“Ted, we have to getout of here,” the youngest of the three said urgently. “And I
meaninmediatamento .”
“Yes,” the older man said, but his gaze remained on Jake. He put a hand over his eyes (to
Eddie he looked like a carny mentalist getting ready to go into his big thought-reading
routine), then lowered it again. “Yes, of course.” He looked at Roland. “Are you the dinh?
Roland of Gilead? Roland of the Eld?”
“Yes, I—” Roland began, then bent over and retched again. Nothing came out but a long
silver string of spittle; he’d already lost his share of Nigel’s soup and sandwiches. Then he raised a slightly trembling fist to his forehead in greeting and said, “Yes. You have the
advantage of me, sai.”
“That doesn’t matter,” the white-haired man replied. “Will you come with us? You and
your ka-tet?”
“To be sure,” Roland said.
Behind him, Eddie bent over and vomited again. “Goddamn!” he cried in a choked voice.
“And I thought going Greyhound was bad! That thing makes the bus look like a…a…”
“Like a first-class stateroom on theQueen Mary, ” Susannah said in a weak voice.
“Come…on!” the youngest man said in an urgent voice. “If The Weasel’s on the way with
his taheen posse, he’ll be here in five minutes! That cat canscramble! ”
“Yes,” the man with the white hair agreed. “We really must go, Mr. Deschain.”
“Lead,” Roland said. “We’ll follow.”
Two
They hadn’t come out in a train station but rather in some sort of colossal roofed
switching-yard. The silvery lines Jake had seen were crisscrossing rail-lines, perhaps as
many as seventy different sets of tracks. On a couple of them, stubby, automated engines
went back and forth on errands that had to be centuries outdated. One was pushing a flatcar
filled with rusty I-beams. The other began to cry in an automated voice: “Will a Camka-A
please go to Portway 9. Camka-A to Portway 9, if you please.”
Pogo-sticking up and down on Eddie’s hip began to make Susannah feel sick to her
stomach all over again, but she’d caught the white-haired man’s urgency like a cold. Also,
she now knew what the taheen were: monstrous creatures with the bodies of human beings
and the heads of either birds or beasts. They reminded her of the things in that Bosch
painting,The Garden of Earthly Delights .
“I may have to puke again, sugarbunch,” she said. “Don’t you dare slow down if I do.”
Eddie made a grunting sound she took for an affirmative. She could see sweat pouring
down his pale skin and felt sorry for him. He was as sick as she was. So now she knew what
it was like to go through a scientific teleportation device that was clearly no longer working very well. She wondered if she would ever be able to bring herself to go through another
one.
Jake looked up and saw a roof made of a million panes of different shapes and sizes; it was
like looking at a tile mosaic painted a uniform dark gray. Then a bird flew through one of
them, and he realized those weren’t tiles up there but panels of glass, some of them broken.
That dark gray was apparently just how the outside world looked in Thunderclap.Like a
constant eclipse, he thought, and shivered. Beside him, Oy made another series of those
hoarse hacking sounds and then trotted on, shaking his head.
Three
They passed a clutter of beached machinery—generators, maybe—then entered a maze of
helter-skelter traincars that were very different from those hauled by Blaine the Mono.
Some looked to Susannah like the sort of New York Central commuter cars she might have
seen in Grand Central Station in her own when of 1964. As if to underline this notion, she
noticed one withBAR CAR printed on the side. Yet there were others that appeared much
older than that; made of dark riveted tin or steel instead of brushed chrome, they looked
like the sort of passenger cars you’d see in an old Western movie, or a TV show
likeMaverick . Beside one of these stood a robot with wires sprouting crazily from its neck.
It was holding its head—which wore a hat with a badge readingCLASS A CONDUCTOR
on it—beneath one arm.
