The Waste Lands (58 page)

“I’m going to leash you. I don’t like it and you’re going to like it even less, but it’s going to be very dark down there.”

He tied the two lengths of rawhide together and formed one end into a wide loop which he slipped over Oy’s head. He expected Oy to bare his teeth again, perhaps even to nip him, but Oy didn’t. He only looked up at Roland with his gold-ringed eyes and barked “Ake!” again in his impatient voice.

Roland put the loose end of his makeshift leash in his mouth, then sat down on the edge of the sewer shaft... if that was what it was. He felt for the top rung of the ladder and found it. He descended slowly and carefully, more aware than ever that he was missing half a hand and that the steel rungs were slimy with oil and some thicker stuff that was probably moss. Oy was a heavy, warm weight between his shirt and belly, panting steadily and harshly. The gold rings in his eyes gleamed like medallions in the dim light.

At last, the gunslinger’s groping foot splashed into the water at the bottom of the shaft. He glanced up briefly at the coin of white light far above him.
This is where it starts getting hard
, he thought. The tunnel was warm and dank and smelled like an ancient charnel house. Somewhere nearby, water was dripping hollowly and monotonously. Farther off, Roland could hear the rumble of machinery. He lifted a very grateful Oy out of his shirt and set him down in the shallow water running sluggishly along the sewer tunnel.

“Now it’s all up to you,” he murmured in the bumbler’s ear. “To Jake, Oy. To Jake!”

“Ake!” the bumbler barked, and splashed rapidly off into the darkness, swinging his head from side to side at the end of his long neck like a pendulum. Roland followed with the end of the rawhide leash wrapped around his diminished right hand.

THE CRADLE—IT WAS easily big enough to have acquired proper-noun status in their minds—stood in the center of a square five times larger than the one where they had come upon the blasted statue, and when she got a really good look at it, Susannah realized how old and gray and fundamentally grungy the rest of Lud really was. The Cradle was so clean it almost hurt her eyes. No vines overgrew its sides; no graffiti daubed its blinding white walls and steps and columns. The yellow plains dust which had coated everything else was absent here. As they drew closer, Susannah saw why: streams of water coursed endlessly down the sides of the Cradle, issuing from nozzles hidden in the shadows of the copper-sheathed eaves. Interval sprays created by other hidden nozzles washed the steps, turning them into off-and-on waterfalls.

“Wow,” Eddie said. “It makes Grand Central look like a Greyhound station in Buttfuck, Nebraska.”

“What a poet you are, dear,” Susannah said dryly.

The steps surrounded the entire building and rose to a great open lobby. There were no obscuring mats of vegetation here, but Eddie and Susannah found they still couldn’t get a good look inside; the shadows thrown by the overhanging roof were too deep. The Totems of the Beam marched all the way around the building, two by two, but the corners were reserved for creatures Susannah fervently hoped never to meet outside of the occasional nightmare—hideous stone dragons with scaly bodies, clutching, claw-tipped hands, and nasty peering eyes.

Eddie touched her shoulder and pointed higher. Susannah looked... and felt her breath come to a stop in her throat. Standing astride the peak of the roof, far above The Totems of the Beam and the dragonish gargoyles, as if given dominion over them, was a golden warrior at least sixty feet high. A battered cowboy hat was shoved back to reveal his lined and careworn brow; a bandanna hung askew on his upper chest, as if it had just been pulled down after serving long, hard duty as a dust-muffle. In one upraised fist he held a revolver; in the other, what appeared to be an olive branch.

Roland of Gilead stood atop the Cradle of Lud, dressed in gold.

No,
she thought, at last remembering to breathe again.
It’s not him. . . but in another way, it is. That man was a gunslinger, and the resemblance between him, who’s probably been dead a thousand years or more, and Roland is all the truth of ka-tet you’ll ever need to know.

Thunder slammed out of the south. Lightning harried racing clouds across the sky. She wished she had more time to study both the golden statue which stood atop the Cradle and the animals which surrounded it; each of these latter appeared to have words carved upon them, and she had an idea that what was written there might be knowledge worth having. Under these circumstances, however, there was no time to spare.

