Stephen King – The Dark Tower

Because Oy doesn’t see it,he thought.

He monkeyed with this idea and couldn’t pull it apart. Oy hadn’t smelled it or heard it,

either. The conclusion was inescapable: to Oy the terrible triceratops in the mighty jungle

below did not exist.

Which doesn’t change the fact that it does to me. It’s a trap that wassetfor me, or for

anyone else equipped with an imagination who might happen along. Some gadget of the

old people, no doubt. Too bad it’s not broken like most of their other stuff, but it’s not. I see

what I see and there’s nothing I can do about i —

No, wait.

Wait just a second.

Jake had no idea how good his mental connection to Oy actually was, but thought he

would soon find out.

“Oy!”

The calling voices of the low men were now horribly close. Soon they would see the boy

and the bumbler stopped here and break into a charge. Oy could smell them coming but

looked at Jake calmly enough anyway. At his beloved Jake, for whom he would die if

called upon to do so.

“Oy, can you change places with me?”

It turned out that he could.

Eight

Oy tottered erect with Ake in his arms, swaying back and forth, horrified to discover how

narrow the boy’s range of balance was. The idea of walking even a short distance on but

two legs was terribly daunting, yet it would have to be done, and done at once. Ake said so.

For his part, Jake knew he would have to shut the borrowed eyes he was looking through.

He was in Oy’s head but he could still see the triceratops; now he could also see a

pterodactyl cruising the hot air above the clearing, its leathery wings stretched to catch the thermals blowing from the air-exchangers.

Oy! You have to do it on your own. And if we’re going to stay ahead of them you have to

do it now.

Ake!Oy responded, and took a tentative step forward. The boy’s body wavered from side

to side, out to the very edge of balance and then beyond. Ake’s stupid two-legs body

tumbled sideways. Oy tried to save it and only made the tumble worse, going down on the

boy’s right side and bumping Ake’s furry head.

Oy tried to bark his frustration. What came out of Ake’s mouth was a stupid thing that was

more word than sound: “Bark! Ark!Shit -bark!”

“I hear him!” someone shouted. “Run! Come on, double-time, you useless cunts! Before

the little bastard gets to the door!”

Ake’s ears weren’t keen, but with the way the tile walls magnified sounds, that was no

problem. Oy could hear their running footfalls.

“You have to get up and go!” Jake tried to yell, and what came out was a garbled, barking

sentence:“Ake-Ake, affa! Up n go! ” Under other circumstances it might have been funny,

but not under these.

Oy got up by putting Ake’s back against the wall and pushing with Ake’s legs. At last he

was getting the hang of the motor controls; they were in a place Ake calledDogan and were

fairly simple. Off to the left, however, an arched corridor led into a huge room filled with

mirror-bright machinery. Oy knew that if he went into that place—the chamber where Ake

kept all his marvelous thoughts and his store of words—he would be lost forever.

Luckily, he didn’t need to. Everything he needed was in the Dogan. Left foot…forward.

(And pause.) Right foot…forward. (And pause.) Hold the thing that looks like a

billy-bumbler but is really your friend and use the other arm for balance. Resist the urge to drop to all fours and crawl. The pursuers will catch up if he does that; he can no longer

smell them (not with Ake’s amazingly stupid little bulb of a snout), but he is sure of it, all the same.

For his part, Jake could smell them clearly, at least a dozen and maybe as many as sixteen.

Their bodies were perfect engines of stink, and they pushed the aroma ahead of them in a

dirty cloud. He could smell the asparagus one had had for dinner; could smell the meaty,

wrong aroma of the cancer which was growing in another, probably in his head but perhaps

in his throat.

Then he heard the triceratops roar again. It was answered by the bird-thing riding the air

overhead.

Jake closed his—well, Oy’s—eyes. In the dark, the bumbler’s side-to-side motion was

even worse. Jake was concerned that if he had to put up with much of it (especially with his

eyes shut), he would ralph his guts out. Just call him ’Bama the Sea-sick Sailor.

Go, Oy,he thought.Fast as you can. Don’t fall down again, but…fast as you can!

Nine

Had Eddie been there, he might have been reminded of Mrs. Mislaburski from up the

block: Mrs. Mislaburski in February, after a sleet storm, when the sidewalk was glazed

with ice and not yet salted down. But, ice or no ice, she would not be kept from her daily

chop or bit of fish at the Castle Avenue Market (or from mass on Sunday, for Mrs.

Mislaburski was perhaps the most devout Catholic in Co-Op City). So here she came, thick

legs spread, candy-pink in their support hose, one arm clutching her purse to her immense

bosom, the other held out for balance, head down, eyes searching for the islands of ashes

where some responsible building super had already been out (Jesus and Mother Mary bless

those good men), also for the treacherous patches that would defeat her, that would send

her whoopsy with her large pink knees flying apart, and down she’d come on her sit-upon,

or maybe on her back, a woman could break her spine, a woman could beparalyzed like poor Mrs. Bernstein’s daughter that was in the car accident in Mamaroneck, such things

happened. And so she ignored the catcalls of the children (Henry Dean and his little brother

Eddie often among them) and went on her way, head down, arm outstretched for balance,

sturdy black old lady’s purse curled to her midsection, determined that if shedid go

whoopsy-my-daisy she would protect her purse and its contents at all costs, would fall on it

like Joe Namath falling on the football after a sack.

So did Oy of Mid-World walk the body of Jake along a stretch of underground corridor

that looked (to him, at least) pretty much like all the rest. The only difference he could see was the three holes on either side, with big glass eyes looking out of them, eyes that made a low and constant humming sound.

In his arms was something that looked like a bumbler with its eyes squeezed tightly shut.

Had they been open, Jake might have recognized these things as projecting devices. More

likely he would not have seen them at all.

Walking slowly (Oy knew they were gaining, but he also knew that walking slowly was

better than falling down), legs spread wide and shuffling along, holding Ake curled to his

chest just as Mrs. Mislaburski had held her purse on those icy days, he made his way past

the glass eyes. The hum faded. Was it far enough? He hoped so. Walking like a human was

simply too hard, too nerve-wracking. So was being close to all of Ake’s thinking

machinery. He felt an urge to turn and look at it—all those bright mirror surfaces!—but

didn’t. To look might well bring on hypnosis. Or something worse.

He stopped. “Jake! Look! See!”

Jake tried to replyOkay and barked, instead. Pretty funny. He cautiously opened his eyes

and saw tiled wall on both sides. There was grass and tiny sprays of fern still growing out

of it, true enough, but itwas tile. Itwas corridor. He looked behind him and saw the clearing.

The triceratops had forgotten them. It was locked in a battle to the death with the

Tyrannasorbet, a scene he recalled with complete clarity fromThe Lost Continent . The girl

with the bodacious ta-tas had watched the battle from the safety of Cesar Romero’s arms,

and when the cartoon Tyrannasorbet had clamped its huge mouth over the triceratops’s

face in a death-bite, the girl had buried her own face against Cesar Romero’s manly chest.

“Oy!” Jake barked, but barking waslame and he switched to thinking, instead.

Change back with me!

Oy was eager to comply—never had he wanted anything so much—but before they could

effect the swap, the pursuers caught sight of them.

“Theah!” shouted the one with the Boston accent—he who had proclaimed that theFaddah

wasdinnah . “Theah they aah! Get em! Shoot em!”

And, as Jake and Oy switched their minds back into their proper bodies, the first bullets began to flick the air around them like snapping fingers.

Ten

The fellow leading the pursuers was a man named Flaherty. Of the seventeen of them, he

was the only hume. The rest save one were low men and vampires. The last was a taheen