CHAPTER 4 #2
The path beside the river (for it was a path—smooth, sunken to a slight concavity) led always upward, toward the river’s head.
At regular intervals they came to curved stone pylons with sunken ringbolts; perhaps once oxen or stagehorses had been tethered there.
At each was a steel flagon holding an electric torch, but these were all barren of life and light.
During the third period of rest-before-sleep, the boy wandered away a little. The gunslinger could hear small conversations of rattled pebbles as Jake moved cautiously.
“Careful,” he said. “You can’t see where you are.”
“I’m crawling. It’s . . . say!”
“What is it?” The gunslinger half crouched, touching the haft of one gun.
There was a slight pause. The gunslinger strained his eyes uselessly.
“I think it’s a railroad,” the boy said dubiously.
The gunslinger got up and walked toward the sound of Jake’s voice, leading with one foot lightly to test for pitfalls.
“Here.” A hand reached out and cat’s-pawed the gunslinger’s face.
The boy was very good in the dark, better than Roland himself.
His eyes seemed to dilate until there was no color left in them: the gunslinger saw this as he struck a meager light.
There was no fuel in this rock womb, and what they had brought with them was going rapidly to ash.
At times the urge to strike a light was well-nigh insatiable.
They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.
The boy was standing beside a curved rock wall that was lined with parallel metal staves running off into the darkness.
Each carried black nodes that might once have been conductors of electricity.
And beside and below, set only inches off the stone floor, were tracks of bright metal.
What might have run on those tracks at one time?
The gunslinger could only imagine sleek electric bullets, firing their courses through this forever night with affrighted searchlight eyes going before.
He had never heard of such things, but there were many remnants of the gone world, just as there were demons.
The gunslinger had once come upon a hermit who’d gained a quasi-religious power over a miserable flock of kine-keepers by possession of an ancient gasoline pump.
The hermit crouched beside it, one arm wrapped possessively around it, and preached wild, guttering sermons.
He occasionally placed the still-bright steel nozzle, which was attached to a rotted rubber hose, between his legs.
On the pump, in perfectly legible (although rust-clotted) letters, was a legend of unknown meaning: AMOCO.
Lead Free. Amoco had become the totem of a thundergod, and they had worshipped Him with the slaughter of sheep and the sound of engines: Rumm! Rummm! Rum-rum-rummmmm!
Hulks, the gunslinger thought. Only meaningless hulks poking from sands that once were seas.
And now a railroad.
“We’ll follow it,” he said.
The boy said nothing.
The gunslinger extinguished the light and they slept.
When Roland awoke, the boy was up before him, sitting on one of the rails and watching him sightlessly in the dark.
They followed the rails like blindmen, Roland leading, Jake following.
They slipped their feet along one rail always, also like blindmen.
The steady rush of the river off to the right was their companion.
They did not speak, and this went on for three periods of waking.
The gunslinger felt no urge to think coherently, or to plan. His sleep was dreamless.
During the fourth period of waking and walking, they literally stumbled on a handcar.
The gunslinger ran into it chest-high, and the boy, walking on the other side, struck his forehead and went down with a cry.
The gunslinger made a light immediately. “Are you all right?” The words sounded sharp, angry, and he winced at them.
“Yes.” The boy was holding his head gingerly. He shook it once to make sure he had told the truth. They turned to look at what they had run into.
It was a flat square plate of metal that sat mutely on the tracks. There was a seesaw handle in the center of the square. It descended into a connection of cogs. The gunslinger had no immediate sense of the thing’s purpose, but the boy grasped it at once.
“It’s a handcar.”
“What?”
“Handcar,” the boy said impatiently, “like in the old cartoons. Look.”
He pulled himself up and went to the handle. He managed to push it down, but it took all his weight hung over the handle to turn the trick. The handcar moved a foot, with silent timelessness, on the rails.
“Good!” said a faint mechanical voice. It made them both jump. “Good, push ag . . .” The mechanical voice died out.
“It works a little hard,” the boy said, as if apologizing for the thing.
