The Waste Lands dt-3

by Stephen King

  Tick-Tock, however, appeared to have forgotten all about both Brandon and the woman who had literally laughed herself to death. His brilliant green eyes had fixed on something which interested him much more than the dead woman.

  “Come here, cully,” he said. “I want a better look at you.”

  Gasher gave him a shove. Jake stumbled forward. He would have fallen if Tick-Tock’s strong hands hadn’t caught him by the shoulders. Then, when he was sure Jake had his balance again, Tick-Tock grasped the boy’s left wrist and raised it. It was Jake’s Seiko which had drawn his interest.

  “If this here’s what I think it is, it’s an omen for sure and true,” Tick-Tock said. “Talk to me, boy-what’s this sigul you wear?”

  Jake, who hadn’t the slightest idea what a sigul was, could only hope for the best. “It’s a watch. But it doesn’t work, Mr. Tick-Tock.”

  Hoots chuckled at that, then clapped both hands over his mouth when the Tick-Tock Man turned to look at him. After a moment, Tick-Toc looked back at Jake, and a sunny smile replaced the frown. Looking at that smile almost made you forget that it was a dead woman and not a movie Mexican taking a siesta over there against the wall. Looking at it almost made you forget that these people were crazy, and the Tick-Tock Man was likely the craziest inmate in the whole asylum.

  “Watch,” Tick-Tock said, nodding. “Ay, a likely enough name for such; after all, what does a person want with a timepiece but to watch it once in a while? Ay, Brandon? Ay, Tilly? Ay, Gasher?”

  They responded with eager affirmatives. The Tick-Tock Man favored them with his winning smile, then turned back to Jake again. Now Jake noticed that the smile, winning or not, stopped well short of the Tick-Tock Man’s green eyes. They were as they had been throughout: cool, cruel, and curious.

  He reached a finger toward the Seiko, which now proclaimed the time to be ninety-one minutes past seven-A.M. and P.M.-and pulled it back just before touching the glass above the liquid crystal display. “Tell me, dear boy-is this ’watch’ of yours boobyrigged?”

  “Huh? Oh! No. No, it’s not boobyrigged.” Jake touched his own finger to the face of the watch.

  “That means nothing, if it’s set to the frequency of your own body,” the Tick-Tock Man said. He spoke in the sharp, scornful tone Jake’s father used when he didn’t want people to figure out that he didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Tick-Tock glanced briefly at Brandon, and Jake saw him weigh the pros and cons of making the bowlegged man his designated toucher. Then he dismissed the notion and looked back into Jake’s eyes. “If this thing gives me a shock, my little friend, you’re going to be choking to death on your own sweetmeats in thirty seconds.”

  Jake swallowed hard but said nothing. The Tick-Tock Man reached out his finger again, and this time allowed it to settle on the face of the Seiko. The moment that it did, all the numbers went to zeros and then began to count upward again.

  Tick-Tock’s eyes had narrowed in a grimace of potential pain as he touched the face of the watch. Now their corners crinkled in the first genuine smile Jake had seen from him. He thought it was partly pleasure at his own courage but mostly simple wonder and interest.

  “May I have it?” he asked Jake silkily. “As a gesture of your goodwill, shall we say? I am something of a clock fancier, my dear young cully- so I am.”

  “Be my guest.” Jake stripped the watch off his arm at once and dropped in onto the Tick-Tock Man’s large waiting palm.

  “Talks just like a little silk-arse gennelman, don’t he?” Gasher said happily. “In the old days someone would have paid a wery high price for the return o’ such as him, Ticky, ay, so they would. Why, my father-”

  “Your father died so blowed-out-rotten with the mandrus that not even the dogs would eat him,” the Tick-Tock Man interrupted. “Now shut up, you idiot.”

  At first Gasher looked furious… and then only abashed. He sank into a nearby chair and closed his mouth.

  Tick-Tock, meanwhile, was examining the Seiko’s expansion band with an expression of awe. He pulled it wide, let it snap back, pulled it wide again, let it snap back again. He dropped a lock of his hair into the open links, then laughed when they closed on it. At last he slipped the watch over his hand and pushed it halfway up his forearm. Jake thought this souvenir of New York looked very strange there, but said nothing.

