of density, it was hard to tell if this meant No guns in the kitchen or / don't ken you.
"All right, I'm going," he said. "And if you don't go yourself while you've got a chance, Jochabim, you're an even bigger fool than you look. Which would be saying a lot. There are video games out there, kid-think about it."
Jochabim continued giving Jake the dnh look, however, and Jake gave up. He was about to speak to Oy when someone spoke to him through the door.
"Hey, kid." Rough. Confidential. Knowing. The voice of a man who could hit you for five or sleep with your girlfriend any time he liked, Jake thought. 'Your friend the faddah's dead. In fact, the faddah's dinnah. You come out now, with no more nonsense, maybe you can avoid being dessert."
"Turn it sideways and stick it up your ass," Jake called. This got through even Jochabim's wall of stupidity; he looked shocked.
"Last chance," said the rough and knowing voice. "Come on out."
"Come on in!" Jake countered. "I've got plenty of plates!"
Indeed, he felt a lunatic urge to rush forward, bang through the door, and take the battle to the low men and women in the restaurant dining room on the other side. Nor was the idea all that crazy, as Roland himself would have known; it was the last thing they'd expect, and there was at least an even chance he could panic them with half a dozen quickly thrown plates and start a rout.
The problem was the monsters that had been feeding behind the tapestry. The vampires. They'd not panic, and Jake knew it. He had an idea that if the Grandfathers had been able to come into the kitchen (or perhaps it was just lack of interest that kept them in the dining room-that and the last scraps of the Pere's corpse), he would be dead already. Jochabim as well, quite likely.
He dropped to one knee, murmured "Oy, find Susannah!" and reinforced the command with a quick mental picture.
The bumbler gave Jochabim a final distrustful look, then began to nose about on the floor. The tiles were damp from a recent mopping, and Jake was afraid the bumbler wouldn't be able to find the scent. Then Oy gave a single sharp cry-more dog's bark than human's word-and began to hurry down the center of the kitchen between the stoves and the steam tables, nose low to the ground, only going out of his way long enough to skirt Chef Warthog's smoldering body.
"Listen, to me, you little bastard!" cried the low man outside the door. "I'm losing patience with you!"
"Good!" Jake cried. "Come on in! Let's see if you go back out again!"
He put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture while looking at Jochabim. He was about to turn and run-he had no idea how long it would be before the washerboy yelled through the door that the kid and his billy-bumbler were no longer holding Thermopylae Pass-when Jochabim spoke to him in a low voice that was little more than a whisper.
"What?" Jake asked, looking at him uncertainly. It sounded as if the kid had said mind the mind-trap, but that made no sense. Did it?
"Mind the mind-trap," Jochabim said, this time much more clearly, and turned away to his pots and sudsy water.
"What mind-trap?" Jake asked, but Jochabim affected not to hear and Jake couldn't stay long enough to cross-examine him.
He ran to catch up with Oy, throwing glances back over his shoulder. If a couple more of the low men burst into the kitchen, Jake wanted to be the first to know.
But none did, at least not before he had followed Oy through another door and into the restaurant's pantry, a dim room stacked high with boxes and smelling of coffee and spices. It was like the storeroom behind the East Stoneham General Store, only cleaner.
TWO
There was a closed door in the corner of the Dixie Pig's pantry.
Beyond it was a tiled stairway leading down God only knew how far. It was lit by low-wattage bulbs behind bleary, fly-spotted glass shades. Oy started down without hesitation, descending with a kind of bobbing, front-end/back-end regularity that was pretty comical. He kept his nose pressed to the stairs, and Jake knew he was onto Susannah; he could pick it up from his litde friend's mind.
Jake tried counting the stairs, made it as far as a hundred and twenty, then lost his grip on the numbers. He wondered if they were