ONE
They did indeed find a good-sized kitchen and an adjoining pantry at ground-level in the Arc 16 Experimental Station, and not far from the infirmary. They found something else, as well: the office of sai Richard P. Sayre, once the Crimson King's Head of Operations, now in the clearing at the end of the path courtesy of Susannah Dean's fast right hand. Lying atop Sayre's desk were amazingly complete files on all four of them.
These they destroyed, using the shredder. There were photographs of Eddie and Jake in the folders that were simply too painful to look at. Memories were better.
On Sayre's wall were two framed oil-paintings. One showed a strong and handsome boy. He was shirtless, barefooted, tousle-haired, smiling, dressed only in jeans and wearing a docker's clutch. He looked about Jake's age. This picture had a notquite-pleasant sensuality about it. Susannah thought that the painter, sai Sayre, or both might have been part of the Lavender Hill Mob, as she had sometimes heard homosexuals called in the Village. The boy's hair was black. His eyes were blue. His lips were red. There was a livid scar on his side and a birthmark on his left heel as crimson as his lips. A snow-white horse lay dead before him. There was blood on its snarling teeth. The boy's marked left foot rested on the horse's flank, and his lips were curved in a smile of triumph.
"That's Llamrei, Arthur Eld's horse," Roland said. "Its image was carried into battle on the pennons of Gilead, and was the sigul of all In-World."
"So according to this picture, the Crimson King wins?" she asked. "Or if not him then Mordred, his son?"
Roland raised his eyebrows. "Thanks to John Farson, the Crimson King's men won the In-World lands long ago," he said.
But then he smiled. It was a sunny expression so unlike his usual look that seeing it always made Susannah feel dizzy. "But I think wwon the only battle that matters. What's shown in this picture is no more than someone's wishful fairy-tale." Then, with a savagery that startled her, he smashed the glass over the frame with his fist and yanked the painting free, ripping it most of the way down the middle as he did so. Before he could tear it to pieces, as he certainly meant to do, she stopped him and pointed to the bottom. Written there in small but nonetheless extravagant calligraphy was the artist's name: ^afoich ^Dwrnu/Ze.
The other painting showed the Dark Tower, a sooty-gray black cylinder tapering upward. It stood at the far end of Can'-Ka No Rey, the field of roses. In their dreams the Tower had seemed taller than the tallest skyscraper in New York (to Susannah this meant the Empire State Building). In the painting it looked to be no more than six hundred feet high, yet this robbed it of none of its dreamlike majesty. The narrow windows rose in an ascending spiral around it just as in their dreams. At the top was an oriel window of many colors-each, Roland knew, corresponding to one of the Wizard's glasses. The inmost circle but one was the pink of the ball that had been left for awhile in the keeping of a certain witch-woman named Rhea; the center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen.
"The room behind that window is where I would go," Roland said, tapping the glass over the picture. "That is where my quest ends." His voice was low and awestruck. "This picture wasn't done from any dream, Susannah. It's as if I could touch the texture of every brick. Do you agree?"
"Yes." It was all she could say. Looking at it here on the late Richard Sayre's wall robbed her breath. Suddenly it all seemed possible. The end of the business was, quite literally, in sight.
"The person who painted it must have been there," Roland mused. "Must have set up his easel in the very roses."
"Patrick Danville," she said. "It's the same signature as on the one of Mordred and the dead horse, do you see?"
"I see it very well."
"And do you see the path through the roses that leads to the steps at the base?"
"Yes. Nineteen steps, I have no doubt. Chassit. And the clouds overhead-"
She saw them, too. They formed a kind of whirlpool before streaming away from the Tower, and toward the Place of the Turtle, at the other end of the Beam they had followed so far. And she saw another thing. Outside the barrel of the Tower, at what might have been fifty-foot intervals, were balconies encircled with waist-high wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny blobs of white: a face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised hands.
"Is that the Crimson King?" she asked, pointing. She didn't quite dare put the tip of her finger on the glass over that tiny figure. It was as if she expected it to come to life and snatch her into the picture.
"Yes," Roland said. "Locked out of the only thing he ever wanted."
"Then maybe we could go right up the stairs and past him.
Give him the old raspberry on the way by." And when Roland looked puzzled at that, she put her tongue between her lips and demonstrated.
This time the gunslinger's smile was faint and distracted. "I
don't think it will be so easy," he said.
Susannah sighed. "Actually I don't, either."
They had what they'd come for-quite a bit more, in fact-but they still found it hard to leave Sayre's office. The picture held them. Susannah asked Roland if he didn't want to take it along. Certainly it would be simple enough to cut it out of the frame with the letter-opener on Sayre's desk and roll it up.
Roland considered the idea, then shook his head. There was a kind of malevolent life in it that might attract the wrong sort of attention, like moths to a bright light. And even if that were not the case, he had an idea that both of them might spend too much time looking at it. The picture might distract them or, even worse, hypnotize them.
In the end, maybe it's just another mind-trap, he thought. Like Insomnia.
"We'll leave it," he said. "Soon enough-in months, maybe even weeks-we'll have the real thing to look at."
"Do you say so?" she asked faintly. "Roland, do you really say so?"
"I do."
"All three of us? Or will Oy and I have to die, too, in order to open your way to the Tower? After all, you started alone, didn't you? Maybe you have to finish that way. Isn't that how a writer would want it?"
"That doesn't mean he can do it," Roland said. "Stephen King's not the water, Susannah-he's only the pipe the water runs through."
