by Stephen King
Eddie searched for the other riddle that had been in Jake’s Final Essay, found it, posed it.
“Blaine: when is a door not a door?”
Once again, for the first time since Susannah had asked Blaine what had four legs and flies, there came a peculiar clicking sound, like a man popping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. The pause was briefer than the one which had followed Susannah’s opening riddle, but it was still there-Eddie heard it. “WHEN IT’s A JAR, OF COURSE” Blaine said. He sounded dour, unhappy. “THIRTEEN MINUTES AND FIVE SECONDS REMAIN BEFORE TERMINATION, EDDIE OF NEW YORK-WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?”
Eddie sat bolt upright, staring at the route-map, and although he could feel warm trickles of sweat running down his back, that smile on his face widened.
“Quit your whining, pal. If you want the privilege of smearing us all over the landscape, you’ll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren’t quite up to your standards of logic.”
“YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me? Don’t make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the game; now play it.”
Thin pink light flashed briefly out of the route-map. “You’re making him angry,” Little Blaine mourned. “Oh, you’re making him so angry.”
“Get lost, squirt,” Eddie said, not unkindly, and when the pink glow receded, once again revealing a flashing green dot that was almost on top of Topeka, Eddie said: “Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn’t fall off, too?”
“THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER.” On the last word Blaine’s voice actually dropped into a lower register, making him sound like a fourteen-year-old coping with a change of voice.
Roland’s eyes were not just gleaming now but blazing. “What do you say, Blaine? I would understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?”
“NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT-”
“Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle.”
“IT’s NOT A RIDDLE!” Blaine almost bleated. “IT’s A JOKE, SOMETHING FOR STUPID CHILDREN TO CACKLE OVER IN THE PLAY YARD!”
“Answer now or I declare the contest over and our ka-tet the winner,” Roland said. He spoke in the dryly confident tone of authority Eddie had first heard in the town of River Crossing. “You must answer, for it is stupidity you complain of, not transgression of the rules, which we agreed upon mutually.”
Another of those clicking sounds, but this time it was much louder- so loud, in fact, that Eddie winced. Oy flattened his ears against his skull. It was followed by the longest pause yet; three seconds, at least. Then:
“THE LITTLE MORON DID NOT FALL OFF BECAUSE HE WAS A LITTLE MORE ON.” Blaine sounded sulky. “MORE PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. TO EVEN ANSWER SUCH AN UNWORTHY RIDDLE MAKES ME FEEL SOILED.”
Eddie held up his right hand. He rubbed the thumb and forefinger together.
“WHAT DOES THAT SIGNIFY, FOOLISH CREATURE?”
“It’s the world’s smallest violin, playing 'My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You,'” Eddie said. Jake fell into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “But never mind the cheap New York humor; back to the contest. Why do police lieutenants wear belts?”
The lights in the Barony Coach began to flicker. An odd thing was happening to the walls, as well; they began to fade in and out of true, lunging toward transparency, perhaps, and then opaquing again. Seeing this phenomenon even out of the comer of his eye made Eddie feel a bit whoopsy.
“Blaine? Answer.”
“Answer,” Roland agreed. “Answer, or I declare the contest at an end and hold you to your promise.”
Something touched Eddie’s elbow. He looked down and saw Susannah’s small and shapely hand. He took it, squeezed it, smiled at her. He hoped the smile was more confident than the man making it felt. They were going to win the contest-he was almost sure of that-but he had no idea what Blaine would do if and when they did.
“TO… TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS?” Blame’s voice firmed, and repeated the question as a statement. “TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS. A RIDDLE BASED UPON THE EXAGGERATED SIMPLICITY OF-”
“Right. Good one, Blaine, but never mind trying to kill time-it won’t work. Next-”
“I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY-”
“Then stop the mono,” Eddie said. “If you’re that upset, stop right here, and I will.”
“NO.”
“Okay, then, on we go. What’s Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in the rain?”
There was another of those clicks, this time so loud it felt like having a blunt spike driven against his eardrum. A pause of five seconds. Now the flashing green dot on the route-map was so close to Topeka that it lit the word like neon each time it flashed. Then: “PADDY O'FURNITURE.”
