by Stephen King
“Hey, guys! All RIGHT! Far fucking out! Get your asses up here!”
“Eddie, help me!
He turned. Susannah was trying to struggle out of her chair, but a fold of the deerskin trousers she was wearing had gotten caught in the brake mechanism. She was laughing and weeping at the same time, her dark eyes blazing with happiness. Eddie lifted her from the chair so violently that it crashed over on its side. He danced her around in a circle. She clung to his neck with one hand and waved strenuously with the other.
“Roland! Jake! Get on up here! Shuck your butts, you hear me?”
When they reached the top, Eddie embraced Roland, pounding him on the back while Susannah covered Jake’s upturned, laughing face with kisses. Oy ran around in tight figure eights, barking shrilly.
“Sugar!” Susannah said. “You all right?”
“Yes,” Jake said. He was still grinning, but tears stood in his eyes. “And glad to be here. You’ll never know how glad.”
“I can guess, sugar. You c’n bet on that.” She turned to look at Roland. “What’d they do to him? His face look like somebody run over it with a bulldozer.”
“That was mostly Gasher,” Roland said. “He won’t be bothering Jake again. Or anyone else.”
“What about you, big boy? You all right?”
Roland nodded, looking about. “So this is the Cradle.”
“Yes,” Eddie said. He was peering into the slot. “What’s down there?”
“Machines and madness.”
“Loquacious as ever, I see.” Eddie looked at Roland, smiling. “Do you know how happy I am to see you, man? Do you have any idea?”
“Yes-I think I do.” Roland smiled then, thinking of how people changed. There had been a time, and not so long ago, when Eddie had been on the edge of cutting his throat with the gunslinger’s own knife.
The engines below them started up again. The escalator came to a stop. The slot in the floor began to slide closed once more. Jake went to Susannah’s overturned chair, and as he was righting it, he caught sight of the smooth pink shape beyond the iron bars. His breath stopped, and the dream he had had after leaving River Crossing returned full force: the vast pink bullet shape slicing across the empty lands of western Missouri toward him and Oy. Two big triangular windows glittering high up in the blank face of that oncoming monster, windows like eyes… and now his dream was becoming reality, just as he had known it eventually would.
It’s just an awful choo-choo train, and its name is Blaine the Pain.
Eddie walked over and slung an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Well, there it is, champ-just as advertised. What do you think of it?”
“Not too much, actually.” This was an understatement of colossal size, but Jake was too drained to do any better.
“Me, either,” Eddie said. “It talks. And it likes riddles.”
Jake nodded.
Roland had Susannah planted on one hip, and together they were examining the control box with its diamond-pattern of raised number-pads. Jake and Eddie joined them. Eddie found he had to keep looking down at Jake in order to verify that it wasn’t just his imagination or wishful thinking; the boy was really here.
“What now?” he asked Roland.
Roland slipped his finger lightly over the numbered buttons which made up the diamond shape and shook his head. He didn’t know.
“Because I think the mono’s engines are cycling faster,” Eddie said. “I mean, it’s hard to tell for sure with that alarm blatting, but I think it is… and it’s a robot, after all. What if it, like, leaves without us?”
“Blaine!” Susannah shouted. “Blaine, are you-”
“LISTEN CLOSELY, MY FRIENDS,” Blaine’s voice boomed. “THERE ARE LARGE STOCKPILES OF CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WARFARE CANNISTERS UNDER THE CITY. I HAVE STARTED A SEQUENCE WHICH WILL CAUSE AN EXPLOSION AND RELEASE THIS GAS. THIS EXPLOSION WILL OCCUR IN TWELVE MINUTES.”
The voice fell silent for a moment, and then the voice of Little Blaine, almost buried by the steady, pulsing whoop of the alarm, came to them:”… / was afraid of something like this… you must hurry…”
Eddie ignored Little Blaine, who wasn’t telling him a damned thing he didn’t already know. Of course they had to hurry, but that fact was running a distant second at the moment. Something much larger occupied most of his mind. “Why?” he asked. “Why in God’s name would you do that?”
“I SHOULD THINK IT OBVIOUS. I CAN’T NUKE THE CITY WITHOUT DESTROYING MYSELF, AS WELL. AND HOW COULD I TAKE YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO IF I WERE DESTROYED?”
