Wizard and Glass
PART ONE RIDDLES CHAPTER III THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE
1
Eddie Dean - who did not know Roland sometimes thought of him as ka mai, ka's fool - heard all of it and heard none of it; saw all of it and saw none of it. The only thing to really make an impression on him once the riddling began in earnest was the fire flashing from the stone eyes of the Hounds; as he raised his hand to shield his eyes from that chain-lightning glare, he thought of the Portal of the Beam in the Clearing of the Bear, how he had pressed his ear against it and heard the distant, dreamy rumble of machinery.
Watching the eyes of the Hounds light up, listening as Blaine drew that current into his batteries, powering up for his final plunge across Mid-World, Eddie had thought: Not all is silent in the halls of the dead and the rooms of ruin. Even now some of the stuff the Old Ones left behind still works. And that's really the horror of it, wouldn't 't you say? Yes. The exact horror of it.
Eddie had been with his friends for a short time after that, mentally as well as physically, but then he had fallen back into his thoughts again. Eddie's zonin. Henry would have said. Let 'im be.
It was the image of Jake striking flint and steel that kept recurring; he would allow his mind to dwell on it for a second or two, like a bee alighting on some sweet flower, and then he would take off again. Because that memory wasn't what he wanted; it was just the way in to what he wanted, another door like the ones on the beach of the Western Sea, or the one he had scraped in the dirt of the speaking ring before they had drawn Jake.. . only this door was in his mind. What he wanted was behind it; what he was doing was kind of... well... diddling the lock.
Zoning, in Henry-speak.
His brother had spent most of his time putting Eddie down - because Henry had been afraid of him and jealous of him, Eddie had finally come to realize - but he remembered one day when Henry had stunned him by saying something that was nice. Better than nice, actually; mind-boggling.
A bunch of them had been sitting in the alley behind Dahlie's, some of them eating Popsicles and Hoodsie Rockets, some of them smoking Kents from a pack Jimmie Polino - Jimmie Polio, they had all called him, because he had that fucked-up thing wrong with him, that clubfoot - had hawked out of his mother's dresser drawer. Henry, predictably enough, had been one of the ones smoking.
There were certain ways of referring to things in the gang Henry was a part of (and which Eddie, as his little brother, was also a part of); the argot of their miserable little ka-tet. In Henry's gang, you never beat anyone else up; you sent em home with a fuckin rupture. You never made out with a girl; you fucked that skag til she cried. You never got stoned; you went on a fuckin bombin-run. And you never brawled with another gang; you got in a fuckin pisser.
The discussion that day had been about who you'd want with you if you got in a fuckin pisser. Jimmie Polio (he got to talk first because he had supplied the cigarettes, which Henry's homeboys called the fuckin cancer-sticks) opted for Skipper Brannigan, because, he said, Skipper wasn't afraid of anyone. One time, Jimmie said, Skipper got pissed off at this teacher - at the Friday night PAL dance, this was - and beat the living shit out of him. Sent THE FUCKIN CHAPERONE home with a fuckin rupture, if you could dig it. That was his homie Skipper Brannigan.
Everyone listened to this solemnly, nodding their heads as they ate their Rockets, sucked their Popsicles, or smoked their Kents. Everyone knew that Skipper Brannigan was a fuckin pussy and Jimmie was full of shit, but no one said so. Christ, no. If they didn't pretend to believe Jimmie Polio's outrageous lies, no one would pretend to believe theirs.
Tommy Fredericks opted for John Parelli. Georgie Pratt went for Csaba Drabnik, also known around the nabe as The Mad Fuckin Hungarian. Frank Duganelli nominated Larry McCain, even though Larry was in Juvenile Detention; Larry fuckin ruled, Frank said.
By then it was around to Henry Dean. He gave the question the weighty consideration it deserved, then put his arm around his surprised brother's shoulders. Eddie, he said. My little bro. He's the man.
They all stared at him, stunned - and none more stunned than Eddie. His jaw had been almost down to his belt-buckle. And then Jimmie Polio said. Come on. Henry, stop fuckin around. This a serious question. Who 'd you want watching your hack if the shit was gonna come down?
I am being serious. Henry had replied.
Why Eddie? Georgie Pratt had asked, echoing the question which had been in Eddie's own mind. He couldn't 't fight his way out of a paper bag. A wet one. So why the fuck?
Henry thought some more - not, Eddie was convinced, because he didn't know why, but because he had to think about how to articulate it. Then he said: Because when Eddie's in that fuckin zone, he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
The image of Jake returned, one memory stepping on another. Jake scraping steel on flint, flashing sparks at the kindling of their campfire, sparks that fell short and died before they lit.
He could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
Move your flint in closer, Roland said, and now there was a third memory, one of Roland at the door they'd come to at the end of the beach, Roland burning with fever, close to death, shaking like a maraca, coughing, his blue bombardier's eyes fixed on Eddie, Roland saying, Come a little closer, Eddie - come a little closer for your father's sake!
Because he wanted to grab me, Eddie thought. Faintly, almost as if it were coming through one of those magic doors from some other world, he heard Blaine telling them that the endgame had commenced; if they had been saving their best riddles, now was the time to trot them out. They had an hour.
An hour! Only an hour!
His mind tried to fix on that and Eddie nudged it away. Something was happening inside him (at least he prayed it was), some desperate game of association, and he couldn't let his mind get fucked up with deadlines and consequences and all that crap; if he did, he'd lose whatever chance he had. It was, in a way, like seeing something in a piece of wood, something you could carve out - a bow, a slingshot, perhaps a key to open some unimaginable door. You couldn't look too long, though, at least to start with. You'd lose it if you did. It was almost as if you had to carve while your own back was turned.
He could feel Blaine's engines powering up beneath him. In his mind's eye he saw the flint flash against the steel, and in his mind's ear he heard Roland telling Jake to move the flint in closer. And don't hit it with the steel, Jake; scrape it.
Why am I here? If this isn't what I want, why does my mind keep coming hack to this place?
Because it's as close as I can get and still stay out of the hurt-zone. Only a medium-sized hurt, actually, but it made me think of Henry. Being put down by Henry.
Henry said you could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
Yes. I always loved him for that. That was great.
And now Eddie saw Roland move Jake's hands, one holding flint and the other steel, closer to the kindling. Jake was nervous. Eddie could see it; Roland had seen it, too. And in order to ease his nerves, take his mind off the responsibility of lighting the fire, Roland had -
He asked the kid a riddle.
Eddie Dean blew breath into the keyhole of his memory. And this time the tumblers turned.
2
The green dot was closing in on Topeka, and for the first time Jake felt vibration ... as if the track beneath them had decayed to a point where Blaine's compensators could no longer completely handle the problem. With the sense of vibration there at last came a feeling of speed. The walls and ceiling of the Barony Coach were still opaqued, but Jake found he didn't need to see the countryside blurring past to imagine it. Blaine was rolling full out now, leading his last sonic boom across the waste lands to the place where Mid-World ended, and Jake also found it easy to imagine the transteel piers at the end of the monorail. They would be painted in diagonal stripes of yellow and black. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did.
"TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES," Blaine said complacently. "WOULD YOU TRY ME AGAIN, GUNSLINGER?"
"I think not, Blaine." Roland sounded exhausted. "I've done with you; you've beaten me. Jake?"
Jake got to his feet and faced the route-map. In his chest his heartbeat seemed very slow but very hard, each pulse like a fist slamming on a drumhead. Oy crouched between his feet, looking anxiously up into his face.
"Hello, Blaine," Jake said, and wet his lips.
"HELLO, JAKE OF NEW YORK." The voice was kindly - the voice, perhaps, of a nice old fellow with a habit of molesting the children he from time to time leads into the bushes. "WOULD YOU TRY ME WITH RIDDLES FROM YOUR BOOK? OUR TIME TOGETHER GROWS SHORT."
"Yes," Jake said. "I would try you with these riddles. Give me your understanding of the truth concerning each, Blaine."
"IT IS FAIRLY SPOKEN, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I WILL DO AS YOU ASK."
Jake opened the book to the place he had been keeping with his finger. Ten riddles. Eleven, counting Samson's riddle, which he was saving for last. If Blaine answered them all (as Jake now believed he probably would), Jake would sit down next to Roland, take Oy onto his lap, and wait for the end. There were, after all, other worlds than these.
"Listen, Blaine: In a tunnel of darkness lies a beast of iron. It can only attack when pulled back. What is it?"
"A BULLET." No hesitation.
"Walk on the living, they don't even mumble. Walk on the dead, they mutter and grumble. What are they?"
"FALLEN LEAVES." No hesitation, and if Jake really knew in his heart that the game was lost, why did he feel such despair, such bitterness, such anger?
Because he's a pain, that's why. Blaine is a really BIG pain, and I'd like to push his face in it, just once. I think even making him stop is second to that on my wish-list.
Jake turned the page. He was very close to Riddle-De-Dum's tom-out answer section now; he could feel it under his finger, a kind of jagged lump. Very close to the end of the book. He thought of Aaron Deepneau in the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Aaron Deepneau telling him to come back anytime, play a little chess, and oh just by the way, old fatso made a pretty good cup of coffee. A wave of homesickness so strong it was like dying swept over him. He felt he would have sold his soul for a look at New York; hell, he would have sold it for one deep lung-filling breath of Forty-second Street at rush hour.
