The Waste Lands (38 page)

Roland grabbed Jake and hauled him to his feet.

“You came!” Jake shouted. “You really came!”

“I came, yes. By the grace of the gods and the courage of my friends, I came.”

As the doorkeeper roared again, Jake burst into tears of relief and terror. Now the house sounded like a ship foundering in a heavy sea. Chunks of wood and plaster fell all around them. Roland swept Jake into his arms and ran for the door. The plaster hand, groping wildly, struck one of his booted feet and spun him into the wall, which again tried to bite. Roland pushed forward, turned, and drew his gun. He fired twice into the aimlessly thrashing hand, vaporizing one of the crude plaster fingers. Behind them, the face of the doorkeeper had gone from white to a dingy purplish-black, as if it were choking on something—something which had been fleeing so rapidly that it had entered the monster’s mouth and jammed in its gullet before it realized what it was doing.

Roland turned again and ran through the doorway. Although there was now no visible barrier, he was stopped cold for a moment, as if an unseen meshwork had been drawn across the chair.

Then he felt Eddie’s hands in his hair and he was yanked not forward but upward.

THEY EMERGED INTO WET air and slackening hail like babies being born. Eddie was the midwife, as the gunslinger had told him he must be. He was sprawled forward on his chest and belly, his arms out of sight in the doorway, his hands clutching fistfuls of Roland’s hair.

“Suze! Help me!”

She wriggled forward, reached through; and groped a hand under Roland’s chin. He came up to her with his head cocked backward and his lips parted in a snarl of pain and effort.

Eddie felt a tearing sensation and one of his hands came free holding a thick lock of the gunslinger’s gray-streaked hair. “He’s slipping!”

“This motherfucker . . . ain’t . . .
nowhere!”
Susannah gasped, and gave a terrific wrench, as if she meant to snap Roland’s neck.

Two small hands shot out of the doorway in the center of the circle and clutched one of the edges. Freed of Jake’s weight, Roland got an elbow up, and a moment later he was boosting himself out. As he did it, Eddie grabbed Jake’s wrists and hauled him up.

Jake rolled onto his back and lay there, panting.

Eddie turned to Susannah, took her in his arms, and began to rain kisses on her forehead, cheeks, and neck. He was laughing and crying at the same time. She clung to him, breathing hard . . . but there was a small, satisfied smile on her lips and one hand slipped over Eddie’s wet hair in slow, contented strokes.

From below them came a cauldron of black sounds: squeals, grunts, thuds, crashes.

Roland crawled away from the hole with his head down. His hair stood up in a wild wad. Threads of blood trickled down his cheeks. “Shut it!” he gasped at Eddie. “Shut it, for your father’s sake!”

Eddie got the door moving, and those vast, unseen hinges did the rest. The door fell with a gigantic, toneless bang, cutting off all sound from below. As Eddie watched, the lines that had marked its edges faded back to smudged marks in the dirt. The doorknob lost its dimension and was once more only a circle he’d drawn with a stick. Where the keyhole had been there was only a crude shape with a chunk of wood sticking out of it, like the hilt of a sword from a stone.

Susannah went to Jake and pulled him gently to a sitting position. “You all right, sugar?”

He looked at her dazedly. “Yes, I think so. Where is he? The gunslinger? There’s something I have to ask him.”

“I’m here, Jake,” Roland said. He got to his feet, drunk-walked over to Jake, and hunkered beside him. He touched the boy’s smooth cheek almost unbelievingly.

“You won’t let me drop this time?”

“No,” Roland said. “Not this time, not ever again.” But in the deepest darkness of his heart, he thought of the Tower and wondered.

THE HAIL CHANGED TO a hard, driving rain, but Eddie could see gleams of blue sky behind the unravelling clouds in the north. The storm was going to end soon, but in the meantime, they were going to get drenched.

He found he didn’t mind. He could not remember when he had felt so calm, so at peace with himself, so utterly drained. This mad adventure wasn’t over yet—he suspected, in fact, that it had barely begun—but today they had won a big one.

“Suze?” He pushed her hair away from her face and looked into her dark eyes. “Are you okay? Did it hurt you?”

“Hurt me a little, but I’m okay. I think that bitch Detta Walker is still the undefeated Roadhouse Champeen, demon or no demon.”

“What’s that mean?”

She grinned impishly. “Not much, not anymore . . . thank God. How about you, Eddie? All right?”

Eddie listened for Henry’s voice and didn’t hear it. He had an idea that Henry’s voice might be gone for good. “Even better than that,” he said, and, laughing, folded her into his arms again. Over her shoulder he could see what was left of the door: only a few faint lines and angles. Soon the rain would wash those away, too.

“WHAT’S YOUR NAME?” JAKE asked the woman whose legs stopped just above the knee. He was suddenly aware that he had lost his pants in his struggle to escape the doorkeeper, and he pulled the tail of his shirt down over his underwear. There wasn’t very much left of her dress, either, as far as that went.

“Susannah Dean,” she said. “I already know your name.”

“Susannah,” Jake said thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose your father owns a railroad company, does he?”

She looked astonished for a moment, then threw her head back and laughed. “Why, no, sugar! He was a dentist who went and invented a few things and got rich. What makes you ask a thing like that?”

Jake didn’t answer. He had turned his attention to Eddie. The terror had already left his face, and his eyes had regained that cool, assessing look which Roland remembered so well from the way station.

“Hi, Jake,” Eddie said. “Good to see you, man.”

“Hi,” Jake said. “I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then.”

“I was a lot younger ten minutes ago. Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Jake said. “Some scratches, that’s all.” He looked around. “You haven’t found the train yet.” This was not a question.

