He let go of the button and waited, stiff with tension. Susannah’s hand crept into his, cold and small. There was still no answer, and Eddie—now more reluctant than ever—pushed the button again.
“Blaine?”
He let go of the button. Waited. And when there was still no answer, a dangerous giddiness overcame him, as it often did in moments of stress and fear. When that giddiness took him, counting the cost no longer seemed to matter. Nothing mattered. It had been like that when he had outfaced Balazar’s sallow-faced contact man in Nassau, and it was like that now. And if Roland had seen him in the moment this lunatic impatience overtook him, he would have seen more than just a resemblance between Eddie and Cuthbert; he would have sworn Eddie was Cuthbert.
He jammed the button in with his thumb and began to bellow into the speaker, adopting a plummy (and completely bogus) British accent. “Hullo, Blaine! Cheerio, old fellow! This is Robin Leach, host of Lifestyles of the Rich and Brainless, here to tell you that you have won six billion dollars and a new Ford Escort in the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes!”
Pigeons took flight above them in soft, startled explosions of wings. Susannah gasped. Her face wore the dismayed expression of a devout woman who has just heard her husband blaspheme in a cathedral. “Eddie, stop it! Stop it!”
Eddie couldn’t stop it. His mouth was smiling, but his eyes glittered with a mixture of fear, hysteria, and frustrated anger. “You and your monorail girlfriend, Patricia, will spend a lux-yoo-rious month in scenic Jimtown, where you’ll drink only the finest wine and eat only the finest virgins! You—”
“. . . shhhh . . .”
Eddie broke off, looking at Susannah. He was at once sure that it had been she who had shushed him—not only because she had already tried but because she was the only other person here—and yet at the same time he knew it hadn’t been Susannah. That had been another voice: the voice of a very young and very frightened child.
“Suze? Did you—”
Susannah was shaking her head and raising her hand at the same time. She pointed at the intercom box, and Eddie saw the button marked COMMAND was glowing a very faint shell-pink. It was the same color as the mono sleeping in its berth on the other side of the barrier.
“Shhh . . . don’t wake him up,” the child’s voice mourned. It drifted from the speaker, soft as an evening breeze.
“What . . .” Eddie began. Then he shook his head, reached toward the TALK/LISTEN switch and pressed it gently. When he spoke again, it was not in the blaring Robin Leach bellow but in the almost-whisper of a conspirator. “What are you? Who are you?”
He released the button. He and Susannah regarded each other with the big eyes of children who now know they are sharing the house with a dangerous—perhaps psychotic—adult. How have they come by the knowledge? Why, because another child has told them, a child who has lived with the psychotic adult for a long time, hiding in corners and stealing out only when it knows the adult is asleep; a frightened child who happens to be almost invisible.
There was no answer. Eddie let the seconds spin out. Each one seemed long enough to read a whole novel in. He was reaching for the button again when the faint pink glow reappeared.
“I’m Little Blaine,” the child’s voice whispered. “The one he doesn’t see. The one he forgot. The one he thinks he left behind in the rooms of ruin and the halls of the dead.”
Eddie pushed the button again with a hand that had picked up an uncontrollable shake. He could hear that shake in his voice, as well. “Who? Who is the one who doesn’t see? Is it the Bear?”
No—not the bear; not he. Shardik lay dead in the forest, many miles behind them; the world had moved on even since then. Eddie suddenly remembered what it had been like to lay his ear against that strange unfound door in the clearing where the bear had lived its violent halflife, that door with its somehow terrible stripes of yellow and black. It was all of a piece, he realized now; all part of some awful, decaying whole, a tattered web with the Dark Tower at its center like an incomprehensible stone spider. All of Mid-World had become one vast haunted mansion in these