At first Susannah tried to keep count of the lefts and rights they were making in this maze,
then gave it up as a bad job. They finally emerged about fifty yards from a clapboard-sided hut with the alliterative message LADING/LOST LUGGAGE over the door. The
intervening distance was an apron of cracked concrete scattered with abandoned
luggage-carts, stacks of crates, and two dead Wolves.No, Susannah thought,make that
three . The third one was leaning against the wall in the deeper shadows just around the
corner from LADING/LOST LUGGAGE.
“Come on,” said the old man with the mop of white hair, “not much further, now. But we
have to hurry, because if the taheen from Heartbreak House catch us, they’ll kill you.”
“They’d kill us, too,” said the youngest of the three. He brushed his hair out of his eyes.
“All except for Ted. Ted’s the only one of us who’s indispensable. He’s just too modest to
say so.”
Past LADING/LOST LUGGAGE was (reasonably enough, Susannah thought)
SHIPPING OFFICE. The fellow with the white hair tried the door. It was locked. This
seemed to please rather than upset him. “Dinky?” he said.
Dinky, it seemed, was the youngest of the three. He took hold of the knob and Susannah
heard a snapping sound from somewhere inside. Dinky stepped back. This time when Ted
tried the door, it opened easily. They stepped into a dim office bisected by a high counter.
On it was a sign that almost made Susannah feel nostalgic:TAKE NUMBER AND WAIT ,
it said.
When the door was closed, Dinky once more grasped the knob. There was another brisk
snap.
“You just locked it again,” Jake said. He sounded accusing, but there was a smile on his
face, and the color was coming back into his cheeks. “Didn’t you?”
“Not now, please,” said the white-haired man—Ted. “No time. Follow me, please.”
He flipped up a section of the counter and led them through. Behind it was an office area
containing two robots that looked long dead, and three skeletons.
“Why the hell do we keep finding bones?” Eddie asked. Like Jake he was feeling better
and only thinking out loud, not really expecting an answer. He got one, however. From
Ted.
“Do you know of the Crimson King, young man? You do, of course you do. I believe that
at one time he covered this entire part of the world with poison gas. Probably for a lark.
Killed almost everyone. The darkness you see is the lingering result. He’s mad, of course.
It’s a large part of the problem. In here.”
He led them through a door markedPRIVATE and into a room that had once probably
belonged to a high poobah in the wonderful world of shipping and lading. Susannah saw
tracks on the floor, suggesting that this place had been visited recently. Perhaps by these same three men. There was a desk beneath six inches of fluffy dust, plus two chairs and a
couch. Behind the desk was a window. Once it had been covered with venetian blinds, but
these had collapsed onto the floor, revealing a vista as forbidding as it was fascinating. The land beyond Thunderclap Station reminded her of the flat, deserty wastes on the far side of
the River Whye, but rockier and even more forbidding.
And of course it was darker.
Tracks (eternally halted trains sat on some of them) radiated out like strands of a steel
spiderweb. Above them, a sky of darkest slate-gray seemed to sag almost close enough to
touch. Between the sky and the Earth the air wasthick, somehow; Susannah found herself
squinting to see things, although there seemed to be no actual mist or smog in the air.
“Dinky,” the white-haired man said.
“Yes, Ted.”
“What have you left for our friend The Weasel to find?”
“A maintenance drone,” Dinky replied. “It’ll look like it found its way in through the
Fedic door, set off the alarm, then got fried on some of the tracks at the far end of the
switching-yard. Quite a few are still hot. You see dead birds around em all the time, fried to a crisp, but even a good-sized rustie’s too small to trip the alarm. A drone, though…I’m
pretty sure he’ll buy it. The Wease ain’t stupid, but it’ll look pretty believable.”
“Good. That’s very good. Look yonder, gunslingers.” Ted pointed to a sharp upthrust of
rock on the horizon. Susannah could make it out easily; in this dark countryside all
horizons seemed close. She could see nothing remarkable about it, though, only folds of
deeper shadow and sterile slopes of tumbled rock. “That’s Can Steek-Tete.”
“The Little Needle,” Roland said.
“Excellent translation. It’s where we’re going.”