Eddie and Susannah exchanged puzzled looks, but Roland only shook his head. “No train.”

“Are your voices gone?”

Roland nodded. “All gone. Yours?”

“Gone. I’m all together again. We both are.”

They looked at the same instant, with the same impulse. As Roland swept Jake into his arms, the boy’s unnatural self-possession broke and he began to cry—it was the exhausted, relieved weeping of a child who has been lost long, suffered much, and is finally safe again. As Roland’s arms closed about his waist, Jake’s own arms slipped about the gunslinger’s neck and gripped like hoops of steel.

“I’ll never leave you again,” Roland said, and now his own tears came. “I swear to you on the names of all my fathers:
I’ll never leave you again.”

Yet his heart, that silent, watchful, lifelong prisoner of
ka,
received the words of this promise not just with wonder but with doubt.

FOUR DAYS AFTER EDDIE had yanked him through the doorway between worlds, minus his original pair of pants and his sneakers but still in possession of his pack and his life, Jake awoke with something warm and wet nuzzling at his. face.

If he had come around to such a sensation on any of the three previous mornings, he undoubtedly would have wakened his companions with his screams, for he had been feverish and his sleep had been haunted by nightmares of the plaster-man. In these dreams his pants did not slide free, the doorkeeper kept its grip, and it tucked him into its unspeakable mouth, where its teeth came down like the bars guarding a castle keep. Jake awoke from these dreams shuddering and moaning helplessly.

The fever had been caused by the spider-bite on the back of his neck. When Roland examined it on the second day and found it worse instead of better, he had conferred briefly with Eddie and had then given Jake a pink pill. “You’ll want to take four of these every day for at least a week,” he said.

Jake had gazed at it doubtfully. “What is it?”

“Cheflet,”
Roland said, then looked disgustedly at Eddie. “You tell him. I
still
can’t say it.”

“Keflex. You can trust it, Jake; it came from a government-approved pharmacy in good old New York. Roland swallowed a bunch of it, and he’s as healthy as a horse. Looks a little like one, too, as you can see.”

Jake was astonished. “How did you get medicine in New York?”

“That’s a long story,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll hear all of it in time, but for now just take the pill.”

Jake did. The response was both quick and satisfying. The angry red swelling around the bite began to fade in twenty-four hours, and now the fever was gone as well.

The warm thing nuzzled again and Jake sat up with a jerk, his eyes flying open.

The creature which had been licking his cheek took two hasty steps backward. It was a billy-bumbler, but Jake didn’t know that; he had never seen one before now. It was skinnier than the ones Roland’s party had seen earlier, and its black- and gray-striped fur was matted and mangy. There was a clot of old dried blood on one flank. Its gold-ringed black eyes looked at Jake anxiously; its hindquarters switched hopefully back and forth. Jake relaxed. He supposed there were exceptions to the rule, but he had an idea that something wagging its tail—or trying to—was probably not too dangerous.

It was just past first light, probably around five-thirty in the morning. Jake could peg it no closer than that because his digital Seiko no longer worked . . . or rather, was working in an extremely eccentric way. When he had first glanced at it after coming through, the Seiko claimed it was 98:71:65, a time which did not, so far as Jake knew, exist. A longer look showed him that the watch was now running backward. If it had been doing this at a steady rate, he supposed it might still have been of some use, but it wasn’t. It would unwind its numbers at what seemed like the right speed for awhile (Jake verified this by saying the word “Mississippi” between each number), and then the readout would either stop entirely for ten or twenty seconds—making him think the watch had finally given up the ghost—or a bunch of numbers would blur by all at once.

He had mentioned this odd behavior to Roland and had shown him the watch, thinking it would amaze him, but Roland examined it closely for only a moment or two before nodding in a dismissive way and telling Jake it was an interesting clock, but as a rule no timepiece did very good work these days. So the Seiko was useless, but Jake still found himself loath to throw it away . . . because, he supposed, it was a piece of his old life, and there were only a few of those left.

Right now the Seiko claimed it was sixty-two minutes past forty on a Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday in both December and March.

The morning was extremely foggy; beyond a radius of fifty or sixty feet, the world simply disappeared. If this day was like the previous three, the sun would show up as a faint white circle in another two hours or so, and by nine-thirty the day would be clear and hot. Jake looked around and saw his travelling companions (he didn’t quite dare call them friends, at least not yet) asleep beneath their hide blankets—Roland close by, Eddie and Susannah a larger hump on the far side of the dead campfire.

He once more turned his attention to the animal which had awakened him. It looked like a combination raccoon and woodchuck, with a dash of dachshund thrown in for good measure.

“How you doin, boy?” he asked softly.

“Oy!”
the billy-bumbler replied at once, still looking at him anxiously. Its voice was low and deep, almost a bark; the voice of an English footballer with a bad cold in his throat.

Jake recoiled, surprised. The billy-bumbler, startled by the quick movement, took several further steps backward, seemed about to flee, and then held its ground. Its hindquarters wagged back and forth more strenuously than ever, and its gold-black eyes continued to regard Jake nervously. The whiskers on its snout trembled.

“This one remembers men,” a voice remarked at Jake’s shoulder. He looked around and saw Roland squatting just behind him with his forearms resting on his thighs and his long hands dangling between his knees. He was looking at the animal with a great deal more interest than he had shown in Jake’s watch.

“What is it?” Jake asked softly. He did not want to startle it away; he was enchanted. “Its eyes are beautiful!”

“Billy-bumbler,” Roland said.

“Umber!”
the creature ejaculated, and retreated another step.