Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,28

fabled zone. Back to see if he could talk the devil into setting himself on fire. No gun would help this time, but maybe that was all right. Maybe that was all right because—

Because I shoot with my mind. My mind. God help me to shoot this overblown calculator with my mind. Help me shoot it from around the corner.

“Blaine?” he said, and then, when the computer had acknowledged him: “I have a couple of riddles.” As he spoke, he discovered a wonderful thing: he was struggling to hold back laughter.

4

“SPEAK, EDDIE OF NEW YORK.”

No time to tell the others to be on their guard, that anything might happen, and from the look of them, no need, either. Eddie forgot about them and turned his full attention to Blaine.

“What has four wheels and flies?”

“THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID.” Disapproval—and dislike? Yeah, probably—all but oozing out of that voice. “ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME.”

Yes, Eddie thought. And what we all missed—because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland’s past or Jake’s book—is that the contest almost ended right there.

“You didn’t like that one, did you, Blaine?”

“I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID,” Blaine agreed. “PERHAPS THAT’S WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO?”

A smile lit Eddie’s face; he shook his finger at the route-map. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, ‘You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I’ll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.’ ”

“Hurry up!” Jake whispered at him. “If you can do something, do it!”

“It doesn’t like silly questions,” Eddie said. “It doesn’t like silly games. And we knew that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, that was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it.”

Eddie searched for the other riddle that had been in Jake’s Final Essay, found it, posed it.

“Blaine: when is a door not a door?”

Once again, for the first time since Susannah had asked Blaine what had four legs and flies, there came a peculiar clicking sound, like a man popping his tongue on the roof of his mouth. The pause was briefer than the one which had followed Susannah’s opening riddle, but it was still there—Eddie heard it. “WHEN IT’S A JAR, OF COURSE,” Blaine said. He sounded dour, unhappy. “THIRTEEN MINUTES AND FIVE SECONDS REMAIN BEFORE TERMINATION, EDDIE OF NEW YORK—WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?”

Eddie sat bolt upright, staring at the route-map, and although he could feel warm trickles of sweat running down his back, that smile on his face widened.

“Quit your whining, pal. If you want the privilege of smearing us all over the landscape, you’ll just have to put up with a few riddles that aren’t quite up to your standards of logic.”

“YOU MUST NOT SPEAK TO ME IN SUCH A MANNER.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me? Don’t make me laugh. Just play. You agreed to the game; now play it.”

Thin pink light flashed briefly out of the route-map. “You’re making him angry,” Little Blaine mourned. “Oh, you’re making him so angry.”

“Get lost, squirt,” Eddie said, not unkindly, and when the pink glow receded, once again revealing a flashing green dot that was almost on top of Topeka, Eddie said: “Answer this one, Blaine: the big moron and the little moron were standing on the bridge over the River Send. The big moron fell off. How come the little moron didn’t fall off, too?”

“THAT IS UNWORTHY OF OUR CONTEST. I WILL NOT ANSWER.” On the last word Blaine’s voice actually dropped into a lower register, making him sound like a fourteen-year-old coping with a change of voice.

Roland’s eyes were not just gleaming now but blazing. “What do you say, Blaine? I would understand you well. Are you saying that you cry off?”

“NO! OF COURSE NOT! BUT—”

“Then answer, if you can. Answer the riddle.”

“IT’S NOT A RIDDLE!” Blaine almost bleated. “IT’S A JOKE, SOMETHING FOR STUPID CHILDREN TO CACKLE OVER IN THE PLAY YARD!”

“Answer now or I declare the contest over and our ka-tet the winner,” Roland said. He spoke in the dryly confident tone of authority Eddie had first heard in the town of River Crossing. “You must answer, for it