Jake didn’t reply. He was looking at a panel of the ventilator grille which circled the chamber.
The Tick-Tock Man grabbed his nose between two of his fingers and squeezed it viciously. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes!” Jake cried. His eyes, now watering with pain as well as terror, returned to Tick-Tock’s face. He wanted to look back at the ventilator grille, wanted desperately to verify that what he had seen there was not simply a trick of his frightened, overloaded mind, but he didn’t dare. He was afraid someone else—Tick-Tock himself, most likely—would follow his gaze and see what he had seen.
“Good.” Tick-Tock pulled Jake back over to the chair by his nose, sat down, and cocked his leg over the arm again. “Let’s have a nice little chin, then. We’ll begin with your name, shall we? Just what might that be, cully?”
“Jake Chambers.” With his nose pinched shut, his voice sounded nasal and foggy.
“And are you a Not-See, Jake Chambers?”
For a moment Jake wondered if this was a peculiar way of asking him if he was blind . . . but of course they could all see he wasn’t. “I don’t understand what—”
Tick-Tock shook him back and forth by the nose. “Not-See! Not-See! You just want to stop playing with me, boy!”
“I don’t understand—” Jake began, and then he looked at the old machine-gun hanging from the chair and thought once more of the crashed Focke-Wulf. The pieces fell together in his mind. “No—I’m not a Nazi. I’m an American. All that ended long before I was born!”
The Tick-Tock Man released his hold on Jake’s nose, which immediately began to gush blood. “You could have told me that in the first place and saved yourself all sorts of pain, Jake Chambers . . . but at least now you understand how we do things around here, don’t you?”
Jake nodded.
“Ay. Well enough! We’ll start with the simple questions.”
Jake’s eyes drifted back to the ventilator grille. What he had seen before was still there; it hadn’t been just his imagination. Two gold-ringed eyes floated in the dark behind the chrome louvers.
Oy.
Tick-Tock slapped his face, knocking him back into Gasher, who immediately pushed him forward again. “It’s school-time, dear heart,” Gasher whispered. “Mind yer lessons, now! Mind em wery sharp!”
“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” Tick-Tock said. “I’ll have some respect, Jake Chambers, or I’ll have your balls.”
“All right.”
Tick-Tock’s green eyes gleamed dangerously. “All right what?”
Jake groped for the right answer, pushing away the tangle of questions and the sudden hope which had dawned in his mind. And what came was what would have served at his own Cradle of the Pubes . . . otherwise known as The Piper School. “All right, sir?”
Tick-Tock smiled. “That’s a start, boy,” he said, and leaned forward, forearms on his thighs. “Now . . . what’s an American?”
Jake began to talk, trying with all his might not to look toward the ventilator grille as he did so.
29
ROLAND HOLSTERED HIS GUN, laid both hands on the valve-wheel, and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t budge. That didn’t much surprise him, but it presented serious problems.
Oy stood by his left boot, looking up anxiously, waiting for Roland to open the door so they could continue the journey to Jake. The gunslinger only wished it was that easy. It wouldn’t do to simply stand out here and wait for someone to leave; it might be hours or even days before one of the Grays decided to use this particular exit again. Gasher and his friends might take it into their heads to flay Jake alive while the gunslinger was waiting for it to happen.
He leaned his head against the steel but heard nothing. That didn’t surprise him, either. He had seen doors like this a long time ago—you couldn’t shoot out the locks, and you certainly couldn’t hear through them. There might be one; there might be two, facing each other, with some dead airspace in between. Somewhere, though, there would be a button which would spin the wheel in the middle of the door and release the locks. If Jake could reach that button, all might still be well.
Roland understood that he was not a full member of this ka-tet; he guessed that even Oy was more fully aware than he of the secret life which existed at its heart (he very much doubted that the bumbler had tracked Jake with his nose alone through those tunnels where water ran in polluted streamlets). Nevertheless,