Then it went out.
None of the others had seen. Jake glanced once more at the train, expecting the light to flash again—maybe expecting the cursed thing to actually start up and make a run at him—but nothing happened.
Heart thumping hard in his chest, Jake hurried after his companions.
3
The Topeka Zoo (the World Famous Topeka Zoo, according to the signs) was full of empty cages and dead animals. Some of the animals that had been freed were gone, but others had died near to hand. The big apes were still in the area marked Gorilla Habitat, and they appeared to have died hand-in-hand. That made Eddie feel like crying, somehow. Since the last of the heroin had washed out of his system, his emotions always seemed on the verge of blowing up into a cyclone.
His old pals would have laughed.
Beyond Gorilla Habitat, a gray wolf lay dead on the path. Oy approached it carefully, sniffed, then stretched out his long neck and began to howl.
“Make him quit that, Jake, you hear me?” Eddie said gruffly. He suddenly realized he could smell decaying animals. The aroma was faint, mostly boiled off over the hot days of the summer just passed, but what was left made him feel like upchucking. Not that he could precisely remember the last time he’d eaten.
“Oy! To me!”
Oy howled one final time, then returned to Jake. He stood on the kid’s feet, looking up at him with those spooky wedding-ring eyes of his. Jake picked him up, took him in a circle around the wolf, and then set him down again on the brick path.
The path led them to a steep set of steps (weeds had begun to push through the stonework already), and at the top Roland looked back over the zoo and the gardens. From here they could easily see the circuit the toy train-tracks made, allowing Charlie’s riders to tour the entire perimeter of Gage Park. Beyond it, fallen leaves clattered down Gage Boulevard before a rush of cold wind.
“So fell Lord Perth,” murmured Roland.
“And the countryside did shake with that thunder,” Jake finished.
Roland looked down at him with surprise, like a man awakening from a deep sleep, then smiled and put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “I have played Lord
Perth in my time,” he said.
“Have you?”
“Yes. Very soon now you shall hear.”
4
Beyond the steps was an aviary full of dead exotic birds; beyond the aviary was a snackbar advertising (perhaps heartlessly, given the location) topeka’s best buffaloburger; beyond the snackbar was another wrought iron arch with a sign reading come back to gage park real soon! Beyond this was the curving upslope of a limited-access-highway entrance ramp. Above it, the green signs they had first spotted from across the way stood clear.
“Tumpikin’ again,” Eddie said in a voice almost too low to hear. “Goddam.” Then he sighed.
“What’s tumpikin’, Eddie?”
Jake didn’t think Eddie was going to answer; when Susannah craned around to look at him as he stood with his fingers wrapped around the handles of the new wheelchair, Eddie looked away. Then he looked back, first at Susannah, then at Jake. “It’s not pretty. Not much about my life before Gary Cooper here yanked me across the Great Divide was.”
“You don’t have to—”
“It’s also no big deal. A bunch of us would get together—me, my brother Henry, Bum O’Hara, usually, ’cause he had a car, Sandra Corbitt, and maybe this friend of Henry’s we called Jimmie Polio—and we’d stick all our names in a hat. The one we drew out was the … the trip-guide, Henry used to call him. He—she, if it was Sandi—had to stay straight. Relatively, anyway. Everyone else got seriously goobered. Then we’d all pile into Bum’s Chrysler and go up 1-95 into Connecticut or maybe take the Taconic Parkway into upstate New York . . . only we called it the Catatonic Parkway. Listen to Creedence or Marvin Gaye or maybe even Elvis
‘s Greatest Hits on the tape-player.
“It was better at night, best when the moon was full. We’d cruise for hours sometimes with our heads stuck out the windows like dogs do when they’re riding, looking up at the moon and watching for shooting stars. We called it tumpikin’.”
Eddie smiled. It looked like an effort. “A charming life, folks.”
“It sounds sort of fun,” Jake said. “Not the drug part, I mean, but riding around with your pals at night, looking at the moon and listening to the music . . . that sounds excellent.”
“It was, actually,” Eddie said. “Even stuffed so full of reds we were as apt to pee on our own shoes as in the bushes, it was excellent.” He paused. “That’s the horrible part, don’t you get it?”
“Tumpikin’,” the gunslinger said. “Let’s do some.”
They left Gage Park and crossed the road to the entrance ramp.
5
Someone had spray-painted over both signs marking the ramp’s ascending curve.
On the one reading st. louis 215, someone had slashed
in black. On the one marked next rest area 10 mi.,
had been written in fat red letters. That scarlet was still bright enough to scream even after an entire summer. Each had been decorated with a symbol—
“Do you know what any of that truck means, Roland?” Susannah asked. Roland shook his head, but he looked troubled, and that introspective look never left his own eyes. They went on.
6
At the place where the ramp merged with the turnpike, the two men, the boy, and the bumbler clustered around Susannah in her new wheelchair. All of them looked east.
Eddie didn’t know what the traffic situation would be like once they cleared Topeka, but here all the lanes, those headed west as well as the eastbound ones on their side, were crammed with cars and trucks. Most of the vehicles were piled high with possessions gone rusty with a season’s worth of rain.
But the traffic was the least of their concerns as they stood there, looking silently eastward. For half a mile or so on either side of them, the city continued—they could see church steeples, a strip of fast food places (Arby’s, Wendy’s, McD’s, Pizza Hut, and one Eddie had never heard of called Boing Boing Burgers), car dealerships, the roof of a bowling alley called Heartland Lanes. They could see another turnpike exit ahead, the sign by the ramp reading Topeka State Hospital and S.W. 6th. Beyond the off-ramp there bulked a massive old red brick edifice with tiny windows peering like desperate eyes out of the climbing ivy. Eddie figured a place that looked so much like Attica had to be a hospital, probably the kind of welfare purgatory where poor folks sat in shitty plastic chairs for hours on end, all so some doctor could look at them like they were dogshit.
Beyond the hospital, the city abruptly ended and the thinny began.
To Eddie, it looked like flat water standing in a vast marshland. It crowded up to the raised barrel of 1-70 on both sides, silvery and shimmering, making the signs and guardrails and stalled cars waver like mirages; it gave off that liquidy humming sound like a stench.
Susannah put her hands to her ears, her mouth drawn down. “I don’t know as I can stand it. Really. I don’t mean to be spleeny, but already I feel like vomiting, and I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”
Eddie felt the same way. Yet, sick as he felt he could hardly take his eyes away from the thinny. It was as if unreality had been given . . . what? A face? No. The vast and humming silver shimmer ahead of them had no face, was the very antithesis of a face, in fact, but it had a body … an aspect … a presence.
Yes; that last was best. It had a presence, as the demon which had come to the
circle of stones while they were trying to draw Jake had had a presence.
Roland, meanwhile, was rummaging in the depths of his purse. He appeared to dig all the way to the bottom before finding what he wanted: a fistful of bullets. He plucked Susannah’s right hand off the arm of her chair, and put two of the bullets in her palm. Then he took two more and poked them, slug ends first, into his ears.
Susannah looked first amazed, then amused, then doubtful. In the end, she followed his example. Almost at once an expression of blissful relief filled her face.
Eddie unshouldered the pack he wore and pulled out the half-full box of .44s that went with Jake’s Ruger. The gunslinger shook his head and held out his hand.
There were still four bullets in it, two for Eddie and two for Jake.
“What’s wrong with these?” Eddie shook a couple of shells from the box that had come from behind the hanging files in Elmer Chambers’s desk drawer.