The Waste Lands (68 page)

Now his head was the cider-press and his brains were the apples. Soon they would pop as the apples had popped beneath the roller, and the blessed darkness would swallow him.

“Andrew! Raise your head and look at me.”

He couldn’t . . . and wouldn’t even if he could. Better to just lie here and wait for the darkness. He was supposed to be dead, anyway; hadn’t the hellish squint put a bullet in his brain?

“It didn’t go anywhere near your brain, you horse’s ass, and you’re not dying. You’ve just got a headache. You
will
die, though, if you don’t stop lying there and puling in your own blood . . . and I will make sure, Andrew, that your dying makes what you are feeling now seem like bliss.”

It was not the threats which caused the man on the floor to raise his head but rather the way the owner of that penetrating, hissing voice seemed to have read his mind. His head came up slowly, and the agony was excruciating—heavy objects seemed to go sliding and careering around the bony case which contained what was left of his mind, ripping bloody channels through his brain as they went. A long, syrupy moan escaped him. There was a flapping, tickling sensation on his right cheek, as if a dozen flies were crawling in the blood there. He wanted to shoo them away, but he knew that he needed both hands just to support himself.

The figure standing on the far side of the room by the hatch which led to the kitchen looked ghastly, unreal. This was partly because the overhead lights were still strobing, partly because he was seeing the newcomer with only one eye (he couldn’t remember what had happened to the other and didn’t want to), but he had an idea it was mostly because the creature
was
ghastly and unreal. It looked like a man . . . but the fellow who had once been Andrew Quick had an idea it really wasn’t a man at all.

The stranger standing in front of the hatch wore a short, dark jacket belted at the waist, faded denim trousers, and old, dusty boots—the boots of a country-man, a range-rider, or—

“Or a gunslinger, Andrew?” the stranger asked, and tittered.

The Tick-Tock Man stared desperately at the figure in the doorway, trying to see the face, but the short jacket had a hood, and it was up. The stranger’s countenance was lost in its shadows.

The siren stopped in mid-whoop. The emergency lights stayed on, but they at least stopped flashing.

“There,” the stranger said in his—or its—whispery, penetrating voice. “At last we can hear ourselves think.”

“Who are you?” the Tick-Tock Man asked. He moved slightly, and more of those weights went sliding through his head, ripping fresh channels in his brain. As terrible as that feeling was, the awful tickling of the flies on his right cheek was somehow worse.

“I’m a man of many handles, pardner,” the man said from inside the darkness of his hood, and although his voice was grave, Tick-Tock heard laughter lurking just below the surface. “There’s some that call me Jimmy, and some that call me Timmy; some that call me Handy and some that call me Dandy. They can call me Loser, or they can call me Winner, just as long as they don’t call me in too late for dinner.”

The man in the doorway threw back his head, and his laughter chilled the skin of the wounded man’s arms and back into lumps of gooseflesh; it was like the howl of a wolf.

“I have been called the Ageless Stranger,” the man said. He began to walk toward Tick-Tock, and as he did, the man on the floor moaned and tried to scrabble backward. “I have also been called Merlin or Maerlyn—and who cares, because I was never
that
one, although I never denied it, either. I am sometimes called the Magician . . . or the Wizard . . . but I hope we can go forward together on more humble terms, Andrew. More
human
terms.”

He pushed back the hood, revealing a fair, broad-browed face that was not, for all its pleasant looks, in any way human. Large hectic roses rode the Wizard’s cheekbones; his blue-green eyes sparkled with a gusty joy far too wild to be sane; his blue-black hair stood up in zany clumps like the feathers of a raven; his lips, lushly red, parted to reveal the teeth of a cannibal.

“Call me Fannin,” the grinning apparition said.

“Richard Fannin. That’s not
exactly
right, maybe, but I reckon it’s close enough for government work.” He held out a hand whose palm was utterly devoid of lines. “What do you say, pard? Shake the hand that shook the world.”

The creature who had once been Andrew Quick and who had been known in the halls of the Grays as the Tick-Tock Man shrieked and again tried to wriggle backward. The flap of scalp peeled loose by the low-caliber bullet which had only grooved his skull instead of penetrating it swung back and forth; the long strands of gray-blonde hair continued to tickle against his cheek. Quick, however, no longer felt it. He had even forgotten the ache in his skull and the throb from the socket where his left eye had been. His entire consciousness had fused into one thought:
I must get away from this beast that looks like a man.

But when the stranger seized his right hand and shook it, that thought passed like a dream on waking. The scream which had been locked in Quick’s breast escaped his lips in a lover’s sigh. He stared dumbly up at the grinning newcomer. The loose flap of his scalp swung and dangled.

“Is that bothering you? It
must
be. Here!” Fannin seized the hanging flap and ripped it briskly off Quick’s head, revealing a bleary swatch of skull. There was a noise like heavy cloth tearing. Quick shrieked.

“There, there, it only hurts for a second.” The man was now squatting on his hunkers before Quick and speaking as an indulgent parent might speak to a child with a splinter in his finger. “Isn’t that so?”

“Y-Y-Yes,” Quick muttered. And it was. Already the pain was fading. And when Fannin reached toward him again, caressing the left side of his face, Quick’s jerk backward was only a reflex, quickly mastered. As the lineless hand stroked, he felt strength flowing back into him. He looked up at the newcomer with dumb gratitude, lips quivering.

“Is that better, Andrew? It is, isn’t it?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“If you want to thank me—as I’m sure you do—you must say something an old acquaintance of mine used to say. He ended up betraying me, but he was a good friend for quite some time, anyway, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him. Say, ‘My life for you,’ Andrew—can you say that?”

