Stephen King - The Dark Tower 4 - Wizard and Glass

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ТЕМНАЯ БАШНЯ IV: КОЛДУН И КРИСТАЛ

THE DARK TOWER IV: WIZARD & GLASS

1997

Стивен КИНГ

ОТРЫВОК ИЗ КНИГИ. 1 И 2 ГЛАВЫ.

Chapter 1

BENEATH THE DEMON MOON

The town of Candleton was a poisoned and irradiated ruin, but not dead; after all the decades and

centuries, it still twitched, still pulsed with its own tenebrous life--trundling beetles the size of

turtles, birds that looked like small, misshapen dragonlets, a few stumbling robots that passed in

and out of the rotten buildings like stainless-steel zombies, their joints squalling, their nuclear eyes

flickering.

"Show your pass, pard!" cried the one that had been stuck in a corner of the lobby of the

Candleton Travellers' Hotel for the last two hundred and thirty-four years. Embossed on the rusty

lozenge of its head was a six-pointed star. It had over the years managed to dig a shallow concavity

in the steel-sheathed wall blocking its way, but that was all.

"Show your pass, pard! Elevated radiation levels possible south and east of town! Show your

pass, pard! Elevated radiation levels possible south and east of town!"

A bloated rat-thing, blind and dragging most of its guts behind it in a sac like a rotten placenta,

struggled over the posse robot's feet. The posse robot took no notice, just went on butting its steel

head into the steel wall. "Show your pass, pard! Elevated radiation levels possible, dad rattit and

gods cuss it! Caution advised!" Behind it, in the hotel bar, the skulls of men and women who had

come in here for one last drink before the cataclysm caught up with them grinned as if they had

died laughing. Perhaps some of them had.

When Blaine the Mono blammed overhead, running up the night like a bullet running up the

barrel of a gun, windows broke, dust sifted down, and several of the skulls disintegrated like ancient

pottery vases. Outside, a brief hurricane of radioactive dust blew up the street, and the hitching-

post in front of the Elegant Beef and Pork Restaurant was sucked into the squally updraft like

smoke. In the town square, the Candleton Fountain split in two, spilling out not water but only dust,

snakes, mutie scorpions, and a few of the blindly trundling turtle-beetles.

Then the shape which had hurtled above the town was gone as if it had never been, Candleton

reverted to the mouldering activity which had been its substitute for life over the last two and a half

centuries . . . and then the trailing sonic boom caught up, slamming its thunderclap above the town

for the first time in seven years, causing enough vibration to tumble the mercantile store on the far

side of the fountain . . . and to at long last kill the posse robot. It tried to voice one final warning:

"Elevated rad--" and then quit for good, facing into its corner like a child that has been bad.

Two or three hundred wheels outside of Candleton, as one travelled along the path of the beam,

the radiation levels and concentrations of DEP3 in the soil began to fall off rapidly. Here the mono's

track swooped back down until it was less than ten feet off the ground, and here a doe that looked

almost normal walked prettily from piney woods to drink from a stream in which the water had

three-quarters cleansed itself.

The doe was not normal--a stumpish fifth leg dangled down from the center of her lower belly like

a teat, waggling bonelessly to and fro when she walked, and a third eye--not just blind but vestigial-

-peered milkily from the left side of her muzzle. Yet she was fertile, and her DNA was in reasonably

good order for a twelfth- generation mutie. In her six years of life, she had given birth to three live

young. Two of these fawns had been not just viable but normal--threaded stock, Aunt Talitha of

River Crossing would have called them. The third, a skinless, bawling horror, had been killed quickly

by its sire.

The world--this part of it, at any rate--had begun to heal itself.

The deer slipped her mouth into the water, began to drink . . . and then looked up, eyes wide,

muzzle dripping. Off in the distance she could hear a low humming sound. A moment later this was

joined by an eyelash of light. Alarm flared in the doe's nerves, but although her reflexes were fast

and the light when first glimpsed was still many wheels away across the desolate countryside, there

was never a chance for her to escape what was coming. Before she could even begin to fire her

muscles, the distant spark had swelled to a searing dragon's eye of light that flooded the stream and

the clearing with its glare. With the light came the maddening hum of Blaine's slo-trans engines,

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running at full capacity. There was a blur of pink above the concrete ridge which bore the rail; a

rooster-tail of dust, stones, small dismembered animals, and whirling foliage followed along after.

The doe was killed instantly by the concussion of Blaine's passage. Too large to be sucked along in

the mono's wake, she was still yanked forward almost seventy yards, with water dripping from her

muzzle and hoofs. Much of her hide (and the vestigial fifth leg) was torn from her body and pulled

after Blaine like a discarded garment.

