The Dark Tower (Page 38)

Past LADING/LOST LUGGAGE was (reasonably enough, Susannah thought) SHIPPING OFFICE. The fellow with the white hair tried the door. It was locked. This seemed to please rather than upset him. "Dinky?" he said.

Dinky, it seemed, was the youngest of the three. He took hold of the knob and Susannah heard a snapping sound from somewhere inside. Dinky stepped back. This time when Ted tried the door, it opened easily. They stepped into a dim office bisected by a high counter. On it was a sign that almost made Susannah feel nostalgic: TAKE NUMBER AND WAIT, it said.

When the door was closed, Dinky once more grasped the knob. There was another brisk snap.

"You just locked it again," Jake said. He sounded accusing, but there was a smile on his face, and the color was coming back into his cheeks. "Didn’t you?"

"Not now, please," said the white-haired man-Ted. "No time. Follow me, please."

He flipped up a section of the counter and led them through. Behind it was an office area containing two robots that looked long dead, and three skeletons.

"Why the hell do we keep finding bones?" Eddie asked.

Like Jake he was feeling better and only thinking out loud, not really expecting an answer. He got one, however. From Ted.

"Do you know of the Crimson King, young man? You do, of course you do. I believe that at one time he covered this entire part of the world with poison gas. Probably for a lark. Killed almost everyone. The darkness you see is the lingering result.

He’s mad, of course. It’s a large part of the problem. In here."

He led them through a door marked PRIVATE and into a room that had once probably belonged to a high poobah in the wonderful world of shipping and lading. Susannah saw tracks on the floor, suggesting that this place had been visited recently.

Perhaps by these same three men. There was a desk beneath six inches of fluffy dust, plus two chairs and a couch. Behind the desk was a window. Once it had been covered with Venetian blinds, but these had collapsed onto the floor, revealing a vista as forbidding as it was fascinating. The land beyond Thunderclap Station reminded her of the flat, deserty wastes on the far side of the River Whye, but rockier and even more forbidding.

And of course it was darker.

Tracks (eternally halted trains sat on some of them) radiated out like strands of a steel spiderweb. Above them, a sky of darkest slate-gray seemed to sag almost close enough to touch.

Between the sky and the Earth the air was thick, somehow; Susannah found herself squinting to see things, although there seemed to be no actual mist or smog in the air.

"Dinky," the white-haired man said.

"Yes, Ted."

"What have you left for our friend The Weasel to find?"

"A maintenance drone," Dinky replied. "It’ll look like it found its way in through the Fedic door, set off the alarm, then got fried on some of the tracks at the far end of the switching-

yard. Quite a few are still hot. You see dead birds around em all the time, fried to a crisp, but even a good-sized rustie’s too small to trip the alarm. A drone, though… I’m pretty sure he’ll buy it. The Wease ain’t stupid, but it’ll look pretty believable."

"Good. That’s very good. Look yonder, gunslingers." Ted pointed to a sharp upthrust of rock on the horizon. Susannah could make it out easily; in this dark countryside all horizons seemed close. She could see nothing remarkable about it, though, only folds of deeper shadow and sterile slopes of tumbled rock. "That’s Can Steek-Tete."

"The Little Needle," Roland said.

"Excellent translation. It’s where we’re going."

Susannah’s heart sank. The mountain-or perhaps you called something like that a butte-had to be eight or ten miles away. At the very limit of vision, in any case. Eddie and Roland and the two younger men in Ted’s party couldn’t carry her that far, she didn’t believe. And how did they know they could trust these new fellows, anyway?

On the other hand, she thought, what choice do we have?

"You won’t need to be carried," Ted told her, "but Stanley can use your help. We’ll join hands, like folks at a seance. I’ll want you all to visualize that rock formation when we go through. And hold the name in the forefront of your mind:

Steek-Tete, the Little Needle."

"Whoa, whoa," Eddie said. They had approached yet another door, this one standing open on a closet. Wire hangers and one ancient red blazer hung in there. Eddie grasped Ted’s shoulder and swung him around. "Go through what? Go through where? Because if it’s a door like the last one-"

Ted looked up at Eddie-had to look up, because Eddie was taller-and Susannah saw an amazing, dismaying thing:

Ted’s eyes appeared to be shaking in their sockets. A moment later she realized this wasn’t actually the case. The man’s pupils were growing and then shrinking with eerie rapidity. It was as if they couldn’t decide if it was light or dark in here.

