The Dark Tower (Page 107)

Through it all Roland was patient with her. He had a nasty idea which he did not share with Susannah: that the maze of passageways and corridors down here might be in drift, just as the points of the compass were, in what he was already thinking of as "the world above." If so, they were in trouble.

It was hot down here, and soon they were both sweating freely. Oy panted harshly and steadily, like a litde engine, but kept a steady pace beside the gunslinger’s left heel. There was no dust on die floor, and the tracks they’d seen off and on earlier were gone. The noises from behind the doors were louder, however, and as they passed one, something on the other side thumped it hard enough to make it shudder in its frame. Oy barked at it, laying his ears back against his skull, and Susannah voiced a litde scream.

"Steady-oh," Roland said. "It can’t break through. None of them can break through."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Yes," said the gunslinger firmly. He wasn’t sure at all. A phrase of Eddie’s occurred to him: All bets are off.

They skirted the puddles, being careful not even to touch the ones diat were glowing with what might have been radiation or witchlight. They passed a broken pipe that was exhaling a listless plume of green steam, and Susannah suggested they hold their breadi until diey were well past it. Roland thought that an extremely good idea.

Thirty or forty yards further along she bid him stop. "I don’t know, Roland," she said, and he could hear her struggling to keep die panic out of her voice. "I thought we had it made in the shade when I saw the Lincoln door, but now this… this here…" Her voice wavered and he felt her draw a deep breadi, struggling to get herself under control. "This all looks different.

And the sounds… how they get in your head…"

He knew what she meant. On their left was an unmarked door that had setded crookedly against its hinges, and from the gap at the top came the atonal jangle of todash chimes, a sound that was both horrible and fascinating. With the chimes came a steady draft of stinking air. Roland had an idea she was about to suggest they go back while they still could, maybe rethink this whole going-under-the-castle idea, and so he said,

"Let’s see what’s up there. It’s a litde brighter, anyway."

As they neared an intersection from which passages and tiled corridors rayed off in all directions, he felt her shift against him, sitting up. "There!" she shouted. "That pile of rubble! We walked around that! We walked around that,

Roland, / remember!"

Part of the ceiling had fallen into the middle of the intersection, creating a jumble of broken tiles, smashed glass, snags of wire, and plain old dirt. Along the edge of it were tracks.

"Down there!" she cried. "Straight ahead! Ted said, ‘I think this is the one they called Main Street’ and Dinky said he thought so, too. Dani Rostov said that a long time ago, around the time the Crimson King did whatever it was that darkened Thunderclap, a whole bunch of people used that way to get out.

Only they left some of their thoughts behind. I asked her what feeling that was like and she said it was a litde like seeing dirty soap-scum on the sides of the tub after you let out the water.

"Not nice," she said. Fred marked it and then we went all the way back up to the infirmary. I don’t want to brag and queer the deal, but I think we’re gonna be okay."

And they were, at least for the time being. Eighty paces beyond the pile of rubble they came upon an arched opening.

Beyond it, flickering white balls of radiance hung down from the ceiling, leading off at a downward-sloping angle. On the wall, in four chalkstrokes that had already started to run because of the moisture seeping through the tiles, was the last message left for them by the liberated Breakers:

They rested here for awhile, eating handfuls of raisins from a vacuum-sealed can. Even Oy nibbled a few, although it was clear from the way he did it that he didn’t care for them much.

When they’d all eaten their fill and Roland had once more stored the can in the leather sack he’d found along the way, he asked her: "Are you ready to go on?"

"Yes. Right away, I think, before I lose my-my God, Roland, what was that?"

From behind them, probably from one of the passages leading away from the rubble-choked intersection, had come a low thudding sound. It had a liquid quality to it, as if a giant in water-filled rubber boots had just taken a single step.

"I don’t know," he said.

Susannah was looking uneasily back over her shoulder but could see only shadows. Some of them were moving, but that could have been because some of the lights were flickering.

Could have been.

"You know," she said, "I think it might be a good idea if we vacated this areajust about as fast as we can."

