The Dark Tower (Page 37)

"Then go on and go for it," Eddie said. "Let’s boogie."

They crowded close behind Roland. Eddie was once more holding Susannah on his hip and Jake had picked Oy up. The bumbler was panting through his usual cheery grin and inside their gold rings his eyes were as bright as polished onyx.

"What do we do-" if it’s lockedwas how Jake meant to finish, but before he could, Roland turned the knob with his right hand (he had his remaining gun in the left) and pulled the door open. Behind the wall, the machinery cycled up a notch, the sound of it growing almost desperate. Jake thought he could smell something hot: burning insulation, maybe. He was just telling himself to stop imagining things when a number of overhead fans started up. They were as loud as taxiing fighter airplanes in a World War II movie, and they all jumped. Susannah actually put a hand on her head, as if to shield it from falling objects.

"Come on," Roland snapped. "Quick." He stepped through without a backward look. During the brief moment when he was halfway through, he seemed to be broken into two pieces.

Beyond the gunslinger, Jake could see a vast and gloomy room, much bigger than the Staging Area. And silvery crisscrossing lines that looked like dashes of pure light.

"Go on, Jake," Susannah said. ‘You next."

Jake took a deep breath and stepped through. There was no riptide, such as they’d experienced in the Cave of Voices, and no jangling chimes. No sense of going todash, not even for a moment. Instead there was a horrid feeling of being turned inside-out, and he was attacked by the most violent nausea he had ever known. He stepped downward, and his knee buckled.

A moment later he was on both knees. Oy spilled out of his arms. Jake barely noticed. He began to retch. Roland was on all fours next to him, doing the same. From somewhere came steady low chugging sounds, the persistent ding-ding-ding-ding of a bell, and an echoing amplified voice.

Jake turned his head, meaning to tell Roland that now he understood why they sent robot raiders through their damned door, and then he vomited again. The remains of his last meal ran steaming across cracked concrete.

All at once Susannah was crying "No! No!" in a distraught voice. Then "Put me down! Eddie, put me down before I-"

Her voice was interrupted by harsh yarking sounds. Eddie managed to deposit her on the cracked concrete before turning his head andjoining the Upchuck Chorus.

Oy fell on his side, hacked hoarsely, then got back on his feet. He looked dazed and disoriented… or maybe Jake was only attributing to the bumbler the way he felt himself.

The nausea was beginning to fade a little when he heard clacking, echoing footfalls. Three men were hurrying toward them, all dressed in jeans, blue chambray shirts, and odd, homemade-looking footwear. One of them, an elderly gent with a mop of untidy white hair, was ahead of the other two. All three had their hands in the air.

"Gunslingers!" cried the man with the white hair. "Are you gunslingers? If you are, don’t shoot! We’re on your side!"

Roland, who looked in no condition to shoot anyone (Not that I’d want to test that, Jake thought), tried to get up, almost made it, then went back to one knee and made another strangled retching sound. The man with the white hair seized one of his wrists and hauled him up without ceremony.

"The sickness is bad," the old man said, "no one knows it any better than I. Fortunately it passes rapidly. You have to come with us right away. I know how little you feel like it but you see, there’s an alarm in the ki’-dam’s study and-"

He stopped. His eyes, almost as blue as Roland’s, were widening. Even in the gloom Jake could see the old guy’s face losing its color. His friends had caught up with him, but he seemed not to notice. It was Jake Chambers he was looking at.

"Bobby?" he said in a voice that was not much more than a whisper. "My God, is it Bobby Garfield?"

Chapter V:STEEK-TETE

ONE

The white-haired gent’s companions were a good deal younger

(one looked to Roland hardly out of his teens), and both seemed absolutely terrified. Afraid of being shot by mistake, of course-that was why they’d come hurrying out of the gloom with dieir hands raised-but of something else, as well, because it must be clear to them now that they weren’t going to be assassinated out of hand.

The older man gave an almost spastic jerk, pulling himself out of some private place. "Of course you’re not Bobby," he murmured. "Hair’s the wrong color, for one thing… and-"

"Ted, we have to get outoi here," the youngest of the three said urgently. "And I mean inmediatamento."

