The Waste Lands (Page 140)

Oy gazed up into his face, saying nothing, not even Jake’s name. Roland had no idea if he had understood or not, but wasting time in ponderation would not help matters. He placed Oy in the ventilator shaft. The bumbler sniffed at the crumbles of dried moss, sneezed delicately, then only crouched there with the draft rippling through his long, silky fur, looking doubtfully at Roland with his strange eyes.

“Go and see and come back,” Roland repeated in a whisper, and Oy disappeared into the shadows, walking silently, claws retracted, on the pads of his paws. Roland drew his gun again and did the hardest thing. He waited. Oy returned less than three minutes later. Roland lifted him out of the shaft and put him on the floor. Oy looked up at him with his long neck extended. “How many, Oy?” Roland asked. “How many did you see?” For a long moment he thought the bumbler wouldn’t do anything except go on staring in his anxious way. Then he lifted his right paw tentatively in the air, extended the claws, and looked at it, as if trying to remember something very difficult. At last he began to tap on the steel floor. One . . . two . . . three . . . four. A pause. Then two more, quick and delicate, the extended claws clicking lightly on the steel: five, six. Oy paused a second time, head down, looking like a child lost in the throes of some titanic mental struggle. Then he tapped his claws one final time on the steel, looking up at Roland as he did it. “Ake!” Six. Grays . . . and Jake.

Roland picked Oy up and stroked him. “Good!” he murmured into Oy’s ear. In truth, he was almost overwhelmed with surprise and grati-tude. He had hoped for something, but this careful response was amaz-ing. And he had few doubts about the accuracy of the count. “Good boy!”

“Oy! Ake!”

Yes, Jake. Jake was the problem. Jake, to whom he had made a promise he intended to keep.

The gunslinger thought deeply in his strange fashion—that combina-tion of dry pragmatism and wild intuition which had probably come from his strange grandmother, Deidre the Mad, and had kept him alive all these years after his old companions had passed. Now he was depending on it to keep Jake alive, too. He picked Oy up again, knowing Jake might live—might—but the bumbler was almost certainly going to die. He whispered several simple words into Oy’s cocked ear, repeating them over and over. At last he ceased speaking and returned him to the ventilator shaft. “Good boy,” he whispered. “Go on, now. Get it done. My heart goes with you.”

“Oy! Art! Ake!” the bumbler whispered, and then scurried off into the darkness again.

Roland waited for all hell to break loose.

ASK ME A QUESTION, Eddie Dean of New York. And it better be a good one . . . if it’s not, you and your woman are going to die, no matter where you came from. And, dear God, how did you respond to something like that? The dark red light had gone out; now the pink one reappeared. “Hurry,” the faint voice of Little Blaine urged them. “He’s worse than ever before . . . hurry or he’ll kill you!”

Eddie was vaguely aware that flocks of disturbed pigeons were still swooping aimlessly through the Cradle, and that some of them had smashed headfirst into the pillars and dropped dead on the floor. “What does it want?” Susannah hissed at the speaker and the voice of Little Blaine somewhere behind it. “For God’s sake, what does it want?” No reply. And Eddie could feel any period of grace they might have started with slipping away. He thumbed the TALK/LISTEN and spoke with frantic vivacity as the sweat trickled down his cheeks and neck. Ask me a question.

“So—Blaine! What have you been up to these last few years? I guess you haven’t been doing the old southeast run, huh? Any reason why not? Haven’t been feeling up to snuff?”

No sound but the rustle and flap of the pigeons. In his mind he saw Ardis trying to scream as his cheeks melted and his tongue caught fire. He felt the hair on the nape of his neck stirring and clumping together. Fear? Or gathering electricity?

Hurry . . . he’s worse than ever before. “Who built you, anyway?” Eddie asked frantically, thinking: If I only knew what the f**king thing wanted! “Want to talk about that? Was it the Grays? Nah . . . probably the Great Old Ones, right? Or . . .” He trailed off. Now he could feel Blaine’s silence as a physical weight on his skin, like fleshy, groping hands.

“What do you want?” he shouted. “Just what in hell do you want to hear?” No answer—but the buttons on the box were glowing an angry dark red again, and Eddie knew their time was almost up. He could hear a low buzzing sound nearby—a sound like an electrical generator—and he didn’t believe that sound was just his imagination, no matter how much he wanted to think so. “Blaine!” Susannah shouted suddenly. “Blaine, do you hear me?” No answer . . . and Eddie felt the air was filling up with electricity as a bowl under a tap fills up with water. He could feel it crackling bitterly in his nose with every breath he took; could feel his fillings buzzing like angry insects. “Blaine, I’ve got a question, and it is a pretty good one! Listen!” She closed her eyes for a moment, fingers rubbing frantically at her temples, and then opened her eyes again. ” ‘There is a thing that . . . uh . . . that nothing is, and yet it has a name; ’tis sometimes tall and . . . and sometimes short . . .’ ” She broke off and stared at Eddie with wide, agonized eyes. “Help me! I can’t remember how the rest of it goes!”

Eddie only stared at her as if she had gone mad. What in the name of God was she talking about? Then it came to him, and it made a weirdly perfect sense, and the rest of the riddle clicked into his mind as neatly as the last two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He swung toward the speaker again. ” ‘It joins our talks, it joins our sport, and plays at every game.’ What is it? That’s our question, Blaine—what is it?” The red light illuminating the COMMAND and ENTER buttons below the diamond of numbers blinked out. There was an endless moment of silence before Blaine spoke again . . . but Eddie was aware that the feeling of electricity crawling all over his skin was diminishing.