The Waste Lands (28 page)

No, of course not,
Jake said. He spoke apologetically.
It’s just that I’ve been cut in two for the last three weeks or so.
He dipped and shot from mid-court. The ball arched high and dropped silently through the hoop. He was delighted . . . but he discovered he was also afraid of what this strange boy might have to tell him.

I know,
the boy said.
It’s been a bitch for you, hasn’t it?
He was wearing faded madras shorts and a yellow T-shirt that said NEVER A DULL MOMENT IN MID-WORLD. He had tied a green bandanna around his forehead to keep his hair out of his eyes.
And things are going to get worse before they get better
.

What is this place?
Jake asked.
And who are you?

That didn’t seem to make sense, and yet somehow it did. Jake told himself that things always seemed that way in dreams, but this didn’t really
feel
like a dream.

As for me, I don’t matter much
, the boy said. He hooked the basketball over his shoulder. It rose, then dropped smoothly through the hoop.
I’m supposed to guide you, that’s all. I’ll take you where you need to go, and I’ll show you what you need to see, but you have to be careful because I won’t know you. And strangers make Henry nervous. He can get mean when he’s nervous, and he’s bigger than you.

Who’s Henry?
Jake asked
.

The boy looked at Jake. There was both pity and fear in his eyes. Jake suddenly realized that the boy was starting to
fade
—he could see the yellow and black slashes on the box right through the boy’s yellow T-shirt.

How will I find you?
Jake was suddenly terrified that the boy would melt away completely before he could say everything Jake needed to hear.

No problem,
the boy said. His voice had taken on a queer, chiming echo.
Just take the subway to Co-Op City. You’ll find me.

Now the boy was just a milky outline. Only his hazel eyes were still completely there, like the Cheshire cat’s grin in
Alice.
They regarded Jake with compassion and anxiety.
No problem-o,
he said.
You found the key and the rose, didn’t you? You’ll find me the same way. This afternoon, Jake. Around three o’clock should be good. You’ll have to be careful, and you’ll have to be quick.
He paused, a ghostly boy with an old basketball lying near one transparent foot.
I have to go now . . . but it was good to meet you. You seem like a nice kid, and I’m not surprised he loves you. Remember, there’s danger, though. Be careful . . . and be quick
.

Wait!
Jake yelled, and ran across the basketball court toward the disappearing boy. One of his feet struck a shattered robot that looked like a child’s toy tractor. He stumbled and fell to his knees, shredding his pants. He ignored the thin burn of pain.
Wait! You have to tell me what all this is about! You have to tell me why these things are happening to me!

Because of the Beam,
the boy who was now only a pair of floating eyes replied,
and because of the Tower. In the end, all things, even the Beams, serve the Dark Tower. Did you think you would be any different?

Jake flailed and stumbled to his feet.
Will I find him? Will I find the gunslinger?

I don’t know,
the boy answered. His voice now seemed to come from a million miles away.
I only know you must try. About that you have no choice.

The boy was gone. The basketball court in the woods was empty. The only sound was that faint rumble of machinery, and Jake didn’t like it. There was something wrong with that sound, and he thought that what was wrong with the machinery was affecting the rose, or vice-versa. It was all hooked together somehow.

He picked up the old, scuffed-up basketball and shot. It went neatly through the hoop . . . and disappeared.

A river
, the strange boy’s voice sighed. It was like a puff of breeze. It came from nowhere and everywhere.
The answer is a river.

JAKE WOKE IN THE first milky light of dawn, looking up at the ceiling of his room. He was thinking of the guy in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind—Aaron Deepneau, who’d been hanging around on Bleecker Street back when Bob Dylan only knew how to blow open G on his Hohner. Aaron Deepneau had given Jake a riddle.

Now he knew the answer. A river ran; a river had a mouth; a river had a bed; a river had a head. The boy had told him the answer. The boy in the dream.

And suddenly he thought of something else Deepneau had said:
That’s only half the answer. Samson’s riddle is a double, my friend.

Jake glanced at his bedside clock and saw it was twenty past six. It was time to get moving if he wanted to be out of here before his parents woke up. There would be no school for him today; Jake thought that maybe, as far as he was concerned, school had been cancelled forever.

He threw back the bedclothes, swung his feet out onto the floor, and saw that there were scrapes on both knees. Fresh scrapes. He had bruised his left side yesterday when he slipped on the bricks and fell, and he had banged his head when he fainted near the rose, but nothing had happened to his knees.

“That happened in the dream,” Jake whispered, and found he wasn’t surprised at all. He began to dress swiftly.

IN THE BACK OF his closet, under a jumble of old laceless sneakers and a heap of
Spiderman
comic books, he found the packsack he had worn to grammar school. No one would be caught dead with a packsack at Piper—how too, too common, my deah—and as Jake grabbed it, he felt a wave of powerful nostalgia for those old days when life had seemed so simple.

He stuffed a clean shirt, a clean pair of jeans, some underwear and socks into it, then added
Riddle-De-Dum!
and
Charlie the Choo-Choo.
He had put the key on his desk before foraging in the closet for his old pack, and the voices came back at once, but they were distant and muted. Besides, he felt sure he could make them go away completely by holding the key again, and that eased his mind.

Okay,
he thought, looking into the pack. Even with the books added, there was plenty of room left.
What else?

For a moment he thought there was nothing else . . . and then he knew.

HIS FATHER’S STUDY SMELLED of cigarettes and ambition.

It was dominated by a huge teakwood desk. Across the room, set into a wall otherwise lined with books, were three Mitsubishi television monitors. Each was tuned to one of the rival networks, and at night, when his father was in here, each played out its progression of prime-time images with the sound off.

