SIXTEEN
The chrome post which had been outside on the night Jake and Pere Callahan had come here had been put in the lobby for safekeeping. Roland stumbled against it, but his reflexes were as quick as ever and he grabbed it before it could fall over. He read the sign on top slowly, sounding the words out and getting the sense of only one: CLOSED. The orange electric flambeaux which had lit the dining room were off but the battery-powered emergency lights were on, filling the area beyond the lobby and the bar with a flat glare. To the left was an arch and another dining room beyond it. There were no emergency lights there; that part of the Dixie Pig was as dark as a cave. The light from the main dining room seemed to creep in about four feet-just far enough to illuminate the end of a long table-and then fall dead. The tapestry of which Jake had spoken was gone. It might be in the evidence room of the nearest police station, or it might already have joined some collector’s trove of oddities.
Roland could smell the faint aroma of charred meat, vague and unpleasant.
In the main dining room, two or three tables were overturned.
Roland saw stains on the red rug, several dark ones that were almost certainly blood and a yellowish curd that was… something else.
H’rozv it aside! Nasty bauble of the ’heep-God, h’row it aside if you dare!
And the Pere’s voice, echoing dimly in Roland’s ears, unafraid: / needn’t stake my faith on the challenge of such a thing as you, sai The Pere. Another of those he had left behind.
Roland thought briefly of the scrimshaw turde that had been hidden in the lining of the bag they had found in the vacant lot, but didn’t waste time looking for it. If it had been here, he thought he would have heard its voice, calling to him in the silence. No, whoever had appropriated die tapestry of the vampire-knights at dinner had very likely taken the skoldpadda as well, not knowing what it was, only knowing it was something strange and wonderful and otherworldly. Too bad. It might have come in handy.
The gunslinger moved on, weaving his way among the tables with Oy trotting at his heel.
SEVENTEEN
He paused in die kitchen long enough to wonder what the constabulary of New York had made of it. He was willing to bet diey had never seen another like it, not in this city of clean machinery and bright electric lights. This was a kitchen in which Hax, the cook he remembered best from his youth (and beneath whose dead feet he and his best friend had once scattered bread for die birds), would have felt at home. The cookfires had been out for weeks, but the smell of the meat that had been roasted here-some of the variety known as long pork-was strong and nasty. There were more signs of trouble here, as well
(a scum-caked pot lying on the green tiles of the floor, blood which had been burned black on one of the stovetops), and Roland could imagine Jake fighting his way through the kitchen.
But not in panic; no, not he. Instead he had paused to demand directions of the cook’s boy.
What’s your name, cully?
Jochabim, that be I, son of Hossa.
Jake had told them this part of his story, but it was not memory that spoke to Roland now. It was the voices of the dead.
He had heard such voices before, and knew them for what they were.
EIGHTEEN
Oy took the lead as he had done the last time he had been here.
He could still smell Ake’s scent, faint and sorrowful. Ake had gone on ahead now, but not so very far; he was good, Ake was good, Ake would wait, and when the time came-when the j ob Ake had given him was done-Oy would catch up and go with him as before. His nose was strong, and he would find fresher scent than this when the time came to search for it. Ake had saved him from death, which did not matter. Ake had saved him from loneliness and shame after Oy had been cast out by the tet of his kind, and that did.
In the meantime, there was this j ob to finish. He led the man Olan into the pantry. The secret door to the stairs had been closed, but the man Olan felt patiently along the shelves of cans and boxes until he found the way to open it. All was as it had been, the long, descending stair dimly lit by overhead bulbs, the scent damp and overlaid with mold. He could smell the rats which scuttered in the walls; rats and other things, too, some of them bugs of the sort he had killed the last time he and Ake had come here. That had been good killing, and he would gladly have more, if more were offered. Oy wished the bugs would show themselves again and challenge him, but of course they didn’t. They were afraid, and they were right to be afraid, for ever had his kind stood enemy to theirs.
He started down the stairs with the man Olan following behind.
NINETEEN
They passed the deserted kiosk with its age-yellowed signs (NEW YORK SOUVENIRS, LAST CHANCE, a n d VISIT SEPTEMBER 11, 2001), and fifteen minutes later-Roland checked his new watch to be sure of the time-they came to a place where there was a good deal of broken glass on the dusty corridor floor. Roland picked Oy up so he wouldn’t cut the pads of his feet. On both walls he saw the shattered remains of what had been glass-covered hatches of some kind. When he looked in, he saw complicated machinery. They had almost caught Jake here, snared him in some kind of mind-trap, but once again Jake had been clever enough and brave enough to get through. He survived everything but a man too stupid and too careless to do the simple job of driving his bucka on an empty road, Roland thought bitterly. And the man who brought him there-that man, too. Then Oy barked at him and Roland realized that in his anger at Bryan Smith (and at himself), he was squeezing the poor little fellow too tightly.
“Cry pardon, Oy,” he said, and put him down.
Oy trotted on without making any reply, and not long after Roland came to the scattered bodies of the boogers who had harried his boy from the Dixie Pig. Here also, printed in the dust that coated the floor of this ancient corridor, were the tracks he and Eddie had made when they arrived. Again he heard a ghost-voice, this time that of the man who had been the harriers’ leader.
I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. ’Tis the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee.
Roland turned the body over with the toe of his boot (a hume named Flaherty, whose da’ had put a fear of dragons in his head, had the gunslinger known or cared… which he did not) and looked down into the dead face, which was already growing a crop of mold. Next to him was the stoat-head taheen whose final proclamation had been Be damned to you, then, chary-ka. And beyond the heaped bodies of these two and their mates was the door that would take him out of the Keystone World for good.
Assuming that it still worked.
Oy trotted to it and sat down before it, looking back at Roland. The bumbler was panting, but his old, amiably fiendish grin was gone. Roland reached the door and placed his hands against the close-grained ghostwood. Deep within he felt a low and troubled vibration. This door was still working but might not be for much longer.
He closed his eyes and thought of his mother bending over him as he lay in his little bed (how soon before he had been promoted from the cradle he didn’t know, but surely not long), her face a patchwork of colors from the nursery windows, Gabrielle Deschain who would later die at those hands which she caressed so lightly and lovingly with her own; daughter of Candor the Tall, wife of Steven, mother of Roland, singing him to sleep and dreams of those lands only children know.
Baby-bunting, baby-dear,
Baby, bring your berries here.
Chussit, chissit, chassit!
Bring enough to fill your basket!
So far I’ve traveled, he thought with his hands splayed on the ghostwood door. So far I’ve traveled and so many I’ve hurt along the way, hurt or killed, and what I may have saved was saved by accident and can never save my soul, do I have one. Yet there’s this much: I’ve come to the head of the last trail, and I need not travel it alone, if only Susannah loillgo with me. Mayhap there’s still enough to fill my basket.
“Chassit,” Roland said, and opened his eyes as the door opened. He saw Oy leap nimbly through. He heard the shrill scream of the void between the worlds, and then stepped through himself, sweeping the door shut behind him and still without a backward look.
Chapter IV:
FEDIC (TWO VIEWS)