The correct answer to a joke-riddle Eddie had first heard in the alley behind Dahlie’s, or at some similar gathering-point, but Blaine had apparently paid a price for forcing his mind into a channel that could conceive it: the Barony Coach lights were flashing more wildly than ever, and Eddie could hear a low humming from inside the walls-the kind of sound your stereo amp made just before its shit blew up.
Pink light stuttered from the route-map. “Stop!” Little Blaine cried, his voice so wavery it sounded like the voice of a character from an old Warner Bros. cartoon. “Stop it, you’re killing him!”
What do you think he’s trying to do to us, squirt? Eddie thought.
He considered shooting Blaine one Jake had told while they’d been sitting around the campfire that night-What’s green, weighs a hundred tons, and lives at the bottom of the ocean? Moby Snot!-and then didn’t. He wanted to stick further inside the bounds of logic than that one allowed… and he could do it. He didn’t think he would have to get much more surreal than the level of, say, a third-grader with a fair-to-good collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards in order to fuck Blaine up royally… and permanently. Because no matter how many emotions his fancy dipolar circuits had allowed him to mimic, he was still an it-a computer. Even following Eddie this far into riddledom’s Twilight Zone had caused Blaine’s sanity to totter.
“Why do people go to bed, Blaine?”
“BECAUSE… BECAUSE… GODS DAMN YOU, BECAUSE…”
A low squalling started up from beneath them, and suddenly the Barony Coach swayed violently from right to left. Susannah screamed. Jake was thrown into her lap. The gunslinger grabbed them both.
“BECAUSE THE BED WON’T COME TO THEM, GODS DAMN YOU! NINE MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS!”
“Give up, Blaine,” Eddie said. “Stop before I have to blow your mind completely. If you don’t quit, it’s going to happen. We both know it.”
“NO!”
“I got a million of these puppies. Been hearing them my whole life.
They stick to my mind the way flies stick to flypaper. Hey, with some people it’s recipes. So what do you say? Want to give?”
“NO! NINE MINUTES AND THIRTY SECONDS!”
“Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby cross the road?”
The mono took another of those gigantic lurches; Eddie didn’t understand how it could still stay on its track after that, but somehow it did. The screaming from beneath them grew louder; the walls, floor, and ceiling of the car began to cycle madly between opacity and transparency. At one moment they were enclosed, at the next they were rushing over a gray daylight landscape that stretched flat and featureless to a horizon which ran across the world in a straight line.
The voice which came from the speakers was now that of a panicky child: “I KNOW IT, JUST A MOMENT, I KNOW IT, RETRIEVAL IN PROGRESS, ALL LOGIC CIRCUITS IN USE-”
“Answer,” Roland said.
“I NEED MORE TIME! YOU MUST GIVE IT TO ME!” Now there was a kind of cracked triumph in that splintered voice. “NO TEMPORAL LIMITS FOR ANSWERING WERE SET, ROLAND OF GILEAD, HATEFUL GUN
SLINGER OUT OF A PAST THAT SHOULD HAVE STAYED DEAD!”
“No,” Roland agreed, “no time limits were set, you are quite right. But you may not kill us with a riddle still unanswered, Blaine, and Topeka draws nigh. Answer!”
The Barony Coach cycled into invisibility again, and Eddie saw what appeared to be a tall and rusty grain elevator go flashing past; it was in his view barely long enough for him to identify it. Now he fully appreciated the maniacal speed at which they were travelling; perhaps three hundred miles faster than a commercial jet at cruising speed.
“Let him alone!” moaned the voice of Little Blaine. “You’re killing him, I say! Killing him!”
“Isn’t that 'bout what he wanted?” Susannah asked in the voice of Detta Walker. “To die? That’s what he said. We don’t mind, either. You not so bad, Little Blaine, but even a world as fucked up as this one has to be better with your big brother gone. It’s just him takin us with him we been objectin to all this time.”
“Last chance,” Roland said. “Answer or give up the goose, Blaine.”
