Gasher looked at him balefully, then slid his hand across his skull, peeling off his sweat-soaked yellow scarf. The skull beneath was bald, except for a few straggling tufts of black hair like porcupine quills, and deeply dented above the left temple. Gasher peered into the scarf and plucked forth a scrap of paper. “Gods bless Hoots,” he muttered. “Hoots takes care of me a right proper, he does.”
He peered at the scrap, turning it this way and that, and then held it out to Jake. He kept his voice pitched low, as if the Tick-Tock Man could hear him even though the TALK button on the intercom wasn’t depressed.
“You’re a proper little gennelman, ain’t you? And the very first thing they teach a gennelman to do after he’s been larned not to eat the paste and piss in the corners is read. So read me the word on this paper, cully, for it’s gone right out of my head—so it has.”
Jake took the paper, looked at it, then looked up at Gasher again. “What if I won’t?” he asked coolly.
Gasher was momentarily taken aback at this response . . . and then he began to grin with dangerous good humor. “Why, I’ll grab yer by the throat and use yer head for a doorknocker,” he said. “I doubt if it’ll conwince old Ticky to let me in—for he’s still nervous of your hardcase friend, so he is—but it’ll do my heart a world of good to see your brains drippin off that wheel.”
Jake considered this, the dark laughter still bubbling away inside him. The Tick-Tock Man was a trig enough cove, all right—he had known that it would be difficult to persuade Gasher, who was dying anyway, to speak the password even if Roland had taken him prisoner. What Tick-Tock hadn’t taken into account was Gasher’s defective memory.
Don’t laugh. If you do, he really will beat your brains out.
In spite of his brave words, Gasher was watching Jake with real anxiety, and Jake realized a potentially powerful fact: Gasher might not be afraid of dying . . . but he was afraid of being humiliated.
“All right, Gasher,” he said calmly. “The word on this piece of paper is bountiful.”
“Gimme that.” Gasher snatched the paper back, returned it to his scarf, and quickly wrapped the yellow cloth around his head again. He thumbed the intercom button. “Tick-Tock? Yer still there?”
“Where else would I be? The West End of the World?” The drawling voice now sounded mildly amused.
Gasher stuck his whitish tongue out at the speaker, but his voice was ingratiating, almost servile. “The password’s bountyful, and a fine word it is, too! Now let me in, gods cuss it!”
“Of course,” the Tick-Tock Man said. A machine started up somewhere nearby, making Jake jump. The valve-wheel in the center of the door spun. When it stopped, Gasher seized it, yanked it outward, grabbed Jake’s arm, and propelled him over the raised lip of the door and into the strangest room he had ever seen in his life.
26
ROLAND DESCENDED INTO DUSKY pink light. Oy’s bright eyes peered out from the open V of his shirt; his neck stretched to the limit of its considerable length as he sniffed at the warm air that blew through the ventilator grilles. Roland had had to depend completely on the bumbler’s nose in the dark passages above, and he had been terribly afraid the animal would lose Jake’s scent in the running water . . . but when he had heard the sound of singing—first Gasher, then Jake—echoing back through the pipes, he had relaxed a little. Oy had not led them wrong.
Oy had heard it, too. Up until then he had been moving slowly and cautiously, even backtracking every now and again to be sure of himself, but when he heard Jake’s voice he began to run, straining the rawhide leash. Roland was afraid he might call after Jake in his harsh voice—Ake! Ake!—but he hadn’t done so. And, just as they reached the shaft which led to the lower levels of this Dycian Maze, Roland had heard the sound of some new machine—a pump of some sort, perhaps—followed by the metallic, echoing crash of a door being slammed shut.
He reached the foot of the square tunnel and glanced briefly at the double line of lighted tubes which led off in either direction. They were lit with swamp-fire, he saw, like the sign outside the place which had belonged to Balazar in