by Stephen King
“NO GUNSLINGER HAS WALKED IN-WORLD OR MID-WORLD FOR ALMOST THREE HUNDRED YEARS.”
“I and my friends are the last.”
Jake took Oy from Roland. The bumbler at once began to lick the boy’s swollen face; his gold-ringed eyes were full of adoration and happiness.
“It’s Blaine,” Jake whispered to Roland. “Isn’t it?”
Roland nodded. Of course it was-but he had an idea that there was a great deal more to Blaine than just a monorail train.
“BOY! ARE YOU JAKE OF NEW YORK?”
Jake pressed closer to Roland and looked up at the speakers. “Yes,” he said. “That’s me. Jake of New York. Uh… son of Elmer.”
“DO YOU STILL HAVE THE BOOK OF RIDDLES? THE ONE OF WHICH I HAVE BEEN TOLD?”
Jake reached over his shoulder, and an expression of dismayed recollection filled his face as his fingers touched nothing but his own back. When he looked at Roland again, the gunslinger was holding his pack out toward him, and although the man’s narrow, finely carved face was as expressionless as ever, Jake sensed the ghost of a smile lurking at die corners of his mouth.
“You’ll have to fix die straps,” Roland said as Jake took the pack. “I made them longer.”
“But Riddle-De-Dum!-?”
Roland nodded. “Both books are still in there.”
“WHAT YOU GOT, LITTLE PILGRIM?” the voice inquired in a leisurely drawl.
“Gripes!” Jake said.
It can see us as well as hear us, Roland thought, and a moment later he spotted a small glass eye in one corner, far above a man’s normal line of sight. He felt a chill slip over his skin, and knew from both the troubled look on Jake’s face and the way the boy’s arms had tightened around Oy that he wasn’t alone in his unease. That voice belonged to a machine, an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with it, all the same.
“The book,” Jake said. “I’ve got the riddle book.”
“GOOD.” There was an almost human satisfaction in the voice. “REALLY EXCELLENT.”
A scruffy, bearded fellow suddenly appeared in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen. A bloodstained, dirt-streaked yellow scarf flapped from the newcomer’s upper arm. “Fires in the walls!” he screamed. In his panic, he seemed not to realize that Roland and Jake were not part of his miserable subterranean ka-tet. “Smoke on the lower levels! People killin theirselves! Somepin’s gone wrong! Hell, everythin’s gone wrong! We gotta-”
The door of the oven suddenly dropped open like an unhinged jaw. A thick beam of blue-white fire shot out and engulfed the scruffy man’s head. He was driven backward with his clothes in flames and his skin boiling on his face.
Jake stared up at Roland, stunned and horrified. Roland put an arm about the boy’s shoulders.
“HE INTERRUPTED ME,” the voice said. “THAT WAS RUDE, WASN’T IT?”
“Yes,” Roland said calmly. “Extremely rude.”
“SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK SAYS YOU HAVE A GREAT MANY RIDDLES BY HEART, ROLAND OF GILEAD. IS THIS TRUE?”
“Yes.”
There was an explosion in one of the rooms opening off this arm of the corridor; the floor shuddered beneath their feet and voices screamed in a jagged chorus. The pulsing lights and the endless, blatting siren faded momentarily, then came back strong. A little skein of bitter, acrid smoke drifted from the ventilators. Oy got a whiff and sneezed.
“TELL ME ONE OF YOUR RIDDLES, GUNSLINGER,” the voice invited. It was serene and untroubled, as if they were all sitting together in a peaceful village square somewhere instead of beneath a city that seemed on the verge of ripping itself apart.
Roland thought for a moment, and what came to mind was Cuthbert’s favorite riddle. “All right, Blaine,” he said, “I will. What’s better than all the gods and worse than Old Man Splitfoot? Dead people eat it always; live people who eat it die slow.”
There was a long pause. Jake put his face in Oy’s fur to try to get away from the stink of the roasted Gray.
“Be careful, gunslinger.” The voice was as small as a cool puff of breeze on summer’s hottest day. The voice of the machine had come from all the speakers, but this one came only from the speaker directly overhead. “Be careful, Jake of New York. Remember that these are The Drawers. Go slow and be very careful.”
