heard a faint, familiar rumbling and decided that if that was a subway train, they were.
Finally they reached the bottom of the stairs. Here was a wide, vaulted area that looked
like a gigantic hotel lobby, only without the hotel. Oy made his way across it, snout still
low to the ground, his squiggle of a tail wagging back and forth. Jake had to jog in order to keep up. Now that they no longer filled the bag, the ’Rizas jangled back and forth. There
was a kiosk on the far side of the lobby-vault, with a sign in one dusty window
readingLAST CHANCE FOR NEW YORK SOUVENIRS and another readingVISIT
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001!TIX STILL AVAILABLE FOR THIS WONDERFUL EVENT!
ASTHMATICS PROHIBITED W/O DR’S CERTIFICATE ! Jake wondered what was so
fabulous about September 11th of 2001 and then decided that maybe he didn’t want to
know.
Suddenly, as loud in his head as a voice spoken directly into his ear:Hey! Hey Positronics
lady! You still there?
Jake had no idea who the Positronics lady might be, but he recognized the voice asking the
question.
Susannah!he shouted, coming to a stop near the tourist kiosk. A surprised, joyful grin
creased his strained face and made it a kid’s again.Suze, are you there?
And heard her cry out in happy surprise.
Oy, realizing that Jake was no longer following close behind, turned and gave an
impatientAke-Ake! cry. For the moment at least, Jake disregarded him.
“I hear you!” he shouted. “Finally! God, who’ve you been talking to? Keep yelling so I
can home in on y—”
From behind him—perhaps at the top of the long staircase, perhaps already on
it—someone yelled, “That’s him!” There were gunshots, but Jake barely heard them. To
his intense horror, something had crawled inside his head. Something like a mental hand.
He thought it was probably the low man who had spoken to him through the door. The low
man’s hand had found dials in some kind of Jake Chambers Dogan, and was fiddling with
them. Trying
(to freeze me freeze me in place freeze my feet right to the floor)
to stop him. And that voice had gotten in because while he was sending and receiving, he
wasopen —
Jake! Jake, where are you?
There was no time to answer her. Once, while trying to open the unfound door in the Cave
of Voices, Jake had summoned a vision of a million doors opening wide. Now he
summoned one of them slamming shut, creating a sound like God’s own sonic boom.
Just in time, too. For a moment longer his feet remained stuck to the dusty floor, and then
something screamed in agony and pulled back from him. Let him go.
Jake got moving, jerkily at first, then picking up steam. God, that had been close! Very
faintly, he heard Susannah call his name again but didn’t dare throw himself open enough
to reply. He’d just have to hope that Oy would hold onto her scent, and that she would keep
sending.
Three
He decided later that he must have started singing the song from Mrs. Shaw’s radio shortly
after Susannah’s final faint cry, but there was no way of telling for sure. One might as well try to pinpoint the genesis of a headache or the exact moment one consciously realizes he is
coming down with a cold. What Jake was sure of was that there were more gunshots, and
once the buzzing whine of a ricochet, but all that was a good distance behind, and finally he didn’t bother ducking anymore (or even looking back). Besides, Oy was moving fast now,
really shucking those furry little buns of his. Buried machinery thumped and wheezed.
Steel rails surfaced in the passageway floor, leading Jake to assume that once a tram or
some other kind of shuttle had run here. At regular intervals, official communiqués
(PATRICIA AHEAD; FEDIC; DO YOU HAVE YOUR BLUE PASS?) were printed on
the walls. In some places the tiles had fallen off, in others the tram-rails were gone, and in several spots puddles of ancient, verminous water filled what looked for all the world like
potholes. Jake and Oy passed two or three stalled vehicles that resembled a cross between
golf-carts and flatcars. They also passed a turnip-headed robot that flashed the dim red
bulbs of its eyes and made a single croaking sound that might have beenhalt . Jake raised
one of the Orizas, having no idea if it could do any good against such a thing if it came after him, but the robot never moved. That single dim flash seemed to have drained the last few
ergs in its batteries, or energy cells, or atomic slug, or whatever it ran on. Here and there he saw graffiti. Two were familiar. The first wasALL HAIL THE CRIMSON KING , with the
red eye above each of the I’s in the message. The other readBANGO SKANK , ’84.Man,
Jake thought distractedly,that guy Bango gets around . And then heard himself clearly for
the first time, singing under his breath. Not words, exactly, but just an old, barely
remembered refrain from one of the songs on Mrs. Shaw’s kitchen radio: “A-wimeweh,
a-wimeweh, a-weee-ummm-immm-oweh…”
He quit it, creeped out by the muttery, talismanic quality of the chant, and called for Oy to stop. “Need to take a leak, boy.”