He fought it off and went to the next riddle.
"I am emeralds and diamonds, lost by the moon. I am found by the sun and picked up soon. What am I?"
"DEW."
Still relentless. Still unhesitating.
The green dot grew closer to Topeka, closing the last of the distance on the route-map. One after another, Jake posed his riddles; one after another, Blaine answered them. When Jake turned to the last page, he saw a boxed message from the author or editor or whatever you called someone who put together books like this: We hope you've enjoyed the unique combination of imagination and logic known as RIDDLING!
I haven't, Jake thought. I haven't enjoyed it one little bit, and I hope you choke. Yet when he looked at the question above the message, he felt a thin thread of hope. It seemed to him that, in this case, at least, they really had saved the best for last.
On the route-map, the green dot was now no more than a finger's width from Topeka.
"Hurry up, Jake," Susannah murmured.
"Blaine?"
"YES, JAKE OF NEW YORK."
"With no wings, I fly. With no eyes, I see. With no arms, I climb. More frightening than any beast, stronger than any foe. I am cunning, ruthless, and tall; in the end, I rule all. What am I?"
The gunslinger had looked up, blue eyes gleaming. Susannah began to turn her expectant face from Jake to the route-map. Yet Blaine's answer was as prompt as ever: "THE IMAGINATION OF MAN AND WOMAN."
Jake briefly considered arguing, then thought, Why waste our time? As always, the answer, when it was right, seemed almost self-evident. "Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak true."
"AND THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE IS ALMOST MINE, I WOT. NINETEEN MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS TO TERMINATION. WOULD YOU SAY MORE, JAKE OF NEW YORK? VISUAL SENSORS INDICATE YOU HAVE COME TO THE END OF YOUR BOOK, WHICH WAS NOT, I MUST SAY, AS GOOD AS I HAD HOPED."
"Everybody's a goddam critic," Susannah said sotto voce. She wiped a tear from the comer of one eye; without looking directly at her, the gunslinger took her free hand. She clasped it tightly.
"Yes, Blaine, I have one more," Jake said.
"EXCELLENT."
"Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came sweetness."
"THIS RIDDLE COMES FROM THE HOLY BOOK KNOWN AS 'OLD TESTAMENT BIBLE OF KING JAMES.'" Blaine sounded amused, and Jake felt the last of his hope slip away. He thought he might cry - not so much out of fear as frustration. "IT WAS MADE BY SAMSON THE STRONG. THE EATER IS A LION; THE SWEETNESS IS HONEY, MADE BY BEES WHICH HIVED IN THE LION'S SKULL. NEXT? YOU STILL HAVE OVER EIGHTEEN MINUTES, JAKE."
Jake shook his head. He let go of Riddle-De-Dum! and smiled when Oy caught it neatly in his jaws and then stretched his long neck up to Jake, holding it out again. "I've told them all. I'm done."
"SHUCKS, L'IL TRAILHAND, THAT'S A PURE-D SHAME," Blaine said. Jake found this drawly John Wayne imitation all but unbearable in their current circumstances. "LOOKS LIKE I WIN THAT THAR GOOSE, UNLESS SOMEBODY ELSE CARES TO SPEAK UP. WHAT ABOUT YOU, OY OF MID-WORLD? GOT ANY RIDDLES, MY LITTLE BUMBLER BUDDY?"
"Oy!" the billy-bumbler responded, his voice muffled by the book. Still smiling, Jake took it and sat down next to Roland, who put an arm around him.
"SUSANNAHof NEWyork?"
She shook her head, not looking up. She had turned Roland's hand over in her own, and was gently tracing the healed stumps where his first two fingers had been.
"ROLAND SON OF STEVEN? HAVE YOU REMEMBERED ANY OTHERS FROM THE FAIR-DAY RIDDLINGS OF GILEAD?"
Roland also shook his head . . . and then Jake saw that Eddie Dean was raising his. There was a peculiar smile on Eddie's face, a peculiar shine in Eddie's eyes, and Jake found that hope hadn't deserted him, after all. It suddenly flowered anew in his mind, red and hot and vivid. Like . . . well, like a rose. A rose in the full fever of its summer.
"Blaine?" Eddie asked in a low tone. To Jake his voice sounded queerly choked.
"YES, EDDIE OF NEW YORK." Unmistakable disdain.
"I have a couple of riddles," Eddie said. "Just to pass the time between here and Topeka, you understand." No, Jake realized, Eddie didn't sound as if he were choking; he sounded as if he were trying to hold back laughter.
"SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK."
3
Sitting and listening to Jake run through the last of his riddles, Eddie had mused on Roland's tale of the Fair-Day goose. From there his mind had returned to Henry, travelling from Point A to Point B through the magic of associative thinking. Or, if you wanted to get Zen about it, via Trans-Bird Airlines: goose to turkey. He and Henry had once had a discussion about getting off heroin. Henry had claimed that going cold turkey wasn't the only way; there was also, he said, such a thing as going cool turkey. Eddie asked Henry what you called a hype who had just administered a hot shot to himself, and, without missing a beat, Henry had said. You call that baked turkey. How they had laughed . . . but now, all this long, strange time later, it looked very much as if the joke was going to be on the younger Dean brother, not to mention the younger Dean brother's new friends. Looked like they were all going to be baked turkey before much longer.
Unless you can yank it out of the zone.
Yes.
Then do it, Eddie. It was Henry's voice again, that old resident of his head, but now Henry sounded sober and clear-minded. Henry sounded like his friend instead of his enemy, as if all the old conflicts were finally settled, all the old hatchets buried. Do it - make the devil set himself on fire. It 'II hurt a little, maybe, but you've hurt worse. Hell, I hurt you worse myself, and you survived. Survived just fine. And you know where to look.
Of course. In their palaver around the campfire Jake had finally managed to light. Roland had asked the kid a riddle to loosen him up, Jake had struck a spark into the kindling, and then they had all sat around the fire, talking. Talking and riddling.
Eddie knew something else, too. Blaine had answered hundreds of riddles as they ran southeast along the Path of the Beam, and the others believed that he had answered every single one of them without hesitation. Eddie had thought much the same . . . but now, as he cast his mind back over the contest, he realized an interesting thing: Blaine had hesitated.
Once.
He was pissed, too. Like Roland was.
The gunslinger, although often exasperated by Eddie, had shown real anger toward him just a single time after the business of carving the key, when Eddie had almost choked. Roland had tried to cover the depth of that anger - make it seem like nothing but more exasperation - but Eddie had sensed what was underneath. He had lived with Henry Dean for a long time, and was still exquisitely attuned to all the negative emotions. It had hurt him, too - not Roland's anger itself, exactly, but the contempt with which it had been laced. Contempt had always been one of Henry's favorite weapons.
Why did the dead baby cross the road? Eddie had asked. Because it was stapled to the chicken, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck!
Later, when Eddie had tried to defend his riddle, arguing that it was tasteless but not pointless, Roland's response had been strangely like Blaine's: / don't care about taste. It's senseless and unsolvable, and that's what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.
But as Jake finished riddling Blaine, Eddie realized a wonderful, liberating thing: that word good was up for grabs. Always had been, always would be. Even if the man using it was maybe a thousand years old and could shoot like Buffalo Bill, that word was still up for grabs. Roland himself had admitted he had never been very good at the riddling game. His tutor claimed that Roland thought too deeply; his father thought it was lack of imagination. Whatever the reason, Roland of Gilead had never won a Fair-Day riddling. He had survived all his contemporaries, and that was certainly a prize of sorts, but he had never carried home a prize goose. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, but I've never been much good at thinking around corners.
Eddie remembered trying to tell Roland that jokes were riddles designed to help you build up that often overlooked talent, but Roland had ignored him. The way, Eddie supposed, a color-blind person would ignore someone's description of a rainbow.
Eddie thought Blaine also might have trouble thinking around comers.
He realized he could hear Blaine asking the others if they had any more riddles - even asking Oy. He could hear the mockery in Blaine's voice, could hear it very well. Sure he could. Because he was coming back. Back from that fabled zone. Back to see if he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire. No gun would help this time, but maybe that was all right. Maybe that was all right because -
Because I shoot with my mind. My mind. God help me to shoot this overblown calculator with my mind. Help me shoot it from around the corner.
"Blaine?" he said, and then, when the computer had acknowledged him: "I have a couple of riddles." As he spoke, he discovered a wonderful thing: he was struggling to hold back laughter.
4
"SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK."
No time to tell the others to be on their guard, that anything might happen, and from the look of them, no need, either. Eddie forgot about them and turned his mil attention to Blaine.
"What has four wheels and flies?"
"THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID." Disapproval - and dislike? Yeah, probably - all but oozing out of that voice. "ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME."
Yes, Eddie thought. And what we all missed - because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland's past or Jake's book - is that the contest almost ended right there.
"You didn't like that one, did you, Blaine?"
"I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID," Blaine agreed. "PERHAPS THAT'S WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO?"
A smile lit Eddie's face; he shook his finger at the route-map. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, 'You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I'll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.' "
"Hurry up!" Jake whispered at him. "If you can do something, do it!"
"It doesn't like silly questions," Eddie said. "It doesn't like silly games. And we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it."
Eddie searched for the other riddle that had been in Jake's Final Essay, found it, posed it.
"Blaine: when is a door not a door?"