“But there are still thousands of people in the city,” Eddie said. “You’ll kill them.”
“YES,” Blaine said calmly. “SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR, AFTER A WHILE CROCODILE, DON’T FORGET TO WRITE.”
“Why?” Susannah shouted. “Why, goddam you?”
“BECAUSE THEY BORE ME. YOU FOUR, HOWEVER, I FIND RATHER INTERESTING. OF COURSE, HOW LONG I CONTINUE TO FIND YOU INTERESTING WILL DEPEND ON HOW GOOD YOUR RIDDLES ARE. AND SPEAKING OF RIDDLES, HADN’T YOU BETTER GET TO WORK SOLVING MINE? YOU HAVE EXACTLY ELEVEN MINUTES AND TWENTY SECONDS BEFORE THE CANNISTERS RUPTURE.”
“Stop it!” Jake yelled over the blatting siren. “It isn’t just the city- gas like that could float anywhere! It could even kill the old people in River Crossing!”
“TOUGH TITTY, SAID THE KITTY,” Blaine responded unfeelingly. “ALTHOUGH I BELIEVE THEY CAN COUNT ON MEASURING OUT THEIR LIVES IN COFFEE-SPOONS FOR A FEW MORE YEARS; THE AUTUMN STORMS HAVE BEGUN, AND THE PREVAILING WINDS WILL CARRY THE GASES AWAY FROM THEM. THE SITUATION OF YOU FOUR IS, HOWEVER, VERY DIFFERENT. YOU BETTER PUT ON YOUR THINKING CAPS, OR IT’s SEE YOU LATER ALLIGATOR, AFTER A WHILE CROCODILE, DON’T FORGET TO WRITE.” The voice paused. “ONE PIECE OF ADDITIONAL INPUT: THIS GAS IS NOT PAINLESS.”
“Take it back!” Jake said. “We’ll still tell you riddles, won’t we, Roland? We’ll tell all the riddles you want! Just take it back!”
Blaine began to laugh. He laughed for a long time, pealing shrieks of electronic mirth into the wide empty space of the Cradle, where it mingled with the monotonous, drilling beat of the alarm.
“Stop it!” Susannah shouted. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!”
Blaine did. A moment later the alarm cut off in mid-blat. The ensuing silence-broken only by the pounding rain-was deafening.
Now the voice issuing from the speaker was very soft, thoughtful, and utterly without mercy. “YOU NOW HAVE TEN MINUTES,” Blaine said. “LET’s SEE JUST HOW INTERESTING YOU REALLY ARE.”
40
“ANDREW.”
There is no Andrew here, stranger, he thought. Andrew is long gone; Andrew is no more, as I shall soon be no more.
“Andrew!” the voice insisted.
It came from far away. It came from outside the cider-press that had once been his head.
Once there had been a boy named Andrew, and his father had taken that boy to a park on the far western side of Lud, a park where there had been apple trees and a rusty tin shack that looked like hell and smelled like heaven. In answer to his question, Andrew’s father had told him it was called the cider house. Then he gave Andrew a pat on the head, told him not to be afraid, and led him through the blanket-covered doorway.
There had been more apples-baskets and baskets of them-stacked against the walls inside, and there had also been a scrawny old man named Dewlap, whose muscles writhed beneath his white skin like worms and whose job was to feed the apples, basket by basket, to the loose-jointed, clanking machine which stood in the middle of the room. What came out of the pipe jutting from the far end of the machine was sweet cider. Another man (he no longer remembered what this one’s name might have been) stood there, his job to fill jug after jug with the cider. A third man stood behind him, and his job was to clout the jug-filler on the head if there was too much spillage.
Andrew’s father had given him a glass of the foaming cider, and although he had tasted a great many forgotten delicacies during his years in the city, h
e had never tasted anything finer than that sweet, cold drink. It had been like swallowing a gust of October wind. Yet what he remembered even more clearly than the taste of the cider or the wormy shift and squiggle of Dewlap’s muscles as he dumped the baskets was the merciless way the machine reduced the big red-gold apples to liquid. Two dozen rollers had carried them beneath a revolving steel drum with holes punched in it. The apples had first been squeezed and then actually popped, spilling their juices down an inclined trough while a screen caught the seeds and pulp.
