“THE BEAM, OF COURSE,” Blaine replied. “ALL THINGS SERVE IT, YOU KNOW. LOOK DOWN—I WILL APPLY 4X MAGNIFICATION TO THE LOWER QUADRANT SCREENS.”
Even Roland felt vertigo twist his gut as the land beneath them seemed to swell upward toward the place where they were floating. The picture which appeared was ugly beyond his past knowledge of ugliness . . . and that knowledge, sadly, was wide indeed. The lands below had been fused and blasted by some terrible event—the disastrous cataclysm which had driven this part of the world deep into itself in the first place, no doubt. The surface of the earth had become distorted black glass, humped upward into spalls and twists which could not properly be called hills and twisted downward into deep cracks and folds which could not properly be called valleys. A few stunted nightmare trees flailed twisted branches at the sky; under magnification, they seemed to clutch at the travellers like the arms of lunatics. Here and there clusters of thick ceramic pipes jutted through the glassy surface of the ground. Some seemed dead or dormant, but within others they could see gleams of eldritch blue-green light, as if titanic forges and furnaces ran on and on in the bowels of the earth. Misshapen flying things which looked like pterodactyls cruised between these pipes on leathery wings, occasionally snapping at each other with their hooked beaks. Whole flocks of these gruesome aviators roosted on the circular tops of other stacks, apparently warming themselves in the updrafts of the eternal fires beneath.
They passed above a fissure zig-zagging along a north-south course like a dead river bed . . . except it wasn’t dead. Deep inside lay a thin thread of deepest scarlet, pulsing like a heartbeat. Other, smaller fissures branched out from this, and Susannah, who had read her Tolkien, thought: This is what Frodo and Sam saw when they reached the heart of Mordor. These are the Cracks of Doom.
A fiery fountain erupted directly below them, spewing flaming rocks and stringy clots of lava upward. For a moment it seemed they would be engulfed in flames. Jake shrieked and pulled his feet up on his chair, clutching Oy to his chest.
“DON’T WORRY, LITTLE TRAILHAND,” John Wayne drawled. “REMEMBER THAT YOU’RE SEEING IT UNDER MAGNIFICATION.”
The flare died. The rocks, many as big as factories, fell back in a soundless storm.
Susannah found herself entranced by the bleak horrors unrolling below them, caught in a deadly fascination she could not break . . . and she felt the dark part of her personality, that side of her khef which was Detta Walker, doing more than just watching; that part of her was drinking in this view, understanding it, recognizing it. In a way, it was the place Detta had always sought, the physical counterpart of her mad mind and laughing, desolate heart. The empty hills north and east of the Western Sea; the shattered woods around the Portal of the Bear; the empty plains northwest of the Send; all these paled in comparison to this fantastic, endless vista of desolation. They had come to The Drawers and entered the waste lands; the poisoned darkness of that shunned place now lay all around them.
8
BUT THESE LANDS, THOUGH poisoned, were not entirely dead. From time to time the travellers caught sight of figures below them—misshapen things which bore no resemblance to either men or animals—prancing and cavorting in the smouldering wilderness. Most seemed to congregate either around the clusters of cyclopean chimneys thrusting out of the fused earth or at the lips of the fiery crevasses which cut through the landscape. It was impossible to see these whitish, leaping things clearly, and for this they were all grateful.
Among the smaller creatures stalked larger ones—pinkish things that looked a little like storks and a little like living camera tripods. They moved slowly, almost thoughtfully, like preachers meditating on the inevitability of damnation, pausing every now and then to bend sharply forward and apparently pluck something from the ground, as herons bend to seize passing fish. There was something unutterably repulsive about these creatures—Roland felt that as keenly as the others—but it was impossible to say what, exactly, caused that feeling. There was no denying its reality, however; the stork-things were, in their exquisite hatefulness, almost impossible to look at.
“This was no nuclear war,” Eddie said. “This . . . this . . .” His thin, horrified voice sounded like that of a child.