The Waste Lands

by Stephen King

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

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

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

  Jake looked at him questioningly.

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

  Jake said, "Like our story of David and Goliath."

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

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

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

  "I think you'd win that bet," Roland said.

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

  Roland nodded. "I'll go with you."

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

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

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

  "Boost me up, Roland."

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

  "Make a step, then."

  Eddie said, "I'll do it, Roland."

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

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

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

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

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

  2

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

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

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

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

  "I don't think I'm very good at this."

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

  "Huh?"

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

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

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

  "Really? Why would anyone study riddles?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "That's dumb, Eddie," Susannah said, but she was smiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Well, excyooose me," Eddie said.

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

  "Sure. It's in my pack. The answers are gone, though. Maybe that's why Mr. Tower gave it to me for fr--" : His shoulder was suddenly seized, and with painful force.

  "What was his name?" Roland asked.

  "Mr. Tower," Jake said. "Calvin Tower. Didn't I tell you that?"

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

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

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

  "Jesus! You guys did take this stuff seriously, didn't you?"

  "Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

  "Idiocy," Roland muttered.

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

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

  "Huh?"

  "That means you have a deal."

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

  3

  "I'VE GOT ONE," JAKE said as they ate their evening burritos.

  "Is it a foolish one?" Roland asked.

  "Nah. It's a real one."

  "Then try me with it."

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

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

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

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

  "That's pushover, Roland, old buddy," Eddie said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Is the answer false love?" Roland asked at last.

  "Nope."

  "Window," Susannah said suddenly and decisively. "When is a door not a door? When it's a window."

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

  "I give up," Susannah said.

  "Yes," Roland said. "Tell if you know."

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

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

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

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

  "What about me?" Jake asked.

  "Later on you may have to take a turn. Right now it's more important for you to get your sleep."

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

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

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

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

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

  Jake read: " 'There is a thing that nothing is, and yet it has a name. It's sometimes tall and sometimes short, joins our talks, joins our sport, and plays at every game.' "

  They discussed this riddle for almost fifteen minutes, but none of them could even hazard an answer.

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

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

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

  "What am I looking for, Roland?" Eddie asked.

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

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