The gunslinger pulled himself up beside Jake and shoved the handle down. The handcar moved forward obediently, then stopped. “Good, push again!” the mechanical voice encouraged.
He had felt a driveshaft turn beneath his feet.
The operation pleased him, and so did the mechanical voice (although he intended to listen to that no longer than necessary).
Other than the pump at the way station, this was the first machine he’d seen in years that still worked well.
But the thing disquieted him, too. It would take them to their destination that much the quicker.
He had no doubt whatever that the man in black had meant for them to find this, too.
“Neat, huh?” the boy said, and his voice was full of loathing. The silence was deep. Roland could hear his organs at work inside his body, and the drip of water, and nothing else.
“You stand on one side, I stand on the other,” Jake said. “You’ll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good. Then I can help. First you push, then I push. We’ll go right along. Get it?”
“I get it,” the gunslinger said. His hands were in helpless, despairing fists.
“But you’ll have to push by yourself until it gets rolling good,” the boy repeated, looking at him.
The gunslinger had a sudden vivid picture of the Great Hall a year or so after the Sowing Night Cotillion.
By then it had been nothing but shattered shards in the wake of revolt, civil strife, and invasion.
This image was followed by one of Allie, the scarred woman from Tull, pushed and pulled by bullets that were killing her for no reason at all .
. . unless reflex was a reason. Next came Cuthbert Allgood’s face, laughing as he went downhill to his death, still blowing that gods-damned horn .
. . and then he saw Susan’s face, twisted, made ugly with weeping.
All my old friends, the gunslinger thought, and smiled hideously.
“I’ll push,” the gunslinger said.
He began to push, and when the voice began to speak (“Good, push again! Good, push again!”) he sent his hand fumbling along the post upon which the seesaw handle had been balanced. At last he found what he was surely looking for: a button. He pushed it.
“Goodbye, pal!” the mechanical voice said cheerily, and was then blessedly silent for some hours.
III
They rolled on through the dark, faster now, no longer having to feel their way. The mechanical voice spoke up once, suggesting they eat Crisp-A-La, and again to say that nothing satisfied at the end of a hard day like Larchies. Following this second piece of advice, it spoke no more.
Once the awkwardness of a buried age had been run off the handcar, it went smoothly.
The boy tried to do his share, and the gunslinger allowed him small shifts, but mostly he pumped by himself, in large and chest-stretching risings and fallings.
The underground river was their companion, sometimes closer on their right, sometimes further away.
Once it took on huge and thunderous hollowness, as if passing through some great cathedral narthex.
Once the sound of it disappeared almost altogether.
The speed and the made wind against their faces seemed to take the place of sight and to drop them once again into a frame of time.
The gunslinger estimated they were making anywhere from ten to fifteen miles an hour, always on a shallow, almost imperceptible uphill grade that wore him out deceptively.
When they stopped he slept like the stone itself.
Their food was almost gone again. Neither of them worried about it.
For the gunslinger, the tenseness of a coming climax was as imperceivable but as real (and accretive) as the fatigue of propelling the handcar.
They were close to the end of the beginning .
. . or at least he was. He felt like a performer placed on center stage minutes before the rise of the curtain; settled in position with his first line held securely in his mind, he heard the unseen audience rattling programs and settling in their seats.
He lived with a tight, tidy ball of unholy anticipation in his belly and welcomed the exercise that let him sleep.
And when he did sleep, it was like the dead.
The boy spoke less and less, but at their stopping place one sleep-period not long before they were attacked by the Slow Mutants, he asked the gunslinger almost shyly about his coming of age.
“For I would hear more of that,” he said.
The gunslinger had been leaning with his back against the handle, a cigarette from his dwindling supply of tobacco clamped in his lips. He’d been on the verge of his usual unthinking sleep when the boy asked his question.
“Why would thee sill to know that?” he asked, amused.
The boy’s voice was curiously stubborn, as if hiding embarrassment. “I just would.” And after a pause, he added: “I always wondered about growing up. I bet it’s mostly lies.”
“What you’d hear of wasn’t my growing-up,” the gunslinger said. “I suppose I did the first of that not long after what thee’d hear of—”