He could and he did; in fact, it seemed he couldn’t
stop
saying it. “My life for you! My life for you! My life for you! My life—”

The stranger touched his cheek again, but this time a huge raw bolt of pain blasted across Andrew Quick’s head. He screamed.

“Sorry about that, but time is short and you were starting to sound like a broken record. Andrew, let me put it to you with no bark on it: how would you like to kill the squint who shot you? Not to mention his friends and the hardcase who brought him here—him, most of all. Even the mutt that took your eye, Andrew—would you like that?”

“Yes!” the former Tick-Tock Man gasped. His hands clenched into bloody fists.
“Yes!”

“That’s good,” the stranger said, and helped Quick to his feet, “because they
have
to die—they’re meddling with things they have no business meddling with. I expected Blaine to take care of them, but things have gone much too far to depend on
anything
... after all, who would have thought they could get as far as they have?”

“I don’t know,” Quick said. He did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what the stranger was talking about. Nor did he care; there was a feeling of exaltation creeping through his mind like some excellent drug, and after the pain of the cider-press, that was enough for him. More than enough.

Richard Fannin’s lips curled. “Bear and bone . . . key and rose . . . day and night . . . time and tide.
Enough!
Enough, I
say! They must not draw closer to the Tower than they are now!”

Quick staggered backward as the man’s hands shot out with the flickery speed of heat lightning. One broke the chain which held the tiny glass-enclosed pendulum clock; the other stripped Jake Chambers’s Seiko from his forearm.

“I’ll just take these, shall I?” Fannin the Wizard smiled charmingly, his lips modestly closed over those awful teeth. “Or do you object?”

“No,” Quick said, surrendering the last symbols of his long leadership without a qualm (without, in fact, even being aware that he was doing so). “Be my guest.”

“Thank you, Andrew,” the dark man said softly. “Now we must step lively—I’m expecting a drastic change in the atmosphere of these environs in the next five minutes or so. We must get to the nearest closet where gas masks are stored before that happens, and it’s apt to be a near thing. I could survive the change quite nicely, but I’m afraid you might have some difficulties.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Andrew Quick said. His head had begun to throb again, and his mind was whirling.

“Nor do you need to,” the stranger said smoothly. “Come, Andrew—I think we should hurry. Busy, busy day, eh? With luck, Blaine will fry them right on the platform, where they are no doubt still standing—he’s become very eccentric over the years, poor fellow. But I think we should hurry, just the same.”

He slid his arm over Quick’s shoulders and, giggling, led him through the hatchway Roland and Jake had used only a few minutes before.

“ALL RIGHT,” ROLAND SAID. “Tell me his riddle.”

“What about all the people out there?” Eddie asked, pointing across the wide, pillared Plaza of the Cradle and toward the city beyond. “What can we do for them?”

“Nothing,” Roland said, “but it’s still possible that we may be able to do something for ourselves. Now what was the riddle?”

Eddie looked toward the streamlined shape of the mono. “He said we’d have to prime the pump to get him going. Only his pump primes backward. Does it mean anything to you?”

Roland thought it over carefully, then shook his head. He looked down at Jake. “Any ideas, Jake?”

Jake shook his head. “I don’t even
see
a pump.”

“That’s probably the easy part,” Roland said. “We say
he
and
him
instead of it and
that
because Blaine sounds like a living being, but he’s still a machine—a sophisticated one, but a machine. He started his own engines, but it must take some sort of code or combination to open the gate and the train doors.”

“We better hurry up,” Jake said nervously. “It’s got to be two or three minutes since he last talked to us. At least.”

“Don’t count on it,” Eddie said gloomily. “Time’s weird over here.”

“Still—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Eddie glanced toward Susannah, but she was sitting astride Roland’s hip and looking at the numeric diamond with a daydreamy expression on her face. He looked back at Roland. “I’m pretty sure you’re right about it being a combination—that must be what all those number-pads are for.” He raised his voice. “Is that it, Blaine? Have we got at least that much right?”

No response; only the quickening rumble of the mono’s engines.

“Roland,” Susannah said abruptly. “You have to help me.”

The daydreamy look was being replaced by an expression of mingled horror, dismay, and determination. To Roland’s eye, she had never looked more beautiful ... or more alone. She had been on his shoulders when they stood at the edge of the clearing and watched the bear trying to claw Eddie out of the tree, and Roland had not seen her expression when he told her she must be the one to shoot it. But he knew what that expression had been, for he was seeing it now.
Ka
was a wheel, its one purpose to turn, and in the end it always came back to the place where it had started. So it had ever been and so it was now; Susannah was once again facing the bear, and her face said she knew it.

“What?” he asked. “What is it, Susannah?”

“I know the answer, but I can’t get it. It’s stuck in my mind the way a fishbone can get stuck in your throat. I need you to help me remember. Not his face, but his voice. What he
said.
”

Jake glanced down at his wrist and was surprised all over again by a memory of the Tick-Tock Man’s catlike green eyes when he saw not his watch but only the place where it had been—a white shape outlined by his deeply tanned skin. How much longer did they have? Surely no more than seven minutes, and that was being generous. He looked up and saw that Roland had removed a cartridge from his gunbelt and was walking it back and forth across the knuckles of his left hand. Jake felt his eyelids immediately grow heavy and looked away, fast.

“What voice would you remember, Susannah Dean?” Roland asked in- a low, musing voice. His eyes were not fixed on her face but on the cartridge as it did its endless, limber dance across his knuckles . . . and back . . . across . . . and back . . .