Once again, for the first time since Susannah had asked Blaine what had four legs and flies, there came a peculiar clicking sound, like a man popping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. The pause was briefer than the one which had followed Susannah's opening riddle, but it was still there - Eddie heard it. "WHEN IT'S A JAR, OF COURSE" Blaine said. He sounded dour, unhappy. "THIRTEEN MINUTES AND FIVE SECONDS REMAIN BEFORE TERMINATION, EDDIE OF NEW YORK-WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?"
Eddie sat bolt upright, staring at the route-map, and although he could feel warm trickles of sweat running down his back, that smile on his face widened.
"Quit your whining, pal. If you want the privilege of smearing us all over the landscape, you'll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren't quite up to your standards of logic."
"YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER."
"Or what? You'll kill me? Don't make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the game; now play it."
Thin pink light flashed briefly out of the route-map. "You're making him angry," Little Blaine mourned. "Oh, you're making him so angry."
"Get lost, squirt," Eddie said, not unkindly, and when the pink glow receded, once again revealing a flashing green dot that was almost on top of Topeka, Eddie said: "Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn't fall off, too?"
"THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER." On the last word Blaine's voice actually dropped into a lower register, making him sound like a fourteen-year-old coping with a change of voice.
Roland's eyes were not just gleaming now but blazing. "What do you say, Blaine? I would understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?"
"NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT - "
"Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle."
"IT'S NOT A RIDDLE!" Blaine almost bleated. "IT'S A JOKE, SOMETHING FOR STUPID CHILDREN TO CACKLE OVER IN THE PLAY YARD!"
"Answer now or I declare the contest over and our ka-tet the winner," Roland said. He spoke in the dryly confident tone of authority Eddie had first heard in the town of River Crossing. "You must answer, for it is stupidity you complain of, not transgression of the rules, which we agreed upon mutually."
Another of those clicking sounds, but this time it was much louder - so loud, in fact, that Eddie winced. Oy flattened his ears against his skull. It was followed by the longest pause yet; three seconds, at least. Then:
"THE LITTLE MORON DID NOT FALL OFF BECAUSE HE WAS A LITTLE MORE ON." Blaine sounded sulky. "MORE PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. TO EVEN ANSWER SUCH AN UNWORTHY RIDDLE MAKES ME FEEL SOILED."
Eddie held up his right hand. He rubbed the thumb and forefinger together.
"WHAT DOES THAT SIGNIFY, FOOLISH CREATURE?"
"It's the world's smallest violin, playing 'My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You,' " Eddie said. Jake fell into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. "But never mind the cheap New York humor; back to the contest. Why do police lieutenants wear belts?"
The lights in the Barony Coach began to flicker. An odd thing was happening to the walls, as well; they began to fade in and out of true, lunging toward transparency, perhaps, and then opaquing again. Seeing this phenomenon even out of the comer of his eye made Eddie feel a bit whoopsy.
"Blaine? Answer."
"Answer," Roland agreed. "Answer, or I declare the contest at an end and hold you to your promise."
Something touched Eddie's elbow. He looked down and saw Susannah's small and shapely hand. He took it, squeezed it, smiled at her. He hoped the smile was more confident than the man making it felt. They were going to win the contest - he was almost sure of that - but he had no idea what Blaine would do if and when they did.
"TO ... TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS?" Blame's voice firmed, and repeated the question as a statement. "TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS. A RIDDLE BASED UPON THE EXAGGERATED SIMPLICITY OF - "
"Right. Good one, Blaine, but never mind trying to kill time - it won't work. Next - "
"I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY - "
"Then stop the mono," Eddie said. "If you're that upset, stop right here, and I will."
"NO."
"Okay, then, on we go. What's Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in the rain?"
There was another of those clicks, this time so loud it felt like having a blunt spike driven against his eardrum. A pause of five seconds. Now the flashing green dot on the route-map was so close to Topeka that it lit the word like neon each time it flashed. Then: "PADDY O'FURNITURE."
The correct answer to a joke-riddle Eddie had first heard in the alley behind Dahlie's, or at some similar gathering-point, but Blaine had apparently paid a price for forcing his mind into a channel that could conceive it: the Barony Coach lights were flashing more wildly than ever, and Eddie could hear a low humming from inside the walls - the kind of sound your stereo amp made just before its shit blew up.
Pink light stuttered from the route-map. "Stop!" Little Blaine cried, his voice so wavery it sounded like the voice of a character from an old Warner Bros. cartoon. "Stop it, you're killing him!"
What do you think he's trying to do to us, squirt? Eddie thought.
He considered shooting Blaine one Jake had told while they'd been sitting around the campfire that night - What's green, weighs a hundred tons, and lives at the bottom of the ocean? Moby Snot! - and then didn't. He wanted to stick further inside the bounds of logic than that one allowed . . . and he could do it. He didn't think he would have to get much more surreal than the level of, say, a third-grader with a fair-to-good collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards in order to fuck Blaine up royally ... and permanently. Because no matter how many emotions his fancy dipolar circuits had allowed him to mimic, he was still an it - a computer. Even following Eddie this far into riddledom's Twilight Zone had caused Blaine's sanity to totter.
"Why do people go to bed, Blaine?"
"BECAUSE ... BECAUSE ... GODS DAMN YOU, BECAUSE ..."
A low squalling started up from beneath them, and suddenly the Barony Coach swayed violently from right to left. Susannah screamed. Jake was thrown into her lap. The gunslinger grabbed them both.
"BECAUSE THE BED WON'T COME TO THEM, GODS DAMN YOU! NINE MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS!"
"Give up, Blaine," Eddie said. "Stop before I have to blow your mind completely. If you don't quit, it's going to happen. We both know it."
"NO!"
"I got a million of these puppies. Been hearing them my whole life.
They stick to my mind the way flies stick to flypaper. Hey, with some people it's recipes. So what do you say? Want to give?"
"NO! NINE MINUTES AND THIRTY SECONDS!"
"Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby cross the road?"
The mono took another of those gigantic lurches; Eddie didn't understand how it could still stay on its track after that, but somehow it did. The screaming from beneath them grew louder; the walls, floor, and ceiling of the car began to cycle madly between opacity and transparency. At one moment they were enclosed, at the next they were rushing over a gray daylight landscape that stretched flat and featureless to a horizon which ran across the world in a straight line.
The voice which came from the speakers was now that of a panicky child: "I KNOW IT, JUST A MOMENT, I KNOW IT, RETRIEVAL IN PROGRESS, ALL LOGIC CIRCUITS IN USE - "
"Answer," Roland said.
"I NEED MORE TIME! YOU MUST GIVE IT TO ME!" Now there was a kind of cracked triumph in that splintered voice. "NO TEMPORAL LIMITS FOR ANSWERING WERE SET, ROLAND OF GILEAD, HATEFUL GUNSLINGER OUT OF A PAST THAT SHOULD HAVE STAYED DEAD!"
"No," Roland agreed, "no time limits were set, you are quite right. But you may not kill us with a riddle still unanswered, Blaine, and Topeka draws nigh. Answer!"
The Barony Coach cycled into invisibility again, and Eddie saw what appeared to be a tall and rusty grain elevator go flashing past; it was in his view barely long enough for him to identify it. Now he fully appreciated the maniacal speed at which they were travelling; perhaps three hundred miles faster than a commercial jet at cruising speed.
"Let him alone!" moaned the voice of Little Blaine. "You're killing him, I say! Killing him!"
"Isn't that 'bout what he wanted?" Susannah asked in the voice of Detta Walker. "To die? That's what he said. We don't mind, either. You not so bad, Little Blaine, but even a world as fucked up as this one has to be better with your big brother gone. It's just him takin us with him we been objectin to all this time."
"Last chance," Roland said. "Answer or give up the goose, Blaine."
"I ... I ... YOU . . . SIXTEEN LOG THIRTY-THREE . . . ALL COSINE SUBSCRIPTS ... ANTI ... ANTI ... IN ALL THESE YEARS . . . BEAM . . . FLOOD . . . PYTHAGOREAN . . . CARTESIAN LOGIC . . . CAN I ... DARE I ... A PEACH . . . EAT A PEACH ... ALLMAN BROTHERS . . . PATRICIA . . . CROCODILE AND WHIPLASH SMILE ... CLOCK OF DIALS . . . TICK-TOCK, ELEVEN O'CLOCK, THE MAN'S IN THE MOON AND HE'S READY TO ROCK . . . INCESSAMENT . . . INCESSAMENT, MON CHER ... OH MY HEAD . . . BLAINE . . . BLAINE DARES . . . BLAINE WILL ANSWER ... I ..."
Blaine, now screaming in the voice of an infant, lapsed into some other language and began to sing. Eddie thought it was French. He knew none of the words, but when the drums kicked in, he knew the song perfectly well: "Velcro Fly" by Z.Z. Top.
The glass over the route-map blew out. A moment later, the route-map itself exploded from its socket, revealing twinkling lights and a maze of circuit-boards behind it. The lights pulsed in time to the drums. Suddenly blue fire flashed out, sizzling the surface around the hole in the wall where the map had been, scorching it black. From deeper within that wall, toward Blaine's blunt, bullet-shaped snout, came a thick grinding noise.