"I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure I entirely believe it."
Roland wasn't completely sure he did, either. He thought of pointing out to Susannah that Cuthbert and Alain had been with him at the true beginning of his quest, in Mejis, and when they set out from Gilead the next time, Jamie DeCurry had joined them, making the trio a quartet. But the quest had really started after the batde of Jericho Hill, and yes, by then he had been on his own.
"I started lonejohn, but that's not how I'll finish," he said.
She had been making her way quite handily from place to place in a rolling office-chair. Now he plucked her out of it and setded her on his right hip, the one that no longer pained him.
"You and Oy will be with me when I climb the steps and enter the door, you'll be with me when I climb the stairs, you'll be with me when I deal with yon capering red goblin, and you'll be with me when I enter the room at the top."
Although Susannah did not say so, this felt like a lie to her.
In truth it felt like a lie to both of them.
TWO
They brought canned goods, a skillet, two pots, two plates, and two sets of utensils back to the Fedic Hotel. Roland had added a flashlight that provided a feeble glow from nearly dead batteries, a butcher's knife, and a handy little hatchet with a rubber grip. Susannah had found a pair of net bags in which to store this little bit of fresh gunna. She also found three cans of jellylike stuff on a high shelf in the pantry adjacent to the infirmary kitchen.
"It's Sterno," she told the gunslinger when he inquired.
"Good stuff. You can light it up. It burns slow and makes a blue flame hot enough to cook on."
"I thought we'd build a little fire behind the hotel," he said. "I won't need this smelly stuff to make one, certainly." He said it with a touch of contempt.
"No, I suppose not. But it might come in handy."
"How?"
"I don't know, but..." She shrugged.
Near the door to the street they passed what appeared to be a janitor's closet filled with piles of rickrack. Susannah had had enough of the Dogan for one day and was anxious to be out, but Roland wanted to have a look. He ignored the mop buckets and brooms and cleaning supplies in favor of a jumble of cords and straps heaped in a corner. Susannah guessed from the boards on top of which they lay that this stuff had once been used to build temporary scaffoldings. She also had an idea what Roland wanted the strappage for, and her heart sank. It was like going all the way back to the beginning.
"Thought I was done with piggybackin," she said crossly, and with more than a touch of Detta in her voice.
"It's the only way, I think," Roland said. "I'm just glad I'm whole enough again to carry your weight."
"And that passage underneath's the only way through?
You're sure of that?"
"I suppose there might be a way through the castle-" he began, but Susannah was already shaking her head.
"I've been up top with Mia, don't forget. The drop into the Discordia on the far side's at least five hundred feet. Probably more. There might have been stairs in the long-ago, but they're gone now."
"Then we're for the passage," he said, "and the passage is for us. Mayhap we'll find something for you to ride in once we're on the other side. In another town or village."
Susannah was shaking her head again. "I think this is where civilization ends, Roland. And I think we better bundle up as much as we can, because it's gonna get cold.'"
Bundling-up materials seemed to be in short supply, however, unlike the foodstuffs. No one had thought to store a few extra sweaters and fleece-lined jackets in vacuum-packed cans.
There were blankets, but even in storage they had grown thin and fragile, just short of useless.
"I don't give a bedbug's ass," she said in a wan voice. 'Just as long as we get out of this place."
"We will," he said.
THREE
Susannah is in Central Park, and it's cold enough to see her breath. The sky overhead is white from side to side, a snow-sky. She's looking down at the polar bear (who's rolling around on his rocky island, seeming to enjoy the cold just fine) when a hand snakes around her waist. Warm lips smack her cold cheek. She turns and there stand Eddie and fake.
They are wearing identical grins and nearly identical red stocking caps. Eddies says MERRY across the front and fake's says CHRISTMAS. She opens her mouth to tell them "You boys can't be here, you boys are dead, "and then she realizes, with a great and singing relief, that all that business was just a dream she had. And really, how could you doubt it? There are no talking animals called billy-bumblers, not really, no taheen-creatures with the bodies of humans and the heads of animals, no places called Fedic or Castle Discordia.
Most of all, there are no gunslingers. John Kennedy was the last, her chauffeur Andrew was right about that.
"Broughtyou hot chocolate, "Eddie says and holds it out to her. It's the perfect cup of hot chocolate, mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of nutmeg dotting the cream; she can smell it, and as she takes it she can feel his fingers inside his gloves and the first flakes of that winters snow drift down between them. She thinks how good it is to be alive in plain old New York, how great that reality is reality, that they are together in the Year of Our Lord-
What Year of Our Lord?
She frowns, because this is a serious question, isn't it? After all, Eddie's an eighties man and she never got any further than 1964 (or was it '65?). As for Jake, Jake Chambers with the toord CHRISTMAS printed on the front of his happy hat, isn't he from the seventies? And if the three of them represent three decades from the second half of the twentieth century, what is their commonality? What year is this?
"NINETEEN," says a voice out of the air (perhaps it is the voice of Bango Skank, the Great Lost Character), "this is NINETEEN, this is CHASSIT. All your friends are dead."
With each word the world becomes more unreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. When she looks doion at the polar bear she sees it's lying dead on its rock island with its paws in the air. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading, being replaced by a musty smell: old plaster, ancient wood. The odor of a hotel room where no one has slept for years.
No, her mind moans. No, I want Central Park, I want Mr.
MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, I want the smell of hot chocolate and the sight of December's first hesitant snowflakes, I've had enough of Fedic, In-World, Mid-World, and End-World. I want Afy-World. I don't care if I ever see the Dark Tower.