  “Wonderful!” Tick-Tock exclaimed. “Where did you get it, cully?”

  “It was a birthday present from my father and mother,” Jake said. Gasher leaned forward at this, perhaps wanting to mention the idea of ransom again. If so, the intent look on the Tick-Tock Man’s face changed his mind and he sat back without saying anything.

  “Was it?” Tick-Tock marvelled, raising his eyebrows. He had discovered the small button which lit the face of the watch and kept pushing it, watching the light go off and on. Then he looked back at Jake, and his eyes were narrowed to bright green slits again. “Tell me something, cully-does this run on a dipolar or unipolar circuit?”

  “Neither one,” Jake said, not knowing that his failure to say he did not know what either of these terms meant was buying him a great deal of future trouble. “It runs on a nickel-cadmium battery. At least I’m pretty sure it does. I’ve never had to replace it, and I lost the instruction folder a long time ago.”

  The Tick-Tock Man looked at him for a long time without speaking, and Jake realized with dismay that the blonde man was trying to decide if Jake had been making fun of him. If he decided Jake had been making fun, Jake had an idea that the abuse he had suffered on the way here would seem like tickling compared to what the Tick-Tock Man might do. He suddenly wanted to divert Tick-Tock’s train of thought-wanted that more than anything in the world. He said the first thing he thought might turn the trick.

  “He was your grandfather, wasn’t he?”

  The Tick-Tock Man raised his brows interrogatively. His hands returned to Jake’s shoulders, and although his grip was not tight, Jake could feel the phenomenal strength there. If Tick-Tock chose to tighten his grip and pull sharply forward, he would snap Jake’s collarbones like pencils. If he shoved, he would probably break his back.

  “Who was my grandfather, cully?”

  Jake’s eyes once more took in the Tick-Tock Man’s massive, nobly shaped head and broad shoulders. He remembered what Susannah had said: Look at the size of him, Roland-they must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!

  “The man in the airplane. David Quick.”

  The Tick-Tock Man’s eyes widened in surprise and amazement. Then he threw back his head and roared out a gust of laughter that echoed off the domed ceiling high above. The others smiled nervously. None, however, dared to laugh right out loud… not after what had happened to the woman with the dark hair.

  “Whoever you are and wherever you come from, boy, you’re the triggest cove old Tick-Tock’s run into for many a year. Quick was my great-grandfather, not my grandfather, but you’re close enough-wouldn’t you say so, Gasher, my dear?”

  “Ay,” Gasher said. “He’s trig, right enough, I could’ve toldjer that. But wery pert, all the same.”

  “Yes,” the Tick-Tock Man said thoughtfully. His hands tightened on the boy’s shoulders and drew Jake closer to that smiling, handsome, lunatic face. “I can see he’s pert. It’s in his eyes. But we’ll take care of that, won’t we, Gasher?”

  It’s not Gasher he’s talking to, Jake thought. It’s me. He thinks he’s hypnotizing me… and maybe he is.

  “Ay,” Gasher breathed.

  Jake felt he was drowning in those wide green eyes. Although the Tick-Tock Man’s grip was still not really tight, he couldn’t get enough breath into his lungs. He summoned all of his own force in an effort to break the blonde man’s hold over him, and again spoke the first words which came to mind:

  “So fell Lord Perth, and the countryside did shake with that thunder.”

  It acted upon Tick-Tock like a hard open-handed blow to the face. He recoiled, green eyes
narrowing, his grip on Jake’s shoulders tightening painfully. “What do you say? Where did you hear that?”

  “A little bird told me,” Jake replied with calculated insolence, and the next instant he was flying across the room.

  If he had struck the curved wall headfirst, he would have been knocked cold or killed. As it happened, he struck on one hip, rebounded, and landed in a heap on the iron grillework. He shook his head groggily, looked around, and found himself face to face with the woman who was not taking a siesta. He uttered a shocked cry and crawled away on his hands and knees. Hoots kicked him in the chest, flipping him onto his back. Jake lay there gasping, looking up at the knot of rainbow colors where the neon tubes came together. A moment later, Tick-Tock’s face filled his field of vision. The man’s lips were pressed together in a hard, straight line, his cheeks flared with color, and there was fear in his eyes. The coffin-shaped glass ornament he wore around his neck dangled directly in front of Jake’s eyes, swinging gently back and forth on its silver chain, as if imitating the pendulum of the tiny grandfather clock inside.