"It crossed the road because it was stapled to the chicken, you dopey fuck!" Eddie yelled. He got to his feet and started to walk toward the smoking hole where the route-map had been. Susannah grabbed at the back of his shirt, but Eddie barely felt it. Barely knew where he was, in fact. The battle-fire had dropped over him, burning him everywhere with its righteous heat, sizzling his sight, frying his synapses and roasting his heart in its holy glow. He had Blaine in his sights, and although the thing behind the voice was already mortally wounded, he was unable to stop squeezing the trigger: I shoot with my mind.
"What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead woodchucks?" Eddie raved. "You can't unload a truck-load of bowling balls with a pitchfork!"
A terrible shriek of mingled anger and agony issued from the hole where the route-map had been. It was followed by a gust of blue fire, as if somewhere forward of Barony Coach an electric dragon had exhaled violently. Jake called a warning, but Eddie didn't need it; his reflexes had been replaced with razor-blades. He ducked, and the burst of electricity went over his right shoulder, making the hair on that side of his neck stand up. He drew the gun he wore - a heavy .45 with a worn sandalwood grip, one of two revolvers which Roland had brought out of Mid-World's ruin. He kept walking as he bore down on the front of the coach .. . and of course he kept talking. As Roland had said, Eddie would die talking. As his old friend Cuthbert had done. Eddie could think of many worse ways to go, and only one better.
"Say, Blaine, you ugly, sadistic fuck! Since we're talking riddles, what is the greatest riddle of the Orient? Many men smoke but Fu Manchu! Get it? No? So solly, Cholly! How about this one? Why'd the woman name her son Seven and a Half? Because she drew his name out of a hat!"
He had reached the pulsing square. Now he lifted Roland's gun and the Barony Coach suddenly filled with its thunder. He put all six rounds into the hole, fanning the hammer with the flat of his hand in the way Roland had shown them, knowing only that this was right, this was proper . . . this was ka, goddammit, fucking ka, it was the way you ended things if you were a gunslinger. He was one of Roland's tribe, all right, his soul was probably damned to the deepest pit of hell, and he wouldn't have changed it for all the heroin in Asia.
"I HATE YOU!" Blaine cried in his childish voice. The splinters were gone from it now; it was growing soft, mushy. "I HATE YOU FOREVER!"
"It's not dying that bothers you, is it?" Eddie asked. The lights in the hole where the route-map had been were fading. More blue fire flashed, but he hardly had to pull his head back to avoid it; the flame was small and weak. Soon Blaine would be as dead as all the Pubes and Grays in Lud. "It's losing that bothers you."
"HATE . . . FORRRRrmr . . ."
The word degenerated into a hum. The hum became a kind of stuttery thudding sound. Then it was gone.
Eddie looked around. Roland was there, holding Susannah with one arm curved around her butt, as one might hold a child. Her thighs clasped his waist. Jake stood on the gunslinger's other side, with Oy at his heel.
Drifting out of the hole where the route-map had been was a peculiar charred smell, somehow not unpleasant. To Eddie it smelled like burning leaves in October. Otherwise, the hole was as dead and dark as a corpse's eye. All the lights in there had gone out.
Your goose is cooked, Blaine, Eddie thought, and your turkey's baked. Happy fuckin Thanksgiving.
5
The shrieking from beneath the mono stopped. There was one final, grinding thud from up front, and then those sounds ceased, too. Roland felt his legs and hips sway gently forward and put out his free hand to steady himself. His body knew what had happened before his head did:
Blaine's engines had quit. They were now simply gliding forward along the track. But -
"Back," he said. "All the way. We're coasting. If we're close enough to Blaine's termination point, we may still crash."
He led them past the puddled remains of Blaine's welcoming ice sculpture and to the back of the coach. "And stay away from that thing," he said, pointing at the instrument which looked like a cross between a piano and a harpsichord. It stood on a small platform. "It may shift. Gods, I wish we could see where we are! Lie down. Wrap your arms over your heads."
They did as he told them. Roland did the same. He lay there with his chin pressing into the nap of the royal blue carpet, eyes shut, thinking about what had just happened.
"I cry your pardon, Eddie," he said. "How the wheel of ka turns! Once I had to ask the same of my friend Cuthbert . . . and for the same reason. There's a kind of blindness in me. An arrogant blindness."
"I hardly think there's any need of pardon-crying," Eddie said. He sounded uncomfortable.
"There is. I held your jokes in contempt. Now they have saved our lives. I cry your pardon. I have forgotten the face of my father."
"You don't need any pardon and you didn't forget anybody's face," Eddie said. "You can't help your nature, Roland."
The gunslinger considered this carefully, and discovered something which was wonderful and awful at the same time: that idea had never occurred to him. Not once in his whole life. That he was a captive of ka - this he had known since earliest childhood. But his nature ... his very nature. ..
"Thank you, Eddie. I think - "
Before Roland could say what he thought, Blaine the Mono crashed to a final bitter halt. All four of them were thrown violently up Barony Coach's central aisle, Oy in Jake's arms and barking. The cabin's front wall buckled and Roland struck it shoulder-first. Even with the padding (the wall was carpeted and, from the feel, undercoated with some resilient stuff), the blow was hard enough to numb him. The chandelier swung forward and tore loose from the ceiling, pelting them with glass pendants. Jake rolled aside, vacating its landing-zone just in time. The harpsichord-piano flew off its podium, struck one of the sofas, and overturned, coming to rest with a discordant brrrannnggg sound. The mono tilted to the right and the gunslinger braced himself, meaning to cover both Jake and Susannah with his own body if it overturned completely. Then it settled back, the floor still a little canted, but at rest.
The trip was over.
The gunslinger raised himself up. His shoulder was still numb, but the arm below it supported him, and that was a good sign. On his left, Jake was sitting up and picking glass beads out of his lap with a dazed expression. On his right, Susannah was dabbing a cut under Eddie's left eye. "All right," Roland said. "Who's hur - "
There was an explosion from above them, a hollow Pow! that reminded Roland of the big-bangers Cuthbert and Alain had sometimes lit and tossed down drains, or into the privies behind the scullery for a prank. And once Cuthbert had shot some big-bangers with his sling. That had been no prank, no childish folly. That had been -
Susannah uttered a short cry - more of surprise than fear, the gunslinger thought - and then hazy daylight was shining down on his face. It felt good. The taste of the air coming in through the blown emergency exit was even better - sweet with the smell of rain and damp earth.
There was a bony rattle, and a ladder - it appeared to be equipped with rungs made of twisted steel wire - dropped out of a slot up there.
"First they throw the chandelier at you, then they show you the door," Eddie said. He struggled to his feet, then got Susannah up. "Okay, I know when I'm not wanted. Let's make like bees and buzz off."
"Sounds good to me." She reached toward the cut on Eddie's face again. Eddie took her fingers, kissed them, and told her to stop poking the moichandise.
"Jake?" the gunslinger asked. "Okay?"
"Yes," Jake said. "What about you, Oy?"
"Oy!"
"Guess he is," Jake said. He raised his wounded hand and looked at it ruefully.
"Hurting again, is it?" the gunslinger asked.
"Yeah. Whatever Blaine did to it is wearing off. I don't care, though - I 'm just glad to still be alive."
"Yes. Life is good. So is astin. There's some of it left."
"Aspirin, you mean."
Roland nodded. A pill of magical properties, but one of the words from Jake's world he would never be able to say correctly.
"Nine out of ten doctors recommend Anacin, honey," Susannah said, and when Jake only looked at her quizzically: "Guess they don't use that one anymore in your when, huh? Doesn't matter. We're here, sugarpie, right here and just fine, and that's what matters." She pulled Jake into her arms and gave him a kiss between the eyes, on the nose, and then flush on the mouth. Jake laughed and blushed bright red. "That's what matters, and right now that's the only thing in the world that does."
6
"First aid can wait," Eddie said. He put his arm around Jake's shoulders and led the boy to the ladder. "Can you use that hand to climb with?"
"Yes. But I can't bring Oy. Roland, will you?"
"Yes." Roland picked Oy up and tucked him into his shirt as he had while descending a shaft under the city in pursuit of Jake and Gasher. Oy peeked out at Jake with his bright, gold-ringed eyes. "Up you go."
Jake climbed. Roland followed close enough so that Oy could sniff the kid's heels by stretching out his long neck.
"Suze?" Eddie asked. "Need a boost?"
"And get your nasty hands all over my well-turned fanny? Not likely, white boy!" Then she dropped him a wink and began to climb, pulling herself up easily with her muscular arms and balancing with the stumps of her legs. She went fast, but not too fast for Eddie; he reached up and gave her a soft pinch where the pinching was good. "Oh, my purity!" Susannah cried, laughing and rolling her eyes. Then she was gone. Only Eddie was left, standing by the foot of the ladder and looking around at the luxury coach which he had believed might well be their ka-tet's coffin.
You did it, kiddo. Henry said. Made him set himself on fire. I knew you could, fuckin-A. Remember when I said that to those scag-bags behind Dahlie's? Jimmie Polio and those guys? And how they laughed? But you did it. Sent him home with a fuckin rupture.
Well, it worked, anyway, Eddie thought, and touched the butt of Roland's gun without even being aware of it. Well enough for us to walk away one more time.
He climbed two rungs, then looked back down. The Barony Coach already felt dead. Long dead, in fact, just another artifact of a world that had moved on.
"Adios, Blaine," Eddie said. "So long, partner."
And he followed his friends out through the emergency exit in the roof.