Eddie's and Jake's lips move in unison, as if they are singing a song she can't hear, but it's not a song; the words she reads on their lips just before the dream breaks apart are
FOUR
"Watch out for Dandelo."
She woke up with these words on her own lips, shivering in the early not-quite-dawn light. And the breath-seeing part of her dream was true, if no other. She felt her cheeks and wiped away the wetness tihere. It wasn't quite cold enough to freeze die tears to her skin, but just-a-damn-bout.
She looked around the dreary room here in the Fedic Hotel, wishing witfi all her heart tfiat her dream of Central Park had been true. For one thing, she'd had to sleep on the floor-the bed was basically nothing but a rust-sculpture waiting to disintegrate-and her back was stiff. For another, the blankets she'd used as a makeshift mattress and the ones she'd wrapped around her had all torn to rags as she tossed and turned. The air was heavy with their dust, tickling her nose and coating her throat, making her feel like she was coming down with the world's worst cold. Speaking of cold, she was shivering. And she needed to pee, which meant dragging herself down the hall on her stumps and half-numbed hands.
And none of that was really what was wrong with Susannah Odetta Holmes Dean this morning, all right? The problem was that she had just come from a beautiful dream to a world
(this is NINETEEN all your friends are dead)
where she was now so lonely that she felt half-crazy with it.
The problem was that the place where the sky was brightening was not necessarily the east. The problem was that she was tired and sad, homesick and heartsore, griefstruck and depressed. The problem was that, in this hour before dawn, in this frontier museum-piece of a hotel room where the air was full of musty blanket-fibers, she felt as if all but the last two ounces of fuck-you had been squeezed out of her. She wanted the dream back.
She wanted Eddie.
"I see you're up, too," said a voice, and Susannah whirled around, pivoting on her hands so quickly she picked up a splinter.
The gunslinger leaned against the door between the room and the hall. He had woven the straps into the sort of carrier with which she was all too familiar, and it hung over his left shoulder.
Hung over his right was a leather sack filled with their new possessions and the remaining Orizas. Oy sat at Roland's feet, looking at her solemnly.
"You scared the living Jesus out of me, sai Deschain," she said.
"You've been crying."
"Isn't any of your nevermind if I have been or if I haven't."
"We'll feel better once we're out of here," he said. "Fedic's curdled."
She knew exacdy what he meant. The wind had kicked up fierce in the night, and when it screamed around the eaves of die hotel and the saloon next door, it had sounded to Susannah like the screams of children-wee ones so lost in time and space they would never find their way home.
"All right, but Roland-before we cross the street and go into that Dogan, I want your promise on one thing."
"What promise would you have?"
"If something looks like getting us-some monster out of the Devil's Arse or one from the todash between-lands-you put a bullet in my head before it happens. When it comes to yourself you can do whatever you want, but... what? What are you holding that out for?" It was one of his revolvers.
"Because I'm only really good with one of them these days.
And because I won't be the one to take your life. If you should decide to do it yourself, however-"
"Roland, your fucked-up scruples never cease to amaze me," she said. Then she took the gun with one hand and pointed to the harness with the other. "As for that thing, if you think I'm gonna ride in it before I have to, you're crazy."
A faint smile touched his lips. "It's better when it's the two of us, isn't it?"
She sighed, then nodded. "A little bit, yeah, but far from perfect. Come on, big fella, let's blow this place. My ass is an ice-cube and the smell is killing my sinuses."
FIVE
He put her in the rolling office-chair once they were back in the Dogan and pushed her in it as far as the first set of stairs,
Susannah holding their gunna and the bag of Orizas in her lap.
At the stairs the gunslinger booted the chair over the edge and then stood with Susannah on his hip, both of them wincing at the crashing echoes as the chair tumbled over and over to the bottom.
"That's the end of that," she said when the echoes had finally ceased. 'You might as well have left it at the top for all the good it's going to do me now."
"We'll see," Roland said, starting down. 'You might be surprised."
"That thing ain't gonna work fo' shit an we bofe know it,"
Detta said. Oy uttered a short, sharp bark, as if to say That's right.
SIX
The chair did survive its tumble, however. And the next, as well. But when Roland hunkered to examine the poor battered thing after being pushed down a third (and extremely long) flight of stairs, one of the casters was bent badly out of true. It reminded him a little of how her abandoned wheelchair had looked when they'd come upon it after the battle with the Wolves on the East Road.
"There, now, dint I tell you?" she asked, and cackled.
"Reckon it's time to start to tin dat barge, Roland!"
He eyed her. "Can you make Detta go away?"
She looked at him, surprised, then used her memory to replay the last thing she had said. She flushed. 'Yes," she said in a remarkably small voice. "Say sorry, Roland."
He picked her up and got her settled into the harness.
Then they went on. As unpleasant as it was beneath the Dogan-as creepy as it was beneath the Dogan-Susannah was glad that they were putting Fedic behind them. Because that meant they were putting the rest of it behind them, too: Lud, the Callas, Thunderclap, Algul Siento; New York City and western Maine, as well. The castle of the Red King was ahead, but she didn't think they had to worry much about it, because its most celebrated occupant had run mad and decamped for the Dark Tower.
