The Dark Tower tdt-7 Page 9

  “San fai, can dit los!” cried the chef. He seemed either unaware of what had happened or was unable to grasp it. He turned to Jake. The eyes beneath his sloping, crenellated forehead were a bleary blue-gray, the eyes of a sentient being. Seen head-on, Jake realized what it was: some kind of freakish, intelligent warthog. Which meant it was cooking its own kind. That seemed perfectly fitting in the Dixie Pig.

  “Can foh pube ain-tet can fah! She-so pan! Vai!” This was addressed to Jake. And then, just to make the lunacy complete:

  “And eef you won’d scrub, don’d even stard!”

  The other washboy, the human one, was screaming some sort of warning, but the chef paid no attention. The chef seemed to believe that Jake, having killed one of his helpers, was now duty- and honor-bound to take the dead cat’s place.

  Jake flung the other plate and it sheared through the warthog’s neck, putting an end to its blabber. Perhaps a gallon of blood flew onto the stovetop to the thing’s right, sizzling and sending up a horrible charred smell. The warthog’s head slewed to the left on its neck and then tilted backward, but didn’t come off. The being-it was easily seven feet tall-took two stagger-steps to its left and embraced the sizzling pig turning on its spit. The head tore loose a little further, now lying on Chef Warthog’s right shoulder, one eye glaring up at the steamwreathed fluorescent lights. The heat sealed the cook’s hands to the roast and they began to melt. Then the thing fell forward into the open flames and its tunic caught fire.

  Jake whirled from this in time to see the other potboy advancing on him with a butcher knife in one hand and a cleaver in the other. Jake grabbed another ’Riza from the bag but held his throw in spite of the voice in his head that was yammering for him to go on, go on and do it, give the bastard what he’d once heard Margaret Eisenhart refer to as a “deep haircut.”

  This term had made the other Sisters of the Plate laugh hard. Yet as much as he wanted to throw, he held his hand.

  What he saw was a young man whose skin was a pallid yellowish-gray under the brilliant kitchen lights. He looked both terrified and malnourished. Jake raised the plate in warning and the young man stopped. It wasn’t the ’Riza he was looking at, however, but Oy, who stood between Jake’s feet. The bumbler’s fur was bushed out around his body, seeming to double his size, and his teeth were bared.

  “Do you-"Jake began, and then the door to the restaurant burst open. One of the low men rushed in. Jake threw the plate without hesitation. It moaned through the steamy, brilliant air and took off the intruder’s head with gory precision just above the Adam’s apple. The headless body bucked first to the left and then to the right, like a stage comic accepting a round of applause with a whimsical move, and then collapsed.

  Jake had another plate in each hand almost immediately, his arms once more crossed over his chest in the position sai Eisenhart called “the load.” He looked at the washerboy, who was still holding the knife and the cleaver. Without much threat, however,

  Jake thought. He tried again and this time got the whole question out. “Do you speak English?”

  Yar,” the boy said. He dropped the cleaver so he could hold

  °ne water-reddened thumb and its matching forefinger about a qviarter of an inch apart. “Bout just a liddle. I learn since I come over here.” He opened his other hand and the knife joined the cleaver on the kitchen floor.

  “Do you come from Mid-World?” Jake asked. ’You do, don’t you?”

  He didn’t think the washerboy was terribly bright (“No quiz-kid,” Elmer Chambers would no doubt have sneered),

  but he was at least smart enough to be homesick; in spite of his terror, Jake saw an unmistakable flash of that look in the boy’s eyes. “Yar,” he said. “Come from Ludweg, me.”

  “Near the city of Lud?”

  “North of there, if you do like it or if you don’t,” said the washerboy. “Will’ee kill me, lad? I don’t want to die, sad as I am.”

  “I won’t be the one to kill you if you tell me the truth. Did a woman come through here?”

  The washerboy hesitated, then said: “Aye. Sayre and his closies had ’er. She ’us out on her feet, that ’un, head all lollin…” He demonstrated, rolling his head on his neck and looking more like the village idiot than ever. Jake thought of Sheemie in Roland’s tale of his Mejis days.

  “But not dead.”