“Oy!” Cocked ears and bright eyes providing the rest of the message:Don’t take too long.
Jake sprayed urine onto one of the tile walls. Greenish dreck was seeping between the
squares. He also listened for the sound of pursuit and was not disappointed. How many
back there? What sort of posse? Roland probably would have known, but Jake had no idea.
The echoes made it sound like a regiment.
As he was shaking off, it came to Jake Chambers that the Pere would never do this again, or grin at him and point his finger, or cross himself before eating. They had killed him.
Taken his life. Stopped his breath and pulse. Save perhaps for dreams, the Pere was now
gone from the story. Jake began to cry. Like his smile, the tears made him once again look
like a child. Oy had turned around, eager to be off on the scent, but now looked back over
one shoulder with an expression of unmistakable concern.
“ ’S’all right,” Jake said, buttoning his fly and then wiping his cheeks with the heel of his hand. Only it wasn’t all right. He was more than sad, more than angry, more than scared
about the low men running relentlessly up his backtrail. Now that the adrenaline in his
system had receded, he realized he was hungry as well as sad. Tired, too.Tired? Verging on
exhaustion. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept. Being sucked through the door
into New York, he could remember that, and Oy almost being hit by a taxi, and the
God-bomb minister with the name that reminded him of Jimmy Cagney playing George M.
Cohan in that old black-and-white movie he’d watched on the TV in his room when he was
small. Because, he realized now, there had been a song in that movie about a guy named
Harrigan:H–A–double R–I; Harrigan, that’s me . He could remember those things, but not
when he’d last eaten a square—
“Ake!” Oy barked, relentless as fate. If bumblers had a breaking point, Jake thought
wearily, Oy was still a long way from his.“Ake-Ake! ”
“Yeah-yeah,” he agreed, pushing away from the wall. “Ake-Ake will now run-run. Go on.
Find Susannah.”
He wanted to plod, but plodding would quite likely not be good enough. Mere walking,
either. He flogged his legs into a jog and once more began to sing under his breath, this
time the words to the song:“In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight…In the
jungle, the quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight…ohhh…” And then he was off
again,wimeweh, wimeweh, wimeweh, nonsense words from the kitchen radio that was
always tuned to the oldies on WCBS…only weren’t memories of some movie wound
around and into his memory of this particular song? Not a song fromYankee Doodle Dandy
but from some other movie? One with scary monsters? Something he’d seen when he was
just a little kid, maybe not even out of his
(clouts)
diapers?
“Near the village, the quiet village, the lion sleeps tonight…Near the village, the peaceful
village, the lion sleeps tonight…HUH-oh, a-wimeweh, a-wimeweh…”
He stopped, breathing hard, rubbing his side. He had a stitch there but it wasn’t bad, at
least not yet, hadn’t sunk deep enough to stop him. But that goo…that greenish goo
dribbling between the tiles…it was oozing through the ancient grout and busted ceramic
because this was
(the jungle)
deep below the city, deep like catacombs
(wimeweh)
or like—
“Oy,” he said, speaking through chapped lips. Christ, he was so thirsty! “Oy, this isn’t goo, this isgrass . Or weeds…or…”
Oy barked his friend’s name, but Jake hardly noticed. The echoing sound of the pursuers