The extraneous was slipping away. They were closing in on the end of their long journey, and there was little else to worry about. That was good. And if she should happen to fall on her way to Roland's obsession? Well, if there was only darkness on the other side of existence (as she had for most of her adult life believed), then nothing was lost, as long as it wasn't todash darkness, a place filled with creeping monsters. And, hey! Perhaps there was an afterlife, a heaven, a reincarnation, maybe even a resurrection in the clearing at the end of the path. She liked that last idea, and had now seen enough wonders to believe it might be so. Perhaps Eddie and Jake would be waiting for her there, all bundled up and with the first down-drifting snowflakes of winter getting caught in their eyebrows: Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, offering her hot chocolate. Mit schlag.
Hot chocolate in Central Park! What was the Dark Tower compared to that?
SEVEN
They passed through the rotunda with its doors to everywhere; they came eventually to the wide passage with the sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED. A little way down it, in the glow of one of the still-working fluorescent lights (and near the forgotten rubber moccasin), they saw something printed on the tile wall and detoured down to read it.
(*J i j C I \ I / I /* I / / L* / \\O\ Av* *)'*?*^aY\V*?*n'? VVC Aft C* Owr- \sJQjy\ *Vi5H U$$O amp; amp; J\ACK;
Under the main message they had signed their names:
Fred Worthington, Dani Rostov, Ted Brautigan, and Dinky Earnshaw. Below the names were two more lines, written in another hand. Susannah thought it was Ted's, and reading them made her feel like crying:
We PO -Vx? s e e k ex \oe.-VWrLoorlo'-7
"God love em," Susannah said hoarsely. "May God love and keep em all."
"Keep-um," said a small and rather timid voice from Roland's heel. They looked down.
"Decided to talk again, sugarpie?" Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was weeks before he spoke again.
EIGHT
Twice they got lost. Once Oy rediscovered their way through the maze of tunnels and passages-some moaning with distant drafts, some alive with sounds that were closer and more menacing-and once Susannah came back to the route herself, spotting a Mounds Bar wrapper Dani had dropped. The Algul had been well-stocked with candy, and the girl had brought plenty with her. ("Although not one single change of clothes,"
Susannah said with a laugh and a shake of her head.) At one point, in front of an ancient ironwood door that looked to Roland like the ones he'd found on the beach, they heard an unpleasant chewing sound. Susannah tried to imagine what might be making such a noise and could think of nothing but a giant, disembodied mouth full of yellow fangs streaked with dirt. On the door was an indecipherable symbol. Just looking at it made her uneasy.
"Do you know what that says?" she asked. Roland-although he spoke over half a dozen languages and was familiar with many more-shook his head. Susannah was relieved. She had an idea that if you knew the sound that symbol stood for, you'd want to say it. Might have to say it. And then the door would open. Would you want to run when you saw the thing that was chewing on the other side? Probably. Would you be able to?
Maybe not.
Shortly after passing this door they went down another, shorter, flight of stairs. "I guess I forgot this one when we were talking yesterday, but I remember it now," she said, and pointed to the dust on the risers, which was disturbed. "Look, there's our tracks. Fred carried me going down, Dinky when we came back up. We're almost there now, Roland, promise you."
But she got lost again in the warren of diverging passages at the bottom of the stairs and this was when Oy put them right, trotting down a dim, tunnel-like passage where the gunslinger had to walk bent-over with Susannah clinging to his neck.
"I don't know-" Susannah began, and that was when Oy led them into a brighter corridor (comparatively brighter: half of the overhead fluorescents were out, and many of the tiles had fallen from the walls, revealing the dark and oozy earth beneath). The bumbler sat down on a scuffed confusion of tracks and looked at them as if to say, Is this what you wanted?
"Yeah," she said, obviously relieved. "Okay. Look, just like I told you." She pointed to a door marked FORD's THEATER, 1865 SEE THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION. Beside it, under glass, was a poster for Our American Cousin that looked as if it had been printed the day before. "What we want's just down here a little way. Two lefts and then a right-I think. Anyway, I'll know it when I see it."
Through it all Roland was patient with her. He had a nasty idea which he did not share with Susannah: that the maze of passageways and corridors down here might be in drift, just as the points of the compass were, in what he was already thinking of as "the world above." If so, they were in trouble.
It was hot down here, and soon they were both sweating freely. Oy panted harshly and steadily, like a litde engine, but kept a steady pace beside the gunslinger's left heel. There was no dust on die floor, and the tracks they'd seen off and on earlier were gone. The noises from behind the doors were louder, however, and as they passed one, something on the other side thumped it hard enough to make it shudder in its frame. Oy barked at it, laying his ears back against his skull, and Susannah voiced a litde scream.
"Steady-oh," Roland said. "It can't break through. None of them can break through."
"Are you sure of that?"
"Yes," said the gunslinger firmly. He wasn't sure at all. A phrase of Eddie's occurred to him: All bets are off.
They skirted the puddles, being careful not even to touch the ones diat were glowing with what might have been radiation or witchlight. They passed a broken pipe that was exhaling a listless plume of green steam, and Susannah suggested they hold their breadi until diey were well past it. Roland thought that an extremely good idea.
Thirty or forty yards further along she bid him stop. "I don't know, Roland," she said, and he could hear her struggling to keep die panic out of her voice. "I thought we had it made in the shade when I saw the Lincoln door, but now this... this here..." Her voice wavered and he felt her draw a deep breadi, struggling to get herself under control. "This all looks different.
And the sounds... how they get in your head..."