The curtains were drawn, and Jake had to turn on the desk lamp in order to see. He felt nervous just being in here, even wearing sneakers. If his father should wake up and come in (and it was possible; no matter how late he went to bed or how much he drank, Elmer Chambers was a light sleeper and an early riser), he would be angry. At the very least it would make a clean getaway much tougher. The sooner he was out of here, the better Jake would feel.

The desk was locked, but his father had never made any secret of where he kept the key. Jake slid his fingers under the blotter and hooked it out. He opened the third drawer, reached past the hanging files, and touched cold metal.

A board creaked in the hall and he froze. Several seconds passed. When the creak didn’t come again, Jake pulled out the weapon his father kept for “home defense”—a .44 Ruger automatic. His father had shown this weapon to Jake with great pride on the day he had bought it—two years ago, that had been. He had been totally deaf to his wife’s nervous demands that he put it away before someone got hurt.

Jake found the button on the side that released the clip. It fell out into his hand with a metallic
snak!
sound that seemed very loud in the quiet apartment. He glanced nervously toward the door again, then turned his attention to the clip. It was fully loaded. He started to slide it back into the gun, and then took it out again. Keeping a loaded gun in a locked desk drawer was one thing; carrying one around New York City was quite another.

He stuffed the automatic down to the bottom of his pack, then felt behind the hanging files again. This time he brought out a box of shells, about half-full. He remembered his father had done some target shooting at the police range on First Avenue before losing interest.

The board creaked again. Jake wanted to get out of here.

He removed one of the shirts he’d packed, laid it on his father’s desk, and rolled up the clip and the box of .44 slugs in it. Then he replaced it in the pack and used the buckles to snug down the flap. He was about to leave when his eye fixed on the little pile of stationery sitting beside his father’s In/Out tray. The reflectorized Ray-Ban sunglasses his father liked to wear were folded on top of the stationery. He took a sheet of paper, and, after a moment’s thought, the sunglasses as well. He slipped the shades into his breast pocket. Then he removed the slim gold pen from its stand, and wrote
Dear Dad and Mom
beneath the letterhead.

He stopped, frowning at the salutation. What went below it? What, exactly, did he have to say? That he loved them? It was true, but it wasn’t enough—there were all sorts of other unpleasant truths stuck through that central one, like steel needles jabbed into a ball of yarn. That he would miss them? He didn’t know if that was true or not, which was sort of horrible. That he hoped
they
would miss
him?

He suddenly realized what the problem was. If he were planning to be gone just today, he would be able to write something. But he felt a near-certainty that it
wasn’t
just today, or this week, or this month, or this summer. He had an idea that when he walked out of the apartment this time, it would be for good.

He almost crumpled the sheet of paper, then changed his mind. He wrote:
Please take care of yourselves. Love, J.
That was pretty limp, but at least it was something.

He did.

The apartment was almost dead still. He tiptoed across the living room, hearing only the sounds of his parents’ breathing: his mother’s soft little snores, his father’s more nasal respiration, where every indrawn breath ended in a slim high whistle. The refrigerator kicked on as he reached the entryway and he froze for a moment, his heart thumping hard in his chest. Then he was at the door. He unlocked it as quietly as he could, then stepped out and pulled it gently shut behind him.

A stone seemed to roll off his heart as the latch snicked, and a strong sense of anticipation seized him. He didn’t know what lay ahead, and he had reason to believe it would be dangerous, but he was eleven years old—too young to deny the exotic delight which suddenly filled him. There was a highway ahead—a hidden highway leading deep into some unknown land. There were secrets which might disclose themselves to him if he was clever . . . and if he was lucky. He had left his home in the long light of dawn, and what lay ahead was some great adventure.

This thought filled him with an eagerness so great it was almost ecstasy.

Three minutes later he stepped out from beneath the awning which shaded the entrance to the building where he had lived all his life. He paused for a moment, then turned left. This decision did not feel random, and it wasn’t. He was moving southeast, along the path of the Beam, resuming his own interrupted quest for the Dark Tower.

Two DAYS AFTER EDDIE had given Roland his unfinished key, the three travellers—hot, sweaty, tired, and out of sorts—pushed through a particularly tenacious tangle of bushes and second-growth trees and discovered what first appeared to be two faint paths, running in tandem beneath the interlacing branches of the old trees crowding close on either side. After a few moments of study, Eddie decided they weren’t just paths but the remains of a long-abandoned road. Bushes and stunted trees grew like untidy quills along what had been its crown. The grassy indentations were wheelruts, and either of them was wide enough to accommodate Susannah’s wheelchair.

“Hallelujah!” he cried. “Let’s drink to it!”

Roland nodded and unslung the waterskin he wore around his waist. He first handed it up to Susannah, who was riding in her sling on his back. Eddie’s key, now looped around Roland’s neck on a piece of rawhide, shifted beneath his shirt with each movement. She took a swallow and passed the skin to Eddie. He drank and then began to unfold her chair. Eddie had come to hate this bulky, balky contraption; it was like an iron anchor, always holding them back. Except for a broken spoke or two, it was still in fine condition. Eddie had days when he thought the goddam thing would outlast all of them. Now, however, it might be useful . . . for a while, at least.

Eddie helped Susannah out of the harness and placed her in the chair. She put her hands against the small of her back, stretched, and grimaced with pleasure. Both Eddie and Roland heard the small crackle her spine made as it stretched.

Up ahead, a large creature that looked like a badger crossed with a raccoon ambled out of the woods. It looked at them with its large, gold-rimmed eyes, twitched its sharp, whiskery snout as if to say
Huh!
Big
deal!,
then strolled the rest of the way across the road and disappeared again. Before it did, Eddie noted its tail—long and closely coiled, it looked like a fur-covered bedspring.