Jake. Then he made the automatic safe again, returned it to the waistband of his pants, and went back to Susannah. He turned her chair away from the steps and rolled her along an aisle of columns which led deeper into the building. She popped the cylinder of Roland’s gun and reloaded it as they went.
Under the roof the rain had a secret, ghostly sound and even the harsh thundercracks were muted. The columns which supported the structure were at least ten feet in diameter, and their tops were lost in the gloom. From up there in the shadows, Eddie heard the cooing conversation of pigeons.
Now a sign hanging on thick chrome-silver chains swam out of the shadows:
“Now we know the name of the one that fell in the river,” Eddie said. “Patricia. They got their colors wrong, though. It’s supposed to be pink for girls and blue for boys, not the other way around.”
“Maybe they’re both blue.”
“They’re not. Blaine’s pink.”
“How would you know that?”
Eddie looked confused. “I don’t know how . . . but I do.”
They followed the arrow pointing toward Blaine’s berth, entering what had to be a grand concourse. Eddie didn’t have Susannah’s ability to see the past in clear, visionary flashes, but his imagination nonetheless filled this vast, pillared space with a thousand hurrying people; he heard clicking heels and murmuring voices, saw embraces of homecoming and farewell. And over everything, the speakers chanting news of a dozen different destinations.
Patricia is now boarding for Northwest Baronies . . .
Will Passenger Killington, passenger Killington, please report to the information booth on the lower level?
Blaine is now arriving at Berth #2, and will be debarking shortly . . .
Now there was only the pigeons.
Eddie shivered.
“Look at the faces,” Susannah murmured. “I don’t know if they give you the willies, but they sure do me.” She was pointing to the right. High up on the wall, a series of sculpted heads seemed to push out of the marble, peering down at them from the shadows—stern men with the harsh faces of executioners who are happy in their work. Some of the faces had fallen from their places and lay in granite shards and splinters seventy or eighty feet below their peers. Those remaining were spiderwebbed with cracks and splattered with pigeon dung.
“They must have been the Supreme Court, or something,” Eddie said, uneasily scanning all those thin lips and cracked, empty eyes. “Only judges can look so smart and so completely pissed off at the same time— you’re talking to a guy who knows. There isn’t one of them who looks like he’d give a crippled crab a crutch.”
“ ‘A heap of broken images, where the sun beats and the dead tree gives no shelter,’ ” Susannah murmured, and at these words Eddie felt gooseflesh waltz across the skin of his arms and chest and legs.
“What’s that, Suze?”
“A poem by a man who must have seen Lud in his dreams,” she said. “Come on, Eddie. Forget them.”
“Easier said than done.” But he began to push her again.
Ahead, a vast grilled barrier like a castle barbican swam out of the gloom . . . and beyond it, they caught their first glimpse of Blaine the Mono. It was pink, just as Eddie had said it would be, a delicate shade which matched the veins running through the marble pillars. Blaine flowed above the wide loading platform in a smooth, streamlined bullet shape which looked more like flesh than metal. Its surface was broken only once—by a triangular window equipped with a huge wiper. Eddie knew there would be another triangular window with another big wiper on the other side of the mono’s nose, so that if you looked at Blaine head-on, it would seem to have a face, just like Charlie the Choo-Choo. The wipers would look like slyly drooping eyelids.
White light from the southeastern slot in the Cradle fell across Blaine in a long, distorted rectangle. To Eddie, the body of the train looked like the breaching back of some fabulous pink whale—one that was utterly silent.
“Wow.” His voice had fallen to a whisper. “We found it.”
“Yes. Blaine the Mono.”
“Is it dead, do you think? It looks dead.”
“It’s not. Sleeping, maybe, but a long way from dead.”
“You sure?”
“Were you sure it would be pink?” It wasn’t a question he had to answer, and he didn’t. The face she turned up to him was strained and badly frightened. “It’s sleeping, and you know what? I’m scared to wake it up.”