He knew what she meant. On their left was an unmarked door that had setded crookedly against its hinges, and from the gap at the top came the atonal jangle of todash chimes, a sound that was both horrible and fascinating. With the chimes came a steady draft of stinking air. Roland had an idea she was about to suggest they go back while they still could, maybe rethink this whole going-under-the-castle idea, and so he said,
"Let's see what's up there. It's a litde brighter, anyway."
As they neared an intersection from which passages and tiled corridors rayed off in all directions, he felt her shift against him, sitting up. "There!" she shouted. "That pile of rubble! We walked around that! We walked around that,
Roland, / remember!"
Part of the ceiling had fallen into the middle of the intersection, creating a jumble of broken tiles, smashed glass, snags of wire, and plain old dirt. Along the edge of it were tracks.
"Down there!" she cried. "Straight ahead! Ted said, 'I think this is the one they called Main Street' and Dinky said he thought so, too. Dani Rostov said that a long time ago, around the time the Crimson King did whatever it was that darkened Thunderclap, a whole bunch of people used that way to get out.
Only they left some of their thoughts behind. I asked her what feeling that was like and she said it was a litde like seeing dirty soap-scum on the sides of the tub after you let out the water.
"Not nice," she said. Fred marked it and then we went all the way back up to the infirmary. I don't want to brag and queer the deal, but I think we're gonna be okay."
And they were, at least for the time being. Eighty paces beyond the pile of rubble they came upon an arched opening.
Beyond it, flickering white balls of radiance hung down from the ceiling, leading off at a downward-sloping angle. On the wall, in four chalkstrokes that had already started to run because of the moisture seeping through the tiles, was the last message left for them by the liberated Breakers:
They rested here for awhile, eating handfuls of raisins from a vacuum-sealed can. Even Oy nibbled a few, although it was clear from the way he did it that he didn't care for them much.
When they'd all eaten their fill and Roland had once more stored the can in the leather sack he'd found along the way, he asked her: "Are you ready to go on?"
"Yes. Right away, I think, before I lose my-my God, Roland, what was that?"
From behind them, probably from one of the passages leading away from the rubble-choked intersection, had come a low thudding sound. It had a liquid quality to it, as if a giant in water-filled rubber boots had just taken a single step.
"I don't know," he said.
Susannah was looking uneasily back over her shoulder but could see only shadows. Some of them were moving, but that could have been because some of the lights were flickering.
Could have been.
"You know," she said, "I think it might be a good idea if we vacated this areajust about as fast as we can."
"I think you're right," he said, resting on one knee and the splayed tips of his fingers, like a runner getting ready to burst from the blocks. When she was back in the harness, he got to his feet and moved past the arrow on the wall, setting a pace that was just short of a jog.
NINE
They had been moving at that nearjog for about fifteen minutes wjien they came upon a skeleton dressed in the remains of a rotting military uniform. There was still a flap of scalp on its head and tuft of listless black hair sprouting from it. The jaw grinned, as if welcoming them to the underworld. Lying on the floor beside the thing's naked pelvis was a ring that had finally slipped from one of the moldering fingers of the dead man's right Hand. Susannah asked Roland if she could have a closer look. He picked it up and handed it to her. She examined it just long enough to confirm what she had thought, then cast it aside. It made a little clink and then there were only the sounds of dripping water and the todash chimes, fainter now but persistent.
"What I thought," she said.
"Arid what was that?" he asked, moving on again.
"The guy was an Elk. My father had the same damn ring."
"An elk? I don't understand."
"It's a fraternal order. A kind of good-ole-boy ka-tet. But what in the hell would an Elk be doing down here? A Shriner, now, that I could understand." And she laughed, a trifle wildly.
The hanging bulbs were filled with some brilliant gas that pulsed with a rhythmic but not quite constant beat. Susannah knew there was something there to get, and after a litde while she got it. While Roland was hurrying, the pulse of the guidelights was rapid. When he slowed down (never stopping but conserving his energy, all the same), the pulse in the globes also slowed down. She didn't think they were responding to his heartbeat, exactly, or hers, but that was part of it. (Had she known the term biorhythm, she would have seized upon it.)
Fifty yards or so ahead of their position at any given time, Main Street was dark. Then, one by one, the lights would come on as they approached. It was mesmerizing. She turned to look back-only once, she didn't want to throw him off his stride-and saw that, yes, the lights were going dark again fifty yards or so behind. These lights were much brighter than the flickering globes at the entrance to Main Street, and she guessed that those ran off some other power-source, one that was (like almost everything else in this world) starting to give out. Then she noticed that one of the globes they were approaching remained dark. As they neared and then passed under it, she saw that it wasn't completely dead; a dim core of illumination burned feebly deep inside, twitching to the beat of their bodies and brains. It reminded her of how you'd sometimes see a neon sign with one or more letters on the fritz, turning PABST into PA ST or TASTY BRATWURST into TASTY RATWURST. A hundred feet or so further on they came to another burnt-out bulb, then another, then two in a row.
"Chances are good we're gonna be in the dark before long," she said glumly.
"I know," Roland said. He was starting to sound the teensiest bit out of breath.
The air was still dank, and a chill was gradually replacing the heat. There were posters on the walls, most rotted far beyond the point of readability. On a dry stretch of wall she saw one that depicted a man who had just lost an arena battle to a tiger. The big cat was yanking a bloody snarl of intestines from the screaming man's belly while the crowd went nuts. There was one line of copy in half a dozen different languages. English was second from the top. VISIT CIRCUS MAXIMUS! YOU WILL CHEER! it said.
"Christ, Roland," Susannah said. "Christ almighty, what were they?"