  “Nar. I hurt her breevin, me.”

  Jake looked toward the door, but no one came through. Yet.

  He should go, but-

  “What’s your name, cully?”

  “Jochabim, that be I, son of Hossa.”

  “Well, listen, Jochabim, there’s a world outside this kitchen called New York City, and pubes like you are free. I suggest you get out while you have an opportunity.”

  “They’d just bring me back and stripe me.”

  “No, you don’t understand how big it is. Like Lud when Lud was-”

  He looked at Jochabim’s dull-eyed face and thought, No,

  I’m the one who doesn’t understand. And if I hang around here trying to convince him to desert, I’ll no doubt get just what I-

  The door leading to the restaurant popped open again. This time two low men tried to come through at once and momentarily jammed together, shoulder to shoulder. Jake threw both of his plates and watched them crisscross in the steamy air, beheading both newcomers just as they burst through. They fell backward and once more the door swung shut. At Piper School Take had learned about the Battle of Thermopylae, where the Greeks had held off a Persian army that had outnumbered them ten to one. The Greeks had drawn the Persians into a narrow mountain pass; he had this kitchen door. As long as they kept coming through by ones and twos-as they must unless they could flank him somehow-he could pick them off.

  At least until he ran out of Orizas.

  “Guns?” he asked Jochabim. “Are there guns here?”

  Jochabim shook his head, but given the young man’s irritating look of density, it was hard to tell if this meant No guns in the kitchen or / don’t ken you.

  “All right, I’m going,” he said. “And if you don’t go yourself while you’ve got a chance, Jochabim, you’re an even bigger fool than you look. Which would be saying a lot. There are video games out there, kid-think about it.”

  Jochabim continued giving Jake the dnh look, however, and Jake gave up. He was about to speak to Oy when someone spoke to him through the door.

  “Hey, kid.” Rough. Confidential. Knowing. The voice of a man who could hit you for five or sleep with your girlfriend any time he liked, Jake thought. ’Your friend the faddah’s dead. In fact, the faddah’s dinnah. You come out now, with no more nonsense, maybe you can avoid being dessert.”

  “Turn it sideways and stick it up your ass,” Jake called. This got through even Jochabim’s wall of stupidity; he looked shocked.

  “Last chance,” said the rough and knowing voice. “Come on out.”

  “Come on in!” Jake countered. “I’ve got plenty of plates!”

  Indeed, he felt a lunatic urge to rush forward, bang through the door, and take the battle to the low men and women in the restaurant dining room on the other side. Nor was the idea all that crazy, as Roland himself would have known; it was the last thing they’d expect, and there was at least an even chance he could panic them with half a dozen quickly thrown plates and start a rout.

  The problem was the monsters that had been feeding behind the tapestry. The vampires. They’d not panic, and Jake knew it. He had an idea that if the Grandfathers had been able to come into the kitchen (or perhaps it was just lack of interest that kept them in the dining room-that and the last scraps of the Pere’s corpse), he would be dead already. Jochabim as well, quite likely.

  He dropped to one knee, murmured “Oy, find Susannah!” and reinforced the command with a quick mental picture.

  The bumbler gave Jochabim a final distrustful look, then began to nose about on the floor. The tiles were damp from a recent mopping, and Jake was af
raid the bumbler wouldn’t be able to find the scent. Then Oy gave a single sharp cry-more dog’s bark than human’s word-and began to hurry down the center of the kitchen between the stoves and the steam tables, nose low to the ground, only going out of his way long enough to skirt Chef Warthog’s smoldering body.

  “Listen, to me, you little bastard!” cried the low man outside the door. “I’m losing patience with you!”

  “Good!” Jake cried. “Come on in! Let’s see if you go back out again!”

  He put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture while looking at Jochabim. He was about to turn and run-he had no idea how long it would be before the washerboy yelled through the door that the kid and his billy-bumbler were no longer holding Thermopylae Pass-when Jochabim spoke to him in a low voice that was little more than a whisper.

  “What?” Jake asked, looking at him uncertainly. It sounded as if the kid had said mind the mind-trap, but that made no sense. Did it?

