The Dark Tower (29 page)

“That doesn’t matter,” the white-haired man replied. “Will you come with us? You and your ka-tet?”

“To be sure,” Roland said.

Behind him, Eddie bent over and vomited again. “God-
damn!
” he cried in a choked voice. “And I thought going Greyhound was bad! That thing makes the bus look like a . . . a . . .”

“Like a first-class stateroom on the
Queen Mary,
” Susannah said in a weak voice.

“Come . . .
on!
” the youngest man said in an urgent voice. “If The Weasel’s on the way with his taheen posse, he’ll be here in five minutes! That cat can
scramble!
”

“Yes,” the man with the white hair agreed. “We really must go, Mr. Deschain.”

“Lead,” Roland said. “We’ll follow.”

They hadn’t come out in a train station but rather in some sort of colossal roofed switching-yard. The silvery lines Jake had seen were crisscrossing rail-lines, perhaps as many as seventy different sets of tracks. On a couple of them, stubby, automated engines went back and forth on errands that had to be centuries outdated. One was pushing a flatcar filled with rusty I-beams. The other began to cry in an automated voice: “Will a Camka-A please go to Portway 9. Camka-A to Portway 9, if you please.”

Pogo-sticking up and down on Eddie’s hip
began to make Susannah feel sick to her stomach all over again, but she’d caught the white-haired man’s urgency like a cold. Also, she now knew what the taheen were: monstrous creatures with the bodies of human beings and the heads of either birds or beasts. They reminded her of the things in that Bosch painting,
The Garden of Earthly Delights
.

“I may have to puke again, sugarbunch,” she said. “Don’t you dare slow down if I do.”

Eddie made a grunting sound she took for an affirmative. She could see sweat pouring down his pale skin and felt sorry for him. He was as sick as she was. So now she knew what it was like to go through a scientific teleportation device that was clearly no longer working very well. She wondered if she would ever be able to bring herself to go through another one.

Jake looked up and saw a roof made of a million panes of different shapes and sizes; it was like looking at a tile mosaic painted a uniform dark gray. Then a bird flew through one of them, and he realized those weren’t tiles up there but panels of glass, some of them broken. That dark gray was apparently just how the outside world looked in Thunderclap.
Like a constant eclipse,
he thought, and shivered. Beside him, Oy made another series of those hoarse hacking sounds and then trotted on, shaking his head.

They passed a clutter of beached machinery—generators, maybe—then entered a maze of helter-skelter traincars that were very different from
those hauled by Blaine the Mono. Some looked to Susannah like the sort of New York Central commuter cars she might have seen in Grand Central Station in her own when of 1964. As if to underline this notion, she noticed one with
BAR CAR
printed on the side. Yet there were others that appeared much older than that; made of dark riveted tin or steel instead of brushed chrome, they looked like the sort of passenger cars you’d see in an old Western movie, or a TV show like
Maverick
. Beside one of these stood a robot with wires sprouting crazily from its neck. It was holding its head—which wore a hat with a badge reading
CLASS A CONDUCTOR
on it—beneath one arm.

At first Susannah tried to keep count of the lefts and rights they were making in this maze, then gave it up as a bad job. They finally emerged about fifty yards from a clapboard-sided hut with the alliterative message
LADING/LOST LUGGAGE
over the door. The intervening distance was an apron of cracked concrete scattered with abandoned luggage-carts, stacks of crates, and two dead Wolves.
No,
Susannah thought,
make that three
. The third one was leaning against the wall in the deeper shadows just around the corner from
LADING/LOST LUGGAGE.

“Come on,” said the old man with the mop of white hair, “not much further, now. But we have to hurry, because if the taheen from Heartbreak House catch us, they’ll kill you.”

“They’d kill us, too,” said the youngest of the three. He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “All except for Ted. Ted’s the only one of us who’s indispensable. He’s just too modest to say so.”

Past
LADING/LOST LUGGAGE
was (reasonably enough, Susannah thought)
SHIPPING OFFICE
. The
fellow with the white hair tried the door. It was locked. This seemed to please rather than upset him. “Dinky?” he said.

