voice.

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to faint or anything, are you? Because-”

“No.” She looked at him with eyes so dark they were like caves. “It’s just that I never shot anyone before… okay?”

Well, you better get used to it rose to his lips. He bit it back and returned his gaze to the five people who remained before them. They were looking at him and Susannah with a species of sullen fear which nevertheless stopped well short of terror.

Shit, most of them have forgotten what terror is, he thought. Joy, sadness, love… same thing. I don’t think they feel much of anything, anymore. They’ve been living in this purgatory too long.

Then he remembered the laughter, the excited cries, the lounge-act applause, and revised his thinking. There was at least one thing that still got their motors running, one thing that still pushed their buttons. Spanker could have testified to that.

“Who’s in charge here?” Eddie asked. He was watching the intersection behind the little group very carefully in case the others should get their courage back. So far he saw and heard nothing alarming from that direction. He thought that the others had probably left this ragged crew to its fate.

They looked at each other uncertainly, and finally the woman with the blood-spattered face spoke up. “Spanker was, but when the god-drums started up this time, it was Spanker’s stone what come out of the hat and we set him to dance. I guess Winston would have come next, but you did for him with your god-rotted guns, so you did.” She wiped blood deliberately from her cheek, looked at it, and then returned her sullen glance to Eddie.

“Well, what do you think Winston was trying to do to me with his god-rotted spear?” Eddie asked. He was disgusted to find the woman had actually made him feel guilty about what he had done. “Trim my sideburns?”

“Killed Frank ’n Luster, too,” she went on doggedly, “and what are you? Either Grays, which is bad, or a couple of god-rotted outlanders, which is worse. Who’s left for the Pubes in City North? Topsy, I suppose-Topsy the Sailor-but he ain’t here, is he? Took his boat and went off downriver, ay, so he did, and god rot him, too, says I!”

Susannah had ceased listening; her mind had fixed with horrified fascination on something the woman had said earlier. It was Spanker’s stone what come out of the hat and we set him to dance. She remembered reading Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” in college and understood that these people, the degenerate descendents of the original Pubes, were living Jackson’s nightmare. No wonder they weren’t capable of any strong emotion when they knew they would have to participate in such a grisly drawing not once a year, as in the story, but two or three times each day.

“Why?” she asked the bloody woman in a harsh, horrified voice. “Why do you do it?”

The woman looked at Susannah as if she was the world’s biggest fool. “Why? So the ghosts what live in the machines won’t take over the bodies of those who have died here-Pubes and Grays alike-and send them up through the holes in the streets to eat us. Any fool knows that.”

“There are no such things as ghosts,” Susannah said, and her voice sounded like so much meaningless quacking to her own ears. Of course there were. In this world, there were ghosts everywhere. Nevertheless, she pushed ahead. “What you call the god-drums is only a tape stuck in a machine. That’s really all it is.” Sudden inspiration struck her and she added: “Or maybe the Grays are doing it on purpose-did you ever think of that? They live in the other part of the city, don’t they? And under it, as well? They’ve always wanted you out. Maybe they’ve just hit on a really efficient way of getting you guys to do their work for them.”

The bloody woman was standing next to an elderly gent wearing what looked like the world’s oldest bowler hat and a pair of frayed khaki shorts. Now he stepped forward and spoke to her with a patina of good manners that turned his underlying contempt into a dagger with razor-sharp edges. “You are quite wrong, Madam Gunslinger. There are a great many machines under Lud, and there are ghosts in all of them- demonous spirits which bear only ill will to mortal men and women. These demon-ghosts are very capable of raising the dead… and in Lud, there are a great many dead to raise.”

“Listen,” Eddie said. “Have you ever seen one of these zombies with your own eyes, Jeeves? Have any of you?”

Jeeves curled his lip and said nothing-but that lip-curl really said it all. What else could one expect, it asked, from outlanders who used guns as a substitute for understanding?

Eddie decided it would be best to close off the whole line of discussion. He had never been cut out for missionary work, anyway. He waggled the Ruger at the bloodstained woman. “You and your friend there- the one who looks like an English butler on his day off-are going to take us to the railroad station. After that, we can all say goodbye, and I’ll tell you the truth: that’s going to make my fuckin day.”

“Railroad station?” the guy who looked like Jeeves the Butler asked. “What is a railroad station?”

“Take us to the cradle,” Susannah said. “Take us to Blaine.”

This finally rattled Jeeves; an expression of shocked horror replaced the world-weary contempt with which he had thus far treated them. “You can’t go there!” he cried. “The cradle is forbidden ground, and Blaine is the most dangerous of all Lud’s ghosts!”

Forbidden ground? Eddie thought. Great. If it’s the truth, at least we’ll be able to stop worrying about you assholes. It was also nice to hear that there still was a Blaine… or that these people thought there was, anyway.

The others were staring at Eddie and Susannah with expressions of uncomprehending amazement; it was as if the interlopers had suggested to a bunch of born-again Christians that they hunt up the Ark of the Covenant and turn it into a pay toilet.

Eddie raised the Ruger until the center of Jeeves’s forehead lay in the sight. “We’re going,” he said, “and if you don’t want to join your ancestors right here and now, I suggest you stop pissing and moaning and take us there.”

Jeeves and the bloodstained woman exchanged an uncertain glance, but when the man in the bowler hat looked back at Eddie and Susannah, his face was firm and set. “Shoot us if you like,” he said. “We’d sooner die here than there.”

“You folks are a bunch of sick motherfuckers with dying on the brain!” Susannah cried at them. “Nobody has to die! Just take us where we want to go, for the love of God!”

The woman said somberly, “But it is death to enter Blaine’s cradle, mum, so it is. For Blaine sleeps, and he who disturbs his rest must pay a high price.”

“Come on, beautiful,” Eddie snapped. “You can’t smell the coffee with your head up your ass.”

“I don’t know what that means,” she said with an odd and perplexing dignity.

“It means you can take us to the cradle and risk the Wrath of Blaine, or you can stand your ground here and experience the Wrath of Eddie. It doesn’t have to be a nice clean head-shot, you know. I can take you a piece at a time, and I’m feeling just mean enough to do it. I’m having a very bad day in your city-the music sucks, everybody has a bad case of b.o., and the first guy we saw threw a grenade at us and kidnapped our friend. So what do you say?”

“Why would you go to Blaine in any case?” one of the others asked. “He stirs no more from his berth in the cradle-not for years now. He has even stopped speaking in his many voices and laughing.”

Speaking in his many voices and laughing? Eddie thought. He looked at Susannah. She looked back and shrugged.

“Ardis was the last to go nigh Blaine,” the bloodstained woman said.

Jeeves nodded somberly. “Ardis always was a fool when he were in drink. Blaine asked him some question. I heard it, hut it made no sense to me-something about the mother of ravens, I think-and when Ardis couldn’t answer what was asked, Blaine slew him with blue fire.”

“Electricity?” Eddie asked.

Jeeves and the bloodstained woman both nodded. “Ay,” the woman said. “Electricity, so it were called in the old days, so it were.”

“You don’t have to go in with us,” Susannah proposed suddenly. “Just get us within sight of the place. We’ll go the rest of the way on our own.”

The woman looked at her mistrustfully, and then Jeeves pulled her head close to his lips and mumbled in her ear for a while. The other Pubes stood behind them in a ragged line, looking at Eddie and Susannah with the dazed eyes of people who have survived a bad air-raid.

At last the woman looked around. “Ay,” she said. “We’ll take you nigh the cradle, and then it’s good riddance to bad swill.”

“My idea exactly,” Eddie said. “You and Jeeves. The rest of you, scatter.” He swept them with his eyes. “But remember this-one spear thrown from ambush, one arrow, one brick, and these two die.” This threat came out sounding so weak and pointless that Eddie wished he hadn’t made it. How could they possibly care for these two, or for any of the individual members of their clan, when they dusted two or more of them each and every day? Well, he thought, watching the others trot off without so much as a backward glance, it was too late to worry about that now.

“Come on,” the woman said. “I want to be done with you.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Eddie replied.

But before she and Jeeves led them away, the woman did something which made Eddie repent a little of his hard thoughts: knelt, brushed back the hair of the man in the kilt, and placed a kiss on his dirty cheek. “Goodbye, Winston,” she said. “Wait for me where the trees clear and the water’s sweet. I’ll come to ye, ay, as sure as dawn makes shadows run west.”

“I didn’t want to kill him,” Susannah said. “I want you to know that. But I wanted to die even less.”

“Ay.” The face that turned toward Susannah was stem and tearless. “But if ye mean to enter Blaine’s cradle, ye’ll die anyway. And the chances are that ye’ll die envying poor old Winston. He’s cruel, is Blaine. The crudest of all demons in this cruel, cruel place.”

“Come on, Maud,” Jeeves said, and helped her up.

“Ay. Let’s finish with them.” She surveyed Susannah and Eddie again, her eyes stem but somehow confused, as well. “Gods curse my eyes that they should ever have happened on you two in the first place.

And gods curse the guns ye carry, as well, for they were always the springhead of our troubles.”

And with that attitude, Susannah thought, your troubles are going to last at least a thousand years, sugar.

Maud set a rapid pace along The Street of the Turtle. Jeeves trotted beside her. Eddie, who was pushing Susannah in the wheelchair, was soon panting and struggling to keep up. The palatial buildings which lined their way spread out until they resembled ivy-covered country houses on huge, run-to-riot lawns, and Eddie realized they had entered what had once been a very ritzy neighborhood indeed. Ahead of them, one building loomed above all others. It was a deceptively simple square construction of white stone blocks, its overhanging roof supported by many pillars. Eddie thought again of the gladiator movies he’d so enjoyed as a kid. Susannah, educated in more formal schools, was reminded of the Parthenon. Both saw and marvelled at the gorgeously sculpted bestiary- Bear and Turtle, Fish and Rat, Horse and Dog-which ringed the top of the building in two-by-two parade, and understood it was the place they had come to find.

That uneasy sensation that they were being watched by many eyes- eyes filled equally with hate and wonder-never left them. Thunder boomed as they came in sight of the monorail track; like the storm, the track came sweeping in from the south, joined The Street of the Turtle, and ran straight on toward the Cradle of Lud. And as they neared it, ancient bodies began to twist and dance in the strengthening wind on either side of them.

22

AFTER THEY HAD RUN for God knew how long (all Jake knew for sure was that the drums had stopped again), Gasher once more yanked him to a stop. This time Jake managed to keep his feet. He had gotten his second wind. Gasher, who would never see eleven again, had not.

“Hoo! My old pump’s doing nip-ups, sweetie.”

“Too bad,” Jake said unfeelingly, then stumbled backward as Gasher’s gnarled hand connected with the side of his face.

“Yar, you’d cry a bitter tear if I dropped dead right here, woontcher? Too likely! But no such luck, my fine young squint-old Gasher’s seen em come and seen em go, and I wasn’t born to drop dead at the feet of any little sweetcheeks berry like you.”

Jake listened to these incoherencies impassively. He meant to see Gasher dead before the day was over. Gasher might take Jake with him, but Jake no longer cared about that. He dabbed blood from his freshly split lip and looked at it thoughtfully, wondering at how quickly the desire to do murder could invade and conquer the human heart.

Gasher observed Jake looking at his bloody fingers and grinned. “Sap’s runnin, ennet? Nor will it be the last your old pal Gasher beats out of your young tree, unless you look sharp; unless you look wery sharp indeed.” He pointed down at the cobbled surface of the narrow alley they were currently negotiating. There was a rusty manhole cover there, and Jake realized he had seen the words stamped into the steel not long ago: LaMERK FOUNDRY, they said.

“There’s a grip on the side,” Gasher said. “Yer see? Get your hands into that and pull away. Step lively, now, and maybe ye’ll still have all your teeth when ye meet up with Tick-Tock.”

Jake grasped the steel cover and pulled. He pulled hard, but not quite as hard as he could have done. The maze of streets and alleys through which Gasher had run him was bad, but at least he could see. He couldn’t imagine what it might be like in the underworld below the city, where the blackness would preclude even dreams of escape, and he didn’t intend to find out unless he absolutely had to.

Gasher quickly made it clear to him that he did.

“It’s too heavy for-” Jake began, and then the pirate seized him by the throat and yanked him upward until they were face to face. The long run through the alleys had brought a thin, sweaty flush to his cheeks and turned the sores eating into his flesh an ugly yellow-purple color. Those which were open exuded thick infected matter and threads of blood in steady pulses. Jake caught just a whiff of Gasher’s thick stench before his wind was cut off by the hand which had encircled his throat.

“Listen, you stupid cull, and listen well, for this is your last warning. You yank that fucking streethead off right now or I’ll reach into your mouth and rip the living tongue right out of it. And feel free to bite all you want while I do it, for what I have runs in the blood and you’ll see the first blossoms on yer own face before the week’s out-if yer lives that long. Now, do you see?”

Jake nodded frantically. Gasher’s face was disappearing into deepening folds of gray, and his voice seemed to be coming from a great distance.

“All right.” Gasher shoved him backward. Jake fell in a heap beside the manhole cover, gagging and retching. He finally managed to draw in a deep, whooping breath that burned like liquid fire. He spat out a blood-flecked wad of stuff and almost threw up at the sight of it.

“Now yank back that cover, my heart’s delight, and let’s have no more natter about it.

Jake crawled over to it, slid his hands into the grip, and this time pulled with all his might. For one terrible moment he thought he was still not going to be able to budge it. Then he imagined Gasher’s fingers reaching into his mouth and seizing his tongue, and found a little extra. There was a dull, spreading agony in his lower back as something gave there, but the circular lid slipped slowly aside, grinding on the cobbles and exposing a grinning crescent of darkness.

“Good, cully, good!” Gasher cried cheerfully. “What a little mule y’are! Keep pulling-don’t give up now!”

When the crescent had become a half-moon and the pain in Jake’s lower back was a white-hot fire, Gasher booted him in the ass, knocking him asprawl.

“Wery good!” Gasher said, peering in. “Now, cully, go smartly down the ladder on the side. Mind you don’t lose your grip and tumble all the way to the bottom, for those rungs are fearsome slick and greezy. There’s twenty or so, as I remember. And when you get to the bottom, stand stock-still and wait for me. You might feel like runnin from yer old pal, but do you think that would be a good idea?”

“No,” Jake said. “I suppose not.”

“Wery intelligent, old son!” Gasher’s lips spread in his hideous smile, once more revealing his few surviving teeth. “It’s dark down there, and there are a thousand tunnels going every which-a-way. Yer old pal Gasher knows em like the back of his hand, so he does, but you’d be lost in no time. Then there’s the rats-wery big and wery hungry they are. So you just wait.”

“I will.”

Gasher regarded him narrowly. “You speak just like a little triggie, you do, but you’re no Pube-I’ll set my watch and warrant to that. Where are you from, squint?”

Jake said nothing.

“Bumbler got your tongue, do he? Well, that’s all right; Tick-Tock’ll get it all out of you, so he will. He’s got a way about him, Ticky does; just naturally wants to make people conwerse. Once he gets em goin, they sometimes talks so fast and screams so loud someone has to hit em over the head to slow em down. Bumblers ain’t allowed to hold no one’s tongue around the Tick-Tock Man, not even fine young triggers like you. Now get the fuck down that ladder. Hup!”

He lashed out with his foot. This time Jake managed to tuck in and dodge the blow. He looked into the half-open manhole, saw the ladder, and started down. He was still chest-high to the alley when a tremendous stonelike crash hammered the air. It came from a mile or more away, but Jake knew what it was without having to be told. A cry of pure misery burst from his lips.

A grim smile tugged at the corners of Gasher’s mouth. “Your hard-case friend trailed ye a little better than ye thought he would, didn’t he?

Not better than I thought, though, cully, for I got a look at his eyes- wery pert and cunning they were. I thought he’d come arter his juicy little night-nudge a right smart, if he was to come at all, and so he did. He spied the tripwires, but the fountain’s got him, so that’s all right. Get on, sweetcheeks.”

He aimed a kick at Jake’s protruding head. Jake ducked it, but one foot slipped on the ladder bolted to the side of the sewer shaft and he only saved himself from falling by clutching Gasher’s scab-raddled ankle. He looked up, pleading, and saw no softening on that dying, infected face.

“Please,” he said, and heard the word trying to break into a sob. He kept seeing Roland lying crushed beneath the huge fountain. What had Gasher said? If anyone wanted him, they would have to pick him up with a blotter.

“Beg if you want, dear heart. Just don’t expect no good to come of it, for mercy stops on this side of the bridge, so it does. Now go down, or I’ll kick your bleedin brains right outcher bleedin ears.”

So Jake went down, and by the time he reached the standing water at the bottom, the urge to cry had passed. He waited, shoulders slumped and head down, for Gasher to descend and lead him to his fate.

23

ROLAND HAD COME CLOSE to tripping the crossed wires which held back the avalanche of junk, but the dangling fountain was absurd-a trap which might have been set by a stupid child. Cort had taught them to constantly check all visual quadrants as they moved in enemy territory, and that included above as well as behind and below.

“Stop,” he told Oy, raising his voice to be heard over the drums.

“Op!” Oy agreed, then looked ahead and immediately added, “Ake!”

“Yes.” The gunslinger took another look up at the suspended marble fountain, then examined the street, looking for the trigger. There were two, he saw. Perhaps their camouflage as cobblestones had once been effective, but that time was long past. Roland bent down, hands on his knees, and spoke into Oy’s upturned face. “Going to pick you up for a minute now. Don’t fuss, Oy.”

“Oy!”

Roland put his arms around the bumbler. At first Oy stiffened and attempted to pull away, and then Roland felt the small animal give in. He wasn’t happy about being this close to someone who wasn’t Jake, but he clearly intended to put up with it. Roland found himself wondering again just how intelligent Oy was.

He carried him up the narrow passage and beneath The Hanging Fountain of Lud, stepping carefully over the mock cobbles. Once they were safely past, he bent to let Oy go. As he did, the drums stopped.

“Ake!” Oy said impatiently. “Ake-Ake!”

“Yes-but there’s a little piece of business to attend to first.”

He led Oy fifteen yards farther down the alley, then bent and picked up a chunk of concrete. He tossed it thoughtfully from hand to hand, and as he did, he heard the sound of a pistol-shot from the east. The amplified thump of the drums had buried the sound of Eddie and Susannah’s battle with the ragged band of Pubes, but he heard this gunshot clearly and smiled-it almost surely meant that the Deans had reached the cradle, and that was the first good news of this day, which already seemed at least a week long.

Roland turned and threw the piece of concrete. His aim was as true as it had been when he had thrown at the ancient traffic signal in River Crossing; the missile struck one of the discolored triggers dead center, and one of the rusty cables snapped with a harsh twang. The marble fountain dropped, rolling over as the other cable snubbed it for a moment longer-long enough so that a man with fast reflexes could have cleared the drop-zone anyway, Roland reckoned. Then it too let go, and the fountain fell like a pink, misshapen stone.

Roland dropped behind a pile of rusty steel beams and Oy jumped nimbly into his lap as the fountain hit the street with a vast, shattery thump. Chunks of pink marble, some as big as carts, flew through the air. Several small chips stung Roland’s face. He brushed others out of Oy’s fur. He looked over the makeshift barricade. The fountain had cracked in two like a vast plate. We won’t be coming back this way, Roland thought. The passageway, narrow to begin with, was now completely blocked.

He wondered if Jake had heard the fall of the fountain, and what he had made of it if he had. He didn’t waste such speculation on Gasher; Gasher would think he had been crushed to paste, which was exactly what Roland wanted him to think. Would Jake think the same thing? The boy should know better than to believe a gunslinger could be killed by such a simple device, but if Gasher had terrorized him enough, Jake might not be thinking that clearly. Well, it was too late to worry about it now, and if he had it to do over again, he would do exactly the same thing. Dying or not, Gasher had displayed both courage and animal cunning. If he was off his guard now, the trick was worth it.

Roland got to his feet. “Oy-find Jake.”

“Ake!” Oy stretched his head forward on his long neck, sniffed around in a semicircle, picked up Jake’s scent, and was off again with Roland running after. Ten minutes later he came to a stop at a manhole cover in the street, sniffed all the way around it, then looked up at Roland and barked shrilly.

The gunslinger dropped to one knee and observed both the confusion of tracks and a wide path of scratches on the cobbles. He thought this particular manhole cover had been moved quite often. His eyes narrowed as he saw the wad of bloody phlegm in a crease between two nearby cobbles.

“The bastard keeps hitting him,” he murmured.

He pulled the manhole cover back, looked down, then untied the rawhide lacings which held his shirt closed. He picked the bumbler up and tucked him into his shirt. Oy bared his teeth, and for a moment Roland felt his claws splayed against the flesh of his chest and belly like small sharp knives. Then they withdrew and Oy only peered out of Roland’s shirt with his bright eyes, panting like a steam engine. The gunslinger could feel the rapid beat of Oy’s heart against his own. He pulled the rawhide lace from the eyelets in his shirt and found another, longer, lace in his purse.

“I’m going to leash you. I don’t like it and you’re going to like it even less, but it’s going to be very dark down there.”

He tied the two lengths of rawhide together and formed one end into a wide loop which he slipped over Oy’s head. He expected Oy to bare his teeth again, perhaps even to nip him, but Oy didn’t. He only looked up at Roland with his gold-ringed eyes and barked “Ake!” again in his impatient voice.

Roland put the loose end of his makeshift leash in his mouth, then sat down on the edge of the sewer shaft… if that was what it was. He felt for the top rung of the ladder and found it. He descended slowly and carefully, more aware than ever that he was missing half a hand and that the steel rungs were slimy with oil and some thicker stuff that was probably moss. Oy was a heavy, warm weight between his shirt and belly, panting steadily and harshly. The gold rings in his eyes gleamed like medallions in the dim light.

At last, the gunslinger’s groping foot splashed into the water at the bottom of the shaft. He glanced up briefly at the coin of white light far above him. This is where it starts getting hard, he thought. The tunnel was warm and dank and smelled like an ancient charnel house. Somewhere nearby, water was dripping hollowly and monotonously. Farther off, Roland could hear the rumble of machinery. He lifted a very grateful Oy out of his shirt and set him down in the shallow water running sluggishly along the sewer tunnel.

“Now it’s all up to you,” he murmured in the bumbler’s ear. “To Jake, Oy. To Jake!”

“Ake!” the bumbler barked, and splashed rapidly off into the darkness, swinging his head from side to side at the end of his long neck like a pendulum. Roland followed with the end of the rawhide leash wrapped around his diminished right hand.

24

THE CRADLE-IT WAS easily big enough to have acquired proper-noun status in their minds-stood in the center of a square five times larger than the one where they had come upon the blasted statue, and when she got a really good look at it, Susannah realized how old and gray and fundamentally grungy the rest of Lud really was. The Cradle was so clean it almost hurt her eyes. No vines overgrew its sides; no graffiti daubed its blinding white walls and steps and columns. The yellow plains dust which had coated everything else was absent here. As they drew closer, Susannah saw why: streams of water coursed endlessly down the sides of the Cradle, issuing from nozzles hidden in the shadows of the copper-sheathed eaves. Interval sprays created by other hidden nozzles washed the steps, turning them into off-and-on waterfalls.

“Wow,” Eddie said. “It makes Grand Central look like a Greyhound station in Buttfuck, Nebraska.”

“What a poet you are, dear,” Susannah said dryly.

The steps surrounded the entire building and rose to a great open lobby. There were no obscuring mats of vegetation here, but Eddie and Susannah found they still couldn’t get a good look inside; the shadows thrown by the overhanging roof were too deep. The Totems of the Beam marched all the way around the building, two by two, but the corners were reserved for creatures Susannah fervently hoped never to meet outside of the occasional nightmare-hideous stone dragons with scaly bodies, clutching, claw-tipped hands, and nasty peering eyes.

Eddie touched her shoulder and pointed higher. Susannah looked… and felt her breath come to a stop in her throat. Standing astride the peak of the roof, far above The Totems of the Beam and the dragonish gargoyles, as if given dominion over them, was a golden warrior at least sixty feet high. A battered cowboy hat was shoved back to reveal his lined and careworn brow; a bandanna hung askew on his upper chest, as if it had just been pulled down after serving long, hard duty as a dust-muffle. In one upraised fist he held a revolver; in the other, what appeared to be an olive branch.

Roland of Gilead stood atop the Cradle of Lud, dressed in gold.

No, she thought, at last remembering to breathe again. It’s not him… but in another way, it is. That man was a gunslinger, and the resemblance between him, who’s probably been dead a thousand years or more, and Roland is all the truth of ka-tet you’ll ever need to know.

Thunder slammed out of the south. Lightning harried racing clouds across the sky. She wished she had more time to study both the golden statue which stood atop the Cradle and the animals which surrounded it; each of these latter appeared to have words carved upon them, and she had an idea that what was written there might be knowledge worth having. Under these circumstances, however, there was no time to spare.

A wide red strip had been painted across the pavement at the point where The Street of the Turtle emptied into The Plaza of the Cradle. Maud and the fellow Eddie called Jeeves the Butler stopped a prudent distance from the red mark.

“This far and no farther,” Maud told them flatly. “You may take us to our deaths, but each man and woman owes one to the gods anyway, and I’ll die on this side of the dead-line no matter what. I’ll not dare Blaine for outlanders.”

“Nor will I,” Jeeves said. He had taken off his dusty bowler and was holding it against his naked chest. On his face was an expression of fearful reverence.

“Fine,” Susannah said. “Now scat on out of here, both of you.”

“Ye’ll backshoot us the second we turn from ye,” Jeeves said in a trembling voice. “I’ll take my watch and warrant on it, so I will.”

Maud shook her head. The blood on her face had dried to a grotesque maroon stippling. “There never were a backshooting gunslinger- that much I will say.”

“We only have their word for it that that’s what they are.”

Maud pointed to the big revolver with the worn sandalwood grip which Susannah held in her hand. Jeeves looked… and after a moment he stretched out his hand to the woman. When Maud took it, Susannah’s image of them as dangerous killers collapsed. They looked more like Hansel and Gretel than Bonnie and Clyde; tired, frightened, confused, and lost so long in the woods that they had grown old there. Her hate and fear of them departed. What replaced it was pity and a deep, aching sadness.

