The Waste Lands

38

THE CHAIN LET GO with a rattling crash and Jake fell heavily, landing on his knees. The doorkeeper roared in triumph. The plaster hand seized Jake about his hips and began to drag him down the hall. He stuck his legs out in front of him and planted his feet, but it did no good. He felt splinters and rust-blunted nails digging into his skin as the hand tightened its grip and continued to drag him forward.

The face appeared to be stuck just inside the entrance to the hallway like a cork in a bottle. The pressure it had exerted to get in that far had squeezed the rudimentary features into a new shape, that of some mon-strous, malformed troll. The mouth yawned open to receive him. Jake groped madly for the key, wanting to use it as some last-ditch talisman, but of course he had left it in the door.

'"You son of a bitch!" he screamed, and threw himself backward with all his strength, bowing his back like an Olympic diver, unmindful of the broken boards which dug into him like a belt of nails. He felt his jeans slide down on his hips, and the grip of the hand slipped momentarily.

Jake lunged again. The hand clenched brutally, but Jake's jeans slid down to his knees and his back slammed to the floor, with the pack to cushion the blow. The hand loosened, perhaps wanting to secure a firmer grip upon its prey. Jake was able to draw his knees up a little, and when the hand tightened again, Jake drove his legs forward. The hand yanked backward at the same time, and what Jake had hoped for happened: his jeans (and his remaining sneaker) were peeled from his body, leaving him free again, at least for the moment. He saw the hand rotate on his wrist of boards and disintegrating plaster and jam his dungarees into his mouth. Then he was crawling back toward the blocked doorway on his hands and knees, oblivious of the glass fragments from the fallen lamp, wanting only to get his key again.

He had almost reached the door when the hand closed over his naked legs and began to pull him back once more.

39

THE SHAPE WAS THERE now, finally all there.

Eddie put the key back into the keyhole and applied pressure. For a moment there was resistance... and then it revolved beneath his hand. He heard the locking mechanism turn, heard the bar pull back, felt the key crack in two the moment it had served its purpose. He grasped the dark, polished knob with both hands and pulled. There was a sense of great weight wheeling on an unseen pivot. A feeling that his arm had been gifted with boundless strength. And a clear knowledge that two worlds had suddenly come in contact, and a way had been opened between them.

He felt a moment of dizziness and disorientation, and as he looked through the doorway he realized why: although he was looking down - vertically - he was seeing horizontally. It was like a strange optical illusion created with prisms and mirrors. Then he saw Jake being pulled backward down the glass�C and plaster-littered hallway, elbows dragging, calves pinned-together by a giant hand. And he saw the monstrous mouth which awaited him, fuming some white fog that might have been either smoke or dust.

"Roland!" Eddie shouted. "Roland, it's got h - "

Then he was knocked aside.

40

SUSANNAH WAS AWARE OF being hauled up and whirled around. The world was a carousel blur: standing stones, gray sky, hailstone-littered ground... and a rectangular hole that looked like a trapdoor in the ground. Screams drifted up from it. Within her, the demon raved and struggled, wanting only to escape but helpless to do so until she allowed it.

"Now!" Roland was shouting. "Let it go now, Susannah! For your father's sake, let it go NOW!"

And she did.

She had (with Detta's help) constructed* a trap for it in her mind, something like a net of woven rushes, and now she cut them. She felt the demon fly back from her at once, and there was an instant of terrible hollowness, terrible emptiness. These feelings were at once overshadowed by relief and a grim sense of nastiness and defilement.

As its invisible weight fell away, she glimpsed it - an inhuman shape like a manta-ray with huge, curling wings and something that looked like a cruel baling hook curving out and up from beneath. She saw/sensed the thing flash above the open hole in the ground. Saw Eddie looking up with wide eyes. Saw Roland spread his arms wide to catch the demon.

The gunslinger staggered back, almost knocked off his feet by the unseen weight of the demon. Then he rocked forward again with an armload of nothing.

Clutching it, he jumped through the doorway and was gone.

41

SUDDEN WHITE LIGHT FLOODED the hallway of The Mansion; hailstones struck the walls and bounced up from the broken boards of the floor. Jake heard confused shouts, then saw the gunslinger come through. He seemed to leap through, as if he had come from above. His arms were held far out in front of him, the tips of the fingers locked.

Jake felt his feet slide into the doorkeeper's mouth.

"Roland!" he shrieked. "Roland, help me!"

The gunslinger's hands parted and his arms were immediately thrown wide. He staggered backward. Jake felt serrated teeth touch his skin, ready to tear flesh and grind bone, and then something huge rushed over his head like a gust of wind. A moment later the teeth were gone. The hand which had pinned his legs together relaxed. He heard an unearthly shriek of pain and surprise begin to issue from the doorkeeper's dusty throat, and then it was muffled, crammed back.

Roland grabbed Jake and hauled him to his feet.

"You came!" Jake shouted. "You really came!"

"I came, yes. By the grace of the gods and the courage of my friends, I came."

As the doorkeeper roared again, Jake burst into tears of relief and terror. Now the house sounded like a ship foundering in a heavy sea. Chunks of wood and plaster fell all around them. Roland swept Jake into his arms and ran for the door. The plaster hand, groping wildly, struck one of his booted feet and spun him into the wall, which again tried to bite. Roland pushed forward, turned, and drew his gun. He fired twice into the aimlessly thrashing hand, vaporizing one of the crude plaster fingers. Behind them, the face of the doorkeeper had gone from white to a dingy purplish-black, as if it were choking on something - something which had been fleeing so rapidly that it had entered the monster's mouth and jammed in its gullet before it realized what it was doing.

