The Dark Tower - Stephen King [241]
Then she brightened.
“There’s one good thing—at speeds of up to three hundred miles an hour, which is what that ain’t-we-happy voice said the Spirit of Topeka was doing, we must have left Master Spider-Boy in the dust.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Roland said.
She rolled her eyes wearily. “Don’t tell me that.”
“I do tell you. But we’ll deal with Mordred when the time comes, and I don’t think that will be today.”
“Good.”
“Have you been beneath the Dogan again? I take it you have.”
Susannah’s eyes grew round. “Isn’t it something? Makes Grand Central look like a train station someplace out in Sticksville, U.S.A. How long did it take you to find your way up?”
“If it had just been me, I’d still be wandering around down there,” Roland admitted. “Oy found the way out. I assumed he was following your scent.”
Susannah considered this. “Maybe he was. Jake’s, more likely. Did you cross a wide passage with a sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED?”
Roland nodded, but the fading sign painted on the wall had meant little to him. He had identified the passage which the Wolves took at the beginning of their raids by the sight of two motionless gray horses far down the passage, and another of those snarling masks. He had also seen a moccasin he remembered quite well, one that had been made from a chunk of rubber. One of Ted’s or Dinky’s, he decided; Sheemie Ruiz had no doubt been buried in his.
“So,” he said. “You got off the train—how many were you?”
“Five, with Sheemie gone,” she said. “Me, Ted, Dinky, Dani Rostov, and Fred Worthington—do you remember Fred?”
Roland nodded. The man in the bankerly suit.
“I gave them the guided tour of the Dogan,” she said. “As much as I could, anyway. The beds where they stole the brains out of the kids and the one where Mia finally gave birth to her monster; the one-way door between Fedic and the Dixie Pig in New York that still works; Nigel’s apartment.
“Ted and his friends were pretty amazed by the rotunda where all the doors are, especially the one going to Dallas in 1963, where President Kennedy was killed. We found another door two levels down—this is where most of the passages are—that goes to Ford’s Theater, where President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. There’s even a poster for the play he was watching when Booth shot him. Our American Cousin, it was called. What kind of people would want to go and watch things like that?”
Roland thought a lot of people might, actually, but knew better than to say so.
“It’s all very old,” she said. “And very hot. And very fucking scary, if you want to know the truth. Most of the machinery has quit, and there are puddles of water and oil and God knows what everywhere. Some of the puddles gave off a glow, and Dinky said he thought it might be radiation. I don’t like to think what I got growin on my bones or when my hair’ll start fallin out. There were doors where we could hear those awful chimes…the ones that set your teeth on edge.”
“Todash chimes.”
“Yep. And things behind some of em. Slithery things. Was it you or was it Mia who told me there are monsters in the todash darkness?”
“I might have,” he said. Gods knew there were.
“There are things in that crack beyond town, too. Was Mia told me that. ‘Monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape,’ she said. And then Ted, Dinky, Dani, and Fred joined hands. They made what Ted called ‘the little good-mind.’ I could feel it even though I wasn’t in their circle, and I was glad to feel it, because that’s one spooky old place down there.” She clutched her blankets more tightly. “I don’t look forward to going again.”
“But you believe we have to.”
“There’s a passage that goes deep under the castle and comes out on the other side, in the Discordia. Ted and his friends located it by picking up old thoughts, what Ted called ghost-thoughts. Fred had a piece of chalk in his pocket and he marked it for me, but it’ll still be hard to find again. What it’s like down there is the labyrinth