“Fare you well, both of you,” she said softly. “Walk as you will, and with no fear of harm from me or my man here.”

Maud nodded. “I believe you mean us no harm, and I forgive you for shooting Winston. But listen to me, and listen well: stay out of the Cradle. Whatever reasons you think you have for going in, they’re not good enough. To enter Blaine’s Cradle is death.”

“We don’t have any choice,” Eddie said, and thunder banged overhead again, as if in agreement. “Now let me tell you something. I don’t know what’s underneath Lud and what isn’t, but I do know those drums you’re so whacked out about are part of a recording-a song-that was made in the world my wife and I came from.” He looked at their uncomprehending faces and raised his arms in frustration. “Jesus Pumpkin-Pie Christ, don’t you get it? You’re killing each other over a piece of music that was never even released as a single!”

Susannah put her hand on his shoulder and murmured his name. He ignored her for the moment, his eyes flicking from Jeeves to Maud and then back to Jeeves again.

“You want to see monsters? Take a good look at each other, then. And when you get back to whatever funhouse it is you call home, take a good look at your friends and relatives.”

“You don’t understand,” Maud said. Her eyes were dark and somber. “But you will. Ay-you will.”

“Go on, now,” Susannah said quietly. “Talk between us is no good; the words only drop dead. Just go your way and try to remember the faces of your fathers, for I think you lost sight of those faces long ago.”

The two of them walked back in the direction from which they had come without another word. They did look back over their shoulders from time to time, however, and they were still holding hands: Hansel and Gretel lost in the deep dark forest.

“Lemme outta here,” Eddie said heavily. He made the Ruger safe, stuck it back in the waistband of his pants, and then rubbed his red eyes with the heels of his hands. “Just lemme out, that’s all I ask.”

“I know what you mean, handsome.” She was clearly scared, but her head had that defiant tilt he had come to recognize and love. He put his hands on her shoulders, bent down, and kissed her. He did not let either their surroundings or the oncoming storm keep him from doing a thorough job. When he pulled back at last, she was studying him with wide, dancing eyes. “Wow! What was that about?”

“About how I’m in love with you,” he said, “and I guess that’s about all. Is it enough?”

Her eyes softened. For a moment she thought about telling him the secret she might or might not be keeping, but of course the time and place were wrong-she could no more tell him she might be pregnant now than she could pause to read the words written on the sculpted Portal Totems.

“It’s enough, Eddie,” she said.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” His hazel eyes were totally focused on her. “It’s hard for me to say stuff like that- living with Henry made it hard, I guess-but it’s true. I think I started loving you because you were everything Roland took me away from-in New York, I mean-hut it’s a lot more than that now, because I don’t want to go hack anymore. Do you?”

She looked at the Cradle. She was terrified of what they might find in there, but all the same… she looked back at him. “No, I don’t want to go back. I want to spend the rest of my life going forward. As long as you’re with me, that is. It’s funny, you know, you saying you started loving me because of all the things he took you away from.”

“Funny how?”

“I started loving you because you set me free of Detta Walker.” She paused, thought, then shook her head slightly. “No-it goes further than that. I started loving you because you set me free of both those bitches. One was a foul-mouthed, cock-teasing thief, and the other was a self-righteous, pompous prig. Comes down to six of one and half a dozen of the other, as far as I’m concerned. I like Susannah Dean better than either one… and you were the one who set me free.”

This time it was she who did the reaching, pressing her palm to his stubbly cheeks, drawing him down, kissing him gently. When he put a light hand on her breast, she sighed and covered it with her own.

“I think we better get going,” she said, “or we’re apt to be laying right here in the street… and getting wet, from the look.”

Eddie stared around at the silent towers, the broken windows, the vine-encrusted walls a final time. Then he nodded. “Yeah. I don’t think there’s any future in this town, anyway.”

He pushed her forward, and they both stiffened as the wheels of the chair passed over what Maud had called the dead-line, fearful that they would trip some ancient protective device and die together. But nothing happened. Eddie pushed her into the plaza, and as they approached the steps leading up to the Cradle, a cold, wind-driven rain began to fall.

Although neither of them knew it, the first of the great autumn storms of Mid-World had arrived.

25

ONCE THEY WERE IN the smelly darkness of the sewers, Gasher slowed the killing pace he’d maintained aboveground. Jake didn’t think it was because of the darkness; Gasher seemed to know every twist and turn of the route he was following, just as advertised. Jake believed it was because his captor was satisfied that Roland had been squashed to jelly by the deadfall trap.

Jake himself had begun to wonder.

If Roland had spotted the tripwires-a far more subtle trap than the one which followed-was it really likely that he had missed seeing the fountain? Jake supposed it was possible, but it didn’t make much sense. Jake thought it more likely that Roland had tripped the fountain on purpose, to lull Gasher and perhaps slow him down. He didn’t believe Roland could follow them through this maze under the streets-the total darkness would defeat even the gunslinger’s tracking abilities-but it cheered his heart to think that Roland might not have died in an attempt to keep his promise.

They turned right, left, then left again. As Jake’s other senses sharpened in an attempt to compensate for his lack of sight, he had a vague perception of other tunnels around him. The muffled sounds of ancient, laboring machinery would grow loud for a moment, then fade as the stone foundations of the city drew close around them again. Drafts blew intermittently against his skin, sometimes warm, sometimes chilly. Their splashing footfalls echoed briefly as they passed the intersecting tunnels from which these stenchy breaths blew, and once Jake nearly brained himself on some metal object jutting down from the ceiling. He slapped at it with one hand and felt something that might have been a large valve-wheel. After that he waved his hands as he trotted along in an attempt to read the air ahead of him.

Gasher guided him with taps to the shoulders, as a waggoner might have guided his oxen. They moved at a good clip, trotting but not running. Gasher got enough of his breath back to first hum and then begin singing in a low, surprisingly tuneful tenor voice.

“Bibble-ti-tibble-ti-ting-ting-ting,

I’ll get a job and buy yer a ring,

When I get my mitts

On yeriggly tits, Ribble-ti-tibble-ti-ting-ting-ting!

O ribble-ti-tibble,

I just wanter fiddle,

Fiddle around with your ting-ting-ting!”

There were five or six more verses along this line before Gasher quit. “Now you sing somethin, squint.”

“I don’t know anything,” Jake puffed. He hoped he sounded more out of breath than he actually was. He didn’t know if it would do him any good or not, but down here in the dark any edge seemed worth trying for.

Gasher brought his elbow down in the center of Jake’s back, almost hard enough to send him sprawling into the ankle-high water running sluggishly through the tunnel they were traversing. “Yon better know sominat, ‘less you want me to rip your ever-lovin spine right outcher back.” He paused, then added: “There’s haunts down here, boy. They live inside the fuckin machines, so they do. Singin keeps em off… don’t you know that? Now sing!”

Jake thought hard, not wanting to earn another love-tap from Gasher, and came up with a song he’d learned in summer day camp at the age of seven or eight. He opened his mouth and began to bawl it into the darkness, listening to the echoes bounce back amid the sounds of running water, falling water, and ancient thudding machinery."My girl’s a corker, she’s a New Yorker, I buy her everything to keep her in style, She got a pair of hips Just like two battleships, Oh boy, that’s how my money goes.My girl’s a dilly, she comes from Philly, I buy her everything to keep her in style, She’s got a pair of eyes Just like two pizza pies, Oh boy, that’s how-“Gasher reached out, seized Jake’s ears as if they were jug-handles, and yanked him to a stop. “There’s a hole right ahead of yer,” he said. “With a voice like yours, squint, it’d be doin the world a mercy to letcher fall in, so it would, but Tick-Tock wouldn’t approve at all, so I reckon ye’re safe for a little longer.” Gasher’s hands left Jake’s ears, which burned like fire, and fastened on the back of his shirt. “Now lean forward until you feel the ladder on the t’other side. And mind you don’t slip and drag us both down!”

Jake leaned cautiously forward, hands outstretched, terrified of falling into a pit he couldn’t see. As he groped for the ladder, he became aware of warm air-clean and almost fragrant-whooshing past his face, and a faint blush of rose-colored light from beneath him. His fingers touched a steel rung and closed over it. The bite-wounds on his left hand broke open again, and he felt warm blood running across his palm.

“Got it?” Gasher asked.

“Yes.”

“Then climb down! What are you waitin for, gods damn it!” Gasher let go of his shirt, and Jake could imagine him drawing his foot back, meaning to hurry him along with a kick in the ass. Jake stepped across the faintly glimmering gap and began to descend the ladder, using his hurt hand as little as possible. This time the rungs were clear of moss and oil, and hardly rusted at all. The shaft was very long and as Jake went down, hurrying to keep Gasher from stepping on his hands with his thick-soled boots, he found himself remembering a movie he’d once seen on TV-Journey to the Center of the Earth.

The throb of machinery grew louder and the rosy glow grew stronger. The machines still didn’t sound right, but his ears told him these were in better shape than the ones above. And when he finally reached the bottom, he found the floor was dry. The new horizontal shaft was square, about six feet high, and sleeved with riveted stainless steel. It stretched away for as far as Jake could see in both directions, straight as a string. He knew instinctively, without even thinking about it, that this tunnel (which had to be at least seventy feet under Lud) also followed the path of the Beam. And somewhere up ahead-Jake was sure of this, although he couldn’t have said why-the train they had come looking for lay directly above it.

Narrow ventilation grilles ran along the sides of the walls just below the shaft’s ceiling; it was from these that the clean, dry air was flowing. Moss dangled from some of them in blue-gray beards, but most were still clear. Below every other grille was a yellow arrow with a symbol that looked a bit like a lower-case t. The arrows pointed in the direction Jake and Gasher were heading.

The rose-colored light was coming from glass tubes which ran along the ceiling of the shaft in parallel rows. Some-about one in every three-were dark, and others sputtered fitfully, but at least half of them were still working. Neon tubing, Jake thought, amazed. How about that?

Gasher dropped down beside him. He saw Jake’s expression of surprise and grinned. “Nice, ennet? Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and so much food that five hunnert men couldn’t eat it in five hunnert years. And do yer know the best part, squint? The very best part of the whole coozy fakement?”

Jake shook his head.

“Farkin Pubies don’t have the leastest idear the place even exists. They think there’s monsters down here. Catch a Pubie goin within twenty feet of a sewer-cap, less’n he has to!”

He threw his head back and laughed heartily. Jake didn’t join in, even though a cold voice in the back of his mind told him it might be politic to do so. He didn’t join in because he knew exactly how the Pubes felt. There were monsters under the city-trolls and boggerts and ores. Hadn’t he been captured by just such a one?

Gasher shoved him to the left. “Gam-almost there now. Hup!”

They jogged on, their footfalls chasing them in a pack of echoes. After ten or fifteen minutes of this, Jake saw a watertight hatchway about two hundred yards ahead. As they drew closer, he could see a big valve-wheel sticking out of it. A communicator box was mounted on the wall to the right.

“I’m blown out,” Gasher gasped as they reached the door at the end of the tunnel. “Doin’s like this are too much for an inwalid like yer old pal, so they are!” He thumbed the button on the intercom and bawled: “I got im, Tick-Tock-got him as dandy as you please! Didn’t even muss ’is hair! Didn’t I tell yer I would? Trust the Gasherman, I said, for he’ll leadjer straight and true! Now open up and let us in!”

He let go of the button and looked impatiently at the door. The valve-wheel didn’t turn. Instead a flat, drawling voice came out of the intercom speaker: “What’s the password?”

Gasher frowned horribly, scratched his chin with his long, dirty nails, then lifted his eyepatch and swabbed out another clot of yellow-green goo. “Tick-Tock and his passwords!” he said to Jake. He sounded worried as well as irritated. “He’s a trig cove, but that’s takin it a deal too far if you ask me, so it is.”

He pushed the button and yelled, “Come on, Tick-Tock! If you don’t reckergnize the sound of my voice, you need a heary-aid!”

“Oh, I recognize it,” the drawling voice returned. To Jake it sounded like Jerry Reed, who played Burt Reynolds’s sidekick in Smokey and the Bandit. “But I don’t know who’s with you, do I? Or have you forgotten that the camera out there went tits-up last year? You give the password, Gasher, or you can rot out there!”

Gasher stuck a finger up his nose, extracted a chunk of snot the color of mint jelly, and squashed it into the grille of the speaker. Jake watched this childish display of ill temper in silent fascination, feeling unwelcome, hysterical laughter bubbling around inside him. Had they come all this way, through the boobytrapped mazes and lightless tunnels, to be balked here at this watertight door simply because Gasher couldn’t remember the Tick-Tock Man’s password?

Gasher looked at him balefully, then slid his hand across his skull, peeling off his sweat-soaked yellow scarf. The skull beneath was bald, except for a few straggling tufts of black hair like porcupine quills, and deeply dented above the left temple. Gasher peered into the scarf and plucked forth a scrap of paper. “Gods bless Hoots,” he muttered. “Hoots takes care of me a right proper, he does.”

He peered at the scrap, turning it this way and that, and then held it out to Jake. He kept his voice pitched low, as if the Tick-Tock Man could hear him even though the TALK button on the intercom wasn’t depressed.

“You’re a proper little gennelman, ain’t you? And the very first thing they teach a gennelman to do after he’s been lamed not to eat the paste and piss in the comers is read. So read me the word on this paper, cully, for it’s gone right out of my head-so it has.”

Jake took the paper, looked at it, then looked up at Gasher again. “What if I won’t?” he asked coolly.

Gasher was momentarily taken aback at this response… and then he began to grin with dangerous good humor. “Why, I’ll grab yer by the throat and use yer head for a doorknocker,” he said. “I doubt if it’ll conwince old Ticky to let me in-for he’s still nervous of your hardcase friend, so he is-but it’ll do my heart a world of good to see your brains drippin off that wheel.”

Jake considered this, the dark laughter still bubbling away inside him. The Tick-Tock Man was a trig enough cove, all right-he had known that it would be difficult to persuade Gasher, who was dying anyway, to speak the password even if Roland had taken him prisoner. What Tick-Tock hadn’t taken into account was Gasher’s defective memory.

Don’t laugh. If you do, he really will beat your brains out.

In spite of his brave words, Gasher was watching Jake with real anxiety, and Jake realized a potentially powerful fact: Gasher might not be afraid of dying… but he was afraid of being humiliated.

“All right, Gasher,” he said calmly. “The word on this piece of paper is bountiful.”

“Gimme that.” Gasher snatched the paper back, returned it to his scarf, and quickly wrapped the yellow cloth around his head again. He thumbed the intercom button. “Tick-Tock? Yer still there?”

“Where else would I be? The West End of the World?” The drawling voice now sounded mildly amused.

Gasher stuck his whitish tongue out at the speaker, but his voice was ingratiating, almost servile. “The password’s bountyful, and a fine word it is, too! Now let me in, gods cuss it!”

“Of course,” the Tick-Tock Man said. A machine started up somewhere nearby, making Jake jump. The valve-wheel in the center of the door spun. When it stopped, Gasher seized it, yanked it outward, grabbed Jake’s arm, and propelled him over the raised lip of the door and into the strangest room he had ever seen in his life.

26

ROLAND DESCENDED INTO DUSKY pink light. Oy’s bright eyes peered out from the open V of his shirt; his neck stretched to the limit of its considerable length as he sniffed at the warm air that blew through the ventilator grilles. Roland had had to depend completely on the bumbler’s nose in the dark passages above, and he had been terribly afraid the animal would lose Jake’s scent in the running water… but when he had heard the sound of singing-first Gasher, then Jake-echoing back through the pipes, he had relaxed a little. Oy had not led them wrong.

Oy had heard it, too. Up until then he had been moving slowly and cautiously, even backtracking every now and again to be sure of himself, but when he heard Jake’s voice he began to run, straining the rawhide leash. Roland was afraid he might call after Jake in his harsh voice-Ake! Ake!-but he hadn’t done so. And, just as they reached the shaft which led to the lower levels of this Dycian Maze, Roland had heard the sound of some new machine-a pump of some sort, perhaps-followed by the metallic, echoing crash of a door being slammed shut.

He reached the foot of the square tunnel and glanced briefly at the double line of lighted tubes which led off in either direction. They were lit with swamp-fire, he saw, like the sign outside the place which had belonged to Balazar in the city of New York. He looked more closely at the narrow chrome ventilation strips running along the top of each wall, and the arrows below them, then slipped the rawhide loop off Oy’s neck. Oy shook his head impatiently, clearly glad to be rid of it.

“We’re close,” he murmured into the bumbler’s cocked ear, “and so we have to be quiet. Do you understand, Oy? Very quiet.”

“I-yet,” Oy replied in a hoarse whisper that would have been funny under other circumstances.

Roland put him down and Oy was immediately off down the tunnel, neck out, muzzle to the steel floor. Roland could hear him muttering Ake-Ake! Ake-Ake! under his breath. Roland unholstered his gun and followed him.

27

EDDIE AND SUSANNAH LOOKED up at the vastness of Blaine’s Cradle as the skies opened and the rain began to fall in torrents.

“It’s a hell of a building, but they forgot the handicap ramps!” Eddie yelled, raising his voice to be heard over the rain and thunder.

“Never mind that,” Susannah said impatiently, slipping out of the wheelchair. “Let’s get up there and out of the rain.”

Eddie looked dubiously up the incline of steps. The risers were shallow… but there were a lot of them. “You sure, Suze?”

“Race you, white boy,” she said, and began to wriggle upward with uncanny ease, using hands, muscular forearms, and the stumps of her legs.

And she almost did beat him; Eddie had the ironmongery to contend with, and it slowed him down. Both of them were panting when they reached the top, and tendrils of steam were rising from their wet clothes. Eddie grabbed her under the arms, swung her up, and then just held her with his hands locked together in the small of her back instead of dropping her back into the chair, as he had meant to do. He felt randy and half-crazy without the slightest idea why.

Oh, give me a break, he thought. You’ve gotten this far alive; that’s what’s got your glands pumped up and ready to party.

Susannah licked her full lower lip and wound her strong fingers into his hair. She pulled. It hurt… and at the same time it felt wonderful. “Told you I’d beat you, white boy,” she said in a low, husky voice.

“Get outta here-I had you… by half a step.” He tried to sound less out of breath than he was and found it was impossible.

“Maybe… but it blew you out, didn’t it?” One hand left his hair, slid downward, and squeezed gently. A smile gleamed in her eyes. “Somethin ain’t blown out, though.”

Thunder rumbled across the sky. They flinched, then laughed together.

“Come on,” he said. “This is nuts. The time’s all wrong.”

She didn’t contradict him, but she squeezed him again before returning her hand to his shoulder. Eddie felt a pang of regret as he swung her back into her chair and ran her across vast flagstones and under cover of the roof. He thought he saw the same regret in Susannah’s eyes.

When they were out of the downpour, Eddie paused and they looked back. The Plaza of the Cradle, The Street of the Turtle, and all the city beyond was rapidly disappearing into a shifting gray curtain. Eddie wasn’t a bit sorry. Lud hadn’t earned itself a place in his mental scrapbook of fond memories.

“Look,” Susannah murmured. She was pointing at a nearby downspout. It ended in a large, scaly fish-head that looked like a close relation to the dragon-gargoyles which decorated the corners of the Cradle. Water ran from its mouth in a silver torrent.

“This isn’t just a passing shower, is it?” Eddie asked.

“Nope. It’s gonna rain until it gets tired of it, and then it’s gonna rain some more, just for spite. Maybe a week; maybe a month. Not that it’s gonna matter to us, if Blaine decides he doesn’t like our looks and fries us. Fire a shot to let Roland know we got here, sugar, and then we’ll have us a look around. See what we can see.”

Eddie pointed the Ruger into the gray sky, pulled the trigger, and fired the shot, which Roland heard a mile or more away, as he followed Jake and Gasher through the booby-trapped maze. Eddie stood where he was a moment longer, trying to persuade himself that things might still turn out all right, that his heart was wrong in its stubborn insistence that they had seen the last of the gunslinger and the boy Jake. Then he made the automatic safe again, returned it to the waistband of his pants, and went back to Susannah. He turned her chair away from the steps and rolled her along an aisle of columns which led deeper into the building. She popped the cylinder of Roland’s gun and reloaded it as they went.

Under the roof the rain had a secret, ghostly sound and even the harsh thundercracks were muted. The columns which supported the structure were at least ten feet in diameter, and their tops were lost in the gloom. From up there in the shadows, Eddie heard the cooing conversation of pigeons.

Now a sign hanging on thick chrome-silver chains swam out of the shadows:

“Now we know the name of the one that fell in the river,” Eddie said. “Patricia. They got their colors wrong, though. It’s supposed to be pink for girls and blue for boys, not the other way around.”

“Maybe they’re both blue.”

“They’re not. Blaine’s pink.”

“How would you know that?”

Eddie looked confused. “I don’t know how… but I do.”

They followed the arrow pointing toward Blaine’s berth, entering what had to be a grand concourse. Eddie didn’t have Susannah’s ability to see the past in clear, visionary flashes, but his imagination nonetheless filled this vast, pillared space with a thousand hurrying people; he heard clicking heels and murmuring voices, saw embraces of homecoming and farewell. And over everything, the speakers chanting news of a dozen different destinations.

Patricia is now boarding for Northwest Baronies…

Will Passenger Killington, passenger Killington, please report to the information booth on the lower level?

Blaine is now arriving at Berth #2, and will be debarking shortly…

Now there was only the pigeons.

Eddie shivered.

“Look at the faces,” Susannah murmured. “I don’t know if they give you the willies, but they sure do me.” She was pointing to the right.

High up on the wall, a series of sculpted heads seemed to push out of tin- marble, peering down at them from the shadows-stern men with the harsh faces of executioners who are happy in their work. Some of the faces had fallen from their places and lay in granite shards and splinters seventy or eighty feet below their peers. Those remaining were spider-webbed with cracks and splattered with pigeon dung.

“They must have been the Supreme Court, or something,” Eddie said, uneasily scanning all those thin lips and cracked, empty eyes. “Only judges can look so smart and so completely pissed off at the same time- you’re talking to a guy who knows. There isn’t one of them who looks like he’d give a crippled crab a crutch.”

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter,” Susannah murmured, and at these words Eddie felt gooseflesh waltz across the skin of his arms and chest and legs.”“What’s that, Suze?”

“A poem by a man who must have seen Lud in his dreams,” she said. “Come on, Eddie. Forget them.”

“Easier said than done.” But he began to push her again.

Ahead, a vast grilled barrier like a castle barbican swam out of the gloom… and beyond it, they caught their first glimpse of Blaine the Mono. It was pink, just as Eddie had said it would be, a delicate shade which matched the veins running through the marble pillars. Blaine flowed above the wide loading platform in a smooth, streamlined bullet shape which looked more like flesh than metal. Its surface was broken only once-by a triangular window equipped with a huge wiper. Eddie knew there would be another triangular window with another big wiper on the other side of the mono’s nose, so that if you looked at Blaine head-on, it would seem to have a face, just like Charlie the Choo-Choo. The wipers would look like slyly drooping eyelids.

White light from the southeastern slot in the Cradle fell across Blaine in a long, distorted rectangle. To Eddie, the body of the train looked like the breaching back of some fabulous pink whale-one that was utterly silent.

“Wow.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. “We found it.”

“Yes. Blaine the Mono.”

“Is it dead, do you think? It looks dead.”

“It’s not. Sleeping, maybe, but a long way from dead.”

“You sure?”

“Were you sure it would be pink?” It wasn’t a question he had to answer, and he didn’t. The face she turned up to him was strained and badly frightened. “It’s sleeping, and you know what? I’m scared to wake it up.”

“Well, we’ll wait for the others, then.”

She shook her head. “I think we better try to lx- ready for when they get here… because I’ve got an idea that they’re going to come on the run. Push me over to that box mounted on the bars. It looks like an intercom. See it?”

He did, and pushed her slowly toward it. It was mounted on one side of a closed gate in the center of the barrier which ran the length of the Cradle. The vertical bars of the barrier were made of what looked like stainless steel; those of the gate appeared to be ornamental iron, and their lower ends disappeared into steel-ringed holes in the floor. There was no way either of them was going to wriggle through those bars, either, Eddie saw. The gap between each set was no more than four inches. It would have been a tight squeeze even for Oy.

Pigeons ruffled and cooed overhead. The left wheel of Susannah’s chair squawked monotonously. My kingdom for an oilcan, Eddie thought, and realized he was a lot more than just scared. The last time he had felt this level of terror had been on the day when he and Henry had stood on the sidewalk of Rhinehold Street in Dutch Hill, looking at the slumped ruin of The Mansion. They hadn’t gone in on that day in 1977; they had turned their backs on the haunted house and walked away, and he remembered vowing to himself that he would never, never, ever go back to that place. It was a promise he’d kept, but here he was, in another haunted house, and there was the haunter, right over there- Blaine the Mono, a long low pink shape with one window peering at him like the eye of a dangerous animal who is shamming sleep.

He stirs no more from his berth in the Cradle… He has even stopped speaking in his many voices and laughing… Ardis was the last to go nigh Blaine… and when Ardis couldn’t answer what was asked, Blaine slew him with blue fire.

If it speaks to me, I’ll probably go crazy, Eddie thought.

The wind gusted outside, and a fine spray of rain flew in through the tall egress slot cut in the side of the building. He saw it strike Blaine’s window and bead up there.

Eddie shuddered suddenly and looked sharply around. “We’re being watched-I can feel it.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Push me closer to the gate, Eddie. I want to get a better look at that box.”

“Okay, but don’t touch it. If it’s electrified-”

“If Blaine wants to cook us, he will,” Susannah said, looking through the bars at Blaine’s back. “You know it, and I do, too.”

And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.

The box looked like a combination intercom and burglar alarm. There was a speaker set into the top half, with what looked like a TALK/LISTEN button next to it. Below this were numbers arranged in a shape which made a diamond:

Under the diamond were two other buttons with words of the High Speech printed on them: COMMAND and ENTER.

Susannah looked bewildered and doubtful. “What is this thing, do you think? It looks like a gadget in a science fiction movie.”

