The Dark Tower (16 page)

Walking slowly (Oy knew they were gaining, but he also knew that walking slowly was better than falling down), legs spread wide and shuffling along, holding Ake curled to his chest just as Mrs. Mislaburski had held her purse on those icy days, he made his way past the glass eyes. The hum faded. Was it far enough? He hoped so. Walking like a human was simply too hard, too nerve-wracking. So was being close to all of Ake’s thinking machinery. He felt an urge to turn and look at it—all those bright mirror surfaces!—but didn’t. To look might well bring on hypnosis. Or something worse.

He stopped. “Jake! Look! See!”

Jake tried to reply
Okay
and barked, instead. Pretty funny. He cautiously opened his eyes and saw tiled wall on both sides. There was grass and tiny sprays of fern still growing out of it, true enough, but it
was
tile. It
was
corridor. He looked behind him and saw the clearing. The triceratops had forgotten them. It was locked in a battle to the
death with the Tyrannasorbet, a scene he recalled with complete clarity from
The Lost Continent
. The girl with the bodacious ta-tas had watched the battle from the safety of Cesar Romero’s arms, and when the cartoon Tyrannasorbet had clamped its huge mouth over the triceratops’s face in a death-bite, the girl had buried her own face against Cesar Romero’s manly chest.

“Oy!” Jake barked, but barking was
lame
and he switched to thinking, instead.

Change back with me!

Oy was eager to comply—never had he wanted anything so much—but before they could effect the swap, the pursuers caught sight of them.

“Theah!
” shouted the one with the Boston accent—he who had proclaimed that the
Faddah
was
dinnah
. “Theah they aah! Get em! Shoot em!”

And, as Jake and Oy switched their minds back into their proper bodies, the first bullets began to flick the air around them like snapping fingers.

The fellow leading the pursuers was a man named Flaherty. Of the seventeen of them, he was the only hume. The rest save one were low men and vampires. The last was a taheen with the head of an intelligent stoat and a pair of huge hairy legs protruding from Bermuda shorts. Below the legs were narrow feet that ended in brutally sharp thorns. A single kick from one of Lamla’s feet could cut a full-grown man in half.

Flaherty—raised in Boston, for the last twenty years one of the King’s men in a score of late-twentieth-century New Yorks—had put together
his posse as fast as he could, in a nerve-roasting agony of fear and fury.
Nothing gets into the Pig
. That was what Sayre had told Meiman. And anything that
did
get in was not, under any circumstances, to be allowed out. That went double for the gunslinger or any of his ka-tet. Their meddling had long since passed the merely annoying stage, and you didn’t have to be one of the elite to know it. But now Meiman, who had been called the Canary by his few friends, was dead and the kid had somehow gotten past them. A
kid,
for God’s love! A fucking
kid!
But how were they to know that the two of them would have such a powerful totem as that turtle? If the damn thing hadn’t happened to bounce beneath one of the tables, it might be holding them in place still.

Flaherty knew it was true, but also knew that Sayre would never accept it as a valid argument. Would not even give him, Flaherty, a chance to put it forward. No, he would be dead long before that, and the others, as well. Sprawled on the floor with the doctor-bugs gorging on their blood.

It was easy to say that the kid would be stopped at the door, that he wouldn’t—
couldn’t
—know any of the authorization phrases that opened it, but Flaherty no longer trusted such ideas, tempting as they might be. All bets were off, and Flaherty felt a soaring sense of relief when he saw the kid and his furry little pal stopped up ahead. Several of the posse fired, but missed. Flaherty wasn’t surprised. There was some sort of green area between them and the kid, a fucking swatch of jungle under the city was what it looked like, and a mist was rising, making it hard to aim. Plus some kind of ridiculous cartoon dinosaurs! One of them raised its blood-smeared
head and roared at them, holding its tiny forepaws against its scaly chest.

Looks like a dragon,
Flaherty thought, and before his eyes the cartoon dinosaur
became
a dragon. It roared and spewed a jet of fire that set several dangling vines and a mat of hanging moss to burning. The kid, meanwhile, was on the move again.

