“I THINK WE CAN DISPENSE WITH THAT BORING OLD SHIT, DON’T YOU?” Blaine asked.
From outside came a tremendous, thudding explosion. Eddie, who was now carrying Susannah, was thrown forward and would have fallen if Roland hadn’t caught him by the arm. Until that moment, Eddie had held onto the desperate notion that Blaine’s threat about the poison gas was no more than a sick joke. You should have known better, he thought. Anyone who thinks impressions of old movie actors is funny absolutely cannot be trusted. I think it’s like a law of nature.
Behind them, the curved section of hull slid back into place with a soft thud. Air began to hiss gently from hidden vents, and Jake felt his ears pop gently. “I think he just pressurized the cabin.”
Eddie nodded, looking around with wide eyes. “I felt it, too. Look at this place! Wow!”
He had once read of an aviation company-Regent Air, it might have been-that had catered to people who wanted to fly between New York and Los Angeles in a grander style than airlines such as Delta and United allowed for. They had operated a customized 727 complete with drawing room, bar, video lounge, and sleeper compartments. He imagined the interior of that plane must have looked a little like what he was seeing now.
They were standing in a long, tubular room furnished with plush-upholstered swivel chairs and modular sofas. At the far end of the compartment, which had to be at least eighty feet long, was an area that looked not like a bar but a cosy bistro. An instrument that could have been a harpsichord stood on a pedestal of polished wood, highlighted by a hidden baby spotlight. Eddie almost expected Hoagy Carmichael to appear and start tinkling out “Stardust.”
Indirect lighting glowed from panels placed high along the walls, and dependent from the ceiling halfway down the compartment was a chandelier. To Jake it looked like a smaller replica of the one which had lain in ruins on the ballroom floor of The Mansion. Nor did this surprise him-he had begun to take such connections and doublings as a matter of course. The only thing about this splendid room which seemed wrong was its lack of even a single window.
The piece de resistance stood on a pedestal below the chandelier. It was an ice-sculpture of a gunslinger with a revolver in his left hand. The right hand was holding the bridle of the ice-horse that walked, head-down and tired, behind him. Eddie could see there were only three digits on this hand: the last two fingers and the thumb.
Jake, Eddie, and Susannah stared in fascination at the haggard face beneath the frozen hat as the floor began to thrum gently beneath their feet. The resemblance to Roland was remarkable.
“I HAD TO WORK RATHER FAST, I’M AFRAID,” Blaine said modestly. “DOES IT DO ANYTHING FOR YOU?”
“It’s absolutely amazing,” Susannah said.
“THANK YOU, SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK.”
Eddie was testing one of the sofas with his hand. It was incredibly soft; touching it made him want to sleep for at least sixteen hours. “The Great Old Ones really travelled in style, didn’t they?”
Blaine laughed again, and the shrill, not-quite-sane undertone of that laugh made them look at each other uneasily. “DON’T GET THE WRONG IDEA,” Blaine said. “THIS WAS THE BARONY CABIN- WHAT I BELIEVE YOU WOULD CALL FIRST CLASS.”
“Where are the other cars?”
Blaine ignored the question. Beneath their feet, the throb of the engines continued to speed up. Susannah was reminded of how the pilots revved their engines before charging down the runway at LaGuardia or Idlewild. “PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS, MY INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS.”
Jake dropped into one of the swivel chairs. Oy jumped promptly into his lap. Roland took the chair nearest him, sparing one glance at the ice-sculpture. The barrel of the revolver was beginning to drip slowly into the shallow china basin in which the sculpture stood.
Eddie sat down on one of the sofas with Susannah. It was every bit as comfortable as his hand had told him it would be. “Exactly where are we going, Blaine?”
Blaine replied in the patient voice of someone who realizes he is speaking to a mental inferior and must make allowances. “ALONG THE PATH OF THE BEAM. AT LEAST, AS FAR ALONG IT AS MY TRACK GOES.”
“To the Dark Tower?” Roland asked. Susannah realized it was the first time the gunslinger had actually spoken to the loquacious ghost in the machine below Lud.
“Only as far as Topeka,” Jake said in a low voice.
“YES,” Blaine said. “TOPEKA IS THE NAME OF MY TERMINATING POINT, ALTHOUGH I AM SURPRISED YOU KNOW IT.”
With all you know about our world, Jake thought, how come you don’t know that some lady wrote a book about you, Blaine? Was it the name-change? Was something that simple enough to fool a complicated machine like you into overlooking your own biography? And what about Beryl Evans, the woman who supposedly wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Did you know her, Blaine? And where is she now?
Good questions… but Jake somehow didn’t think this would be a good time to ask them.
The throb of the engines became steadily stronger. A faint thud- not nearly as strong as the explosion which had shaken the Cradle as they boarded-ran through the floor. An expression of alarm crossed Susannah’s face. “Oh shit! Eddie! My wheelchair! It’s back there!”
Eddie put an arm around her shoulders. “Too late now, babe,” he said as Blaine the Mono began to move, sliding toward its slot in the Cradle for the first time in ten years… and for the last time in its long, long history.
5
“THE BARONY CABIN HAS A PARTICULARLY FINE VISUAL MODE,” Blaine said. “WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO ACTIVATE IT?”
Jake glanced at Roland, who shrugged and nodded.
“Yes, please,” Jake said.
What happened then was so spectacular that it stunned all of them to silence…although Roland, who knew little of technology but who had spent his entire life on comfortable terms with magic, was the least wonder-struck of the four. It was not a matter of windows appearing in the compartment’s curved walls; the entire cabin-floor and ceiling as well as walls-grew milky, grew translucent, grew transparent, and then disappeared completely. Within a space of five seconds, Blaine the Mono seemed to be gone and the pilgrims seemed to be zooming through the lanes of the city with no aid or support at all.
Susannah and Eddie clutched each other like small children in the path of a charging animal. Oy barked and tried to jump down the front of Jake’s shirt. Jake barely noticed; he was clutching the sides of his seat and looking from side to side, his eyes wide with amazement. His initial alarm was being replaced by amazed delight.
The furniture groupings were still here, he saw; so was the bar, the piano-harpsichord, and the ice-sculpture Blaine had created as a party-favor, but now this living-room configuration appeared to be cruising seventy feet above Lud’s rain-soaked central district. Five feet to Jake’s left, Eddie and Susannah were floating along on one of the couches; three feet to his right, Roland was sitting in a powder-blue swivel chair, his dusty, battered boots resting on nothing, flying serenely over the rubble-strewn urban waste land below.
Jake could feel the carpet beneath his moccasins, but his eyes insisted that neither the carpet nor the floor beneath it was still there. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the dark slot in the stone flank of the Cradle slowly receding in the distance.
“Eddie! Susannah! Check it out!”
Jake got to his feet, holding Oy inside his shirt, and began to walk slowly through what looked like empty space. Taking the initial step required a great deal of willpower, because his eyes told him there was nothing at all between the floating islands of furniture, but once he began to move, the undeniable feel of the floor beneath him made it easier. To Eddie and Susannah, the boy appeared to be walking on thin air while the battered, dingy buildings of the city slid by on either side.