Stephen King – The Waste Lands

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Under the diamond were two other buttons with words of the High Speech printed on them:

COMMAND and ENTER.

Susannah looked bewildered and doubtful. “What is this thing, do you think? It looks like

a gadget in a science fiction movie.”

Of course it did, Eddie realized. Susannah had probably seen a home security system or

two in her time—she had, after all, lived among the Manhattan rich, even if she had not

been very enthusiastically accepted by them—but there was a world of difference between

the electronics gear available in her when, 1963, and his own, which was 1987. We’ve

never talked much about the differences, either, he thought. I wonder what she’d think if I

told her Ronald Reagan was President of the United States when Roland snatched me?

Probably that I was crazy.

“It’s a security system,” he said. Then, although his nerves and instincts screamed out against it, he forced himself to reach out with his right hand and thumb the TALK/LISTEN

switch.

There was no crackle of electricity; no deadly blue fire went racing up his arm. No sign

that the thing was even still connected.

Maybe Blaine is dead. Maybe he’s dead, after all.

But he didn’t really believe that.

“Hello?” he said, and in his mind’s eye saw tin- unfortunate Ardis, screaming as he- was microwaved by the blue fire dancing all over his face and body, melting his eyes and

setting his hair ablaze. “Hello . . . Blaine? Anybody ?”

He let go of the button and waited, stiff with tension. Susannah’s hand crept into his, cold

and small. There was still no answer, and Eddie—now more reluctant than ever—pushed

the button again.

“Blaine?”

He let go of the button. Waited. And when there was still no answer, a dangerous giddiness

overcame him, as it often did in moments of stress and fear. When that giddiness took him,

counting the cost no longer seemed to matter. Nothing mattered. It had been like that when

he had outfaced Balazar’s sallow-faced contact man in Nassau, and it was like that now.

And if Roland had seen him in the moment this lunatic impa- tience overtook him, he would

have seen more than just a resemblance between Eddie and Cuthbert; he would have sworn

Eddie was Cuthbert.

He jammed the button in with his thumb and began to bellow into the speaker, adopting a

plummy (and completely bogus) British accent. “Hullo, Blaine! Cheerio, old fellow! This

is Robin Leach, host of Life- styles of the Rich andBrainless, here to tell you that you have

won six billion dollars and a new Ford Escort in the Publishers Clearing House

Sweepstakes!”

Pigeons took flight above them in soft, startled explosions of wings. Susannah gasped. Her

face wore the dismayed expression of a devout woman who has just heard her husband

blaspheme in a cathedral. “Eddie, stop it! Stop it!”

Eddie couldn’t stop it. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes glittered with a mixture of fear,

hysteria, and frustrated anger. “You and your monorail girlfriend, Patricia, will spend a

lux-yoo-rious month in scenic Jimtown, where you’ll drink only the finest wine and eat

only the finest virgins! You—”

“. . . shhhh . . .”

Eddie broke off, looking at Susannah. He was at once sure that it had been she who had shushed him—not only because she had already tried but because she was the only other

person here—and yet at the same time he knew it hadn’t been Susannah. That had been

another voice: the voice of a very young and very frightened child.

“Suze? Did you—”

Susannah was shaking her head and raising her hand at the same time. She pointed at the

intercom box, and Eddie saw the button marked COMMAND was glowing a very faint

shell-pink. It was the same color as the mono sleeping in its berth on the other side of the

barrier.

“Shhh… don’t wake him up,” the child’s voice mourned. It drifted from the speaker, soft as an evening breeze.

“What . . .” Eddie began. Then he shook his head, reached toward the TALK/LISTEN

switch and pressed it gently. When he spoke again, it was not in the blaring Robin Leach

bellow but in the almost-whisper of a conspirator. “What are you? Who are you?”

He released the button. He and Susannah regarded each other with the big eyes of children

who now know they are sharing the house with a dangerous—perhaps psychotic—adult.

How have they come by the knowledge? Why, because another child has told them, a child

who has lived with the psychotic adult for a long time, hiding in corners and stealing out

only when it knows the adult is asleep; a frightened child who happens to be almost

invisible.

There was no answer. Eddie let the seconds spin out. Each one seemed long enough to

read a whole novel in. He was reaching for the button again when the faint pink glow

reappeared.

“I’m Little Blaine,” the child’s voice whispered. “The one he doesn’t see. The one he forgot.

The one he thinks he left behind in the rooms of ruin and the halls of the dead.”

Eddie pushed the button again with a hand that had picked up an uncontrollable shake. He

could hear that shake in his voice, as well. “Who? Who is the one who doesn’t see? Is it the Bear?”

No—not the bear; not he. Shardik lay dead in the forest, many miles behind them; the

world had moved on even since then. Eddie suddenly remembered what it had been like to

lay his ear against that strange unfound door in the clearing where die bear had lived its

violent half-life, that door with its somehow terrible stripes of yellow and black. It was all

of a piece, he realized now; all part of some awful, decaying whole, a tattered web with the

Dark Tower at its center like an incompre- hensible stone spider. All of Mid-World had

become one vast haunted mansion in these strange latter days; all of Mid-World had

become The Drawers; all of Mid-World had become a waste land, haunting and haunted.

He saw Susannah’s lips form the words of the real answer before the voice from the intercom could speak them, and those words were as obvious as the solution to a riddle

once the answer is spoken.

“Big Blaine,” the unseen voice whispered. “Big Blaine is the ghost in the machine—the ghost in all the machines.”

Susannah’s hand had gone to her throat and was clutching it, as if she intended to strangle

herself. Her eyes were full of terror, but they were not glassy, not stunned; they were sharp

with understanding. Per- haps she knew a voice like this one from her own when—the when

where the integrated whole that was Susannah had been shunted aside by the warring

personalities of Detta and Odetta. The childish voice had sur- prised her as well as him, but

her agonized eyes said she was no stranger to the concept being expressed.

Susannah knew all about the madness of duality.

“Eddie we have to go,” she said. Her terror turned the words into an unpunctuated auditory smear. He could hear air whistling in her wind- pipe like a cold wind around a chimney.

“Eddie we have to get away Eddie we have to get away Eddie—”

“Too late,” the tiny, mourning voice said. “He’s awake. Big Blaine is awake. He knows you are here. And he’s coming.”

Suddenly lights—bright orange arc-sodiums—began to flash on in pairs above them,

bathing the pillared vastness of the Cradle in a harsh glare that banished all shadows.

Hundreds of pigeons darted and swooped in frightened, aimless flight, startled from their

complex of interlocked nests high above.

“Wait!” Eddie shouted. “Please, wait!”

In his agitation he forgot to push the button, but it made no differ- ence; Little Blaine

responded anyway. “No! I can’t let him catch me! I can’t let him kill me, too!”

The light on the intercom box went dark again, but only for a moment. This time both

COMMAND and ENTER lit up, and their color was not pink but the lurid dark red of a

blacksmith’s forge.

“WHO ARE YOU?” a voice roared, and it came not just from the box but from every

speaker in the city which still operated. The rotting bodies hanging from the poles shivered

with the vibrations of that mighty voice; it seemed that even the dead would run from

Blaine, if they could. .

Susannah shrank back in her chair, the heels of her hands pressed to her ears, her face long

with dismay, her mouth distorted in a silent scream. Eddie felt himself shrinking toward all

the fantastic, hallucinatory terrors of eleven. Had it been this voice he had feared when he