He looks at the door for several moments, pondering, then walks deeper into the stable, curious about the machine he heard. There’s no pain when he walks, if he just took a long fall his body hasn’t yet got the news, but Kee-rist is it ever hot in here!
There are horse stalls, long abandoned. There’s a pile of ancient hay, and beside it a neatly folded blanket and what looks like a breadboard. On the board is a single scrap of dried meat. He picks it up, sniffs it, smells salt. Jerky, he thinks, and pops it into his mouth. He’s not very worried about being poisoned. How can you poison a man who’s already dead?
Chewing, he continues his explorations. At the rear of the stable is a small room like an afterthought. There are a few chinks in the walls of this room, too, enough for him to see a machine squatting on a concrete pad.
Everything in the stable whispers of long years and abandonment, but this gadget, which looks sort of like a milking machine, appears brand new. No rust, no dust. He goes closer. There’s a chrome pipe jutting from one side. Beneath it is a drain. The steel collar around it looks damp. On top of the machine is a small metal plate. Next to the plate is a red button. Stamped on the plate is this:
LaMERK INDUSTRIES
834789-AA-45-776019
DO NOT REMOVE SLUG
ASK FOR ASSISTANCE
The red button is stamped with the word ON. Callahan pushes it. The weary thudding sound resumes, and after a moment water gushes from the chrome pipe. He puts his hands under it. The water is numbingly cold, shocking his overheated skin. He drinks. The water is neither sweet nor sour and he thinks, Such things as
taste must be forgotten at great depths. This—
“Hello, Faddah.”
Callahan screams in surprise. His hands fly up and for a moment jewels of water sparkle in a dusty sunray falling between two shrunken boards. He wheels around on the eroded heels of his boots. Standing just outside the door of the pump-room is a man in a hooded robe.
Sayre, he thinks. It’s Sayre, he’s followed me, he came through that damn door—
” Calm down,” says the man in the robe. ” ‘ Cool your jets,’ as the gunslinger’s new friend might say.”
Confidingly: “His name is Jake, but the housekeeper calls him ‘Bama. “And then, in the bright tone of one just struck by a fine idea, he says, “I would show him to you! Both of them! Perhaps it’s not too late! Come!”
He holds out a hand. The fingers emerging from the robe’s sleeve are long and white, somehow unpleasant.
Like wax. When Callahan makes no move to come forward, the man in the robe speaks reasonably. “Come.
You can’t stay here, you know. This is only a way station, and nobody stays here for long. Come. ”
“Who are you?”
The man in the robe makes an impatient tsk ing sound. “No time for all that, Faddah. Name, name, what’s in a name, as someone or other said. Shakespeare? Virginia Woolf? Who can remember? Come, and I’ll show you a wonder. And I won’t touch you; I’ll walk ahead of you. See?”
He turns. His robe swirls like the skirt of an evening dress. He walks back into the stable, and after a moment Callahan follows. The pump-room is no good to him, after all; the pump-room is a dead end. Outside the stable, he might be able to run.
Run where?
Well, that’s to see, isn’t it?
The man in the robe raps on the free-standing door as he passes it. “Knock on wood, Donnie be good!” he says merrily, and as he steps into the brilliant rectangle of light falling through the stable door, Callahan sees he’s carrying something in his left hand. It’s a box, perhaps a foot long and wide and deep. It looks like it might be made of the same wood as the door. Or perhaps it’s a heavier version of that wood. Certainly it’s darker, and even closer-grained.
Watching the robed man carefully, meaning to stop if he stops, Callahan follows into the sun. The heat is even stronger once he’s in the light, the sort of heat he’s felt in Death Valley. And yes, as they step out of the stable he sees that they are in a desert. Off to one side is a ramshackle building that rises from a foundation of crumbling sandstone blocks. It might once have been an inn, he supposes. Or an abandoned set from a Western movie. On the other side is a corral where most of the posts and rails have fallen. Beyond it he sees miles of rocky, stony sand. Nothing else but—
Yes! Yes, there is something! Two somethings! Two tiny moving dots at the far horizon!
“You see them! How excellent your eyes must be, Faddah!”
The man in the robe— it’s black, his face within the hood nothing but a pallid suggestion— stands about twenty paces from him. He titters. Callahan cares for the sound no more than for the waxy look of his fingers.
It’s like the sound of mice scampering over bones. That makes no actual sense, but—
“Who are they?” Callahan asks in a dry voice. “Who are you? Where is this place?”
The man in black sighs theatrically. “So much backstory, so little time,” he says. “Call me Walter, if you like.
As for this place, it’s a way station, just as I told you. A little rest stop between the hoot of your world and the holler of the next. Oh, you thought you were quite the far wanderer, didn’t you? Following all those hidden highways of yours? But now, Faddah, you’re on a real journey. ”
“Stop calling me that!” Callahan shouts. His throat is already dry. The sunny heat seems to be accumulating on top of his head like actual weight.
” Faddah, Faddah, Faddah!” the man in black says. He sounds petulant, but Callahan knows he’s laughing inside. He has an idea this man— if he is a man— spends a great deal of time laughing on the inside. “Oh well, no need to be pissy about it, I suppose. I’ll callyouDon. Do you like that better?”
The black specks in the distance are wavering now; the rising thermals cause them to levitate, disappear, then reappear again. Soon they’ll be gone for good.
“Who are they ? ” he asks the man in black.
” Folks you’ll almost certainly never meet, ” the man in black says dreamily. The hood shifts; for a moment Callahan can see the waxy blade of a nose and the curve of an eye, a small cup filled with dark fluid. “They’ll die under the mountains. If they don’t die under the mountains, there are things in the Western Sea that will eat them alive. Dod-a-chock! ” He laughs again. But—
But all at once you don’t sound completely sure of yourself, my friend, Callahan thinks.
“If all else fails, ” Walter says, “this will kill them.” He raises the box. Again, faintly, Callahan hears the unpleasant ripple of the chimes. “And who will bring it to them”? Ka, of course, yet even ka needs a friend, a kai-mai. That would be you.”
“I don’t understand.”
” No,” the man in black agrees sadly, “and I don’t have time to explain. Like the White Rabbit in Alice, I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date. They’re following me, you see, but I needed to double back and talk to you. Busy-busy-busy! Now I must get ahead of them again— how else will I draw them on ? You and I, Don, must be done with our palaver, regrettably short though it has been. Back into the stable with you, amigo. Quick as a bunny!”
” What if I don’t want to?” Only there’s really no what-if about it. He’s never wanted to go anyplace less.
Suppose he asks this fellow to let him go and try to catch up with those wavering specks ? What if he tells the man in black, “That’s where I’m supposed to be, where what you call ka wants me to be “? He guesses he knows. Might as well spit in the ocean.
As if to confirm this, Walter says, “What you want hardly matters. You’ll go where the King decrees, and there you will wait. If yon two die on their course— as they almost certainly must— you will live a life of rural serenity in the place to which I send you, and there you too will die, full of years and possibly with a false but undoubtedly pleasing sense of redemption. You’ll live on your level of the Tower long after I’m bone-dust on mine. This I promise you, faddah, for I have seen it in the glass, say true! And if they keep coming? If they reach you in the place to which you are going? Why, in that unlikely case you’ll aid them in every way you can and kill them by doing so. It’s a mind-blower, isn’t it? Wouldn’t you say it’s a mind-blower?”