wildly.
The hanging bulbs were filled with some brilliant gas that pulsed with a rhythmic but not
quite constant beat. Susannah knew there was something there to get, and after a little
while she got it. While Roland was hurrying, the pulse of the guide-lights was rapid. When
he slowed down (never stopping but conserving his energy, all the same), the pulse in the
globes also slowed down. She didn’t think they were responding to his heartbeat, exactly,
or hers, but that was part of it. (Had she known the termbiorhythm, she would have seized
upon it.) Fifty yards or so ahead of their position at any given time, Main Street was dark.
Then, one by one, the lights would come on as they approached. It was mesmerizing. She
turned to look back—only once, she didn’t want to throw him off his stride—and saw that,
yes, the lights were going dark again fifty yards or so behind. These lights were much
brighter than the flickering globes at the entrance to Main Street, and she guessed that those ran off some other power-source, one that was (like almost everything else in this world)
starting to give out. Then she noticed that one of the globes they were approaching
remained dark. As they neared and then passed under it, she saw that it wasn’tcompletely
dead; a dim core of illumination burned feebly deep inside, twitching to the beat of their
bodies and brains. It reminded her of how you’d sometimes see a neon sign with one or
more letters on the fritz, turningPABST intoPA ST orTASTY BRATWURST intoTASTY
RATWURST . A hundred feet or so further on they came to another burnt-out bulb, then
another, then two in a row.
“Chances are good we’re gonna be in the dark before long,” she said glumly.
“I know,” Roland said. He was starting to sound the teensiest bit out of breath.
The air was still dank, and a chill was gradually replacing the heat. There were posters on
the walls, most rotted far beyond the point of readability. On a dry stretch of wall she saw
one that depicted a man who had just lost an arena battle to a tiger. The big cat was yanking a bloody snarl of intestines from the screaming man’s belly while the crowd went nuts.
There was one line of copy in half a dozen different languages. English was second from
the top.VISIT CIRCUS MAXIMUS!YOU WILL CHEER! it said.
“Christ, Roland,” Susannah said. “Christ almighty, whatwere they?”
Roland did not reply, although he knew the answer: they werefolken who had run mad.
Ten
At hundred-yard intervals, little flights of stairs—the longest was only ten risers from top
to bottom—took them gradually deeper into the bowels of the earth. After they’d gone
what Susannah estimated to be a quarter of a mile, they came to a gate that had been torn
away, perhaps by some sort of vehicle, and smashed to flinders. Here were more skeletons,
so many that Roland had to tread upon some in order to pass. They did not crunch but made
a damp puttering sound that was somehow worse. The smell that arose from them was sallow and wet. Most of the tiles had been torn away above these bodies, and those that
were still on the walls had been pocked with bullet-holes. A firefight, then. Susannah
opened her mouth to say something about it, but before she could, that low thudding sound
came again. She thought it was a little louder this time. A little closer. She looked behind
her again and saw nothing. The lights fifty yards back were still going dark in a line.
“I don’t like to sound paranoid, Roland, but I think we are being followed.”
“I know we are.”
“You want me to throw a shot at it? Or a plate? That whistling can be pretty spooky.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It may not know what we are. If you shoot…it will.”
It took her a moment to realize what he was really saying: he wasn’t sure bullets—or an
Oriza—would stop whatever was back there. Or, worse, perhaps hewas sure.
When she spoke again, she worked very hard to sound calm, and thought she succeeded
tolerably well. “It’s something from that crack in the earth, do you think?”
“It might be,” Roland said. “Or it might be something that got through from todash space.
Now hush.”
The gunslinger went on more quickly, finally reaching jogging pace and then passing it.
She was amazed by his mobility now that the pain that had troubled his hip was gone, but
she could hear his breathing as well as feel it in the rise and fall of his back—quick, gasping intakes followed by rough expulsions that sounded almost like cries of annoyance. She
would have given anything to be running beside him on her own legs, the strong ones Jack
Mort had stolen from her.
The overhead globes pulsed faster now, the pulsation easier to see because there were
fewer of them. In between, their combined shadow would stretch long ahead of them, then
shorten little by little as they approached the next light. The air was cooler; the ceramic
stuff which floored the passage less and less even. In places it had split apart and pieces of it had been tossed aside, leaving traps for the unwary. These Oy avoided with ease, and so
far Roland had been able to avoid them, too.
She was about to tell him that she hadn’t heard their follower for awhile when something
behind them pulled in a great gasping breath. She felt the air around her reverse direction;
felt the tight curls on her head spring wildly about as the air was sucked backward. There
was an enormous slobbering noise that made her feel like screaming. Whatever was back
there, it was big.
No.
Enormous.
Eleven
They pelted down another of those short stairways. Fifty yards beyond it, three more of the
pulsing globes bloomed with unsteady light, but after that there was just darkness. The
ragged tiled sides of the passage and its uneven, decaying floor melted into a void so deep
that it looked like a physical substance: great clouds of loosely packed black felt. They
would run into it, she thought, and at first their momentum would continue to carry them
forward. Then the stuff would shove them backward like a spring, and whatever was back
there would be on them. She would catch a glimpse of it, something so awful and alien her
mind would not be able to recognize it, and that might be a mercy. Then it would pounce,
and—
Roland ran into the darkness without slowing, and of course they did not bounce back. At
first there was a little light, some from behind them and some from the globes overhead (a
few were still giving off a last dying core of radiance). Just enough to see another short
stairway, its upper end flanked by crumbling skeletons wearing a few wretched rags of
clothing. Roland hurried down the steps—there were nine in this flight—without stopping.
Oy ran at his side, ears back against his skull, fur rippling sleekly, almost dancing his way down. Then they were in pure dark.
“Bark, Oy, so we don’t run into each other!” Roland snapped. “Bark!”
Oy barked. A thirty-count later, he snapped the same order and Oy barked again.
“Roland, what if we come to another stairway?”
“We will,” he said, and a ninety-count after that, they did. She felt him tip forward, feet
stuttering. She felt the muscles in his shoulders jump as he put his hands out before him,
but they did not fall. Susannah could only marvel at his reflexes. His boots rapped
unhesitatingly downward in the dark. Twelve steps this time? Fourteen? They were back
on the flat surface of the passageway before she could get a good count. So now she knew
he was capable of negotiating stairs even in the dark, even at a dead run. Only what if he
stuck his foot in a hole? God knew it was possible, given the way the flooring had rotted.
Or suppose they came to a stacked bone-barrier of skeletons? In the flat passageway, at the
speed he was now running, that would mean a nasty tumble at the very least. Or suppose
they ran into a jumble of bones at the head of one of the little stairways? She tried to block the vision of Roland swooping out into blackness like a crippled high-diver and couldn’t
quite do it. How many oftheir bones would be broken when they crash-landed at the
bottom?Shit, sugar, pick a number, Eddie might have said. This flat-out run was insanity.
But there was no choice. She could hear the thing behind them all too clearly now, not just its slobbering breath but a sandpapery rasping sound as something slid across one of the
passageway walls—or maybe both. Every now and then she’d also hear a clink and a clitter