Dinky, it seemed, was the youngest of the three. He took hold of the knob and Susannah heard a snapping sound from somewhere inside. Dinky stepped back. This time when Ted tried the door, it opened easily. They stepped into a dim office bisected by a high counter. On it was a sign that almost made Susannah feel nostalgic:
TAKE NUMBER AND WAIT
, it said.

When the door was closed, Dinky once more grasped the knob. There was another brisk snap.

“You just locked it again,” Jake said. He sounded accusing, but there was a smile on his face, and the color was coming back into his cheeks. “Didn’t you?”

“Not now, please,” said the white-haired man—Ted. “No time. Follow me, please.”

He flipped up a section of the counter and led them through. Behind it was an office area containing two robots that looked long dead, and three skeletons.

“Why the hell do we keep finding bones?” Eddie asked. Like Jake he was feeling better and only thinking out loud, not really expecting an answer. He got one, however. From Ted.

“Do you know of the Crimson King, young man? You do, of course you do. I believe that at one time he covered this entire part of the world with poison gas. Probably for a lark. Killed almost everyone. The darkness you see is the lingering result. He’s mad, of course. It’s a large part of the problem. In here.”

He led them through a door marked
PRIVATE
and into a room that had once probably belonged to a high poobah in the wonderful world of shipping
and lading. Susannah saw tracks on the floor, suggesting that this place had been visited recently. Perhaps by these same three men. There was a desk beneath six inches of fluffy dust, plus two chairs and a couch. Behind the desk was a window. Once it had been covered with venetian blinds, but these had collapsed onto the floor, revealing a vista as forbidding as it was fascinating. The land beyond Thunderclap Station reminded her of the flat, deserty wastes on the far side of the River Whye, but rockier and even more forbidding.

And of course it was darker.

Tracks (eternally halted trains sat on some of them) radiated out like strands of a steel spiderweb. Above them, a sky of darkest slate-gray seemed to sag almost close enough to touch. Between the sky and the Earth the air was
thick,
somehow; Susannah found herself squinting to see things, although there seemed to be no actual mist or smog in the air.

“Dinky,” the white-haired man said.

“Yes, Ted.”

“What have you left for our friend The Weasel to find?”

“A maintenance drone,” Dinky replied. “It’ll look like it found its way in through the Fedic door, set off the alarm, then got fried on some of the tracks at the far end of the switching-yard. Quite a few are still hot. You see dead birds around em all the time, fried to a crisp, but even a good-sized rustie’s too small to trip the alarm. A drone, though . . . I’m pretty sure he’ll buy it. The Wease ain’t stupid, but it’ll look pretty believable.”

“Good. That’s very good. Look yonder, gunslingers.” Ted pointed to a sharp upthrust of rock on the horizon. Susannah could make it out easily;
in this dark countryside all horizons seemed close. She could see nothing remarkable about it, though, only folds of deeper shadow and sterile slopes of tumbled rock. “That’s Can Steek-Tete.”

“The Little Needle,” Roland said.

“Excellent translation. It’s where we’re going.”

Susannah’s heart sank. The mountain—or perhaps you called something like that a butte—had to be eight or ten miles away. At the very limit of vision, in any case. Eddie and Roland and the two younger men in Ted’s party couldn’t carry her that far, she didn’t believe. And how did they know they could trust these new fellows, anyway?

On the other hand,
she thought,
what choice do we have?

“You won’t need to be carried,” Ted told her, “but Stanley can use your help. We’ll join hands, like folks at a séance. I’ll want you all to visualize that rock formation when we go through. And hold the name in the forefront of your mind: Steek-Tete, the Little Needle.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Eddie said. They had approached yet another door, this one standing open on a closet. Wire hangers and one ancient red blazer hung in there. Eddie grasped Ted’s shoulder and swung him around. “Go through what? Go through where? Because if it’s a door like the last one—”

Ted looked up at Eddie—had to look up, because Eddie was taller—and Susannah saw an amazing, dismaying thing: Ted’s eyes appeared to be
shaking
in their sockets. A moment later she realized this wasn’t actually the case. The man’s pupils were growing and then shrinking with eerie rapidity. It was as if they couldn’t decide if it was light or dark in here.

