There was brief silence, thin as new skin or early ice on a Year’s End pond, and then the sonic boom came rushing after like some noisy creature late for a wedding-feast, tearing the silence apart, knocking a single mutated bird-it might have been a raven-dead out of the air. The bird fell like a stone and splashed into the stream.
In the distance, a dwindling red eye: Blaine’s taillight.
Overhead, a full moon came out from behind a scrim of cloud, painting the clearing and the stream in the tawdry hues of pawnshop jewelry. There was a face in the moon, but not one upon which lovers would wish to look. It seemed the scant face of a skull, like those in the Candleton Travellers’ Hotel; a face which looked upon those few beings still alive and struggling below with the amusement of a lunatic. In Gilead, before the world had moved on, the full moon of Year’s End had been called the Demon Moon, and it was considered ill luck to look directly at it.
Now, however, such did not matter. Now there were demons everywhere.
2
Susannah looked at the route-map and saw that the green dot marking their present position was now almost halfway between Candleton and Rilea, Blaine’s next stop. Except who’s stopping? she thought.
From the route-map she turned to Eddie. His gaze was still directed up at the ceiling of the Barony Coach. She followed it and saw a square which could only be a trapdoor (except when you were dealing with futuristic shit like a talking train, she supposed you called it a hatch, or something even cooler). Stencilled on it was a simple red drawing which showed a man stepping through the opening. Susannah tried to imagine following the implied instruction and popping up through that hatch at over eight hundred miles an hour. She got a quick but clear image of a woman’s head being ripped from her neck like a flower from its stalk; she saw the head flying backward along the length of the Barony Coach, perhaps bouncing once, and then disappearing into the dark, eyes staring and hair rippling.
She pushed the picture away as fast as she could. The hatch up there was almost certainly locked shut, anyway. Blaine the Mono had no intention of letting them go. They might win their way out, but Susannah didn’t think that was a sure thing even if they managed to stump Blaine with a riddle.
Sorry to say this, but you sound like just one more honky motherfucker to me, honey, she thought in a mental voice that was not quite Detta Walker’s. I don’t trust your mechanical ass. You apt to be more dangerous beaten than with the blue ribbon pinned to your memory banks.
Jake was holding his tattered book of riddles out to the gunslinger as if he no longer wanted the responsibility of carrying it. Susannah knew how the kid must feel; their lives might very well be in those grimy, well-thumbed pages. She wasn’t sure she would want the responsibility of holding onto it, either.
“Roland!” Jake whispered. “Do you want this?”
“Ont!” Oy said, giving the gunslinger a forbidding glance. “Olan-ont-iss!” The bumbler fixed his teeth on the book, took it from Jake’s hand, and stretched his disproportionately long neck toward Roland, offering him Riddle-De-Dum! Brain-Twisters and Puzzles for Everyone!
Roland glanced at it for a moment, his face distant and preoccupied, then shook his head. “Not yet.” He looked forward at the route-map. Blaine had no face, so the map had to serve them as a fixing-point. The flashing green dot was closer to Rilea now. Susannah wondered briefly what the countryside through which they were passing looked like, and decided she didn’t really want to know. Not after what they’d seen as they left the city of Lud.
“Blaine!” Roland called.
“YES.”
“Can you leave the room? We need to confer.”
You nuts if you think he’s gonna do that, Susannah thought, but Blaine’s reply was quick and eager.
“YES, GUNSLINGER. I WILL TURN OFF ALL MY SENSORS IN THE BARONY COACH. WHEN YOUR CONFERENCE IS DONE AND YOU ARE READY TO BEGIN THE RIDDLING, I WILL RETURN.”
“Yeah, you and General MacArthur,” Eddie muttered.
“WHAT DID YOU SAY, EDDIE OF NEW YORK?”
“Nothing. Talking to myself, that’s all.”
“TO SUMMON ME, SIMPLY TOUCH THE ROUTE-MAP,” said Blaine. “AS LONG AS THE MAP IS RED, MY SENSORS ARE OFF. SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR. AFTER AWHILE, CROCODILE. DON’T FORGET TO WRITE.” A pause. Then: “OLIVE OIL BUT NOT CASTORIA.”
The route-map rectangle at the front of the cabin suddenly turned a red so bright Susannah couldn’t look at it without squinting.
“Olive oil but not castoria?” Jake asked. “What the heck does that mean?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Roland said. “We don’t have much time. The mono travels just as fast toward its point of ending whether Blaine’s with us or not.”
“You don’t really believe he’s gone, do you?” Eddie asked. “A slippery pup like him? Come on, get real. He’s peeking, I guarantee you.”
“I doubt it very much,” Roland said, and Susannah decided she agreed with him. For now, at least. “You could hear how excited he was at the idea of riddling again after all these years. And-”
“And he’s confident,” Susannah said. “Doesn’t expect to have much trouble with the likes of us.”
“Will he?” Jake asked the gunslinger. “Will he have trouble with us?”
“I don’t know,” Roland said. “I don’t have a Watch Me hidden up my sleeve, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s a straight game… but at least it’s a game I’ve played before. We’ve all played it before, at least to some extent. And there’s that.” He nodded toward the book which Jake had taken back from Oy. “There are forces at work here, big ones, and not all of them are working to keep us away from the Tower.”
Susannah heard him, but it was Blaine she was thinking of-Blaine who had gone away and left them alone, like the kid who’s been chosen “it” obediently covering his eyes while his playmates hide. And wasn’t that what they were? Blaine’s playmates? The thought was somehow worse than the image she’d had of trying the escape hatch and having her head torn off.
“So what do we do?” Eddie asked. “You must have an idea, or you never would have sent him away.”
“His great intelligence-coupled with his long period of loneliness and forced inactivity-may have combined to make him more human than he knows. That’s my hope, anyway. First, we must establish a kind of geography. We must tell, if we can, where he is weak and where he is strong, where he is sure of the game and where not so sure. Riddles are not just about the cleverness of the riddler, never think it. They are also about the blind spots of he who is riddled.”
“Does he have blind spots?” Eddie asked.
“If he doesn’t,” Roland said calmly, “we’re going to die on this train.”
“I like the way you kind of ease us over the rough spots,” Eddie said with a thin smile. “It’s one of your many charms.”