Roland did not reply, although he knew the answer: they were folken who had run mad.
TEN
At hundred-yard intervals, little flights of stairs-the longest was only ten risers from top to bottom-took them gradually deeper into the bowels of the earth. After they'd gone what Susannah estimated to be a quarter of a mile, they came to a gate that had been torn away, perhaps by some sort of vehicle, and smashed to flinders. Here were more skeletons, so many that Roland had to tread upon some in order to pass. They did not crunch but made a damp puttering sound that was somehow worse. The smell that arose from them was sallow and wet. Most of the tiles had been torn away above these bodies, and those that were still on the walls had been pocked with bullet-
holes. A firefight, then. Susannah opened her mouth to say something about it, but before she could, that low thudding sound came again. She thought it was a little louder this time.
A little closer. She looked behind her again and saw nothing.
The lights fifty yards back were still going dark in a line.
"I don't like to sound paranoid, Roland, but I think we are being followed."
"I know we are."
"You want me to throw a shot at it? Or a plate? That whistling can be pretty spooky."
"No."
"Why not?"
"It may not know what we are. If you shoot... it will."
It took her a moment to realize what he was really saying: he wasn't sure bullets-or an Oriza-would stop whatever was back there. Or, worse, perhaps he was sure.
When she spoke again, she worked very hard to sound calm, and thought she succeeded tolerably well. "It's something from that crack in the earth, do you think?"
"It might be," Roland said. "Or it might be something that got through from todash space. Now hush."
The gunslinger went on more quickly, finally reaching jogging pace and then passing it. She was amazed by his mobility now that the pain that had troubled his hip was gone, but she could hear his breathing as well as feel it in the rise and fall of his back-quick, gasping intakes followed by rough expulsions that sounded almost like cries of annoyance. She would have given anything to be running beside him on her own legs, the strong ones Jack Mort had stolen from her.
The overhead globes pulsed faster now, the pulsation easier to see because there were fewer of them. In between, their combined shadow would stretch long ahead of them, then shorten little by litde as they approached the next light. The air was cooler; the ceramic stuff which floored the passage less and less even. In places it had split apart and pieces of it had been tossed aside, leaving traps for the unwary. These Oy avoided with ease, and so far Roland had been able to avoid them, too.
She was about to tell him that she hadn't heard their follower for awhile when something behind them pulled in a great gasping breath. She felt the air around her reverse direction; felt the tight curls on her head spring wildly about as the air was sucked backward. There was an enormous slobbering noise that made her feel like screaming. Whatever was back there, it was big.
No.-...
Enormous.
ELEVEN
They pelted down another of those short stairways. Fifty yards beyond it, three more of the pulsing globes bloomed with unsteady light, but after that there was just darkness. The ragged tiled sides of the passage and its uneven, decaying floor melted into a void so deep that it looked like a physical substance: great clouds of loosely packed black felt. They would run into it, she thought, and at first their momentum would continue to carry them forward. Then the stuff would shove them backward like a spring, and whatever was back there would be on them. She would catch a glimpse of it, something so awful and alien her mind would not be able to recognize it, and that might be a mercy. Then it would pounce, and-
Roland ran into the darkness without slowing, and of course they did not bounce back. At first there was a little light, some from behind them and some from the globes overhead (a few were still giving off a last dying core of radiance). Just enough to see another short stairway, its upper end flanked by crumbling skeletons wearing a few wretched rags of clothing. Roland hurried down the steps-there were nine in this flight-without stopping. Oy ran at his side, ears back against his skull, fur rippling sleekly, almost dancing his way down. Then they were in pure dark.
"Bark, Oy, so we don't run into each other!" Roland snapped. "Bark!"
Oy barked. A thirty-count later, he snapped the same order and Oy barked again.
"Roland, what if we come to another stairway?"
"We will," he said, and a ninety-count after that, they did. She felt him tip forward, feet stuttering. She felt the muscles in his shoulders jump as he put his hands out before him, but they did not fall. Susannah could only marvel at his reflexes. His boots rapped unhesitatingly downward in the dark. Twelve steps this time? Fourteen? They were back on the flat surface of the passageway before she could get a good count. So now she knew he was capable of negotiating stairs even in the dark, even at a dead run. Only what if he stuck his foot in a hole? God knew it was possible, given the way the flooring had rotted. Or suppose they came to a stacked bone-barrier of skeletons? In the flat passageway, at the speed he was now running, that would mean a nasty tumble at the very least. Or suppose they ran into a jumble of bones at the head of one of the little stairways? She tried to block the vision of Roland swooping out into blackness like a crippled high-diver and couldn't quite do it. How many of their bones would be broken when they crash-landed at the bottom?
Shit, sugar, pick a number, Eddie might have said. This flatout run was insanity.
But there was no choice. She could hear the thing behind them all too clearly now, not just its slobbering breath but a sandpapery rasping sound as something slid across one of the passageway walls-or maybe both. Every now and then she'd also hear a clink and a clitter as a tile was torn off. It was impossible not to construct a picture from these sounds, and what Susannah began to see was a great black worm whose segmented body filled the passage from side to side, occasionally ripping off loose ceramic squares and crushing them beneath its gelatinous body as it rushed ever onward, hungry, closing the gap between it and them.
And closing it much more rapidly now. Susannah thought she knew why. Before, they had been running in a moving island of light. Whatever that thing behind them was, it didn't like the light. She thought of the flashlight Roland had added to their gunna, but without fresh batteries, it would be next to useless. Twenty seconds after flicking the switch on its long barrel, the damn thing would be dead.
