Stephen King – The Waste Lands

doesn’t like our looks and fries us. Fire a shot to let Roland know we got here, sugar, and

then we’ll have us a look around. See what we can see.”

Eddie pointed the Ruger into the gray sky, pulled the trigger, and fired the shot, which

Roland heard a mile or more away, as he followed Jake and Gasher through the

booby-trapped maze. Eddie stood where he was a moment longer, trying to persuade

himself that things might still turn out all right, that his heart was wrong in its stubborn

insistence that they had seen the last of the gunslinger and the boy Jake. Then he made the

automatic safe again, returned it to the waistband of his pants, and went back to Susannah.

He turned her chair away from the steps and rolled her along an aisle of columns which led

deeper into the build- ing. She popped the cylinder of Roland’s gun and reloaded it as they

went.

Under the roof the rain had a secret, ghostly sound and even the harsh thundercracks were

muted. The columns which supported the structure were at least ten feet in diameter, and their tops were lost in the gloom. From up there in the shadows, Eddie heard the cooing

con- versation of pigeons.

Now a sign hanging on thick chrome-silver chains swam out of the shadows:

NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS WELCOMES YOU

TO THE CRADLE OF LUD

<— SOUTHEAST TRAVEL (BLAINE)

NORTHWEST TRAVEL (PATRICIA) —>

“Now we know the name of the one that fell in the river,” Eddie said. “Patricia. They got their colors wrong, though. It’s supposed to be pink for girls and blue for boys, not the other

way around.”

“Maybe they’re both blue.”

“They’re not. Blaine’s pink.”

“How would you know that?”

Eddie looked confused. “I don’t know how . . . but I do.”

They followed the arrow pointing toward Blaine’s berth, entering what had to be a grand

concourse. Eddie didn’t have Susannah’s ability to see the past in clear, visionary flashes,

but his imagination nonetheless filled this vast, pillared space with a thousand hurrying

people; he heard clicking heels and murmuring voices, saw embraces of homecoming and

farewell. And over everything, the speakers chanting news of a dozen different

destinations.

Patricia is now boarding for Northwest Baronies . . .

Will Passenger Killington, passenger Killington, please report to the information booth on

the lower level?

Blaine is now arriving at Berth #2, and will be debarking shortly . . .

Now there was only the pigeons.

Eddie shivered.

“Look at the faces,” Susannah murmured. “I don’t know if they give you the willies, but they sure do me.” She was pointing to the right.

High up on the wall, a series of sculpted heads seemed to push out of tin- marble, peering

down at them from the shadows—stern men with the harsh faces of executioners who are

happy in their work. Some of the faces had fallen from their places and lay in granite shards

and splinters seventy or eighty feet below their peers. Those remaining were

spider-webbed with cracks and splattered with pigeon dung.

“They must have been the Supreme Court, or something,” Eddie said, uneasily scanning

all those thin lips and cracked, empty eyes. “Only judges can look so smart and so

completely pissed off at the same time— you’re talking to a guy who knows. There isn’t

one of them who looks like he’d give a crippled crab a crutch.”

” ‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter,’ ”

Susannah murmured, and at these words Eddie felt gooseflesh waltz across the skin of his

arms and chest and legs.

“What’s that, Suze?”

“A poem by a man who must have seen Lud in his dreams,” she said. “Come on, Eddie.

Forget them.”

“Easier said than done.” But he began to push her again.

Ahead, a vast grilled barrier like a castle barbican swam out of the gloom . . . and beyond it,

they caught their first glimpse of Blaine the Mono. It was pink, just as Eddie had said it

would be, a delicate shade which matched the veins running through the marble pillars.

Blaine flowed above the wide loading platform in a smooth, streamlined bullet shape

which looked more like flesh than metal. Its surface was broken only once—by a triangular

window equipped with a huge wiper. Eddie knew there would be another triangular

window with another big wiper on the other side of the mono’s nose, so that if you looked at

Blaine head-on, it would seem to have a face, just like Charlie the Choo-Choo. The wipers

would look like slyly drooping eyelids.

White light from the southeastern slot in the Cradle fell across Blaine in a long, distorted

rectangle. To Eddie, the body of the train looked like the breaching back of some fabulous

pink whale—one that was utterly silent.

“Wow.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. “We found it.”

“Yes. Blaine the Mono.”

“Is it dead, do you think? It looks dead.”

“It’s not. Sleeping, maybe, but a long way from dead.”

“You sure?”

“Were you sure it would be pink?” It wasn’t a question he had to answer, and he didn’t. The face she turned up to him was strained and badly frightened. “It’s sleeping, and you know

what? I’m scared to wake it up.”

“Well, we’ll wait for the others, then.”

She shook her head. “I think we better try to lx- ready for when they get here . . . because I’ve got an idea that they’re going to come on the run. Push me over to that box mounted on

the bars. It looks like an intercom. See it?”

He did, and pushed her slowly toward it. It was mounted on one side of a closed gate in the

center of the barrier which ran the length of the Cradle. The vertical bars of the barrier were

made of what looked like stainless steel; those of the gate appeared to be ornamental iron,

and their lower ends disappeared into steel-ringed holes in the floor. There was no way either of them was going to wriggle through those bars, either, Eddie saw. The gap between

each set was no more than four inches. It would have been a tight squeeze even for Oy.

Pigeons ruffled and cooed overhead. The left wheel of Susannah’s chair squawked

monotonously. My kingdom for an oilcan, Eddie thought, and realized he was a lot more

than just scared. The last time he had felt this level of terror had been on the day when he

and Henry had stood on the sidewalk of Rhinehold Street in Dutch Hill, looking at the

slumped ruin of The Mansion. They hadn’t gone in on that day in 1977; they had turned

their backs on the haunted house and walked away, and he remembered vowing to himself

that he would never, never, ever go back to that place. It was a promise he’d kept, but here

he was, in another haunted house, and there was the haunter, right over there— Blaine the

Mono, a long low pink shape with one window peering at him like the eye of a dangerous

animal who is shamming sleep.

He stirs no more from his berth in the Cradle. . . . He has even stopped speaking in his

many voices and laughing. . . . Ardis was the last to go nigh Blaine . . . and when Ardis

couldn’t answer what was asked, Blaine slew him with blue fire.

If it speaks to me, I’ll probably go crazy, Eddie thought.

The wind gusted outside, and a fine spray of rain flew in through the tall egress slot cut in

the side of the building. He saw it strike Blaine’s window and bead up there.

Eddie shuddered suddenly and looked sharply around. “We’re being watched—I can feel

it.”

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Push me closer to the gate, Eddie. I want to get a better look at that box.”

“Okay, but don’t touch it. If it’s electrified—”

“If Blaine wants to cook us, he will,” Susannah said, looking through the bars at Blaine’s back. “You know it, and I do, too.”

And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.

The box looked like a combination intercom and burglar alarm. There was a speaker set

into the top half, with what looked like a TALK/LISTEN button next to it. Below this were

numbers arranged in a shape which made a diamond:

1

2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72