There was a brief silence, thin as new skin or early ice on a Year's End pond, and then the trailing

sonic boom came rushing after like some noisy creature late for a wedding-feast, tearing the silence

apart, knocking a single mutated bird--it might have been a raven-- dead out of the air. The bird fell

like a stone and splashed into the stream.

In the distance, a dwindling red eye: Blaine's taillight.

Overhead, a full moon came out from behind a scrim of cloud, painting the clearing and the

stream in the tawdry hues of the jewelry one sees in pawnshop windows. It pooled in the three eyes

of the dead doe. There was a face in the moon, but not one upon which lovers would wish to look. It

seemed the scant face of a skull, like those in the Candleton Travellers' Hotel; a face which looked

upon those few things still alive and struggling below with the amusement of a lunatic. In Gilead,

before the world had moved on, the full moon of Year's End had been called the Demon Moon, and it

was considered extremely ill luck to look directly at it.

Now, however, it was hard not to look. Now there were demons everywhere.

Susannah looked at the route-map and saw that the green dot marking their present position was

now almost halfway between Candleton and Rilea, Blaine's next stop. Except who's stopping? she

thought.

From the route-map she turned to Eddie. His gaze was still directed up at the ceiling of the

Barony Coach. She followed it and saw a square which could only be a trapdoor (except when you

were dealing with futuristic shit like a talking train, she supposed, you called it a hatch, or a pod, or

something even cooler). Stencilled on it was a simple red drawing which showed a man stepping

through the square opening. Susannah tried to imagine following the implied instruction and popping

up through that hatch at over eight hundred miles an hour. She got a quick but clear image of a

woman's head being ripped from her neck like a flower from its stalk; she saw the head flying

backward along the length of the Barony Coach, perhaps bouncing once, and then disappearing into

the dark, eyes staring and hair rippling.

She pushed the picture away as fast as she could. The hatch up there was almost certainly locked

shut, anyway. Blaine the Mono had no intention of letting them go. They might win their way out,

but Susannah didn't think that was a sure thing even if they managed to stump Blaine with a riddle.

Sorry to say this, but you sound like just one more honky motherfucker to me, honey, she

thought in a mental voice that was not quite Detta Walker's. I don't trust your mechanical ass any

further than I could toss a basket of apples. You apt to be more dangerous beaten than with the

blue ribbon pinned to your memory banks.

Jake was holding his tattered book of riddles out to the gunslinger as if he no longer wanted the

responsibility of carrying it. Susannah knew how the kid must feel; their lives might very well be in

those grimy, well-thumbed pages. She wasn't sure she would want the responsibility of holding onto

it, either.

"Roland!" Jake whispered. "Do you want this?"

"Ont!" Oy said, giving the gunslinger a forbidding glance. "Olan-ont-iss!" The bumbler fixed his

teeth on the book, took it from Jake's hand, and stretched his disproportionately long neck toward

Roland, offering him Riddle-De-Dum! Brain-Twisters and Puzzles for Everyone!

Roland glanced at it for a moment, his expression distant and preoccupied, then shook his head.

"Not yet." He looked forward at the route-map. Blaine had no face, so the map had to serve them as

a fixing-point. The flashing green dot was closer to Rilea now. Susannah wondered briefly what the

countryside through which they were passing looked like, and decided she didn't really want to

know. Not after what they'd seen as they left the city of Lud.

"Blaine!" Roland called.

"YES."

"Can you leave the room? We need to confer."

You crazy if you think he's gonna do that, sugar, Susannah thought, but Blaine's response was

quick and eager.

"YES, GUNSLINGER. I CAN AND WILL TURN OFF ALL MY SENSORS IN THE BARONY COACH.

WHEN YOUR CONFERENCE IS DONE AND YOU ARE READY TO BEGIN THE RIDDLING, I WILL

RETURN."

"Yeah, you and fuckin' General MacArthur," Eddie muttered.

"WHAT DID YOU SAY, EDDIE OF NEW YORK?"

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"Nothing," Eddie said. "Talking to myself, that's all."

"TO SUMMON ME, SIMPLY TOUCH THE ROUTE-MAP," said Blaine. "AS LONG AS THE MAP IS

RED,MY SENSORS ARE OFF. SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR. AFTER AWHILE, CROCODILE. DON'T

FORGET TO WRITE." A pause. Then: "OLIVE OIL BUT NOT CASTORIA."