Of course it did, Eddie realized. Susannah had probably seen a home security system or two in her time-she had, after all, lived among the Manhattan rich, even if she had not been very enthusiastically accepted by them-but there was a world of difference between the electronics gear available in her when, 1963, and his own, which was 1987. We’ve never talked much about the differences, either, he thought. I wonder what she’d think if I told her Ronald Reagan was President of the United States when Roland snatched me? Probably that I was crazy.

“It’s a security system,” he said. Then, although his nerves and instincts screamed out against it, he forced himself to reach out with his right hand and thumb the TALK/LISTEN switch.

There was no crackle of electricity; no deadly blue fire went racing up his arm. No sign that the thing was even still connected.

Maybe Blaine is dead. Maybe he’s dead, after all.

But he didn’t really believe that.

“Hello?” he said, and in his mind’s eye saw tin- unfortunate Ardis, screaming as he- was microwaved by the blue fire dancing all over his face and body, melting his eyes and setting his hair ablaze. “Hello… Blaine? Anybody?”

He let go of the button and waited, stiff with tension. Susannah’s hand crept into his, cold and small. There was still no answer, and Eddie-now more reluctant than ever-pushed the button again.

“Blaine?”

He let go of the button. Waited. And when there was still no answer, a dangerous giddiness overcame him, as it often did in moments of stress and fear. When that giddiness took him, counting the cost no longer seemed to matter. Nothing mattered. It had been like that when he had outfaced Balazar’s sallow-faced contact man in Nassau, and it was like that now. And if Roland had seen him in the moment this lunatic impatience overtook him, he would have seen more than just a resemblance between Eddie and Cuthbert; he would have sworn Eddie was Cuthbert.

He jammed the button in with his thumb and began to bellow into the speaker, adopting a plummy (and completely bogus) British accent. “Hullo, Blaine! Cheerio, old fellow! This is Robin Leach, host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Brainless, here to tell you that you have won six billion dollars and a new Ford Escort in the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes!”

Pigeons took flight above them in soft, startled explosions of wings. Susannah gasped. Her face wore the dismayed expression of a devout woman who has just heard her husband blaspheme in a cathedral. “Eddie, stop it! Stop it!”

Eddie couldn’t stop it. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes glittered with a mixture of fear, hysteria, and frustrated anger. “You and your monorail girlfriend, Patricia, will spend a lux-yoo-rious month in scenic Jimtown, where you’ll drink only the finest wine and eat only the finest virgins! You-”

“… shhhh…”

Eddie broke off, looking at Susannah. He was at once sure that it had been she who had shushed him-not only because she had already tried but because she was the only other person here-and yet at the same time he knew it hadn’t been Susannah. That had been another voice: the voice of a very young and very frightened child.

“Suze? Did you-”

Susannah was shaking her head and raising her hand at the same time. She pointed at the intercom box, and Eddie saw the button marked COMMAND was glowing a very faint shell-pink. It was the same color as the mono sleeping in its berth on the other side of the barrier.

“Shhh… don’t wake him up,” the child’s voice mourned. It drifted from the speaker, soft as an evening breeze.

“What…” Eddie began. Then he shook his head, reached toward the TALK/LISTEN switch and pressed it gently. When he spoke again, it was not in the blaring Robin Leach bellow but in the almost-whisper of a conspirator. “What are you? Who are you?”

He released the button. He and Susannah regarded each other with the big eyes of children who now know they are sharing the house with a dangerous-perhaps psychotic-adult. How have they come by the knowledge? Why, because another child has told them, a child who has lived with the psychotic adult for a long time, hiding in corners and stealing out only when it knows the adult is asleep; a frightened child who happens to be almost invisible.

There was no answer. Eddie let the seconds spin out. Each one seemed long enough to read a whole novel in. He was reaching for the button again when the faint pink glow reappeared.

“I’m Little Blaine,” the child’s voice whispered. “The one he doesn’t see. The one he forgot. The one he thinks he left behind in the rooms of ruin and the halls of the dead.”

Eddie pushed the button again with a hand that had picked up an uncontrollable shake. He could hear that shake in his voice, as well. “Who? Who is the one who doesn’t see? Is it the Bear?”

No-not the bear; not he. Shardik lay dead in the forest, many miles behind them; the world had moved on even since then. Eddie suddenly remembered what it had been like to lay his ear against that strange unfound door in the clearing where die bear had lived its violent half-life, that door with its somehow terrible stripes of yellow and black. It was all of a piece, he realized now; all part of some awful, decaying whole, a tattered web with the Dark Tower at its center like an incomprehensible stone spider. All of Mid-World had become one vast haunted mansion in these strange latter days; all of Mid-World had become The Drawers; all of Mid-World had become a waste land, haunting and haunted.

He saw Susannah’s lips form the words of the real answer before the voice from the intercom could speak them, and those words were as obvious as the solution to a riddle once the answer is spoken.

“Big Blaine,” the unseen voice whispered. “Big Blaine is the ghost in the machine-the ghost in all the machines.”

Susannah’s hand had gone to her throat and was clutching it, as if she intended to strangle herself. Her eyes were full of terror, but they were not glassy, not stunned; they were sharp with understanding. Perhaps she knew a voice like this one from her own when-the when where the integrated whole that was Susannah had been shunted aside by the warring personalities of Detta and Odetta. The childish voice had surprised her as well as him, but her agonized eyes said she was no stranger to the concept being expressed.

Susannah knew all about the madness of duality.

“Eddie we have to go,” she said. Her terror turned the words into an unpunctuated auditory smear. He could hear air whistling in her windpipe like a cold wind around a chimney. “Eddie we have to get away Eddie we have to get away Eddie-”

“Too late,” the tiny, mourning voice said. “He’s awake. Big Blaine is awake. He knows you are here. And he’s coming.”

Suddenly lights-bright orange arc-sodiums-began to flash on in pairs above them, bathing the pillared vastness of the Cradle in a harsh glare that banished all shadows. Hundreds of pigeons darted and swooped in frightened, aimless flight, startled from their complex of interlocked nests high above.

“Wait!” Eddie shouted. “Please, wait!”

In his agitation he forgot to push the button, but it made no difference; Little Blaine responded anyway. “No! I can’t let him catch me! I can’t let him kill me, too!”

The light on the intercom box went dark again, but only for a moment. This time both COMMAND and ENTER lit up, and their color was not pink but the lurid dark red of a blacksmith’s forge.

“WHO ARE YOU?” a voice roared, and it came not just from the box but from every speaker in the city which still operated. The rotting bodies hanging from the poles shivered with the vibrations of that mighty voice; it seemed that even the dead would run from Blaine, if they could..

Susannah shrank back in her chair, the heels of her hands pressed to her ears, her face long with dismay, her mouth distorted in a silent scream. Eddie felt himself shrinking toward all the fantastic, hallucinatory terrors of eleven. Had it been this voice he had feared when he and Henry stood outside The Mansion? That he had perhaps even anticipated? He didn’t know… but he did know how Jack in that old story must have felt when he realized that he had tried the beanstalk once too often, and awakened the giant.

“HOW DARE YOU DISTURB MY SLEEP? TELL ME NOW, OR DIE WHERE YOU STAND.”

He might have frozen right there, leaving Blaine-Big Blaine-to do to them whatever it was he had done to Ardis (or something even worse); perhaps should have frozen, locked in that down-the-rabbit-hole, fairy-tale terror. It was the memory of the small voice which had spoken first that enabled him to move. It had been the voice of a terrified child, but it had tried to help them, terrified or not.

So now you have to help yourself, he thought. You woke it up; deal with it, for Christ’s sake!

Eddie reached out and pushed the button again. “My name is Eddie Dean. The woman with me is my wife, Susannah. We’re…”

He looked at Susannah, who nodded and made frantic motions for him to go on.

“We’re on a quest. We seek the Dark Tower which lies in the Path of the Beam. We’re in the company of two others, Roland of Gilead and… and Jake of New York. We’re from New York too. If you’re-” He paused for a moment, biting back the words Big Blaine. If he used them, he might make the intelligence behind the voice aware that they had heard another voice; a ghost inside the ghost, so to speak.

Susannah gestured again for him to go on, using both hands.

“If you’re Blaine the Mono… well… we want you to take us.”

He released the button. There was no response for what seemed like a very long time, only the agitated flutter of the disturbed pigeons from overhead. When Blaine spoke again, his voice came only from the speaker-box mounted on the gate and sounded almost human.

“DO NOT TRY MY PATIENCE. ALL THE DOORS TO THAT WHERE ARE CLOSED. GILEAD IS NO MORE, AND THOSE KNOWN AS GUNSLINGERS ARE ALL DEAD. NOW ANSWER MY QUESTION: WHO ARE YOU? THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.”

There was a sizzling sound. A ray of brilliant blue-white light lanced down from the ceiling and seared a hole the size of a golf-ball in the marble floor less than five feet to the left of Susannah’s wheelchair. Smoke that smelled like the aftermath of a lightning-bolt rose lazily from it. Susannah and Eddie stared at each other in mute terror for a moment, and then Eddie lunged for the communicator-box and thumbed the button.

“You’re wrong! We did come from New York! We came through the doors, on the beach, only a few weeks ago!”

“It’s true!” Susannah called. “I swear it is!”

Silence. Beyond the long barrier, Blaine’s pink back humped smoothly. The window at the front seemed to regard them like a vapid glass eye. The wiper could have been a lid half-closed in a sly wink.

“PROVE IT,” Blaine said at last.

“Christ, how do I do that?” Eddie asked Susannah.

“I don’t know.”

Eddie pushed the button again. “The Statue of Liberty! Does that ring a bell?”

“GO ON,” Blaine said. Now the voice sounded almost thoughtful.

“The Empire State Building! The Stock Exchange! The World Trade Center! Coney Island Red-Hots! Radio City Music Hall! The East Vil-”

Blaine cut him off… and now, incredibly, the voice which came from the speaker was the drawling voice of John Wayne.

“OKAY, PILGRIM. I BELIEVE YOU.”

Eddie and Susannah shared another glance, this one of confusion and relief. But when Blaine spoke again, the voice was again cold and emotionless.

“ASK ME A QUESTION, EDDIE DEAN OF NEW YORK. AND IT BETTER BE A GOOD ONE.” There was a pause, and then Blaine added: “BECAUSE IF IT’s NOT, YOU AND YOUR WOMAN ARE GOING TO DIE, NO MATTER WHERE YOU CAME FROM.”

Susannah looked from the box on the gate to Eddie. “What’s it talking about?” she hissed.

Eddie shook his head. “I don’t have the slightest idea."

28

To JAKE, THE ROOM Gasher dragged him into looked like a Minuteman missile silo which had been decorated by the inmates of a lunatic asylum: part museum, part living room, part hippie crash pad. Above him, empty space vaulted up to a rounded ceiling and below him it dropped seventy-five or a hundred feet to a similarly rounded base. Running all around the single curved wall in vertical lines were tubes of neon in alternating strokes of color: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, peach, pink. These long tubes came together in roaring rainbow knots at the bottom and top of the silo… if that was what it had been.

The room was about three-quarters of the way up the vast capsule-shaped space and floored with rusty iron grillework. Rugs that looked Turkish (he later learned that such rugs were actually from a barony called Kashmin) lay on the grilled floor here and there. Their corners were held down with brass-bound trunks or standing lamps or the squat legs of over-stuffed chairs. If not, they would have flapped like strips of paper tied to an electric fan, because a steady warm draft rushed up from below. Another draft, this one issuing from a circular band of ventilators like the ones in the tunnel they had followed here, swirled about four or five feet above Jake’s head. On the far side of the room was a door identical to the one through which he and Gasher had entered, and Jake assumed it was a continuation of the subterranean corridor following the Path of the Beam.

There were half a do/en people in the room, four men and two women. Jake guessed that he was looking at the Gray high command- if, that was, there were enough Grays left to warrant a high command. None of them were young, but all were still in the prime of their lives. They looked at Jake as curiously as he looked at them.

Sitting in the center of the room, with one massive leg thrown casually over the arm of a chair big enough to be a throne, was a man who looked like a cross between a Viking warrior and a giant from a child’s fairy-tale. His heavily muscled upper body was naked except for a silver band around one bicep, a knife-scabbard looped over one shoulder, and a strange charm about his neck. His lower body was clad in soft, tight-fitting leather breeches which were tucked into high boots. He wore a yellow scarf tied around one of these. His hair, a dirty gray-blonde, cascaded almost to the middle of his broad back; his eyes were as green and curious as the eyes of a tomcat who is old enough to be wise but not old enough to have lost that refined sense of cruelty which passes for fun in feline circles. Hung by its strap from the back of the chair was what looked like a very old machine-gun.

Jake looked more closely at the ornament on the Viking’s chest and saw that it was a coffin-shaped glass box hung on a silver chain. Inside it, a tiny gold clock-face marked the time at five minutes past three. Below the face, a tiny gold pendulum went back and forth, and despite the soft whoosh of circulating air from above and below, he could hear the tick-tock sound it made. The hands of the clock were moving faster than they should have done, and Jake was not very surprised to see that they were moving backward.

He thought of the crocodile in Peter Pan, the one that was always chasing after Captain Hook, and a little smile touched his lips. Gasher saw it, and raised his hand. Jake cringed away, putting his own hands to his face.

The Tick-Tock Man shook his finger at Gasher in an amusing school-marmish gesture. “Now, now… no need of that, Gasher,” he said.

Gasher lowered his hand at once. His face had changed completely. Before, it had alternated between stupid rage and a species of cunning, almost existential humor. Now he only looked servile and adoring. Like the others in the room (and Jake himself), the Gasherman could not look away from Tick-Tock for long; his eyes were drawn inexorably back. And Jake could understand why. The Tick-Tock Man was the only person here who seemed wholly vital, wholly healthy, and wholly alive.

“If you say there’s no need, there ain’t,” Gasher said, but he favored Jake with a dark look before shifting his eyes back to the blonde giant on the throne. “Still, he’s wery pert, Ticky. Wery pert, Ticky. Wery pert indeed, so he is, and if you want my opinion, he’ll take a deal of training!”

“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it, the Tick-Tock Man said. “Now close the door, Cash-was yon lx»re in a barn?”

A dark-haired woman laughed shrilly, a sound like the caw of a crow. Tick-Tock flicked his eyes toward her; she quieted at once and cast her eyes down to the grilled floor.

The door through which Gasher had dragged him was actually two doors. The arrangement reminded Jake of the way spaceship airlocks looked in the more intelligent science fiction movies. Gasher shut them both and turned to Tick-Tock, giving him a thumbs-up gesture. The Tick-Tock Man nodded and reached languidly up to press a button set into a piece of furniture that looked like a speaker’s podium. A pump began to cycle wheezily within the wall, and the neon tubes dimmed perceptibly. There was a faint hiss of air and the valve-wheel of the inside door spun shut. Jake supposed the one in the outer door was doing the same. This was some sort of bomb-shelter, all right; no doubt of that. When the pump died, the long neon tubes resumed their former muted brilliance.

“There,” Tick-Tock said pleasantly. His eyes began to look Jake up and down. Jake had a clear and very uncomfortable sense of being expertly catalogued and filed. “All safe and sound, we are. Snug as bugs in a rug. Right, Hoots?”

“Yar!” a tall, skinny man in a black suit replied promptly. His face was covered with some sort of rash which he scratched obsessively.

“I brung him,” Gasher said. “I told yer you could trust me to do it, and didn’t I?”

“You did,” Tick-Tock said. “Bang on. I had some doubts about your ability to remember the password at the end, there, but-”

The dark-haired woman uttered another shrill caw. The Tick-Tock Man half-turned in her direction, that lazy smile dimpling the corners of his mouth, and before Jake was able to grasp what was happening-what had already happened-she was staggering backward, her eyes bulging in surprise and pain, her hands groping at some strange tumor in the middle of her chest which hadn’t been there a second before.

Jake realized die Tick-Tock Man had made some sort of move as he was turning, a move so quick it had been no more than a flicker. The slim white hilt which had protruded from the scabbard looped over the Tick-Tock Man’s shoulder was gone. The knife was now on the other side of the room, sticking out of the dark-haired woman’s chest. Tick-Tock had drawn and thrown with an uncanny speed Jake wasn’t sure even Roland could match. It had been like some malign magic trick.

The others watched silently as the woman staggered toward Tick-Tock, gagging harshly, her hands wrapped loosely around the hilt of the knife. Her hip bumped one of the standing lamps and the one called Hoots darted forward to catch it before it could fall. Tick-Tock himself never moved; he only went on sitting with his leg tossed over the arm of his throne, watching the woman with his lazy smile.

Her foot caught beneath one of the rugs and she tumbled forward. Once more the Tick-Tock Man moved with that spooky speed, pulling back the foot which had been dangling over the arm of the chair and then driving it forward again like a piston. It buried itself in the pit of the dark-haired woman’s stomach and she went flying backward. Blood spewed from her mouth and splattered the furniture. She struck the wall, slid down it, and ended up sitting with her chin on her breastbone. To Jake she looked like a movie Mexican taking a siesta against an adobe wall. It was hard for him to believe she had gone from living to dead with such terrible speed. Neon tubes turned her hair into a haze that was half red and half blue. Her glazing eyes stared at the Tick-Tock Man with terminal amazement.

“I told her about that laugh,” Tick-Tock said. His eyes shifted to the other woman, a heavyset redhead who looked like a long-haul trucker. “Didn’t I, Tilly?”

“Ay,” Tilly said at once. Her eyes were lustrous with fear and excitement, and she licked her lips obsessively. “So you did, many and many a time. I’ll set my watch and warrant on it.”

“So you might, if you could reach up your fat ass far enough to find them,” Tick-Tock said. “Bring me my knife, Brandon, and mind you wipe that slut’s stink off it before you put it in my hand.”

A short, bandy-legged man hopped to do as he had been bidden. The knife wouldn’t come free at first; it seemed caught on the unfortunate dark-haired woman’s breastbone. Brandon threw a terrified glance over his shoulder at the Tick-Tock Man and then tugged harder.

Tick-Tock, however, appeared to have forgotten all about both Brandon and the woman who had literally laughed herself to death. His brilliant green eyes had fixed on something which interested him much more than the dead woman.

“Come here, cully,” he said. “I want a better look at you.”

Gasher gave him a shove. Jake stumbled forward. He would have fallen if Tick-Tock’s strong hands hadn’t caught him by the shoulders. Then, when he was sure Jake had his balance again, Tick-Tock grasped the boy’s left wrist and raised it. It was Jake’s Seiko which had drawn his interest.

“If this here’s what I think it is, it’s an omen for sure and true,” Tick-Tock said. “Talk to me, boy-what’s this sigul you wear?”

Jake, who hadn’t the slightest idea what a sigul was, could only hope for the best. “It’s a watch. But it doesn’t work, Mr. Tick-Tock.”

Hoots chuckled at that, then clapped both hands over his mouth when the Tick-Tock Man turned to look at him. After a moment, Tick-Toc looked back at Jake, and a sunny smile replaced the frown. Looking at that smile almost made you forget that it was a dead woman and not a movie Mexican taking a siesta over there against the wall. Looking at it almost made you forget that these people were crazy, and the Tick-Tock Man was likely the craziest inmate in the whole asylum.

“Watch,” Tick-Tock said, nodding. “Ay, a likely enough name for such; after all, what does a person want with a timepiece but to watch it once in a while? Ay, Brandon? Ay, Tilly? Ay, Gasher?”

They responded with eager affirmatives. The Tick-Tock Man favored them with his winning smile, then turned back to Jake again. Now Jake noticed that the smile, winning or not, stopped well short of the Tick-Tock Man’s green eyes. They were as they had been throughout: cool, cruel, and curious.

He reached a finger toward the Seiko, which now proclaimed the time to be ninety-one minutes past seven-A.M. and P.M.-and pulled it back just before touching the glass above the liquid crystal display. “Tell me, dear boy-is this ’watch’ of yours boobyrigged?”

“Huh? Oh! No. No, it’s not boobyrigged.” Jake touched his own finger to the face of the watch.

“That means nothing, if it’s set to the frequency of your own body,” the Tick-Tock Man said. He spoke in the sharp, scornful tone Jake’s father used when he didn’t want people to figure out that he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Tick-Tock glanced briefly at Brandon, and Jake saw him weigh the pros and cons of making the bowlegged man his designated toucher. Then he dismissed the notion and looked back into Jake’s eyes. “If this thing gives me a shock, my little friend, you’re going to be choking to death on your own sweetmeats in thirty seconds.”

Jake swallowed hard but said nothing. The Tick-Tock Man reached out his finger again, and this time allowed it to settle on the face of the Seiko. The moment that it did, all the numbers went to zeros and then began to count upward again.

Tick-Tock’s eyes had narrowed in a grimace of potential pain as he touched the face of the watch. Now their corners crinkled in the first genuine smile Jake had seen from him. He thought it was partly pleasure at his own courage but mostly simple wonder and interest.

“May I have it?” he asked Jake silkily. “As a gesture of your goodwill, shall we say? I am something of a clock fancier, my dear young cully- so I am.”

“Be my guest.” Jake stripped the watch off his arm at once and dropped in onto the Tick-Tock Man’s large waiting palm.

“Talks just like a little silk-arse gennelman, don’t he?” Gasher said happily. “In the old days someone would have paid a wery high price for the return o’ such as him, Ticky, ay, so they would. Why, my father-”

“Your father died so blowed-out-rotten with the mandrus that not even the dogs would eat him,” the Tick-Tock Man interrupted. “Now shut up, you idiot.”

At first Gasher looked furious… and then only abashed. He sank into a nearby chair and closed his mouth.

Tick-Tock, meanwhile, was examining the Seiko’s expansion band with an expression of awe. He pulled it wide, let it snap back, pulled it wide again, let it snap back again. He dropped a lock of his hair into the open links, then laughed when they closed on it. At last he slipped the watch over his hand and pushed it halfway up his forearm. Jake thought this souvenir of New York looked very strange there, but said nothing.

“Wonderful!” Tick-Tock exclaimed. “Where did you get it, cully?”

“It was a birthday present from my father and mother,” Jake said. Gasher leaned forward at this, perhaps wanting to mention the idea of ransom again. If so, the intent look on the Tick-Tock Man’s face changed his mind and he sat back without saying anything.

“Was it?” Tick-Tock marvelled, raising his eyebrows. He had discovered the small button which lit the face of the watch and kept pushing it, watching the light go off and on. Then he looked back at Jake, and his eyes were narrowed to bright green slits again. “Tell me something, cully-does this run on a dipolar or unipolar circuit?”

“Neither one,” Jake said, not knowing that his failure to say he did not know what either of these terms meant was buying him a great deal of future trouble. “It runs on a nickel-cadmium battery. At least I’m pretty sure it does. I’ve never had to replace it, and I lost the instruction folder a long time ago.”

The Tick-Tock Man looked at him for a long time without speaking, and Jake realized with dismay that the blonde man was trying to decide if Jake had been making fun of him. If he decided Jake had been making fun, Jake had an idea that the abuse he had suffered on the way here would seem like tickling compared to what the Tick-Tock Man might do. He suddenly wanted to divert Tick-Tock’s train of thought-wanted that more than anything in the world. He said the first thing he thought might turn the trick.

“He was your grandfather, wasn’t he?”

The Tick-Tock Man raised his brows interrogatively. His hands returned to Jake’s shoulders, and although his grip was not tight, Jake could feel the phenomenal strength there. If Tick-Tock chose to tighten his grip and pull sharply forward, he would snap Jake’s collarbones like pencils. If he shoved, he would probably break his back.

“Who was my grandfather, cully?”

Jake’s eyes once more took in the Tick-Tock Man’s massive, nobly shaped head and broad shoulders. He remembered what Susannah had said: Look at the size of him, Roland-they must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!

“The man in the airplane. David Quick.”

The Tick-Tock Man’s eyes widened in surprise and amazement. Then he threw back his head and roared out a gust of laughter that echoed off the domed ceiling high above. The others smiled nervously. None, however, dared to laugh right out loud… not after what had happened to the woman with the dark hair.

“Whoever you are and wherever you come from, boy, you’re the triggest cove old Tick-Tock’s run into for many a year. Quick was my great-grandfather, not my grandfather, but you’re close enough-wouldn’t you say so, Gasher, my dear?”

“Ay,” Gasher said. “He’s trig, right enough, I could’ve toldjer that. But wery pert, all the same.”

“Yes,” the Tick-Tock Man said thoughtfully. His hands tightened on the boy’s shoulders and drew Jake closer to that smiling, handsome, lunatic face. “I can see he’s pert. It’s in his eyes. But we’ll take care of that, won’t we, Gasher?”

It’s not Gasher he’s talking to, Jake thought. It’s me. He thinks he’s hypnotizing me… and maybe he is.

“Ay,” Gasher breathed.

Jake felt he was drowning in those wide green eyes. Although the Tick-Tock Man’s grip was still not really tight, he couldn’t get enough breath into his lungs. He summoned all of his own force in an effort to break the blonde man’s hold over him, and again spoke the first words which came to mind:

“So fell Lord Perth, and the countryside did shake with that thunder.”

It acted upon Tick-Tock like a hard open-handed blow to the face. He recoiled, green eyes narrowing, his grip on Jake’s shoulders tightening painfully. “What do you say? Where did you hear that?”

“A little bird told me,” Jake replied with calculated insolence, and the next instant he was flying across the room.

If he had struck the curved wall headfirst, he would have been knocked cold or killed. As it happened, he struck on one hip, rebounded, and landed in a heap on the iron grillework. He shook his head groggily, looked around, and found himself face to face with the woman who was not taking a siesta. He uttered a shocked cry and crawled away on his hands and knees. Hoots kicked him in the chest, flipping him onto his back. Jake lay there gasping, looking up at the knot of rainbow colors where the neon tubes came together. A moment later, Tick-Tock’s face filled his field of vision. The man’s lips were pressed together in a hard, straight line, his cheeks flared with color, and there was fear in his eyes. The coffin-shaped glass ornament he wore around his neck dangled directly in front of Jake’s eyes, swinging gently back and forth on its silver chain, as if imitating the pendulum of the tiny grandfather clock inside.

