Gasher frowned horribly, scratched his chin with his long, dirty nails, then lifted his eyepatch and swabbed out another clot of yellow-green goo. “Tick-Tock and his passwords!” he said to Jake. He sounded worried as well as irritated. “He’s a trig cove, but that’s takin it a deal too far if you ask me, so it is.”
He pushed the button and yelled, “Come on, Tick-Tock! If you don’t reckergnize the sound of my voice, you need a heary-aid!” “Oh, I recognize it,” the drawling voice returned. To Jake it sounded like Jerry Reed, who played Burt Reynolds’s sidekick in Smokey and the Bandit. “But I don’t know who’s with you, do I? Or have you forgotten that the camera out there went tits-up last year? You give the password, Gasher, or you can rot out there!” Gasher stuck a finger up his nose, extracted a chunk of snot the color of mint jelly, and squashed it into the grille of the speaker. Jake watched this childish display of ill temper in silent fascination, feeling unwelcome, hysterical laughter bubbling around inside him. Had they come all this way, through the boobytrapped mazes and lightless tunnels, to be balked here at this watertight door simply because Gasher couldn’t remember the Tick-Tock Man’s password?
Gasher looked at him balefully, then slid his hand across his skull, peeling off his sweat-soaked yellow scarf. The skull beneath was bald, except for a few straggling tufts of black hair like porcupine quills, and deeply dented above the left temple. Gasher peered into the scarf and plucked forth a scrap of paper. “Gods bless Hoots,” he muttered. “Hoots takes care of me a right proper, he does.”
He peered at the scrap, turning it this way and that, and then held it out to Jake. He kept his voice pitched low, as if the Tick-Tock Man could hear him even though the TALK button on the intercom wasn’t depressed. “You’re a proper little gennelman, ain’t you? And the very first thing they teach a gennelman to do after he’s been lamed not to eat the paste and piss in the comers is read. So read me the word on this paper, cully, for it’s gone right out of my head—so it has.”
Jake took the paper, looked at it, then looked up at Gasher again. “What if I won’t?” he asked coolly.
Gasher was momentarily taken aback at this response . . . and then he began to grin with dangerous good humor. “Why, I’ll grab yer by the throat and use yer head for a doorknocker,” he said. “I doubt if it’ll conwince old Ticky to let me in—for he’s still nervous of your hardcase friend, so he is—but it’ll do my heart a world of good to see your brains drippin off that wheel.” Jake considered this, the dark laughter still bubbling away inside him. The Tick-Tock Man was a trig enough cove, all right—he had known that it would be difficult to persuade Gasher, who was dying anyway, to speak the password even if Roland had taken him prisoner. What Tick-Tock hadn’t taken into account was Gasher’s defective memory.
Don’t laugh. If you do, he really will beat your brains out. In spite of his brave words, Gasher was watching Jake with real anxiety, and Jake realized a potentially powerful fact: Gasher might not be afraid of dying . . . but he was afraid of being humiliated. “All right, Gasher,” he said calmly. “The word on this piece of paper is bountiful.”
“Gimme that.” Gasher snatched the paper back, returned it to his scarf, and quickly wrapped the yellow cloth around his head again. He thumbed the intercom button. “Tick-Tock? Yer still there?”
“Where else would I be? The West End of the World?” The drawl-ing voice now sounded mildly amused.
Gasher stuck his whitish tongue out at the speaker, but his voice was ingratiating, almost servile. “The password’s bountyful, and a fine word it is, too! Now let me in, gods cuss it!”
“Of course,” the Tick-Tock Man said. A machine started up some-where nearby, making Jake jump. The valve-wheel in the center of the door spun. When it stopped, Gasher seized it, yanked it outward, grabbed Jake’s arm, and propelled him over the raised lip of the door and into the strangest room he had ever seen in his life.