Eddie Dean - who did not know Roland sometimes thought of him as ka mai, ka's fool - heard all of it and heard none of it; saw all of it and saw none of it. The only thing to really make an impression on him once the riddling began in earnest was the fire flashing from the stone eyes of the Hounds; as he raised his hand to shield his eyes from that chain-lightning glare, he thought of the Portal of the Beam in the Clearing of the Bear, how he had pressed his ear against it and heard the distant, dreamy rumble of machinery.
Watching the eyes of the Hounds light up, listening as Blaine drew that current into his batteries, powering up for his final plunge across Mid-World, Eddie had thought: Not all is silent in the halls of the dead and the rooms of ruin. Even now some of the stuff the Old Ones left behind still works. And that's really the horror of it, wouldn't 't you say? Yes. The exact horror of it.
Eddie had been with his friends for a short time after that, mentally as well as physically, but then he had fallen back into his thoughts again. Eddie's zonin. Henry would have said. Let 'im be.
It was the image of Jake striking flint and steel that kept recurring; he would allow his mind to dwell on it for a second or two, like a bee alighting on some sweet flower, and then he would take off again. Because that memory wasn't what he wanted; it was just the way in to what he wanted, another door like the ones on the beach of the Western Sea, or the one he had scraped in the dirt of the speaking ring before they had drawn Jake.. . only this door was in his mind. What he wanted was behind it; what he was doing was kind of... well... diddling the lock.
Zoning, in Henry-speak.
His brother had spent most of his time putting Eddie down - because Henry had been afraid of him and jealous of him, Eddie had finally come to realize - but he remembered one day when Henry had stunned him by saying something that was nice. Better than nice, actually; mind-boggling.
A bunch of them had been sitting in the alley behind Dahlie's, some of them eating Popsicles and Hoodsie Rockets, some of them smoking Kents from a pack Jimmie Polino - Jimmie Polio, they had all called him, because he had that fucked-up thing wrong with him, that clubfoot - had hawked out of his mother's dresser drawer. Henry, predictably enough, had been one of the ones smoking.
There were certain ways of referring to things in the gang Henry was a part of (and which Eddie, as his little brother, was also a part of); the argot of their miserable little ka-tet. In Henry's gang, you never beat anyone else up; you sent em home with a fuckin rupture. You never made out with a girl; you fucked that skag til she cried. You never got stoned; you went on a fuckin bombin-run. And you never brawled with another gang; you got in a fuckin pisser.
The discussion that day had been about who you'd want with you if you got in a fuckin pisser. Jimmie Polio (he got to talk first because he had supplied the cigarettes, which Henry's homeboys called the fuckin cancer-sticks) opted for Skipper Brannigan, because, he said, Skipper wasn't afraid of anyone. One time, Jimmie said, Skipper got pissed off at this teacher - at the Friday night PAL dance, this was - and beat the living shit out of him. Sent THE FUCKIN CHAPERONE home with a fuckin rupture, if you could dig it. That was his homie Skipper Brannigan.
Everyone listened to this solemnly, nodding their heads as they ate their Rockets, sucked their Popsicles, or smoked their Kents. Everyone knew that Skipper Brannigan was a fuckin pussy and Jimmie was full of shit, but no one said so. Christ, no. If they didn't pretend to believe Jimmie Polio's outrageous lies, no one would pretend to believe theirs.
Tommy Fredericks opted for John Parelli. Georgie Pratt went for Csaba Drabnik, also known around the nabe as The Mad Fuckin Hungarian. Frank Duganelli nominated Larry McCain, even though Larry was in Juvenile Detention; Larry fuckin ruled, Frank said.
By then it was around to Henry Dean. He gave the question the weighty consideration it deserved, then put his arm around his surprised brother's shoulders. Eddie, he said. My little bro. He's the man.
They all stared at him, stunned - and none more stunned than Eddie. His jaw had been almost down to his belt-buckle. And then Jimmie Polio said. Come on. Henry, stop fuckin around. This a serious question. Who 'd you want watching your hack if the shit was gonna come down?
I am being serious. Henry had replied.
Why Eddie? Georgie Pratt had asked, echoing the question which had been in Eddie's own mind. He couldn't 't fight his way out of a paper bag. A wet one. So why the fuck?
Henry thought some more - not, Eddie was convinced, because he didn't know why, but because he had to think about how to articulate it. Then he said: Because when Eddie's in that fuckin zone, he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
The image of Jake returned, one memory stepping on another. Jake scraping steel on flint, flashing sparks at the kindling of their campfire, sparks that fell short and died before they lit.
He could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
Move your flint in closer, Roland said, and now there was a third memory, one of Roland at the door they'd come to at the end of the beach, Roland burning with fever, close to death, shaking like a maraca, coughing, his blue bombardier's eyes fixed on Eddie, Roland saying, Come a little closer, Eddie - come a little closer for your father's sake!
Because he wanted to grab me, Eddie thought. Faintly, almost as if it were coming through one of those magic doors from some other world, he heard Blaine telling them that the endgame had commenced; if they had been saving their best riddles, now was the time to trot them out. They had an hour.
An hour! Only an hour!
His mind tried to fix on that and Eddie nudged it away. Something was happening inside him (at least he prayed it was), some desperate game of association, and he couldn't let his mind get fucked up with deadlines and consequences and all that crap; if he did, he'd lose whatever chance he had. It was, in a way, like seeing something in a piece of wood, something you could carve out - a bow, a slingshot, perhaps a key to open some unimaginable door. You couldn't look too long, though, at least to start with. You'd lose it if you did. It was almost as if you had to carve while your own back was turned.
He could feel Blaine's engines powering up beneath him. In his mind's eye he saw the flint flash against the steel, and in his mind's ear he heard Roland telling Jake to move the flint in closer. And don't hit it with the steel, Jake; scrape it.
Why am I here? If this isn't what I want, why does my mind keep coming hack to this place?
Because it's as close as I can get and still stay out of the hurt-zone. Only a medium-sized hurt, actually, but it made me think of Henry. Being put down by Henry.
Henry said you could talk the devil into setting himself on fire.
Yes. I always loved him for that. That was great.
And now Eddie saw Roland move Jake's hands, one holding flint and the other steel, closer to the kindling. Jake was nervous. Eddie could see it; Roland had seen it, too. And in order to ease his nerves, take his mind off the responsibility of lighting the fire, Roland had -
He asked the kid a riddle.
Eddie Dean blew breath into the keyhole of his memory. And this time the tumblers turned.
2
The green dot was closing in on Topeka, and for the first time Jake felt vibration ... as if the track beneath them had decayed to a point where Blaine's compensators could no longer completely handle the problem. With the sense of vibration there at last came a feeling of speed. The walls and ceiling of the Barony Coach were still opaqued, but Jake found he didn't need to see the countryside blurring past to imagine it. Blaine was rolling full out now, leading his last sonic boom across the waste lands to the place where Mid-World ended, and Jake also found it easy to imagine the transteel piers at the end of the monorail. They would be painted in diagonal stripes of yellow and black. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did.
"TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES," Blaine said complacently. "WOULD YOU TRY ME AGAIN, GUNSLINGER?"
"I think not, Blaine." Roland sounded exhausted. "I've done with you; you've beaten me. Jake?"
Jake got to his feet and faced the route-map. In his chest his heartbeat seemed very slow but very hard, each pulse like a fist slamming on a drumhead. Oy crouched between his feet, looking anxiously up into his face.
"Hello, Blaine," Jake said, and wet his lips.
"HELLO, JAKE OF NEW YORK." The voice was kindly - the voice, perhaps, of a nice old fellow with a habit of molesting the children he from time to time leads into the bushes. "WOULD YOU TRY ME WITH RIDDLES FROM YOUR BOOK? OUR TIME TOGETHER GROWS SHORT."
"Yes," Jake said. "I would try you with these riddles. Give me your understanding of the truth concerning each, Blaine."
"IT IS FAIRLY SPOKEN, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I WILL DO AS YOU ASK."
Jake opened the book to the place he had been keeping with his finger. Ten riddles. Eleven, counting Samson's riddle, which he was saving for last. If Blaine answered them all (as Jake now believed he probably would), Jake would sit down next to Roland, take Oy onto his lap, and wait for the end. There were, after all, other worlds than these.
"Listen, Blaine: In a tunnel of darkness lies a beast of iron. It can only attack when pulled back. What is it?"
"A BULLET." No hesitation.
"Walk on the living, they don't even mumble. Walk on the dead, they mutter and grumble. What are they?"
"FALLEN LEAVES." No hesitation, and if Jake really knew in his heart that the game was lost, why did he feel such despair, such bitterness, such anger?
Because he's a pain, that's why. Blaine is a really BIG pain, and I'd like to push his face in it, just once. I think even making him stop is second to that on my wish-list.
Jake turned the page. He was very close to Riddle-De-Dum's tom-out answer section now; he could feel it under his finger, a kind of jagged lump. Very close to the end of the book. He thought of Aaron Deepneau in the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Aaron Deepneau telling him to come back anytime, play a little chess, and oh just by the way, old fatso made a pretty good cup of coffee. A wave of homesickness so strong it was like dying swept over him. He felt he would have sold his soul for a look at New York; hell, he would have sold it for one deep lung-filling breath of Forty-second Street at rush hour.
He fought it off and went to the next riddle.