"Yes," the older man said, but his gaze remained on Jake. He put a hand over his eyes (to Eddie he looked like a carny mentalist getting ready to go into his big thought-reading routine),

then lowered it again. "Yes, of course." He looked at Roland.

"Are you the dinh? Roland of Gilead? Roland of the Eld?"

"Yes, I-" Roland began, then bent over and retched again.

Nothing came out but a long silver string of spittle; he’d already lost his share of Nigel’s soup and sandwiches. Then he raised a slightly trembling fist to his forehead in greeting and said,

"Yes. You have the advantage of me, sai."

"That doesn’t matter," the white-haired man replied. "Will you come with us? You and your ka-tet?"

"To be sure," Roland said.

Behind him, Eddie bent over and vomited again. "Goddamn!"

he cried in a choked voice. "And I thought going Greyhound was bad! That thing makes the bus look like a… a…"

"Like a first-class stateroom on the Queen Mary," Susannah said in a weak voice.

"Come… on!" the youngest man said in an urgent voice.

"If The Weasel’s on the way with his taheen posse, he’ll be here in five minutes! That cat can scrambler

"Yes," the man with the white hair agreed. "We really must go, Mr. Deschain."

"Lead," Roland said. "We’ll follow."

TWO

They hadn’t come out in a train station but rather in some sort of colossal roofed switching-yard. The silvery lines Jake had seen were crisscrossing rail-lines, perhaps as many as seventy different sets of tracks. On a couple of them, stubby, automated engines went back and forth on errands that had to be centuries outdated. One was pushing a flatcar filled with rusty I-beams. The other began to cry in an automated voice: "Will a Camka-A please go to Portway 9. Camka-A to Portway 9, if you please."

Pogo-sticking up and down on Eddie’s hip began to make Susannah feel sick to her stomach all over again, but she’d caught the white-haired man’s urgency like a cold. Also, she now knew what the taheen were: monstrous creatures with the bodies of human beings and the heads of either birds or beasts.

They reminded her of the things in that Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.

"I may have to puke again, sugarbunch," she said. "Don’t you dare slow down if I do."

Eddie made a grunting sound she took for an affirmative.

She could see sweat pouring down his pale skin and felt sorry for him. He was as sick as she was. So now she knew what it was like to go through a scientific teleportation device that was clearly no longer working very well. She wondered if she would ever be able to bring herself to go through another one.

Jake looked up and saw a roof made of a million panes of different shapes and sizes; it was like looking at a tile mosaic painted a uniform dark gray. Then a bird flew through one of them, and he realized those weren’t tiles up there but panels of glass, some of them broken. That dark gray was apparently just how the outside world looked in Thunderclap. Like a constant eclipse, he thought, and shivered. Beside him, Oy made another series of those hoarse hacking sounds and then trotted on, shaking his head.

THREE

They passed a clutter of beached machinery-generators, maybe-then entered a maze of helter-skelter traincars that were very different from those hauled by Blaine the Mono.

Some looked to Susannah like the sort of New York Central commuter cars she might have seen in Grand Central Station in her own when of 1964. As if to underline this notion, she noticed one with BAR CAR printed on the side. Yet there were others that appeared much older than that; made of dark riveted tin or steel instead of brushed chrome, they looked like the sort of passenger cars you’d see in an old Western movie, or a TV show like Maverick. Beside one of these stood a robot with wires sprouting crazily from its neck. It was holding its head-which wore a hat with a badge reading CLASS A CONDUCTOR on it-beneath one arm.

At first Susannah tried to keep count of the lefts and rights they were making in this maze, then gave it up as a bad job.

They finally emerged about fifty yards from a clapboard-sided hut with the alliterative message LADING/LOST LUGGAGE over the door. The intervening distance was an apron of cracked concrete scattered with abandoned luggage-carts, stacks of crates, and two dead Wolves. No, Susannah thought, make that three. The third one was leaning against the wall in the deeper shadows just around the corner from LADING/LOST LUGGAGE.

"Come on," said the old man with the mop of white hair, "not much further, now. But we have to hurry, because if the taheen from Heartbreak House catch us, they’ll kill you."

"They’d kill us, too," said the youngest of the three. He brvished his hair out of his eyes. "All except for Ted. Ted’s only one of us who’s indispensable. He’s just too modest to say so."