SEVEN
They passed through the rotunda with its doors to everywhere; they came eventually to the wide passage with the sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED. A little way down it, in the glow of one of the still-working fluorescent lights (and near the forgotten rubber moccasin), they saw something printed on the tile wall and detoured down to read it.
(*J i j C I \ I / I /* I / / L* / \\O\ Av* *)'*?*^aY\V*?*n'? VVC Aft C* Owr- \sJQjy\ *Vi5H U$$O amp; amp; J\ACK;
Under the main message they had signed their names:
Fred Worthington, Dani Rostov, Ted Brautigan, and Dinky Earnshaw. Below the names were two more lines, written in another hand. Susannah thought it was Ted's, and reading them made her feel like crying:
We PO -Vx? s e e k ex \oe.-VWrLoorlo'-7
"God love em," Susannah said hoarsely. "May God love and keep em all."
"Keep-um," said a small and rather timid voice from Roland's heel. They looked down.
"Decided to talk again, sugarpie?" Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was weeks before he spoke again.
EIGHT
Twice they got lost. Once Oy rediscovered their way through the maze of tunnels and passages-some moaning with distant drafts, some alive with sounds that were closer and more menacing-and once Susannah came back to the route herself, spotting a Mounds Bar wrapper Dani had dropped. The Algul had been well-stocked with candy, and the girl had brought plenty with her. ("Although not one single change of clothes,"
Susannah said with a laugh and a shake of her head.) At one point, in front of an ancient ironwood door that looked to Roland like the ones he'd found on the beach, they heard an unpleasant chewing sound. Susannah tried to imagine what might be making such a noise and could think of nothing but a giant, disembodied mouth full of yellow fangs streaked with dirt. On the door was an indecipherable symbol. Just looking at it made her uneasy.
"Do you know what that says?" she asked. Roland-although he spoke over half a dozen languages and was familiar with many more-shook his head. Susannah was relieved. She had an idea that if you knew the sound that symbol stood for, you'd want to say it. Might have to say it. And then the door would open. Would you want to run when you saw the thing that was chewing on the other side? Probably. Would you be able to?
Maybe not.
Shortly after passing this door they went down another, shorter, flight of stairs. "I guess I forgot this one when we were talking yesterday, but I remember it now," she said, and pointed to the dust on the risers, which was disturbed. "Look, there's our tracks. Fred carried me going down, Dinky when we came back up. We're almost there now, Roland, promise you."
But she got lost again in the warren of diverging passages at the bottom of the stairs and this was when Oy put them right, trotting down a dim, tunnel-like passage where the gunslinger had to walk bent-over with Susannah clinging to his neck.
"I don't know-" Susannah began, and that was when Oy led them into a brighter corridor (comparatively brighter: half of the overhead fluorescents were out, and many of the tiles had fallen from the walls, revealing the dark and oozy earth beneath). The bumbler sat down on a scuffed confusion of tracks and looked at them as if to say, Is this what you wanted?
"Yeah," she said, obviously relieved. "Okay. Look, just like I told you." She pointed to a door marked FORD's THEATER, 1865 SEE THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION. Beside it, under glass, was a poster for Our American Cousin that looked as if it had been printed the day before. "What we want's just down here a little way. Two lefts and then a right-I think. Anyway, I'll know it when I see it."
Through it all Roland was patient with her. He had a nasty idea which he did not share with Susannah: that the maze of passageways and corridors down here might be in drift, just as the points of the compass were, in what he was already thinking of as "the world above." If so, they were in trouble.
It was hot down here, and soon they were both sweating freely. Oy panted harshly and steadily, like a litde engine, but kept a steady pace beside the gunslinger's left heel. There was no dust on die floor, and the tracks they'd seen off and on earlier were gone. The noises from behind the doors were louder, however, and as they passed one, something on the other side thumped it hard enough to make it shudder in its frame. Oy barked at it, laying his ears back against his skull, and Susannah voiced a litde scream.
"Steady-oh," Roland said. "It can't break through. None of them can break through."
"Are you sure of that?"