"Do you know of the Crimson King, young man? You do, of course you do. I believe that at one time he covered this entire part of the world with poison gas. Probably for a lark. Killed almost everyone. The darkness you see is the lingering result.
He's mad, of course. It's a large part of the problem. In here."
He led them through a door marked PRIVATE and into a room that had once probably belonged to a high poobah in the wonderful world of shipping and lading. Susannah saw tracks on the floor, suggesting that this place had been visited recently.
Perhaps by these same three men. There was a desk beneath six inches of fluffy dust, plus two chairs and a couch. Behind the desk was a window. Once it had been covered with Venetian blinds, but these had collapsed onto the floor, revealing a vista as forbidding as it was fascinating. The land beyond Thunderclap Station reminded her of the flat, deserty wastes on the far side of the River Whye, but rockier and even more forbidding.
And of course it was darker.
Tracks (eternally halted trains sat on some of them) radiated out like strands of a steel spiderweb. Above them, a sky of darkest slate-gray seemed to sag almost close enough to touch.
Between the sky and the Earth the air was thick, somehow; Susannah found herself squinting to see things, although there seemed to be no actual mist or smog in the air.
"Dinky," the white-haired man said.
"Yes, Ted."
"What have you left for our friend The Weasel to find?"
"A maintenance drone," Dinky replied. "It'll look like it found its way in through the Fedic door, set off the alarm, then got fried on some of the tracks at the far end of the switching-
yard. Quite a few are still hot. You see dead birds around em all the time, fried to a crisp, but even a good-sized rustie's too small to trip the alarm. A drone, though... I'm pretty sure he'll buy it. The Wease ain't stupid, but it'll look pretty believable."
"Good. That's very good. Look yonder, gunslingers." Ted pointed to a sharp upthrust of rock on the horizon. Susannah could make it out easily; in this dark countryside all horizons seemed close. She could see nothing remarkable about it, though, only folds of deeper shadow and sterile slopes of tumbled rock. "That's Can Steek-Tete."
"The Little Needle," Roland said.
"Excellent translation. It's where we're going."
Susannah's heart sank. The mountain-or perhaps you called something like that a butte-had to be eight or ten miles away. At the very limit of vision, in any case. Eddie and Roland and the two younger men in Ted's party couldn't carry her that far, she didn't believe. And how did they know they could trust these new fellows, anyway?
On the other hand, she thought, what choice do we have?
"You won't need to be carried," Ted told her, "but Stanley can use your help. We'll join hands, like folks at a seance. I'll want you all to visualize that rock formation when we go through. And hold the name in the forefront of your mind:
Steek-Tete, the Little Needle."
"Whoa, whoa," Eddie said. They had approached yet another door, this one standing open on a closet. Wire hangers and one ancient red blazer hung in there. Eddie grasped Ted's shoulder and swung him around. "Go through what? Go through where? Because if it's a door like the last one-"
Ted looked up at Eddie-had to look up, because Eddie was taller-and Susannah saw an amazing, dismaying thing:
Ted's eyes appeared to be shaking in their sockets. A moment later she realized this wasn't actually the case. The man's pupils were growing and then shrinking with eerie rapidity. It was as if they couldn't decide if it was light or dark in here.
"It's not a door we're going through at all, at least not of the kinds with which you may be familiar. You have to trust me, young man. Listen."
They all fell silent, and Susannah could hear the snarl of approaching motors.
"That's The Weasel," Ted told them. "He'll have taheen with him, at least four, maybe half a dozen. If they catch sight of us in here, Dink and Stanley are almost certainly going to die.
They don't have to catch us but only catch sight of us. We're risking our lives for you. This isn't a game, and I need you to stop asking questions and follow mel"
"We will," Roland said. "And we'll think about the Little Needle."
"Steek-Tete," Susannah agreed.
"You won't get sick again," Dinky said. "Promise."
"Thank God," Jake said.
"Thang-odd," Oy agreed.
Stanley, the third member of Ted's party, continued to say nothing at all.
FOUR
It was just a closet, and an office closet, at that-narrow and musty. The ancient red blazer had a brass tag on the breast pocket with the words HEAD OF SHIPPING stamped on it. Stanley led the way to the back, which was nothing but a blank wall.