The Waste Lands by Stephen King
27
EDDIE AND SUSANNAH LOOKED up at the vastness of Blaine's Cradle as the skies opened and the rain began to fall in torrents.
"It's a hell of a building, but they forgot the handicap ramps!" Eddie yelled, raising his voice to be heard over the rain and thunder.
"Never mind that," Susannah said impatiently, slipping out of the wheelchair. "Let's get up there and out of the rain."
Eddie looked dubiously up the incline of steps. The risers were shallow. . . but there were a lot of them. "You sure, Suze?"
"Race you, white boy," she said, and began to wriggle upward with uncanny ease, using hands, muscular forearms, and the stumps of her legs.
And she almost did beat him; Eddie had the ironmongery to contend with, and it slowed him down. Both of them were panting when they reached the top, and tendrils of steam were rising from their wet clothes. Eddie grabbed her under the arms, swung her up, and then just held her with his hands locked together in the small of her back instead of dropping her back into the chair, as he had meant to do. He felt randy and half-crazy without the slightest idea why.
Oh, give me a break, he thought. You've gotten this far alive; that's what's got your glands pumped up and ready to party.
Susannah licked her full lower lip and wound her strong fingers into his hair. She pulled. It hurt. . . and at the same time it felt wonderful. "Told you I'd beat you, white boy," she said in a low, husky voice.
"Get outta here--I had you. . . by half a step." He tried to sound less out of breath than he was and found it was impossible.
"Maybe. . . but it blew you out, didn't it?" One hand left his hair, slid downward, and squeezed gently. A smile gleamed in her eyes. "Somethin ain't blown out, though."
Thunder rumbled across the sky. They flinched, then laughed together.
"Come on," he said. "This is nuts. The time's all wrong."
She didn't contradict him, but she squeezed him again before returning her hand to his shoulder. Eddie felt a pang of regret as he swung her back into her chair and ran her across vast flagstones and under cover of the roof. He thought he saw the same regret in Susannah's eyes.
When they were out of the downpour, Eddie paused and they looked back. The Plaza of the Cradle, The Street of the Turtle, and all the city beyond was rapidly disappearing into a shifting gray curtain. Eddie wasn't a bit sorry. Lud hadn't earned itself a place in his mental scrapbook of fond memories.
"Look," Susannah murmured. She was pointing at a nearby downspout. It ended in a large, scaly fish-head that looked like a close relation to the dragon-gargoyles which decorated the corners of the Cradle. Water ran from its mouth in a silver torrent.
"This isn't just a passing shower, is it?" Eddie asked.
"Nope. It's gonna rain until it gets tired of it, and then it's gonna rain some more, just for spite. Maybe a week; maybe a month. Not that it's gonna matter to us, if Blaine decides he doesn't like our looks and fries us. Fire a shot to let Roland know we got here, sugar, and then we'll have us a look around. See what we can see."
Eddie pointed the Ruger into the gray sky, pulled the trigger, and fired the shot which Roland heard a mile or more away, as he followed Jake and Gasher through the booby-trapped maze. Eddie stood where he was a moment longer, trying to persuade himself that things might still turn out all right, that his heart was wrong in its stubborn insistence that they had seen the last of the gunslinger and the boy Jake. Then he made the automatic safe again, returned it to the waistband of his pants, and went back to Susannah. He turned her chair away from the steps and rolled her along an aisle of columns which led deeper into the building. She popped the cylinder of Roland's gun and reloaded it as they went.
Under the roof the rain had a secret, ghostly sound and even the harsh thundercracks were muted. The columns which supported the structure were at least ten feet in diameter, and their tops were lost in the gloom. From up there in the shadows, Eddie heard the cooing conversation of pigeons.
Now a sign hanging on thick chrome-silver chains swam out of the shadows: NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS WELCOMES YOU TO THE CRADLE OF LUD -SOUTHEAST TRAVEL (BLAINE) NORTHWEST TRAVEL (PATRICIA) -
"Now we know the name of the one that fell in the river," Eddie said. "Patricia. They got their colors wrong, though. It's supposed to be pink for girls and blue for boys, not the other way around."