Roland turned again and ran through the doorway. Although there was now no visible barrier, he was stopped cold for a moment, as if an unseen meshwork had been drawn across the chair.

Then he felt Eddie's hands in his hair and he was yanked not for-ward but upward.

42

THEY EMERGED INTO WET air and slackening hail like babies being born. Eddie was the midwife, as die gunslinger had told him he must be. He was sprawled forward on his chest and belly, his arms out of sight in the doorway, his hands clutching fistfuls of Roland's hair.

"Suze! Help me!"

She wriggled forward, reached through, and groped a hand under Roland's chin. He came up to her with his head cocked backward and his lips parted in a snarl of pain and effort.

Eddie felt a tearing sensation and one of his hands came free holding a thick lock of the gunslinger's gray-streaked hair. "He's slipping!"

"This motherfucker... ain't... nowhere!" Susannah gasped, and gave a terrific wrench, as if she meant to snap Roland's neck.

Two small hands shot out of the doorway in the center of the circle and clutched one of the edges. Freed of Jake's weight, Roland got an elbow up, and a moment later he was boosting himself out. As he did it, Eddie grabbed Jake's wrists and hauled him up.

Jake rolled onto his back and lay there, panting.

Eddie turned to Susannah, took her in his arms, and began to rain kisses on her forehead, cheeks, and neck. He was laughing and crying at the same time. She clung to him, breathing hard... but there was a small, satisfied smile on her lips and one hand slipped over Eddie's wet hair in slow, contented strokes.

From below them came a cauldron of black sounds: squeals, grunts, thuds, crashes.

Roland crawled away from the hole with his head down. His hair stood up in a wild wad. Threads of blood trickled down his cheeks. "Shut it!" he gasped at Eddie. "Shut it, for your father's sake!"

Eddie got the door moving, and those vast, unseen hinges did the rest. The door fell with a gigantic, toneless bang, cutting off all sound from below. As Eddie watched, the lines that had marked its edges faded back to smudged marks in the dirt. The doorknob lost its dimension and was once more only a circle he'd drawn with a stick. Where the keyhole had been there was only a crude shape with a chunk of wood sticking out of it, like the hilt of a sword from a stone.

Susannah went to Jake and pulled him gently to a sitting position. "You all right, sugar?"

He looked at her dazedly. "Yes, I think so. Where is he? The gunslinger? There's something I have to ask him."

"I'm here, Jake," Roland said. He got to his feet, drunk-walked over to Jake, and hunkered beside him. He touched the boy's smooth cheek almost unbelievingly.

"You won't let me drop this time?"

"No," Roland said. "Not this time, not ever again." But in the deep-est darkness of his heart, he thought of the Tower and wondered.

43

THE HAIL CHANGED TO a hard, driving rain, but Eddie could see gleams of blue sky behind the unravelling clouds in the north. The storm was going to end soon, but in the meantime, they were going to get drenched.

He found he didn't mind. He could not remember when he had felt so calm, so at peace with himself, so utterly drained. This mad adven-ture wasn't over yet - he suspected, in fact, that it had barely begun -  but today they had won a big one.

"Su/e?" He pushed her hair away from her face and looked into her dark eyes. "Are you okay? Did it hurt you?"

"Hurt me a little, but I'm okay. I think that bitch Detta Walker is still the undefeated Roadhouse Champeen, demon or no demon."

"What's that mean?"

She grinned impishly. "Not much, not anymore... thank God. How about you, Eddie? All right?"

Eddie listened for Henry's voice and didn't hear it. He had an idea that Henry's voice might be gone for good. "Even better than that," he said, and, laughing, folded her into his arms again. Over her shoulder he could see what was left of the door: only a few faint lines and angles. Soon the rain would wash those away, too.

44

"WHAT's YOUR NAME?" JAKE asked the woman whose legs stopped just above the knee. He was suddenly aware that he had lost his pants in his struggle to escape the doorkeeper, and he pulled the tail of his shirt down over his underwear. There wasn't very much left of her dress, either, as far as that went.

"Susannah Dean," she said. "I already know your name."

"Susannah," Jake said thoughtfully. "I don't suppose your father owns a railroad company, does he?"

She looked astonished for a moment, then threw her head back and laughed. "Why, no, sugar! He was a dentist who went and invented a few things and got rich. What makes you ask a thing like that?"

Jake didn't answer. He had turned his attention to Eddie. The terror had already left his face, and his eyes had regained that cool, assessing look which Roland remembered so well from the way station.

"Hi, Jake," Eddie said. "Good to see you, man."

"Hi," Jake said. "I met you earlier today, but you were a lot younger then."

"I was a lot younger ten minutes ago. Are you okay?"

"Yes," Jake said. "Some scratches, that's all." He looked around. "You haven't found the train yet." This was not a question.

Eddie and Susannah exchanged puzzled looks, but Roland only shook his head. "No train."

"Are your voices gone?"

Roland nodded. "All gone. Yours?"

"Gone. I'm all together again. We both are."

They looked at the same instant, with the same impulse. As Roland swept Jake into his arms, the boy's unnatural self-possession broke and he began to cry - it was the exhausted, relieved weeping of a child who has been lost long, suffered much, and is finally safe again. As Roland's arms closed about his waist, Jake's own arms slipped about the gunslinger's neck and gripped like hoops of steel.

"I'll never leave you again," Roland said, and now his own tears came. "I swear to you on the names of all my fathers: I'll never leave you again."

Yet his heart, that silent, watchful, lifelong prisoner of ka, received the words of this promise not just with wonder but with doubt.