  “Mind the mind-trap,” Jochabim said, this time much more clearly, and turned away to his pots and sudsy water.

  “What mind-trap?” Jake asked, but Jochabim affected not to hear and Jake couldn’t stay long enough to cross-examine him.

  He ran to catch up with Oy, throwing glances back over his shoulder. If a couple more of the low men burst into the kitchen, Jake wanted to be the first to know.

  But none did, at least not before he had followed Oy through another door and into the restaurant’s pantry, a dim room stacked high with boxes and smelling of coffee and spices. It was like the storeroom behind the East Stoneham General Store, only cleaner.

  TWO

  There was a closed door in the corner of the Dixie Pig’s pantry.

  Beyond it was a tiled stairway leading down God only knew how far. It was lit by low-wattage bulbs behind bleary, fly-spotted glass shades. Oy started down without hesitation, descending with a kind of bobbing, front-end/back-end regularity that was pretty comical. He kept his nose pressed to the stairs, and Jake knew he was onto Susannah; he could pick it up from his litde friend’s mind.

  Jake tried counting the stairs, made it as far as a hundred and twenty, then lost his grip on the numbers. He wondered if they were still in New York (or under it). Once he thought he heard a faint, familiar rumbling and decided that if that was a subway train, they were.

  Finally they reached the bottom of the stairs. Here was a wide, vaulted area that looked like a gigantic hotel lobby, only without the hotel. Oy made his way across it, snout still low to the ground, his squiggle of a tail wagging back and forth. Jake had to j og in order to keep up. Now that they no longer filled the bag, the ’Rizas jangled back and forth. There was a kiosk on the far side of the lobby-vault, with a sign in one dusty window reading LAST CHANCE FOR NEW YORK SOUVENIRS and another reading VISIT SEPTEMBER 11, 2OO1! TIX STILL AVAILABLE FOR THIS WONDERFUL EVENT! ASTHMATICS PROHIBITED W/O DR’s CERTIFICATE! Jake wondered what was so fabulous about September 11 th of 2001 and then decided that maybe he didn’t want to know.

  Suddenly, as loud in his head as a voice spoken directly into his ear: Hey! Hey Positronics lady! You still there?

  Jake had no idea who the Positronics lady might be, but he recognized the voice asking the question.

  Susannah! he shouted, coming to a stop near the tourist kiosk. A surprised, joyful grin creased his strained face and made it a kid’s again. Suze, are you there?

  And heard her cry out in happy surprise.

  Oy, realizing that Jake was no longer following close behind, turned and gave an impatient Ake-Ake! cry. For the moment at least, Jake disregarded him.

  “I hear you!” he shouted. “Finally! God, who’ve you been talking to? Keep yelling so I can home in on y-”

  From behind him-perhaps at the top of the long staircase, perhaps already on it-someone yelled, “That’s him!” There were gunshots, but Jake barely heard them. To his intense horror, something had crawled inside his head. Something like a mental hand. He thought it was probably the low man who had spoken to him through the door. The low man’s hand had found dials in some kind of Jake Chambers Dogan, and was fiddling with them. Trying

  (to freeze me freeze me in place freeze my feet right to the floor)

  to stop him. And that voice had gotten in because while he was sending and receiving, he was open-

  Jake! fake, where are you?

  There was no time to answer her. Once, while trying to open the unfound door in the Cave of Voices, Jake had summoned a vision of a million doors opening wide. Now he summoned one of them slamming shut, creating a sound like God’s own sonic boom.

  Just in time, too. For a moment longer his feet remained stuck to the dusty floor, and then something screamed in agony and pulled back from him. Let him go.

  Jake got moving, jerkily at first, then picking up steam.

  God, that had been close! Very faintly, he heard Susannah call his name again but didn’t dare throw himself open enough to reply. He’d just have to hope that Oy would hold onto her scent, and that she would keep sending.

