The Waste Lands (Page 28)

“Everything in the world is either coming to rest or falling to pieces,” he said flatly. “At the same time, the forces which interlock and give the world its coherence—in time and size as well as in space—are weakening. We knew that even as children, but we had no idea what the time of the end would be like. How could we? Yet now I am living in those times, and I don’t believe they affect my world alone. They affect yours, Eddie and Susannah; they may affect a billion others. The Beams are breaking down. I don’t know if that’s a cause or only another symptom, but I know it’s true. Come! Draw close! Listen!” As Eddie approached the metal box with its alternating diagonal slashes of yellow and black, a strong and unpleasant memory seized him—for the first time in years he found himself thinking of a crumbling Victorian wreck in Dutch Hill, about a mile away from the neighborhood he and Henry had grown up. This wreck, which was known as The Mansion to the neighborhood kids, occupied a plot of weedy, untended lawn on Rhinehold Street. Eddie guessed that practically all the kids in the borough had heard spooky stories about The Mansion. The house stood slumped beneath its steep roofs, seeming to glare at passersby from the deep shadows thrown by its eaves. The windows were gone, of course—kids can throw rocks through windows without getting too close to a place—hut it had not been spray-painted, and it had not become a make-out spot or a shooting gallery. Oddest of all was the simple fact of its continued existence: no one had set it on fire to collect the insurance or just to see it bum. The kids said it was haunted, of course, and as Eddie stood on the sidewalk with Henry one day, looking at it (they had made the pilgrimage specifically to see this object of fabulous rumor, although Henry had told their mother they were only going for Hoodsie Rockets at Dahlberg’s with some of his friends), it had seemed that it really might be haunted. Hadn’t he felt some strong and unfriendly force seeping from that old Victorian’s shadowy windows, windows that seemed to look at him with the fixed stare of a dangerous lunatic? Hadn’t he felt some subtle wind stirring the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck? Hadn’t he had the clear intuition that if he stepped inside that place, the door would slam and lock behind him and the walls would begin to close in, grinding the bones of dead mice to powder, wanting to crush his bones the same way? Haunting. Haunted.

He felt that same old sense of mystery and danger now, as he approached the metal box. Gooseflesh began to ripple up his legs and down his arms; the hair on the back of his neck bushed out and became rough, overlapping hackles. He felt that same subtle wind blowing past him, although the leaves on the trees which ringed the clearing were perfectly still. Yet he walked toward the door anyway (for that was what it was, of course, another door, although this one was locked and always would be against the likes of him), not stopping until his ear was pressed against it. It was as if he had dropped a tab of really strong acid half an hour ago and it was just beginning to come on heavy. Strange colors flowed across the darkness behind his eyeballs. He seemed to hear voices mur-muring up to him from long hallways like stone throats, halls which were lit with guttering electric torches. Once these flambeaux of the modern age had thrown a bright glare across everything, but now they were only sullen cores of blue light. He sensed emptiness . . . desertion . . . desola-tion . . . death.

The machinery rumbled on and on, but wasn’t there a rough under-tone to the sound? A land of desperate thudding beneath the hum, like the arrhythmia of a diseased heart? A feeling that the machinery produc-ing this sound, although far more sophisticated even than that within the bear had been, was somehow falling out of tune with itself?

“All is silent in the halls of the dead,” Eddie heard himself whisper in a falling, fainting voice. “All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin. These are the halls of the dead where the spiders spin and the great circuits tall quiet, one by one.”

Roland pulled him roughly back, and Eddie looked at him with dazed eyes. “That’s enough,” Roland said.

“Whatever they put in there isn’t doing so well, is it?” Eddie heard himself ask. His trembling voice seemed to come from far away. He could still feel the power coming out of that box. It called to him. “No. Nothing in my world is doing so well these days.” “If you boys are planning to camp here for the night, you’ll have to do without the pleasure of my company,” Susannah said. Her face was a white blur in the ashy aftermath of twilight. “I’m going over yonder. I don’t like the way that thing makes me feel.”

“We’ll all camp over yonder,” Roland said. “Let’s go.” “What a good idea,” Eddie said. As they moved away from the box, the sound of the machinery began to dim. Eddie felt its hold on him weakening, although it still called to him, invited him to explore the half-lit hallways, the standing stairways, the rooms of ruin where the spiders spun and the control panels were going dark, one by one.

IN His DREAM THAT night, Eddie again went walking down Second Ave-nue toward Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth. He passed a record store and the Rolling Stones boomed from the speakers: “I see a red door and I want to paint it black, No colours anymore, I want them to turn black, I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes, I have to turn my head until my darkness goes …” He walked on, passing a store called Reflections of You between Forty-ninth and Forty-eighth. He saw himself in one of the mirrors hang-ing in the display window. He thought he looked better than he had in years—hair a little too long, but otherwise tanned and fit. The clothes, though . . . uh-uh, man. Square-bear shit all the way. Blue blazer, white shirt, dark red tie, gray dress pants … he had never owned a yuppie-from-hell outfit like that in his life. Someone was shaking him.