The Waste Lands (Page 120)
“Not across, idiot child! Down! See them two dark cobblestones?” After a moment, Jake did. He nodded apathetically. “Yer don’t wanter step on em, for that’d bring the whole works down on your head, cully, and anybody who wanted yer after that’d have to pick yer up with a blotter. Understand?”
Jake nodded again.
“Good.” Gasher took a final deep breath and slapped Jake’s shoulder. “Go on, then, whatcher waitin for? Hup!”
Jake stepped over the first of the discolored stones and saw it wasn’t really a cobblestone at all but a metal plate which had been rounded to look like one. The second was just ahead of it, cunningly placed so that if an unaware intruder happened to miss the first one, he or she would almost certainly step on the second.
Go ahead and do it, then, he thought. Why not? The gunslinger’s never going to find you in this maze, so go ahead and bring it down. It’s got to be cleaner than what Gasher and his friends have got planned for you. Quicker, too. His dusty moccasin wavered in the air above the booby-trap. Gasher hit him with a fist in the middle of the back, but not hard. “Thinkin about takin a ride on the handsome, are you, my little cull?” he asked. The laughing cruelty in his voice had been replaced by simple curiosity. If it was tinged with any other emotion, it wasn’t fear but amusement. “Well, go ahead, if it’s what yer mean to do, for I have my ticket already. Only be quick about it, gods blast your eyes.”
Jake’s foot came down beyond the trigger of the booby-trap. His decision to live a little longer was not based on any hope that Roland would find him; it was just that this was what Roland would do—go on until someone made him stop, and then a few yards farther still if he could.
If he did it now, he could take Gasher with him, but Gasher alone wasn’t sufficient—one look was enough to make it clear that he was telling the truth when he said he was dying already. If he went on, he might have a chance to take some of the Gasherman’s friends, too— maybe even the one he called the Tick-Tock Man.
If I’m going to ride what he calls the handsome, Jake thought, I’d just as soon go with plenty of company.
Roland would have understood.
JAKE WAS WRONG IN his assessment of the gunslinger’s ability to follow their path through the maze; Jake’s pack was only the most obvious bit of sign they left behind them, but Roland quickly realized he did not have to pause to look for sign. He only had to follow Oy.
He paused at several intersecting passages nevertheless, wanting to make sure, and each time he did, Oy looked back and uttered his low, impatient bark that seemed to say, Hurry up! Do you want to lose them? After the signs he saw—a track, a thread from Jake’s shirt, a scrap of bright yellow cloth from Gasher’s scarf—had three times confirmed the bumbler’s choices, Roland simply followed Oy. He did not give up look-ing for sign, but he quit making stops to hunt for it. Then the drums started up, and it was the drums—plus Gasher’s nosiness about what Jake might be carrying—that saved Roland’s life that afternoon. He skidded to a halt in his dusty boots, and his gun was in his hand before he realized what the sound was. When he did realize, he dropped the revolver back into its holster with an impatient grunt. He was about to go on again when his eye happened first on Jake’s pack . . . and then on a pair of faint, gleaming streaks in midair just to the left of it. Roland narrowed his eyes and made out two thin wires which crisscrossed at knee level not three feet in front of him. Oy, who was built low to the ground, had scurried neatly through the inverted V formed by the wires, but if not for the drums and spotting Jake’s castoff pack, Roland would have run right into them. As his eyes moved upward, tracing the not-quite-random piles of junk poised on either side of the passageway at this point, Roland’s mouth tightened. It had been a close call, and only ka had saved him.
Oy barked impatiently.
Roland dropped to his belly and crawled beneath the wires, moving slowly and carefully—he was bigger than either Jake or Gasher, and he realized a really big man wouldn’t be able to get under here at all without triggering the carefully prepared avalanche. The drums pumped and thumped in his ears. I wonder if they’ve all gone mad, he thought. If I had to listen to that every day, I think I would have.
He got to the far side of the wires, picked up the pack, and looked inside. Jake’s books and a few items of clothing were still in there, so were the treasures he had picked up along the way—a rock which gleamed with yellow flecks that looked like gold but weren’t; an arrow-head, probably the leaving of the old forest folk, which Jake had found in a grove of trees the day after his drawing; some coins from his own world; his father’s sunglasses; a few other things which only a boy not yet in his teens could really love and understand. Things he would want back again … if, that was, Roland got to him before Gasher and his friends could change him, hurt him in ways that would cause him to lose interest in the innocent pursuits and curiosities of pre-adolescent boyhood.
Gasher’s grinning face swam into Roland’s mind like the face of a demon or a djinni from a bottle: the snaggle teeth, the vacant eyes, the mandrus crawling over the cheeks and spreading beneath the stubbly lines of the jaws. If you hurt him … he thought, and then forced his mind away, because that line of thought was a blind alley. If Gasher hurt the boy (Jake! his mind insisted fiercely—Not just the boy but Jake! Jake!), Roland would kill him, yes. But the act would mean nothing, for Gasher was a dead man already. The gunslinger lengthened the straps of the pack, marvelling at the clever buckles which made this possible, slipped it onto his own back, and stood up again. Oy turned to be off, but Roland called his name and the bumbler looked back.