The Waste Lands (Page 132)

Thunder rumbled across the sky. They flinched, then laughed together.

“Come on,” he said. “This is nuts. The time’s all wrong.” She didn’t contradict him, but she squeezed him again before returning her hand to his shoulder. Eddie felt a pang of regret as he swung her back into her chair and ran her across vast flagstones and under cover of the roof. He thought he saw the same regret in Susannah’s eyes.

When they were out of the downpour, Eddie paused and they looked back. The Plaza of the Cradle, The Street of the Turtle, and all the city beyond was rapidly disappearing into a shifting gray curtain. Eddie wasn’t a bit sorry. Lud hadn’t earned itself a place in his mental scrapbook of fond memories. “Look,” Susannah murmured. She was pointing at a nearby down-spout. It ended in a large, scaly fish-head that looked like a close relation to the dragon-gargoyles which decorated the corners of the Cradle. Water ran from its mouth in a silver torrent.

“This isn’t just a passing shower, is it?” Eddie asked. “Nope. It’s gonna rain until it gets tired of it, and then it’s gonna rain some more, just for spite. Maybe a week; maybe a month. Not that it’s gonna matter to us, if Blaine decides he doesn’t like our looks and fries us. Fire a shot to let Roland know we got here, sugar, and then we’ll have us a look around. See what we can see.”

Eddie pointed the Ruger into the gray sky, pulled the trigger, and fired the shot, which Roland heard a mile or more away, as he followed Jake and Gasher through the booby-trapped maze. Eddie stood where he was a moment longer, trying to persuade himself that things might still turn out all right, that his heart was wrong in its stubborn insistence that they had seen the last of the gunslinger and the boy Jake. Then he made the automatic safe again, returned it to the waistband of his pants, and went back to Susannah. He turned her chair away from the steps and rolled her along an aisle of columns which led deeper into the build-ing. She popped the cylinder of Roland’s gun and reloaded it as they went.

Under the roof the rain had a secret, ghostly sound and even the harsh thundercracks were muted. The columns which supported the structure were at least ten feet in diameter, and their tops were lost in the gloom. From up there in the shadows, Eddie heard the cooing con-versation of pigeons. Now a sign hanging on thick chrome-silver chains swam out of the shadows: NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS WELCOMES YOU TO THE CRADLE OF LUD NORTHWEST TRAVEL (PATRICIA)

“Now we know the name of the one that fell in the river,” Eddie said. “Patricia. They got their colors wrong, though. It’s supposed to be pink for girls and blue for boys, not the other way around.”

“Maybe they’re both blue.”

“They’re not. Blaine’s pink.”

“How would you know that?”

Eddie looked confused. “I don’t know how . . . but I do.” They followed the arrow pointing toward Blaine’s berth, entering what had to be a grand concourse. Eddie didn’t have Susannah’s ability to see the past in clear, visionary flashes, but his imagination nonetheless filled this vast, pillared space with a thousand hurrying people; he heard clicking heels and murmuring voices, saw embraces of homecoming and farewell. And over everything, the speakers chanting news of a dozen different destinations. Patricia is now boarding for Northwest Baronies . . . Will Passenger Killington, passenger Killington, please report to the information booth on the lower level?

Blaine is now arriving at Berth #2, and will be debarking shortly . . . Now there was only the pigeons.

Eddie shivered.

“Look at the faces,” Susannah murmured. “I don’t know if they give you the willies, but they sure do me.” She was pointing to the right. High up on the wall, a series of sculpted heads seemed to push out of tin- marble, peering down at them from the shadows—stern men with the harsh faces of executioners who are happy in their work. Some of the faces had fallen from their places and lay in granite shards and splinters seventy or eighty feet below their peers. Those remaining were spider-webbed with cracks and splattered with pigeon dung.

“They must have been the Supreme Court, or something,” Eddie said, uneasily scanning all those thin lips and cracked, empty eyes. “Only judges can look so smart and so completely pissed off at the same time— you’re talking to a guy who knows. There isn’t one of them who looks like he’d give a crippled crab a crutch.”

“‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter,’ ” Susannah murmured, and at these words Eddie felt gooseflesh waltz across the skin of his arms and chest and legs. “What’s that, Suze?”

“A poem by a man who must have seen Lud in his dreams,” she said. “Come on, Eddie. Forget them.”

“Easier said than done.” But he began to push her again. Ahead, a vast grilled barrier like a castle barbican swam out of the gloom . . . and beyond it, they caught their first glimpse of Blaine the Mono. It was pink, just as Eddie had said it would be, a delicate shade which matched the veins running through the marble pillars. Blaine flowed above the wide loading platform in a smooth, streamlined bullet shape which looked more like flesh than metal. Its surface was broken only once—by a triangular window equipped with a huge wiper. Eddie knew there would be another triangular window with another big wiper on the other side of the mono’s nose, so that if you looked at Blaine head-on, it would seem to have a face, just like Charlie the Choo-Choo. The wipers would look like slyly drooping eyelids. White light from the southeastern slot in the Cradle fell across Blaine in a long, distorted rectangle. To Eddie, the body of the train looked like the breaching back of some fabulous pink whale—one that was utterly silent. “Wow.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. “We found it.” “Yes. Blaine the Mono.”