A wide red strip had been painted across the pavement at the point where The Street of the Turtle emptied into The Plaza of the Cradle. Maud and the fellow Eddie called Jeeves the Butler stopped a prudent distance from the red mark.

“This far and no farther,” Maud told them flatly. “You may take us to our deaths, but each man and woman owes one to the gods anyway, and I’ll die on this side of the dead-line no matter what. I’ll not dare Blaine for outlanders.”

“Nor will I,” Jeeves said. He had taken off his dusty bowler and was holding it against his naked chest. On his face was an expression of fearful reverence. “Fine,” Susannah said. “Now scat on out of here, both of you.”

“Ye’ll backshoot us the second we turn from ye,” Jeeves said in a trembling voice. “I’ll take my watch and warrant on it, so I will.”

Maud shook her head. The blood on her face had dried to a grotesque maroon stippling. “There never were a backshooting gunslinger—that much I
will
say.
⁹⁹

“We only have
their
word for it that that’s what they are.”

Maud pointed to the big revolver with the worn sandalwood grip which Susannah held in her hand. Jeeves looked . . . and after a moment he stretched out his hand to the woman. When Maud took it, Susannah’s image of them as dangerous killers collapsed. They looked more like Hansel and Gretel than Bonnie and Clyde; tired, frightened, confused, and lost so long in the woods that they had grown old there. Her hate and fear of them departed. What replaced it was pity and a deep, aching sadness.

“Fare you well, both of you,” she said softly. “Walk as you will, and with no fear of harm from me or my man here.”

Maud nodded. “I believe you mean us no harm, and I forgive you for shooting Winston. But listen to me, and listen well:
stay out of the Cradle
. Whatever reasons you think you have for going in, they’re not good enough. To enter Blaine’s Cradle is death.”

“We don’t have any choice,” Eddie said, and thunder banged overhead again, as if in agreement. “Now let me tell
you
something. I don’t know what’s underneath Lud and what isn’t, but I do know those drums you’re so whacked out about are part of a recording—a
song
—that was made in the world my wife and I came from.” He looked at their uncomprehending faces and raised his arms in frustration. “Jesus Pumpkin-Pie Christ, don’t you get it? You’re killing each other over a piece of music that was never even released as a single!”

Susannah put her hand on his shoulder and murmured his name. He ignored her for the moment, his eyes flicking from Jeeves to Maud and then back to Jeeves again.

“You want to see monsters? Take a good look at each other, then. And when you get back to whatever funhouse it is you call home, take a good look at your friends and relatives.”

“You don’t understand,” Maud said. Her eyes were dark and somber. “But you will. Ay—you will.”

“Go on, now,” Susannah said quietly. “Talk between us is no good; the words only drop dead. Just go your way and try to remember the faces of your fathers, for I think you lost sight of those faces long ago.”

The two of them walked back in the direction from which they had come without another word. They did look back over their shoulders from time to time, however, and they were still holding hands: Hansel and Gretel lost in the deep dark forest.

“Lemme outta here,” Eddie said heavily. He made the Ruger safe, stuck it back in the waistband of his pants, and then rubbed his red eyes with the heels of his hands. “Just lemme out, that’s all I ask.”

“I know what you mean, handsome.” She was clearly scared, but her head had that defiant tilt he had come to recognize and love. He put his hands on her shoulders, bent down, and kissed her. He did not let either their surroundings or the oncoming storm keep him from doing a thorough job. When he pulled back at last, she was studying him with wide, dancing eyes. “Wow! What was that about?”

“About how I’m in love with you,” he said, “and I guess that’s about all. Is it enough?”

Her eyes softened. For a moment she thought about telling him the secret she might or might not be keeping, but of course the time and place were wrong—she could no more tell him she might be pregnant now than she could pause to read the words written on the sculpted Portal Totems.

“It’s enough, Eddie,” she said.