Lamla, the stoat-headed taheen, pushed his way to the forefront and raised one furred fist to his forehead. Flaherty returned the salute impatiently. “What’s down theah, Lam? Do you know?”

Flaherty himself had never been below the Pig. When he traveled on business, it was always between New Yorks, which meant using either the door on Forty-seventh Street between First and Second, the one in the eternally empty warehouse on Bleecker Street (only in some worlds that one was an eternally half-completed building), or the one way up-town on Ninety-fourth Street. (The last was now on the blink much of the time, and of course nobody knew how to fix it.) There were other doors in the city—New York was lousy with portals to other wheres and whens—but those were the only ones that still worked.

And the one to Fedic, of course. The one up ahead.

“’Tis a mirage-maker,” the stoat-thing said. Its voice was wet and rumbling and very far from human. “‘Yon machine trolls for what ye fear and makes it real. Sayre would’ve turned it on when he and his tet passed with the blackskin jilly. To keep ’is backtrail safe, ye do ken.”

Flaherty nodded. A mind-trap. Very clever. Yet how good was it, really? Somehow the cursed shitting boy had passed, hadn’t he?

“Whatever the boy saw will turn into what
we
fear,” the taheen said. “It works on imagination.”

Imagination
. Flaherty seized on the word. “Fine. Whatevah they see down theah, tell em to just ignore it.”

He raised an arm to motion his men onward, greatly relieved by what Lam had told him. Because they had to press the chase, didn’t they? Sayre (or Walter o’ Dim, who was even worse) would very likely kill the lot of them if they failed to stop yon snot-babby. And Flaherty really
did
fear the idea of dragons, that was the other thing; had ever since his father had read him a story about such when he was a boy.

The taheen stopped him before he could complete the let’s-go gesture.

“What now, Lam?” Flaherty snarled.

“You don’t understand. What’s down there is real enough to kill you. To kill
all
of us.”

“What do
you
see, then?” This was no time to be curious, but that had always been Conor Flaherty’s curse.

Lamla lowered his head. “I don’t like to say. ’Tis bad enough. The point is, sai, we’ll die down there if we’re not careful. What happened to you might look like a stroke or a heart attack to a cut-em-up man, but t’would be whatever you see down there. Anyone who doesn’t think the imagination can kill is a fool.”

The rest had gathered behind the taheen now. They were alternating glances into the hazy clearing with looks at Lamla. Flaherty didn’t like what he saw on their faces, not a bit. Killing one or two of those least willing to veil their sullen eyes might restore the enthusiasm of the rest, but what good
would that do if Lamla was right? Cursed old people, always leaving their toys behind! Dangerous toys! How they complicated a man’s life! A pox on every last one!

“Then how do we get past?” Flaherty cried. “For that mattah, how did the
brat
get past?”

“Dunno about the brat,” Lamla said, “but all
we
need to do is shoot the projectors.”

“What
shitting projectors?”

Lamla pointed below . . . or along the course of the corridor, if what the ugly bastard said was true. “There,” Lam said. “I know you can’t see em, but take my word for it, they’re there. Either side.”

Flaherty was watching with a certain fascination as Jake’s misty jungle clearing continued to change before his eyes into the deep dark forest, as in
Once upon a time when everyone lived in the deep dark forest and nobody lived anywhere else, a dragon came to rampage
.

Flaherty didn’t know what Lamla and the rest of them were seeing, but before his eyes the dragon (which had been a Tyrannasorbet Wrecks not so long ago) obediently rampaged, setting trees on fire and looking for little Catholic boys to eat.

“I see
NOTHING!
” he shouted at Lamla. “I think youah out of your shitting
MIND!
”

“I’ve seen em turned off,” Lamla said quietly, “and can recall near about where they lie. If you’ll let me bring up four men and set em shooting on either side, I don’t believe it will take long to shut em down.”

And what will Sayre say when I tell him we shot the hell out of his precious mind-trap?
Flaherty could have said.
What will Walter o’ Dim say, for that mattah? For what’s roont can never be fixed, not by such as us who
know how to rub two sticks together and make a fire but not much more.

