by Stephen King
“All right. What has—”
“HOLD, HOLD. THE FORCE OF THE BEAM GATHERS. LOOK NOT DIRECTLY AT THE HOUNDS, MY INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS! AND SHIELD YOUR EYES!”
Jake looked away from the colossal rock sculptures jutting from the falls, but didn’t get his hand up quite in time. With his peripheral vision he saw those featureless heads suddenly develop eyes of a fiercely glowing blue. Jagged tines of lightning leaped out of them and toward the mono. Then Jake was lying on the carpeted floor of the Barony Coach with the heels of his hands pasted against his closed eyes and the sound of Oy whining in one faintly ringing ear. Beyond Oy, he heard the crackle of electricity as it stormed around the mono.
When Jake opened his eyes again, the Falls of the Hounds were gone; Blaine had opaqued the cabin. He could still hear the sound, though—a waterfall of electricity, a force somehow drawn from the Beam and shot out through the eyes of the stone heads. Blaine was feeding himself with it, somehow. When we go on, Jake thought, he’ll be running on batteries. Then Lud really will be behind us. For good.
“Blaine,” Roland said. “How is the power of the Beam stored in that place? What makes it come from the eyes of yon stone temple-dogs? How do you use it?”
Silence from Blaine.
“And who carved them?” Eddie asked. “Was it the Great Old Ones? It wasn’t, was it? There were people even before them. Or . . . were they people?”
More silence from Blaine. And maybe that was good. Jake wasn’t sure how much he wanted to know about the Falls of the Hounds, or what went on beneath them. He had been in the dark of Roland’s world before, and had seen enough to believe that most of what was growing there was neither good nor safe.
“Better not to ask him,” the voice of Little Blaine drifted down from over their heads. “Safer.”
“Don’t ask him silly questions, he won’t play silly games,” Eddie said. That distant, dreaming look had come onto his face again, and when Susannah spoke his name, he didn’t seem to hear.
3
Roland sat down across from Jake and scrubbed his right hand slowly up the stubble on his right cheek, an unconscious gesture he seemed to make only when he was feeling tired or doubtful. “I’m running out of riddles,” he said.
Jake looked back at him, startled. The gunslinger had posed fifty or more to the computer, and Jake supposed that was a lot to just yank out of your head with no preparation, but when you considered that riddling had been such a big deal in the place where Roland had grown up . . .
He seemed to read some of this on Jake’s face, for a small smile, lemon-bitter, touched the corners of his mouth, and he nodded as if the boy had spoken out loud. “I don’t understand, either. If you’d asked me yesterday or the day before, I would have told you that I had at least a thousand riddles stored up in the junkbin I keep at the back of my mind. Perhaps two thousand. But . . .”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, shook his head, rubbed his hand up his cheek again.
“It’s not like forgetting. It’s as if they were never there in the first place. What’s happening to the rest of the world is happening to me, I reckon.”
“You’re moving on,” Susannah said, and looked at Roland with an expression of pity which Roland could look back at for only a second or two; it was as if he felt burned by her regard. “Like everything else here.”
“Yes, I fear so.” He looked at Jake, lips tight, eyes sharp. “Will you be ready with the riddles from your book when I call on you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. And take heart. We’re not finished yet.”
Outside, the dim crackle of electricity ceased.
“I HAVE FED MY BATTERIES AND ALL IS WELL,” Blaine announced.
“Marvelous,” Susannah said dryly.
“Luss!” Oy agreed, catching Susannah’s sarcastic tone exactly.
“I HAVE A NUMBER OF SWITCHING FUNCTIONS TO PERFORM. THESE WILL TAKE ABOUT FORTY MINUTES AND ARE LARGELY AUTOMATIC. WHILE THIS SWITCHOVER TAKES PLACE AND THE ACCOMPANYING CHECKLIST IS RUNNING, WE SHALL CONTINUE OUR CONTEST. I AM ENJOYING IT VERY MUCH.”
“It’s like when you have to switch over from electric to diesel on the train to Boston,” Eddie said. He still sounded as if he wasn’t quite with them. “At Hartford or New Haven or one of those other places where no one in their right fucking mind would want to live.”
“Eddie?” Susannah asked. “What are you—”
Roland touched her shoulder and shook his head.
“NEVER MIND EDDIE OF NEW YORK,” Blaine said in his expansive, gosh-but-this-is-fun voice.
“That’s right,” Eddie said. “Never mind Eddie of New York.”
