by Stephen King
Eddie touched her shoulder and pointed higher. Susannah looked… and felt her breath come to a stop in her throat. Standing astride the peak of the roof, far above The Totems of the Beam and the dragonish gargoyles, as if given dominion over them, was a golden warrior at least sixty feet high. A battered cowboy hat was shoved back to reveal his lined and careworn brow; a bandanna hung askew on his upper chest, as if it had just been pulled down after serving long, hard duty as a dust-muffle. In one upraised fist he held a revolver; in the other, what appeared to be an olive branch.
Roland of Gilead stood atop the Cradle of Lud, dressed in gold.
No, she thought, at last remembering to breathe again. It’s not him… but in another way, it is. That man was a gunslinger, and the resemblance between him, who’s probably been dead a thousand years or more, and Roland is all the truth of ka-tet you’ll ever need to know.
Thunder slammed out of the south. Lightning harried racing clouds across the sky. She wished she had more time to study both the golden statue which stood atop the Cradle and the animals which surrounded it; each of these latter appeared to have words carved upon them, and she had an idea that what was written there might be knowledge worth having. Under these circumstances, however, there was no time to spare.
A wide red strip had been painted across the pavement at the point where The Street of the Turtle emptied into The Plaza of the Cradle. Maud and the fellow Eddie called Jeeves the Butler stopped a prudent distance from the red mark.
“This far and no farther,” Maud told them flatly. “You may take us to our deaths, but each man and woman owes one to the gods anyway, and I’ll die on this side of the dead-line no matter what. I’ll not dare Blaine for outlanders.”
“Nor will I,” Jeeves said. He had taken off his dusty bowler and was holding it against his naked chest. On his face was an expression of fearful reverence.
“Fine,” Susannah said. “Now scat on out of here, both of you.”
“Ye’ll backshoot us the second we turn from ye,” Jeeves said in a trembling voice. “I’ll take my watch and warrant on it, so I will.”
Maud shook her head. The blood on her face had dried to a grotesque maroon stippling. “There never were a backshooting gunslinger- that much I will say.”
“We only have their word for it that that’s what they are.”
Maud pointed to the big revolver with the worn sandalwood grip which Susannah held in her hand. Jeeves looked… and after a moment he stretched out his hand to the woman. When Maud took it, Susannah’s image of them as dangerous killers collapsed. They looked more like Hansel and Gretel than Bonnie and Clyde; tired, frightened, confused, and lost so long in the woods that they had grown old there. Her hate and fear of them departed. What replaced it was pity and a deep, aching sadness.
“Fare you well, both of you,” she said softly. “Walk as you will, and with no fear of harm from me or my man here.”
Maud nodded. “I believe you mean us no harm, and I forgive you for shooting Winston. But listen to me, and listen well: stay out of the Cradle. Whatever reasons you think you have for going in, they’re not good enough. To enter Blaine’s Cradle is death.”
“We don’t have any choice,” Eddie said, and thunder banged overhead again, as if in agreement. “Now let me tell you something. I don’t know what’s underneath Lud and what isn’t, but I do know those drums you’re so whacked out about are part of a recording-a song-that was made in the world my wife and I came from.” He looked at their uncomprehending faces and raised his arms in frustration. “Jesus Pumpkin-Pie Christ, don’t you get it? You’re killing each other over a piece of music that was never even released as a single!”
Susannah put her hand on his shoulder and murmured his name. He ignored her for the moment, his eyes flicking from Jeeves to Maud and then back to Jeeves again.
“You want to see monsters? Take a good look at each other, then. And when you get back to whatever funhouse it is you call home, take a good look at your friends and relatives.”
“You don’t understand,” Maud said. Her eyes were dark and somber. “But you will. Ay-you will.”
“Go on, now,” Susannah said quietly. “Talk between us is no good; the words only drop dead. Just go your way and try to remember the faces of your fathers, for I think you lost sight of those faces long ago.”
The two of them walked back in the direction from which they had come without another word. They did look back over their shoulders from time to time, however, and they were still holding hands: Hansel and Gretel lost in the deep dark forest.
