The Waste Lands (Page 135)

So now you have to help yourself, he thought. You woke it up; deal with it, for Christ’s sake!

Eddie reached out and pushed the button again. “My name is Eddie Dean. The woman with me is my wife, Susannah. We’re . . .” He looked at Susannah, who nodded and made frantic motions for him to go on. “We’re on a quest. We seek the Dark Tower which lies in the Path of the Beam. We’re in the company of two others, Roland of Gilead and . . . and Jake of New York. We’re from New York too. If you’re—” He paused for a moment, biting back the words Big Blaine. If he used them, he might make the intelligence behind the voice aware that they had heard another voice; a ghost inside the ghost, so to speak.

Susannah gestured again for him to go on, using both hands. “If you’re Blaine the Mono . . . well … we want you to take us.” He released the button. There was no response for what seemed like a very long time, only the agitated flutter of the disturbed pigeons from overhead. When Blaine spoke again, his voice came only from the speaker-box mounted on the gate and sounded almost human.

“DO NOT TRY MY PATIENCE. ALL THE DOORS TO THAT WHERE ARE CLOSED. GILEAD IS NO MORE, AND THOSE KNOWN AS GUNSLINGERS ARE ALL DEAD. NOW ANSWER MY QUESTION: WHO ARE YOU? THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.”

There was a sizzling sound. A ray of brilliant blue-white light lanced down from the ceiling and seared a hole the size of a golf-ball in the marble floor less than five feet to the left of Susannah’s wheelchair. Smoke that smelled like the aftermath of a lightning-bolt rose lazily from it. Susannah and Eddie stared at each other in mute terror for a moment, and then Eddie lunged for the communicator-box and thumbed the button. “You’re wrong! We did come from New York! We came through the doors, on the beach, only a few weeks ago!”

“It’s true!” Susannah called. “I swear it is!” Silence. Beyond the long barrier, Blaine’s pink back humped smoothly. The window at the front seemed to regard them like a vapid glass eye. The wiper could have been a lid half-closed in a sly wink.

“PROVE IT,” Blaine said at last.

“Christ, how do I do that?” Eddie asked Susannah. “I don’t know.”

Eddie pushed the button again. “The Statue of Liberty! Does that ring a bell?” “GO ON,” Blaine said. Now the voice sounded almost thoughtful. “The Empire State Building! The Stock Exchange! The World Trade Center! Coney Island Red-Hots! Radio City Music Hall! The East Vil—” Blaine cut him off . . . and now, incredibly, the voice which came from the speaker was the drawling voice of John Wayne. “OKAY, PILGRIM. I BELIEVE YOU.”

Eddie and Susannah shared another glance, this one of confusion and relief. But when Blaine spoke again, the voice was again cold and emotionless. “ASK ME A QUESTION, EDDIE DEAN OF NEW YORK. AND IT BETTER BE A GOOD ONE.” There was a pause, and then Blaine added: “BECAUSE IF IT’S NOT, YOU AND YOUR WOMAN ARE GOING TO DIE, NO MATTER WHERE YOU CAME FROM.” Susannah looked from the box on the gate to Eddie. “What’s it talking about?” she hissed.

Eddie shook his head. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

To JAKE, THE ROOM Gasher dragged him into looked like a Minuteman missile silo which had been decorated by the inmates of a lunatic asylum: part museum, part living room, part hippie crash pad. Above him, empty space vaulted up to a rounded ceiling and below him it dropped seventy-five or a hundred feet to a similarly rounded base. Running all around the single curved wall in vertical lines were tubes of neon in alternating strokes of color: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, peach, pink. These long tubes came together in roaring rainbow knots at the bottom and top of the silo … if that was what it had been. The room was about three-quarters of the way up the vast capsule-shaped space and floored with rusty iron grillework. Rugs that looked Turkish (he later learned that such rugs were actually from a barony called Kashmin) lay on the grilled floor here and there. Their corners were held down with brass-bound trunks or standing lamps or the squat legs of over-stuffed chairs. If not, they would have flapped like strips of paper tied to an electric fan, because a steady warm draft rushed up from below. Another draft, this one issuing from a circular band of venti-lators like the ones in the tunnel they had followed here, swirled about four or five feet above Jake’s head. On the far side of the room was a door identical to the one through which he and Gasher had entered, and Jake assumed it was a continuation of the subterranean corridor following the Path of the Beam.

There were half a do/en people in the room, four men and two women. Jake guessed that he was looking at the Gray high command— if, that was, there were enough Grays left to warrant a high command. None of them were young, but all were still in the prime of their lives. They looked at Jake as curiously as he looked at them.

Sitting in the center of the room, with one massive leg thrown casu-ally over the arm of a chair big enough to be a throne, was a man who looked like a cross between a Viking warrior and a giant from a child’s fairy-tale. His heavily muscled upper body was naked except for a silver band around one bicep, a knife-scabbard looped over one shoulder, and a strange charm about his neck. His lower body was clad in soft, tight-fitting leather breeches which were tucked into high boots. He wore a yellow scarf tied around one of these. His hair, a dirty gray-blonde, cas-caded almost to the middle of his broad back; his eyes were as green and curious as the eyes of a tomcat who is old enough to be wise but not old enough to have lost that refined sense of cruelty which passes for fun in feline circles. Hung by its strap from the back of the chair was what looked like a very old machine-gun.