“I… I… YOU… SIXTEEN LOG THIRTY-THREE… ALL COSINE SUBSCRIPTS… ANTI… ANTI… IN ALL THESE YEARS… BEAM… FLOOD… PYTHAGOREAN… CARTESIAN LOGIC… CAN I… DARE I… A PEACH… EAT A PEACH… ALLMAN BROTHERS… PATRICIA… CROCODILE AND WHIPLASH SMILE… CLOCK OF DIALS… TICK-TOCK, ELEVEN O'CLOCK, THE MAN’s IN THE MOON AND HE’s READY TO ROCK… INCESSAMENT… INCESSAMENT, MON CHER… OH MY HEAD… BLAINE… BLAINE DARES… BLAINE WILL ANSWER… I…”
Blaine, now screaming in the voice of an infant, lapsed into some other language and began to sing. Eddie thought it was French. He knew none of the words, but when the drums kicked in, he knew the song perfectly well: “Velcro Fly” by Z.Z. Top.
The glass over the route-map blew out. A moment later, the route-map itself exploded from its socket, revealing twinkling lights and a maze of circuit-boards behind it. The lights pulsed in time to the drums. Suddenly blue fire flashed out, sizzling the surface around the hole in the wall where the map had been, scorching it black. From deeper within that wall, toward Blaine’s blunt, bullet-shaped snout, came a thick grinding noise.
“It crossed the road because it was stapled to the chicken, you dopey fuck!” Eddie yelled. He got to his feet and started to walk toward the smoking hole where the route-map had been. Susannah grabbed at the back of his shirt, but Eddie barely felt it. Barely knew where he was, in fact. The battle-fire had dropped over him, burning him everywhere with its righteous heat, sizzling his sight, frying his synapses and roasting his heart in its holy glow. He had Blaine in his sights, and although the thing behind the voice was already mortally wounded, he was unable to stop squeezing the trigger: I shoot with my mind.
“What’s the difference between a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead woodchucks?” Eddie raved. “You can’t unload a truck-load of bowling balls with a pitchfork!”
A terrible shriek of mingled anger and agony issued from the hole where the route-map had been. It was followed by a gust of blue fire, as if somewhere forward of Barony Coach an electric dragon had exhaled violently. Jake called a warning, but Eddie didn’t need it; his reflexes had been replaced with razor-blades. He ducked, and the burst of electricity went over his right shoulder, making the hair on that side of his neck stand up. He drew the gun he wore-a heavy.45 with a worn sandalwood grip, one of two revolvers which Roland had brought out of Mid-World’s ruin. He kept walking as he bore down on the front of the coach… and of course he kept talking. As Roland had said, Eddie would die talking. As his old friend Cuthbert had done. Eddie could think of many worse ways to go, and only one better.
“Say, Blaine, you ugly, sadistic fuck! Since we’re talking riddles, what is the greatest riddle of the Orient? Many men smoke but Fu Manchu! Get it? No? So solly, Cholly! How about this one? Why’d the woman name her son Seven and a Half? Because she drew his name out of a hat!”
He had reached the pulsing square. Now he lifted Roland’s gun and the Barony Coach suddenly filled with its thunder. He put all six rounds into the hole, fanning the hammer with the flat of his hand in the way Roland had shown them, knowing only that this was right, this was proper… this was ka, goddammit, fucking ka, it was the way you ended things if you were a gunslinger. He was one of Roland’s tribe, all right, his soul was probably damned to the deepest pit of hell, and he wouldn’t have changed it for all the heroin in Asia.
“I HATE YOU!” Blaine cried in his childish voice. The splinters were gone from it now; it was growing soft, mushy. “I HATE YOU FOREVER!”
“It’s not dying that bothers you, is it?” Eddie asked. The lights in the hole where the route-map had been were fading. More blue fire flashed, but he hardly had to pull his head back to avoid it; the flame was small and weak. Soon Blaine would be as dead as all the Pubes and Grays in Lud. “It’s losing that bothers you.”
“HATE… FORRRRrmr…”
The word degenerated into a hum. The hum became a kind of stuttery thudding sound. Then it was gone.
Eddie looked around. Roland was there, holding Susannah with one arm curved around her butt, as one might hold a child. Her thighs clasped his waist. Jake stood on the gunslinger’s other side, with Oy at his heel.
Drifting out of the hole where the route-map had been was a peculiar charred smell, somehow not unpleasant. To Eddie it smelled like burning leaves in October. Otherwise, the hole was as dead and dark as a corpse’s eye. All the lights in there had gone out.
