The Waste Lands dt-3 Read online

  Eddie thought of the rough diagram of the portals which Roland had drawn in the dirt. “Is this the edge of the world?” he asked, almost timidly. “I mean, it doesn’t look much different than anyplace else.” He laughed a little. “If there’s a drop-off, I don’t see it.”

  Roland shook his head. “It’s not that kind of edge. It’s the place where one of the Beams starts. Or so I was taught.”

  “Beams?” Susannah asked. “What Beams?”

  “The Great Old Ones didn’t make the world, but they did re-make it. Some tale-tellers say the Beams saved it; others say they are the seeds of the world’s destruction. The Great Old Ones created the Beams. They are lines of some sort… lines which bind… and hold…”

  “Are you talking about magnetism?” Susannah asked cautiously.

  His whole face lit up, transforming its harsh planes and furrows into something new and amazing, and for a moment Eddie knew how Roland would look if he actually did reach his Tower.

  “Yes! Not just magnetism, but that is a part of it… and gravity… and the proper alignment of space, size, and dimension. The Beams are the forces which bind these things together.”

  “Welcome to physics in the nuthouse,” Eddie said in a low voice.

  Susannah ignored this. “And the Dark Tower? Is it some kind of generator? A central power-source for these Beams?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you do know that this is point A,” Eddie said. “If we walked long enough in a straight line, we’d come to another portal-call it point C-on the other edge of the world. But before we did, we’d come to point B. The center-point. The Dark Tower.”

  The gunslinger nodded.

  “How long a trip is it? Do you know?”

  “No. But I know it’s very far, and that the distance grows with every day that passes.”

  Eddie had bent to examine the walking box. Now he straightened up and stared at Roland. “That can’t be.” He sounded like a man trying to explain to a small child that there really isn’t a boogeyman living in his closet, that there can’t be because there isn’t any such thing as the boogeyman, not really. “Worlds don’t grow, Roland.”

  “Don’t they? When I was a boy, Eddie, there were maps. I remember one in particular. It was called The Greater Kingdoms of the Western Earth. It showed my land, which was called by the name Gilead. It showed the Downland Baronies, which were overrun by riot and civil war in the year after I won my guns, and the hills, and the desert, and the mountains, and the Western Sea. It was a long distance from Gilead to the Western Sea-a thousand miles or more-but it had taken me over twenty years to cross that distance.”

  “That’s impossible,” Susannah said quickly, fearfully. “Even if you walked the whole distance it couldn’t take twenty years.”

  “Well, you have to allow for stops to write postcards and drink beer,” Eddie said, but they both ignored him.

  “I didn’t walk but rode most of the distance on horseback,” Roland said. “I was-slowed up, shall we say?-every now and then, but for most of that time I was moving. Moving away from John Farson, who led the revolt which toppled the world I grew up in and who wanted my head on a pole in his courtyard-he had good reason to want that, I suppose, since I and my compatriots were responsible for the deaths of a great many of his followers-and because I stole something he held very dear.”

  “What, Roland?” Eddie asked curiously.

  Roland shook his head. “That’s a story for another day… or maybe never. For now, think not of that but of this: I’ve come many thousands of miles. Because the world is growing.”

  “A thing like that just can’t happen,” Eddie reiterated, but he was badly shaken, all the same. “There’d be earthquakes… floods… tidal waves… I don’t know what all…”

  “Look!” Roland said furiously. “Just look around you! What do you see? A world that is slowing down like a child’s top even as it speeds up and moves on in some other way none of us understand. Look at your kills, Eddie! Look at your kills, for your father’s sake!”

  He took two strides toward the stream, picked up the steel snake, examined it briefly, and tossed it to Eddie, who caught it with his left hand. The snake broke in two pieces as he did so.

  “You see? It’s exhausted. All the creatures we found here were exhausted. If we hadn’t come, they would have died before long, anyway. Just as the hear would have died.”

  “The bear had some sort of disease,” Susannah said.

  The gunslinger nodded. “Parasites which attacked the natural parts of its body. But why did they never attack it before?”

