He reached the foot of the square tunnel and glanced briefly at the double line of lighted tubes which led off in either direction. They were lit with swamp-fire, he saw, like the sign outside the place which had belonged to Balazar in the city of New York. He looked more closely at the narrow chrome ventilation strips running along the top of each wall, and the arrows below them, then slipped the rawhide loop off Oy’s neck. Oy shook his head impatiently, clearly glad to be rid of it.
“We’re close,” he murmured into the bumbler’s cocked ear, “and so we have to be quiet. Do you understand, Oy? Very quiet.”
“I-yet,” Oy replied in a hoarse whisper that would have been funny under other circumstances.
Roland put him down and Oy was immediately off down the tunnel, neck out, muzzle to the steel floor. Roland could hear him muttering Ake-Ake! Ake-Ake! under his breath. Roland unholstered his gun and followed him.
27
EDDIE AND SUSANNAH LOOKED up at the vastness of Blaine’s Cradle as the skies opened and the rain began to fall in torrents.
“It’s a hell of a building, but they forgot the handicap ramps!” Eddie yelled, raising his voice to be heard over the rain and thunder.
“Never mind that,” Susannah said impatiently, slipping out of the wheelchair. “Let’s get up there and out of the rain.”
Eddie looked dubiously up the incline of steps. The risers were shallow… but there were a lot of them. “You sure, Suze?”
“Race you, white boy,” she said, and began to wriggle upward with uncanny ease, using hands, muscular forearms, and the stumps of her legs.
And she almost did beat him; Eddie had the ironmongery to contend with, and it slowed him down. Both of them were panting when they reached the top, and tendrils of steam were rising from their wet clothes. Eddie grabbed her under the arms, swung her up, and then just held her with his hands locked together in the small of her back instead of dropping her back into the chair, as he had meant to do. He felt randy and half-crazy without the slightest idea why.
Oh, give me a break, he thought. You’ve gotten this far alive; that’s what’s got your glands pumped up and ready to party.
Susannah licked her full lower lip and wound her strong fingers into his hair. She pulled. It hurt… and at the same time it felt wonderful. “Told you I’d beat you, white boy,” she said in a low, husky voice.
“Get outta here-I had you… by half a step.” He tried to sound less out of breath than he was and found it was impossible.
“Maybe… but it blew you out, didn’t it?” One hand left his hair, slid downward, and squeezed gently. A smile gleamed in her eyes. “Somethin ain’t blown out, though.”
Thunder rumbled across the sky. They flinched, then laughed together.
“Come on,” he said. “This is nuts. The time’s all wrong.”
She didn’t contradict him, but she squeezed him again before returning her hand to his shoulder. Eddie felt a pang of regret as he swung her back into her chair and ran her across vast flagstones and under cover of the roof. He thought he saw the same regret in Susannah’s eyes.
When they were out of the downpour, Eddie paused and they looked back. The Plaza of the Cradle, The Street of the Turtle, and all the city beyond was rapidly disappearing into a shifting gray curtain. Eddie wasn’t a bit sorry. Lud hadn’t earned itself a place in his mental scrapbook of fond memories.
“Look,” Susannah murmured. She was pointing at a nearby downspout. It ended in a large, scaly fish-head that looked like a close relation to the dragon-gargoyles which decorated the corners of the Cradle. Water ran from its mouth in a silver torrent.
“This isn’t just a passing shower, is it?” Eddie asked.
“Nope. It’s gonna rain until it gets tired of it, and then it’s gonna rain some more, just for spite. Maybe a week; maybe a month. Not that it’s gonna matter to us, if Blaine decides he doesn’t like our looks and fries us. Fire a shot to let Roland know we got here, sugar, and then we’ll have us a look around. See what we can see.”
Eddie pointed the Ruger into the gray sky, pulled the trigger, and fired the shot, which Roland heard a mile or more away, as he followed Jake and Gasher through the booby-trapped maze. Eddie stood where he was a moment longer, trying to persuade himself that things might still turn out all right, that his heart was wrong in its stubborn insistence that they had seen the last of the gunslinger and the boy Jake. Then he made the automatic safe again, returned it to the waistband of his pants, and went back to Susannah. He turned her chair away from the steps and rolled her along an aisle of columns which led deeper into the building. She popped the cylinder of Roland’s gun and reloaded it as they went.
Under the roof the rain had a secret, ghostly sound and even the harsh thundercracks were muted. The columns which supported the structure were at least ten feet in diameter, and their tops were lost in the gloom. From up there in the shadows, Eddie heard the cooing conversation of pigeons.
Now a sign hanging on thick chrome-silver chains swam out of the shadows:
“Now we know the name of the one that fell in the river,” Eddie said. “Patricia. They got their colors wrong, though. It’s supposed to be pink for girls and blue for boys, not the other way around.”
“Maybe they’re both blue.”
“They’re not. Blaine’s pink.”
“How would you know that?”
Eddie looked confused. “I don’t know how… but I do.”
They followed the arrow pointing toward Blaine’s berth, entering what had to be a grand concourse. Eddie didn’t have Susannah’s ability to see the past in clear, visionary flashes, but his imagination nonetheless filled this vast, pillared space with a thousand hurrying people; he heard clicking heels and murmuring voices, saw embraces of homecoming and farewell. And over everything, the speakers chanting news of a dozen different destinations.
Patricia is now boarding for Northwest Baronies…
Will Passenger Killington, passenger Killington, please report to the information booth on the lower level?
Blaine is now arriving at Berth #2, and will be debarking shortly…
Now there was only the pigeons.
Eddie shivered.
“Look at the faces,” Susannah murmured. “I don’t know if they give you the willies, but they sure do me.” She was pointing to the right.
High up on the wall, a series of sculpted heads seemed to push out of tin- marble, peering down at them from the shadows-stern men with the harsh faces of executioners who are happy in their work. Some of the faces had fallen from their places and lay in granite shards and splinters seventy or eighty feet below their peers. Those remaining were spider-webbed with cracks and splattered with pigeon dung.
“They must have been the Supreme Court, or something,” Eddie said, uneasily scanning all those thin lips and cracked, empty eyes. “Only judges can look so smart and so completely pissed off at the same time- you’re talking to a guy who knows. There isn’t one of them who looks like he’d give a crippled crab a crutch.”
“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter,” Susannah murmured, and at these words Eddie felt gooseflesh waltz across the skin of his arms and chest and legs.”“What’s that, Suze?”
“A poem by a man who must have seen Lud in his dreams,” she said. “Come on, Eddie. Forget them.”