“TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES,” Blaine said complacently. “WOULD YOU TRY ME AGAIN, GUNSLINGER?”
“I think not, Blaine.” Roland sounded exhausted. “I’ve done with you; you’ve beaten me. Jake?”
Jake got to his feet and faced the route-map. In his chest his heartbeat seemed very slow but very hard, each pulse like a fist slamming on a drumhead. Oy crouched between his feet, looking anxiously up into his face.
“Hello, Blaine,” Jake said, and wet his lips.
“HELLO, JAKE OF NEW YORK.” The voice was kindly-the voice, perhaps, of a nice old fellow with a habit of molesting the children he from time to time leads into the bushes. “WOULD YOU TRY ME WITH RIDDLES FROM YOUR BOOK? OUR TIME TOGETHER GROWS SHORT.”
“Yes,” Jake said. “I would try you with these riddles. Give me your understanding of the truth concerning each, Blaine.”
“IT IS FAIRLY SPOKEN, JAKE OF NEW YORK. I WILL DO AS YOU ASK.”
Jake opened the book to the place he had been keeping with his finger. Ten riddles. Eleven, counting Samson’s riddle, which he was saving for last. If Blaine answered them all (as Jake now believed he probably would), Jake would sit down next to Roland, take Oy onto his lap, and wait for the end. There were, after all, other worlds than these.
“Listen, Blaine: In a tunnel of darkness lies a beast of iron. It can only attack when pulled back. What is it?”
“A BULLET.” No hesitation.
“Walk on the living, they don’t even mumble. Walk on the dead, they mutter and grumble. What are they?”
“FALLEN LEAVES.” No hesitation, and if Jake really knew in his heart that the game was lost, why did he feel such despair, such bitterness, such anger?
Because he’s a pain, that’s why. Blaine is a really BIG pain, and I’d like to push his face in it, just once. I think even making him stop is second to that on my wish-list.
Jake turned the page. He was very close to Riddle-De-Dum’s tom-out answer section now; he could feel it under his finger, a kind of jagged lump. Very close to the end of the book. He thought of Aaron Deepneau in the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Aaron Deepneau telling him to come back anytime, play a little chess, and oh just by the way, old fatso made a pretty good cup of coffee. A wave of homesickness so strong it was like dying swept over him. He felt he would have sold his soul for a look at New York; hell, he would have sold it for one deep lung-filling breath of Forty-second Street at rush hour.
He fought it off and went to the next riddle.
“I am emeralds and diamonds, lost by the moon. I am found by the sun and picked up soon. What am I?”
“DEW.”
Still relentless. Still unhesitating.
The green dot grew closer to Topeka, closing the last of the distance on the route-map. One after another, Jake posed his riddles; one after another, Blaine answered them. When Jake turned to the last page, he saw a boxed message from the author or editor or whatever you called someone who put together books like this: We hope you’ve enjoyed the unique combination of imagination and logic known as RIDDLING!
I haven’t, Jake thought. I haven’t enjoyed it one little bit, and I hope you choke. Yet when he looked at the question above the message, he felt a thin thread of hope. It seemed to him that, in this case, at least, they really had saved the best for last.
On the route-map, the green dot was now no more than a finger’s width from Topeka.
“Hurry up, Jake,” Susannah murmured.
“Blaine?”
“YES, JAKE OF NEW YORK.”
“With no wings, I fly. With no eyes, I see. With no arms, I climb. More frightening than any beast, stronger than any foe. I am cunning, ruthless, and tall; in the end, I rule all. What am I?”
The gunslinger had looked up, blue eyes gleaming. Susannah began to turn her expectant face from Jake to the route-map. Yet Blaine’s answer was as prompt as ever: “THE IMAGINATION OF MAN AND WOMAN.”
Jake briefly considered arguing, then thought, Why waste our time? As always, the answer, when it was right, seemed almost self-evident. “Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak true.”
“AND THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE IS ALMOST MINE, I WOT. NINETEEN MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS TO TERMINATION. WOULD YOU SAY MORE, JAKE OF NEW YORK? VISUAL SENSORS INDICATE YOU HAVE COME TO THE END OF YOUR BOOK, WHICH WAS NOT, I MUST SAY, AS GOOD AS I HAD HOPED.”
“Everybody’s a goddam critic,” Susannah said sotto voce. She wiped a tear from the comer of one eye; without looking directly at her, the gunslinger took her free hand. She clasped it tightly.
“Yes, Blaine, I have one more,” Jake said.
“EXCELLENT.”
“Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came sweetness.”
“THIS RIDDLE COMES FROM THE HOLY BOOK KNOWN AS 'OLD TESTAMENT BIBLE OF KING JAMES.'” Blaine sounded amused, and Jake felt the last of his hope slip away. He thought he might cry- not so much out of fear as frustration. “IT WAS MADE BY SAMSON THE STRONG. THE EATER IS A LION; THE SWEETNESS IS HONEY, MADE BY BEES WHICH HIVED IN THE LION’s SKULL. NEXT? YOU STILL HAVE OVER EIGHTEEN MINUTES, JAKE.”
Jake shook his head. He let go of Riddle-De-Dum! and smiled when Oy caught it neatly in his jaws and then stretched his long neck up to Jake, holding it out again. “I’ve told them all. I’m done.”