  Susannah did not reply.

  Eddie was examining the snake. Unlike the bear, it appeared to be a totally artificial construction, a thing of metal, circuits, and yards (or maybe miles) of gossamer-thin wire. Yet he could see flecks of rust, not just on the surface of the half-snake he still held, but in its guts as well. And there was a patch of wetness where either oil had leaked out or water had seeped in. This moisture had rotted away some of the wires, and a greenish stuff that looked like moss had grown over several of the thumbnail-sized circuit boards.

  Eddie turned the snake over. A steel plate proclaimed it to be the work of North Central Positronics, Ltd. There was a serial number, but no name. Probably too unimportant to name, he thought. Just a sophisticated mechanical Roto-Rooter designed to give old Br’er Bear an enema every once In a while, keep him regular, or something equally disgusting.

  He dropped the snake and wiped his hands on his pants.

  Roland had picked up the tractor-gadget. He yanked at one of the treads. It came off easily, showering a cloud of rust down between his boots. He tossed it aside.

  “Everything in the world is either coming to rest or falling to pieces,” he said flatly. “At the same time, the forces which interlock and give the world its coherence-in time and size as well as in space-are weakening. We knew that even as children, but we had no idea what the time of the end would be like. How could we? Yet now I am living in those times, and I don’t believe they affect my world alone. They affect yours, Eddie and Susannah; they may affect a billion others. The Beams are breaking down. I don’t know if that’s a cause or only another symptom, but I know it’s true. Come! Draw close! Listen!”

  As Eddie approached the metal box with its alternating diagonal slashes of yellow and black, a strong and unpleasant memory seized him-for the first time in years he found himself thinking of a crumbling Victorian wreck in Dutch Hill, about a mile away from the neighborhood he and Henry had grown up. This wreck, which was known as The Mansion to the neighborhood kids, occupied a plot of weedy, untended lawn on Rhinehold Street. Eddie guessed that practically all the kids in the borough had heard spooky stories about The Mansion. The house stood slumped beneath its steep roofs, seeming to glare at passersby from the deep shadows thrown by its eaves. The windows were gone, of course-kids can throw rocks through windows without getting too close to a place-hut it had not been spray-painted, and it had not become a make-out spot or a shooting gallery. Oddest of all was the simple fact of its continued existence: no one had set it on fire to collect the insurance or just to see it bum. The kids said it was haunted, of course, and as Eddie stood on the sidewalk with Henry one day, looking at it (they had made the pilgrimage specifically to see this object of fabulous rumor, although Henry had told their mother they were only going for Hoodsie Rockets at Dahlberg’s with some of his friends), it had seemed that it really might be haunted. Hadn’t he felt some strong and unfriendly force seeping from that old Victorian’s shadowy windows, windows that seemed to look at him with the fixed stare of a dangerous lunatic? Hadn’t he felt some subtle wind stirring the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck? Hadn’t he had the clear intuition that if he stepped inside that place, the door would slam and lock behind him and the walls would begin to close in, grinding the bones of dead mice to powder, wanting to crush his bones the same way?

  Haunting. Haunted.
r />   He felt that same old sense of mystery and danger now, as he approached the metal box. Gooseflesh began to ripple up his legs and down his arms; the hair on the back of his neck bushed out and became rough, overlapping hackles. He felt that same subtle wind blowing past him, although the leaves on the trees which ringed the clearing were perfectly still.

  Yet he walked toward the door anyway (for that was what it was, of course, another door, although this one was locked and always would be against the likes of him), not stopping until his ear was pressed against it.

  It was as if he had dropped a tab of really strong acid half an hour ago and it was just beginning to come on heavy. Strange colors flowed across the darkness behind his eyeballs. He seemed to hear voices murmuring up to him from long hallways like stone throats, halls which were lit with guttering electric torches. Once these flambeaux of the modern age had thrown a bright glare across everything, but now they were only sullen cores of blue light. He sensed emptiness… desertion… desolation… death.

