Stephen King – The Dark Tower

unpleasantchewing sound. Susannah tried to imagine what might be making such a noise

and could think of nothing but a giant, disembodied mouth full of yellow fangs streaked

with dirt. On the door was an indecipherable symbol. Just looking at it made her uneasy.

“Do you know what that says?” she asked. Roland—although he spoke over half a dozen languages and was familiar with many more—shook his head. Susannah was relieved. She

had an idea that if you knew the sound that symbol stood for, you’d want to say it.

Mighthave to say it. And then the door would open. Would you want to run when you saw

the thing that was chewing on the other side? Probably. Would you beable to?

Maybe not.

Shortly after passing this door they went down another, shorter, flight of stairs. “I guess I forgot this one when we were talking yesterday, but I remember it now,” she said, and

pointed to the dust on the risers, which was disturbed. “Look, there’s our tracks. Fred

carried me going down, Dinky when we came back up. We’re almost there now, Roland,

promise you.”

But she got lost again in the warren of diverging passages at the bottom of the stairs and

this was when Oy put them right, trotting down a dim, tunnel-like passage where the

gunslinger had to walk bent-over with Susannah clinging to his neck.

“I don’t know—” Susannah began, and that was when Oy led them into a brighter corridor

(comparativelybrighter: half of the overhead fluorescents were out, and many of the tiles

had fallen from the walls, revealing the dark and oozy earth beneath). The bumbler sat

down on a scuffed confusion of tracks and looked at them as if to say,Is this what you

wanted?

“Yeah,” she said, obviously relieved. “Okay. Look, just like I told you.” She pointed to a

door markedFORD’S THEATER , 1865SEE THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION. Beside

it, under glass, was a poster forOur American Cousin that looked as if it had been printed

the day before. “What we want’s just down here a little way. Two lefts and then a right—I

think. Anyway, I’ll know it when I see it.”

Through it all Roland was patient with her. He had a nasty idea which he did not share with

Susannah: that the maze of passageways and corridors down here might be in drift, just as

the points of the compass were, in what he was already thinking of as “the world above.” If

so, they were in trouble.

It was hot down here, and soon they were both sweating freely. Oy panted harshly and

steadily, like a little engine, but kept a steady pace beside the gunslinger’s left heel. There was no dust on the floor, and the tracks they’d seen off and on earlier were gone. The noises from behind the doors were louder, however, and as they passed one, something on the

other side thumped it hard enough to make it shudder in its frame. Oy barked at it, laying

his ears back against his skull, and Susannah voiced a little scream.

“Steady-oh,” Roland said. “It can’t break through. None of them can break through.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes,” said the gunslinger firmly. He wasn’t sure at all. A phrase of Eddie’s occurred to

him:All bets are off .

They skirted the puddles, being careful not even to touch the ones that were glowing with

what might have been radiation or witchlight. They passed a broken pipe that was exhaling

a listless plume of green steam, and Susannah suggested they hold their breath until they

were well past it. Roland thought that an extremely good idea.

Thirty or forty yards further along she bid him stop. “I don’t know, Roland,” she said, and

he could hear her struggling to keep the panic out of her voice. “I thought we had it made in the shade when I saw the Lincoln door, but now this…this here…” Her voice wavered and

he felt her draw a deep breath, struggling to get herself under control. “This all looks

different. And thesounds …how they get in your head…”

He knew what she meant. On their left was an unmarked door that had settled crookedly

against its hinges, and from the gap at the top came the atonal jangle of todash chimes, a

sound that was both horrible and fascinating. With the chimes came a steady draft of

stinking air. Roland had an idea she was about to suggest they go back while they still

could, maybe rethink this whole going-under-the-castle idea, and so he said, “Let’s see

what’s up there. It’s a little brighter, anyway.”

As they neared an intersection from which passages and tiled corridors rayed off in all

directions, he felt her shift against him, sitting up. “There!” she shouted. “That pile of

rubble! We walked around that! We walked around that, Roland,I remember! ”

Part of the ceiling had fallen into the middle of the intersection, creating a jumble of

broken tiles, smashed glass, snags of wire, and plain old dirt. Along the edge of it were

tracks.

“Down there!” she cried. “Straight ahead! Ted said, ‘I think this is the one they called

Main Street’ and Dinky said he thought so, too. Dani Rostov said that a long time ago,

around the time the Crimson King did whatever it was that darkened Thunderclap, a whole

bunch of people used that way to get out. Only they left some of their thoughts behind. I

asked her what feeling that was like and she said it was a little like seeing dirty soap-scum on the sides of the tub after you let out the water. ‘Not nice,’ she said. Fred marked it and then we went all the way back up to the infirmary. I don’t want to brag and queer the deal,

but I think we’re gonna be okay.”

And they were, at least for the time being. Eighty paces beyond the pile of rubble they

came upon an arched opening. Beyond it, flickering white balls of radiance hung down

from the ceiling, leading off at a downward-sloping angle. On the wall, in four chalkstrokes

that had already started to run because of the moisture seeping through the tiles, was the

last message left for them by the liberated Breakers:

They rested here for awhile, eating handfuls of raisins from a vacuum-sealed can. Even Oy nibbled a few, although it was clear from the way he did it that he didn’t care for them

much. When they’d all eaten their fill and Roland had once more stored the can in the

leather sack he’d found along the way, he asked her: “Are you ready to go on?”

“Yes. Right away, I think, before I lose my—my God, Roland, what was that?”

From behind them, probably from one of the passages leading away from the

rubble-choked intersection, had come a low thudding sound. It had a liquid quality to it, as

if a giant in water-filled rubber boots had just taken a single step.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Susannah was looking uneasily back over her shoulder but could see only shadows. Some

of them were moving, but that could have been because some of the lights were flickering.

Couldhave been.

“You know,” she said, “I think it might be a good idea if we vacated this area just about as

fast as we can.”

“I think you’re right,” he said, resting on one knee and the splayed tips of his fingers, like a runner getting ready to burst from the blocks. When she was back in the harness, he got to

his feet and moved past the arrow on the wall, setting a pace that was just short of a jog.

Nine

They had been moving at that near-jog for about fifteen minutes when they came upon a

skeleton dressed in the remains of a rotting military uniform. There was still a flap of scalp on its head and tuft of listless black hair sprouting from it. The jaw grinned, as if

welcoming them to the underworld. Lying on the floor beside the thing’s naked pelvis was

a ring that had finally slipped from one of the moldering fingers of the dead man’s right

hand. Susannah asked Roland if she could have a closer look. He picked it up and handed it

to her. She examined it just long enough to confirm what she had thought, then cast it aside.

It made a little clink and then there were only the sounds of dripping water and the todash

chimes, fainter now but persistent.

“What I thought,” she said.

“And what was that?” he asked, moving on again.

“The guy was an Elk. My father had the same damn ring.”

“An elk? I don’t understand.”

“It’s a fraternal order. A kind of good-ole-boy ka-tet. But what in the hell would an Elk be doing down here? A Shriner, now, that I could understand.” And she laughed, a trifle