Past LADING/LOST LUGGAGE was (reasonablyenough, Susannah thought) SHIPPING OFFICE. The fellow with the white hair triedthe door. It was locked. This seemed to please rather than upset him. “Dinky?”he said.
Dinky, it seemed, was the youngest of thethree. He took hold of the knob and Susannah heard a snapping sound fromsomewhere inside. Dinky stepped back. This time when Ted tried the door, itopened easily. They stepped into a dim office bisected by a high counter. On itwas a sign that almost made Susannah feel nostalgic: TAKE NUMBER AND WAIT,it said.
When the door was closed, Dinky once moregrasped the knob. There was another brisk snap.
“You just locked it again,” Jake said. Hesounded accusing, but there was a smile on his face, and the color was comingback into his cheeks. “Didn’t you?”
“Not now, please,” said the white-hairedman—Ted. “No time. Follow me, please.”
He flipped up a section of the counter andled them through. Behind it was an office area containing two robots thatlooked long dead, and three skeletons.
“Why the hell do we keep finding bones?”Eddie asked. Like Jake he was feeling better and only thinking out loud, notreally expecting an answer. He got one, however. From Ted.
“Do you know of the Crimson King, youngman? You do, of course you do. I believe that at one time he covered thisentire part of the world with poison gas. Probably for a lark. Killed almosteveryone. The darkness you see is the lingering result. He’s mad, of course.It’s a large part of the problem. In here.”
He led them through a door marked PRIVATEand into a room that had once probably belonged to a high poobah in thewonderful world of shipping and lading. Susannah saw tracks on the floor,suggesting that this place had been visited recently. Perhaps by these samethree men. There was a desk beneath six inches of fluffy dust, plus two chairsand a couch. Behind the desk was a window. Once it had been covered withvenetian blinds, but these had collapsed onto the floor, revealing a vista asforbidding as it was fascinating. The land beyond Thunderclap Station remindedher of the flat, deserty wastes on the far side of the River Whye, but rockierand even more forbidding.
And of course it was darker.
Tracks (eternally halted trains sat on someof them) radiated out like strands of a steel spiderweb. Above them, a sky ofdarkest slate-gray seemed to sag almost close enough to touch. Between the skyand the Earth the air was thick, somehow; Susannah found herself squintingto see things, although there seemed to be no actual mist or smog in the air.
“Dinky,” the white-haired man said.
“Yes, Ted.”
“What have you left for our friend TheWeasel to find?”
“A maintenance drone,” Dinky replied.“It’ll look like it found its way in through the Fedic door, set off the alarm,then got fried on some of the tracks at the far end of the switching-yard.Quite a few are still hot. You see dead birds around em all the time, fried toa crisp, but even a good-sized rustie’s too small to trip the alarm. A drone,though… I’m pretty sure he’ll buy it. The Wease ain’t stupid, but it’ll lookpretty believable.”
“Good. That’s very good. Look yonder,gunslingers.” Ted pointed to a sharp upthrust of rock on the horizon. Susannahcould make it out easily; in this dark countryside all horizons seemed close.She could see nothing remarkable about it, though, only folds of deeper shadowand sterile slopes of tumbled rock. “That’s Can Steek-Tete.”
“The Little Needle,” Roland said.
“Excellent translation. It’s where we’regoing.”
Susannah’s heart sank. Themountain—or perhaps you called something like that a butte—had tobe eight or ten miles away. At the very limit of vision, in any case. Eddie andRoland and the two younger men in Ted’s party couldn’t carry her that far, shedidn’t believe. And how did they know they could trust these new fellows,anyway?
On the other hand, she thought, whatchoice do we have?
“You won’t need to be carried,” Ted toldher, “but Stanley can use your help. We’ll join hands, like folks at aséance. I’ll want you all to visualize that rock formation when we gothrough. And hold the name in the forefront of your mind: Steek-Tete, theLittle Needle.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Eddie said. They hadapproached yet another door, this one standing open on a closet. Wire hangersand one ancient red blazer hung in there. Eddie grasped Ted’s shoulder andswung him around. “Go through what? Go through where? Because if it’s a doorlike the last one—”
Ted looked up at Eddie—had to lookup, because Eddie was taller—and Susannah saw an amazing, dismayingthing: Ted’s eyes appeared to be shaking in their sockets. A momentlater she realized this wasn’t actually the case. The man’s pupils were growingand then shrinking with eerie rapidity. It was as if they couldn’t decide if itwas light or dark in here.
“It’s not a door we’re going through atall, at least not of the kinds with which you may be familiar. You have totrust me, young man. Listen.”
They all fell silent, and Susannah couldhear the snarl of approaching motors.
“That’s The Weasel,” Ted told them. “He’llhave taheen with him, at least four, maybe half a dozen. If they catch sight ofus in here, Dink and Stanley are almost certainly going to die. They don’t haveto catch us but only catch sight of us. We’re risking our livesfor you. This isn’t a game, and I need you to stop asking questions and followme!”
“We will,” Roland said. “And we’ll thinkabout the Little Needle.”
“Steek-Tete,” Susannah agreed.
“You won’t get sick again,” Dinky said. “Promise.”
“Thank God,” Jake said.
“Thang-odd,” Oy agreed.
Stanley, the third member of Ted’s party,continued to say nothing at all.
Four
It was just a closet, and an office closet,at that—narrow and musty. The ancient red blazer had a brass tag on the breastpocket with the words HEAD OF SHIPPING stamped on it. Stanley led the way tothe back, which was nothing but a blank wall. Coathangers jingled and jangled.Jake had to watch his step to keep from treading on Oy. He’d always beenslightly prone to claustrophobia, and now he began to feel the pudgy fingers ofthe Panic-Man caressing his neck: first one side and then the other. The ‘Rizasclanked softly together in their bag. Seven people and one billy-bumblercrowding into an abandoned office closet? It was nuts. He could still hear thesnarl of the approaching engines. The one in charge called The Weasel.
“Join hands,” Ted murmured. “Andconcentrate.”
“Steek-Tete,” Susannah repeated, but toJake she sounded dubious this time.
“Little Nee—” Eddie began, and thenstopped. The blank wall at the end of the closet was gone. Where it had beenwas a small clearing with boulders on one side and a steep, scrub-crustedhillside on another. Jake was willing to bet that was Steek-Tete, and if it wasa way out of this enclosed space, he was delighted to see it.
Stanley gave a little moan of pain oreffort or both. The man’s eyes were closed and tears were trickling out frombeneath the lids.
“Now,” Ted said. “Lead us through,Stanley.” To the others he added: “And help him if you can! Help him, for yourfathers’ sakes!”
Jake tried to hold an image of the outcropTed had pointed to through the office window and walked forward, holdingRoland’s hand ahead of him and Susannah’s behind him. He felt a breath of coldair on his sweaty skin and then stepped through onto the slope of Steek-Tete inThunderclap, thinking just briefly of Mr. C. S. Lewis, and the wonderfulwardrobe that took you to Narnia.
Five
They did not come out in Narnia.
It was cold on the slope of the butte, andJake was soon shivering. When he looked over his shoulder he saw no sign of theportal they’d come through. The air was dim and smelled of something pungentand not particularly pleasant, like kerosene. There was a small cave foldedinto the flank of the slope (it was really not much more than another closet),and from it Ted brought a stack of blankets and a canteen that turned out tohold a sharp, alkali-tasting water. Jake and Roland wrapped themselves insingle blankets. Eddie took two and bundled himself and Susannah together.Jake, trying not to let his teeth start chattering (once they did, there’d beno stopping them), envied the two of them their extra warmth.