"Maybe they're both blue."
"They're not. Blaine's pink."
"How would you know that?"
Eddie looked confused. "I don't know how. . . but I do."
They followed the arrow pointing toward Blaine's berth, entering what had to be a grand concourse. Eddie didn't have Susannah's ability to see the past in clear, visionary flashes, but his imagination nonetheless filled this vast, pillared space with a thousand hurrying people; he heard clicking heels and murmuring voices, saw embraces of homecoming and farewell. And over everything, the speakers chanting news of a dozen different destinations.
Patricia is now boarding for Northwest Baronies. . .
Will Passenger Killington, passenger Killington, please report to the information booth on the lower level?
Blaine is now arriving at Berth #2, and will be debarking shortly . . .
Now there was only the pigeons.
Eddie shivered.
"Look at the faces," Susannah murmured. "I don't know if they give you the willies, but they sure do me." She was pointing to the right. High up on the wall, a series of sculpted heads seemed to push out of the marble, peering down at them from the shadows--stern men with the harsh faces of executioners who are happy in their work. Some of the faces had fallen from their places and lay in granite shards and splinters seventy or eighty feet below their peers. Those remaining were spiderwebbed with cracks and splattered with pigeon dung.
"They must have been the Supreme Court, or something," Eddie said, uneasily scanning all those thin lips and cracked, empty eyes. "Only judges can look so smart and so completely pissed off at the same time--you're talking to a guy who knows. There isn't one of them who looks like he'd give a crippled crab a crutch."
" 'A heap of broken images, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter,' " Susannah murmured, and at these words Eddie felt gooseflesh waltz across the skin of his arms and chest and legs.
"What's that, Suze?"
"A poem by a man who must have seen Lud in his dreams," she said. "Come on, Eddie. Forget them."
"Easier said than done." But he began to push her again.
Ahead, a vast grilled barrier like a castle barbican swam out of the gloom. . . and beyond it, they caught their first glimpse of Blaine the Mono. It was pink, just as Eddie had said it would be, a delicate shade which matched the veins running through the marble pillars. Blaine flowed above the wide loading platform in a smooth, streamlined bullet shape which looked more like flesh than metal. Its surface was broken only once--by a triangular window equipped with a huge wiper. Eddie knew there would be another triangular window with another big wiper on the other side of the mono's nose, so that if you looked at Blaine head-on, it would seem to have a face, just like Charlie the Choo-Choo. The wipers would look like slyly drooping eyelids.
White light from the southeastern slot in the Cradle fell across Blaine in a long, distorted rectangle. To Eddie, the body of the train looked like the breaching back of some fabulous pink whale--one that was utterly silent.
"Wow." His voice had fallen to a whisper. "We found it."
"Yes. Blaine the Mono."
"Is it dead, do you think? It looks dead."
"It's not. Sleeping, maybe, but a long way from dead."
"You sure?"
"Were you sure it would be pink?" It wasn't a question he had to answer, and he didn't. The face she turned up to him was strained and badly frightened. "It's sleeping, and you know what? I'm scared to wake it up."
"Well, we'll wait for the others, then."
She shook her head. "I think we better try to be ready for when they ge
He did, and pushed her slowly toward it. It was mounted on one side of a closed gate in the center of the barrier which ran the length of the Cradle. The vertical bars of the barrier were made of what looked like stainless steel; those of the gate appeared to be ornamental iron, and their lower ends disappeared into steel-ringed holes in the floor. There was no way either of them was going to wriggle through those bars, either, Eddie saw. The gap between each set was no more than four inches. It would have been a tight squeeze even for Oy.
Pigeons ruffled and cooed overhead. The left wheel of Susannah's chair squawked monotonously. My kingdom for an oilcan, Eddie thought, and realized he was a lot more than just scared. The last time he had felt this level of terror had been on the day when he and Henry had stood on the sidewalk of Rhmehold Street in Dutch Hill, looking at the slumped ruin of The Mansion. They hadn't gone in on that day in 1977; they had turned their backs on the haunted house and walked away, and he remembered vowing to himself that he would never, never, ever go back to that place. It was a promise he'd kept, but here he was, in another haunted house, and there was the haunter, right over there--Blaine the Mono, a long low pink shape with one window peering at him like the eye of a dangerous animal who is shamming sleep.