"I am emeralds and diamonds, lost by the moon. I am found by the sun and picked up soon. What am I?"
"DEW."
Still relentless. Still unhesitating.
The green dot grew closer to Topeka, closing the last of the distance on the route-map. One after another, Jake posed his riddles; one after another, Blaine answered them. When Jake turned to the last page, he saw a boxed message from the author or editor or whatever you called someone who put together books like this: We hope you've enjoyed the unique combination of imagination and logic known as RIDDLING!
I haven't, Jake thought. I haven't enjoyed it one little bit, and I hope you choke. Yet when he looked at the question above the message, he felt a thin thread of hope. It seemed to him that, in this case, at least, they really had saved the best for last.
On the route-map, the green dot was now no more than a finger's width from Topeka.
"Hurry up, Jake," Susannah murmured.
"Blaine?"
"YES, JAKE OF NEW YORK."
"With no wings, I fly. With no eyes, I see. With no arms, I climb. More frightening than any beast, stronger than any foe. I am cunning, ruthless, and tall; in the end, I rule all. What am I?"
The gunslinger had looked up, blue eyes gleaming. Susannah began to turn her expectant face from Jake to the route-map. Yet Blaine's answer was as prompt as ever: "THE IMAGINATION OF MAN AND WOMAN."
Jake briefly considered arguing, then thought, Why waste our time? As always, the answer, when it was right, seemed almost self-evident. "Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak true."
"AND THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE IS ALMOST MINE, I WOT. NINETEEN MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS TO TERMINATION. WOULD YOU SAY MORE, JAKE OF NEW YORK? VISUAL SENSORS INDICATE YOU HAVE COME TO THE END OF YOUR BOOK, WHICH WAS NOT, I MUST SAY, AS GOOD AS I HAD HOPED."
"Everybody's a goddam critic," Susannah said sotto voce. She wiped a tear from the comer of one eye; without looking directly at her, the gunslinger took her free hand. She clasped it tightly.
"Yes, Blaine, I have one more," Jake said.
"EXCELLENT."
"Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came sweetness."
"THIS RIDDLE COMES FROM THE HOLY BOOK KNOWN AS 'OLD TESTAMENT BIBLE OF KING JAMES.'" Blaine sounded amused, and Jake felt the last of his hope slip away. He thought he might cry - not so much out of fear as frustration. "IT WAS MADE BY SAMSON THE STRONG. THE EATER IS A LION; THE SWEETNESS IS HONEY, MADE BY BEES WHICH HIVED IN THE LION'S SKULL. NEXT? YOU STILL HAVE OVER EIGHTEEN MINUTES, JAKE."
Jake shook his head. He let go of Riddle-De-Dum! and smiled when Oy caught it neatly in his jaws and then stretched his long neck up to Jake, holding it out again. "I've told them all. I'm done."
"SHUCKS, L'IL TRAILHAND, THAT'S A PURE-D SHAME," Blaine said. Jake found this drawly John Wayne imitation all but unbearable in their current circumstances. "LOOKS LIKE I WIN THAT THAR GOOSE, UNLESS SOMEBODY ELSE CARES TO SPEAK UP. WHAT ABOUT YOU, OY OF MID-WORLD? GOT ANY RIDDLES, MY LITTLE BUMBLER BUDDY?"
"Oy!" the billy-bumbler responded, his voice muffled by the book. Still smiling, Jake took it and sat down next to Roland, who put an arm around him.
"SUSANNAHof NEWyork?"
She shook her head, not looking up. She had turned Roland's hand over in her own, and was gently tracing the healed stumps where his first two fingers had been.
"ROLAND SON OF STEVEN? HAVE YOU REMEMBERED ANY OTHERS FROM THE FAIR-DAY RIDDLINGS OF GILEAD?"
Roland also shook his head . . . and then Jake saw that Eddie Dean was raising his. There was a peculiar smile on Eddie's face, a peculiar shine in Eddie's eyes, and Jake found that hope hadn't deserted him, after all. It suddenly flowered anew in his mind, red and hot and vivid. Like . . . well, like a rose. A rose in the full fever of its summer.
"Blaine?" Eddie asked in a low tone. To Jake his voice sounded queerly choked.
"YES, EDDIE OF NEW YORK." Unmistakable disdain.
"I have a couple of riddles," Eddie said. "Just to pass the time between here and Topeka, you understand." No, Jake realized, Eddie didn't sound as if he were choking; he sounded as if he were trying to hold back laughter.
"SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK."
3
Sitting and listening to Jake run through the last of his riddles, Eddie had mused on Roland's tale of the Fair-Day goose. From there his mind had returned to Henry, travelling from Point A to Point B through the magic of associative thinking. Or, if you wanted to get Zen about it, via Trans-Bird Airlines: goose to turkey. He and Henry had once had a discussion about getting off heroin. Henry had claimed that going cold turkey wasn't the only way; there was also, he said, such a thing as going cool turkey. Eddie asked Henry what you called a hype who had just administered a hot shot to himself, and, without missing a beat, Henry had said. You call that baked turkey. How they had laughed . . . but now, all this long, strange time later, it looked very much as if the joke was going to be on the younger Dean brother, not to mention the younger Dean brother's new friends. Looked like they were all going to be baked turkey before much longer.
Unless you can yank it out of the zone.
Yes.
Then do it, Eddie. It was Henry's voice again, that old resident of his head, but now Henry sounded sober and clear-minded. Henry sounded like his friend instead of his enemy, as if all the old conflicts were finally settled, all the old hatchets buried. Do it - make the devil set himself on fire. It 'II hurt a little, maybe, but you've hurt worse. Hell, I hurt you worse myself, and you survived. Survived just fine. And you know where to look.
Of course. In their palaver around the campfire Jake had finally managed to light. Roland had asked the kid a riddle to loosen him up, Jake had struck a spark into the kindling, and then they had all sat around the fire, talking. Talking and riddling.
Eddie knew something else, too. Blaine had answered hundreds of riddles as they ran southeast along the Path of the Beam, and the others believed that he had answered every single one of them without hesitation. Eddie had thought much the same . . . but now, as he cast his mind back over the contest, he realized an interesting thing: Blaine had hesitated.
Once.
He was pissed, too. Like Roland was.
The gunslinger, although often exasperated by Eddie, had shown real anger toward him just a single time after the business of carving the key, when Eddie had almost choked. Roland had tried to cover the depth of that anger - make it seem like nothing but more exasperation - but Eddie had sensed what was underneath. He had lived with Henry Dean for a long time, and was still exquisitely attuned to all the negative emotions. It had hurt him, too - not Roland's anger itself, exactly, but the contempt with which it had been laced. Contempt had always been one of Henry's favorite weapons.
Why did the dead baby cross the road? Eddie had asked. Because it was stapled to the chicken, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck!
Later, when Eddie had tried to defend his riddle, arguing that it was tasteless but not pointless, Roland's response had been strangely like Blaine's: / don't care about taste. It's senseless and unsolvable, and that's what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.
But as Jake finished riddling Blaine, Eddie realized a wonderful, liberating thing: that word good was up for grabs. Always had been, always would be. Even if the man using it was maybe a thousand years old and could shoot like Buffalo Bill, that word was still up for grabs. Roland himself had admitted he had never been very good at the riddling game. His tutor claimed that Roland thought too deeply; his father thought it was lack of imagination. Whatever the reason, Roland of Gilead had never won a Fair-Day riddling. He had survived all his contemporaries, and that was certainly a prize of sorts, but he had never carried home a prize goose. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, but I've never been much good at thinking around corners.
Eddie remembered trying to tell Roland that jokes were riddles designed to help you build up that often overlooked talent, but Roland had ignored him. The way, Eddie supposed, a color-blind person would ignore someone's description of a rainbow.
Eddie thought Blaine also might have trouble thinking around comers.
He realized he could hear Blaine asking the others if they had any more riddles - even asking Oy. He could hear the mockery in Blaine's voice, could hear it very well. Sure he could. Because he was coming back. Back from that fabled zone. Back to see if he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire. No gun would help this time, but maybe that was all right. Maybe that was all right because -
Because I shoot with my mind. My mind. God help me to shoot this overblown calculator with my mind. Help me shoot it from around the corner.
"Blaine?" he said, and then, when the computer had acknowledged him: "I have a couple of riddles." As he spoke, he discovered a wonderful thing: he was struggling to hold back laughter.
4
"SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK."
No time to tell the others to be on their guard, that anything might happen, and from the look of them, no need, either. Eddie forgot about them and turned his mil attention to Blaine.
"What has four wheels and flies?"
"THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID." Disapproval - and dislike? Yeah, probably - all but oozing out of that voice. "ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME."
Yes, Eddie thought. And what we all missed - because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland's past or Jake's book - is that the contest almost ended right there.
"You didn't like that one, did you, Blaine?"
"I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID," Blaine agreed. "PERHAPS THAT'S WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO?"
A smile lit Eddie's face; he shook his finger at the route-map. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, 'You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I'll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.' "
"Hurry up!" Jake whispered at him. "If you can do something, do it!"
"It doesn't like silly questions," Eddie said. "It doesn't like silly games. And we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it."
Eddie searched for the other riddle that had been in Jake's Final Essay, found it, posed it.
"Blaine: when is a door not a door?"
