EIGHTEEN
Oy took the lead as he had done the last time he had been here.
He could still smell Ake's scent, faint and sorrowful. Ake had gone on ahead now, but not so very far; he was good, Ake was good, Ake would wait, and when the time came-when the j ob Ake had given him was done-Oy would catch up and go with him as before. His nose was strong, and he would find fresher scent than this when the time came to search for it. Ake had saved him from death, which did not matter. Ake had saved him from loneliness and shame after Oy had been cast out by the tet of his kind, and that did.
In the meantime, there was this j ob to finish. He led the man Olan into the pantry. The secret door to the stairs had been closed, but the man Olan felt patiently along the shelves of cans and boxes until he found the way to open it. All was as it had been, the long, descending stair dimly lit by overhead bulbs, the scent damp and overlaid with mold. He could smell the rats which scuttered in the walls; rats and other things, too, some of them bugs of the sort he had killed the last time he and Ake had come here. That had been good killing, and he would gladly have more, if more were offered. Oy wished the bugs would show themselves again and challenge him, but of course they didn't. They were afraid, and they were right to be afraid, for ever had his kind stood enemy to theirs.
He started down the stairs with the man Olan following behind.
NINETEEN
They passed the deserted kiosk with its age-yellowed signs (NEW YORK SOUVENIRS, LAST CHANCE, a n d VISIT SEPTEMBER 11, 2001), and fifteen minutes later-Roland checked his new watch to be sure of the time-they came to a place where there was a good deal of broken glass on the dusty corridor floor. Roland picked Oy up so he wouldn't cut the pads of his feet. On both walls he saw the shattered remains of what had been glass-covered hatches of some kind. When he looked in, he saw complicated machinery. They had almost caught Jake here, snared him in some kind of mind-trap, but once again Jake had been clever enough and brave enough to get through. He survived everything but a man too stupid and too careless to do the simple job of driving his bucka on an empty road, Roland thought bitterly. And the man who brought him there-that man, too. Then Oy barked at him and Roland realized that in his anger at Bryan Smith (and at himself), he was squeezing the poor little fellow too tightly.
"Cry pardon, Oy," he said, and put him down.
Oy trotted on without making any reply, and not long after Roland came to the scattered bodies of the boogers who had harried his boy from the Dixie Pig. Here also, printed in the dust that coated the floor of this ancient corridor, were the tracks he and Eddie had made when they arrived. Again he heard a ghost-voice, this time that of the man who had been the harriers' leader.
I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. 'Tis the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee.
Roland turned the body over with the toe of his boot (a hume named Flaherty, whose da' had put a fear of dragons in his head, had the gunslinger known or cared... which he did not) and looked down into the dead face, which was already growing a crop of mold. Next to him was the stoat-head taheen whose final proclamation had been Be damned to you, then, chary-ka. And beyond the heaped bodies of these two and their mates was the door that would take him out of the Keystone World for good.
Assuming that it still worked.
Oy trotted to it and sat down before it, looking back at Roland. The bumbler was panting, but his old, amiably fiendish grin was gone. Roland reached the door and placed his hands against the close-grained ghostwood. Deep within he felt a low and troubled vibration. This door was still working but might not be for much longer.
He closed his eyes and thought of his mother bending over him as he lay in his little bed (how soon before he had been promoted from the cradle he didn't know, but surely not long), her face a patchwork of colors from the nursery windows, Gabrielle Deschain who would later die at those hands which she caressed so lightly and lovingly with her own; daughter of Candor the Tall, wife of Steven, mother of Roland, singing him to sleep and dreams of those lands only children know.
Baby-bunting, baby-dear,
Baby, bring your berries here.
Chussit, chissit, chassit!
Bring enough to fill your basket!
So far I've traveled, he thought with his hands splayed on the ghostwood door. So far I've traveled and so many I've hurt along the way, hurt or killed, and what I may have saved was saved by accident and can never save my soul, do I have one. Yet there's this much: I've come to the head of the last trail, and I need not travel it alone, if only Susannah loillgo with me. Mayhap there's still enough to fill my basket.
"Chassit," Roland said, and opened his eyes as the door opened. He saw Oy leap nimbly through. He heard the shrill scream of the void between the worlds, and then stepped through himself, sweeping the door shut behind him and still without a backward look.