Except... wait a minute.
Its barrel.
Its long barrel!
Susannah reached into the leather bag bouncing around at Roland's side, finding tins of food, but those weren't the tins she wanted. At last she found one that she did, recognizing it by the circular gutter running around the lid. There was no time to wonder why it should feel so immediately and intimately familiar; Detta had her secrets, and something to do with Sterno was probably one of them. She held die can up to smell and be sure, then promptly bashed herself on the bridge of the nose with it when Roland stumbled over something-maybe a chunk of flooring, maybe another skeleton-and had to batde again for balance. He won diis time, too, but eventually he'd lose and the thing back there might be on them before he could get up.
Susannah felt warm blood begin to course down her face and the thing behind them, perhaps smelling it, let loose an enormous damp cry. She thought of a gigantic alligator in a Florida swamp, raising its scaly head to bay at the moon. And it was so close.
Oh dear God give me time, she thought. I don't want to go like this, getting shot's one thing, but getting eaten alive in the dark-
That was another.
"Go fasterV she snarled at Roland, and thumped at his sides with her thighs, like a rider urging on a weary horse.
Somehow, Roland did. His respiration was now an agonized roar. He had not breathed so even after dancing the commala. If he kept on, his heart would burst in his chest. But-
"Faster, Tex! Let it all out, goddammit! I might have a trick up my sleeve, but in the meantime you give it every-damneverything you got!"
And there in the dark beneath Casde Discordia, Roland did...
TWELVE
She plunged her free hand once more into the bag and it closed on the flashlight's barrel. She pulled it out and tucked it under her arm (knowing if she dropped it they were gone for sure), then snapped back the tab-release on the Sterno can, relieved to hear the momentary hiss as the vacuum-seal broke.
Relieved but not surprised-if the seal had been broken, the flammable jelly inside would have evaporated long ago and the can would have been lighter.
"Roland!" she shouted. "Roland, I need matches!"
"Shirt... pocket!" he panted. "Reach for them!"
But first she dropped the flashlight into the seam where her crotch met the middle of his back, then snatched it up just before it could slide away. Now, with a good hold on it, she plunged the barrel into the can of Sterno. To grab one of the matches while holding the can and the jelly-coated flashlight would have taken a third hand, so she jettisoned the can. There were two others in the bag, but if this didn't work she'd never have a chance to reach for one of them.
The thing bellowed again, sounding as if it were right behind them. Now she could smell it, the aroma like a load of fish rotting in the sun.
She reached over Roland's shoulder and plucked a single match from his pocket. There might be time to light one; not for two. Roland and Eddie were able to pop them alight with their thumbnails, but Detta Walker had known a trick worth two of that, had used it on more than one occasion to impress her whiteboy victims in the roadhouses where she'd gone trolling.
She grimaced in the dark, peeling her lips away from her teeth, and placed the head of the match between the two front ones on top. Eddie, if you're there, help me, sugar-help me do right.
She struck the match. Something hot burned the roof of her mouth and she tasted sulfur on her tongue. The head of the match nearly blinded her dark-adapted eyes, but she could see well enough to touch it to the jelly-coated barrel of the flashlight.
The Sterno caught at once, turning the barrel into a torch. It was weak but it was something.
"Turn around!" she screamed.
Roland skidded to a stop immediately-no questions, no protest-and pivoted on his heels. She held the burning flashlight out before her and for a moment they both saw the head of something wet and covered with pink albino eyes. Below them was a mouth the size of a trapdoor, filled with squirming tentacles. The Sterno didn't burn brightly, but in this Stygian blackness it was bright enough to make the thing recoil. Before it disappeaied into the blackness again, she saw all those eyes squeezing shut and had a moment to think of how sensitive they must be if even a little guttering flame like this could-
Lining the floor of the passageway on both sides were jumbled heaps of bones. In her hand, the bulb end of the flashlight was already growing warm. Oy was barking frantically, looking back into the dark with his head down and his short legs splayed, every hair standing on end.
"Squat down, Roland, squat!"
He did and she handed him the makeshift torch, which was already beginning to gutter, the yellow flames running up and down the stainless steel barrel turning blue. The thing in the dark let out another deafening roar, and now she could see its shape again, weaving from side to side. It was creeping closer as the light faltered.
If the floor's wet here, we're most likely done, she thought, but the touch of her fingers as she groped for a thighbone suggested it was not. Perhaps that was a false message sent by her hopeful senses-she could certainly hear water dripping from the ceiling somewhere up ahead-but she didn't think so.
She reached into the bag for another can of Sterno, but at first the release-ring defied her. The thing was coming and now she could see any number of short, misshapen legs beneaui its raised lump of a head. Not a worm after all but some kind of giant centipede. Oy placed himself in front of her, still barking, every tooth on display. It was Oy the thing would take first if she couldn't-
Then her finger slipped into the ring lying almost flat against the lid of the can. There was a pop-hissh sound. Roland was waving die flashlight back and forth, trying to fan a litde life into the guttering flames (which might have worked had there been fuel for them), and she saw their fading shadows rock deliriously back and fordi on the decaying tile walls.
The circumference of die bone was too big for the can. Now lying in an awkward sprawl, half in and half out of the harness, she dipped into it, brought out a handful of jelly, and slathered it up and down the bone. If the bone was wet, this would only buy them a few more seconds of horror. If it was dry, however, then maybe... just maybe...