  The machinery rumbled on and on, but wasn’t there a rough undertone to the sound? A land of desperate thudding beneath the hum, like the arrhythmia of a diseased heart? A feeling that the machinery producing this sound, although far more sophisticated even than that within the bear had been, was somehow falling out of tune with itself?

  “All is silent in the halls of the dead,” Eddie heard himself whisper in a falling, fainting voice. “All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin.

  These are the halls of the dead where the spiders spin and the great circuits tall quiet, one by one.”

  Roland pulled him roughly back, and Eddie looked at him with dazed eyes.

  “That’s enough,” Roland said.

  “Whatever they put in there isn’t doing so well, is it?” Eddie heard himself ask. His trembling voice seemed to come from far away. He could still feel the power coming out of that box. It called to him.

  “No. Nothing in my world is doing so well these days.”

  “If you boys are planning to camp here for the night, you’ll have to do without the pleasure of my company,” Susannah said. Her face was a white blur in the ashy aftermath of twilight. “I’m going over yonder. I don’t like the way that thing makes me feel.”

  “We’ll all camp over yonder,” Roland said. “Let’s go.”

  “What a good idea,” Eddie said. As they moved away from the box, the sound of the machinery began to dim. Eddie felt its hold on him weakening, although it still called to him, invited him to explore the half-lit hallways, the standing stairways, the rooms of ruin where the spiders spun and the control panels were going dark, one by one.

  29

  IN His DREAM THAT night, Eddie again went walking down Second Avenue toward Tom and Gerry’s Artistic Deli on the corner of Second and Forty-sixth. He passed a record store and the Rolling Stones boomed from the speakers:

  “I see a red door and I want to paint it black,

  No colours anymore, I want them to turn black,

  I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes,

  I have to turn my head until my darkness goes…”

  He walked on, passing a store called Reflections of You between Forty-ninth and Forty-eighth. He saw himself in one of the mirrors hanging in the display window. He thought he looked better than he had in years-hair a little too long, but otherwise tanned and fit. The clothes, though… uh-uh, man. Square-bear shit all the way. Blue blazer, white shirt, dark red tie, gray dress pants… he had never owned a yuppie-from-hell outfit like that in his life.

  Someone was shaking him.

  Eddie tried to burrow deeper into the dream. He didn’t want to wake up now. Not before he got to the deli and used his key to go through the door and into the field of roses. He wanted to see it all again-the endless blanket of red, the overarching blue sky where those great white cloud-ships sailed, and the Dark Tower. He was afraid of the darkness which lived within that eldritch column, waiting to eat anyone who got too close, but he wanted to see it again just the same. Needed to see it.

  The hand, however, would not stop shaking. The dream began to darken, and the smells of car exhaust along Second Avenue became the smell of woodsmoke-thin now, because the fire was almost out.

  It was Susannah. She looked scared. Eddie sat up and put an arm around her. They had camped on the far side of the alder grove, within earshot of the stream babbling through the bone-littered clearing. On the other side of the glowing embers which had been their campfire, Roland lay asleep. His sleep was not easy. He had cast aside his single blanket and lay with his knees drawn up almost to his chest. With his boots off, his feet looked white and narrow and defenseless. The great toe of the right foot was gone, victim of the lobster-thing which had also snatched away part of his right hand.

  He was moaning some slurred phrase over and over again. After a few repetitions, Eddie realized it was the phrase he had spoken before keeling over in the clearing where Susannah had shot the bear: Go, then-there are other worlds than these. He would fall silent for a moment, then call out the boy’s name: “Jake! Where are you? Jake!”

  The desolation and despair in his voice filled Eddie with horror. His arms stole around Susannah and he pulled her tight against him. He could feel her shivering, although the night was warm.

  The gunslinger rolled over. Starlight fell into his open eyes.

  “Jake, where are you?” he called to the night. “Come back!”

  “Oh Jesus-he’s off again. What should we do, Suze?”

  “I don’t know. I just knew I couldn’t listen to it anymore by myself. He sounds so far away. So far away from everything.”