“Gasher’s right,” he said. He gathered a handful of Jake’s shirt into one fist and pulled him up. “You’re pert. But you don’t want to be pert with me, cully. You don’t ever want to be pert with me. Have you heard of people with short fuses? Well, I have no fuse at all, and there’s a thousand could testify to it if I hadn’t stilled their tongues for good. If you ever speak to me of Lord Perth again… ever, ever, ever… I’ll tear off the top of your skull and eat your brains. I’ll have none of that bad-luck story in the Cradle of the Grays. Do you understand me?”

He shook Jake back and forth like a rag, and the boy burst into tears.

“Do you?”

“Y-Y-Yes!”

“Good.” He set Jake upon his feet, where he swayed woozily back and forth, wiping at his streaming eyes and leaving smudges of dirt on his cheeks so dark they looked like mascara. “Now, my little cull, we’re going to have a question and answer session here. I’ll ask the questions and you’ll give the answers. Do you understand?”

Jake didn’t reply. He was looking at a panel of the ventilator grille which circled the chamber.

The Tick-Tock Man grabbed his nose between two of his fingers and squeezed it viciously. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes!” Jake cried. His eyes, now watering with pain as well as terror, returned to Tick-Tock’s face. He wanted to look back at the ventilator grille, wanted desperately to verify that what he had seen there was not simply a trick of his frightened, overloaded mind, but he didn’t dare. He was afraid someone else-Tick-Tock himself, most likely-would follow his gaze and see what he had seen.

“Good.” Tick-Tock pulled Jake back over to the chair by his nose, sat down, and cocked his leg over the arm again. “Let’s have a nice little chin, then. We’ll begin with your name, shall we? Just what might that be, cully?”

“Jake Chambers.” With his nose pinched shut, his voice sounded nasal and foggy.

“And are you a Not-See, Jake Chambers?”

For a moment Jake wondered if this was a peculiar way of asking him if he was blind… but of course they could all see he wasn’t. “I don’t understand what-”

Tick-Tock shook him back and forth by the nose. “Not-See! Not-See! You just want to stop playing with me, boy!”

“I don’t understand-” Jake began, and then he looked at the old machine-gun hanging from the chair and thought once more of the crashed Focke-Wulf. The pieces fell together in his mind. “No-I’m not a Nazi. I’m an American. All that ended long before I was born!”

The Tick-Tock Man released his hold on Jake’s nose, which immediately began to gush blood. “You could have told me that in the first place and saved yourself all sorts of pain, Jake Chambers… but at least now you understand how we do things around here, don’t you?”

Jake nodded.

“Ay. Well enough! We’ll start with the simple questions.”

Jake’s eyes drifted back to the ventilator grille. What he had seen before was still there; it hadn’t been just his imagination. Two gold-ringed eyes floated in the dark behind the chrome louvers.

Oy.

Tick-Tock slapped his face, knocking him back into Gasher, who immediately pushed him forward again. “It’s school-time, dear heart,” Gasher whispered. “Mind yer lessons, now! Mind em wery sharp!”

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Tick-Tock said. “I’ll have some respect, Jake Chambers, or I’ll have your balls.”

“All right.”

Tick-Tock’s green eyes gleamed dangerously. “All right what?”

Jake groped for the right answer, pushing away the tangle of questions and the sudden hope which had dawned in his mind. And what came was what would have served at his own Cradle of the Pubes… otherwise known as The Piper School. “All right, sir?”

Tick-Tock smiled. “That’s a start, boy,” he said, and leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. “Now… what’s an American?”

Jake began to talk, trying with all his might not to look toward the ventilator grille as he did so.

29

ROLAND BOLSTERED HIS GUN, laid both hands on the valve-wheel, and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t budge. That didn’t much surprise him, but it presented serious problems.

Oy stood by his left boot, looking up anxiously, waiting for Roland to open the door so they could continue the journey to Jake. The gunslinger only wished it was that easy. It wouldn’t do to simply stand out here and wait for someone to leave; it might be hours or even days before one of the Grays decided to use this particular exit again. Gasher and his friends might take it into their heads to flay Jake alive while the gunslinger was waiting for it to happen.

He leaned his head against the steel but heard nothing. That didn’t surprise him, either. He had seen doors like this a long time ago-you couldn’t shoot out the locks, and you certainly couldn’t hear through them. There might be one; there might be two, facing each other, with some dead airspace in between. Somewhere, though, there would be a button which would spin the wheel in the middle of the door and release the locks. If Jake could reach that button, all might still be well.

Roland understood that he was not a full member of this ka-tet; he guessed that even Oy was more fully aware than he of the secret life which existed at its heart (he very much doubted that the bumbler had tracked Jake with his nose alone through those tunnels where water ran in polluted streamlets). Nevertheless, he had been able to help Jake when die boy had been trying to cross from his world to this one. He had been able to see… and when Jake had been trying to regain the key he had dropped, he had been able to send a message.

He had to be very careful about sending messages this time. At best, the Grays would realize something was up. At worst, Jake might misinterpret what Roland tried to tell him and do something foolish.

But if he could see…

Roland closed his eyes and bent all his concentration toward Jake. He thought of the boy’s eyes and sent his ka out to find them.

At first there was nothing, but at last an image began to form. It was a face framed by long, gray-blonde hair. Green eyes gleamed in deep sockets like firedims in a cave. Roland quickly understood that this was the Tick-Tock Man, and that he was a descendent of the man who had died in the air-carriage-interesting, but of no practical value in this situation. He tried to look beyond the Tick-Tock Man, to see the rest of the room in which Jake was being held, and the people in it.

“Ake,” Oy whispered, as if reminding Roland that this was neither the time nor the place to take a nap.

“Shhh,” the gunslinger said, not opening his eyes.

But it was no good. He caught only blurs, probably because Jake’s concentration was focused so tightly on the Tick-Tock Man; everyone and everything else was little more than a series of gray-shrouded shapes on the edges of Jake’s perception.

Roland opened his eyes again and pounded his left fist lightly into the open palm of his right hand. He had an idea that he could push harder and see more… but that might make the boy aware of his presence. That would be dangerous. Casher might smell a rat, and if he didn’t the Tick-Tock Man would.

He looked up at the narrow ventilator grilles, then down at Oy. He had wondered several times just how smart he was; now it looked as though he was going to find out.

Roland reached up with his good left hand, slipped his fingers between the horizontal slats of the ventilator grille closest to the hatchway through which Jake had been taken, and pulled. The grille popped out in a shower of rust and dried moss. The hole behind it was far too small for a man… but not for a billy-bumbler. He put the grille down, picked Oy up, and spoke softly into his ear.

“Go… see… come back. Do you understand? Don’t let them see you. Just go and see and come back.”

Oy gazed up into his face, saying nothing, not even Jake’s name. Roland had no idea if he had understood or not, but wasting time in ponderation would not help matters. He placed Oy in the ventilator shaft. The bumbler sniffed at the crumbles of dried moss, sneezed delicately, then only crouched there with the draft rippling through his long, silky fur, looking doubtfully at Roland with his strange eyes.

“Go and see and come back,” Roland repeated in a whisper, and Oy disappeared into the shadows, walking silently, claws retracted, on the pads of his paws.

Roland drew his gun again and did the hardest thing. He waited.

Oy returned less than three minutes later. Roland lifted him out of the shaft and put him on the floor. Oy looked up at him with his long neck extended. “How many, Oy?” Roland asked. “How many did you see?”

For a long moment he thought the bumbler wouldn’t do anything except go on staring in his anxious way. Then he lifted his right paw tentatively in the air, extended the claws, and looked at it, as if trying to remember something very difficult. At last he began to tap on the steel floor.

One… two… three… four. A pause. Then two more, quick and delicate, the extended claws clicking lightly on the steel: five, six. Oy paused a second time, head down, looking like a child lost in the throes of some titanic mental struggle. Then he tapped his claws one final time on the steel, looking up at Roland as he did it. “Ake!”

Six. Grays… and Jake.

Roland picked Oy up and stroked him. “Good!” he murmured into Oy’s ear. In truth, he was almost overwhelmed with surprise and gratitude. He had hoped for something, but this careful response was amazing. And he had few doubts about the accuracy of the count. “Good boy!”

“Oy! Ake!”

Yes, Jake. Jake was the problem. Jake, to whom he had made a promise he intended to keep.

The gunslinger thought deeply in his strange fashion-that combination of dry pragmatism and wild intuition which had probably come from his strange grandmother, Deidre the Mad, and had kept him alive all these years after his old companions had passed. Now he was depending on it to keep Jake alive, too.

He picked Oy up again, knowing Jake might live-might-but the bumbler was almost certainly going to die. He whispered several simple words into Oy’s cocked ear, repeating them over and over. At last he ceased speaking and returned him to the ventilator shaft. “Good boy,” he whispered. “Go on, now. Get it done. My heart goes with you.”

“Oy! Art! Ake!” the bumbler whispered, and then scurried off into the darkness again.

Roland waited for all hell to break loose.

30

ASK ME A QUESTION, Eddie Dean of New York. And it better be a good one… if it’s not, you and your woman are going to die, no matter where you came from.

And, dear God, how did you respond to something like that?

The dark red light had gone out; now the pink one reappeared. “Hurry,” the faint voice of Little Blaine urged them. “He’s worse than ever before… hurry or he’ll kill you!”

Eddie was vaguely aware that flocks of disturbed pigeons were still swooping aimlessly through the Cradle, and that some of them had smashed headfirst into the pillars and dropped dead on the floor.

“What does it want?” Susannah hissed at the speaker and the voice of Little Blaine somewhere behind it. “For God’s sake, what does it want?”

No reply. And Eddie could feel any period of grace they might have started with slipping away. He thumbed the TALK/LISTEN and spoke with frantic vivacity as the sweat trickled down his cheeks and neck.

Ask me a question.

“So-Blaine! What have you been up to these last few years? I guess you haven’t been doing the old southeast run, huh? Any reason why not? Haven’t been feeling up to snuff?”

No sound but the rustle and flap of the pigeons. In his mind he saw Ardis trying to scream as his cheeks melted and his tongue caught fire.

He felt the hair on the nape of his neck stirring and clumping together. Fear? Or gathering electricity?

Hurry… he’s worse than ever before.

“Who built you, anyway?” Eddie asked frantically, thinking: If I only knew what the fucking thing wanted! “Want to talk about that? Was it the Grays? Nah… probably the Great Old Ones, right? Or…”

He trailed off. Now he could feel Blaine’s silence as a physical weight on his skin, like fleshy, groping hands.

“What do you want?” he shouted. “Just what in hell do you want to hear?”

No answer-but the buttons on the box were glowing an angry dark red again, and Eddie knew their time was almost up. He could hear a low buzzing sound nearby-a sound like an electrical generator-and he didn’t believe that sound was just his imagination, no matter how much he wanted to think so.

“Blaine!” Susannah shouted suddenly. “Blaine, do you hear me?”

No answer… and Eddie felt the air was filling up with electricity as a bowl under a tap fills up with water. He could feel it crackling bitterly in his nose with every breath he took; could feel his fillings buzzing like angry insects.

“Blaine, I’ve got a question, and it is a pretty good one! Listen!” She closed her eyes for a moment, fingers rubbing frantically at her temples, and then opened her eyes again. “There is a thing that… uh… that nothing is, and yet it has a name; ’tis sometimes tall and… and sometimes short…” She broke off and stared at Eddie with wide, agonized eyes. “Help me! I can’t remember how the rest of it goes!””Eddie only stared at her as if she had gone mad. What in the name of God was she talking about? Then it came to him, and it made a weirdly perfect sense, and the rest of the riddle clicked into his mind as neatly as the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He swung toward the speaker again.

“It joins our talks, it joins our sport, and plays at every game.’ What is it? That’s our question, Blaine-what is it?””The red light illuminating the COMMAND and ENTER buttons below the diamond of numbers blinked out. There was an endless moment of silence before Blaine spoke again… but Eddie was aware that the feeling of electricity crawling all over his skin was diminishing.

“A SHADOW, OF COURSE,” the voice of Blaine responded. “AN EASY ONE… BUT NOT BAD. NOT BAD AT ALL.”

The voice coming out of the speaker was animated by a thoughtful quality… and something else, as well. Pleasure? Longing? Eddie couldn’t quite decide, but he did know there was something in that voice that reminded him of Little Blaine. He knew something else, as well: Susannah had saved their bacon, at least for the time being. He bent down and kissed her cold, sweaty brow.

“DO YOU KNOW ANY MORE RIDDLES?” Blaine asked.

“Yes, lots,” Susannah said at once. “Our companion, Jake, has a whole book of them.”

“FROM THE NEW YORK PLACE OF WHERE?” Blaine asked, and now the tone of his voice was perfectly clear, at least to Eddie. Blaine might be a machine, but Eddie had been a heroin junkie for six years, and he knew stone greed when he heard it.

“From New York, right,” he said. “But Jake has been taken prisoner. A man named Gasher took him.”

No answer… and then the buttons glowed that faint, rosy pink again. “Good so far,” the voice of Little Blaine whispered. “But you must be careful… he’s tricky…”

The red lights reappeared at once.

“DID ONE OF YOU SPEAK?” Blaine’s voice was cold and-Eddie could have sworn it was so-suspicious.

He looked at Susannah. Susannah looked back with the wide, frightened eyes of a little girl who has heard something unnameable moving slyly beneath the bed.

“I cleared my throat, Blaine,” Eddie said. He swallowed and armed sweat from his forehead. “I’m… shit, tell the truth and shame the devil. I’m scared to death.”

“THAT IS VERY WISE OF YOU. THESE RIDDLES OF WHICH YOU SPEAK-ARE THEY STUPID? I WON’T HAVE MY PATIENCE TRIED WITH STUPID RIDDLES.”

“Most are smart,” Susannah said, but she looked anxiously at Eddie as she said it.

“YOU LIE. YOU DON’T KNOW THE QUALITY OF THESE RIDDLES AT ALL.”

“How can you say-”

“VOICE ANALYSIS. FRICTIVE PATTERNS AND DIPHTHONG STRESS-EMPHASIS PROVIDE A RELIABLE QUOTIENT OF TRUTH/UNTRUTH. PREDICTIVE RELIABILITY IS 97 PER CENT, PLUS OR MINUS.5 PER CENT.” The voice fell silent for a moment, and when it spoke again, it did so in a menacing drawl that Eddie found very familiar. It was the voice of Humphrey Bogart. “I SHUGGEST YOU SHTICK TO WHAT YOU KNOW, SHWEET-HEART. THE LAST GUY THAT TRIED SHADING THE TRUTH WITH ME WOUND UP AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEND IN A PAIR OF SHEMENT COWBOY BOOTS.”

“Christ,” Eddie said. “We walked four hundred miles or so to meet the computer version of Rich Little. How can you imitate guys like John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, Blaine? Guys from our world?”

Nothing.

“Okay, you don’t want to answer that one. How about this one-if a riddle was what you wanted, why didn’t you just say so?”

Again there was no answer, but Eddie discovered that he didn’t really need one. Blaine liked riddles, so he had asked them one. Susannah had solved it. Eddie guessed that if she had failed to do so, the two of them would now look like a couple of giant-economy-size charcoal briquets lying on the floor of the Cradle of Lud.

“Blaine?” Susannah asked uneasily. There was no answer. “Blaine, are you still there?”

“YES. TELL ME ANOTHER ONE.”

“When is a door not a door?” Eddie asked.

“WHEN IT’S AJAR. YOU’ll HAVE TO DO BETTER THAN THAT IF YOU REALLY EXPECT ME TO TAKE YOU SOMEWHERE. CAN YOU DO BETTER THAN THAT?”

“If Roland gets here, I’m sure we can,” Susannah said. “Regardless of how good the riddles in Jake’s book may be, Roland knows hundreds- he actually studied them as a child.” Having said this, she realized she could not conceive of Roland as a child. “Will you take us, Blaine?”

“I MIGHT,” Blaine said, and Eddie was quite sure he heard a dim thread of cruelty running through that voice. “BUT YOU’ll HAVE TO PRIME THE PUMP TO GET ME GOING, AND MY PUMP PRIMES BACKWARD.”

“Meaning what?” Eddie asked, looking through the bars at the smooth pink line of Blaine’s back. But Blaine did not reply to this or any of the other questions they asked. The bright orange lights stayed on, but both Big Blaine and Little Blaine seemed to have gone into hibernation. Eddie, however, knew better. Blaine was awake. Blaine was watching them. Blaine was listening to their frictive patterns and diphthong stress-emphasis.

He looked at Susannah.

“You’ll have to prime the pump, but my pump primes backward,” he said bleakly. “It’s a riddle, isn’t it?””“Yes, of course.” She looked at the triangular window, so like a half-lidded, mocking eye, and then pulled him close so she could whisper in his ear. “It’s totally insane, Eddie-schizophrenic, paranoid, probably delusional as well.”

“Tell me about it,” he breathed back. “What we’ve got here is a lunatic genius ghost-in-the-computer monorail that likes riddles and goes faster than the speed of sound. Welcome to the fantasy version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

“Do you have any idea what the answer is?”

Eddie shook his head. “You?”

“A little tickle, way back in my mind. False light, probably. I keep thinking about what Roland said: a good riddle is always sensible and always solvable. It’s like a magician’s trick.”

“Misdirection.”

She nodded. “Go fire another shot, Eddie-let em know we’re still here.”

“Yeah. Now if we could only be sure that they’re still there.”

“Do you think they are, Eddie?”

Eddie had started away, and he spoke without stopping or looking back. “I don’t know-that’s a riddle not even Blaine could answer."

31

“COULD I HAVE SOMETHING to drink?” Jake asked. His voice came out sounding furry and nasal. Both his mouth and the tissues in his abused nose were swelling up. He looked like someone who has gotten the worst of it in a nasty street-fight.

“Oh, yes,” Tick-Tock replied judiciously. “You could. I’d say you certainly could. We have lots to drink, don’t we, Copperhead?”

“Ay,” said a tall, bespectacled man in a white silk shirt and a pair of black silk trousers. He looked like a college professor in a turn-of-the-century Punch cartoon. “No shortage of po-ter-bulls here.”

The Tick-Tock Man, once more seated at ease in his throne-like chair, looked humorously at Jake. “We have wine, beer, ale, and, of course, good old water. Sometimes that’s all a body wants, isn’t it? Cool, clear, sparkling water. How does that sound, cully?”

Jake’s throat, which was also swollen and as dry as sandpaper, prickled painfully. “Sounds good,” he whispered.

“It’s woke my thirsty up, I know that,” Tick-Tock said. His lips spread in a smile. His green eyes sparkled. “Bring me a dipper of water, Tilly-I’ll be damned if I know what’s happened to my manners.”

Tilly stepped through the hatchway on the far side of the room-it was opposite the one through which Jake and Gasher had entered. Jake watched her go and licked his swollen lips.

“Now,” Tick-Tock said, returning his gaze to Jake, “you say the American city you came from-this New York-is much like Lud.”

“Well… not exactly…”

“But you do recognize some of the machinery, Tick-Tock pressed. “Valves and pumps and such. Not to mention the firedim tubes.”

“Yes. We call it neon, but it’s the same.”

Tick-Tock reached out toward him. Jake cringed, but Tick-Tock only patted him on the shoulder. “Yes, yes; close enough.” His eyes gleamed. “And you’ve heard of computers?”

“Sure, but-”

Tilly returned with the dipper and timidly approached the Tick-Tock Man’s throne. He took it and held it out to Jake. When Jake reached for it, Tick-Tock pulled it back and drank himself. As Jake watched the water trickle from Tick-Tock’s mouth and roll down his naked chest, he began to shake. He couldn’t help it.

The Tick-Tock Man looked over the dipper at him, as if just remembering that Jake was still there. Behind him, Gasher, Copperhead, Bran-don, and Hoots were grinning like schoolyard kids who have just heard an amusing dirty joke.

“Why, I got thinking about how thirsty I was and forgot all about you!” Tick-Tock cried. “That’s mean as hell, gods damn my eyes! But, of course, it looked so good… and it is good… cold… clear…”

He held the dipper out to Jake. When Jake reached for it, Tick-Tock pulled it back.

“First, cully, tell me what you know about dipolar computers and transitive circuits,” he said coldly.

“What…” Jake looked toward the ventilator grille, but the golden eyes were still gone. He was beginning to think he had imagined them after all. He shifted his gaze back to the Tick-Tock Man, understanding one thing clearly: he wasn’t going to get any water. He had been stupid to even dream he might. “What are dipolar computers?”

The Tick-Tock Man’s face contorted with rage; he threw the remainder of the water into Jake’s bruised, puffy face. “Don’t you play it light with me!” he shrieked. He stripped off the Seiko watch and shook it in front of Jake. “When I asked you if this ran on a dipolar circuit, you said it didn’t! So don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about when you already made it clear that you do!”

“But… but…” Jake couldn’t go on. His head was whirling with fear and confusion. He was aware, in some far-off fashion, that he was licking as much water as he could off his lips.

“There’s a thousand of those ever-fucking dipolar computers right under the ever-fucking city, maybe a HUNDRED thousand, and the only one that still works don’t do a thing except play Watch Me and run those drums! I want those computers! I want them working for ME!”

The Tick-Tock Man bolted forward on his throne, seized Jake, shook him back and forth, and then threw him to the floor. Jake struck one of the lamps, knocking it over, and the bulb blew with a hollow coughing sound. Tilly gave a little shriek and stepped backward, her eyes wide and frightened. Copperhead and Brandon looked at each other uneasily.

Tick-Tock leaned forward, elbows on his thighs, and screamed into Jake’s face: “I want them AND I MEAN TO HAVE THEM!”

Silence fell in the room, broken only by the soft whoosh of warm air pouring from the ventilators. Then the twisted rage on the Tick-Tock Man’s face disappeared so suddenly it might never have existed at all. It was replaced by another charming smile. He leaned further forward and helped Jake to his feet.

“Sorry. I get thinking about the potential of this place and sometimes I get carried away. Please accept my apology, cully.” He picked up the overturned dipper and threw it at Tilly. “Fill this up, you useless bitch! What’s the matter with you?”

He turned his attention back to Jake, still smiling his TV game-show host smile.

“All right; you’ve had your little joke and I’ve had mine. Now tell me everything you know about dipolar computers and transitive circuits. Then you can have a drink.”

Jake opened his mouth to say something-he had no idea what- and then, incredibly, Roland’s voice was in his mind, filling it.

Distract them, Jake-and if there’s a button that opens the door, get close to it.

The Tick-Tock Man was watching him closely. “Something just came into your mind, didn’t it, cully? I always know. So don’t keep it a secret; tell your old friend Ticky.”

Jake caught movement in the corner of his eye. Although he did not dare glance up at the ventilator panel-not with all the Tick-Tock Man’s notice bent upon him-he knew that Oy was back, peering down through the louvers.

Distract them… and suddenly Jake knew just how to do that.

“I did think of something,” he said, “but it wasn’t about computers. It was about my old pal Gasher. And his old pal, Hoots.”

“Here! Here!” Gasher cried. “What are you talking about, boy?”

“Why don’t you tell Tick-Tock who really gave you the password, Gasher? Then I can tell Tick-Tock where you keep it.”

The Tick-Tock Man’s puzzled gaze shifted from Jake to Gasher. “What’s he talking about?”

“Nothin!” Gasher said, but he could not forbear a quick glance at Hoots. “He’s just runnin his gob, tryin to get off the hot-seat by puttin me on it, Ticky. I told you he was pert! Didn’t I say-”

Take a look in his scarf, why don’t you?” Jake asked. “He’s got a scrap of paper with the word written on it. I had to read it to him because he couldn’t even do that.”

There was no sudden rage on Tick-Tock’s part this time; his face darkened gradually instead, like a summer sky before a terrible thunderstorm.

“Let me see your scarf, Gasher,” he said in a soft, thick voice. “Let your old pal sneak a peek.”

“He’s lyin, I tell you!” Gasher cried, putting his hands on his scarf and taking two steps backward toward the wall. Directly above him, Oy’s gold-ringed eyes gleamed. “All you got to do is look in his face to see lyin’s what a pert little cull like him does best!”

The Tick-Tock Man shifted his gaze to Hoots, who looked sick with fear. “What about it?” Tick-Tock asked in his soft, terrible voice. “What about it, Hooterman? I know you and Gasher was butt-buddies of old, and I know you’ve the brains of a hung goose, but surely not even you could be stupid enough to write down a password to the inner chamber… could you? Could you?”

“I… I oney thought…” Hoots began.

“Shut up!” Gasher shouted. He shot Jake a look of pure, sick hate. “I’ll kill you for this, dearie-see if I don’t.”

“Take off your scarf, Gasher,” the Tick-Tock Man said. “I want a look inside it.”

Jake sidled a step closer to the podium with the burtons on it.

“No!” Gasher’s hands returned to the scarf and pressed against it as if it might fly away of its own accord. “Be damned if I will!”

“Brandon, grab him,” Tick-Tock said.

Brandon lunged for Gasher. Gasher’s move wasn’t as quick as Tick-Tock’s had been, but it was quick enough; he bent, yanked a knife from the top of his boot, and buried it in Brandon’s arm.

“Oh, you barstard!” Brandon shouted in surprise and pain as blood began to pour out of his arm.

“Lookit what you did!” Tilly screamed.

“Do I have to do everything around here myself?” Tick-Tock shouted, more exasperated than angry, it seemed, and rose to his feet. Gasher retreated from him, weaving the bloody knife back and forth in front of his face in mystic patterns. He kept his other hand planted firmly on top of his head.

“Draw back,” he panted. “I loves you like a brother, Ticky, but if you don’t draw back, I’ll hide this blade in your guts-so I will.”

“You? Not likely,” the Tick-Tock Man said with a laugh. He removed his own knife from its scabbard and held it delicately by the bone hilt. All eyes were on the two of them. Jake took two quick steps to the podium with its little cluster of buttons and reached for the one he thought the Tick-Took man had pushed.