He stirs no more from his berth in the Cradle. . . He has even stopped speaking in his many voices and laughing. . . Ardis was the last to go nigh Blaine . . . and when Ardis couldn't answer what was asked, Blaine slew him with blue fire.
If it speaks to me, I'll probably go crazy, Eddie thought.
The wind gusted outside, and a fine spray of rain flew in through the tall egress slot cut in the side of the building. He saw it strike Blaine's window and bead up there.
Eddie shuddered suddenly and looked sharply around. "We're being watched--I can feel it."
"I wouldn't be at all surprised. Push me closer to the gate, Eddie. I want to get a better look at that box."
"Okay, but don't touch it. If it's electrified--"
"If Blaine wants to cook us, he will," Susannah said, looking through the bars at Blaine's back. "You know it, and I do, too."
And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.
The box looked like a combination intercom and burglar alarm. There was a speaker set into the top half, with what looked like a TALK/LISTEN button next to it. Below this were numbers arranged in a shape which made a diamond:
Under the diamond were two other buttons with words of the High Speech printed on them: COMMAND and ENTER.
Susannah looked bewildered and doubtful. "What is this thing, do you think? It looks like a gadget in a science fiction movie."
Of course it did, Eddie realized. Susannah had probably seen a home security system or two in her time--she had, after all, lived among the Manhattan rich, even if she had not been very enthusiastically accepted by them--but there was a world of difference between the electronics gear available in her when, 1963, and his own, which was 1987. We've never talked much about the differences, either, he thought. I wonder what she'd think if I told her Ronald Reagan was President of the United States when Roland snatched me? Probably that I was crazy.
"It's a security system," he said. Then, although his nerves and instincts screamed out against it, he forced himself to reach out with his right hand and thumb the TALK/LISTEN switch.
There was no crackle of electricity; no deadly blue fire went racing up his arm. No sign that the thing was even still connected.
Maybe Blaine is dead. Maybe he's dead, after all.
But he didn't really believe that.
"Hello?" he said, and in his mind's eye saw the unfortunate Ardis, screaming as he was microwaved by the blue fire dancing all over his face and body, melting his eyes and setting his hair ablaze. "Hello . . . Blaine? Anybody?"
He let go of the button and waited, stiff with tension. Susannah's hand crept into his, cold and small. There was still no answer, and Eddie--now more reluctant than ever--pushed the button again.
"Blaine?"
He let go of the button. Waited. And when there was still no answer, a dangerous giddiness overcame him, as it often did in moments of stress and fear. When that giddiness took him, counting the cost no longer seemed to matter. Nothing mattered. It had been like that when he had outfaced Balazar's sallow-faced contact man in Nassau, and it was like that now. And if Roland had seen him in the moment this lunatic impatience overtook him, he would have seen more than just a resemblance between Eddie and Cuthbert; he would have sworn Eddie was Cuthbert.
He jammed the button in with his thumb and began to bellow into the speaker, adopting a plummy (and completely bogus) British accent. "Hullo, Blaine! Cheerio, old fellow! This is Robin Leach, host of Life-styles of the Rich and Brainless, here to tell you that you have won six billion dollars and a new Ford Escort in the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes!"
Pigeons took flight above them in soft, startled explosions of wings. Susannah gasped. Her face wore the dismayed expression of a devout woman who has just heard her husband blaspheme in a cathedral. "Eddie, stop it! Stop it!"
Eddie couldn't stop it. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes glittered with a mixture of fear, hysteria, and frustrated anger. "You and your monorail girlfriend, Patricia, will spend a lux-yoo-rious month in scenic Jimtown, where you'll drink only the finest wine and eat only the finest virgins! You--"
". . . shhhh . . . "
Eddie broke off, looking at Susannah. He was at once sure that it had been she who had shushed him--not only because she had already tried but because she was the only other person here--and yet at the same time he knew it hadn't been Susannah. That had been another voice: the voice of a very young and very frightened child.