Jake looked at the gunslinger with widening eyes. Roland gave his head a small, faint shake and raised one finger. He looked as if he was scratching the side of his nose, but that finger also lay across his lips, and Jake had an idea Roland was actually telling him to keep his mouth shut.
“A CLEVER RIDDLE,” Blaine said at last. There seemed to be real admiration in its voice. “THE ANSWER IS NOTHING, IS IT NOT?”
“That’s right,” Roland said. “You’re pretty clever yourself, Blaine.”
When the voice spoke again, Roland heard what Eddie had heard already: a deep and ungovernable greed. “ASK ME ANOTHER.”
Roland drew a deep breath. “Not just now.”
“I HOPE YOU ARE NOT REFUSING ME, ROLAND, SON OF STEVEN, FOR THAT IS ALSO RUDE. EXTREMELY RUDE.”
“Take us to our friends and help us get out of Lud,” Roland said. “Then there may be time for riddling.”
“I COULD KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND,” the voice said, and now it was as cold as winter’s darkest day.
“Yes,” Roland said. “I’m sure you could. But the riddles would die with us.”
“I COULD TAKE THE BOY’s BOOK.”
“Thieving is ruder than either refusal or interruption,” Roland remarked. He spoke as if merely passing the time of day, but the remaining fingers of his right hand were tight on Jake’s shoulder.
“Besides,” Jake said, looking up at the speaker in the ceiling, “the answers aren’t in the book. Those pages were torn out.” In a flash of inspiration, he tapped his temple. “They’re up here, though.”
“YOU FELLOWS WANT TO REMEMBER THAT NOBODY LOVES A SMARTASS,” Blaine said. There was another explosion, this one louder and closer. One of the ventilator grilles blew off and shot across the kitchen like a projectile. A moment later two men and a woman emerged through the door which led to the rest of the Grays’ warren. The gunslinger levelled his revolver at them, then lowered it as they stumbled across the kitchen and into the silo beyond without so much as a look at Roland and Jake. To Roland they looked like animals fleeing before a forest fire.
A stainless steel panel in the ceiling slid open, revealing a square of darkness. Something silvery flashed within it, and a few moments later a steel sphere, perhaps a foot in diameter, dropped from the hole and hung in the air of the kitchen.
“FOLLOW,” Blaine said flatly.
“Will it take us to Eddie and Susannah?” Jake asked hopefully.
Blaine replied only with silence… but when the sphere began floating down the corridor, Roland and Jake followed it.
38
JAKE HAD NO CLEAR memory of the time which followed, and that was probably merciful. He had left his world over a year before nine hundred people would commit suicide together in a small South American country called Gyana, but he knew about the periodic death-rushes of the lemmings, and what was happening in the disintegrating undercity of the Grays was like that.
There were explosions, some on their level but most far below them; acrid smoke occasionally drifted from the ventilator grilles, but most of the air-purifiers were still working and they whipped the worst of it away before it could gather in choking clouds. They saw no fires. Yet the Grays were reacting as if the time of the apocalypse had come. Most only fled, their faces blank O’s of panic, but many had committed suicide in the halls and interconnected rooms through which the steel sphere led Roland and Jake. Some had shot themselves; many more had slashed their throats or wrists; a few appeared to have swallowed poison. On all the faces of the dead was the same expression of overmastering terror. Jake could only vaguely understand what had driven them to this. Roland had a better idea of what had happened to th
em-to their minds-when the long-dead city first came to life around them and then seemed to commence tearing itself apart. And it was Roland who understood that Blaine was doing it on purpose. That Blaine was driving them to it.
They ducked around a man hanging from an overhead heating-duct and pounded down a flight of steel stairs behind the floating steel ball.
“Jake!” Roland shouted. “You never let me in at all, did you?”
Jake shook his head.
“I didn’t think so. It was Blaine.”
They reached the bottom of the stairs and hurried along a narrow corridor toward a hatch with the words ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE printed on it in the spiked letters of the High Speech.
“Is it Blaine?” Jake asked.
“Yes-that’s as good a name as any.”