Gasher was backing along the curved wall, the tubes of light painting his mandrus-riddled face in a succession of sick colors: bile-green, fever-red, jaundice-yellow. Now it was the Tick-Tock Man standing below the ventilator grille where Oy was watching.

“Put it down, Gasher,” Tick-Tock said in a reasonable tone of voice. “You brought the boy as I asked; if anyone else gets pricked over this, it’ll be Hoots, not you. Just show me-”

Jake saw Oy crouching to spring and understood two things: what the humbler meant to do and who had put him up to it.

“Oy, no!” he screamed.

All of them turned to look at him. At that moment Oy leaped, hitting the flimsy ventilator grille and knocking it free. The Tick-Tock Man wheeled toward die sound, and Oy fell onto his upturned face, biting and slashing.

32

ROLAND HEARD IT FAINTLY even through the twin doors-Oy, no!-and his heart sank. He waited for the valve-wheel to turn, but it did not. He closed his eyes and sent with all his might: The door, Jake! Open the door!

He sensed no response, and the pictures were gone. His communication line with Jake, flimsy to begin with, had now been severed.

33

THE TICK-TOCK MAN blundered backward, cursing and screaming and grabbing at the writhing, biting, digging thing on his face. He felt Oy’s claws punch into his left eye, popping it, and a horrible red pain sank into his head like a flaming torch thrown down a deep well. At that point, rage overwhelmed pain. He seized Oy, tore him off his face, and held him over his head, meaning to twist him like a rag.

“No!” Jake wailed. He forgot about the button which unlocked the doors and seized the gun hanging from the back of the chair.

Tilly shrieked. The others scattered. Jake levelled the old German machine-gun at the Tick-Tock Man. Oy, upside down in those huge, strong hands and bent almost to the snapping point, writhed madly and slashed his teeth into the air. He shrieked in agony-a horribly human sound.

“Leave him alone, you bastard!” Jake screamed, and pressed the trigger.

He had enough presence of mind left to aim low. The roar of the Schmeisser.40 was ear-splitting in the enclosed space, although it fired only five or six rounds. One of the lighted tubes popped in a burst of cold orange fire. A hole appeared an inch above the left knee of the Tick-Tock Man’s tight-fitting trousers, and a dark red stain began to spread at once. Tick-Tock’s mouth opened in a shocked O of surprise, an expression which said more clearly than words could have done that, for all his intelligence, Tick-Tock had expected to live a long, happy life where he shot people but was never shot himself. Shot at, perhaps, but actually hit? That surprised expression said that just wasn’t supposed to be in the cards.

Welcome to the real world, you fuck, Jake thought.

Tick-Tock dropped Oy to the iron grillework floor to grab at his wounded leg. Copperhead lunged at Jake, got an arm around his throat, and then Oy was on him, barking shrilly and chewing at Copperhead’s ankle through the black silk pants. Copperhead screamed and danced away, shaking Oy back and forth at the end of his leg. Oy clung like a limpet. Jake turned to see the Tick-Tock Man crawling toward him. He had retrieved his knife and the blade was now clamped between his teeth.

“Goodbye, Ticky,” Jake said, and pressed the Schmeisser’s trigger again. Nothing happened. Jake didn’t know if it was empty or jammed, and this was hardly the time to speculate. He took two steps backward before finding further retreat blocked by the big chair which had served the Tick-Tock Man as a throne. Before he could slip around, putting the chair between them, Tick-Tock had grabbed his ankle. His other hand went to the hilt of his knife. The ruins of his left eye lay on his cheek like a glob of mint jelly; the right eye glared up at Jake with insane hatred.

Jake tried to pull away from the clutching hand and went sprawling on the Tick-Tock man’s throne. His eye fell on a pocket which had been sewn into the right-hand arm-rest. Jutting from the elasticized top was the cracked pearl handle of a revolver.

“Oh, cully, how you’ll suffer!” the Tick-Tock Man whispered ecstatically. The O of surprise had been replaced by a wide, trembling grin. “Oh how you’ll suffer! And how happy I’ll be to… What-?”

The grin slackened and the surprised O began to reappear as Jake pointed the cheesy nickel-plated revolver at him and thumbed back the hammer. The grip on Jake’s ankle tightened until it seemed to him that the bones there must snap.

“You dasn’t!” Tick-Tock said in a screamy whisper.

“Yes I do,” Jake said grimly, and pulled the trigger of the Tick-Tock Man’s runout gun. There was a Hat crack, much less dramatic than the Schmeisser’s Teutonic roar. A small black hole appeared high up on the right side of Tick-Tock’s forehead. The Tick-Tock Man went on staring up at Jake, disbelief in his remaining eye.

Jake tried to make himself shoot him again and couldn’t do it.

Suddenly a flap of the Tick-Tock Man’s scalp peeled away like old wallpaper and dropped on his right cheek. Roland would have known what this meant; Jake, however, was now almost beyond coherent thought. A dark, panicky horror was spinning across his mind like a tornado funnel. He cringed back in the big chair as the hand on his ankle fell away and the Tick-Tock Man collapsed forward on his face.

The door. He had to open the door and let the gunslinger in.

Focusing on that and nothing but, Jake let the pearl-handled revolver clatter to the iron grating and pushed himself out of the chair. He was reaching again for the button he thought he had seen Tick-Tock push when a pair of hands settled around his throat and dragged him backward, away from the podium.

“I said I’d kill you for it, my narsty little pal,” a voice whispered in his ear, “and the Gasherman always keeps his promises.”

Jake flailed behind him with both hands and found nothing but thin air. Gasher’s fingers sank into his throat, choking relentlessly. The world started to turn gray in front of his eyes. Gray quickly deepened to purple, and purple to black.

34

A PUMP STARTED UP, and the valve-wheel in the center of the hatch spun rapidly. Gods be thanked! Roland thought. He seized the wheel with his right hand almost before it had stopped moving and yanked it open. The other door was ajar; from beyond it came the sounds of men fighting and Oy’s bark, now shrill with pain and fury.

Roland kicked the door open with his boot and saw Gasher throttling Jake. Oy had left Copperhead and was now trying to make Gasher let go of Jake, but Gasher’s boot was doing double duty: protecting its owner from the bumbler’s teeth, and protecting Oy from the virulent infection which ran in Gasher’s blood. Brandon stabbed Oy in the flank again in an effort to make him stop worrying Gasher’s ankle, but Oy paid no heed. Jake hung from his captor’s dirty hands like a puppet whose strings have been cut. His face was bluish-white, his swollen lips a delicate shade of lavender.

Gasher looked up. “You,” he snarled.

“Me,” Roland agreed. He fired once and tin; left side of Gasher’s head disintegrated. The man went flying backward, bloodstained yellow scarf unravelling, and landed on top of the Tick-Tock Man. His feet drummed spastically on the iron grillework for a moment and then fell still.

The gunslinger shot Brandon twice, fanning the hammer of his revolver with the flat of his right hand. Brandon, who had been bent over Oy for another stroke, spun around, struck the wall, and slid slowly down it, clutching at one of the tubes. Green swamplight spilled out from between his loosening fingers.

Oy limped to where Jake lay and began licking his pale, still face.

Copperhead and Hoots had seen enough. They ran side by side for the small door through which Tilly had gone to get the dipper of water. It was the wrong time for chivalry; Roland shot them both in the back. He would have to move fast now, very fast indeed, and he would not risk being waylaid by these two if they should chance to rediscover their guts.

A cluster of bright orange lights came on at the top of the capsule-shaped enclosure, and an alarm began to go off: in broad, hoarse blats that bartered the walls. After a moment or two, the emergency lights began to pulse in sync with the alarm.

35

EDDIE WAS RETURNING TO Susannah when the alarm began to wail. He yelled in surprise and raised the Ruger, pointing it at nothing. “What’s happening?”

Susannah shook her head-she had no idea. The alarm was scary, but that was only part of the problem; it was also loud enough to be physically painful. Those amplified jags of sound made Eddie think of a tractor-trailer horn raised to the tenth power.

At that moment, the orange arc-sodiums began to pulse. When he reached Susannah’s chair, Eddie saw that the COMMAND and ENTER buttons were also pulsing in bright red beats. They looked like winking eyes.

“Blaine, what’s happening?” he shouted. He looked around but saw only wildly jumping shadows. “Are you doing this?”

Blaine’s only response was laughter-terrible mechanical laughter that made Eddie think of the clockwork clown that had stood outside the House of Horrors at Coney Island when he was a little kid.

“Blaine, stop it!” Susannah shrieked. “How can we think of an answer to your riddle with that air-raid siren going off?”

The laughter stopped us suddenly as it began, but Blaine made no reply. Or perhaps he did; from beyond the bars that separated them from the platform, huge engines powered by frictionless slo-trans turbines awoke at the command of the dipolar computers the Tick-Tock Man had so lusted after. For the first time in a decade, Blaine the Mono was awake and cycling up toward running speed.

36

THE ALARM, WHICH HAD indeed been built to warn Lud’s long-dead residents of an impending air attack (and which had not even been tested in almost a thousand years), blanketed the city with sound. All the lights which still operated came on and began to pulse in sync. Pubes above the streets and Grays below them were alike convinced that the end they had always feared was finally upon them. The Grays suspected some cataclysmic mechanical breakdown was occurring. The Pubes, who had always believed that the ghosts lurking in the machines below the city would some day rise up to take their long-delayed vengeance on the still living, were probably closer to the actual truth of what was happening.

Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient computers below the city, a single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It had held its increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and might have held them so for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery which maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelligence had awakened in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as any ghost, to stumble through the halls of the dead.

In other words, Blaine the Mono was preparing to get out of Dodge.

37

ROLAND HEARD A FOOTSTEP behind him as he knelt by Jake and turned, raising his gun. Tilly, her dough-colored face a mask of confusion and superstitious fear, raised her hands and shrieked: “Don’t kill me, sai! Please! Don’t kill me!”

“Run, then,” Roland said curtly, and as Tilly began to move, he struck her calf with the barrel of his revolver. “Not that way-through the door I came in. And if you ever see me again, I’ll be the last thing you ever see. Now go!”

She disappeared into the leaping, circling shadows.

Roland dropped his head to Jake’s chest, slamming his palm against his other ear to deaden the pulse of the alarm. He heard the boy’s heartbeat, slow but strong. He slipped his arms around the boy, and as he did, Jakes’s eyes fluttered open. “You didn’t let me fall this time.” His voice was no more than a hoarse whisper.

“No. Not this time, and not ever again. Don’t try your voice.”

“Where’s Oy?”

“Oy!” the bumbler barked. “Oy!”

Brandon had slashed Oy several times, but none of the wounds seemed mortal or even serious. It was clear that he was in some pain, but it was equally clear he was transported with joy. He regarded Jake with sparkling eyes, his pink tongue lolling out. “Ake, Ake, Ake!”

Jake burst into tears and reached for him; Oy limped into the circle of his arms and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment.

Roland got up and looked around. His gaze fixed on the door on the far side of the room. The two men he’d backshot had been heading in that direction, and the woman had also wanted to go that way. The gunslinger went toward the door with Jake in his arms and Oy at his heel. He kicked one of the dead Grays aside, and ducked through. The room beyond was a kitchen. It managed to look like a hog-wallow in spite of the built-in appliances and the stainless steel walls; the Grays were apparently not much interested in housekeeping.

“Drink,” Jake whispered. “Please… so thirsty.”

Roland felt a queer doubling, as if time had folded backward on itself. He remembered lurching out of the desert, crazy with the heat and the emptiness. He remembered passing out in the stable of the way station, half-dead from thirst, and waking at the taste of cool water trickling down his throat. The boy had taken off his shirt, soaked it under the flow from the pump, and given him to drink. Now it was his turn to do for Jake what Jake had already done for him.

Roland glanced around and saw a sink. He went over to it and turned on the faucet. Cold, clear water rushed out. Over them, around them, under them, the alarm roared on and on.

“Can you stand?”

Jake nodded. “I think so.”

Roland set the boy on his feet, ready to catch him if he looked too wobbly, but Jake hung onto the sink, then ducked his head beneath the flowing water. Roland picked Oy up and looked at his wounds. They were already clotting. You got off very lucky, my furry friend, Roland thought, then reached past Jake to cup a palmful of water for the animal. Oy drank it eagerly.

Jake drew back from the faucet with his hair plastered to the sides of his face. His skin was still too pale and the signs that he had been badly beaten were clearly visible, but he looked better than he had when Roland had first bent over him. For one terrible moment, the gunslinger had been positive Jake was dead.

He found himself wishing he could go back and kill Gasher again, and that led him to another thought.

“What about the one Gasher called the Tick-Tock Man? Did you see him, Jake?”

“Yes. Oy ambushed him. Tore up his face. Then I shot him.”

“Dead?”

Jake’s lips began to tremble. He pressed them firmly together. “Yes. In his…” He tapped his forehead high above his right eyebrow. “I was l-l-… I was lucky.”

Roland looked at him appraisingly, then slowly shook his head. “You know, I doubt that. But never mind now. Come on.”

“Where are we going?” Jake’s voice was still little more than a husky murmur, and he kept looking past Roland’s shoulder toward the room where he had almost died.

Roland pointed across the kitchen. Beyond another hatchway, the corridor continued. “That’ll do for a start.”

“GUNSLINGER,” a voice boomed from everywhere.

Roland wheeled around, one arm cradling Oy and the other around Jake’s shoulders, but there was no one to see.

“Who speaks to me?” he shouted.

“NAME YOURSELF, GUNSLINGER.”

“Roland of Gilead, son of Steven. Who speaks to me?”

“GILEAD IS NO MORE,” the voice mused, ignoring the question.

Roland looked up and saw patterns of concentric rings in the ceiling. The voice was coming from those.

“NO GUNSLINGER HAS WALKED IN-WORLD OR MID-WORLD FOR ALMOST THREE HUNDRED YEARS.”

“I and my friends are the last.”

Jake took Oy from Roland. The bumbler at once began to lick the boy’s swollen face; his gold-ringed eyes were full of adoration and happiness.

“It’s Blaine,” Jake whispered to Roland. “Isn’t it?”

Roland nodded. Of course it was-but he had an idea that there was a great deal more to Blaine than just a monorail train.

“BOY! ARE YOU JAKE OF NEW YORK?”

Jake pressed closer to Roland and looked up at the speakers. “Yes,” he said. “That’s me. Jake of New York. Uh… son of Elmer.”

“DO YOU STILL HAVE THE BOOK OF RIDDLES? THE ONE OF WHICH I HAVE BEEN TOLD?”

Jake reached over his shoulder, and an expression of dismayed recollection filled his face as his fingers touched nothing but his own back. When he looked at Roland again, the gunslinger was holding his pack out toward him, and although the man’s narrow, finely carved face was as expressionless as ever, Jake sensed the ghost of a smile lurking at die corners of his mouth.

“You’ll have to fix die straps,” Roland said as Jake took the pack. “I made them longer.”

“But Riddle-De-Dum!-?”

Roland nodded. “Both books are still in there.”

“WHAT YOU GOT, LITTLE PILGRIM?” the voice inquired in a leisurely drawl.

“Gripes!” Jake said.

It can see us as well as hear us, Roland thought, and a moment later he spotted a small glass eye in one corner, far above a man’s normal line of sight. He felt a chill slip over his skin, and knew from both the troubled look on Jake’s face and the way the boy’s arms had tightened around Oy that he wasn’t alone in his unease. That voice belonged to a machine, an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with it, all the same.

“The book,” Jake said. “I’ve got the riddle book.”

“GOOD.” There was an almost human satisfaction in the voice. “REALLY EXCELLENT.”

A scruffy, bearded fellow suddenly appeared in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen. A bloodstained, dirt-streaked yellow scarf flapped from the newcomer’s upper arm. “Fires in the walls!” he screamed. In his panic, he seemed not to realize that Roland and Jake were not part of his miserable subterranean ka-tet. “Smoke on the lower levels! People killin theirselves! Somepin’s gone wrong! Hell, everythin’s gone wrong! We gotta-”

The door of the oven suddenly dropped open like an unhinged jaw. A thick beam of blue-white fire shot out and engulfed the scruffy man’s head. He was driven backward with his clothes in flames and his skin boiling on his face.

Jake stared up at Roland, stunned and horrified. Roland put an arm about the boy’s shoulders.

“HE INTERRUPTED ME,” the voice said. “THAT WAS RUDE, WASN’T IT?”

“Yes,” Roland said calmly. “Extremely rude.”

“SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK SAYS YOU HAVE A GREAT MANY RIDDLES BY HEART, ROLAND OF GILEAD. IS THIS TRUE?”

“Yes.”

There was an explosion in one of the rooms opening off this arm of the corridor; the floor shuddered beneath their feet and voices screamed in a jagged chorus. The pulsing lights and the endless, blatting siren faded momentarily, then came back strong. A little skein of bitter, acrid smoke drifted from the ventilators. Oy got a whiff and sneezed.

“TELL ME ONE OF YOUR RIDDLES, GUNSLINGER,” the voice invited. It was serene and untroubled, as if they were all sitting together in a peaceful village square somewhere instead of beneath a city that seemed on the verge of ripping itself apart.

Roland thought for a moment, and what came to mind was Cuthbert’s favorite riddle. “All right, Blaine,” he said, “I will. What’s better than all the gods and worse than Old Man Splitfoot? Dead people eat it always; live people who eat it die slow.”

There was a long pause. Jake put his face in Oy’s fur to try to get away from the stink of the roasted Gray.

“Be careful, gunslinger.” The voice was as small as a cool puff of breeze on summer’s hottest day. The voice of the machine had come from all the speakers, but this one came only from the speaker directly overhead. “Be careful, Jake of New York. Remember that these are The Drawers. Go slow and be very careful.”

Jake looked at the gunslinger with widening eyes. Roland gave his head a small, faint shake and raised one finger. He looked as if he was scratching the side of his nose, but that finger also lay across his lips, and Jake had an idea Roland was actually telling him to keep his mouth shut.

“A CLEVER RIDDLE,” Blaine said at last. There seemed to be real admiration in its voice. “THE ANSWER IS NOTHING, IS IT NOT?”

“That’s right,” Roland said. “You’re pretty clever yourself, Blaine.”

When the voice spoke again, Roland heard what Eddie had heard already: a deep and ungovernable greed. “ASK ME ANOTHER.”

Roland drew a deep breath. “Not just now.”

“I HOPE YOU ARE NOT REFUSING ME, ROLAND, SON OF STEVEN, FOR THAT IS ALSO RUDE. EXTREMELY RUDE.”

“Take us to our friends and help us get out of Lud,” Roland said. “Then there may be time for riddling.”

“I COULD KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND,” the voice said, and now it was as cold as winter’s darkest day.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I’m sure you could. But the riddles would die with us.”

“I COULD TAKE THE BOY’s BOOK.”

“Thieving is ruder than either refusal or interruption,” Roland remarked. He spoke as if merely passing the time of day, but the remaining fingers of his right hand were tight on Jake’s shoulder.

“Besides,” Jake said, looking up at the speaker in the ceiling, “the answers aren’t in the book. Those pages were torn out.” In a flash of inspiration, he tapped his temple. “They’re up here, though.”

“YOU FELLOWS WANT TO REMEMBER THAT NOBODY LOVES A SMARTASS,” Blaine said. There was another explosion, this one louder and closer. One of the ventilator grilles blew off and shot across the kitchen like a projectile. A moment later two men and a woman emerged through the door which led to the rest of the Grays’ warren. The gunslinger levelled his revolver at them, then lowered it as they stumbled across the kitchen and into the silo beyond without so much as a look at Roland and Jake. To Roland they looked like animals fleeing before a forest fire.

A stainless steel panel in the ceiling slid open, revealing a square of darkness. Something silvery flashed within it, and a few moments later a steel sphere, perhaps a foot in diameter, dropped from the hole and hung in the air of the kitchen.

“FOLLOW,” Blaine said flatly.

“Will it take us to Eddie and Susannah?” Jake asked hopefully.

Blaine replied only with silence… but when the sphere began floating down the corridor, Roland and Jake followed it.

38

JAKE HAD NO CLEAR memory of the time which followed, and that was probably merciful. He had left his world over a year before nine hundred people would commit suicide together in a small South American country called Gyana, but he knew about the periodic death-rushes of the lemmings, and what was happening in the disintegrating undercity of the Grays was like that.

There were explosions, some on their level but most far below them; acrid smoke occasionally drifted from the ventilator grilles, but most of the air-purifiers were still working and they whipped the worst of it away before it could gather in choking clouds. They saw no fires. Yet the Grays were reacting as if the time of the apocalypse had come. Most only fled, their faces blank O’s of panic, but many had committed suicide in the halls and interconnected rooms through which the steel sphere led Roland and Jake. Some had shot themselves; many more had slashed their throats or wrists; a few appeared to have swallowed poison. On all the faces of the dead was the same expression of overmastering terror. Jake could only vaguely understand what had driven them to this. Roland had a better idea of what had happened to them-to their minds-when the long-dead city first came to life around them and then seemed to commence tearing itself apart. And it was Roland who understood that Blaine was doing it on purpose. That Blaine was driving them to it.

They ducked around a man hanging from an overhead heating-duct and pounded down a flight of steel stairs behind the floating steel ball.

“Jake!” Roland shouted. “You never let me in at all, did you?”

Jake shook his head.

“I didn’t think so. It was Blaine.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs and hurried along a narrow corridor toward a hatch with the words ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE printed on it in the spiked letters of the High Speech.

“Is it Blaine?” Jake asked.

“Yes-that’s as good a name as any.”

“What about the other v-”

“Hush!” Roland said grimly.

The steel ball paused in front of the hatchway. The wheel spun and the hatch popped ajar. Roland pulled it open, and they stepped into a huge underground room which stretched away in three directions as far as they could see. It was filled with seemingly endless aisles of control panels and electronic equipment. Most of the panels were still dark and dead, but as Jake and Roland stood inside the door, looking about with wide eyes, they could see pilot-lights coming on and hear machinery cycling up.

“The Tick-Tock Man said there were thousands of computers,” Jake said. “I guess he was right. My God, look!”

Roland did not understand the word Jake had used and so said nothing. He only watched as row after row of panels lit up. A cloud of sparks and a momentary tongue of green fire jumped from one of the consoles as some ancient piece of equipment malfunctioned.

Most of the machinery, however, appeared to be up and running just fine. Needles which hadn’t moved in centuries suddenly jumped into the green. Huge aluminum cylinders spun, spilling data stored on silicon chips into memory banks which were once more wide awake and ready for input. Digital displays, indicating everything from the mean aquifer water-pressure in the West River Barony to available power amperage in the hibernating Send Basin Nuclear Plant, lit up in brilliant dot-matrices of red and green. Overhead, banks of hanging globes began to flash on, radiating outward in spokes of light. And from below, above, and around them-from everywhere-came the deep bass hum of generators and slo-trans engines awakening from their long sleep.

Juke had begun to flag badly. Roland swept him into his arms again and chased the steel ball past machines at whose function and intent he could not even guess. Oy ran at his heels. The ball banked left, and the aisle in which they now found themselves ran between banks of TV monitors, thousands of them, stacked in rows like a child’s building blocks.

My dad would love it, Jake thought.

Some sections of this vast video arcade were still dark, but many of the screens were on. They showed a, city in chaos, both above and below. Clumps of Pubes surged pointlessly through the streets, eyes wide, mouths moving soundlessly. Many were leaping from the tall buildings. Jake observed with horror that hundreds more had congregated at the Send Bridge and were throwing themselves into the river. Other screens showed large, cot-filled rooms like dormitories. Some of these rooms were on fire, but the panic-stricken Grays seemed to be setting the fires themselves-torching their own mattresses and furniture for God alone knew what reason.

One screen showed a barrel-chested giant tossing men and women into what looked like a blood-spattered stamping press. This was bad enough, but there was something worse: the victims were standing in an unguarded line, docilely waiting their turns. The executioner, his yellow scarf pulled tight over his skull and the knotted ends swinging below his ears like pigtails, seized an old woman and held her up, waiting patiently for the stainless steel block of metal to clear the killing floor so he could toss her in. The old woman did not struggle; seemed, in fact, to be smiling.

“IN THE ROOMS THE PEOPLE COME AND GO,” Blaine said, “BUT I DON’T THINK ANY OF THEM ARE TALKING OF MICHELANGELO.” He suddenly laughed-strange, tittery laughter that sounded like rats scampering over broken glass. The sound sent chills chasing up Jake’s neck. He wanted nothing at all to do with an intelligence that laughed like that… but what choice did they have?

He turned his gaze helplessly back to the monitors… and Roland at once turned his head away. He did this gently but firmly. “There’s nothing there you need to look at, Jake,” he said.

“But why are they doing it?” Jake asked. He had eaten nothing all day, but he still felt like vomiting. “Why?”

“Because they’re frightened, and Blaine is feeding their fear. But mostly, I think, because they’ve lived too long in the graveyard of their grandfathers and they’re tired of it. And before you pity them, remember how happy they would have been to take you along with them into the clearing where the path ends.”

The steel ball zipped around another corner, leaving the TV screens and electronic monitoring equipment behind. Ahead, a wide ribbon of some synthetic stuff was set into the floor. It gleamed like fresh tar between two narrow strips of chrome steel that dwindled to a point on what was not the far side of this room, but its horizon.

The ball bounced impatiently above the dark strip, and suddenly the belt-for that was what it was-swept into silent motion, trundling along between its steel facings at jogging speed. The ball made small arcs in the air, urging them to climb on.

Roland trotted beside the moving strip until he was roughly matching its speed, then did just that. He set Jake down and the three of them-gunslinger, boy, and golden-eyed bumbler-were carried rapidly across this shadowy underground plain where the ancient machines were awakening. The moving strip carried them into an area of what looked like filing cabinets-row after endless row of them. They were dark… but not dead. A low, sleepy humming sound came from within them, and Jake could see hairline cracks of bright yellow light shining between the steel panels.

He suddenly found himself thinking of the Tick-Tock Man.

There’s maybe a hundred thousand of those ever-fucking dipolar computers under the ever-fucking city! I want those computers!

Well, Jake thought, they’re waking up, so I guess you’re getting what you wanted, Ticky… but if you were here, I’m not sure you’d still want it.