"Suze? Did you--"
Susannah was shaking her head and raising her hand at the same time. She pointed at the intercom box, and Eddie saw the button marked COMMAND was glowing a very faint shell-pink. It was the same color as the mono sleeping in its berth on the other side of the barrier.
"Shhh . . . don't wake him up," the child's voice mourned. It drifted from the speaker, soft as an evening breeze.
"What . . ." Eddie began. Then he shook his head, reached toward the TALK/LISTEN switch and pressed it gently. When he spoke again, it was not in the blaring Robin Leach bellow but in the almost-whisper of a conspirator. "What are you? Who are you?"
He released the button. He and Susannah regarded each other with the big eyes of children who now know they are sharing the house with a dangerous--perhaps psychotic--adult. How have they come by the knowledge? Why, because another child has told them, a child who has lived with the psychotic adult for a long time, hiding in corners and stealing out only when it knows the adult is asleep; a frightened child who happens to be almost invisible.
There was no answer. Eddie let the seconds spin out. Each one seemed long enough to read a whole novel in. He was reaching for the button again when the faint pink glow reappeared.
"I'm Little Blaine," the child's voice whispered. "The one he doesn't see. The one he forgot. The one he thinks he left behind in the rooms of ruin and the halls of the dead."
Eddie pushed the button again with a hand that had picked up an uncontrollable shake. He could hear that shake in his voice, as well. "Who? Who is the one who doesn't see? Is it the Bear?"
No--not the bear; not he. Shardik lay dead in the forest, many miles behind them; the world had moved on even since then. Eddie suddenly remembered what it had been like to lay his ear against that strange unfound door in the clearing where the bear had lived its violent half-life, that door with its somehow terrible stripes of yellow and black. It was all of a piece, he realized now; all part of some awful, decaying whole, a tattered web with the Dark Tower at its center like an incomprehensible stone spider. All of Mid-World had become one vast haunted mansion in these strange latter d
He saw Susannah's lips form the words of the real answer before the voice from the intercom could speak them, and those words were as obvious as the solution to a riddle once the answer is spoken.
"Big Blaine," the unseen voice whispered. "Big Blaine is the ghost in the machine--the ghost in all the machines. "
Susannah's hand had gone to her throat and was clutching it, as if she intended to strangle herself. Her eyes were full of terror, but they were not glassy, not stunned; they were sharp with understanding. Perhaps she knew a voice like this one from her own when--the when where the integrated whole that was Susannah had been shunted aside by the warring personalities of Detta and Odetta. The childish voice had surprised her as well as him, but her agonized eyes said she was no stranger to the concept being expressed.
Susannah knew all about the madness of duality.
"Eddie we have to go," she said. Her terror turned the words into an unpunctuated auditory smear. He could hear air whistling in her windpipe like a cold wind around a chimney. "Eddie we have to get away Eddie we have to get away Eddie--"
"Too late," the tiny, mourning voice said. "He's awake. Big Blaine is awake. He knows you are here. And he's coming."
Suddenly lights--bright orange arc-sodiums--began to flash on in pairs above them, bathing the pillared vastness of the Cradle in a harsh glare that banished all shadows. Hundreds of pigeons darted and swooped in frightened, aimless flight, startled from their complex of interlocked nests high above.
"Wait!" Eddie shouted. "Please, wait!"
In his agitation he forgot to push the button, but it made no difference; Little Blaine responded anyway. "No! I can't let him catch me! I can't let him kill me, too!"
The light on the intercom box went dark again, but only for a moment. This time both COMMAND and ENTER lit up, and their color was not pink but the lurid dark red of a blacksmith's forge.
"WHO ARE YOU?" a voice roared, and it came not just from the box but from every speaker in the city which still operated. The rotting bodies hanging from the poles shivered with the vibrations of that mighty voice; it seemed that even the dead would run from Blaine, if they could.