“What about the other v-”
“Hush!” Roland said grimly.
The steel ball paused in front of the hatchway. The wheel spun and the hatch popped ajar. Roland pulled it open, and they stepped into a huge underground room which stretched away in three directions as far as they could see. It was filled with seemingly endless aisles of control panels and electronic equipment. Most of the panels were still dark and dead, but as Jake and Roland stood inside the door, looking about with wide eyes, they could see pilot-lights coming on and hear machinery cycling up.
“The Tick-Tock Man said there were thousands of computers,” Jake said. “I guess he was right. My God, look!”
Roland did not understand the word Jake had used and so said nothing. He only watched as row after row of panels lit up. A cloud of sparks and a momentary tongue of green fire jumped from one of the consoles as some ancient piece of equipment malfunctioned.
Most of the machinery, however, appeared to be up and running just fine. Needles which hadn’t moved in centuries suddenly jumped into the green. Huge aluminum cylinders spun, spilling data stored on silicon chips into memory banks which were once more wide awake and ready for input. Digital displays, indicating everything from the mean aquifer water-pressure in the West River Barony to available power amperage in the hibernating Send Basin Nuclear Plant, lit up in brilliant dot-matrices of red and green. Overhead, banks of hanging globes began to flash on, radiating outward in spokes of light. And from below, above, and around them-from everywhere-came the deep bass hum of generators and slo-trans engines awakening from their long sleep.
Juke had begun to flag badly. Roland swept him into his arms again and chased the steel ball past machines at whose function and intent he could not even guess. Oy ran at his heels. The ball banked left, and the aisle in which they now found themselves ran between banks of TV monitors, thousands of them, stacked in rows like a child’s building blocks.
My dad would love it, Jake thought.
Some sections of this vast video arcade were still dark, but many of the screens were on. They showed a, city in chaos, both above and below. Clumps of Pubes surged pointlessly through the streets, eyes wide, mouths moving soundlessly. Many were leaping from the tall buildings. Jake observed with horror that hundreds more had congregated at the Send Bridge and were throwing themselves into the river. Other screens showed large, cot-filled rooms like dormitories. Some of these rooms were on fire, but the panic-stricken Grays seemed to be setting the fires themselves-torching their own mattresses and furniture for God alone knew what reason.
One screen showed a barrel-chested giant tossing men and women into what looked like a blood-spattered stamping press. This was bad enough, but there was something worse: the victims were standing in an unguarded line, docilely waiting their turns. The executioner, his yellow scarf pulled tight over his skull and the knotted ends swinging below his ears like pigtails, seized an old woman and held her up, waiting patiently for the stainless steel block of metal to clear the killing floor so he could toss her in. The old woman did not struggle; seemed, in fact, to be smiling.
“IN THE ROOMS THE PEOPLE COME AND GO,” Blaine said, “BUT I DON’T THINK ANY OF THEM ARE TALKING OF MICHELANGELO.” He suddenly laughed-strange, tittery laughter that sounded like rats scampering over broken glass. The sound sent chills chasing up Jake’s neck. He wanted nothing at all to do with an intelligence that laughed like that… but what choice did they have?
He turned his gaze helplessly back to the monitors… and Roland at once turned his head away. He did this gently but firmly. “There’s nothing there you need to look at, Jake,” he said.
“But why are they doing it?” Jake asked. He had eaten nothing all day, but he still felt like vomiting. “Why?”
“Because they’re frightened, and Blaine is feeding their fear. But mostly, I think, because they’ve lived too long in the graveyard of their grandfathers and they’re tired of it. And before you pity them, remember how happy they would have been to take you along with them into the clearing where the path ends.”
The steel ball zipped around another corner, leaving the TV screens and electronic monitoring equipment behind. Ahead, a wide ribbon of some synthetic stuff was set into the floor. It gleamed like fresh tar between two narrow strips of chrome steel that dwindled to a point on what was not the far side of this room, but its horizon.
The ball bounced impatiently above the dark strip, and suddenly the belt-for that was what it was-swept into silent motion, trundling along between its steel facings at jogging speed. The ball made small arcs in the air, urging them to climb on.