  “Gasher’s right,” he said. He gathered a handful of Jake’s shirt into one fist and pulled him up. “You’re pert. But you don’t want to be pert with me, cully. You don’t ever want to be pert with me. Have you heard of people with short fuses? Well, I have no fuse at all, and there’s a thousand could testify to it if I hadn’t stilled their tongues for good. If you ever speak to me of Lord Perth again… ever, ever, ever… I’ll tear off the top of your skull and eat your brains. I’ll have none of that bad-luck story in the Cradle of the Grays. Do you understand me?”

  He shook Jake back and forth like a rag, and the boy burst into tears.

  “Do you?”

  “Y-Y-Yes!”

  “Good.” He set Jake upon his feet, where he swayed woozily back and forth, wiping at his streaming eyes and leaving smudges of dirt on his cheeks so dark they looked like mascara. “Now, my little cull, we’re going to have a question and answer session here. I’ll ask the questions and you’ll give the answers. Do you understand?”

  Jake didn’t reply. He was looking at a panel of the ventilator grille which circled the chamber.

  The Tick-Tock Man grabbed his nose between two of his fingers and squeezed it viciously. “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes!” Jake cried. His eyes, now watering with pain as well as terror, returned to Tick-Tock’s face. He wanted to look back at the ventilator grille, wanted desperately to verify that what he had seen there was not simply a trick of his frightened, overloaded mind, but he didn’t dare. He was afraid someone else-Tick-Tock himself, most likely-would follow his gaze and see what he had seen.

  “Good.” Tick-Tock pulled Jake back over to the chair by his nose, sat down, and cocked his leg over the arm again. “Let’s have a nice little chin, then. We’ll begin with your name, shall we? Just what might that be, cully?”

  “Jake Chambers.” With his nose pinched shut, his voice sounded nasal and foggy.

  “And are you a Not-See, Jake Chambers?”

  For a moment Jake wondered if this was a peculiar way of asking him if he was blind… but of course they could all see he wasn’t. “I don’t understand what-”

  Tick-Tock shook him back and forth by the nose. “Not-See! Not-See! You just want to stop playing with me, boy!”

  “I don’t understand-” Jake began, and then he looked at the old machine-gun hanging from the chair and thought once more of the crashed Focke-Wulf. The pieces fell together in his mind. “No-I’m not a Nazi. I’m an American. All that ended long before I was born!”

  The Tick-Tock Man released his hold on Jake’s nose, which immediately began to gush blood. “You could have told me that in the first place and saved yourself all sorts of pain, Jake Chambers… but at least now you understand how we do things around here, don’t you?”

  Jake nodded.

  “Ay. Well enough! We’ll start with the simple questions.”

  Jake’s eyes drifted back to the ventilator grille. What he had seen before was still there; it hadn’t been just his imagination. Two gold-ringed eyes floated in the dark behind the chrome louvers.

  Oy.

  Tick-Tock slapped his face, knocking him back into Gasher, who immediately pushed him forward again. “It’s school-time, dear heart,” Gasher whispered. “Mind yer lessons, now! Mind em wery sharp!”

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Tick-Tock said. “I’ll have some respect, Jake Chambers, or I’ll have your balls.”

  “All right.”

  Tick-Tock’s green eyes gleamed dangerously. “All right what?”

  Jake groped for the right answer, pushing away the tangle of questions and the sudden hope which had dawned in his mind. And what came was what would have served at his own Cradle of the Pubes… otherwise known as The Piper School. “All right, sir?”

  Tick-Tock smiled. “That’s a start, boy,” he said, and leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. “Now… what’s an American?”

  Jake began to talk, trying with all his might not to look toward the ventilator grille as he did so.

  29

  ROLAND BOLSTERED HIS GUN, laid both hands on the valve-wheel, and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t budge. That didn’t much surprise him, but it presented serious problems.

