The Dark Tower - Stephen King [252]
Nine
They had been moving at that near-jog for about fifteen minutes when they came upon a skeleton dressed in the remains of a rotting military uniform. There was still a flap of scalp on its head and tuft of listless black hair sprouting from it. The jaw grinned, as if welcoming them to the underworld. Lying on the floor beside the thing’s naked pelvis was a ring that had finally slipped from one of the moldering fingers of the dead man’s right hand. Susannah asked Roland if she could have a closer look. He picked it up and handed it to her. She examined it just long enough to confirm what she had thought, then cast it aside. It made a little clink and then there were only the sounds of dripping water and the todash chimes, fainter now but persistent.
“What I thought,” she said.
“And what was that?” he asked, moving on again.
“The guy was an Elk. My father had the same damn ring.”
“An elk? I don’t understand.”
“It’s a fraternal order. A kind of good-ole-boy ka-tet. But what in the hell would an Elk be doing down here? A Shriner, now, that I could understand.” And she laughed, a trifle wildly.
The hanging bulbs were filled with some brilliant gas that pulsed with a rhythmic but not quite constant beat. Susannah knew there was something there to get, and after a little while she got it. While Roland was hurrying, the pulse of the guide-lights was rapid. When he slowed down (never stopping but conserving his energy, all the same), the pulse in the globes also slowed down. She didn’t think they were responding to his heartbeat, exactly, or hers, but that was part of it. (Had she known the term biorhythm, she would have seized upon it.) Fifty yards or so ahead of their position at any given time, Main Street was dark. Then, one by one, the lights would come on as they approached. It was mesmerizing. She turned to look back—only once, she didn’t want to throw him off his stride—and saw that, yes, the lights were going dark again fifty yards or so behind. These lights were much brighter than the flickering globes at the entrance to Main Street, and she guessed that those ran off some other power-source, one that was (like almost everything else in this world) starting to give out. Then she noticed that one of the globes they were approaching remained dark. As they neared and then passed under it, she saw that it wasn’t completely dead; a dim core of illumination burned feebly deep inside, twitching to the beat of their bodies and brains. It reminded her of how you’d sometimes see a neon sign with one or more letters on the fritz, turning PABST into PA ST or TASTY BRATWURST into TASTY RATWURST. A hundred feet or so further on they came to another burnt-out bulb, then another, then two in a row.
“Chances are good we’re gonna be in the dark before long,” she said glumly.
“I know,” Roland said. He was starting to sound the teensiest bit out of breath.
The air was still dank, and a chill was gradually replacing the heat. There were posters on the walls, most rotted far beyond the point of readability. On a dry stretch of wall she saw one that depicted a man who had just lost an arena battle to a tiger. The big cat was yanking a bloody snarl of intestines from the screaming man’s belly while the crowd went nuts. There was one line of copy in half a dozen different languages. English was second from the top. VISIT CIRCUS MAXIMUS! YOU WILL CHEER! it said.
“Christ, Roland,” Susannah said. “Christ almighty, what were they?”
Roland did not reply, although he knew the answer: they were folken who had run mad.
Ten
At hundred-yard intervals, little flights of stairs—the longest was only ten risers from top to bottom—took them gradually deeper into the bowels of the earth. After they’d gone what Susannah estimated to be a quarter of a mile, they came to a gate that had been torn away, perhaps by some sort of vehicle, and smashed to flinders. Here were more skeletons, so many that Roland had to tread