The gunslinger went on more quickly, finally reaching jogging pace and then passing it. She was amazed by his mobility now that the pain that had troubled his hip was gone, but she could hear his breathing as well as feel it in the rise and fall of his back-quick, gasping intakes followed by rough expulsions that sounded almost like cries of annoyance. She would have given anything to be running beside him on her own legs, the strong ones Jack Mort had stolen from her.
The overhead globes pulsed faster now, the pulsation easier to see because there were fewer of them. In between, their combined shadow would stretch long ahead of them, then shorten little by litde as they approached the next light. The air was cooler; the ceramic stuff which floored the passage less and less even. In places it had split apart and pieces of it had been tossed aside, leaving traps for the unwary. These Oy avoided with ease, and so far Roland had been able to avoid them, too.
She was about to tell him that she hadn't heard their follower for awhile when something behind them pulled in a great gasping breath. She felt the air around her reverse direction; felt the tight curls on her head spring wildly about as the air was sucked backward. There was an enormous slobbering noise that made her feel like screaming. Whatever was back there, it was big.
No.-...
Enormous.
ELEVEN
They pelted down another of those short stairways. Fifty yards beyond it, three more of the pulsing globes bloomed with unsteady light, but after that there was just darkness. The ragged tiled sides of the passage and its uneven, decaying floor melted into a void so deep that it looked like a physical substance: great clouds of loosely packed black felt. They would run into it, she thought, and at first their momentum would continue to carry them forward. Then the stuff would shove them backward like a spring, and whatever was back there would be on them. She would catch a glimpse of it, something so awful and alien her mind would not be able to recognize it, and that might be a mercy. Then it would pounce, and-
Roland ran into the darkness without slowing, and of course they did not bounce back. At first there was a little light, some from behind them and some from the globes overhead (a few were still giving off a last dying core of radiance). Just enough to see another short stairway, its upper end flanked by crumbling skeletons wearing a few wretched rags of clothing. Roland hurried down the steps-there were nine in this flight-without stopping. Oy ran at his side, ears back against his skull, fur rippling sleekly, almost dancing his way down. Then they were in pure dark.
"Bark, Oy, so we don't run into each other!" Roland snapped. "Bark!"
Oy barked. A thirty-count later, he snapped the same order and Oy barked again.
"Roland, what if we come to another stairway?"
"We will," he said, and a ninety-count after that, they did. She felt him tip forward, feet stuttering. She felt the muscles in his shoulders jump as he put his hands out before him, but they did not fall. Susannah could only marvel at his reflexes. His boots rapped unhesitatingly downward in the dark. Twelve steps this time? Fourteen? They were back on the flat surface of the passageway before she could get a good count. So now she knew he was capable of negotiating stairs even in the dark, even at a dead run. Only what if he stuck his foot in a hole? God knew it was possible, given the way the flooring had rotted. Or suppose they came to a stacked bone-barrier of skeletons? In the flat passageway, at the speed he was now running, that would mean a nasty tumble at the very least. Or suppose they ran into a jumble of bones at the head of one of the little stairways? She tried to block the vision of Roland swooping out into blackness like a crippled high-diver and couldn't quite do it. How many of their bones would be broken when they crash-landed at the bottom?
Shit, sugar, pick a number, Eddie might have said. This flatout run was insanity.
But there was no choice. She could hear the thing behind them all too clearly now, not just its slobbering breath but a sandpapery rasping sound as something slid across one of the passageway walls-or maybe both. Every now and then she'd also hear a clink and a clitter as a tile was torn off. It was impossible not to construct a picture from these sounds, and what Susannah began to see was a great black worm whose segmented body filled the passage from side to side, occasionally ripping off loose ceramic squares and crushing them beneath its gelatinous body as it rushed ever onward, hungry, closing the gap between it and them.
And closing it much more rapidly now. Susannah thought she knew why. Before, they had been running in a moving island of light. Whatever that thing behind them was, it didn't like the light. She thought of the flashlight Roland had added to their gunna, but without fresh batteries, it would be next to useless. Twenty seconds after flicking the switch on its long barrel, the damn thing would be dead.
Except... wait a minute.
Its barrel.