Roland, who looked in no condition to shoot anyone (Not that I’d want to test that, Jake thought), tried to get up, almost made it, then went back to one knee and made another strangled retching sound. The man with the white hair seized one of his wrists and hauled him up without ceremony.
“The sickness is bad,” the old man said, “no one knows it any better than I. Fortunately it passes rapidly. You have to come with us right away. I know how little you feel like it but you see, there’s an alarm in the ki’-dam’s study and—”
He stopped. His eyes, almost as blue as Roland’s, were widening. Even in the gloom Jake could see the old guy’s face losing its color. His friends had caught up with him, but he seemed not to notice. It was Jake Chambers he was looking at.
“Bobby?” he said in a voice that was not much more than a whisper. “My God, is it Bobby Garfield?”
Chapter V:
Steek-Tete
One
The white-haired gent’s companions were a good deal younger (one looked to Roland hardly out of his teens), and both seemed absolutely terrified. Afraid of being shot by mistake, of course—that was why they’d come hurrying out of the gloom with their hands raised—but of something else, as well, because it must be clear to them now that they weren’t going to be assassinated out of hand.
The older man gave an almost spastic jerk, pulling himself out of some private place. “Of course you’re not Bobby,” he murmured. “Hair’s the wrong color, for one thing… and—”
“Ted, we have to get out of here,” the youngest of the three said urgently. “And I mean inmediatamento.”
“Yes,” the older man said, but his gaze remained on Jake. He put a hand over his eyes (to Eddie he looked like a carny mentalist getting ready to go into his big thought-reading routine), then lowered it again. “Yes, of course.” He looked at Roland. “Are you the dinh? Roland of Gilead? Roland of the Eld?”
“Yes, I—” Roland began, then bent over and retched again. Nothing came out but a long silver string of spittle; he’d already lost his share of Nigel’s soup and sandwiches. Then he raised a slightly trembling fist to his forehead in greeting and said, “Yes. You have the advantage of me, sai.”
“That doesn’t matter,” the white-haired man replied. “Will you come with us? You and your ka-tet?”
“To be sure,” Roland said.
Behind him, Eddie bent over and vomited again. “Goddamn!” he cried in a choked voice. “And I thought going Greyhound was bad! That thing makes the bus look like a… a…”
“Like a first-class stateroom on the Queen Mary,” Susannah said in a weak voice.
“Come… on!” the youngest man said in an urgent voice. “If The Weasel’s on the way with his taheen posse, he’ll be here in five minutes! That cat can scramble!”
“Yes,” the man with the white hair agreed. “We really must go, Mr. Deschain.”
“Lead,” Roland said. “We’ll follow.”
Two
They hadn’t come out in a train station but rather in some sort of colossal roofed switching-yard. The silvery lines Jake had seen were crisscrossing rail-lines, perhaps as many as seventy different sets of tracks. On a couple of them, stubby, automated engines went back and forth on errands that had to be centuries outdated. One was pushing a flatcar filled with rusty I-beams. The other began to cry in an automated voice: “Will a Camka-A please go to Portway 9. Camka-A to Portway 9, if you please.”
Pogo-sticking up and down on Eddie’s hip began to make Susannah feel sick to her stomach all over again, but she’d caught the white-haired man’s urgency like a cold. Also, she now knew what the taheen were: monstrous creatures with the bodies of human beings and the heads of either birds or beasts. They reminded her of the things in that Bosch painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.
“I may have to puke again, sugarbunch,” she said. “Don’t you dare slow down if I do.”
Eddie made a grunting sound she took for an affirmative. She could see sweat pouring down his pale skin and felt sorry for him. He was as sick as she was. So now she knew what it was like to go through a scientific teleportation device that was clearly no longer working very well. She wondered if she would ever be able to bring herself to go through another one.
Jake looked up and saw a roof made of a million panes of different shapes and sizes; it was like looking at a tile mosaic painted a uniform dark gray. Then a bird flew through one of them, and he realized those weren’t tiles up there but panels of glass, some of them broken. That dark gray was apparently just how the outside world looked in Thunderclap. Like a constant eclipse, he thought, and shivered. Beside him, Oy made another series of those hoarse hacking sounds and then trotted on, shaking his head.
Three
They passed a clutter of beached machinery—generators, maybe—then entered a maze of helter-skelter traincars that were very different from those hauled by Blaine the Mono. Some looked to Susannah like the sort of New York Central commuter cars she might have seen in Grand Central Station in her own when of 1964. As if to underline this notion, she noticed one with BAR CAR printed on the side. Yet there were others that appeared much older than that; made of dark riveted tin or steel instead of brushed chrome, they looked like the sort of passenger cars you’d see in an old Western movie, or a TV show like Maverick. Beside one of these stood a robot with wires sprouting crazily from its neck. It was holding its head—which wore a hat with a badge reading CLASS A CONDUCTOR on it—beneath one arm.
At first Susannah tried to keep count of the lefts and rights they were making in this maze, then gave it up as a bad job. They finally emerged about fifty yards from a clapboard-sided hut with the alliterative message LADING/LOST LUGGAGE over the door. The intervening distance was an apron of cracked concrete scattered with abandoned luggage-carts, stacks of crates, and two dead Wolves. No, Susannah thought, make that three. The third one was leaning against the wall in the deeper shadows just around the corner from LADING/LOST LUGGAGE.
“Come on,” said the old man with the mop of white hair, “not much further, now. But we have to hurry, because if the taheen from Heartbreak House catch us, they’ll kill you.”
“They’d kill us, too,” said the youngest of the three. He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “All except for Ted. Ted’s the only one of us who’s indispensable. He’s just too modest to say so.”
Past LADING/LOST LUGGAGE was (reasonably enough, Susannah thought) SHIPPING OFFICE. The fellow with the white hair tried the door. It was locked. This seemed to please rather than upset him. “Dinky?” he said.
Dinky, it seemed, was the youngest of the three. He took hold of the knob and Susannah heard a snapping sound from somewhere inside. Dinky stepped back. This time when Ted tried the door, it opened easily. They stepped into a dim office bisected by a high counter. On it was a sign that almost made Susannah feel nostalgic: TAKE NUMBER AND WAIT, it said.
When the door was closed, Dinky once more grasped the knob. There was another brisk snap.
“You just locked it again,” Jake said. He sounded accusing, but there was a smile on his face, and the color was coming back into his cheeks. “Didn’t you?”
“Not now, please,” said the white-haired man—Ted. “No time. Follow me, please.”
He flipped up a section of the counter and led them through. Behind it was an office area containing two robots that looked long dead, and three skeletons.
“Why the hell do we keep finding bones?” Eddie asked. Like Jake he was feeling better and only thinking out loud, not really expecting an answer. He got one, however. From Ted.