“Lemme outta here,” Eddie said heavily. He made the Ruger safe, stuck it back in the waistband of his pants, and then rubbed his red eyes with the heels of his hands. “Just lemme out, that’s all I ask.”
“I know what you mean, handsome.” She was clearly scared, but her head had that defiant tilt he had come to recognize and love. He put his hands on her shoulders, bent down, and kissed her. He did not let either their surroundings or the oncoming storm keep him from doing a thorough job. When he pulled back at last, she was studying him with wide, dancing eyes. “Wow! What was that about?”
“About how I’m in love with you,” he said, “and I guess that’s about all. Is it enough?”
Her eyes softened. For a moment she thought about telling him the secret she might or might not be keeping, but of course the time and place were wrong-she could no more tell him she might be pregnant now than she could pause to read the words written on the sculpted Portal Totems.
“It’s enough, Eddie,” she said.
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” His hazel eyes were totally focused on her. “It’s hard for me to say stuff like that- living with Henry made it hard, I guess-but it’s true. I think I started loving you because you were everything Roland took me away from-in New York, I mean-hut it’s a lot more than that now, because I don’t want to go hack anymore. Do you?”
She looked at the Cradle. She was terrified of what they might find in there, but all the same… she looked back at him. “No, I don’t want to go back. I want to spend the rest of my life going forward. As long as you’re with me, that is. It’s funny, you know, you saying you started loving me because of all the things he took you away from.”
“Funny how?”
“I started loving you because you set me free of Detta Walker.” She paused, thought, then shook her head slightly. “No-it goes further than that. I started loving you because you set me free of both those bitches. One was a foul-mouthed, cock-teasing thief, and the other was a self-righteous, pompous prig. Comes down to six of one and half a dozen of the other, as far as I’m concerned. I like Susannah Dean better than either one… and you were the one who set me free.”
This time it was she who did the reaching, pressing her palm to his stubbly cheeks, drawing him down, kissing him gently. When he put a light hand on her breast, she sighed and covered it with her own.
“I think we better get going,” she said, “or we’re apt to be laying right here in the street… and getting wet, from the look.”
Eddie stared around at the silent towers, the broken windows, the vine-encrusted walls a final time. Then he nodded. “Yeah. I don’t think there’s any future in this town, anyway.”
He pushed her forward, and they both stiffened as the wheels of the chair passed over what Maud had called the dead-line, fearful that they would trip some ancient protective device and die together. But nothing happened. Eddie pushed her into the plaza, and as they approached the steps leading up to the Cradle, a cold, wind-driven rain began to fall.
Although neither of them knew it, the first of the great autumn storms of Mid-World had arrived.
25
ONCE THEY WERE IN the smelly darkness of the sewers, Gasher slowed the killing pace he’d maintained aboveground. Jake didn’t think it was because of the darkness; Gasher seemed to know every twist and turn of the route he was following, just as advertised. Jake believed i
t was because his captor was satisfied that Roland had been squashed to jelly by the deadfall trap.
Jake himself had begun to wonder.
If Roland had spotted the tripwires-a far more subtle trap than the one which followed-was it really likely that he had missed seeing the fountain? Jake supposed it was possible, but it didn’t make much sense. Jake thought it more likely that Roland had tripped the fountain on purpose, to lull Gasher and perhaps slow him down. He didn’t believe Roland could follow them through this maze under the streets-the total darkness would defeat even the gunslinger’s tracking abilities-but it cheered his heart to think that Roland might not have died in an attempt to keep his promise.
They turned right, left, then left again. As Jake’s other senses sharpened in an attempt to compensate for his lack of sight, he had a vague perception of other tunnels around him. The muffled sounds of ancient, laboring machinery would grow loud for a moment, then fade as the stone foundations of the city drew close around them again. Drafts blew intermittently against his skin, sometimes warm, sometimes chilly. Their splashing footfalls echoed briefly as they passed the intersecting tunnels from which these stenchy breaths blew, and once Jake nearly brained himself on some metal object jutting down from the ceiling. He slapped at it with one hand and felt something that might have been a large valve-wheel. After that he waved his hands as he trotted along in an attempt to read the air ahead of him.