“It’s not a door we’re going through at all, at
least not of the kinds with which you may be familiar. You have to trust me, young man. Listen.”

They all fell silent, and Susannah could hear the snarl of approaching motors.

“That’s The Weasel,” Ted told them. “He’ll have taheen with him, at least four, maybe half a dozen. If they catch sight of us in here, Dink and Stanley are almost certainly going to die. They don’t have to
catch
us but only
catch sight
of us. We’re risking our lives for you. This isn’t a game, and I need you to stop asking questions and
follow
me!”

“We will,” Roland said. “And we’ll think about the Little Needle.”

“Steek-Tete,” Susannah agreed.

“You won’t get sick again,” Dinky said. “Promise.”

“Thank God,” Jake said.

“Thang-odd,” Oy agreed.

Stanley, the third member of Ted’s party, continued to say nothing at all.

It was just a closet, and an office closet, at that—narrow and musty. The ancient red blazer had a brass tag on the breast pocket with the words
HEAD OF SHIPPING
stamped on it. Stanley led the way to the back, which was nothing but a blank wall. Coathangers jingled and jangled. Jake had to watch his step to keep from treading on Oy. He’d always been slightly prone to claustrophobia, and now he began to feel the pudgy fingers of the Panic-Man caressing his neck: first one side and then the other. The ’Rizas clanked softly together in their bag. Seven people and one billy-bumbler crowding into an abandoned office closet? It was nuts. He
could still hear the snarl of the approaching engines. The one in charge called The Weasel.

“Join hands,” Ted murmured. “And concentrate.”

“Steek-Tete,” Susannah repeated, but to Jake she sounded dubious this time.

“Little Nee—” Eddie began, and then stopped. The blank wall at the end of the closet was gone. Where it had been was a small clearing with boulders on one side and a steep, scrub-crusted hillside on another. Jake was willing to bet that was Steek-Tete, and if it was a way out of this enclosed space, he was delighted to see it.

Stanley gave a little moan of pain or effort or both. The man’s eyes were closed and tears were trickling out from beneath the lids.

“Now,” Ted said. “Lead us through, Stanley.” To the others he added: “And help him if you can! Help him, for your fathers’ sakes!”

Jake tried to hold an image of the outcrop Ted had pointed to through the office window and walked forward, holding Roland’s hand ahead of him and Susannah’s behind him. He felt a breath of cold air on his sweaty skin and then stepped through onto the slope of Steek-Tete in Thunder-clap, thinking just briefly of Mr. C. S. Lewis, and the wonderful wardrobe that took you to Narnia.

They did not come out in Narnia.

It was cold on the slope of the butte, and Jake was soon shivering. When he looked over his shoulder he saw no sign of the portal they’d come through. The air was dim and smelled of something pungent and not particularly pleasant, like
kerosene. There was a small cave folded into the flank of the slope (it was really not much more than another closet), and from it Ted brought a stack of blankets and a canteen that turned out to hold a sharp, alkali-tasting water. Jake and Roland wrapped themselves in single blankets. Eddie took two and bundled himself and Susannah together. Jake, trying not to let his teeth start chattering (once they did, there’d be no stopping them), envied the two of them their extra warmth.

Dink had also wrapped himself in a blanket, but neither Ted nor Stanley seemed to feel the cold.

“Look down there,” Ted invited Roland and the others. He was pointing at the spiderweb of tracks. Jake could see the rambling glass roof of the switching-yard and a green-roofed structure next to it that had to be half a mile long. Tracks led away in every direction.
Thunderclap Station,
he marveled.
Where the Wolves put the kidnapped kids on the train and send them along the Path of the Beam to Fedic. And where they bring them back after they’ve been roont.

Even after all he’d been through, it was hard for Jake to believe that they had been down there, six or eight miles away, less than two minutes ago. He suspected they’d all played a part in keeping the portal open, but it was the one called Stanley who’d created it in the first place. Now he looked pale and tired, nearly used up. Once he staggered on his feet and Dink (a
very
unfortunate nickname, in Jake’s humble opinion) grabbed his arm and steadied him. Stanley seemed not to notice. He was looking at Roland with awe.