Once again, for the first time since Susannah had asked Blaine what had four legs and flies, there came a peculiar clicking sound, like a man popping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. The pause was briefer than the one which had followed Susannah's opening riddle, but it was still there - Eddie heard it. "WHEN IT'S A JAR, OF COURSE" Blaine said. He sounded dour, unhappy. "THIRTEEN MINUTES AND FIVE SECONDS REMAIN BEFORE TERMINATION, EDDIE OF NEW YORK-WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?"
Eddie sat bolt upright, staring at the route-map, and although he could feel warm trickles of sweat running down his back, that smile on his face widened.
"Quit your whining, pal. If you want the privilege of smearing us all over the landscape, you'll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren't quite up to your standards of logic."
"YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER."
"Or what? You'll kill me? Don't make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the game; now play it."
Thin pink light flashed briefly out of the route-map. "You're making him angry," Little Blaine mourned. "Oh, you're making him so angry."
"Get lost, squirt," Eddie said, not unkindly, and when the pink glow receded, once again revealing a flashing green dot that was almost on top of Topeka, Eddie said: "Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn't fall off, too?"
"THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER." On the last word Blaine's voice actually dropped into a lower register, making him sound like a fourteen-year-old coping with a change of voice.
Roland's eyes were not just gleaming now but blazing. "What do you say, Blaine? I would understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?"
"NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT - "
"Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle."
"IT'S NOT A RIDDLE!" Blaine almost bleated. "IT'S A JOKE, SOMETHING FOR STUPID CHILDREN TO CACKLE OVER IN THE PLAY YARD!"
"Answer now or I declare the contest over and our ka-tet the winner," Roland said. He spoke in the dryly confident tone of authority Eddie had first heard in the town of River Crossing. "You must answer, for it is stupidity you complain of, not transgression of the rules, which we agreed upon mutually."
Another of those clicking sounds, but this time it was much louder - so loud, in fact, that Eddie winced. Oy flattened his ears against his skull. It was followed by the longest pause yet; three seconds, at least. Then:
"THE LITTLE MORON DID NOT FALL OFF BECAUSE HE WAS A LITTLE MORE ON." Blaine sounded sulky. "MORE PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. TO EVEN ANSWER SUCH AN UNWORTHY RIDDLE MAKES ME FEEL SOILED."
Eddie held up his right hand. He rubbed the thumb and forefinger together.
"WHAT DOES THAT SIGNIFY, FOOLISH CREATURE?"
"It's the world's smallest violin, playing 'My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You,' " Eddie said. Jake fell into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. "But never mind the cheap New York humor; back to the contest. Why do police lieutenants wear belts?"
The lights in the Barony Coach began to flicker. An odd thing was happening to the walls, as well; they began to fade in and out of true, lunging toward transparency, perhaps, and then opaquing again. Seeing this phenomenon even out of the comer of his eye made Eddie feel a bit whoopsy.
"Blaine? Answer."
"Answer," Roland agreed. "Answer, or I declare the contest at an end and hold you to your promise."
Something touched Eddie's elbow. He looked down and saw Susannah's small and shapely hand. He took it, squeezed it, smiled at her. He hoped the smile was more confident than the man making it felt. They were going to win the contest - he was almost sure of that - but he had no idea what Blaine would do if and when they did.
"TO ... TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS?" Blame's voice firmed, and repeated the question as a statement. "TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS. A RIDDLE BASED UPON THE EXAGGERATED SIMPLICITY OF - "
"Right. Good one, Blaine, but never mind trying to kill time - it won't work. Next - "
"I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY - "
"Then stop the mono," Eddie said. "If you're that upset, stop right here, and I will."
"NO."
"Okay, then, on we go. What's Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in the rain?"
There was another of those clicks, this time so loud it felt like having a blunt spike driven against his eardrum. A pause of five seconds. Now the flashing green dot on the route-map was so close to Topeka that it lit the word like neon each time it flashed. Then: "PADDY O'FURNITURE."
The correct answer to a joke-riddle Eddie had first heard in the alley behind Dahlie's, or at some similar gathering-point, but Blaine had apparently paid a price for forcing his mind into a channel that could conceive it: the Barony Coach lights were flashing more wildly than ever, and Eddie could hear a low humming from inside the walls - the kind of sound your stereo amp made just before its shit blew up.
Pink light stuttered from the route-map. "Stop!" Little Blaine cried, his voice so wavery it sounded like the voice of a character from an old Warner Bros. cartoon. "Stop it, you're killing him!"
What do you think he's trying to do to us, squirt? Eddie thought.
He considered shooting Blaine one Jake had told while they'd been sitting around the campfire that night - What's green, weighs a hundred tons, and lives at the bottom of the ocean? Moby Snot! - and then didn't. He wanted to stick further inside the bounds of logic than that one allowed . . . and he could do it. He didn't think he would have to get much more surreal than the level of, say, a third-grader with a fair-to-good collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards in order to fuck Blaine up royally ... and permanently. Because no matter how many emotions his fancy dipolar circuits had allowed him to mimic, he was still an it - a computer. Even following Eddie this far into riddledom's Twilight Zone had caused Blaine's sanity to totter.
"Why do people go to bed, Blaine?"
"BECAUSE ... BECAUSE ... GODS DAMN YOU, BECAUSE ..."
A low squalling started up from beneath them, and suddenly the Barony Coach swayed violently from right to left. Susannah screamed. Jake was thrown into her lap. The gunslinger grabbed them both.
"BECAUSE THE BED WON'T COME TO THEM, GODS DAMN YOU! NINE MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS!"
"Give up, Blaine," Eddie said. "Stop before I have to blow your mind completely. If you don't quit, it's going to happen. We both know it."
"NO!"
"I got a million of these puppies. Been hearing them my whole life.
They stick to my mind the way flies stick to flypaper. Hey, with some people it's recipes. So what do you say? Want to give?"
"NO! NINE MINUTES AND THIRTY SECONDS!"
"Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby cross the road?"
The mono took another of those gigantic lurches; Eddie didn't understand how it could still stay on its track after that, but somehow it did. The screaming from beneath them grew louder; the walls, floor, and ceiling of the car began to cycle madly between opacity and transparency. At one moment they were enclosed, at the next they were rushing over a gray daylight landscape that stretched flat and featureless to a horizon which ran across the world in a straight line.
The voice which came from the speakers was now that of a panicky child: "I KNOW IT, JUST A MOMENT, I KNOW IT, RETRIEVAL IN PROGRESS, ALL LOGIC CIRCUITS IN USE - "
"Answer," Roland said.
"I NEED MORE TIME! YOU MUST GIVE IT TO ME!" Now there was a kind of cracked triumph in that splintered voice. "NO TEMPORAL LIMITS FOR ANSWERING WERE SET, ROLAND OF GILEAD, HATEFUL GUNSLINGER OUT OF A PAST THAT SHOULD HAVE STAYED DEAD!"
"No," Roland agreed, "no time limits were set, you are quite right. But you may not kill us with a riddle still unanswered, Blaine, and Topeka draws nigh. Answer!"
The Barony Coach cycled into invisibility again, and Eddie saw what appeared to be a tall and rusty grain elevator go flashing past; it was in his view barely long enough for him to identify it. Now he fully appreciated the maniacal speed at which they were travelling; perhaps three hundred miles faster than a commercial jet at cruising speed.
"Let him alone!" moaned the voice of Little Blaine. "You're killing him, I say! Killing him!"
"Isn't that 'bout what he wanted?" Susannah asked in the voice of Detta Walker. "To die? That's what he said. We don't mind, either. You not so bad, Little Blaine, but even a world as fucked up as this one has to be better with your big brother gone. It's just him takin us with him we been objectin to all this time."
"Last chance," Roland said. "Answer or give up the goose, Blaine."
"I ... I ... YOU . . . SIXTEEN LOG THIRTY-THREE . . . ALL COSINE SUBSCRIPTS ... ANTI ... ANTI ... IN ALL THESE YEARS . . . BEAM . . . FLOOD . . . PYTHAGOREAN . . . CARTESIAN LOGIC . . . CAN I ... DARE I ... A PEACH . . . EAT A PEACH ... ALLMAN BROTHERS . . . PATRICIA . . . CROCODILE AND WHIPLASH SMILE ... CLOCK OF DIALS . . . TICK-TOCK, ELEVEN O'CLOCK, THE MAN'S IN THE MOON AND HE'S READY TO ROCK . . . INCESSAMENT . . . INCESSAMENT, MON CHER ... OH MY HEAD . . . BLAINE . . . BLAINE DARES . . . BLAINE WILL ANSWER ... I ..."
Blaine, now screaming in the voice of an infant, lapsed into some other language and began to sing. Eddie thought it was French. He knew none of the words, but when the drums kicked in, he knew the song perfectly well: "Velcro Fly" by Z.Z. Top.
The glass over the route-map blew out. A moment later, the route-map itself exploded from its socket, revealing twinkling lights and a maze of circuit-boards behind it. The lights pulsed in time to the drums. Suddenly blue fire flashed out, sizzling the surface around the hole in the wall where the map had been, scorching it black. From deeper within that wall, toward Blaine's blunt, bullet-shaped snout, came a thick grinding noise.