Your goose is cooked, Blaine, Eddie thought, and your turkey’s baked. Happy fuckin Thanksgiving.
5
The shrieking from beneath the mono stopped. There was one final, grinding thud from up front, and then those sounds ceased, too. Roland felt his legs and hips sway gently forward and put out his free hand to steady himself. His body knew what had happened before his head did:
Blaine’s engines had quit. They were now simply gliding forward along the track. But-
“Back,” he said. “All the way. We’re coasting. If we’re close enough to Blaine’s termination point, we may still crash.”
He led them past the puddled remains of Blaine’s welcoming ice sculpture and to the back of the coach. “And stay away from that thing,” he said, pointing at the instrument which looked like a cross between a piano and a harpsichord. It stood on a small platform. “It may shift. Gods, I wish we could see where we are! Lie down. Wrap your arms over your heads.”
They did as he told them. Roland did the same. He lay there with his chin pressing into the nap of the royal blue carpet, eyes shut, thinking about what had just happened.
“I cry your pardon, Eddie,” he said. “How the wheel of ka turns! Once I had to ask the same of my friend Cuthbert… and for the same reason. There’s a kind of blindness in me. An arrogant blindness.”
“I hardly think there’s any need of pardon-crying,” Eddie said. He sounded uncomfortable.
“There is. I held your jokes in contempt. Now they have saved our lives. I cry your pardon. I have forgotten the face of my father.”
“You don’t need any pardon and you didn’t forget anybody’s face,” Eddie said. “You can’t help your nature, Roland.”
The gunslinger considered this carefully, and discovered something which was wonderful and awful at the same time: that idea had never occurred to him. Not once in his whole life. That he was a captive of ka- this he had known since earliest childhood. But his nature… his very nature…
“Thank you, Eddie. I think-”
Before Roland could say what he thought, Blaine the Mono crashed to a final bitter halt. All four of them were thrown violently up Barony Coach’s central aisle, Oy in Jake’s arms and barking. The cabin’s front wall buckled and Roland struck it shoulder-first. Even with the padding (the wall was carpeted and, from the feel, undercoated with some resilient stuff), the blow was hard enough to numb him. The chandelier swung forward and tore loose from the ceiling, pelting them with glass pendants. Jake rolled aside, vacating
its landing-zone just in time. The harpsichord-piano flew off its podium, struck one of the sofas, and overturned, coming to rest with a discordant brrrannnggg sound. The mono tilted to the right and the gunslinger braced himself, meaning to cover both Jake and Susannah with his own body if it overturned completely. Then it settled back, the floor still a little canted, but at rest.
The trip was over.
The gunslinger raised himself up. His shoulder was still numb, but the arm below it supported him, and that was a good sign. On his left, Jake was sitting up and picking glass beads out of his lap with a dazed expression. On his right, Susannah was dabbing a cut under Eddie’s left eye. “All right,” Roland said. “Who’s hur-”
There was an explosion from above them, a hollow Pow! that reminded Roland of the big-bangers Cuthbert and Alain had sometimes lit and tossed down drains, or into the privies behind the scullery for a prank. And once Cuthbert had shot some big-bangers with his sling. That had been no prank, no childish folly. That had been-
Susannah uttered a short cry-more of surprise than fear, the gunslinger thought-and then hazy daylight was shining down on his face. It felt good. The taste of the air coming in through the blown emergency exit was even better-sweet with the smell of rain and damp earth.
There was a bony rattle, and a ladder-it appeared to be equipped with rungs made of twisted steel wire-dropped out of a slot up there.
“First they throw the chandelier at you, then they show you the door,” Eddie said. He struggled to his feet, then got Susannah up. “Okay, I know when I’m not wanted. Let’s make like bees and buzz off.”
“Sounds good to me.” She reached toward the cut on Eddie’s face again. Eddie took her fingers, kissed them, and told her to stop poking the moichandise.
“Jake?” the gunslinger asked. “Okay?”
“Yes,” Jake said. “What about you, Oy?”
“Oy!”
“Guess he is,” Jake said. He raised his wounded hand and looked at it ruefully.