  Oy stood by his left boot, looking up anxiously, waiting for Roland to open the door so they could continue the journey to Jake. The gunslinger only wished it was that easy. It wouldn’t do to simply stand out here and wait for someone to leave; it might be hours or even days before one of the Grays decided to use this particular exit again. Gasher and his friends might take it into their heads to flay Jake alive while the gunslinger was waiting for it to happen.

  He leaned his head against the steel but heard nothing. That didn’t surprise him, either. He had seen doors like this a long time ago-you couldn’t shoot out the locks, and you certainly couldn’t hear through them. There might be one; there might be two, facing each other, with some dead airspace in between. Somewhere, though, there would be a button which would spin the wheel in the middle of the door and release the locks. If Jake could reach that button, all might still be well.

  Roland understood that he was not a full member of this ka-tet; he guessed that even Oy was more fully aware than he of the secret life which existed at its heart (he very much doubted that the bumbler had tracked Jake with his nose alone through those tunnels where water ran in polluted streamlets). Nevertheless, he had been able to help Jake when die boy had been trying to cross from his world to this one. He had been able to see… and when Jake had been trying to regain the key he had dropped, he had been able to send a message.

  He had to be very careful about sending messages this time. At best, the Grays would realize something was up. At worst, Jake might misinterpret what Roland tried to tell him and do something foolish.

  But if he could see…

  Roland closed his eyes and bent all his concentration toward Jake. He thought of the boy’s eyes and sent his ka out to find them.

  At first there was nothing, but at last an image began to form. It was a face framed by long, gray-blonde hair. Green eyes gleamed in deep sockets like firedims in a cave. Roland quickly understood that this was the Tick-Tock Man, and that he was a descendent of the man who had died in the air-carriage-interesting, but of no practical value in this situation. He tried to look beyond the Tick-Tock Man, to see the rest of the room in which Jake was being held, and the people in it.

  “Ake,” Oy whispered, as if reminding Roland that this was neither the time nor the place to take a nap.

  “Shhh,” the gunslinger said, not opening his eyes.

  But it was no good. He caught only blurs, probably because Jake’s concentration was focused so tightly on the Tick-Tock Man; everyone and everything else was little more than a series of gray-shrouded shapes on the edges of Jake’s perception.

  Roland opened his eyes again and pounded his left fist lightly into the
open palm of his right hand. He had an idea that he could push harder and see more… but that might make the boy aware of his presence. That would be dangerous. Casher might smell a rat, and if he didn’t the Tick-Tock Man would.

  He looked up at the narrow ventilator grilles, then down at Oy. He had wondered several times just how smart he was; now it looked as though he was going to find out.

  Roland reached up with his good left hand, slipped his fingers between the horizontal slats of the ventilator grille closest to the hatchway through which Jake had been taken, and pulled. The grille popped out in a shower of rust and dried moss. The hole behind it was far too small for a man… but not for a billy-bumbler. He put the grille down, picked Oy up, and spoke softly into his ear.

  “Go… see… come back. Do you understand? Don’t let them see you. Just go and see and come back.”

  Oy gazed up into his face, saying nothing, not even Jake’s name. Roland had no idea if he had understood or not, but wasting time in ponderation would not help matters. He placed Oy in the ventilator shaft. The bumbler sniffed at the crumbles of dried moss, sneezed delicately, then only crouched there with the draft rippling through his long, silky fur, looking doubtfully at Roland with his strange eyes.

  “Go and see and come back,” Roland repeated in a whisper, and Oy disappeared into the shadows, walking silently, claws retracted, on the pads of his paws.

  Roland drew his gun again and did the hardest thing. He waited.

  Oy returned less than three minutes later. Roland lifted him out of the shaft and put him on the floor. Oy looked up at him with his long neck extended. “How many, Oy?” Roland asked. “How many did you see?”

  For a long moment he thought the bumbler wouldn’t do anything except go on staring in his anxious way. Then he lifted his right paw tentatively in the air, extended the claws, and looked at it, as if trying to remember something very difficult. At last he began to tap on the steel floor.