Stephen King – The Waste Lands

He stood there for a moment, thinking. Then, on an impulse that didn’t really feel like an

impulse at all, Jake walked back inside The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind.

Calvin Tower looked up from the chessboard. “Change your mind about that cup of coffee,

O Hyperborean Wanderer?”

“No. I wanted to ask you if you know the answer to a riddle.”

“Fire away,” Tower invited, and moved a pawn.

“Samson told it. The strong guy in the Bible? It goes like this—”

” ‘Out of the eater came forth meat,’ ” said Aaron Deepneau, swing- ing around again to look at Jake, ” ‘and out of the strong came forth sweetness.’ That the one?”

“Yeah, it is,” Jake said. “How’d you know—”

“Oh, I’ve been around the block a time or two. Listen to this.” He threw his head back and sang in a full, melodious voice:

” ‘Samson and a lion got in attack,

And Samson climbed up on the lion’s back.

Well, you’ve read about lion killin men with their paws,

But Samson put his hands round the lion’s jaws!

He rode that lion ’til the beast fell dead,

And the bees made honey in the lion’s head.'”

Aaron winked and then laughed at Jake’s surprised expression. “That answer your question,

friend?”

Jake’s eyes were wide. “Wow! Good song! Where’d you hear it?”

“Oh, Aaron knows them all,” Tower said. “He was hanging around Bleecker Street back before Bob Dylan knew how to blow more than open G on his Hohner. At least, if you

believe him.”

“It’s an old spiritual,” Aaron said to Jake, and then to Tower: “By the way, you’re in check, fatso.”

“Not for long,” Tower said. He moved his bishop. Aaron promptly bagged it. Tower

muttered something under his breath. To Jake it sounded suspiciously like fuckwad.

“So the answer is a lion,” Jake said.

Aaron shook his head. “Only half the answer. Samson’s Riddle is a double, my friend. The

other half of the answer is honey. Get it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Okay, now try this one.” Aaron closed his eyes for a moment and then recited,

“What can run but never walks,

Has a mouth but never talks,

Has a bed but never sleeps,

Has a head but never weeps?”

“Smartass,” Tower growled at Aaron.

Jake thought it over, then shook his head. He could have worried it longer—he found this

business of riddles both fascinating and charm- ing—but he had a strong feeling that he

ought to be moving on from here, that he had other business on Second Avenue this

morning.

“I give up.”

“No, you don’t,” Aaron said. “That’s what you do with modern rid- dles. But a real riddle isn’t just a joke, kiddo—it’s a puzzle. Turn it over in your head. If you still can’t get it, make it an excuse to come back another day. If you need another excuse, fatso here does make a

pretty good cup of joe.”

“Okay,” Jake said. “Thanks. I will.”

But as he left, a certainty stole over him: he would never enter The Manhattan Restaurant

of the Mind again.

15

JAKE WALKED SLOWLY DOWN Second Avenue, holding his new purchases in his

left hand. At first he tried to think about the riddle—what did have a bed but never

slept?—but little by little the question was driven from his mind by an increasing sense of

anticipation. His senses seemed more acute than ever before in his life; he saw billions of

coruscating sparks in the pavement, smelled a thousand mixed aromas in every breath he

took, and seemed to hear other sounds, secret sounds, within each of the sounds he heard.

He wondered if this was the way dogs felt before thunderstorms or earthquakes, and felt

almost sure that it was. Yet the sensation that the impending event was not bad but good,

that it would balance out the terrible thing which had happened to him three weeks ago,

continued to grow.

And now, as he drew close to the place where the course would be set, that

knowing-in-advance fell upon him once again.

A bum is going to ask me for a handout, and I’ll give him the change Mr, Tower gave me.

And there’s a record store. The door’s open to let in the fresh air and I’ll hear a Stones song

playing when I pass. And I’m going to see my own reflection in a bunch of mirrors.

Traffic on Second Avenue was still light. Taxis honked and wove their way amid the

slower-moving cars and trucks. Spring sunshine twin- kled off their windshields and bright

yellow hides. While he was waiting for a light to change, Jake saw the bum on the far

corner of Second and Fifty-second. He was sitting against the brick wall of a small

restaurant, and as Jake approached him, he saw that the name of the restaurant was Chew

Chew Mama’s.

Choo-choo, Jake thought. And that’s the truth.

“Godda-quarder?” the bum asked tiredly, and Jake dropped his change from the bookstore into the bum’s lap without even looking around. Now he could hear the Rolling Stones,

right on schedule:

“I see a red door and I want to paint it black,

No colours anymore, I want them to turn black …”

As he passed, he saw—also without surprise—that the name of the store was Tower of

Power Records.

Towers were selling cheap today, it seemed.

Jake walked on, the street-signs floating past in a kind of dream-daze. Between

Forty-ninth and Forty-eighth he passed a store called Reflections of You. He turned his

head and caught sight of a dozen Jakes in the mirrors, as he had known he would—a dozen

boys who were small for their age, a do/en boys dressed in neat school clothes: blue blazers,

white shirts, dark red ties, gray dress pants. Piper School didn’t have an official uniform,

but this was as close to the unofficial one as you could get.

Piper seemed long ago and far away now.

Suddenly Jake realized where he was going. This knowledge rose in his mind like sweet,

refreshing water from an underground spring. It’s a delicatessen, he thought. That’s what it

looks like, anyway. It’s really something else—a doorway to another world. The world. His

world. The right world.

He began to run, looking ahead eagerly. The light at Forty-seventh was against him but he

ignored it, leaping from the curb and racing nimbly between the broad white lines of the

crosswalk with just a per- functory glance to the left. A plumbing van stopped short with a

squeal of tires as Jake flashed in front of it.

“Hey! Whaddaya-whaddaya?” the driver yelled, but Jake ignored him.

Only one more block.

He began to sprint all-out now. His tie fluttered behind his left shoulder; his hair had

blown back from his forehead; his school loafers hammered the sidewalk. He ignored the

stares—some amused, some merely curious—of the passersby as he had ignored the van

driver’s out- raged shout.

Up here—up here on the corner. Next to the stationery store.

Here came a UPS man in dark brown fatigues, pushing a dolly loaded with packages. Jake

hurdled it like a long-jumper, arms up. The tail of his white shirt pulled free of his pants and flapped beneath his blazer like the hem of a slip. He came down and almost collided with a

baby-carriage being pushed by a young Puerto Rican woman. Jake hooked around the

pram like a halfback who has spotted a hole in the line and is bound for glory. “Where’s the fire, handsome?” the young woman asked, but Jake ignored her, too. He dashed past The

Paper Patch, with its window-display of pens and notebooks and desk calculators.

The door! he thought ecstatically. I’m going to see it! And am I going to stop? No, way,

Jose! I’m going to go straight through it, and if it’s locked, I’ll flatten it right in front of m—

Then he saw what was at the corner of Second and Forty-sixth and stopped after

all—skidded to a halt, in fact, on the heels of his loafers. He stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, hands clenched, his breath rasping harshly in and out of his lungs, his hair falling

back onto his forehead in sweaty clumps.

“No,” he almost whimpered. “No!” But his near-frantic negation did not change what he saw, which was nothing at all. There was nothing to see but a short board fence and a

littered, weedy lot beyond it.

The building which had stood there had been demolished.

16

JAKE STOOD OUTSIDE THE fence without moving for almost two minutes, surveying

the vacant lot with dull eyes. One comer of his mouth twitched randomly. He could feel his

hope, his absolute certainty, draining out of him. The feeling which was replacing it was

the deepest, bitterest despair he had ever known.

Just another false alarm, he thought when the shock had abated enough so he could think