The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (7 page)

“Oy!” the billy-bumbler responded, his voice muffled by the book. Still smiling, Jake took it and sat down next to Roland, who put an arm around him.

“SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK?”

She shook her head, not looking up. She had turned Roland’s hand over in her own, and was gently tracing the healed stumps where his first two fingers had been.

“ROLAND SON OF STEVEN? HAVE YOU REMEMBERED ANY OTHERS FROM THE FAIR-DAY RIDDLINGS OF GILEAD?”

Roland also shook his head . . . and then Jake saw that Eddie Dean was raising his. There was a peculiar smile on Eddie’s face, a peculiar shine in Eddie’s eyes, and Jake found
that hope hadn’t deserted him, after all. It suddenly flowered anew in his mind, red and hot and vivid. Like . . . well, like a rose. A rose in the full fever of its summer.

“Blaine?” Eddie asked in a low tone. To Jake his voice sounded queerly choked.

“YES, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.” Unmistakable disdain.

“
I
have a couple of riddles,” Eddie said. “Just to pass the time between here and Topeka, you understand.” No, Jake realized, Eddie didn’t sound as if he were choking; he sounded as if he were trying to hold back laughter.

“SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.”

Sitting and listening to Jake run through the last of his riddles, Eddie had mused on Roland’s tale of the Fair-Day goose. From there his mind had returned to Henry, travelling from Point A to Point B through the magic of associative thinking. Or, if you wanted to get Zen about it, via Trans-Bird Airlines: goose to turkey. He and Henry had once had a discussion about getting off heroin. Henry had claimed that going cold turkey wasn’t the only way; there was also, he said, such a thing as going
cool
turkey. Eddie asked Henry what you called a hype who had just administered a hot shot to himself, and, without missing a beat, Henry had said,
You call that
baked
turkey.
How they had laughed . . . but now, all this long, strange time later, it looked very much as if the joke was going to be on the younger Dean brother, not to mention the younger Dean brother’s new friends. Looked like they were all going to be baked turkey before much longer.

Unless you can yank it out of the zone.

Yes.

Then do it, Eddie.
It was Henry’s voice again, that old resident of his head, but now Henry sounded sober and clear-minded. Henry sounded like his friend instead of his enemy, as if all the old conflicts were finally settled, all the old hatchets buried.
Do it—make the devil set himself on fire. It’ll hurt a little, maybe, but you’ve hurt worse. Hell, I hurt you worse myself, and you survived. Survived just fine. And you know where to look.

Of course. In their palaver around the campfire Jake had finally managed to light. Roland had asked the kid a riddle
to loosen him up, Jake had struck a spark into the kindling, and then they had all sat around the fire, talking. Talking and riddling.

Eddie knew something else, too. Blaine had answered hundreds of riddles as they ran southeast along the Path of the Beam, and the others believed that he had answered every single one of them without hesitation. Eddie had thought much the same . . . but now, as he cast his mind back over the contest, he realized an interesting thing: Blaine
had
hesitated.

Once.

He was pissed, too. Like Roland was.

The gunslinger, although often exasperated by Eddie, had shown real anger toward him just a single time after the business of carving the key, when Eddie had almost choked. Roland had tried to cover the depth of that anger—make it seem like nothing but more exasperation—but Eddie had sensed what was underneath. He had lived with Henry Dean for a long time, and was still exquisitely attuned to all the negative emotions. It had hurt him, too—not Roland’s anger itself, exactly, but the contempt with which it had been laced. Contempt had always been one of Henry’s favorite weapons.

Why did the dead baby cross the road?
Eddie had asked.
Because it was stapled to the chicken, nyuck-nyuck-nyuck!

Later, when Eddie had tried to defend his riddle, arguing that it was tasteless but not pointless, Roland’s response had been strangely like Blaine’s:
I don’t care about taste
.
It’s senseless and unsolvable, and that’s what makes it silly. A good riddle is neither.

But as Jake finished riddling Blaine, Eddie realized a wonderful, liberating thing: that word
good
was up for grabs. Always had been, always would be. Even if the man using it was maybe a thousand years old and could shoot like Buffalo Bill, that word was still up for grabs. Roland himself had admitted he had never been very good at the riddling game. His tutor claimed that Roland thought too deeply; his father thought it was lack of imagination. Whatever the reason, Roland of Gilead had never won a Fair-Day riddling. He had survived all his contemporaries, and that was certainly a prize of sorts, but he had never carried home a prize goose.
I could always haul a gun faster than any of my mates, but I’ve never been much good at thinking around corners.

Eddie remembered trying to tell Roland that jokes were
riddles designed to help you build up that often overlooked talent, but Roland had ignored him. The way, Eddie supposed, a color-blind person would ignore someone’s description of a rainbow.

Eddie thought Blaine also might have trouble thinking around corners.

He realized he could hear Blaine asking the others if they had any more riddles—even asking Oy. He could hear the mockery in Blaine’s voice, could hear it very well. Sure he could. Because he was coming back. Back from that fabled zone. Back to see if he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire. No gun would help this time, but maybe that was all right. Maybe that was all right because—

Because I shoot with my mind. My mind. God help me to shoot this overblown calculator with my mind. Help me shoot it from around the corner.

“Blaine?” he said, and then, when the computer had acknowledged him: “
I
have a couple of riddles.” As he spoke, he discovered a wonderful thing: he was struggling to hold back laughter.

“SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.”

No time to tell the others to be on their guard, that anything might happen, and from the look of them, no need, either. Eddie forgot about them and turned his full attention to Blaine.

“What has four wheels and flies?”

“THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID.” Disapproval—and dislike? Yeah, probably—all but oozing out of that voice. “ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME.”

Yes,
Eddie thought.
And what we all missed—because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland’s past or Jake’s book—is that the contest almost ended right there.

“You didn’t like that one, did you, Blaine?”

“I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID,” Blaine agreed. “PERHAPS THAT’S WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO?”

A smile lit Eddie’s face; he shook his finger at the
route-map. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, ‘You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I’ll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.’ ”

“Hurry up!” Jake whispered at him. “If you can do something,
do
it!”

“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 corner 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?” Blaine’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.