Now his head was the cider-press and his brains were the apples. Soon they would pop as the apples had popped beneath the roller, and the blessed darkness would swallow him.
“Andrew! Raise your head and look at me.”
He couldn’t… and wouldn’t even if he could. Better to just lie here and wait for the darkness. He was supposed to be dead, anyway; hadn’t the hellish squint put a bullet in his brain?
“It didn’t go anywhere near your brain, you horse’s ass, and you’re not dying. You’ve just got a headache. You will die, though, if you don’t stop lying there and puling in your own blood… and I will make sure, Andrew, that your dying makes what you are feeling now seem like bliss.”
It was not the threats which caused the man on the floor to raise his head but rather the way the owner of that penetrating, hissing voice seemed to have read his mind. His head came up slowly, and the agony was excruciating-heavy objects seemed to go sliding and careering around the bony case which contained what was left of his mind, ripping bloody channels through his brain as they went. A long, syrupy moan escaped him. There was a flapping, tickling sensation on his right cheek, as if a dozen flies were crawling in the blood there. He wanted to shoo them away, but he knew that he needed both hands just to support himself.
The figure standing on the far side of the room by the hatch which led to the kitchen looked ghastly, unreal. This was partly because the overhead lights were still strobing, partly because he was seeing the newcomer with only one eye (he couldn’t remember what had happened to the other and didn’t want to), but he had an idea it was mostly because the creature was ghastly and unreal. It looked like a man… but die fellow who had once been Andrew Quick had an idea it really wasn’t a man at all.
The stranger standing in front of the hatch wore a short, dark jacket belted at the waist, faded denim trousers, and old, dusty boots-the boots of a countryman, a range-rider, or-
“Or a gunslinger, Andrew?” the stranger asked, and tittered.
The Tick-Tock Man stared desperately at the figure in the doorway, trying to see the face, but the short jacket had a hood, and it was up. The stranger’s countenance was lost in its shadows.
The siren stopped in mid-whoop. The emergency lights stayed on, but they at least stopped flashing.
“There,” the stranger said in his-or its-whispery, penetrating voice. “At last we can hear ourselves think.”
“Who are you?” the Tick-Tock Man asked. He moved slightly, and more of those weights went sliding through his head, ripping fresh channels in his brain. As terrible as that feeling was, the awful tickling of the flies on his right cheek was somehow worse.
“I’m a man of many handles, pardner,” the man said from inside the darkness of his hood, and although his voice was grave, Tick-Tock heard laughter lurking just below the surface. “There’s some that call me Jimmy, and some that call me Timmy; some that call me Handy and some that call me Dandy. They can call me Loser, or they can call me Winner, just as long as they don’t call me in too late for dinner.”
The man in the doorway threw back his head, and his laughter chilled the skin of the wounded man’s arms and back into lumps of gooseflesh; it was like the howl of a wolf.
“I have been called the Ageless Stranger,” the man said. He began to walk toward Tick-Tock, and as he did, the man on die floor moaned and tried to scrabble backward. “I have also been called Merlin or Maerlyn-and who cares, because I was never that one, although I never denied it, either. I am sometimes called the Magician… or the Wizard… but I hope we can go forward together on more humble terms, Andrew. More human terms.”
He pushed back the hood, revealing a fair, broad-browed face that was not, for all its pleasant looks, in any way human. Large hectic roses rode the Wizard’s cheekbones; his blue-green eyes sparkled with a gusty joy far too wild to be sane; his blue-black hair stood up in zany clumps like the feathers of a raven; his lips, lushly red, parted to reveal the teeth of a cannibal.
“Call me Fannin,” the grinning apparition said. “Richard Fannin. That’s not exactly right, maybe, but I reckon it’s close enough for government work.” He held out a hand whose palm was utterly devoid of lines. “What do you say, pard? Shake the hand that shook the world.”
The creature who had once been Andrew Quick and who had been known in the halls of the Grays as the Tick-Tock Man shrieked and again tried to wriggle backward. The flap of scalp peeled loose by the low-caliber bullet which had only grooved his skull instead of penetrating it swung back and forth; the long strands of gray-blonde hair continued to tickle against his cheek. Quick, however, no longer felt it. He had even forgotten the ache in his skull and the throb from the socket where his left eye had been. His entire consciousness had fused into one thought: I must get away from this beast that looks like a man.