“HE KNOWS NO GOOD RIDDLES. BUT YOU KNOW MANY, ROLAND OF GILEAD. TRY ME WITH ANOTHER.”
And, as Roland did just that, Jake thought of his Final Essay. Blaine is a pain, he had written there. Blaine is a pain and that is the truth. It was the truth, all right.
The stone truth.
A little less than an hour later, Blaine the Mono began to move again.
4
Susannah watched with dreadful fascination as the flashing dot approached Dasherville, passed it, and made its final dogleg for home. The dot’s movement said that Blaine was moving a bit more slowly now that it had switched over to batteries, and she fancied the lights in the Barony Coach were a little dimmer, but she didn’t believe it would make much difference, in the end. Blaine might reach his terminus in Topeka doing six hundred miles an hour instead of eight hundred, but his last load of passengers would be toothpaste either way.
Roland was also slowing down, going deeper and deeper into that mental junkbin of his to find riddles. Yet he did find them, and he refused to give up. As always. Ever since he had begun teaching her to shoot, Susannah had felt a reluctant love for Roland of Gilead, a feeling that seemed a mixture of admiration, fear, and pity. She thought she would never really like him (and that the Detta Walker part of her might always hate him for the way he had seized hold of her and dragged her, raving, into the sun), but her love was nonetheless strong. He had, after all, saved Eddie Dean’s life and soul; had rescued her beloved. She must love him for that if for nothing else. But she loved him even more, she suspected, for the way he would never, never give up. The word retreat didn’t seem to be in his vocabulary, even when he was discouraged . . . as he so clearly was now.
“Blaine, where may you find roads without carts, forests without trees, cities without houses?”
“ON A MAP.”
“You say true, sai. Next. I have a hundred legs but cannot stand, a long neck but no head; I eat the maid’s life. What am I?”
“A BROOM, GUNSLINGER. ANOTHER VARIATION ENDS, ‘I EASE THE MAID’S LIFE.’ I LIKE YOURS BETTER.”
Roland ignored this. “Cannot be seen, cannot be felt, cannot be heard, cannot be smelt. It lies behind the stars and beneath the hills. Ends life and kills laughter. What is it, Blaine?”
“THE DARK.”
“Thankee-sai, you speak true.”
The diminished right hand slid up the right cheek—the old fretful gesture—and the minute scratching sound produced by the callused pads of his fingers made Susannah shiver. Jake sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at the gunslinger with a kind of fierce intensity.
“This thing runs but cannot walk, sometimes sings but never talks. Lacks arms, has hands; lacks a head but has a face. What is it, Blaine?”
“A CLOCK.”
“Shit,” Jake whispered, lips compressing.
Susannah looked over at Eddie and felt a passing ripple of irritation. He seemed to have lost interest in the whole thing—had “zoned out,” in his weird 1980s slang. She thought to throw an elbow into his side, wake him up a little, then remembered Roland shaking his head at her and didn’t. You wouldn’t know he was thinking, not from that slack expression on his face, but maybe he was.
If so, you better hurry it up a little, precious, she thought. The dot on the route-map was still closer to Dasherville than
Topeka, but it would reach the halfway point within the next fifteen minutes or so.
And still the match went on, Roland serving questions, Blaine sending the answers whistling right back at him, low over the net and out of reach.
What builds up castles, tears down mountains, makes some blind, helps others to see? SAND.
Thankee-sai.
What lives in winter, dies in summer, and grows with its roots upward? AN ICICLE.
Blaine, you say true.
Man walks over; man walks under; in time of war he burns asunder? A BRIDGE.
Thankee-sai.
A seemingly endless parade of riddles marched past her, one after the other, until she lost all sense of their fun and playfulness. Had it been so in the days of Roland’s youth, she wondered, during the riddle contests of Wide Earth and Full Earth, when he and his friends (although she had an idea they hadn’t all been his friends, no, not by a long chalk) had vied for the Fair-Day goose? She guessed that the answer was probably yes. The winner had probably been the one who could stay fresh longest, keep his poor bludgeoned brains aerated somehow.
The killer was the way Blaine came back with the answer so damned promptly each time. No matter how hard the riddle might seem to her, Blaine served it right back to their side of the court, ka-slam.
“Blaine, what has eyes yet cannot see?”
“THERE ARE FOUR ANSWERS,” Blaine replied. “NEEDLES, STORMS, POTATOES, AND A TRUE LOVER.”
“Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak—”
“LISTEN, ROLAND OF GILEAD. LISTEN, KA-TET.”
