“Ay,” Gasher said. “He’s trig, right enough, I could’ve toldjer that. But wery pert, all the same.”

“Yes,” the Tick-Tock Man said thoughtfully. His hands tightened on the boy’s shoulders and drew Jake closer to that smiling, handsome, lunatic face. “I can see he’s pert. It’s in his eyes. But we’ll take care of that, won’t we, Gasher?”

It’s not Gasher he’s talking to, Jake thought. It’s me. He thinks he’s hypnotizing me… and maybe he is.

“Ay,” Gasher breathed.

Jake felt he was drowning in those wide green eyes. Although the Tick-Tock Man’s grip was still not really tight, he couldn’t get enough breath into his lungs. He summoned all of his own force in an effort to break the blonde man’s hold over him, and again spoke the first words which came to mind:

“So fell Lord Perth, and the countryside did shake with that thunder.”

It acted upon Tick-Tock like a hard open-handed blow to the face. He recoiled, green eyes narrowing, his grip on Jake’s shoulders tightening painfully. “What do you say? Where did you hear that?”

“A little bird told me,” Jake replied with calculated insolence, and the next instant he was flying across the room.

If he had struck the curved wall headfirst, he would have been knocked cold or killed. As it happened, he struck on one hip, rebounded, and landed in a heap on the iron grillework. He shook his head groggily, looked around, and found himself face to face with the woman who was not taking a siesta. He uttered a shocked cry and crawled away on his hands and knees. Hoots kicked him in the chest, flipping him onto his back. Jake lay there gasping, looking up at the knot of rainbow colors where the neon tubes came together. A moment later, Tick-Tock’s face filled his field of vision. The man’s lips were pressed together in a hard, straight line, his cheeks flared with color, and there was fear in his eyes. The coffin-shaped glass ornament he wore around his neck dangled directly in front of Jake’s eyes, swinging gently back and forth on its silver chain, as if imitating the pendulum of the tiny grandfather clock inside.

“Gasher’s right,” he said. He gathered a handful of Jake’s shirt into one fist and pulled him up. “You’re pert. But you don’t want to be pert with me, cully. You don’t ever want to be pert with me. Have you heard of people with short fuses? Well, I have no fuse at all, and there’s a thousand could testify to it if I hadn’t stilled their tongues for good. If you ever speak to me of Lord Perth again… ever, ever, ever… I’ll tear off the top of your skull and eat your brains. I’ll have none of that bad-luck story in the Cradle of the Grays. Do you understand me?”

He shook Jake back and forth like a rag, and the boy burst into tears.

“Do you?”

“Y-Y-Yes!”

“Good.” He set Jake upon his feet, where he swayed woozily back and forth, wiping at his streaming eyes and leaving smudges of dirt on his cheeks so dark they looked like mascara. “Now, my little cull, we’re going to have a question and answer session here. I’ll ask the questions and you’ll give the answers. Do you understand?”

Jake didn’t reply. He was looking at a panel of the ventilator grille which circled the chamber.

The Tick-Tock Man grabbed his nose between two of his fingers and squeezed it viciously. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes!” Jake cried. His eyes, now watering with pain as well as terror, returned to Tick-Tock’s face. He wanted to look back at the ventilator grille, wanted desperately to verify that what he had seen there was not simply a trick of his frightened, overloaded mind, but he didn’t dare. He was afraid someone else-Tick-Tock himself, most likely-would follow his gaze and see what he had seen.

“Good.” Tick-Tock pulled Jake back over to the chair by his nose, sat down, and cocked his leg over the arm again. “Let’s have a nice little chin, then. We’ll begin with your name, shall we? Just what might that be, cully?”

“Jake Chambers.” With his nose pinched shut, his voice sounded nasal and foggy.

“And are you a Not-See, Jake Chambers?”

For a moment Jake wondered if this was a peculiar way of asking him if he was blind… but of course they could all see he wasn’t. “I don’t understand what-”

Tick-Tock shook him back and forth by the nose. “Not-See! Not-See! You just want to stop playing with me, boy!”

“I don’t understand-” Jake began, and then he looked at the old machine-gun hanging from the chair and thought once more of the crashed Focke-Wulf. The pieces fell together in his mind. “No-I’m not a Nazi. I’m an American. All that ended long before I was born!”

The Tick-Tock Man released his hold on Jake’s nose, which immediately began to gush blood. “You could have told me that in the first place and saved yourself all sorts of pain, Jake Chambers… but at least now you understand how we do things around here, don’t you?”

Jake nodded.

“Ay. Well enough! We’ll start with the simple questions.”

Jake’s eyes drifted back to the ventilator grille. What he had seen before was still there; it hadn’t been just his imagination. Two gold-ringed eyes floated in the dark behind the chrome louvers.

Oy.

Tick-Tock slapped his face, knocking him back into Gasher, who immediately pushed him forward again. “It’s school-time, dear heart,” Gasher whispered. “Mind yer lessons, now! Mind em wery sharp!”

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Tick-Tock said. “I’ll have some respect, Jake Chambers, or I’ll have your balls.”

“All right.”

Tick-Tock’s green eyes gleamed dangerously. “All right what?”

Jake groped for the right answer, pushing away the tangle of questions and the sudden hope which had dawned in his mind. And what came was what would have served at his own Cradle of the Pubes… otherwise known as The Piper School. “All right, sir?”

Tick-Tock smiled. “That’s a start, boy,” he said, and leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. “Now… what’s an American?”

Jake began to talk, trying with all his might not to look toward the ventilator grille as he did so.

29

ROLAND BOLSTERED HIS GUN, laid both hands on the valve-wheel, and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t budge. That didn’t much surprise him, but it presented serious problems.

Oy stood by his left boot, looking up anxiously, waiting for Roland to open the door so they could continue the journey to Jake. The gunslinger only wished it was that easy. It wouldn’t do to simply stand out here and wait for someone to leave; it might be hours or even days before one of the Grays decided to use this particular exit again. Gasher and his friends might take it into their heads to flay Jake alive while the gunslinger was waiting for it to happen.

He leaned his head against the steel but heard nothing. That didn’t surprise him, either. He had seen doors like this a long time ago-you couldn’t shoot out the locks, and you certainly couldn’t hear through them. There might be one; there might be two, facing each other, with some dead airspace in between. Somewhere, though, there would be a button which would spin the wheel in the middle of the door and release the locks. If Jake could reach that button, all might still be well.

Roland understood that he was not a full member of this ka-tet; he guessed that even Oy was more fully aware than he of the secret life which existed at its heart (he very much doubted that the bumbler had tracked Jake with his nose alone through those tunnels where water ran in polluted streamlets). Nevertheless, he had been able to help Jake when die boy had been trying to cross from his world to this one. He had been able to see… and when Jake had been trying to regain the key he had dropped, he had been able to send a message.

He had to be very careful about sending messages this time. At best, the Grays would realize something was up. At worst, Jake might misinterpret what Roland tried to tell him and do something foolish.