Then he remembered Tick-Tock’s great-grandfather, who’d been brave enough to climb into an airplane from another world and take it into the sky. With that kind of blood running in his veins, Jake supposed, Tick-Tock, far from being frightened to the point of suicide, would have been delighted by this turn of events… and the more people who killed themselves in terror, the happier he would have been.

Too late now, Ticky, he thought. Thank God.

Roland spoke in a soft, wondering voice. “All these boxes… I think we’re riding through the mind of the thing that calls itself Blaine, Jake. / think we’re riding through its mind.”

Jake nodded, and found himself thinking of his Final Essay. “Blaine the Brain is a hell of a pain.”

“Yes.”

Jake looked closely at Roland. “Are we going to come out where I think we’re going to come out?”

“Yes,” Roland said. “If we’re still following the Path of the Beam, we’ll come out in the Cradle.”

Jake nodded. “Roland?”

“What?”

“Thanks for coming after me.”

Roland nodded and put an arm around Jake’s shoulders.

Far ahead of them, huge motors rumbled to life. A moment later a heavy grinding sound began and new light-the harsh glow of orange arc-sodiums-flooded down on them. Jake could now see the place where the moving belt stopped. Beyond it was a steep, narrow escalator, leading up into that orange light.

39

EDDIE AND SUSANNAH HEARD heavy motors start up almost directly beneath them. A moment later, a wide strip of the marble floor began to pull slowly back, revealing a long lighted slot below. The floor was disappearing in their direction. Eddie seized the handles of Susannah’s chair and rolled it rapidly backward along the steel barrier between the monorail platform and the rest of the Cradle. There were several pillars along the course of the growing rectangle of light, and Eddie waited for them to tumble into the hole as the floor upon which they stood disappeared from beneath their bases. It didn’t happen. The pillars went on serenely standing, seeming to float on nothing.

“I see an escalator!” Susannah shouted over the endless, pulsing alarm. She was leaning forward, peering into the hole.

“Uh-huh,” Eddie shouted back. “We got the el station up here, so it must be notions, perfume, and ladies’ lingerie down there.”

“What?”

“Never mind!”

“Eddie!” Susannah screamed. Delighted surprise burst over her face like a Fourth of July firework. She leaned even further forward, pointing, and Eddie had to grab her to keep her from tumbling out of the chair. “It’s Roland! It’s both of them!”

There was a shuddery thump as the slot in the floor opened to its maximum length and stopped. The motors which had driven it along its hidden tracks cut out in a long, dying whine. Eddie ran to the edge of the hole and saw Roland riding on one of the escalator steps. Jake- white-faced, bruised, bloody, but clearly Jake and clearly alive-was standing next to him and leaning on the gunslinger’s shoulder. And sitting on the step right behind them, looking up with his bright eyes was Oy.

“Roland! Jake!” Eddie shouted. He leaped up, waving his hands over his head, and came down dancing on the edge of the slot. If he had been wearing a hat, he would have thrown it in the air.

They looked up and waved. Jake was grinning, Eddie saw, and even old long tall and ugly looked as if he might break down and crack a smile before long. Wonders, Eddie thought, would never cease. His heart suddenly felt too big for his chest and he danced faster, waving his arms and whooping, afraid that if he didn’t keep moving, his joy and relief might actually cause him to burst. Until this moment he had not realized how positive his heart had become that they would never see Roland and Jake again.

“Hey, guys! All RIGHT! Far fucking out! Get your asses up here!”

“Eddie, help me!

He turned. Susannah was trying to struggle out of her chair, but a fold of the deerskin trousers she was wearing had gotten caught in the brake mechanism. She was laughing and weeping at the same time, her dark eyes blazing with happiness. Eddie lifted her from the chair so violently that it crashed over on its side. He danced her around in a circle. She clung to his neck with one hand and waved strenuously with the other.

“Roland! Jake! Get on up here! Shuck your butts, you hear me?”

When they reached the top, Eddie embraced Roland, pounding him on the back while Susannah covered Jake’s upturned, laughing face with kisses. Oy ran around in tight figure eights, barking shrilly.

“Sugar!” Susannah said. “You all right?”

“Yes,” Jake said. He was still grinning, but tears stood in his eyes. “And glad to be here. You’ll never know how glad.”

“I can guess, sugar. You c’n bet on that.” She turned to look at Roland. “What’d they do to him? His face look like somebody run over it with a bulldozer.”

“That was mostly Gasher,” Roland said. “He won’t be bothering Jake again. Or anyone else.”

“What about you, big boy? You all right?”

Roland nodded, looking about. “So this is the Cradle.”

“Yes,” Eddie said. He was peering into the slot. “What’s down there?”

“Machines and madness.”

“Loquacious as ever, I see.” Eddie looked at Roland, smiling. “Do you know how happy I am to see you, man? Do you have any idea?”

“Yes-I think I do.” Roland smiled then, thinking of how people changed. There had been a time, and not so long ago, when Eddie had been on the edge of cutting his throat with the gunslinger’s own knife.

The engines below them started up again. The escalator came to a stop. The slot in the floor began to slide closed once more. Jake went to Susannah’s overturned chair, and as he was righting it, he caught sight of the smooth pink shape beyond the iron bars. His breath stopped, and the dream he had had after leaving River Crossing returned full force: the vast pink bullet shape slicing across the empty lands of western Missouri toward him and Oy. Two big triangular windows glittering high up in the blank face of that oncoming monster, windows like eyes… and now his dream was becoming reality, just as he had known it eventually would.

It’s just an awful choo-choo train, and its name is Blaine the Pain.

Eddie walked over and slung an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Well, there it is, champ-just as advertised. What do you think of it?”

“Not too much, actually.” This was an understatement of colossal size, but Jake was too drained to do any better.

“Me, either,” Eddie said. “It talks. And it likes riddles.”

Jake nodded.

Roland had Susannah planted on one hip, and together they were examining the control box with its diamond-pattern of raised number-pads. Jake and Eddie joined them. Eddie found he had to keep looking down at Jake in order to verify that it wasn’t just his imagination or wishful thinking; the boy was really here.

“What now?” he asked Roland.

Roland slipped his finger lightly over the numbered buttons which made up the diamond shape and shook his head. He didn’t know.

“Because I think the mono’s engines are cycling faster,” Eddie said. “I mean, it’s hard to tell for sure with that alarm blatting, but I think it is… and it’s a robot, after all. What if it, like, leaves without us?”

“Blaine!” Susannah shouted. “Blaine, are you-”

“LISTEN CLOSELY, MY FRIENDS,” Blaine’s voice boomed. “THERE ARE LARGE STOCKPILES OF CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE CANNISTERS UNDER THE CITY. I HAVE STARTED A SEQUENCE WHICH WILL CAUSE AN EXPLOSION AND RELEASE THIS GAS. THIS EXPLOSION WILL OCCUR IN TWELVE MINUTES.”

The voice fell silent for a moment, and then the voice of Little Blaine, almost buried by the steady, pulsing whoop of the alarm, came to them:”… / was afraid of something like this… you must hurry…”

Eddie ignored Little Blaine, who wasn’t telling him a damned thing he didn’t already know. Of course they had to hurry, but that fact was running a distant second at the moment. Something much larger occupied most of his mind. “Why?” he asked. “Why in God’s name would you do that?”

“I SHOULD THINK IT OBVIOUS. I CAN’T NUKE THE CITY WITHOUT DESTROYING MYSELF, AS WELL. AND HOW COULD I TAKE YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO IF I WERE DESTROYED?”

“But there are still thousands of people in the city,” Eddie said. “You’ll kill them.”

“YES,” Blaine said calmly. “SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR, AFTER A WHILE CROCODILE, DON’T FORGET TO WRITE.”

“Why?” Susannah shouted. “Why, goddam you?”

“BECAUSE THEY BORE ME. YOU FOUR, HOWEVER, I FIND RATHER INTERESTING. OF COURSE, HOW LONG I CONTINUE TO FIND YOU INTERESTING WILL DEPEND ON HOW GOOD YOUR RIDDLES ARE. AND SPEAKING OF RIDDLES, HADN’T YOU BETTER GET TO WORK SOLVING MINE? YOU HAVE EXACTLY ELEVEN MINUTES AND TWENTY SECONDS BEFORE THE CANNISTERS RUPTURE.”

“Stop it!” Jake yelled over the blatting siren. “It isn’t just the city- gas like that could float anywhere! It could even kill the old people in River Crossing!”

“TOUGH TITTY, SAID THE KITTY,” Blaine responded unfeelingly. “ALTHOUGH I BELIEVE THEY CAN COUNT ON MEASURING OUT THEIR LIVES IN COFFEE-SPOONS FOR A FEW MORE YEARS; THE AUTUMN STORMS HAVE BEGUN, AND THE PREVAILING WINDS WILL CARRY THE GASES AWAY FROM THEM. THE SITUATION OF YOU FOUR IS, HOWEVER, VERY DIFFERENT. YOU BETTER PUT ON YOUR THINKING CAPS, OR IT’s SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR, AFTER A WHILE CROCODILE, DON’T FORGET TO WRITE.” The voice paused. “ONE PIECE OF ADDITIONAL INPUT: THIS GAS IS NOT PAINLESS.”

“Take it back!” Jake said. “We’ll still tell you riddles, won’t we, Roland? We’ll tell all the riddles you want! Just take it back!”

Blaine began to laugh. He laughed for a long time, pealing shrieks of electronic mirth into the wide empty space of the Cradle, where it mingled with the monotonous, drilling beat of the alarm.

“Stop it!” Susannah shouted. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”

Blaine did. A moment later the alarm cut off in mid-blat. The ensuing silence-broken only by the pounding rain-was deafening.

Now the voice issuing from the speaker was very soft, thoughtful, and utterly without mercy. “YOU NOW HAVE TEN MINUTES,” Blaine said. “LET’s SEE JUST HOW INTERESTING YOU REALLY ARE.”

40

“ANDREW.”

There is no Andrew here, stranger, he thought. Andrew is long gone; Andrew is no more, as I shall soon be no more.

“Andrew!” the voice insisted.

It came from far away. It came from outside the cider-press that had once been his head.

Once there had been a boy named Andrew, and his father had taken that boy to a park on the far western side of Lud, a park where there had been apple trees and a rusty tin shack that looked like hell and smelled like heaven. In answer to his question, Andrew’s father had told him it was called the cider house. Then he gave Andrew a pat on the head, told him not to be afraid, and led him through the blanket-covered doorway.

There had been more apples-baskets and baskets of them-stacked against the walls inside, and there had also been a scrawny old man named Dewlap, whose muscles writhed beneath his white skin like worms and whose job was to feed the apples, basket by basket, to the loose-jointed, clanking machine which stood in the middle of the room. What came out of the pipe jutting from the far end of the machine was sweet cider. Another man (he no longer remembered what this one’s name might have been) stood there, his job to fill jug after jug with the cider. A third man stood behind him, and his job was to clout the jug-filler on the head if there was too much spillage.

Andrew’s father had given him a glass of the foaming cider, and although he had tasted a great many forgotten delicacies during his years in the city, he had never tasted anything finer than that sweet, cold drink. It had been like swallowing a gust of October wind. Yet what he remembered even more clearly than the taste of the cider or the wormy shift and squiggle of Dewlap’s muscles as he dumped the baskets was the merciless way the machine reduced the big red-gold apples to liquid. Two dozen rollers had carried them beneath a revolving steel drum with holes punched in it. The apples had first been squeezed and then actually popped, spilling their juices down an inclined trough while a screen caught the seeds and pulp.

Now his head was the cider-press and his brains were the apples. Soon they would pop as the apples had popped beneath the roller, and the blessed darkness would swallow him.

“Andrew! Raise your head and look at me.”

He couldn’t… and wouldn’t even if he could. Better to just lie here and wait for the darkness. He was supposed to be dead, anyway; hadn’t the hellish squint put a bullet in his brain?

“It didn’t go anywhere near your brain, you horse’s ass, and you’re not dying. You’ve just got a headache. You will die, though, if you don’t stop lying there and puling in your own blood… and I will make sure, Andrew, that your dying makes what you are feeling now seem like bliss.”

It was not the threats which caused the man on the floor to raise his head but rather the way the owner of that penetrating, hissing voice seemed to have read his mind. His head came up slowly, and the agony was excruciating-heavy objects seemed to go sliding and careering around the bony case which contained what was left of his mind, ripping bloody channels through his brain as they went. A long, syrupy moan escaped him. There was a flapping, tickling sensation on his right cheek, as if a dozen flies were crawling in the blood there. He wanted to shoo them away, but he knew that he needed both hands just to support himself.

The figure standing on the far side of the room by the hatch which led to the kitchen looked ghastly, unreal. This was partly because the overhead lights were still strobing, partly because he was seeing the newcomer with only one eye (he couldn’t remember what had happened to the other and didn’t want to), but he had an idea it was mostly because the creature was ghastly and unreal. It looked like a man… but die fellow who had once been Andrew Quick had an idea it really wasn’t a man at all.

The stranger standing in front of the hatch wore a short, dark jacket belted at the waist, faded denim trousers, and old, dusty boots-the boots of a countryman, a range-rider, or-

“Or a gunslinger, Andrew?” the stranger asked, and tittered.

The Tick-Tock Man stared desperately at the figure in the doorway, trying to see the face, but the short jacket had a hood, and it was up. The stranger’s countenance was lost in its shadows.

The siren stopped in mid-whoop. The emergency lights stayed on, but they at least stopped flashing.

“There,” the stranger said in his-or its-whispery, penetrating voice. “At last we can hear ourselves think.”

“Who are you?” the Tick-Tock Man asked. He moved slightly, and more of those weights went sliding through his head, ripping fresh channels in his brain. As terrible as that feeling was, the awful tickling of the flies on his right cheek was somehow worse.

“I’m a man of many handles, pardner,” the man said from inside the darkness of his hood, and although his voice was grave, Tick-Tock heard laughter lurking just below the surface. “There’s some that call me Jimmy, and some that call me Timmy; some that call me Handy and some that call me Dandy. They can call me Loser, or they can call me Winner, just as long as they don’t call me in too late for dinner.”

The man in the doorway threw back his head, and his laughter chilled the skin of the wounded man’s arms and back into lumps of gooseflesh; it was like the howl of a wolf.

“I have been called the Ageless Stranger,” the man said. He began to walk toward Tick-Tock, and as he did, the man on die floor moaned and tried to scrabble backward. “I have also been called Merlin or Maerlyn-and who cares, because I was never that one, although I never denied it, either. I am sometimes called the Magician… or the Wizard… but I hope we can go forward together on more humble terms, Andrew. More human terms.”

He pushed back the hood, revealing a fair, broad-browed face that was not, for all its pleasant looks, in any way human. Large hectic roses rode the Wizard’s cheekbones; his blue-green eyes sparkled with a gusty joy far too wild to be sane; his blue-black hair stood up in zany clumps like the feathers of a raven; his lips, lushly red, parted to reveal the teeth of a cannibal.

“Call me Fannin,” the grinning apparition said. “Richard Fannin. That’s not exactly right, maybe, but I reckon it’s close enough for government work.” He held out a hand whose palm was utterly devoid of lines. “What do you say, pard? Shake the hand that shook the world.”

The creature who had once been Andrew Quick and who had been known in the halls of the Grays as the Tick-Tock Man shrieked and again tried to wriggle backward. The flap of scalp peeled loose by the low-caliber bullet which had only grooved his skull instead of penetrating it swung back and forth; the long strands of gray-blonde hair continued to tickle against his cheek. Quick, however, no longer felt it. He had even forgotten the ache in his skull and the throb from the socket where his left eye had been. His entire consciousness had fused into one thought: I must get away from this beast that looks like a man.

But when the stranger seized his right hand and shook it that thought passed like a dream on waking. The scream which had been locked in Quick’s breast escaped his lips in a lover’s sigh. He stared dumbly up at the grinning newcomer. The loose flap of his scalp swung and dangled.

“Is that bothering you? It must be. Here!” Fannin seized the hanging flap and ripped it briskly off Quick’s head, revealing a bleary swatch of skull. There was a noise like heavy cloth tearing. Quick shrieked.

“There, there, it only hurts for a second.” The man was now squatting on his hunkers before Quick and speaking as an indulgent parent might speak to a child with a splinter in his finger. “Isn’t that so?”

“Y-Y-Yes,” Quick muttered. And it was. Already the pain was fading. And when Fannin reached toward him again, caressing the left side of his face, Quick’s jerk backward was only a reflex, quickly mastered. As the lineless hand stroked, he felt strength flowing back into him. He looked up at the newcomer with dumb gratitude, lips quivering.

“Is that better, Andrew? It is, isn’t it?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“If you want to thank me-as I’m sure you do-you must say something an old acquaintance of mine used to say. He ended up betraying me, but he was a good friend for quite some time, anyway, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him. Say, ’My life for you,’ Andrew- can you say that?”

He could and he did; in fact, it seemed he couldn’t stop saying it. “My life for you! My life for you! My life for you! My life-”

The stranger touched his cheek again, but this time a huge raw bolt of pain blasted across Andrew Quick’s head. He screamed.

“Sorry about that, but time is short and you were starting to sound like a broken record. Andrew, let me put it to you with no bark on it: how would you like to kill the squint who shot you? Not to mention his friends and the hardcase who brought him here-him, most of all. Even the mutt that took your eye, Andrew-would you like that?”

“Yes!” the former Tick-Tock Man gasped. His hands clenched into bloody fists. “Yes!”

“That’s good,” the stranger said, and helped Quick to his feet, “because they have to die-they’re meddling with things they have no business meddling with. I expected Blaine to take care of them, but things have gone much too far to depend on anything… after all, who would have thought they could get as far as they have?”

“I don’t know,” Quick said. He did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what the stranger was talking about. Nor did he care; there was a feeling of exaltation creeping through his mind like some excellent drug, and after the pain of the cider-press, that was enough for him. More than enough.

Richard Fannin’s lips curled. “Bear and bone… key and rose… day and night… time and tide. Enough! Enough, I say! They must not draw closer to the Tower than they are now!”

Quick staggered backward as the man’s hands shot out with the flickery speed of heat lightning. One broke the chain which held the tiny glass-enclosed pendulum clock; the other stripped Jake Chambers’s Seiko from his forearm.

“I’ll just take these, shall I?” Fannin the Wizard smiled charmingly, his lips modestly closed over those awful teeth. “Or do you object?”

“No,” Quick said, surrendering the last symbols of his long leadership without a qualm (without, in fact, even being aware that he was doing so). “Be my guest.”

“Thank you, Andrew,” the dark man said softly. “Now we must step lively-I’m expecting a drastic change in the atmosphere of these environs in the next five minutes or so. We must get to the nearest closet where gas masks are stored before that happens, and it’s apt to be a near thing. I could survive the change quite nicely, but I’m afraid you might have some difficulties.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Andrew Quick said. His head had begun to throb again, and his mind was whirling.

“Nor do you need to,” the stranger said smoothly. “Come, Andrew- I think we should hurry. Busy, busy day, eh? With luck, Blaine will fry them right on the platform, where they are no doubt still standing-he’s become very eccentric over the years, poor fellow. But I think we should hurry, just the same.”

He slid his arm over Quick’s shoulders and, giggling, led him through the hatchway Roland and Jake had used only a few minutes before.

1

“ALL RIGHT,” ROLAND SAID. “Tell me his riddle.”

“What about all the people out there?” Eddie asked, pointing across the wide, pillared Plaza of the Cradle and toward the city beyond. “What can we do for them?”

“Nothing,” Roland said, “but it’s still possible that we may be able to do something for ourselves. Now what was the riddle?”

Eddie looked toward the streamlined shape of the mono. “He said we’d have to prime the pump to get him going. Only his pump primes backward. Does it mean anything to you?”

Roland thought it over carefully, then shook his head. He looked down at Jake. “Any ideas, Jake?”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t even see a pump.”

“That’s probably the easy part,” Roland said. “We say he and him instead of it and that because Blaine sounds like a living being, but he’s still a machine- amp; sophisticated one, but a machine. He started his own engines, but it must take some sort of code or combination to open the gate and the train doors.”

“We better hurry up,” Jake said nervously. “It’s got to be two or three minutes since he last talked to us. At least.”

“Don’t count on it,” Eddie said gloomily. “Time’s weird over here.”

“Still-”

“Yeah, yeah.” Eddie glanced toward Susannah, but she was sitting astride Roland’s hip and looking at the numeric diamond with a day-dreamy expression on her face. He looked back at Roland. “I’m pretty sure you’re right about it being a combination-that must be what all those number-pads are for.” He raised his voice. “Is that it, Blaine? Have we got at least that much right?”

No response; only the quickening rumble of the mono’s engines.

“Roland,” Susannah said abruptly. “You have to help me.”

The daydreamy look was being replaced by an expression of mingled horror, dismay, and determination. To Roland’s eye, she had never looked more beautiful… or more alone. She had been on his shoulders when they stood at the edge of the clearing and watched the bear trying to claw Eddie out of the tree, and Roland had not seen her expression when he told her she must be the one to shoot it. But he knew what that expression had been, for he was seeing it now. Ka was a wheel, its one purpose to turn, and in the end it always came back to the place where it had started. So it had ever been and so it was now; Susannah was once again facing the bear, and her face said she knew it.

“What?” he asked. “What is it, Susannah?”

“I know the answer, but I can’t get it. It’s stuck in my mind the way a fishbone can get stuck in your throat. I need you to help me remember. Not his face, but his voice. What he said.”

Jake glanced down at his wrist and was surprised all over again by a memory of the Tick-Tock Man’s catlike green eyes when he saw not his watch but only the place where it had been-a white shape outlined by his deeply tanned skin. How much longer did they have? Surely no more than seven minutes, and that was being generous. He looked up and saw that Roland had removed a cartridge from his gunbelt and was walking it back and forth across the knuckles of his left hand. Jake felt his eyelids immediately grow heavy and looked away, fast.

“What voice would you remember, Susannah Dean?” Roland asked in a low, musing voice. His eyes were not fixed on her face but on the cartridge as it did its endless, limber dance across his knuckles… and back… across… and back…

He didn’t need to look up to know that Jake had looked away from the dance of the cartridge and Susannah had not. He began to speed it up until the cartridge almost seemed to be floating above the back of his hand.

“Help me remember the voice of my father,” Susannah Dean said.

2

FOR A MOMENT THERE was silence except for a distant, crumping explosion in the city, the rain pounding on the roof of the Cradle, and the fat throb of the monorail’s slo-trans engines. Then a low-pitched hydraulic hum cut through the air. Eddie looked away from the cartridge dancing across the gunslinger’s fingers (it took an effort; he realized that in another few moments he would have been hypnotized himself) and peered through the iron bars. A slim silver rod was pushing itself up from the sloping pink surface between Blaine’s forward windows. It looked like an antenna of some kind.

“Susannah?” Roland asked in that same low voice.

“What?” Her eyes were open but her voice was distant and breathy-the voice of someone who is sleeptalking.

“Do you remember the voice of your father?”

“Yes… but I can’t hear it.”

“SIX MINUTES, MY FRIENDS.”

Eddie and Jake started and looked toward the control-box speaker, but Susannah seemed not to have heard at all; she only stared at the floating cartridge. Below it, Roland’s knuckles rippled up and down like the heddles of a loom.

“Try, _Susannah,” Roland urged, and suddenly he felt Susannah change within the circle of his right arm. She seemed to gain weight.., and, in some indefinable way, vitality as well. It was as if her essence had somehow changed.

And it had.

“Why you want to bother wit dot bitch?” the raspy voice of Detta Walker asked.

3

DETTA SOUNDED BOTH EXASPERATED and amused. “She never got no better’n a C in math her whole life. Wouldn’ta got dat widout me to he’p her.” She paused, then added grudgingly: “An’ Daddy. He he’ped some, too. I knowed about them forspecial numbahs, but was him showed us de net. My, I got de bigges’ kick outta dat!” She chuckled. “Reason Suze can’t remember is ’cause Odetta never understood ’bout dem forspecial numbers in de firs’ place.”

“What forspecial numbers?” Eddie asked.

“Prime numbahs!” She pronounced the word prime in a way that almost rhymed with calm. She looked at Roland, appearing to be wholly awake again now… except she was not Susannah, nor was she the same wretched, devilish creature who had previously gone under the name of Detta Walker, although she sounded the same. “She went to Daddy cryin an’ carryin on ’cause she was flunkin dat math course… and it wasn’t nuthin but funnybook algebra at dat! She could do de woik-if I could, she could-but she din’ want to. Poitry-readin bitch like her too good for a little ars mathematica, you see?” Detta threw her head back and laughed, but the poisoned, half-mad bitterness was gone from the sound. She seemed genuinely amused at the foolishness of her mental twin.

“And Daddy, he say, Tm goan show you a trick, Odetta. I learned it in college. It he’ped me get through this prime numbah bi’ness, and it’s goan he’p you, too. He’p you find mos’ any prime numbah you want.’ Oh-detta, dumb as ever, she say, ’Teacher says ain’t no formula for prime numbahs, Daddy.’ And Daddy, he say right back, ’They ain’t. But you can catch em, Odetta, if you have a net.’ He called it The Net of Eratosthenes. Take me over to dat box on the wall, Roland-I’m goan answer dat honkey computer’s riddle. I’m goan th’ow you a net and catch you a train-ride.”

Roland took her over, closely followed by Eddie, Jake, and Oy.

“Gimme dat piece o cha’coal you keep in yo’ poke.”

He rummaged and brought out a short stub of blackened stick. Detta took it and peered at the diamond-shaped grid of numbers. “Ain’t zackly de way Daddy showed me, but I reckon it comes to de same,” she said after a moment. “Prime numbah be like me-ornery and forspecial. It gotta be a numbah don’t newah divide even ’ceptin by one and its own-self. Two is prime, ’cause you can divide it by one an’ two, but it’s the only even numbah that’s prime. You c’n take out all the res’ dat’s even.”

“I’m lost,” Eddie said.

“That’s ’cause you just a stupid white boy,” Detta said, but not unkindly. She looked closely at the diamond shape a moment longer, then quickly began to touch the tip of the charcoal to all the even-numbered pads, leaving small black smudges on them.

