The Dark Tower (Page 19)

Eventually his parents come back. Top Hat enjoys a week’s run on Million Dollar Movie and littleJakie’s night terrors are never mentioned.

Eventually he forgets his fear of the triceratops and the Tyrannasorbet.

SEVEN

Now, lying in the high green grass and peering into the misty clearing from between the leaves of a fern, Jake discovered that some things you neveriorgot.

Mind the mind-trap, Jochabim had said, and looking down at the lumbering dinosaur-a cartoon triceratops in a real jungle like an imaginary toad in a real garden-Jake realized that this was it. This was the mind-trap. The triceratops wasn’t real no matter how fearsomely it might roar, no matter that Jake could actually smell it-the rank vegetation rotting in the soft folds where its stubby legs met its stomach, the shit caked to its vast armor-plated rear end, the endless cud drooling between its tusk-edged jaws-and hear its panting breath. It couldn’tbe real, it was a cartoon, for God’s sake!

And yet he knew it was real enough to kill him. If he went down there, the cartoon triceratops would tear him apart just as it would have torn apart the Daisy Mae with die bodacious ta-tas if Cesar Romero hadn’t appeared in time to put a bullet into the thing’s One Vulnerable Spot with his big-game hunter’s rifle.

Jake had gotten rid of the hand that had tried to monkey with his motor controls-had slammed all those doors so hard he’d chopped off the hand’s intruding fingers, for all he knew-but this was different. He could not close his eyes and just walk by; that was a real monster his traitor mind had created, and it could really tear him apart.

There was no Cesar Romero here to keep it from happening.

No Roland, either.

There were only the low men, running his backtrail and getting closer all the time.

As if to emphasize this point, Oy looked back the way they’d come and barked once, piercingly loud.

The triceratops heard and roared in response. Jake expected Oy to shrink against him at that mighty sound, but Oy continued to look back over Jake’s shoulder. It was the low men Oy was worried about, not the triceratops below them or the Tyrannasorbet Wrecks that might come next, or-

Because Oy doesn’t see it, he thought.

He monkeyed with this idea and couldn’t pull it apart. Oy hadn’t smelled it or heard it, either. The conclusion was inescapable: to Oy the terrible triceratops in the mighty jungle below did not exist.

Which doesn’t change the fact that it does to me. It’s a trap that was set for me, or for anyone else equipped with an imagination who might happen along. Some gadget of the old people, no doubt. Too bad it’s not broken like most of their other stuff, but it’s not. I see what I see and there’s nothing I can do about i-

No, wait.

Wait just a second.

Jake had no idea how good his mental connection tp Oy actually was, but thought he would soon find out.

"Oy!"

The calling voices of the low men were now horribly close.

Soon they would see the boy and the bumbler stopped here and break into a charge. Oy could smell them coming but looked at Jake calmly enough anyway. At his beloved Jake, for whom he would die if called upon to do so.

"Oy, can you change places with me?"

It turned out that he could.

EIGHT

Oy tottered erect with Ake in his arms, swaying back and forth, horrified to discover how narrow the boy’s range of balance was. The idea of walking even a short distance on but two legs was terribly daunting, yet it would have to be done, and done at once. Ake said so.

For his part, Jake knew he would have to shut the borrowed eyes he was looking through. He was in Oy’s head but he could still see the triceratops; now he could also see a pterodactyl cruising the hot air above the clearing, its leathery wings stretched to catch the thermals blowing from the air-exchangers.

Oy! You have to do it on your own. And if we ‘re going to stay ahead of them you have to do it now.

Ake! Oy responded, and took a tentative step forward. The boy’s body wavered from side to side, out to the very edge of balance and then beyond. Ake’s stupid two-legs body tumbled sideways. Oy tried to save it and only made the tumble worse, going down on the boy’s right side and bumping Ake’s furry head.

Oy tried to bark his frustration. What came out of Ake’s mouth was a stupid thing that was more word than sound:

"Bark! Ark! SAif-barkl"

"I hear him!" someone shouted. "Run! Come on, doubletime, you useless cunts! Before the little bastard gets to the door!"

Ake’s ears weren’t keen, but with the way the tile walls magnified sounds, that was no problem. Oy could hear their running footfalls.

"You have to get up and go.I" Jake tried to yell, and what came out was a garbled, barking sentence: "Ake-Ake, affal Up n go!"

Under other circumstances it might have been funny, but not under these.