Could have said but didn’t. Because getting the boy was more important than any antique gadget of the old people, even one as amazing as yon mind-trap. And Sayre was the one who turned it on, wasn’t he? Say aye! If there was explaining to be done, let Sayre do it! Let him make his knee to the big boys and talk till they shut him up! Meanwhile, the gods-damned snot-babby continued to rebuild the lead that Flaherty (who’d had visions of being honored for stepping so promptly into the breach) and his men had so radically reduced. If only one of them had been lucky enough to hit the kid when he and his little furbag friend had been in view! Ah, but wish in one hand, shit in the other! See which one fills up first!

“Bring youah best shots,” Flaherty said in his Back Bay/John F. Kennedy accent. “Have at it.”

Lamla ordered three low men and one of the vamps forward, put two on each side, and talked to them rapidly in another language. Flaherty gathered that a couple of them had already been down here and, like Lam, remembered about where the projectors lay hidden in the walls.

Meanwhile, Flaherty’s dragon—or, more properly speaking, his
da’s
dragon—continued to rampage in the deep dark forest (the jungle was completely gone now) and set things on fire.

At last—although it seemed a very long time to Flaherty, it was probably less than thirty seconds—the sharpshooters began to fire. Almost immediately both forest and dragon paled before Flaherty’s eyes, turned into something that looked like overexposed movie footage.

“That’s one of em, cullies!
” Lamla yelled in a voice that became unfortunately ovine when it was raised.
“Pour it on! Pour it on for the love of your fathers!
”

Half this crew probably never had such a thing,
Flaherty thought morosely. Then came the clearly audible shatter-sound of breaking glass and the dragon froze in place with billows of flame issuing from its mouth and nostrils, as well as from the gills on the sides of its armored throat.

Encouraged, the sharpshooters began firing faster, and a few moments later the clearing and the frozen dragon both disappeared. Where they had been was only more tiled hallway, with the tracks of those who had recently passed this way marking the dust. On either side were the shattered projector portals.

“All right!” Flaherty yelled after giving Lamla an approving nod. “Now we’re going after the kid, and we’re going to double-time it, and we’re going to catch him, and we’re going to bring him back with his head on a stick! Are you with me?”

They roared savage agreement, none louder than Lamla, whose eyes glowed the same baleful yellow-orange as the dragon’s breath.

“Good, then!” Flaherty set off, roaring a tune any Marine drill-corps would have recognized:
“We don’t care how far you run
—
”

“WE DON’T CARE HOW FAR YOU RUN!
” they bawled back as they trotted four abreast through the place where Jake’s jungle had been. Their feet crunched in the shattered glass.

“We’ll bring you back before we’re done!
”

“WE’LL BRING YOU BACK BEFORE WE’RE DONE!
”

“You can run to Cain or Lud
—”

“YOU CAN RUN TO CAIN OR LUD!
”

“We’ll eat your balls and drink your blood!
”

They called it in return, and Flaherty picked up the pace yet a little more.

Jake heard them coming again, come-come-commala. Heard them promising to eat his balls and drink his blood.

Brag, brag, brag,
he thought, but tried to run faster, anyway. He was alarmed to find he couldn’t. Doing the mindswap with Oy had tired him out quite a little b—

No.

Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied. Jake had done his best to heed this advice, and as a result admitted that “being tired” no longer described his situation. The stitch in his side had grown fangs that had sunk deep into his armpit. He knew he had gained on his pursuers; he also knew from the shouted cadence-chant that they were making up the distance they’d lost. Soon they would be shooting at him and Oy again, and while men didn’t shoot for shit while they were running, someone could always get lucky.

Now he saw something up ahead, blocking the corridor. A door. As he approached it, Jake allowed himself to wonder what he’d do if Susannah wasn’t on the other side. Or if she was there but didn’t know how to help him.

Well, he and Oy would make a stand, that was all. No cover, no way to reenact Thermopylae Pass
this time, but he’d throw plates and take heads until they brought him down.

If he needed to, that was.

Maybe he would not.