The boy cried out: "Hey! Hey . . ."
The gunslinger turned around and went to him. The boy was standing, transfixed, at the book stall. Inside, sprawled in the far corner, was a mummy. It was wearing a blue uniform with gold piping--a trainman's uniform, by the look. There was an ancient, perfectly preserved newspaper on the dead thing's lap, and it crumbled to dust when the gunslinger touched it. The mummy's face was like an old, shriveled apple. Cautiously, the gunslinger touched the cheek. There was a small puff of dust. When it cleared, they were able to look through the flesh and into the mummy's mouth. A gold tooth twinkled there.
"Gas," the gunslinger murmured. "The old people made a gas that would do this. Or so Vannay told us."
"The one who taught from books."
"Yes. He."
"I bet these old people fought wars with it," the boy said darkly. "Killed other old people with it."
"I'm sure you're right."
There were perhaps a dozen other mummies. All but two or three were wearing the blue and gold ornamental uniforms. The gunslinger supposed that the gas had been used when the place was empty of most incoming and outgoing traffic. Perhaps once in the dim ago, the station had been a military objective of some long-gone army and cause.
The thought depressed him.
"We better go on," he said, and started toward Track 10 and the handcar again. But the boy stood rebelliously behind him.
"Not going."
The gunslinger turned back, surprised.
The boy's face was twisted and trembling. "You won't get what you want until I'm dead. I'll take my chances by myself."
The gunslinger nodded noncommittally, hating himself for what he was going to do. "Okay, Jake," he said mildly. "Long days, pleasant nights." He turned around, walked across to the stone piers, leaped easily down onto the handcar.
"You made a deal with someone!" the boy screamed after him. "I know you did!"
The gunslinger, not replying, carefully put the bow in front of the T-post rising out of the handcar's floor, out of harm's way.
The boy's fists were clenched, his features drawn in agony.
How easily you bluff this young boy, the gunslinger told himself. Again and again his wonderful intuition--his touch--has led him to this point, and again and again you have led him on past it. And how difficult could it be--after all, he has no friends but you.
In a sudden, simple thought (almost a vision) it came to him that all he had to do was give it over, turn around, take the boy with him, and make him the center of a new force. The Tower did not have to be obtained in this humiliating, nose-rubbing way, did it? Let his quest resume after the boy had a growth of years, when the two of them could cast the man in black aside like a cheap wind-up toy.
Surely, he thought cynically. Surely.
He knew with sudden coldness that turning backward would mean death for both of them--death or worse: entombment with the Slow Muties behind them. Decay of all the faculties. With, perhaps, the guns of his father living long after both of them, kept in rotten splendor as totems not unlike the unforgotten gas pump.
Show some guts, he told himself falsely.
He reached for the handle and began to pump it. The handcar moved away from the stone piers.
The boy screamed: "Wait!" And began running on the diagonal, toward where the handcar would emerge nearer the darkness ahead. The gunslinger had an impulse to speed up, to leave the boy alone yet at least with an uncertainty.
Instead, he caught him as he leaped. The heart beneath the thin shirt thrummed and fluttered as Jake clung to him.
The end was very close now.
XIII
The sound of the river had become very loud, filling even their dreams with its thunder. The gunslinger, more as a whim than anything else, let the boy pump them ahead while he shot a number of the bad arrows, tethered by fine white lengths of thread, into the dark.
The bow was also very bad, incredibly preserved but with a terrible pull and aim despite that, and the gunslinger knew nothing would improve it. Even re-stringing would not help the tired wood. The arrows would not fly far into the dark, but the last one he sent out came back wet and slick. The gunslinger only shrugged when the boy asked him how far to the water, but privately he didn't think the arrow could have traveled more than sixty yards from the rotted bow--and lucky to get that far.
And still the river's thunder grew louder, closer.
During the third waking period after the station, a spectral radiance began to grow again. They had entered a long tunnel of some weird phosphorescent rock, and the wet walls glittered and twinkled with thousands of minute starbursts. The boy called them fot-suls. They saw things in a kind of eerie, horror-house surreality.