"I think you’re right," he said, resting on one knee and the splayed tips of his fingers, like a runner getting ready to burst from the blocks. When she was back in the harness, he got to his feet and moved past the arrow on the wall, setting a pace that was just short of a jog.

NINE

They had been moving at that nearjog for about fifteen minutes wjien they came upon a skeleton dressed in the remains of a rotting military uniform. There was still a flap of scalp on its head and tuft of listless black hair sprouting from it. The jaw grinned, as if welcoming them to the underworld. Lying on the floor beside the thing’s naked pelvis was a ring that had finally slipped from one of the moldering fingers of the dead man’s right Hand. Susannah asked Roland if she could have a closer look. He picked it up and handed it to her. She examined it just long enough to confirm what she had thought, then cast it aside. It made a little clink and then there were only the sounds of dripping water and the todash chimes, fainter now but persistent.

"What I thought," she said.

"Arid what was that?" he asked, moving on again.

"The guy was an Elk. My father had the same damn ring."

"An elk? I don’t understand."

"It’s a fraternal order. A kind of good-ole-boy ka-tet. But what in the hell would an Elk be doing down here? A Shriner, now, that I could understand." And she laughed, a trifle wildly.

The hanging bulbs were filled with some brilliant gas that pulsed with a rhythmic but not quite constant beat. Susannah knew there was something there to get, and after a litde while she got it. While Roland was hurrying, the pulse of the guidelights was rapid. When he slowed down (never stopping but conserving his energy, all the same), the pulse in the globes also slowed down. She didn’t think they were responding to his heartbeat, exactly, or hers, but that was part of it. (Had she known the term biorhythm, she would have seized upon it.)

Fifty yards or so ahead of their position at any given time, Main Street was dark. Then, one by one, the lights would come on as they approached. It was mesmerizing. She turned to look back-only once, she didn’t want to throw him off his stride-and saw that, yes, the lights were going dark again fifty yards or so behind. These lights were much brighter than the flickering globes at the entrance to Main Street, and she guessed that those ran off some other power-source, one that was (like almost everything else in this world) starting to give out. Then she noticed that one of the globes they were approaching remained dark. As they neared and then passed under it, she saw that it wasn’t completely dead; a dim core of illumination burned feebly deep inside, twitching to the beat of their bodies and brains. It reminded her of how you’d sometimes see a neon sign with one or more letters on the fritz, turning PABST into PA ST or TASTY BRATWURST into TASTY RATWURST. A hundred feet or so further on they came to another burnt-out bulb, then another, then two in a row.

"Chances are good we’re gonna be in the dark before long," she said glumly.

"I know," Roland said. He was starting to sound the teensiest bit out of breath.

The air was still dank, and a chill was gradually replacing the heat. There were posters on the walls, most rotted far beyond the point of readability. On a dry stretch of wall she saw one that depicted a man who had just lost an arena battle to a tiger. The big cat was yanking a bloody snarl of intestines from the screaming man’s belly while the crowd went nuts. There was one line of copy in half a dozen different languages. English was second from the top. VISIT CIRCUS MAXIMUS! YOU WILL CHEER! it said.

"Christ, Roland," Susannah said. "Christ almighty, what were they?"

Roland did not reply, although he knew the answer: they were folken who had run mad.

TEN

At hundred-yard intervals, little flights of stairs-the longest was only ten risers from top to bottom-took them gradually deeper into the bowels of the earth. After they’d gone what Susannah estimated to be a quarter of a mile, they came to a gate that had been torn away, perhaps by some sort of vehicle, and smashed to flinders. Here were more skeletons, so many that Roland had to tread upon some in order to pass. They did not crunch but made a damp puttering sound that was somehow worse. The smell that arose from them was sallow and wet. Most of the tiles had been torn away above these bodies, and those that were still on the walls had been pocked with bullet-

holes. A firefight, then. Susannah opened her mouth to say something about it, but before she could, that low thudding sound came again. She thought it was a little louder this time.

A little closer. She looked behind her again and saw nothing.

The lights fifty yards back were still going dark in a line.