"It crossed the road because it was stapled to the chicken, you dopey fuck!" Eddie yelled. He got to his feet and started to walk toward the smoking hole where the route-map had been. Susannah grabbed at the back of his shirt, but Eddie barely felt it. Barely knew where he was, in fact. The battle-fire had dropped over him, burning him everywhere with its righteous heat, sizzling his sight, frying his synapses and roasting his heart in its holy glow. He had Blaine in his sights, and although the thing behind the voice was already mortally wounded, he was unable to stop squeezing the trigger: I shoot with my mind.
"What's the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead woodchucks?" Eddie raved. "You can't unload a truck-load of bowling balls with a pitchfork!"
A terrible shriek of mingled anger and agony issued from the hole where the route-map had been. It was followed by a gust of blue fire, as if somewhere forward of Barony Coach an electric dragon had exhaled violently. Jake called a warning, but Eddie didn't need it; his reflexes had been replaced with razor-blades. He ducked, and the burst of electricity went over his right shoulder, making the hair on that side of his neck stand up. He drew the gun he wore - a heavy .45 with a worn sandalwood grip, one of two revolvers which Roland had brought out of Mid-World's ruin. He kept walking as he bore down on the front of the coach .. . and of course he kept talking. As Roland had said, Eddie would die talking. As his old friend Cuthbert had done. Eddie could think of many worse ways to go, and only one better.
"Say, Blaine, you ugly, sadistic fuck! Since we're talking riddles, what is the greatest riddle of the Orient? Many men smoke but Fu Manchu! Get it? No? So solly, Cholly! How about this one? Why'd the woman name her son Seven and a Half? Because she drew his name out of a hat!"
He had reached the pulsing square. Now he lifted Roland's gun and the Barony Coach suddenly filled with its thunder. He put all six rounds into the hole, fanning the hammer with the flat of his hand in the way Roland had shown them, knowing only that this was right, this was proper . . . this was ka, goddammit, fucking ka, it was the way you ended things if you were a gunslinger. He was one of Roland's tribe, all right, his soul was probably damned to the deepest pit of hell, and he wouldn't have changed it for all the heroin in Asia.
"I HATE YOU!" Blaine cried in his childish voice. The splinters were gone from it now; it was growing soft, mushy. "I HATE YOU FOREVER!"
"It's not dying that bothers you, is it?" Eddie asked. The lights in the hole where the route-map had been were fading. More blue fire flashed, but he hardly had to pull his head back to avoid it; the flame was small and weak. Soon Blaine would be as dead as all the Pubes and Grays in Lud. "It's losing that bothers you."
"HATE . . . FORRRRrmr . . ."
The word degenerated into a hum. The hum became a kind of stuttery thudding sound. Then it was gone.
Eddie looked around. Roland was there, holding Susannah with one arm curved around her butt, as one might hold a child. Her thighs clasped his waist. Jake stood on the gunslinger's other side, with Oy at his heel.
Drifting out of the hole where the route-map had been was a peculiar charred smell, somehow not unpleasant. To Eddie it smelled like burning leaves in October. Otherwise, the hole was as dead and dark as a corpse's eye. All the lights in there had gone out.
Your goose is cooked, Blaine, Eddie thought, and your turkey's baked. Happy fuckin Thanksgiving.
5
The shrieking from beneath the mono stopped. There was one final, grinding thud from up front, and then those sounds ceased, too. Roland felt his legs and hips sway gently forward and put out his free hand to steady himself. His body knew what had happened before his head did:
Blaine's engines had quit. They were now simply gliding forward along the track. But -
"Back," he said. "All the way. We're coasting. If we're close enough to Blaine's termination point, we may still crash."
He led them past the puddled remains of Blaine's welcoming ice sculpture and to the back of the coach. "And stay away from that thing," he said, pointing at the instrument which looked like a cross between a piano and a harpsichord. It stood on a small platform. "It may shift. Gods, I wish we could see where we are! Lie down. Wrap your arms over your heads."
They did as he told them. Roland did the same. He lay there with his chin pressing into the nap of the royal blue carpet, eyes shut, thinking about what had just happened.
"I cry your pardon, Eddie," he said. "How the wheel of ka turns! Once I had to ask the same of my friend Cuthbert . . . and for the same reason. There's a kind of blindness in me. An arrogant blindness."
"I hardly think there's any need of pardon-crying," Eddie said. He sounded uncomfortable.
"There is. I held your jokes in contempt. Now they have saved our lives. I cry your pardon. I have forgotten the face of my father."
"You don't need any pardon and you didn't forget anybody's face," Eddie said. "You can't help your nature, Roland."
The gunslinger considered this carefully, and discovered something which was wonderful and awful at the same time: that idea had never occurred to him. Not once in his whole life. That he was a captive of ka - this he had known since earliest childhood. But his nature ... his very nature. ..
"Thank you, Eddie. I think - "
Before Roland could say what he thought, Blaine the Mono crashed to a final bitter halt. All four of them were thrown violently up Barony Coach's central aisle, Oy in Jake's arms and barking. The cabin's front wall buckled and Roland struck it shoulder-first. Even with the padding (the wall was carpeted and, from the feel, undercoated with some resilient stuff), the blow was hard enough to numb him. The chandelier swung forward and tore loose from the ceiling, pelting them with glass pendants. Jake rolled aside, vacating its landing-zone just in time. The harpsichord-piano flew off its podium, struck one of the sofas, and overturned, coming to rest with a discordant brrrannnggg sound. The mono tilted to the right and the gunslinger braced himself, meaning to cover both Jake and Susannah with his own body if it overturned completely. Then it settled back, the floor still a little canted, but at rest.
The trip was over.
The gunslinger raised himself up. His shoulder was still numb, but the arm below it supported him, and that was a good sign. On his left, Jake was sitting up and picking glass beads out of his lap with a dazed expression. On his right, Susannah was dabbing a cut under Eddie's left eye. "All right," Roland said. "Who's hur - "
There was an explosion from above them, a hollow Pow! that reminded Roland of the big-bangers Cuthbert and Alain had sometimes lit and tossed down drains, or into the privies behind the scullery for a prank. And once Cuthbert had shot some big-bangers with his sling. That had been no prank, no childish folly. That had been -
Susannah uttered a short cry - more of surprise than fear, the gunslinger thought - and then hazy daylight was shining down on his face. It felt good. The taste of the air coming in through the blown emergency exit was even better - sweet with the smell of rain and damp earth.
There was a bony rattle, and a ladder - it appeared to be equipped with rungs made of twisted steel wire - dropped out of a slot up there.
"First they throw the chandelier at you, then they show you the door," Eddie said. He struggled to his feet, then got Susannah up. "Okay, I know when I'm not wanted. Let's make like bees and buzz off."
"Sounds good to me." She reached toward the cut on Eddie's face again. Eddie took her fingers, kissed them, and told her to stop poking the moichandise.
"Jake?" the gunslinger asked. "Okay?"
"Yes," Jake said. "What about you, Oy?"
"Oy!"
"Guess he is," Jake said. He raised his wounded hand and looked at it ruefully.
"Hurting again, is it?" the gunslinger asked.
"Yeah. Whatever Blaine did to it is wearing off. I don't care, though - I 'm just glad to still be alive."
"Yes. Life is good. So is astin. There's some of it left."
"Aspirin, you mean."
Roland nodded. A pill of magical properties, but one of the words from Jake's world he would never be able to say correctly.
"Nine out of ten doctors recommend Anacin, honey," Susannah said, and when Jake only looked at her quizzically: "Guess they don't use that one anymore in your when, huh? Doesn't matter. We're here, sugarpie, right here and just fine, and that's what matters." She pulled Jake into her arms and gave him a kiss between the eyes, on the nose, and then flush on the mouth. Jake laughed and blushed bright red. "That's what matters, and right now that's the only thing in the world that does."
6
"First aid can wait," Eddie said. He put his arm around Jake's shoulders and led the boy to the ladder. "Can you use that hand to climb with?"
"Yes. But I can't bring Oy. Roland, will you?"
"Yes." Roland picked Oy up and tucked him into his shirt as he had while descending a shaft under the city in pursuit of Jake and Gasher. Oy peeked out at Jake with his bright, gold-ringed eyes. "Up you go."
Jake climbed. Roland followed close enough so that Oy could sniff the kid's heels by stretching out his long neck.
"Suze?" Eddie asked. "Need a boost?"
"And get your nasty hands all over my well-turned fanny? Not likely, white boy!" Then she dropped him a wink and began to climb, pulling herself up easily with her muscular arms and balancing with the stumps of her legs. She went fast, but not too fast for Eddie; he reached up and gave her a soft pinch where the pinching was good. "Oh, my purity!" Susannah cried, laughing and rolling her eyes. Then she was gone. Only Eddie was left, standing by the foot of the ladder and looking around at the luxury coach which he had believed might well be their ka-tet's coffin.
You did it, kiddo. Henry said. Made him set himself on fire. I knew you could, fuckin-A. Remember when I said that to those scag-bags behind Dahlie's? Jimmie Polio and those guys? And how they laughed? But you did it. Sent him home with a fuckin rupture.
Well, it worked, anyway, Eddie thought, and touched the butt of Roland's gun without even being aware of it. Well enough for us to walk away one more time.
He climbed two rungs, then looked back down. The Barony Coach already felt dead. Long dead, in fact, just another artifact of a world that had moved on.
"Adios, Blaine," Eddie said. "So long, partner."
And he followed his friends out through the emergency exit in the roof.