“SHUCKS, L’IL TRAILHAND, THAT’s A PURE-D SHAME,” Blaine said. Jake found this drawly John Wayne imitation all but unbearable in their current circumstances. “LOOKS LIKE I WIN THAT THAR GOOSE, UNLESS SOMEBODY ELSE CARES TO SPEAK UP. WHAT ABOUT YOU, OY OF MID-WORLD? GOT ANY RIDDLES, MY LITTLE BUMBLER BUDDY?”
“Oy!” the billy-bumbler responded, his voice muffled by the book. Still smiling, Jake took it and sat down next to Roland, who put an arm around him.
“SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK?”
She shook her head, not looking up. She had turned Roland’s hand over in her own, and was gently tracing the healed stumps where his first two fingers had been.
“ROLAND SON OF STEVEN? HAVE YOU REMEMBERED ANY OTHERS FROM THE FAIR-DAY RIDDLINGS OF GILEAD?”
Roland also shook his head… and then Jake saw that Eddie Dean was raising his. There was a peculiar smile on Eddie’s face, a peculiar shine in Eddie’s eyes, and Jake found that hope hadn’t deserted him, after all. It suddenly flowered anew in his mind, red and hot and vivid. Like… well, like a rose. A rose in the full fever of its summer.
“Blaine?” Eddie asked in a low tone. To Jake his voice sounded queerly choked.
“YES, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.” Unmistakable disdain.
“I have a couple of riddles,” Eddie said. “Just to pass the time between here and Topeka, you understand.” No, Jake realized, Eddie didn’t sound as if he were choking; he sounded as if he were trying to hold back laughter.
“SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.”
3
Sitting and listening to Jake run through the last of his riddles, Eddie had mused on Roland’s tale of the Fair-Day goose. From there his mind had returned to Henry, travelling from Point A to Point B through the magic of associative thinking. Or, if you wanted to get Zen about it, via Trans-Bird Airlines: goose to turkey. He and Henry had once had a discussion about getting off heroin. Henry had claimed that going cold turkey wasn’t the only way; there was also, he said, such a thing as going cool turkey. Eddie asked Henry what you called a hype who had just administered a hot shot to himself, and, without missing a beat, Henry had said. You call that baked turkey. How they had laughed… but now, all this long, strange time later, it looked very much as if the joke was going to be on the younger Dean brother, not to mention the younger Dean brother’s new friends. Looked like they were all going to be baked turkey before much longer.
Unless you can yank it out of the zone.
Yes.
Then do it, Eddie. It was Henry’s voice again, that old resident of his head, but now Henry sounded sober and clear-minded. Henry sounded like his friend instead of his enemy, as if all the old conflicts were finally settled, all the old hatchets buried. Do it-make the devil set himself on fire. It’ll hurt a little, maybe, but you’ve hurt worse. Hell, I hurt you worse myself, and you survived. Survived just fine. And you know where to look.
Of course. In their palaver around the campfire Jake had finally managed to light. Roland had asked the kid a riddle to loosen him up, Jake had struck a spark into the kindling, and then they had all sat around the fire, talking. Talking and riddling.
Eddie knew something else, too. Blaine had answered hundreds of riddles as they ran southeast along the Path of the Beam, and the others believed that he had answered every single one of them without hesitation. Eddie had thought much the same… but now, as he cast his mind back over the contest, he realized an interesting thing: Blaine had hesitated.
Once.
He was pissed, too. Like Roland was.
The gunslinger, although often exasperated by Eddie, had shown real anger toward him just a single time after the business of carving the key, when Eddie had almost choked. Roland had tried to cover the depth of that anger-make it seem like nothing but more exasperation-but Eddie had sensed what was underneath. He had lived with Henry Dean for a long time, and was still exquisitely attuned to all the negative emotions. It had hurt him, too-not Roland’s anger itself, exactly, but the contempt with which it had been laced. Contempt had always been one of Henry’s favorite weapons.
Why did the dead baby cross the road? Eddie had asked. Because it was stapled to the chicken, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck!
Later, when Eddie had tried to defend his riddle, arguing that it was tasteless but not pointless, Roland’s response had been strangely like Blaine’s: don’t care about taste. It’s senseless and unsolvable, and that’s what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.
But as Jake finished riddling Blaine, Eddie realized a wonderful, liberating thing: that word good was up for grabs. Always had been, always would be. Even if the man using it was maybe a thousand years old and could shoot like Buffalo Bill, that word was still up for grabs. Roland himself had admitted he had never been very good at the riddling game. His tutor claimed that Roland thought too deeply; his father thought it was lack of imagination. Whatever the reason, Roland of Gilead had never won a Fair-Day riddling. He had survived all his contemporaries, and that was certainly a prize of sorts, but he had never carried home a prize goose. I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, but I’ve never been much good at thinking around corners.
Eddie remembered trying to tell Roland that jokes were riddles designed to help you build up that often overlooked talent, but Roland had ignored him. The way, Eddie supposed, a color-blind person would ignore someone’s description of a rainbow.
Eddie thought Blaine also might have trouble thinking around comers.
He realized he could hear Blaine asking the others if they had any more riddles-even asking Oy. He could hear the mockery in Blaine’s voice, could hear it very well. Sure he could. Because he was