The thing was creeping ever closer. Amid the tentacles sprouting from its mouth she could see jutting fangs. In another moment it would be close enough to lunge at Oy, taking him with the speed of a gecko snatching a fly out of the air. Its rotted-fish aroma was strong and nauseating. And what might be behind it? What other abominations?
No time to think about that now.
She touched her thighbone torch to the fading flames licking along the barrel of the flashlight. The bloom of fire was greater than she had expected-far greater-and the thing's scream this time was filled with pain as well as surprise. There was a nasty squelching sound, like mud being squeezed in a vinyl raincoat, and it lashed backward.
"Git me more bones," she said as Roland cast the flashlight aside. "And make sure they're dem drah bones." She laughed at her own wit (since nobody else would), a down-anddirty Detta cackle.
Still gasping for breath, Roland did as she told him.
THIRTEEN
They resumed their progress along the passage, Susannah now riding backward, a position that was difficult but not impossible.
If they got out of here, her back would ache a bitch for the next day or two. And I'll relish every single throb, she told herself.
Roland still had the Bridgton Old Home Days tee-shirt Irene Tassenbaum had bought him. He handed it up to Susannah.
She wrapped it around the bottom of the bone and held it out as far as she possibly could while still keeping her balance.
Roland wasn't able to run-she would have surely tumbled out of the harness had he tried doing that-but he maintained a good fast walking pace, pausing every now and then to pick up a likely-looking arm- or legbone. Oy soon got the idea and began bringing them to the gunslinger in his mouth. The thing continued to follow them. Every now and then Susannah caught a glimpse of its slick-gleaming skin, and even when it drew back beyond the chancy light of her current torch they would hear those liquid stomping sounds, like a giant in mudfilled boots. She began to think it was the sound of the thing's tail. This filled her with a horror that was unreasoning and private and almost powerful enough to undo her mind.
That it should have a tail! her mind nearly raved. A tail that sounds like it's filled with water or jelly or half-coagulated blood!
Christ! My God! My Christ!
It wasn't just light keeping it from attacking them, she reckoned, but fear of fire. The thing must have hung back while they were in the part of the passage where the glow-globes still worked, thinking (if it could think) that it would wait and take them once they were in the dark. She had an idea that if it had known they had access to fire, it might simply have closed some or all of its many eyes and pounced on them where a few of the globes were out and the light was dimmer. Now it was at least temporarily out of luck, because the bones made surprisingly good torches (the idea that they were being helped by the recovering Beam in this regard did not cross her mind). The only question was whether or not the Sterno would hold out.
She was able to conserve now because the bones burned on their own once they were going-except for a couple of damp ones that she had to cast aside after lighting her next torches from their guttering tips-but you did have to get diem going, and she was already deep into the third and last can. She bitterly regretted the one she'd tossed away when the thing had been closing in on them, but didn't know what else she could have done. She also wished Roland would go faster, although she guessed he now couldn't have maintained much speed even if she'd been faced around the right way and holding onto him.
Maybe a short burst, but surely no more. She covild feel his muscles trembling under his shirt. He was close to blown out.
Five minutes later, while getting a handful of canned heat to slather on a bony bulb of knee atop a shinbone, her fingers touched the bottom of the Sterno can. From the darkness behind them came another of those watery stomping sounds.
The tail of their friend, her mind insisted. It was keeping pace.
Waiting for them to run out of fuel and for the world to go dark again. Then it would pounce.
Then it would eat.
FOURTEEN
They were going to need a fallback position. She became sure of that almost as soon as the tips of her fingers touched the bottom of the can. Ten minutes and three torches later, Susannah prepared to tell the gunslinger to stop when-and if-they came to another especially large ossuary. They could make a bonfire of rags and bones, and once it was going hot and bright, they'd simply run like hell. When-and if-they heard the thing on their side of the fire-barrier again, Roland could lighten his load and speed his heels by leaving her behind. She saw this idea not as self-sacrificing but merely logical-there was no reason for the monstrous centipede to get both of them if they could avoid it. And she had no plans to let it take her, as far as that went. Certainly not alive. She had his gun, and she'd use it. Five shots for Sai Centipede; if it kept coming after that, the sixth for herself.
Before she could say any of these things, however, Roland got in three words that stopped all of hers. "Light," he panted.
"Up ahead."
She craned around and at first saw nothing, probably because of the torch she'd been holding out. Then she did: a faint white glow.
"More of those globes?" she asked. "A stretch of them that are still working?"
"Maybe. I don't think so."
Five minutes later she realized she could see the floor and walls in the light of her latest torch. The floor was covered with a fine scrim of dust and pebbles such as could only have been blown in from outside. Susannah threw her arms up over her head, one hand holding a blazing bone wrapped in a shirt, and gave a scream of triumph. The thing behind her answered with a roar of fury and frustration that did her heart good even as it pebbled her skin with goosebumps.
"Goodbye, honey!" she screamed. "Goodbye, you eyecovered muthafuck!"
It roared again and thrust itself forward. For one moment she saw it plain: a huge round lump that couldn't be called a face in spite of the lolling mouth; the segmented body, scratched and oozing from contact with the rough walls; a quartet of stubby armlike appendages, two on each side. These ended in snapping pincers. She shrieked and thrust the torch back at it, and the thing retreated with another deafening roar.
"Did your mother never teach you that it's wrong to tease the animals?" Roland asked her, and his tone was so dry she couldn't tell if he was kidding her or not.
Five minutes after that they were out.