“It doesn’t like silly questions,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t like silly games. And we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it.”
Eddie searched for the other riddle that had been in Jake’s Final Essay, found it, posed it.
“Blaine: when is a door not a door?”
Once again, for the first time since Susannah had asked Blaine what had four legs and flies, there came a peculiar clicking sound, like a man popping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. The pause was briefer than the one which had followed Susannah’s opening riddle, but it was still there-Eddie heard it. “WHEN IT’s A JAR, OF COURSE” Blaine said. He sounded dour, unhappy. “THIRTEEN MINUTES AND FIVE SECONDS REMAIN BEFORE TERMINATION, EDDIE OF NEW YORK-WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?”
Eddie sat bolt upright, staring at the route-map, and although he could feel warm trickles of sweat running down his back, that smile on his face widened.
“Quit your whining, pal. If you want the privilege of smearing us all over the landscape, you’ll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren’t quite up to your standards of logic.”
“YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER.”
“Or what? You’ll kill me? Don’t make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the game; now play it.”
Thin pink light flashed briefly out of the route-map. “You’re making him angry,” Little Blaine mourned. “Oh, you’re making him so angry.”
“Get lost, squirt,” Eddie said, not unkindly, and when the pink glow receded, once again revealing a flashing green dot that was almost on top of Topeka, Eddie said: “Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn’t fall off, too?”
“THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER.” On the last word Blaine’s voice actually dropped into a lower register, making him sound like a fourteen-year-old coping with a change of voice.
Roland’s eyes were not just gleaming now but blazing. “What do you say, Blaine? I would understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?”
“NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT-”
“Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle.”
“IT’s NOT A RIDDLE!” Blaine almost bleated. “IT’s A JOKE, SOMETHING FOR STUPID CHILDREN TO CACKLE OVER IN THE PLAY YARD!”
“Answer now or I declare the contest over and our ka-tet the winner,” Roland said. He spoke in the dryly confident tone of authority Eddie had first heard in the town of River Crossing. “You must answer, for it is stupidity you complain of, not transgression of the rules, which we agreed upon mutually.”
Another of those clicking sounds, but this time it was much louder- so loud, in fact, that Eddie winced. Oy flattened his ears against his skull. It was followed by the longest pause yet; three seconds, at least. Then:
“THE LITTLE MORON DID NOT FALL OFF BECAUSE HE WAS A LITTLE MORE ON.” Blaine sounded sulky. “MORE PHONETIC COINCIDENCE. TO EVEN ANSWER SUCH AN UNWORTHY RIDDLE MAKES ME FEEL SOILED.”
Eddie held up his right hand. He rubbed the thumb and forefinger together.
“WHAT DOES THAT SIGNIFY, FOOLISH CREATURE?”
“It’s the world’s smallest violin, playing 'My Heart Pumps Purple Piss for You,'” Eddie said. Jake fell into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “But never mind the cheap New York humor; back to the contest. Why do police lieutenants wear belts?”
The lights in the Barony Coach began to flicker. An odd thing was happening to the walls, as well; they began to fade in and out of true, lunging toward transparency, perhaps, and then opaquing again. Seeing this phenomenon even out of the comer of his eye made Eddie feel a bit whoopsy.
“Blaine? Answer.”
“Answer,” Roland agreed. “Answer, or I declare the contest at an end and hold you to your promise.”
Something touched Eddie’s elbow. He looked down and saw Susannah’s small and shapely hand. He took it, squeezed it, smiled at her. He hoped the smile was more confident than the man making it felt. They were going to win the contest-he was almost sure of that-but he had no idea what Blaine would do if and when they did.
“TO… TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS?” Blame’s voice firmed, and repeated the question as a statement. “TO HOLD UP THEIR PANTS. A RIDDLE BASED UPON THE EXAGGERATED SIMPLICITY OF-”
“Right. Good one, Blaine, but never mind trying to kill time-it won’t work. Next-”
“I INSIST YOU STOP ASKING THESE SILLY-”
“Then stop the mono,” Eddie said. “If you’re that upset, stop right here, and I will.”
“NO.”
“Okay, then, on we go. What’s Irish and stays out in back of the house, even in the rain?”
There was another of those clicks, this time so loud it felt like having a blunt spike driven against his eardrum. A pause of five seconds. Now the flashing green dot on the route-map was so close to Topeka that it lit the word like neon each time it flashed. Then: “PADDY O'FURNITURE.”
The correct answer to a joke-riddle Eddie had first heard in the alley behind Dahlie’s, or at some similar gathering-point, but Blaine had apparently paid a price for forcing his mind into a channel that could conceive it: the Barony Coach lights were flashing more wildly than ever, and Eddie could hear a low humming from inside the walls-the kind of sound your stereo amp made just before its shit blew up.
Pink light stuttered from the route-map. “Stop!” Little Blaine cried, his voice so wavery it sounded like the voice of a character from an old Warner Bros. cartoon. “Stop it, you’re killing him!”
What do you think he’s trying to do to us, squirt? Eddie thought.
He considered shooting Blaine one Jake had told while they’d been sitting around the campfire that night-What’s green, weighs a hundred tons, and lives at the bottom of the ocean? Moby Snot!-and then didn’t. He wanted to stick further inside the bounds of logic than that one allowed… and he could do it. He didn’t think he would have to get much more surreal than the level of, say, a third-grader with a fair-to-good collection of Garbage Pail Kids cards in order to fuck Blaine up royally… and permanently. Because no matter how many emotions his fancy dipolar circuits had allowed him to mimic, he was still an it-a computer. Even following Eddie this far into riddledom’s Twilight Zone had caused Blaine’s sanity to totter.
“Why do people go to bed, Blaine?”
“BECAUSE… BECAUSE… GODS DAMN YOU, BECAUSE…”
A low squalling started up from beneath them, and suddenly the Barony Coach swayed violently from right to left. Susannah screamed. Jake was thrown into her lap. The gunslinger grabbed them both.
“BECAUSE THE BED WON’T COME TO THEM, GODS DAMN YOU! NINE MINUTES AND FIFTY SECONDS!”
“Give up, Blaine,” Eddie said. “Stop before I have to blow your mind completely. If you don’t quit, it’s going to happen. We both know it.”
“NO!”
“I got a million of these puppies. Been hearing them my whole life.
They stick to my mind the way flies stick to flypaper. Hey, with some people it’s recipes. So what do you say? Want to give?”
“NO! NINE MINUTES AND THIRTY SECONDS!”
“Okay, Blaine. You asked for it. Here comes the cruncher. Why did the dead baby cross the road?”
The mono took another of those gigantic lurches; Eddie didn’t understand how it could still stay on its track after that, but somehow it did. The screaming from beneath them grew louder; the walls, floor, and ceiling of the car began to cycle madly between opacity and transparency. At one moment they were enclosed, at the next they were rushing over a gray daylight landscape that stretched flat and featureless to a horizon which ran across the world in a straight line.