Oy got up by putting Ake’s back against the wall and pushing with Ake’s legs. At last he was getting the hang of the motor controls; they were in a place Ake called Dogan and were fairly simple. Off to the left, however, an arched corridor led into a huge room filled with mirror-bright machinery. Oy knew that if he went into that place-the chamber where Ake kept all his marvelous thoughts and his store of words-he would be lost forever.

Luckily, he didn’t need to. Everything he needed was in the Dogan. Left foot… forward. (And pause.) Right foot… forward.

(Andpause.) Hold die thing that looks like a billy-bumbler but is really your friend and use the other arm for balance.

Resist the urge to drop to all fours and crawl. The pursuers will catch up if he does that; he can no longer smell them (not Ake’s amazingly stupid little bulb of a snout), but he is sure of it, all the same.

For his part, Jake could smell them clearly, at least a dozen and maybe as many as sixteen. Their bodies were perfect engines of stink, and they pushed the aroma ahead of them in a dirty cloud. He could smell the asparagus one had had for dinner; could smell the meaty, wrong aroma of the cancer which was growing in another, probably in his head but perhaps in his throat.

Then he heard the triceratops roar again. It was answered by the bird-thing riding the air overhead.

Jake closed his-well, Oy’s-eyes. In the dark, the bumbler’s side-to-side motion was even worse. Jake was concerned that if he had to put up with much of it (especially with his eyes shut), he would ralph his guts out. Just call him ‘Bama the Seasick Sailor.

Go, Oy, he thought. Fast as you can. Don’t fall down again, but… fast as you can!

NINE

Had Eddie been there, he might have been reminded of Mrs.

Mislaburski from up the block: Mrs. Mislaburski in February, after a sleet storm, when the sidewalk was glazed with ice and not yet salted down. But, ice or no ice, she would not be kept from her daily chop or bit offish at the Castle Avenue Market

(or from mass on Sunday, for Mrs. Mislaburski was perhaps the most devout Catholic in Co-Op City). So here she came, thick legs spread, candy-pink in their support hose, one arm clutching her purse to her immense bosom, the other held out for balance, head down, eyes searching for the islands of ashes where some responsible building super had already been out (Jesus and Mother Mary bless those good men), also for the treacherous patches that would defeat her, that would send her whoopsy with her large pink knees flying apart, and down she’d come on her sit-upon, or maybe on her back, a woman could break her spine, a woman could be paralyzed like poor Mrs. Bernstein’s daughter that was in the car accident in Mamaroneck, such things happened. And so she ignored the catcalls of the children (Henry Dean and his little brother Eddie often among them) and went on her way, head down, arm outstretched for balance, sturdy black old lady’s purse curled to her midsection, determined that if she did go whoopsymy-daisy she would protect her purse and its contents at all costs, would fall on it like Joe Namath falling on the football after a sack.

So did Oy of Mid-World walk the body of Jake along a stretch of underground corridor that looked (to him, at least) pretty much like all the rest. The only difference he could see was the three holes on either side, with big glass eyes looking out of them, eyes that made a low and constant humming sound.

In his arms was something that looked like a bumbler with its eyes squeezed tightly shut. Had they been open, Jake might have recognized these things as projecting devices. More likely he would not have seen them at all.

Walking slowly (Oy knew they were gaining, but he also knew that walking slowly was better than falling down), legs spread wide and shuffling along, holding Ake curled to his chest just as Mrs. Mislaburski had held her purse on those icy days, he made his way past the glass eyes. The hum faded. Was it far enough? He hoped so. Walking like a human was simply too hard, too nerve-wracking. So was being close to all of Ake’s thinking machinery. He felt an urge to turn and look at it-all those bright mirror surfaces!-but didn’t. To look might well bring on hypnosis. Or something worse.

He stopped. "Jake! Look! See!"

Jake tried to reply Okay and barked, instead. Pretty funny.

He cautiously opened his eyes and saw tiled wall on both sides.

There was grass and tiny sprays of fern still growing out of it, true enough, but it was tile. It was corridor. He looked behind him and saw the clearing. The triceratops had forgotten them.

It was locked in a battle to the death with the Tyrannasorbet, a scene he recalled with complete clarity from The Lost Continent.

The girl with the bodacious ta-tas had watched the battle from the safety of Cesar Romero’s arms, and when the cartoon Tyrannasorbet had clamped its huge mouth over the triceratops’s face in a death-bite, the girl had buried her own face against Cesar Romero’s manly chest.