Chapter IV:FEDIC (TWO VIEWS)
ONE
Look at how brilliant it is here!
When we came before, Fedic was shadowless and dull, but there was a reason for that: it wasn't the real Fedic but only a kind of todash substitute; a place Mia knew well and remembered well (just as she remembered the castle allure, where she went often before circumstances-in the person of Walter o' Dim-gave her a physical body) and could thus re-create.
Today, however, the deserted village is almost too bright to look at (although we'll no doubt see better once our eyes have adjusted from the murk of Thunderclap and the passage beneath the Dixie Pig). Every shadow is crisp; they might have been cut from black felt and laid upon the oggan. The sky is a sharp and cloudless blue. The air is chill. The wind whining around the eaves of the empty buildings and through the battlements of Castle Discordia is autumnal and somehow introspective.
Sitting in Fedic Station is an atomic locomotive-what was called a hot-enj by the old people-with the words SPIRIT OF TOPEKA written on both sides of the bullet nose. The slim pilot-house windows have been rendered almost completely opaque by centuries of desert grit flung against the glass, but little does that matter; the Spirit ofTopeka has made her last trip, and even when she did run regularly, no mere hume ever guided her course. Behind the engine are only three cars.
There were a dozen when she set out from Thunderclap Station on her last run, and there were a dozen when she arrived in sight of this ghost town, but...
Ah, well, that's Susannah's tale to tell, and we will listen as she tells it to the man she called dinh when there was a ka-tet for him to guide. And here is Susannah herself, sitting where we saw her once before, in front of the Gin-Puppy Saloon. Parked at die hitching rail is her chrome steed, which Eddie dubbed Suzie's Cruisin Trike. She's cold and hasn't so much as a sweater to pull close around her, but her heart tells her that her wait is almost over. And how she hopes her heart is right, for diis is a haunted place. To Susannah, the whine of die wind sounds too much like the bewildered cries of the children who were brought here to have their bodies roont and their minds murdered.
Beside the rusty Quonset hut up the street (the Arc 16 Experimental Station, do ya not recall it) are the gray cyborg horses. A few more have fallen over since the last time we visited; a few more click their heads resdessly back and forth, as if trying to see the riders who will come and untether them. But that will never happen, for the Breakers have been set free to wander and there's no more need of children to feed their talented heads.
And now, look you! At last comes what the lady has waited for all this long day, and the day before, and the day before that, when Ted Brautigan, Dinky Earnshaw, and a few others (not Sheemie, he's gone into the clearing at the end of the path, say sorry) bade her goodbye. The door of the Dogan opens, and a man comes out. The first thing she sees is that his limp is gone.
Next she notices his new bluejeans and shirt. Nifty duds, but he's otherwise as ill-prepared for this cold weather as she is. In his arms the newcomer holds a furry animal with its ears cocked.
That much is well, but the boy who should be holding the animal is absent. No boy, and her heart fills with sorrow. Not surprise, however, because she has known, just as yonder man
(yonder chary man) would have known had she been the one to pass from the path.
She slips down from her seat on her hands and the stumps of her legs; she hoists herself off the boardwalk and into the street. There she raises a hand and waves it over her head.
"Roland!" she cries. "Hey, gunslinger! I'm over here!"
He sees her and waves back. Then he bends and puts down the animal. Oy races toward her hellbent for election, head down, ears flat against his skull, running with the speed and lowslung, leaping grace of a weasel on a crust of snow. While he's still seven feet away from her (seven at least), he jumps into the air, his shadow flying fleetly over the packed dirt of the street.
She grabs him like a deep receiver hauling in a Hail Mary pass.
The force of his forward motion knocks the breath from her and bowls her over in a puff of dust, but the first breath she's able to take in goes back out as laughter. She's still laughing as he stands with his stubby front legs on her chest and his stubby rear ones on her belly, ears up, squiggly tail wagging, licking her cheeks, her nose, her eyes.
"Let up on it!" she cries. "Let up on it, honey, 'fore you kill me!"
She hears this, so lighdy meant, and her laughter stops. Oy steps off her, sits, tilts his snout at the empty blue socket of the sky, and lets loose a single long howl that tells her everything she would need to know, had she not known already. For Oy has more eloquent ways of speaking than his few words.