Roland fell silent at once, his eyes narrowing, his head slightly cocked.
“YOU WILL SHORTLY HEAR MY ENGINES BEGIN TO CYCLE UP,” Blaine said. “WE ARE NOW EXACTLY SIXTY MINUTES OUT OF TOPEKA. AT THIS POINT—”
“If we’ve been riding for seven hours or more, I grew up with the Brady Bunch,” Jake said.
Susannah looked around apprehensively, expecting some new terror or small act of cruelty in response to Jake’s sarcasm, but Blaine only chuckled. When he spoke again, the voice of Humphrey Bogart had resurfaced.
“TIME’S DIFFERENT HERE, SHWEETHEART. YOU MUST KNOW THAT BY NOW. BUT DON’T WORRY; THE FUNDAMENTAL THINGS APPLY AS TIME GOES BY. WOULD I LIE TO YOU?”
“Yes,” Jake muttered.
That apparently struck Blaine’s funnybone, because he began to laugh again—the mad, mechanical laughter that made Susannah think of funhouses in sleazy amusement parks and roadside carnivals. When the lights began to pulse in sync with the laughter, she shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears.
“Stop it, Blaine! Stop it!”
“BEG PARDON, MA’AM,” drawled the aw-shucks voice of Jimmy Stewart. “AH’M RIGHT SORRY IF I RUINT YOUR EARS WITH MY RISABILITY.”
“Ruin this,” Jake said, and hoisted his middle finger at the route-map.
Susannah expected Eddie to laugh—you could count on him to be amused by vulgarity at any time of the day or night, she would have said—but Eddie only continued looking down at his lap, his forehead creased, his eyes vacant, his mouth hung slightly agape. He looked a little too much like the village idiot for comfort, Susannah thought, and again had to restrain herself from throwing an elbow into his side to get that doltish look off his face. She wouldn’t restrain herself for much longer; if they were going to die at the end of Blaine’s run, she wanted Eddie’s arms around her when it happened, Eddie’s eyes on her, Eddie’s mind with hers.
But for now, better let him be.
“AT THIS POINT,” Blaine resumed in his normal voice, “I INTEND TO BEGIN WHAT I LIKE TO THINK OF AS MY KAMIKAZE RUN. THIS WILL QUICKLY DRAIN MY BATTERIES, BUT I THINK THE TIME FOR CONSERVATION HAS PASSED, DON’T YOU? WHEN I STRIKE THE TRANSTEEL PIERS AT THE END OF THE TRACK, I SHOULD BE TRAVELLING AT BETTER THAN NINE HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR—FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY IN WHEELS, THAT IS. SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR, AFTER AWHILE, CROCODILE, DON’T FORGET TO WRITE. I TELL YOU THIS IN THE SPIRIT OF FAIR PLAY, MY INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS. IF YOU HAVE BEEN SAVING YOUR BEST RIDDLES FOR LAST, YOU MIGHT DO WELL TO POSE THEM TO ME NOW.”
The unmistakable greed in Blaine’s voice—its naked desire to hear and solve their best riddles before it killed them—made Susannah feel tired and old.
“I might not have time even so to pose you all my very best ones,” Roland said in a casual, considering tone of voice. “That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?”
A pause ensued—brief, but more of a hesitation than the computer had accorded any of Roland’s riddles—and then Blaine chuckled. Susannah hated the sound of its mad laughter, but there was a cynical weariness in this chuckle that chilled her even more deeply. Perhaps because it was almost sane.
“GOOD, GUNSLINGER. A VALIANT EFFORT. BUT YOU ARE NOT SCHEHERAZADE, NOR DO WE HAVE A THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS IN WHICH TO HOLD PALAVER.”
“I don’t understand you. I know not this Scheherazade.”
“NO MATTER. SUSANNAH CAN FILL YOU IN, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW. PERHAPS EVEN EDDIE. THE POINT, ROLAND, IS THAT I’LL NOT BE DRAWN ON BY THE PROMISE OF MORE RIDDLES. WE VIE FOR THE GOOSE. COME TOPEKA, IT SHALL BE AWARDED, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?”
Once more the diminished hand went up Roland’s cheek; once more Susannah heard the minute rasp of his fingers against the wiry stubble of his beard.
“We play for keeps. No one cries off.”
“CORRECT. NO ONE CRIES OFF.”
“All right, Blaine, we play for keeps and no one cries off. Here’s the next.”
“AS ALWAYS, I AWAIT IT WITH PLEASURE.”