The brute sound of the river was channeled to them by the confining rock, magnified in its own natural amplifier. Yet the sound remained oddly constant, even as they approached the crossing point the gunslinger was sure lay ahead, because the walls were widening, drawing back. The angle of their ascent became more pronounced.
The tracks arrowed through the new light. To the gunslinger the clumps of fot-suls looked like the captive tubes of swamp gas sometimes sold for a pretty at the Feast of Reaptide fair; to the boy they looked like endless streamers of neon tubing. But in its glow they could both see that the rock that had enclosed them so long ended up ahead in ragged twin peninsulas that pointed toward a gulf of darkness--the chasm over the river.
The tracks continued out and over that unknowable drop, supported by a trestle aeons old. And beyond, what seemed an incredible distance, was a tiny pinprick of light, not phosphorescence or fluorescence, but the hard, true light of day. It was as tiny as a needle-prick in a dark cloth, yet weighted with frightful meaning.
"Stop," the boy said. "Stop for a minute. Please."
Unquestioning, the gunslinger let the handcar coast to a stop. The sound of the river was a steady, booming roar, coming from beneath and ahead. The artificial glow from the wet rock was suddenly hateful. For the first time he felt a claustrophobic hand touch him, and the urge to get out, to get free of this living burial, was strong and nearly undeniable.
"We'll go on," the boy said. "Is that what he wants? For us to drive the handcar out over . . . that . . . and fall down?"
The gunslinger knew it was not but said: "I don't know what he wants."
They got down and approached the lip of the drop carefully. The stone beneath their feet continued to rise until, with a sudden, angling drop, the floor fell away from the tracks and the tracks continued alone, across blackness.
The gunslinger dropped to his knees and peered down. He could dimly make out a complex, nearly incredible webwork of steel girders and struts, disappearing down toward the roar of the river, all in support of the graceful arch of the tracks across the void.
In his mind's eye he could imagine the work of time and water on the steel, in deadly tandem. How much support was left? Little? Hardly any? None? He suddenly saw the face of the mummy again, and the way the flesh, seemingly solid
, had crumbled to powder at the effortless touch of his finger.
"We'll walk now," the gunslinger said.
He half expected the boy to balk again, but he preceded the gunslinger out onto the rails, crossing on the welded steel slats calmly, with sure feet. The gunslinger followed him out over the chasm, ready to catch him if Jake should put a foot wrong.
The gunslinger felt a fine slick of sweat cover his skin. The trestle was rotten, very rotten. It thrummed beneath his feet with the heady motion of the river far beneath, swaying a little on unseen guy wires. We're acrobats, he thought. Look, Mother, no net. I'm flying.
He knelt once and examined the crossties they were walking on. They were caked and pitted with rust (he could feel the reason on his face--fresh air, the friend of corruption; they must be very close to the surface now), and a strong blow of the fist made the metal quiver sickly. Once he heard a warning groan beneath his feet and felt the steel settle preparatory to giving way, but he had already moved on.
The boy, of course, was over a hundred pounds lighter and safe enough, unless the going became progressively worse.
Behind them, the handcar had melted into the general gloom. The stone pier on the left extended out perhaps twenty yards. It jutted further than the one on the right, but this was also left behind and then they were alone over the gulf.
At first it seemed that the tiny prick of daylight remained mockingly constant (perhaps even drawing away from them at the exact pace they approached it--that would be a fine bit of magic indeed), but gradually the gunslinger realized that it was widening, becoming more defined. They were still below it, but the tracks were rising to meet it.
The boy gave a surprised grunt and suddenly lurched to the side, arms pinwheeling in slow, wide revolutions. It seemed that he tottered on the brink for a very long time indeed before stepping forward again.
"It almost went on me," he said softly, without emotion. "There's a hole. Step over if you don't want to take a quick trip to the bottom. Simon says take one giant step."
That was a game the gunslinger knew as Mother Says, remembered well from childhood games with Cuthbert, Jamie, and Alain, but he said nothing, only stepped over.