The route-map rectangle at the front of the cabin suddenly turned a red so bright Susannah

couldn't look at it without squinting.

"Olive oil but not castoria?" Jake asked. "What the heck does that mean?"

"It doesn't matter," Roland said. "We don't have much time. The mono travels just as fast toward

its point of ending whether Blaine's with us or not."

"You don't really believe he's gone, do you?" Eddie asked. "A slippery puppy like him? Come on,

Roland, get real. He's peeking under the blindfold. I guarantee you that."

"I doubt it very much," Roland said, and Susannah decided she agreed with him . . . for now, at

least. "You could hear how excited he was at the idea of riddling again after all these years. And--"

"And he's confident," Susannah said. "Doesn't expect to have much trouble with the likes of us."

"Will he?" Jake asked the gunslinger. "Will he have trouble with us?"

"I don't know," Roland said. "I don't have a Watch Me hidden up my sleeve, if that's what you're

asking. It's a straight game . . . but at least it's a game I've played before. We've all played it

before, at least to some extent. And there's that." He nodded toward the book which Jake had taken

back from Oy. "There are forces at work here, big ones, and not all of them are working to keep us

away from the Tower."

Susannah heard him, but it was Blaine she was thinking of--Blaine who had gone away and left

them alone, like the little boy who has been chosen "it" obediently covering his eyes while his

playmates hide. And wasn't that what they were? Blaine's playmates? The thought was somehow

worse than the image she'd had of trying the escape hatch and having her head torn off.

"So what do we do?" Eddie asked. "You must have an idea, or you never would have sent him

away."

"His great intelligence--coupled with his long period of loneliness and forced inactivity--may have

combined to make him more human than he knows or understands. That's my hope, anyway. So

first, we must establish a kind of geography. We must tell, if we can, where he is weak and where

he is strong, where he is sure of the game and where not so sure. Riddles are not just about the

cleverness of the riddler, never think it. They are also about the blind spots of he who is riddled."

"Will he have blind spots?" Eddie asked.

"If he doesn't," Roland said calmly, "we are going to die on this train."

"I like the way you have of softening the blow," Eddie said with a thin smile. "Kind of easing us

over the rough spots. It's one of your many charms."

"We will riddle him four times to begin with," Roland said. "Easy, not so easy, quite hard, very

hard. He'll answer all four, of that I am confident, but we will be listening for how he answers."

Eddie was nodding slowly, and Susannah felt a small, almost reluctant glimmer of hope. It

sounded like the right approach, all right.

"Then we'll send him away again and hold palaver," the gunslinger said. "Mayhap we'll get an

idea of what direction to send our horses. These first riddles can come from anywhere, but"-- he

nodded gravely toward the book--"based on Jake's story of the bookstore, the answer we really

need should be in there, not in any memories I have of Fair-Day riddlings. Must be in there."

"Question," Susannah said.

Roland looked at her, eyebrows raised over his faded, dangerous eyes.

"It's a question we're looking for, not an answer," she said. "This time it's the answers that are

apt to get us killed."

The gunslinger nodded. He looked puzzled--frustrated, even--and this was not an expression

Susannah liked seeing on his face. But this time, when Jake held out the book, Roland took it. He

held it for a moment (its faded but still gay red cover looked very strange in his big sunburned

hands . . . especially in the right one, with its essential reduction of two fingers), then passed it on

to Eddie.

"You're easy," Roland said, turning to Susannah.

"Perhaps," she replied, with a trace of a smile, "but it's still not a very polite thing to say to a

lady, Roland."

He turned to Jake. "You'll go second, with one that's a little harder. I'll go third." He turned to

Eddie. You'll go last, Eddie. Pick one from the book that looks hard . . ."

"The hard ones are toward the back," Jake supplied.

". . . but none of your foolishness, mind. This is life and death. The time for foolishness is past."

Eddie looked at him--old long, tall, and ugly, who'd done God knew how many ugly things in the

name of reaching his Dark Tower--and wondered if Roland had any idea at all of how much that

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©Составлениеиоформление-el`Poison-,2002.http://el-poison.narod.ruТЕМНАЯБАШНЯIV:КОЛДУНИКРИСТАЛTHEDARKTOWERIV:WIZARD&GLASS1997СтивенКИНГОТРЫВОКИЗКНИГИ.1И2ГЛАВЫ.Chapter1BENEATHTHEDEMONMOONThetownofCandletonwasapoisonedandirradiatedruin,butnotdead;afterallthedecadesandcenturies,itstilltwitched,stillpuls...

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