  THREE

  He decided later that he must have started singing the song from Mrs. Shaw’s radio shortly after Susannah’s final faint cry, but there was no way of telling for sure. One might as well try to pinpoint the genesis of a headache or the exact moment one consciously realizes he is coming down with a cold. What Jake was sure of was that there were more gunshots, and once the buzzing whine of a ricochet, but all that was a good distance behind, and finally he didn’t bother ducking anymore (or even looking back). Besides, Oy was moving fast now, really shucking those furry little buns of his. Buried machinery thumped and wheezed. Steel rails surfaced in the passageway floor, leading Jake to assume that once a tram or some other kind of shuttle had run here. At regular intervals, official communiques

  (PATRICIA AHEAD; FEDIC; DO YOU HAVE YOUR BLUE PASS?) were printed on the walls. In some places the tiles had fallen off, in others the tram-rails were gone, and in several spots puddles of ancient, verminous water filled what looked for all the world like potholes. Jake and Oy passed two or three stalled vehicles that resembled a cross between golf-carts and flatcars. They also passed a turnip-headed robot that flashed the dim red bulbs of its eyes and made a single croaking sound that might have been halt. Jake raised one of the Orizas, having no idea if it could do any good against such a thing if it came after him, but the robot never moved. That single dim flash seemed to have drained the last few ergs in its batteries, or energy cells, or atomic slug, or whatever it ran on. Here and there he saw graffiti. Two were familiar. The first was ALL HAIL THE CRIMSON KING, with the red eye above each of the I’s in the message.

  The other read BANGO SKANK, ’84. Man, Jake thought distractedly, that guy Bango gets around. And then heard himself clearly for the first time, singing under his breath. Not words, exactly, but just an old, barely remembered refrain from one of the songs on Mrs. Shaw’s kitchen radio: “A-wimeweh, a-wimeweh, a-weee-ummm-immm-oweh…”

  He quit it, creeped out by the muttery, talismanic quality of the chant, and called for Oy to stop. “Need to take a leak, boy.”

  “Oy!” Cocked ears and bright eyes providing the rest of the message: Don’t take too long.

  Jake sprayed urine onto one of the tile walls. Greenish dreck was seeping between the squares. He also listened for the sound of pursuit and was not disappointed. How many back there? What sort of posse? Roland probably would have known, but Jake had no idea. The echoes made it sound like a regiment.

  As he was shaking off, it came to Jake Chambers that the Pere would never do this again, or grin at him and point his finger, or cross himself before eating. They had killed him. Taken his life. Stopped his breath and pulse. Save perhaps for dreams, die Pere was now gone from the story. Jake began to cry. Like his smile, the tears made him once again look like a child. Oy had turned around, eager to be off on the scent, but now looked back over one shoulder with an expression of unmistakable concern.

  “’s’all righ
t,” Jake said, buttoning his fly and then wiping his cheeks with the heel of his hand. Only it wasn’t all right. He was more than sad, more than angry, more than scared about the low men running relendessly up his backtrail. Now that the adrenaline in his system had receded, he realized he was hungry as well as sad. Tired, too. Tired?Verging on exhaustion. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept. Being sucked through the door into New York, he could remember that, and Oy almost being hit by a taxi, and the God-bomb minister with the name that reminded him of Jimmy Cagney playing George M.

  Cohan in that old black-and-white movie he’d watched on the TV in his room when he was small. Because, he realized now, there had been a song in that movie about a guy named Harrigan:

  H-A-double R-I; Harrigan, that’s me. He could remember those things, but not when he’d last eaten a square-

  “Ake!” Oy barked, relentless as fate. If bumblers had a breaking point, Jake thought wearily, Oy was still a long way from his. “Ake-Ake!”

  “Yeah-yeah,” he agreed, pushing away from the wall. “Ake-

  Ake will now run-run. Go on. Find Susannah.”

  He wanted to plod, but plodding would quite likely not be good enough. Mere walking, either. He flogged his legs into a jog and once more began to sing under his breath, this time the words to the song: “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight… In the jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight… ohhh… “And then he was off again, wimeweh, wimeweh, luimeweh, nonsense words from the kitchen radio that was always tuned to the oldies on WCBS… only weren’t memories of some movie wound around and into his memory of this particular song? Not a song from Yankee Doodle Dandy but from some other movie?

  One with scary monsters? Something he’d seen when he was just a little kid, maybe not even out of his