strange latter days; all of Mid-World had become The Drawers; all of Mid-World had become a waste land, haunting and haunted.
He saw Susannah’s lips form the words of the real answer before the voice from the intercom could speak them, and those words were as obvious as the solution to a riddle once the answer is spoken.
“Big Blaine,” the unseen voice whispered. “Big Blaine is the ghost in the machine—the ghost in all the machines.”
Susannah’s hand had gone to her throat and was clutching it, as if she intended to strangle herself. Her eyes were full of terror, but they were not glassy, not stunned; they were sharp with understanding. Perhaps she knew a voice like this one from her own when—the when where the integrated whole that was Susannah had been shunted aside by the warring personalities of Detta and Odetta. The childish voice had surprised her as well as him, but her agonized eyes said she was no stranger to the concept being expressed.
Susannah knew all about the madness of duality.
“Eddie we have to go,” she said. Her terror turned the words into an unpunctuated auditory smear. He could hear air whistling in her windpipe like a cold wind around a chimney. “Eddie we have to get away Eddie we have to get away Eddie—”
“Too late,” the tiny, mourning voice said. “He’s awake. Big Blaine is awake. He knows you are here. And he’s coming.”
Suddenly lights—bright orange arc-sodiums—began to flash on in pairs above them, bathing the pillared vastness of the Cradle in a harsh glare that banished all shadows. Hundreds of pigeons darted and swooped in frightened, aimless flight, startled from their complex of interlocked nests high above.
“Wait!” Eddie shouted. “Please, wait!”
In his agitation he forgot to push the button, but it made no difference; Little Blaine responded anyway. “No! I can’t let him catch me! I can’t let him kill me, too!”
The light on the intercom box went dark again, but only for a moment. This time both COMMAND and ENTER lit up, and their color was not pink but the lurid dark red of a blacksmith’s forge.
“WHO ARE YOU?” a voice roared, and it came not just from the box but from every speaker in the city which still operated. The rotting bodies hanging from the poles shivered with the vibrations of that mighty voice; it seemed that even the dead would run from Blaine, if they could.
Susannah shrank back in her chair, the heels of her hands pressed to her ears, her face long with dismay, her mouth distorted in a silent scream. Eddie felt himself shrinking toward all the fantastic, hallucinatory terrors of eleven. Had it been this voice he had feared when he and Henry stood outside The Mansion? That he had perhaps even anticipated? He didn’t know . . . but he did know how Jack in that old story must have felt when he realized that he had tried the beanstalk once too often, and awakened the giant.
“HOW DARE YOU DISTURB MY SLEEP? TELL ME NOW, OR DIE WHERE YOU STAND.”
He might have frozen right there, leaving Blaine—Big Blaine—to do to them whatever it was he had done to Ardis (or something even worse); perhaps should have frozen, locked in that down-the-rabbit-hole, fairy-tale terror. It was the memory of the small voice which had spoken first that enabled him to move. It had been the voice of a terrified child, but it had tried to help them, terrified or not.
So now you have to help yourself, he thought. You woke it up; deal with it, for Christ’s sake!
Eddie reached out and pushed the button again. “My name is Eddie Dean. The woman with me is my wife, Susannah. We’re . . .”
He looked at Susannah, who nodded and made frantic motions for him to go on.
“We’re on a quest. We seek the Dark Tower which lies in the Path of the Beam. We’re in the company of two others, Roland of Gilead and . . . and Jake of New York. We’re from New York too. If you’re—” He paused for a moment, biting back the words Big Blaine. If he used them, he might make the intelligence behind the voice aware that they had heard another voice; a ghost inside the ghost, so to speak.
Susannah gestured again for him to go on, using both hands.
“If you’re Blaine the Mono . . . well . . . we want you to take us.”