"It’s not a door we’re going through at all, at least not of the kinds with which you may be familiar. You have to trust me, young man. Listen."

They all fell silent, and Susannah could hear the snarl of approaching motors.

"That’s The Weasel," Ted told them. "He’ll have taheen with him, at least four, maybe half a dozen. If they catch sight of us in here, Dink and Stanley are almost certainly going to die.

They don’t have to catch us but only catch sight of us. We’re risking our lives for you. This isn’t a game, and I need you to stop asking questions and follow mel"

"We will," Roland said. "And we’ll think about the Little Needle."

"Steek-Tete," Susannah agreed.

"You won’t get sick again," Dinky said. "Promise."

"Thank God," Jake said.

"Thang-odd," Oy agreed.

Stanley, the third member of Ted’s party, continued to say nothing at all.

FOUR

It was just a closet, and an office closet, at that-narrow and musty. The ancient red blazer had a brass tag on the breast pocket with the words HEAD OF SHIPPING stamped on it. Stanley led the way to the back, which was nothing but a blank wall.

Coathangers jingled and jangled. Jake had to watch his step to keep from treading on Oy. He’d always been slightly prone to claustrophobia, and now he began to feel the pudgy fingers of the Panic-Man caressing his neck: first one side and then the other. The ‘Rizas clanked softly together in their bag. Seven people and one billy-bumbler crowding into an abandoned office closet? It was nuts. He could still hear the snarl of the approaching engines. The one in charge called The Weasel.

"Join hands," Ted murmured. "And concentrate."

"Steek-Tete," Susannah repeated, but to Jake she sounded dubious this time.

"Little Nee-" Eddie began, and then stopped. The blank wall at the end of the closet was gone. Where it had been was a small clearing with boulders on one side and a steep, scrubcrusted hillside on another. Jake was willing to bet that was Steek-Tete, and if it was a way out of this enclosed space, he was delighted to see it.

Stanley gave a little moan of pain or effort or both. The man’s eyes were closed and tears were trickling out from beneath the lids.

"Now," Ted said. "Lead us through, Stanley." To the others he added: "And help him if you can! Help him, for your fathers’ sakes!"

Jake tried to hold an image of the outcrop Ted had pointed to through the office window and walked forward, holding Roland’s hand ahead of him and Susannah’s behind him. He felt a breath of cold air on his sweaty skin and then stepped through onto the slope of Steek-Tete in Thunderclap, thinking just briefly of Mr. C. S. Lewis, and the wonderful wardrobe that took you to Narnia.

FIVE

They did not come out in Narnia.

It was cold on the slope of the butte, and Jake was soon shivering.

When he looked over his shoulder he saw no sign of the portal they’d come through. The air was dim and smelled of something pungent and not particularly pleasant, like kerosene.

There was a small cave folded into the flank of the slope (it was really not much more than another closet), and from it Ted brought a stack of blankets and a canteen that turned out to hold a sharp, alkali-tasting water. Jake and Roland wrapped themselves in single blankets. Eddie took two and bundled himself and Susannah together. Jake, trying not to let his teeth start chattering (once they did, there’d be no stopping them), envied the two of them their extra warmth.

Dink had also wrapped himself in a blanket, but neither Ted nor Stanley seemed to feel the cold.

"Look down there," Ted invited Roland and the others. He was pointing at the spiderweb of tracks. Jake could see the rambling glass roof of the switching-yard and a green-roofed structure next to it that had to be half a mile long. Tracks led away in every direction. Thunderclap Station, he marveled. Where the Wolves put the kidnapped kids on the train and send them along the Path of the Beam to Fedic. And where they bring them back after they ‘ve been roont.

Even after all he’d been through, it was hard for Jake to believe that they had been down there, six or eight miles away, less than two minutes ago. He suspected they’d all played a part in keeping the portal open, but it was the one called Stanley who’d created it in the first place. Now he looked pale and tired, nearly used up. Once he staggered on his feet and Dink (a very unfortunate nickname, in Jake’s humble opinion) grabbed his arm and steadied him. Stanley seemed not to notice. He was looking at Roland with awe.