Roland trotted beside the moving strip until he was roughly matching its speed, then did just that. He set Jake down and the three of them-gunslinger, boy, and golden-eyed bumbler-were carried rapidly across this shadowy underground plain where the ancient machines were awakening. The moving strip carried them into an area of what looked like filing cabinets-row after endless row of them. They were dark… but not dead. A low, sleepy humming sound came from within them, and Jake could see hairline cracks of bright yellow light shining between the steel panels.
He suddenly found himself thinking of the Tick-Tock Man.
There’s maybe a hundred thousand of those ever-fucking dipolar computers under the ever-fucking city! I want those computers!
Well, Jake thought, they’re waking up, so I guess you’re getting what you wanted, Ticky… but if you were here, I’m not sure you’d still want it.
Then he remembered Tick-Tock’s great-grandfather, who’d been brave enough to climb into an airplane from another world and take it into the sky. With that kind of blood running in his veins, Jake supposed, Tick-Tock, far from being frightened to the point of suicide, would have been delighted by this turn of events… and the more people who killed themselves in terror, the happier he would have been.
Too late now, Ticky, he thought. Thank God.
Roland spoke in a soft, wondering voice. “All these boxes… I think we’re riding through the mind of the thing that calls itself Blaine, Jake. / think we’re riding through its mind.”
Jake nodded, and found himself thinking of his Final Essay. “Blaine the Brain is a hell of a pain.”
“Yes.”
Jake looked closely at Roland. “Are we going to come out where I think we’re going to come out?”
“Yes,” Roland said. “If we’re still following the Path of the Beam, we’ll come out in the Cradle.”
Jake nodded. “Roland?”
“What?”
“Thanks for coming after me.”
Roland nodded and put an arm around Jake’s shoulders.
Far ahead of them, huge motors rumbled to life. A moment later a heavy grinding sound began and new light-the harsh glow of orange arc-sodiums-flooded down on them. Jake could now see the place where the moving belt stopped. Beyond it was a steep, narrow escalator, leading up into that orange light.
39
EDDIE AND SUSANNAH HEARD heavy motors start up almost directly beneath them. A moment later, a wide strip of the marble floor began to pull slowly back, revealing a long lighted slot below. The floor was disappearing in their direction. Eddie
seized the handles of Susannah’s chair and rolled it rapidly backward along the steel barrier between the monorail platform and the rest of the Cradle. There were several pillars along the course of the growing rectangle of light, and Eddie waited for them to tumble into the hole as the floor upon which they stood disappeared from beneath their bases. It didn’t happen. The pillars went on serenely standing, seeming to float on nothing.
“I see an escalator!” Susannah shouted over the endless, pulsing alarm. She was leaning forward, peering into the hole.
“Uh-huh,” Eddie shouted back. “We got the el station up here, so it must be notions, perfume, and ladies’ lingerie down there.”
“What?”
“Never mind!”
“Eddie!” Susannah screamed. Delighted surprise burst over her face like a Fourth of July firework. She leaned even further forward, pointing, and Eddie had to grab her to keep her from tumbling out of the chair. “It’s Roland! It’s both of them!”
There was a shuddery thump as the slot in the floor opened to its maximum length and stopped. The motors which had driven it along its hidden tracks cut out in a long, dying whine. Eddie ran to the edge of the hole and saw Roland riding on one of the escalator steps. Jake- white-faced, bruised, bloody, but clearly Jake and clearly alive-was standing next to him and leaning on the gunslinger’s shoulder. And sitting on the step right behind them, looking up with his bright eyes was Oy.
“Roland! Jake!” Eddie shouted. He leaped up, waving his hands over his head, and came down dancing on the edge of the slot. If he had been wearing a hat, he would have thrown it in the air.
They looked up and waved. Jake was grinning, Eddie saw, and even old long tall and ugly looked as if he might break down and crack a smile before long. Wonders, Eddie thought, would never cease. His heart suddenly felt too big for his chest and he danced faster, waving his arms and whooping, afraid that if he didn’t keep moving, his joy and relief might actually cause him to burst. Until this moment he had not realized how positive his heart had become that they would never see Roland and Jake again.