Gasher guided him with taps to the shoulders, as a waggoner might have guided his oxen. They moved at a good clip, trotting but not running. Gasher got enough of his breath back to first hum and then begin singing in a low, surprisingly tuneful tenor voice.
“Bibble-ti-tibble-ti-ting-ting-ting,
I’ll get a job and buy yer a ring,
When I get my mitts
On yeriggly tits, Ribble-ti-tibble-ti-ting-ting-ting!
O ribble-ti-tibble,
I just wanter fiddle,
Fiddle around with your ting-ting-ting!”
There were five or six more verses along this line before Gasher quit. “Now you sing somethin, squint.”
“I don’t know anything,” Jake puffed. He hoped he sounded more out of breath than he actually was. He didn’t know if it would do him any good or not, but down here in the dark any edge seemed worth trying for.
Gasher brought his elbow down in the center of Jake’s back, almost hard enough to send him sprawling into the ankle-high water running sluggishly through the tunnel they were traversing. “Yon better know sominat, ‘less you want me to rip your ever-lovin spine right outcher back.” He paused, then added: “There’s haunts down here, boy. They live inside the fuckin machines, so they do. Singin keeps em off… don’t you know that? Now sing!”
Jake thought hard, not wanting to earn another love-tap from Gasher, and came up with a song he’d learned in summer day camp at the age of seven or eight. He opened his mouth and began to bawl it into the darkness, listening to the echoes bounce back amid the sounds of running water, falling water, and ancient thudding machinery."My girl’s a corker, she’s a New Yorker, I buy her everything to keep her in style, She got a pair of hips Just like two battleships, Oh boy, that’s how my money goes.My girl’s a dilly, she comes from Philly, I buy her everything to keep her in style, She’s got a pair of eyes Just like two pizza pies, Oh boy, that’s how-“Gasher reached out, seized Jake’s ears as if they were jug-handles, and yanked him to a stop. “There’s a hole right ahead of yer,” he said. “With a voice like yours, squint, it’d be doin the world a mercy to letcher fall in, so it would, but Tick-Tock wouldn’t approve at all, so I reckon ye’re safe for a little longer.” Gasher’s hands left Jake’s ears, which burned like fire, and fastened on the back of his shirt. “Now lean forward until you feel the ladder on the t’other side. And mind you don’t slip and drag us both down!”
Jake leaned cautiously forward, hands outstretched, terrified of falling into a pit he couldn’t see. As he groped for the ladder, he became aware of warm air-clean and almost fragrant-whooshing past his face, and a faint blush of rose-colored light from beneath him. His fingers touched a steel rung and closed over it. The bite-wounds on his left hand broke open again, and he felt warm blood running across his palm.
“Got it?” Gasher asked.
“Yes.”
“Then climb down! What are you waitin for, gods damn it!” Gasher let go of his shirt, and Jake could imagine him drawing his foot back, meaning to hurry him along with a kick in the ass. Jake stepped across the faintly glimmering gap and began to descend the ladder, using his hurt hand as little as possible. This time the rungs were clear of moss and oil, and hardly rusted at all. The shaft was very long and as Jake went down, hurrying to keep Gasher from stepping on his hands with his thick-soled boots, he found himself remembering a movie he’d once seen on TV-Journey to the Center of the Earth.
The throb of machinery grew louder and the rosy glow grew stronger. The machines still didn’t sound right, but his ears told him these were in better shape than the ones above. And when he finally reached the bottom, he found the floor was dry. The new horizontal shaft was square, about six feet high, and sleeved with riveted stainless steel. It stretched away for as far as Jake could see in both directions, straight as a string. He knew instinctively, without even thinking about it, that this tunnel (which had to be at least seventy feet under Lud) also followed the path of the Beam. And somewhere up ahead-Jake was sure of this, although he couldn’t have said why-the train they had come looking for lay directly above it.