  “Go, then,” the gunslinger murmured, rolling back onto his side and drawing his knees up once more, “there are other worlds than these.” He was silent for a moment. Then his chest hitched and he loosed the boy’s name in a long, bloodcurdling cry. In the woods behind them, some large bird flew away in a dry whirr of wings toward some less exciting part of the world.

  “Do you have any ideas?” Susannah asked. Her eyes were wide and wet with tears. “Maybe we should wake him up?”

  “I don’t know.” Eddie saw the gunslinger’s revolver, the one he wore on his left hip. It had been placed, in its holster, on a neatly folded square of hide within easy reach of the place where Roland lay. “I don’t think I dare,” he added at last.

  “It’s driving him crazy.”

  Eddie nodded.

  “What do we do about it? Eddie, what do we do?”

  Eddie didn’t know. An antibiotic had stopped the infection caused by the bite of the lobster-thing; now Roland was burning with infection again, but Eddie didn’t think there was an antibiotic in the world that would cure what was wrong with him this time.

  “I don’t know. Lie down with me, Suze.”

  Eddie threw a hide over both of them, and after a while her trembling quieted.

  “If he goes insane, he may hurt us,” she said.

  “Don’t I know it.” This unpleasant idea had occurred to him in terms of the bear-its red, hate-filled eyes (and had there not been bewilderment as well, lurking deep in those red depths?) and its deadly slashing claws. Eddie’s eyes moved to the revolver, lying so close to the gunslinger’s good left hand, and he remembered again how fast Roland had been when he’d seen the mechanical bat swooping down toward them. So fast his hand had seemed to disappear. If the gunslinger went mad, and if he and Susannah became the focus of that madness, they would have no chance. No chance at all.

  He pressed his face into the warm hollow of Susannah’s neck and closed his eyes.

  Not long after, Roland ceased his babbling. Eddie raised his head and looked over. The gunslinger appeared to be sleeping naturally again. Eddie looked at Susannah and saw that she had also gone to sleep. He lay down beside her, gently kissed the swell of her breast, and closed his own eyes.

  Not you, buddy; you’re go
nna be awake a long, long time.

  But they had been on the move for two days and Eddie was bone-tired. He drifted off… drifted down.

  Back to the dream, he thought as he went. I want to go back to Second Avenue… back to Tom and Gerry’s. That’s what I want.

  The dream did not return that night, however.

  30

  THEY ATE A QUICK breakfast as the sun came up, repacked and redistributed the gear, and then returned to the wedge-shaped clearing. It didn’t look quite so spooky in the clear light of morning, but all three of them were still at pains to keep well away from the metal box with its warning slashes of black and yellow. If Roland had any recollection of the bad dreams which had haunted him in the night, he gave no sign. He had gone about the morning chores as he always did, in thoughtful, stolid silence.

  “How do you plan to keep to a straight-line course from here?” Susannah asked the gunslinger.

  “If the legends are right, that should be no problem. Do you remember when you asked about magnetism?”

  She nodded.

  He rummaged deep into his purse and at last emerged with a small square of old, supple leather. Threaded through it was a long silver needle.

  “A compass!” Eddie said. “You really are an Eagle Scout!”

  Roland shook his head. “Not a compass. I know what they are, of course, but these days I keep my directions by the sun and stars, and even now they serve me quite well.”

  “Even now?” Susannah asked, a trifle uneasily.

  He nodded. “The directions of the world are also in drift.”

  “Christ,” Eddie said. He tried to imagine a world where true north was slipping slyly off to the east or west and gave up almost at once. It made him feel a little ill; the way looking down from the top of a high building had always made him feel a little ill.

  “This is just a needle, but it is steel and it should serve our purpose as well as a compass. The Beam is our course now, and the needle will show it.” He rummaged in his purse again and came out with a poorly made pottery cup. A crack ran down one side. Roland had mended this artifact, which he had found at the old campsite, with pine-gum. Now he went to the stream, dipped the cup into it, and brought it back to where Susannah sat in her wheelchair. He put the cup down carefully on the wheelchair’s arm, and when the surface of the water inside was calm, he dropped the needle in. It sank to the bottom and rested there.