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” His hazel eyes were totally focused on her. “It’s hard for me to say stuff like that—living with Henry made it hard, I guess—but it’s true. I think I started loving you because you were everything Roland took me away from—in New York, I mean—but it’s a lot more than that now, because I don’t want to go back anymore. Do you?”

She looked at the Cradle. She was terrified of what they might find in there, but all the same. . . she looked back at him. “No, I don’t want to go back. I want to spend the rest of my life going forward. As long as you’re with me, that is. It’s funny, you know, you saying you started loving me because of all the things he took you away from.”

“Funny how?”

“I started loving you because you set me free of Detta Walker.” She paused, thought, then shook her head slightly. “No—it goes further than that. I started loving you because you set me free of
both
those bitches. One was a foul-mouthed, cock-teasing thief, and the other was a self-righteous, pompous prig. Comes down to six of one and half a dozen of the other, as far as I’m concerned. I like Susannah Dean better than either one... and you were the one who set me free.”

This time it was she who did the reaching, pressing her palm to his stubbly cheeks, drawing him down, kissing him gently. When he put a light hand on her breast, she sighed and covered it with her own.

“I think we better get going,” she said, “or we’re apt to be laying right here in the street. . . and getting wet, from the look.”

Eddie stared around at the silent towers, the broken windows, the vine-encrusted walls a final time. Then he nodded. “Yeah. I don’t think there’s any future in this town, anyway.”

He pushed her forward, and they both stiffened as the wheels of the chair passed over what Maud had called the dead-line, fearful that they would trip some ancient protective device and die together. But nothing happened. Eddie pushed her into the plaza, and as they approached the steps leading up to the Cradle, a cold, wind-driven rain began to fall.

Although neither of them knew it, the first of the great autumn storms of Mid-World had arrived.

ONCE THEY WERE IN the smelly darkness of the sewers, Gasher slowed the killing pace he’d maintained aboveground. Jake didn’t think it was because of the darkness; Gasher seemed to know every twist and turn of the route he was following, just as advertised. Jake believed it was because his captor was satisfied that Roland had been squashed to jelly by the deadfall trap.

Jake himself had begun to wonder.

If Roland had spotted the tripwires—a far more subtle trap than the one which followed—was it really likely that he had missed seeing the fountain? Jake supposed it was possible, but it didn’t make much sense. Jake thought it more likely that Roland had tripped the fountain on purpose, to lull Gasher and perhaps slow him down. He didn’t believe Roland could follow them through this maze under the streets—the total darkness would defeat even the gunslinger’s tracking abilities—but it cheered his heart to think that Roland might not have died in an attempt to keep his promise.

They turned right, left, then left again. As Jake’s other senses sharpened in an attempt to compensate for his lack of sight, he had a vague perception of other tunnels around him. The muffled sounds of ancient, laboring machinery would grow loud for a moment, then fade as the stone foundations of the city drew close around them again. Drafts blew intermittently against his skin, sometimes warm, sometimes chilly. Their splashing footfalls echoed briefly as they passed the intersecting tunnels from which these stenchy breaths blew, and once Jake nearly brained himself on some metal object jutting down from the ceiling. He slapped at it with one hand and felt something that might have been a large valve-wheel. After that he waved his hands as he trotted along in an attempt to read the air ahead of him.

Gasher guided him with taps to the shoulders, as a waggoner might have guided his oxen. They moved at a good clip, trotting but not running. Gasher got enough of his breath back to first hum and then begin singing in a low, surprisingly tuneful tenor voice.

There were five or six more verses along this line before Gasher quit. “Now
you
sing somethin, squint.”

“I don’t know anything,” Jake puffed. He hoped he sounded more out of breath than he actually was. He didn’t know if it would do him any good or not, but down here in the dark any edge seemed worth trying for.

Gasher brought his elbow down in the center of Jake’s back, almost hard enough to send him sprawling into the ankle-high water running sluggishly through the tunnel they were traversing. “You
better
know sommat, ’less you want me to rip your everlovin spine right outcher back.” He paused, then added: “There’s haunts down here, boy. They live inside the fuckin machines, so they do. Singin keeps em off . . . don’t you know that? Now
sing
!”