Narrow ventilation grilles ran along the sides of the walls just below the shaft’s ceiling; it was from these that the clean, dry air was flowing. Moss dangled from some of them in blue-gray beards, but most were still clear. Below every other grille was a yellow arrow with a symbol that looked a bit like a lower-case t. The arrows pointed in the direction Jake and Gasher were heading.
The rose-colored light was coming from glass tubes which ran along the ceiling of the shaft in parallel rows. Some-about one in every three-were dark, and others sputtered fitfully, but at least half of them were still working. Neon tubing, Jake thought, amazed. How about that?
Gasher dropped down beside him. He saw Jake’s expression of surprise and grinned. “Nice, ennet? Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and so much food that five hunnert men couldn’t eat it in five hunnert years. And do yer know the best part, squint? The very best part of the whole coozy fakement?”
Jake shook his head.
“Farkin Pubies don’t have the leastest idear the place even exists. They think there’s monsters down here. Catch a Pubie goin within twenty feet of a sewer-cap, less’n he has to!”
He threw his head back and laughed heartily. Jake didn’t join in, even though a cold voice in the back of his mind told him it might be politic to do so. He didn’t join in because he knew exactly how the Pubes felt. There were monsters under the city-trolls and boggerts and ores. Hadn’t he been captured by just such a one?
Gasher shoved him to the left. “Gam-almost there now. Hup!”
They jogged on, their footfalls chasing them in a pack of echoes. After ten or fifteen minutes of this, Jake saw a watertight hatchway about two hundred yards ahead. As they drew closer, he could see a big valve-wheel sticking out of it. A communicator box was mounted on the wall to the right.
“I’m blown out,” Gasher gasped as they reached the door at the end of the tunnel. “Doin’s like this are too much for an inwalid like yer old pal, so they are!” He thumbed the button on the intercom and bawled: “I got im, Tick-Tock-got him as dandy as you please! Didn’t even muss ’is hair! Didn’t I tell yer I would? Trust the Gasherman, I said, for he’ll leadjer straight and true! Now open up and let us in!”
He let go of the button and looked impatiently at the door. The valve-wheel didn’t turn. Instead a flat, drawling voice came out of the intercom speaker: “What’s the password?”
Gasher frowned horribly, scratched his chin with his long, di
rty nails, then lifted his eyepatch and swabbed out another clot of yellow-green goo. “Tick-Tock and his passwords!” he said to Jake. He sounded worried as well as irritated. “He’s a trig cove, but that’s takin it a deal too far if you ask me, so it is.”
He pushed the button and yelled, “Come on, Tick-Tock! If you don’t reckergnize the sound of my voice, you need a heary-aid!”
“Oh, I recognize it,” the drawling voice returned. To Jake it sounded like Jerry Reed, who played Burt Reynolds’s sidekick in Smokey and the Bandit. “But I don’t know who’s with you, do I? Or have you forgotten that the camera out there went tits-up last year? You give the password, Gasher, or you can rot out there!”
Gasher stuck a finger up his nose, extracted a chunk of snot the color of mint jelly, and squashed it into the grille of the speaker. Jake watched this childish display of ill temper in silent fascination, feeling unwelcome, hysterical laughter bubbling around inside him. Had they come all this way, through the boobytrapped mazes and lightless tunnels, to be balked here at this watertight door simply because Gasher couldn’t remember the Tick-Tock Man’s password?
Gasher looked at him balefully, then slid his hand across his skull, peeling off his sweat-soaked yellow scarf. The skull beneath was bald, except for a few straggling tufts of black hair like porcupine quills, and deeply dented above the left temple. Gasher peered into the scarf and plucked forth a scrap of paper. “Gods bless Hoots,” he muttered. “Hoots takes care of me a right proper, he does.”
He peered at the scrap, turning it this way and that, and then held it out to Jake. He kept his voice pitched low, as if the Tick-Tock Man could hear him even though the TALK button on the intercom wasn’t depressed.
“You’re a proper little gennelman, ain’t you? And the very first thing they teach a gennelman to do after he’s been lamed not to eat the paste and piss in the comers is read. So read me the word on this paper, cully, for it’s gone right out of my head-so it has.”