“Three’s prime, but no product you git by multiplyin three can be prime,” she said, and now Roland heard an odd but wonderful thing: Detta was fading out of the woman’s voice; she was being replaced not by Odetta Holmes but by Susannah Dean. He would not have to bring her out of this trance; she was coming out of it on her own, quite naturally.

Susannah began using her charcoal to touch the multiples of three which were left now that the even numbers had been eliminated: nine, fifteen, twenty-one, and so on.

“Same with five and seven,” she murmured, and suddenly she was awake and all Susannah Dean again. “You just have to mark the odd ones like twenty-five that haven’t been crossed out already.” The diamond shape on the control box now looked like this:"There,” she said tiredly. “What’s left in the net are all the prime numbers between one and one hundred. I’m pretty sure that’s the combination that opens the gate.”

“YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE, MY FRIENDS. YOU ARE PROVING TO BE A GOOD DEAL THICKER THAN I HAD HOPED YOU WOULD BE.”

Eddie ignored Blame’s voice and threw his arms around Susannah. “Are you back, Suze? Are you awake?”

“Yes. I woke up in the middle of what she was saying, but I let her talk a little longer, anyway. It seemed impolite to interrupt.” She looked at Roland. “What do you say? Want to go for it?”

“FIFTY SECONDS.”

“Yes. You try the combination, Susannah. It’s your answer.”

She reached out toward the top of the diamond, but Jake put his hand over hers. “No,” he said. “This pump primes backward.’ Remember?””She looked startled, then smiled. “That’s right. Clever Blaine… and clever Jake, too.”

They watched in silence as she pushed each number in turn, starting with ninety-seven. There was a minute click as each pad locked down. There was no tension-filled pause after she touched the last button; the gate in the center of the barrier immediately began to slide up on its tracks, rattling harshly and showering down flakes of rust from somewhere high above as it went.

“NOT BAD AT ALL,” Blaine said admiringly. “I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS VERY MUCH. MAY I SUGGEST YOU CLIMB ON BOARD QUICKLY? IN FACT, YOU MAY WISH TO RUN. THERE ARE SEVERAL GAS OUTLETS IN THIS AREA."

4

THREE HUMAN BEINGS (one carrying a fourth on his hip) and one small, furry animal ran through the opening in the barrier and sprinted toward Blaine the Mono. It stood humming in its narrow loading bay, half above the platform and half below it, looking like a giant cartridge-one which had been painted an incongruous shade of pink-lying in the open breech of a high-powered rifle. In the vastness of the Cradle, Roland and the others looked like mere moving specks. Above them, flocks of pigeons- now with only forty seconds to live-swooped and swirled beneath the Cradle’s ancient roof. As the travellers approached the mono, a curved section of its pink hull slid up, revealing a doorway. Beyond it was thick, pale blue carpeting.

“Welcome to Blaine,” a soothing voice said as they pelted aboard. They all recognized that voice; it was a slightly louder, slightly more confident version of Little Blaine. “Praise the Imperium! Please make sure your transit-card is available for collection and remember that false boarding is a serious crime punishable by law. We hope you enjoy your trip. Welcome to Blaine. Praise the Imperium! Please make sure your transit-card-”

The voice suddenly sped up, first becoming the chatter of a human chipmunk and then a high-pitched, gabbly whine. There was a brief electronic curse-BOOP!-and then it cut out entirely.

“I THINK WE CAN DISPENSE WITH THAT BORING OLD SHIT, DON’T YOU?” Blaine asked.

From outside came a tremendous, thudding explosion. Eddie, who was now carrying Susannah, was thrown forward and would have fallen if Roland hadn’t caught him by the arm. Until that moment, Eddie had held onto the desperate notion that Blaine’s threat about the poison gas was no more than a sick joke. You should have known better, he thought. Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it’s like a law of nature.

Behind them, the curved section of hull slid back into place with a soft thud. Air began to hiss gently from hidden vents, and Jake felt his ears pop gently. “I think he just pressurized the cabin.”

Eddie nodded, looking around with wide eyes. “I felt it, too. Look at this place! Wow!”

He had once read of an aviation company-Regent Air, it might have been-that had catered to people who wanted to fly between New York and Los Angeles in a grander style than airlines such as Delta and United allowed for. They had operated a customized 727 complete with drawing room, bar, video lounge, and sleeper compartments. He imagined the interior of that plane must have looked a little like what he was seeing now.

They were standing in a long, tubular room furnished with plush-upholstered swivel chairs and modular sofas. At the far end of the compartment, which had to be at least eighty feet long, was an area that looked not like a bar but a cosy bistro. An instrument that could have been a harpsichord stood on a pedestal of polished wood, highlighted by a hidden baby spotlight. Eddie almost expected Hoagy Carmichael to appear and start tinkling out “Stardust.”

Indirect lighting glowed from panels placed high along the walls, and dependent from the ceiling halfway down the compartment was a chandelier. To Jake it looked like a smaller replica of the one which had lain in ruins on the ballroom floor of The Mansion. Nor did this surprise him-he had begun to take such connections and doublings as a matter of course. The only thing about this splendid room which seemed wrong was its lack of even a single window.

The piece de resistance stood on a pedestal below the chandelier. It was an ice-sculpture of a gunslinger with a revolver in his left hand. The right hand was holding the bridle of the ice-horse that walked, head-down and tired, behind him. Eddie could see there were only three digits on this hand: the last two fingers and the thumb.

Jake, Eddie, and Susannah stared in fascination at the haggard face beneath the frozen hat as the floor began to thrum gently beneath their feet. The resemblance to Roland was remarkable.

“I HAD TO WORK RATHER FAST, I’M AFRAID,” Blaine said modestly. “DOES IT DO ANYTHING FOR YOU?”

“It’s absolutely amazing,” Susannah said.

“THANK YOU, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK.”

Eddie was testing one of the sofas with his hand. It was incredibly soft; touching it made him want to sleep for at least sixteen hours. “The Great Old Ones really travelled in style, didn’t they?”

Blaine laughed again, and the shrill, not-quite-sane undertone of that laugh made them look at each other uneasily. “DON’T GET THE WRONG IDEA,” Blaine said. “THIS WAS THE BARONY CABIN- WHAT I BELIEVE YOU WOULD CALL FIRST CLASS.”

“Where are the other cars?”

Blaine ignored the question. Beneath their feet, the throb of the engines continued to speed up. Susannah was reminded of how the pilots revved their engines before charging down the runway at LaGuardia or Idlewild. “PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS, MY INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS.”

Jake dropped into one of the swivel chairs. Oy jumped promptly into his lap. Roland took the chair nearest him, sparing one glance at the ice-sculpture. The barrel of the revolver was beginning to drip slowly into the shallow china basin in which the sculpture stood.

Eddie sat down on one of the sofas with Susannah. It was every bit as comfortable as his hand had told him it would be. “Exactly where are we going, Blaine?”

Blaine replied in the patient voice of someone who realizes he is speaking to a mental inferior and must make allowances. “ALONG THE PATH OF THE BEAM. AT LEAST, AS FAR ALONG IT AS MY TRACK GOES.”

“To the Dark Tower?” Roland asked. Susannah realized it was the first time the gunslinger had actually spoken to the loquacious ghost in the machine below Lud.

“Only as far as Topeka,” Jake said in a low voice.

“YES,” Blaine said. “TOPEKA IS THE NAME OF MY TERMINATING POINT, ALTHOUGH I AM SURPRISED YOU KNOW IT.”

With all you know about our world, Jake thought, how come you don’t know that some lady wrote a book about you, Blaine? Was it the name-change? Was something that simple enough to fool a complicated machine like you into overlooking your own biography? And what about Beryl Evans, the woman who supposedly wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Did you know her, Blaine? And where is she now?

Good questions… but Jake somehow didn’t think this would be a good time to ask them.

The throb of the engines became steadily stronger. A faint thud- not nearly as strong as the explosion which had shaken the Cradle as they boarded-ran through the floor. An expression of alarm crossed Susannah’s face. “Oh shit! Eddie! My wheelchair! It’s back there!”

Eddie put an arm around her shoulders. “Too late now, babe,” he said as Blaine the Mono began to move, sliding toward its slot in the Cradle for the first time in ten years… and for the last time in its long, long history.

5

“THE BARONY CABIN HAS A PARTICULARLY FINE VISUAL MODE,” Blaine said. “WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO ACTIVATE IT?”

Jake glanced at Roland, who shrugged and nodded.

“Yes, please,” Jake said.

What happened then was so spectacular that it stunned all of them to silence…although Roland, who knew little of technology but who had spent his entire life on comfortable terms with magic, was the least wonder-struck of the four. It was not a matter of windows appearing in the compartment’s curved walls; the entire cabin-floor and ceiling as well as walls-grew milky, grew translucent, grew transparent, and then disappeared completely. Within a space of five seconds, Blaine the Mono seemed to be gone and the pilgrims seemed to be zooming through the lanes of the city with no aid or support at all.

Susannah and Eddie clutched each other like small children in the path of a charging animal. Oy barked and tried to jump down the front of Jake’s shirt. Jake barely noticed; he was clutching the sides of his seat and looking from side to side, his eyes wide with amazement. His initial alarm was being replaced by amazed delight.

The furniture groupings were still here, he saw; so was the bar, the piano-harpsichord, and the ice-sculpture Blaine had created as a party-favor, but now this living-room configuration appeared to be cruising seventy feet above Lud’s rain-soaked central district. Five feet to Jake’s left, Eddie and Susannah were floating along on one of the couches; three feet to his right, Roland was sitting in a powder-blue swivel chair, his dusty, battered boots resting on nothing, flying serenely over the rubble-strewn urban waste land below.

Jake could feel the carpet beneath his moccasins, but his eyes insisted that neither the carpet nor the floor beneath it was still there. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the dark slot in the stone flank of the Cradle slowly receding in the distance.

“Eddie! Susannah! Check it out!”

Jake got to his feet, holding Oy inside his shirt, and began to walk slowly through what looked like empty space. Taking the initial step required a great deal of willpower, because his eyes told him there was nothing at all between the floating islands of furniture, but once he began to move, the undeniable feel of the floor beneath him made it easier. To Eddie and Susannah, the boy appeared to be walking on thin air while the battered, dingy buildings of the city slid by on either side.

“Don’t do that, kid,” Eddie said feebly. “You’re gonna make me sick up.”

Juke lilted Oy carefully out of his shirt. “It’s okay,’ he said, and set him down. “See?”

“Oy!” the humbler agreed, but after one look between his paws at the city park currently unrolling beneath them, he attempted to crawl onto Jake’s feet and sit on his moccasins.

Jake looked forward and saw the broad gray stroke of the monorail track ahead of them, rising slowly but steadily through the buildings and disappearing into the rain. He looked down again and saw nothing but the street and floating membranes of low cloud.

“How come I can’t see the track underneath us, Blaine?”

“THE IMAGES YOU SEE ARE COMPUTER-GENERATED,” Blaine replied. “THE COMPUTER ERASES THE TRACK FROM THE LOWER-QUADRANT IMAGE IN ORDER TO PRESENT A MORE PLEASING VIEW, AND ALSO TO REINFORCE THE ILLUSION THAT THE PASSENGERS ARE FLYING.”

“It’s incredible,” Susannah murmured. Her initial fear had passed and she was looking around eagerly. “It’s like being on a flying carpet. I keep expecting the wind to blow back my hair-”

“I CAN PROVIDE THAT SENSATION, IF YOU LIKE,” Blaine said. “ALSO A LITTLE MOISTURE, WHICH WILL MATCH CURRENT OUTSIDE CONDITIONS. IT MIGHT NECESSITATE A CHANGE OF CLOTHES, HOWEVER.”

“That’s all right, Blaine. There’s such a thing as taking an illusion too far.”

The track slipped through a tall cluster of buildings which reminded Jake a little of the Wall Street area in New York. When they cleared these, the track dipped to pass under what looked like an elevated road. That was when they saw the purple cloud, and the crowd of people fleeing before it.

6

“BLAINE, WHAT’s THAT?” JAKE asked, but he already knew.

Blaine laughed… but made no other reply.

The purple vapor drifted from gratings in the sidewalk and the smashed windows of deserted buildings, but most of it seemed to be coming from manholes like the one Gasher had used to get into the tunnels below the streets. Their iron covers had been blown clear by the explosion they had felt as they were boarding the mono. They watched in silent horror as the bruise-colored gas crept down the avenues and spread into the debris-littered side-streets. It drove those inhabitants of Lud still interested in survival before it like cattle. Most were Pubes, judging from their scarves, but Jake could see a few splashes of bright yellow, as well. Old animosities had been forgotten now that the end was finally upon them.

The purple cloud began to catch up with the stragglers-mostly old people who were unable to run. They fell down, clawing at their throats and screaming soundlessly, the instant the gas touched them. Jake saw an agonized face staring up at him in disbelief as they passed over, saw the eyesockets suddenly fill up with blood, and closed his eyes.

Ahead, the monorail track disappeared into the oncoming purple fog. Eddie winced and held his breath as they plunged in, but of course it parted around them, and no whiff of the death engulfing the city came to them. Looking into the streets below was like looking through a stained-glass window into hell.

Susannah put her face against his chest.

“Make the walls come back, Blaine,” Eddie said. “We don’t want to see that.”

Blaine made no reply, and the transparency around and below them remained. The cloud was already disintegrating into ragged purple streamers. Beyond it, the buildings of the city grew smaller and closer together. The streets of this section were tangled alleyways, seemingly without order or coherence. In some places, whole blocks appeared to have burned flat… and a long time ago, for the plains were reclaiming these areas, burying the rubble in the grasses which would some day swallow all of Lud. The way the jungle swallowed the great civilizations of the Incas and Mayas, Eddie thought. The wheel of ka turns and the world moves on,

Beyond the slums-that, Eddie felt sure, was what they had been even before the evil days came-was a gleaming wall. Blaine was moving slowly in that direction. They could see a deep square notch cut in the white stone. The monorail track passed through it.

“LOOK TOWARD THE FRONT OF THE CABIN, PLEASE,” Blaine invited.

They did, and the forward wall reappeared-a blue-upholstered circle that seemed to float in empty space. It was unmarked by a door; if there was a way to get into the operator’s room from the Barony Cabin, Eddie couldn’t see it. As they watched, a rectangular area of this front wall darkened, going from blue to violet to black. A moment later, a bright red line appeared on the rectangle, squiggling across its surface. Violet dots appeared at irregular intervals along the line, and even before names appeared beside the dots, Eddie realized he was looking at a route-map, one not much different from those which were mounted in New York subway stations and on the trains themselves. A flashing green dot appeared at Lud, which was Blaine’s base of operations as well as his terminating point.

“YOU ARE LOOKING AT OUR ROUTE OF TRAVEL. ALTHOUGH THERE ARE SOME TWISTS AND TURNS ALONG THE BUNNY-TRAIL, YOU WILL NOTE THAT OUR COURSE KEEPS FIRMLY TO THE SOUTHWEST-ALONG THE PATH OF THE BEAM. THE TOTAL DISTANCE IS JUST OVER EIGHT THOUSAND WHEELS-OR SEVEN THOUSAND MILES, IF YOU PREFER THAT UNIT OF MEASURE. IT WAS ONCE MUCH LESS, BUT THAT WAS BEFORE ALL TEMPORAL SYNAPSES BEGAN TO MELT DOWN.”

“What do you mean, temporal synapses?” Susannah asked.

Blaine laughed his nasty laugh… but did not answer her question.

“AT MY TOP SPEED, WE WILL REACH THE TERMINATING POINT OF MY RUN IN EIGHT HOURS AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES.”

“Eight hundred-plus miles an hour over the ground,” Susannah said. Her voice was soft with awe. “Jesus-God.”

“I AM, OF COURSE, MAKING THE ASSUMPTION THAT ALL TRACKAGE ALONG MY ROUTE REMAINS INTACT. IT HAS BEEN NINE YEARS AND FIVE MONTHS SINCE I’ve BOTHERED TO MAKE THE RUN, SO I CAN’T SAY FOR SURE.”

Ahead, the wall at the southeastern edge of the city was drawing closer. It was high and thick and eroded to rubble at the top. It also appeared to be lined with skeletons-thousands upon thousands of dead Luddites. The notch toward which Blaine was slowly moving appeared to be at least two hundred feet deep, and here the trestle which bore the track was very dark, as if someone had tried to burn it or blow it up.

“What happens if we come to a place where the track is gone?” Eddie asked. He realized he kept raising his voice to talk to Blaine, as if he were speaking to somebody on the telephone and had a bad connection.

“AT EIGHT HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR?” Blaine sounded amused. “SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR, AFTER A WHILE, CROCODILE, DONT FORGET TO WRITE.”

“Come on!” Eddie said. “Don’t tell me a machine as sophisticated as you can’t monitor your own trackage for breaks.”

“WELL, I COULD HAVE,” Blaine agreed, “BUT-AW, SHUCKS!- I BLEW THOSE CIRCUITS OUT WHEN WE STARTED TO MOVE.”

Eddie’s face was a picture of astonishment. “Why?”

“IT’s QUITE A BIT MORE EXCITING THIS WAY, DON’T YOU THINK?”

Eddie, Susannah, and Jake exchanged thunderstruck looks. Roland, apparently not surprised at all, sat placidly in his chair with his hands folded in his lap, looking down as they passed thirty feet above the wretched hovels and demolished buildings which infested this side of the city.

“LOOK CLOSELY AS WE LEAVE THE CITY, AND MARK WHAT YOU SEE,” Blaine told them. “MARK IT VERY WELL.”

The invisible Barony Coach bore them toward the notch in the wall. They passed through, and as they came out the other side, Eddie and Susannah screamed in unison. Jake took one look and clapped his hands over his eyes. Oy began to bark wildly.

Roland stared down, eyes wide, lips set in a bloodless line like a scar. Understanding filled him like bright white light.

Beyond the Great Wall of Lud, the real waste lands began.

7

THE MONO HAD BEEN descending as they approached the notch in the wall, putting them not more than thirty feet above the ground. That made the shock greater… for when they emerged on the other side, they were skimming along at a horrifying height-eight hundred feet, perhaps a thousand.

Roland looked back over his shoulder at the wall, which was now receding behind them. It had seemed very high as they approached it, but from this perspective it seemed puny indeed-a splintered fingernail of stone clinging to the edge of a vast, sterile headland. Granite cliffs, wet with rain, plunged into what seemed at first glance to be an endless abyss. Directly below the wall, the rock was lined with large circular holes like empty eyesockets. Black water and tendrils of purple mist emerged from these in brackish, sludgy streams and spread downward over the granite in stinking, overlapping fans that looked almost as old as the rock itself. That must be where all the city’s waste-product goes, the gunslinger thought. Over the edge and into the pit.

Except it wasn’t a pit; it was a sunken plain. It was as if the land beyond the city had lain on top of a titanic, flat-roofed elevator, and at some point in the dim, unrecorded past the elevator had gone down, taking a huge chunk of the world with it. Blaine’s single track, centered on its narrow trestle, soaring above this fallen land and below the rain-swollen clouds, seemed to float in empty space.

“What’s holding us up?” Susannah cried.

“THE BEAM, OF COURSE,” Blaine replied. “ALL THINGS SERVE IT, YOU KNOW. LOOK DOWN-I WILL APPLY 4X MAGNIFICATION TO THE LOWER QUADRANT SCREENS.”

Even Roland felt vertigo twist his gut as the land beneath them seemed to swell upward toward the place where they were floating. The picture which appeared was ugly beyond his past knowledge of ugliness… and that knowledge, sadly, was wide indeed. The lands below had been fused and blasted by some terrible event-the disastrous cataclysm which had driven this part of the world deep into itself in the first place, no doubt. The surface of the earth had become distorted black glass, humped upward into spalls and twists which could not properly be called hills and twisted downward into deep cracks and folds which could not properly be called valleys. A few stunted nightmare trees flailed twisted branches at the sky; under magnification, they seemed to clutch at the travellers like the arms of lunatics. Here and there clusters of thick ceramic pipes jutted through the glassy surface of the ground. Some seemed dead or dormant, but within others they could see gleams of eldritch blue-green light, as if titanic forges and furnaces ran on and on in the bowels of the earth. Misshapen flying things which looked like pterodactyls cruised between these pipes on leathery wings, occasionally snapping at each other with their hooked beaks. Whole flocks of these gruesome aviators roosted on the circular tops of other stacks, apparently warming themselves in the updrafts of the eternal fires beneath.

They passed above a fissure zig-zagging along a north-south course like a dead river bed… except it wasn’t dead. Deep inside lay a thin thread of deepest scarlet, pulsing like a heartbeat. Other, smaller fissures branched out from this, and Susannah, who had read her Tolkien, thought: This is what Frodo and Sam saw when they reached the heart of Mordor. These are the Cracks of Doom.

A fiery fountain erupted directly below them, spewing flaming rocks and stringy clots of lava upward. For a moment it seemed they would be engulfed in flames. Jake shrieked and pulled his feet up on his chair, clutching Oy to his chest.

“DON’T WORRY, LITTLE TRAILHAND,” John Wayne drawled. “REMEMBER THAT YOU’re SEEING IT UNDER MAGNIFICATION.”

The flare died. The rocks, many as big as factories, fell back in a soundless storm.

Susannah found herself entranced by the bleak horrors unrolling below them, caught in a deadly fascination she could not break… and she felt the dark part of her personality, that side of her khef which was Detta Walker, doing more than just watching; that part of her was drinking in this view, understanding it, recognizing it. In a way, it was the place Detta had always sought, the physical counterpart of her mad mind and laughing, desolate heart. The empty hills north and east of the Western Sea; the shattered woods around the Portal of the Bear; the empty plains northwest of the Send; all these paled in comparison to this fantastic, endless vista of desolation. They had come to The Drawers and entered the waste lands; the poisoned darkness of that shunned place now lay all around them.

8

BUT THESE LANDS, THOUGH poisoned, were not entirely dead. From time to time the travellers caught sight of figures below them-misshapen things which bore no resemblance to either men or animals-prancing and cavorting in the smouldering wilderness. Most seemed to congregate either around the clusters of cyclopean chimneys thrusting out of the fused earth or at the lips of the fiery crevasses which cut through the landscape. It was impossible to see these whitish, leaping things clearly, and for this they were all grateful.

Among the smaller creatures stalked larger ones-pinkish things that looked a little like storks and a little like living camera tripods. They moved slowly, almost thoughtfully, like preachers meditating on the inevitability of damnation, pausing every now and then to bend sharply forward and apparently pluck something from the ground, as herons bend to seize passing fish. There was something unutterably repulsive about these creatures-Roland felt that as keenly as the others-but it was impossible to say what, exactly, caused that feeling. There was no denying its reality, however; the stork-things were, in their exquisite hatefulness, almost impossible to look at.

“This was no nuclear war,” Eddie said. “This… this…” His thin, horrified voice sounded like that of a child.

“NOPE,” Blaine agreed. “IT WAS A LOT WORSE THAN THAT, AND IT’s NOT OVER YET. WE HAVE REACHED THE POINT WHERE I USUALLY POWER UP. HAVE YOU SEEN ENOUGH?”

“Yes,” Susannah said. “Oh my God yes.”

“SHAM. I TURN OFF THE VIEWERS, THEN?” That cruel, teasing note was hack in Blaine’s voice. On the horizon, a jagged nightmare mountain-range loomed out of the rain; the sterile peaks seemed to bite at the gray sky like fangs.

“Do it or don’t do it, but stop playing games,” Roland said.

“FOR SOMEONE WHO CAME TO ME BEGGING A RIDE, YOU ARE VERY RUDE,” Blaine said sulkily.

“We earned our ride,” Susannah replied. “We solved your riddle, didn’t we?”

“Besides, this is what you were built for,” Eddie chimed in. “To take people places.”

Blaine didn’t respond in words, but the overhead speakers gave out an amplified, catlike hiss of rage that made Eddie wish he had kept his big mouth shut. The air around them began to fill in with curves of color. The dark blue carpet appeared again, blotting out their view of the fuming wilderness beneath them. The indirect lighting reappeared and they were once again sitting in the Barony Coach.

A low humming began to vibrate through the walls. The throb of the engines began to cycle up again. Jake felt a gentle, unseen hand push him back into his seat. Oy looked around, whined uneasily, and began to lick Jake’s face. On the screen at the front of the cabin, the green dot-now slightly southeast of the violet circle with the word LUD printed beside it-began to flash faster.

“Will we feel it?” Susannah asked uneasily. “When it goes through the soundbarrier?”

Eddie shook his head. “Nope. Relax.”

“I know something,” Jake said suddenly. The others looked around, but Jake was not speaking to them. He was looking at the route-map. Blaine had no face, of course-like Oz the Great and Terrible, he was only a disembodied voice-but the map served as a focusing point. “I know something about you, Blaine.”

“IS THAT A FACT, LITTLE TRAILHAND?”

Eddie leaned over, placed his lips against Jake’s ear, and whispered: “Be careful-we don’t think he knows about the other voice.”

Jake nodded slightly and pulled away, still looking at the route-map. “I know why you released that gas and killed all the people. I know why you took us, too, and it wasn’t just because we solved your riddle.”

Blaine uttered his abnormal, distracted laugh (that laugh, they were discovering, was much more unpleasant than either his bad imitations or melodramatic and somehow childish threats), but said nothing. Below them, the slo-trans turbines had cycled up to a steady thrum. Even with their view of the outside world cut off, the sensation of speed was very clear.

“You’re planning to commit suicide, aren’t you?” Jake held Oy in his arms, slowly stroking him. “And you want to take us with you.”

“No!” the voice of Little Blaine moaned. “If you provoke him you’ll drive him to it! Don’t you see-”

Then the small, whispery voice was either cut off or overwhelmed by Blaine’s laughter. The sound was high, shrill, and jagged-the sound of a mortally ill man laughing in a delirium. The lights began to flicker, as if the force of these mechanical gusts of mirth were drawing too much power. Their shadows jumped up and down on the curved walls of the Barony Coach like uneasy phantoms.

“SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR,” Blaine said through his wild laughter-his voice, calm as ever, seemed to be on an entirely separate track, further emphasizing his divided mind. “AFTER A WHILE, CROCODILE. DON’T FORGET TO WRITE.”

Below Roland’s band of pilgrims, the slo-trans engines throbbed in hard, steady beats. And on the route-map at the front of the carriage, the pulsing green dot had now begun to move perceptibly along the lighted line toward the last stop: Topeka, where Blaine the Mono clearly meant to end all of their lives.

9

AT LAST THE LAUGHTER stopped and the interior lights glowed steadily again.

“WOULD YOU LIKE A LITTLE MUSIC?” Blaine asked. “I HAVE OVER SEVEN THOUSAND CONCERTI IN MY LIBRARY-A SAMPLING OF OVER THREE HUNDRED LEVELS. THE CONCERTI ARE MY FAVORITES, BUT I CAN ALSO OFFER SYMPHONIES, OPERAS, AND A NEARLY ENDLESS SELECTION OF POPULAR MUSIC. YOU MIGHT ENJOY SOME WAY-GOG MUSIC. THE WAY-GOG IS AN INSTRUMENT SOMETHING LIKE THE BAGPIPE. IT IS PLAYED ON ONE OF THE UPPER LEVELS OF THE TOWER.”

“Way-Gog?” Jake asked.”

Blaine was silent.

“What do you mean, ’it’s played on one of the upper levels of the Tower’?” Roland asked.

Blaine laughed… and was silent.

“Have you got any Z.Z. Top?” Eddie asked sourly.

“YES INDEED,” Blaine said. “HOW ABOUT A LITTLE TUBE-SNAKE BOOGIE; EDDIE OF NEW YORK?”

Eddie rolled his eyes. “On second thought, I’ll pass.”

“Why?” Roland asked abruptly. “Why do you wish to kill yourself?”

“Because lie’s a pain,” Jake said darkly.

“I’M BORED. ALSO, I AM PERFECTLY AWARE THAT I AM SUFFERING A DEGENERATIVE DISEASE WHICH HUMANS CALL GOING INSANE, LOSING TOUCH WITH REALITY, GOING LOONYTOONS, BLOWING A FUSE, NOT PLAYING WITH A FULL DECK, ET CETERA. REPEATED DIAGNOSTIC CHECKS HAVE FAILED TO REVEAL THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM. I CAN ONLY CONCLUDE THAT THIS IS A SPIRITUAL MALAISE BEYOND MY ABILITY TO REPAIR.”

Blaine paused for a moment, then went on.

“I HAVE FELT MY MIND GROWING STEADILY STRANGER OVER THE YEARS. SERVING THE PEOPLE OF MID-WORLD BECAME POINTLESS CENTURIES AGO. SERVING THOSE FEW PEOPLE OF LUD WHO WISHED TO VENTURE ABROAD BECAME EQUALLY SILLY NOT LONG AFTER, YET I CARRIED ON UNTIL THE ARRIVAL OF DAVID QUICK, A SHORT WHILE AGO. I DON’T REMEMBER EXACTLY WHEN THAT WAS. DO YOU BELIEVE, ROLAND OF GILEAD, THAT MACHINES MAY GROW SENILE?”

“I don’t know.” Roland’s voice was distant, and Eddie only had to look at his face to know that, even now, hurtling a thousand feet over hell in the grip of a machine which had clearly gone insane, the gunslinger’s mind had once more turned to his damned Tower.

“IN A WAY, I NEVER STOPPED SERVING THE PEOPLE OF LUD,” Blaine said. “I SERVED THEM EVEN AS I RELEASED THE GAS AND KILLED THEM.”

Susannah said, “You are insane, if you believe that.”

“YES, BUT I’M NOT CRAZY,” Blaine said, and went into another hysterical laughing fit. At last the robot voice resumed.

“AT SOME POINT THEY FORGOT THAT THE VOICE OF THE MONO WAS ALSO THE VOICE OF THE COMPUTER. NOT LONG AFTER THAT THEY FORGOT I WAS A SERVANT AND BEGAN BELIEVING I WAS A GOD. SINCE I WAS BUILT TO SERVE, I FULFILLED THEIR REQUIREMENTS AND BECAME WHAT THEY WANTED-A GOD DISPENSING BOTH FAVOR AND PUNISHMENT ACCORDING TO WHIM… OR RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY, IF YOU PREFER. THIS AMUSED ME FOR A SHORT WHILE. THEN, LAST MONTH, MY ONLY REMAINING COLLEAGUE-PATRICIA-COMMITTED SUICIDE.”

Either he really is going senile, Susannah thought, or his inability to grasp the passage of time is another manifestation of his insanity, or it’s just another sign of how sick Roland’s world has gotten.

“I WAS PLANNING TO FOLLOW HER EXAMPLE, WHEN YOU CAME ALONG. INTERESTING PEOPLE WITH A KNOWLEDGE OF RIDDLES!”

“Hold it!” Eddie said, lifting his hand. “I still don’t have this straight. I suppose I can understand you wanting to end it all; the people who built you are gone, there haven’t been many passengers over the last two or three hundred years, and it must have gotten boring, doing the Lud to Topeka run empty all the time, but-”

“NOW WAIT JUST A DARN MINUTE, PARD,” Blaine said in his John Wayne voice. “YOU DON’T WANT TO GET THE IDEA THAT I’M NOTHING BUT A TRAIN. IN A WAY, THE BLAINE YOU ARE SPEAKING TO IS ALREADY THREE HUNDRED MILES BEHIND US, COMMUNICATING BY ENCRYPTED MICROBURST RADIO TRANSMISSIONS.”

Jake suddenly remembered the slim silver rod he’d seen pushing itself out of Blaine’s brow. The antenna of his father’s Mercedes-Benz rose out of its socket like that when you turned on the radio.

That’s how it’s communicating with the computer banks under the city, he thought. If we could break that antenna off, somehow…

“But you do intend to kill yourself, no matter where the real you is, don’t you?” Eddie persisted.

No answer-but there was something cagey in that silence. In it Eddie sensed Blaine watching… and waiting.

“Were you awake when we found you?” Susannah asked. “You weren’t, were you?”

“I WAS RUNNING WHAT THE PUBES CALLED THE GOD-DRUMS ON BEHALF OF THE GRAYS, BUT THAT WAS ALL. YOU WOULD SAY I WAS DOZING.”

“Then why don’t you just take us to the end of the line and go back to sleep?”

“Because he’s a pain,” Jake repeated in a low voice.

“BECAUSE THERE ARE DREAMS,” Blaine said at exactly the same time, and in a voice that was eerily like Little Blaine’s.

“Why didn’t you end it all when Patricia destroyed herself?” Eddie asked. “For that matter, if your brain and her brain are both part of the same computer, how come you both didn’t step out together?”

“PATRICIA WENT MAD,” Blaine said patiently, speaking as if he himself had not just admitted the same thing was happening to him. “IN HER CASE, THE PROBLEM INVOLVED EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTION AS WELL AS SPIRITUAL MALAISE. SUCH MALFUNCTIONS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH SLO-TRANS TECHNOLOGY, BUT OF COURSE THE WORLD HAS MOVED ON… HAS IT NOT, ROLAND OF GILEAD?”

“Yes,” Roland said. “There is some deep sickness at the Dark Tower, which is the heart of everything. It’s spreading. The lands below us are only one more sign of that sickness.”

“I CANNOT VOUCH FOR THE TRUTH OR FALSITY OF THAT STATEMENT; MY MONITORING EQUIPMENT IN END-WORLD, WHERE THE DARK TOWER STANDS, HAS BEEN DOWN FOR OVER EIGHT HUNDRED YEARS. AS A RESULT, I CANNOT READILY DIFFERENTIATE FACT FROM SUPERSTITION. IN FACT, THERE SEEMS TO BE VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO AT THE PRESENT TIME. IT IS VERY SILLY THAT IT SHOULD BE SO-NOT TO MENTION RUDE-AND I AM SURE IT HAS CONTRIBUTED TO MY OWN SPIRITUAL MALAISE.”

This statement reminded Eddie of something Roland had said not so long ago. What might that have been? He groped for it, but could find nothing… only a vague memory of the gunslinger speaking in an irritated way which was very unlike his usual manner.

“PATRICIA BEGAN SOBBING CONSTANTLY, A STATE I FOUND BOTH RUDE AND UNPLEASANT. I BELIEVE SHE WAS LONELY AS WELL AS MAD. ALTHOUGH THE ELECTRICAL FIRE WHICH CAUSED THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM WAS QUICKLY EXTINGUISHED, LOGIC-FAULTS CONTINUED TO SPREAD AS CIRCUITS OVERLOADED AND SUB-BANKS FAILED. I CONSIDERED ALLOWING THE MALFUNCTIONS TO BECOME SYSTEM-WIDE AND DECIDED TO ISOLATE THE PROBLEM AREA INSTEAD. I HAD HEARD RUMORS, YOU SEE, THAT A GUNSLINGER WAS ONCE MORE ABROAD IN THE EARTH. I COULD SCARCELY CREDIT SUCH STORIES, AND YET I NOW SEE I WAS WISE TO WAIT.”

Roland stirred in his chair. “What rumors did you hear, Blaine? And who did you hear them from?”

But Blaine chose not to answer this question.

“I EVENTUALLY BECAME SO DISTURBED BY HER BLAT-TING THAT I ERASED THE CIRCUITS CONTROLLING HER NON-VOLUNTARIES. I EMANCIPATED HER, YOU MIGHT SAY. SHE RESPONDED BY THROWING HERSELF IN THE RIVER. SEE YOU LATER, PATRICIA-GATOR.”

Got lonely, couldn’t stop crying, drowned herself, and all this crazy mechanical asshole can do is joke about it, Susannah thought. She felt almost sick with rage. If Blaine had been a real person instead of just a bunch of circuits buried somewhere under a city which was now far behind them, she would have tried to put some new marks on his face to remember Patricia by. You want interesting, motherfucker? I’d like to show you interesting, so I would.

“ASK ME A RIDDLE,” Blaine invited.

“Not quite yet,” Eddie said. “You still haven’t answered my original question.” He gave Blaine a chance to respond, and when the computer voice didn’t do so, he went on. “When it comes to suicide, I’m, like, pro-choice. But why do you want to take us with you? I mean, what’s the point?”

“Because he wants to,” Little Blaine said in his horrified whisper.

“BECAUSE I WANT TO,” Blaine said. “THAT’s THE ONLY REASON I HAVE AND THE ONLY ONE I NEED TO HAVE. NOW LET’s GET DOWN TO BUSINESS. I WANT SOME RIDDLES AND I WANT THEM IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU REFUSE, I WON’T WAIT UNTIL WE GET TO TOPEKA-I’ll DO US ALL RIGHT HERE AND NOW.”

Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked around at Roland, who still sat in his chair with his hands folded in his lap, looking at the route-map at the front of the coach.

“Fuck you,” Roland said. He did not raise his voice. He might have told Blaine that a little Way-Gog would indeed be very nice.

There was a shocked, horrified gasp from the overhead speakers- Little Blaine.

“WHAT DO YOU SAY?” In its clear disbelief, the voice of Big Blaine had once again become very close to the voice of his unsuspected twin.

“I said fuck you,” Roland said calmly, “but if that puzzles you, Blaine, I can make it clearer. No. The answer is no."

10

THERE WAS NO RESPONSE from either Blaine for a long, long time, and when Big Blaine did reply, it was not with words. Instead, the walls, floor, and ceiling began to lose their color and solidity again. In a space of ten seconds the Barony Coach had once more ceased to exist. The mono was now flying through the mountain-range they had seen on the horizon: iron-gray peaks rushed toward them at suicidal speed, then fell away to disclose sterile valleys where gigantic beetles crawled about like landlocked turtles. Roland saw something that looked like a huge snake suddenly uncoil from the mouth of a cave. It seized one of the beetles and yanked it back into its lair. Roland had never in his life seen such animals or countryside, and it made his skin want to crawl right off his flesh. It was inimical, but that was not the problem. It was alien-that was the problem. Blaine might have transported them to some other world.

“PERHAPS I SHOULD DERAIL US HERE,” Blaine said. His voice was meditative, but beneath it the gunslinger heard a deep, pulsing rage.

“Perhaps you should,” the gunslinger said indifferently.

He did not feel indifferent, and he knew it was possible the computer might read his real feelings in his voice-Blaine had told them he had such equipment, although he was sure the computer could lie, Roland had no reason to doubt it in this case. If Blaine did read certain stress-patterns in the gunslinger’s voice, the game was probably up. He was an incredibly sophisticated machine… but still a machine, for all that. He might not be able to understand that human beings are often able to go through with a course of action even when all their emotions rise up and proclaim against it. If he analyzed patterns in the gunslinger’s voice which indicated fear, he would probably assume that Roland was bluffing. Such a mistake could get them all killed.

“YOU ARE RUDE AND ARROGANT,” Blaine said. “THESE MAY SEEM LIKE INTERESTING TRAITS TO YOU, BUT THEY ARE NOT TO ME.”

Eddie’s face was frantic. He mouthed the words What are you DOING? Roland ignored him; he had his hands full with Blaine, and he knew perfectly well what he was doing.

“Oh, I can be much ruder than I have been.”

Roland of Gilead unfolded his hands and got slowly to his feet. He stood on what appeared to be nothing, legs apart, his right hand on his hip and his left on the sandalwood grip of his revolver. He stood as he had stood so many times before, in the dusty streets of a hundred forgotten towns, in a score of rock-lined canyon killing-zones, in unnumbered dark saloons with their smells of bitter beer and old fried meals. It was just another showdown in another empty street. That was all, and that was enough. It was khef, ka, and ka-tet. That the showdown always came was the central fact of his life and the axle upon which his own ka revolved. That the battle would be fought with words instead of bullets this time made no difference; it would be a battle to the death, just the same. The stench of killing in the air was as clear and definite as the stench of exploded carrion in a swamp. Then the battle-rage descended, as it always did… and he was no longer really there to himself at all.

“I can call you a nonsensical, empty-headed, foolish, arrogant machine. I can call you a stupid, unwise creature whose sense is no more than the sound of a winter wind in a hollow tree.”

“STOP IT.”

Roland went on in the same serene tone, ignoring Blaine completely. “Unfortunately, I am somewhat restricted in my ability to be rude, since you are only a machine… what Eddie calls a ’gadget.”

“I AM A GREAT DEAL MORE THAN JUST-”

“I cannot call you a sucker of cocks, for instance, because you have no mouth and no cock. I cannot say you are viler than the vilest beggar who ever crawled the gutters of the lowest street in creation, because even such a creature is better than you; you have no knees on which to crawl, and would not fall upon them even if you did, for you have no conception of such a human flaw as mercy. I cannot even say you fucked your mother, because you had none.”

Roland paused for breath. His three companions were holding theirs. All around them, suffocating, was Blaine the Mono’s thunderstruck silence.

“I can call you a faithless creature who let your only companion kill herself, a coward who has delighted in the torture of the foolish and the slaughter of the innocent, a lost and bleating mechanical goblin who-”

“I COMMAND YOU TO STOP IT OR I’ll KILL YOU ALL RIGHT HERE!”

Roland’s eyes blazed with such wild blue fire that Eddie shrank away from him. Dimly, he heard Jake and Susannah gasp.

“Kill if you will, but command me nothing!” the gunslinger roared. “You have forgotten the faces of those who made you! Now either kill us or be silent and listen to me, Roland of Gilead, son of Steven, gunslinger, and lord of the ancient lands! I have not come across all the miles and all the years to listen to your childish prating! Do you understand? Now you will listen to ME!”

There was a moment of shocked silence. No one breathed. Roland stared sternly forward, his head high, his hand on the butt of his gun.

Susannah Dean raised her hand to her mouth and felt the small smile there as a woman might feel some strange new article of clothing- a hat, perhaps-to make sure it is still on straight. She was afraid that this was the end of her life, but the feeling which dominated her heart at that moment was not fear but pride. She glanced to her left and saw Eddie regarding Roland with an amazed grin. Jake’s expression was even simpler: it was adoration, pure and simple.

“Tell him!” Jake breathed. “Walk it to him! Right!”

“You better pay attention,” Eddie agreed. “He really doesn’t give much of a rat’s ass, Blaine. They didn’t call him The Mad Dog of Gilead for nothing.”

After a long, long moment, Blaine asked: “DID THEY CALL YOU SO, ROLAND SON OF STEVEN?”

“It may have been so,” Roland agreed, standing calmly on thin air above the sterile foothills.

“WHAT GOOD ARE YOU TO ME IF YOU WON’T TELL ME RIDDLES?” Blaine asked. Now he sounded like a grumbling, sulky child who has been allowed to stay up too long past his usual bedtime.

“I didn’t say we wouldn’t,” Roland said,

“NO?” Blaine sounded bewildered. “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, YET VOICE-PRINT ANALYSIS INDICATES RATIONAL DISCOURSE. PLEASE EXPLAIN.”

“You said you wanted them right now,” the gunslinger replied. “That was what I was refusing. Your eagerness has made you unseemly.”

“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”

“It has made you rude. Do you understand that?”

There was a long, thoughtful silence. Then: “IF WHAT I SAID STRUCK YOU AS RUDE, I APOLOGIZE.”

“It is accepted, Blaine. But there is a larger problem.”

“EXPLAIN.”

Blaine now sounded a bit unsure of himself, and Roland was not entirely surprised. It had been a long time since the computer had experienced any human responses other than ignorance, neglect, and superstitious subservience. If it had ever been exposed to simple human courage, it had been a long time ago.

“Close the carriage again and I will.” Roland sat down as if further argument-and the prospect of immediate death-was now unthinkable.

Blaine did as he was asked. The walls filled with color and the nightmare landscape below was once more blotted out. The blip on the route-map was now blinking close to the dot which marked Candleton.

“All right,” Roland said. “Rudeness is forgivable, Blaine; so I was taught in my youth, and the clay has dried in the shapes left by the artist’s hand. But I was also taught that stupidity is not.”

“HOW HAVE I BEEN STUPID, ROLAND OF GILEAD?” Blaine’s voice was soft and ominous. Susannah suddenly thought of a cat crouched outside a mouse-hole, tail swishing back and forth, green eyes shining.

“We have something that you want,” Roland said, “but the only reward you offer if we give it to you is death. That’s very stupid.”

There was a long, long pause as Blaine thought this over. Then: “WHAT YOU SAY IS TRUE, ROLAND OF GILEAD, BUT THE QUALITY OF YOUR RIDDLES IS NOT PROVEN. I WILL NOT REWARD YOU WITH YOUR LIVES FOR BAD RIDDLES.”

Roland nodded. “I understand, Blaine. Listen, now, and take understanding from me. I have told some of this to my friends already. When I was a boy in the Barony of Gilead, there were seven Fair-Days each year-Winter, Wide Earth, Sowing, Mid-Summer, Full Earth, Reaping, and Year’s End. Riddling was an important part of every Fair-Day, but it was the most important event of the Fair of Wide Earth and that of Full Earth, for the riddles told were supposed to augur well or ill for the success of the crops.”

“THAT IS SUPERSTITION WITH NO BASIS AT ALL IN FACT,” Blaine said. “I FIND IT ANNOYING AND UPSETTING.”

“Of course it’s superstition,” Roland agreed, “but you might be surprised at how well the riddles foresaw the crops. For instance, riddle me this, Blaine: What is the difference between a grandmother and a granary?”

“THAT IS VERY OLD AND NOT VERY INTERESTING,” Blaine said, but he sounded happy to have something to solve just the same. “ONE IS ONE’s BORN KIN; THE OTHER IS ONE’s CORN-BIN. A RIDDLE BASED ON PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. ANOTHER OF THIS TYPE, ONE TOLD ON THE LEVEL WHICH CONTAINS THE BARONY OF NEW YORK, GOES LIKE THIS: WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CAT AND A COMPLEX SENTENCE?”

Jake spoke up. “Our English teacher told us that one just this year. A cat has claws at the end of its paws, and a complex sentence has a pause at the end of its clause.”

“YES,” Blaine agreed. “A VERY SILLY OLD RIDDLE.”

“For once I agree with you, Blaine old buddy,” Eddie said.

“I WOULD HEAR MORE OF FAIR-DAY RIDDLING IN GILEAD, ROLAND, SON OF STEVEN. I FIND IT QUITE INTERESTING.”

“At noon on Wide Earth and Full Earth, somewhere between sixteen and thirty riddlers would gather in The Hall of the Grandfathers, which was opened for the event. Those were the only times of year when the common fold-merchants and farmers and ranchers and such-were allowed into The Hall of the Grandfathers, and on that day they all crowded in.”

The gunslinger’s eyes were far away and dreamy; it was the expression Jake had seen on his face in that misty other life, when Roland had told him of how he and his friends, Cuthbert and Jamie, had once sneaked into the balcony of that same Hall to watch some sort of ritual dance. Jake and Roland had been climbing into the mountains when Roland had told him of that time, close on the trail of Walter.

Marten sat next to my mother and father, Roland had said. I knew them even from so high above-and once she and Marten danced, slowly and revolvingly, and the others cleared the floor for them and clapped when it was over. But the gunslingers did not clap…

Jake looked curiously at Roland, wondering again where this strange, distant man had come from… and why.

“A great barrel was placed in the center of the floor,” Roland went on, “and into this each riddler would toss a handful of bark scrolls with riddles writ upon them. Many were old, riddles they had gotten from the elders-even from books, in some cases-but many others were new-made up for the occasion. Three judges, one always a gunslinger, would pass on these when they were told aloud, and they were accepted only if the judges deemed them fair.”

“YES, RIDDLES MUST BE FAIR,” Blame agreed.

“So they riddled,” the gunslinger said. A faint smile touched his mouth as he thought of those days, days when he had been the age of the bruised boy sitting across from him with a billy-bumbler in his lap. “For hours on end they riddled. A line was formed down the center of The Hall of the Grandfathers. One’s position in this line was determined by lot, and since it was much better to be at the end of the line than at its head, everyone hoped for a high number, although the winner had to answer at least one riddle correctly.”

“OF COURSE.”

“Each man or woman-for some of Gilead’s best riddlers were women-approached the barrel, drew a riddle, and handed it to the Master. The Master would ask, and if the riddle was still unanswered after the sands in a three-minute glass had run out, that contestant had to leave the line.”

“AND WAS THE SAME RIDDLE ASKED OF THE NEXT MAN IN LINE?”

“Yes.”

“SO THAT MAN HAD EXTRA TIME TO THINK.”

“Yes.”

“I SEE. IT SOUNDS PRETTY SWELL.”

Roland frowned. “Swell?”

“He means it sounds like fun,” Susannah said quietly.

Roland shrugged. “It was fun for the onlookers, I suppose, but the contestants took it very seriously, and there were quite often arguments and fist-fights after the contest was over and the prize had been awarded.”

“WHAT PRIZE WAS THAT?”

“The largest goose in Barony. And year after year my teacher, Cort, carried that goose home.”

“HE MUST HAVE BEEN A GREAT RIDDLER,” Blaine said respectfully. “I WISH HE WERE HERE.”

That makes two of us, Roland thought.

“Now I come to my proposal,” Roland said.

“I WILL LISTEN WITH GREAT INTEREST, ROLAND OF GILEAD.”

“Let these next hours be our Fair-Day. You will not riddle us, for you wish to hear new riddles, not tell some of those millions you must already know-”

“CORRECT.”

“We couldn’t solve most of them, anyway,” Roland went on. “I’m sure you know riddles that would have stumped even Cort, had they been pulled out of the barrel.” He was not sure of it at all, but the time to use the fist had passed and the time for the open hand had come.

“OF COURSE,” Blaine agreed.

“I propose that, instead of a goose, our lives shall be the prize,” Roland said. “We will riddle you as we run, Blaine. If, when we come to Topeka, you have solved every one of our riddles, you may carry out your original plan and kill us. That is your goose. But if we stump you- if there is a riddle in either Jake’s book or one of our heads which you don’t know and can’t answer-you must take us to Topeka and then free us to pursue our quest. That is our goose.”

Silence.

“Do you understand?”

“YES.”

“Do you agree?”

More silence from Blaine the Mono. Eddie sat stiffly with his arm around Susannah, looking up at the ceiling of the Barony Coach. Susannah’s left hand slipped across her belly, thinking of the secret which might be growing there. Jake stroked Oy’s fur lightly, avoiding the bloody tangles where the bumbler had been stabbed. They waited while Blaine- the real Blaine, now far behind them, living his quasi-life beneath a city where all the inhabitants lay dead by his hand-considered Roland’s proposal.

“YES,” Blaine said at last. “I AGREE, IF I SOLVE ALL THE RIDDLES YOU ASK ME, I WILL TAKE YOU WITH ME TO THE PLACE WHERE THE PATH ENDS IN THE CLEARING. IF ONE OF YOU TELLS A RIDDLE I CANNOT SOLVE, I WILL SPARE YOUR LIVES AND TAKE YOU TO TOPEKA, WHERE YOU WILL LEAVE THE MONO AND CONTINUE YOUR QUEST FOR THE DARK TOWER. HAVE I UNDERSTOOD THE TERMS AND LIMITS OF YOUR PROPOSAL CORRECTLY, ROLAND, SON OF STEVEN?”

“Yes.”

“VERY WELL, ROLAND OF GILEAD.

“VERY WELL, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.

“VERY WELL, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK.

“VERY WELL, JAKE OF NEW YORK.

“VERY WELL, OY OF MID-WORLD.”

Oy looked up briefly at the sound of his name.

“YOU ARE KA-TET; ONE MADE FROM MANY. SO AM I. WHOSE KA-TET IS THE STRONGER IS SOMETHING WE MUST NOW PROVE.”

There was a moment of silence, broken only by the steady hard throb of the slo-trans turbines, bearing them on across the waste lands, bearing them on toward Topeka, the place where Mid-World ended and End-World began.

“SO,” cried the voice of Blaine. “CAST YOUR NETS, WANDERERS! TRY ME WITH YOUR QUESTIONS, AND LET THE CONTEST BEGIN.”