Roland looked down at Jake. “Be ready with yours, Jake; I’m almost at the end of mine.”
Jake nodded.
Beneath them, the mono’s slo-trans engines continued to cycle up—that beat-beat-beat which Susannah did not so much hear as feel in the hinges of her jaw, the hollows of her temples, the pulse-points of her wrists.
It’s not going to happen unless there’s a stumper in Jake’s book, she thought. Roland can’t pose Blaine, and I think he knows it. I think he knew it an hour ago.
“Blaine, I occur once in a minute, twice in every moment, but not once in a hundred thousand years. What am I?”
And so the contest would continue, Susannah realized, Roland asking and Blaine answering with his increasingly terrible lack of hesitation, like an all-seeing, all-knowing god. Susannah sat with her cold hands clasped in her lap and watched the glowing dot draw nigh Topeka, the place where all rail service ended, the place where the path of their ka-tet would end in the clearing. She thought about the Hounds of the Falls, how they had jutted from the thundering white billows below the dark and starshot sky; she thought of their eyes.
Their electric-blue eyes.
CHAPTER III
THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE
1
Eddie Dean—who did not know Roland sometimes thought of him as ka-mai, ka’s fool—heard all of it and heard none of it; saw all of it and saw none of it. The only thing to really make an impression on him once the riddling began in earnest was the fire flashing from the stone eyes of the Hounds; as he raised his hand to shield his eyes from that chain-lightning glare, he thought of the Portal of the Beam in the Clearing of the Bear, how he had pressed his ear against it and heard the distant, dreamy rumble of machinery.
Watching the eyes of the Hounds light up, listening as Blaine drew that current into his batteries, powering up for his final plunge across Mid-World, Eddie had thought: Not all is silent in the halls of the dead and the rooms of ruin. Even now some of the stuff the Old Ones left behind still works. And that’s really the horror of it, wouldn’t you say? Yes. The exact horror of it.
Eddie had been with his friends for a short time after that, mentally as well as physically, but then he had fallen back into his thoughts again. Eddie’s zonin, Henry would have said. Let ’im be.
It was the image of Jake striking flint and steel that kept recurring; he would allow his mind to dwell on it for a second or two, like a bee al
ighting on some sweet flower, and then he would take off again. Because that memory wasn’t what he wanted; it was just the way in to what he wanted, another door like the ones on the beach of the Western Sea, or the one he had scraped in the dirt of the speaking ring before they had drawn Jake . . . only this door was in his mind. What he wanted was behind it; what he was doing was kind of . . . well . . . diddling the lock.
Zonin, in Henry-speak.
His brother had spent most of his time putting Eddie down—because Henry had been afraid of him and jealous of him, Eddie had finally come to realize—but he remembered one day when Henry had stunned him by saying something that was nice. Better than nice, actually; mind-boggling.
A bunch of them had been sitting in the alley behind Dahlie’s, some of them eating Popsicles and Hoodsie Rockets, some of them smoking Kents from a pack Jimmie Polino—Jimmie Polio, they had all called him, because he had that fucked-up thing wrong with him, that clubfoot—had hawked out of his mother’s dresser drawer. Henry, predictably enough, had been one of the ones smoking.
There were certain ways of referring to things in the gang Henry was a part of (and which Eddie, as his little brother, was also a part of); the argot of their miserable little ka-tet. In Henry’s gang, you never beat anyone else up; you sent em home with a fuckin rupture. You never made out with a girl; you fucked that skag til she cried. You never got stoned; you went on a fuckin bombin-run. And you never brawled with another gang; you got in a fuckin pisser.
The discussion that day had been about who you’d want with you if you got in a fuckin pisser. Jimmie Polio (he got to talk first because he had supplied the cigarettes, which Henry’s homeboys called the fuckin cancer-sticks) opted for Skipper Brannigan, because, he said, Skipper wasn’t afraid of anyone. One time, Jimmie said, Skipper got pissed off at this teacher—at the Friday night PAL dance, this was—and beat the living shit out of him. Sent THE FUCKIN CHAPERONE home with a fuckin rupture, if you could dig it. That was his homie Skipper Brannigan.
Everyone listened to this solemnly, nodding their heads as they ate their Rockets, sucked their Popsicles, or smoked their Kents. Everyone knew that Skipper Brannigan was a fuckin pussy and Jimmie was full of shit, but no one said so. Christ, no. If they didn’t pretend to believe Jimmie Polio’s outrageous lies, no one would pretend to believe theirs.