But when the stranger seized his right hand and shook it that thought passed like a dream on waking. The scream which had been locked in Quick’s breast escaped his lips in a lover’s sigh. He stared dumbly up at the grinning newcomer. The loose flap of his scalp swung and dangled.
“Is that bothering you? It must be. Here!” Fannin seized the hanging flap and ripped it briskly off Quick’s head, revealing a bleary swatch of skull. There was a noise like heavy cloth tearing. Quick shrieked.
“There, there, it only hurts for a second.” The man was now squatting on his hunkers before Quick and speaking as an indulgent parent might speak to a child with a splinter in his finger. “Isn’t that so?”
“Y-Y-Yes,” Quick muttered. And it was. Already the pain was fading. And when Fannin reached toward him again, caressing the left side of his face, Quick’s jerk backward was only a reflex, quickly mastered. As the lineless hand stroked, he felt strength flowing back into him. He looked up at the newcomer with dumb gratitude, lips quivering.
“Is that better, Andrew? It is, isn’t it?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“If you want to thank me-as I’m sure you do-you must say something an old acquaintance of mine used to say. He ended up betraying me, but he was a good friend for quite some time, anyway, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him. Say, ’My life for you,’ Andrew- can you say that?”
He could and he did; in fact, it seemed he couldn’t stop saying it. “My life for you! My life for you! My life for you! My life-”
The stranger touched his cheek again, but this time a huge raw bolt of pain blasted across Andrew Quick’s head. He screamed.
“Sorry about that, but time is short and you were starting to sound like a broken record. Andrew, let me put it to you with no bark on it: how would you like to kill the squint who shot you? Not to mention his friends and the hardcase who brought him here-him, most of all. Even the mutt that took your eye, Andrew-would you like that?”
“Yes!” the former Tick-Tock Man gasped. His hands clenched into bloody fists. “Yes!”
“That’s good,” the stranger said, and helped Quick to his feet, “because they have to die-they’re meddling with things they have no business meddling with. I expected Blaine to take care of them, but things have gone much too far to depend on anything… after all, who would have thought they could get as far as they have?”
“I don’t know,” Quick said. He did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what the stranger was talking about. Nor did he care; there was a feeling of exaltation creeping through his mind like some excellent drug, and after the pain of the cider-press, that was enough f
or him. More than enough.
Richard Fannin’s lips curled. “Bear and bone… key and rose… day and night… time and tide. Enough! Enough, I say! They must not draw closer to the Tower than they are now!”
Quick staggered backward as the man’s hands shot out with the flickery speed of heat lightning. One broke the chain which held the tiny glass-enclosed pendulum clock; the other stripped Jake Chambers’s Seiko from his forearm.
“I’ll just take these, shall I?” Fannin the Wizard smiled charmingly, his lips modestly closed over those awful teeth. “Or do you object?”
“No,” Quick said, surrendering the last symbols of his long leadership without a qualm (without, in fact, even being aware that he was doing so). “Be my guest.”
“Thank you, Andrew,” the dark man said softly. “Now we must step lively-I’m expecting a drastic change in the atmosphere of these environs in the next five minutes or so. We must get to the nearest closet where gas masks are stored before that happens, and it’s apt to be a near thing. I could survive the change quite nicely, but I’m afraid you might have some difficulties.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Andrew Quick said. His head had begun to throb again, and his mind was whirling.
“Nor do you need to,” the stranger said smoothly. “Come, Andrew- I think we should hurry. Busy, busy day, eh? With luck, Blaine will fry them right on the platform, where they are no doubt still standing-he’s become very eccentric over the years, poor fellow. But I think we should hurry, just the same.”
He slid his arm over Quick’s shoulders and, giggling, led him through the hatchway Roland and Jake had used only a few minutes before.
VI. RIDDLE AND WASTE LANDS
1
“ALL RIGHT,” ROLAND SAID. “Tell me his riddle.”
“What about all the people out there?” Eddie asked, pointing across the wide, pillared Plaza of the Cradle and toward the city beyond. “What can we do for them?”
