Hearts in Atlantis(77)

'Wasn't bad,' Ted replied.

'I hope you at least got laid,' another said, 'because you probably won't get another chance.'

Bobby looked around. The low men stood shoulder to shoulder, surrounding them, penning them in their smell of sweat and maggoty meat, blocking off any sight of the street with their yellow coats. They were dark-skinned, deep-eyed, red-lipped (as if they had been eating cherries) . . . but they weren't what they looked like. They weren't what they looked like at all. Their faces wouldn't stay in their faces, for one thing; their cheeks and chins and hair kept trying to spread outside the lines (it was the only way Bobby could interpret what he was seeing). Beneath their dark skins were skins as white as their pointed reet-petite shoes. But their lips are still red, Bobby thought, their lips are always red. As their eyes were always black, not really eyes at all but caves. And they are so tall, he realized. So tall and so thin. There are no thoughts like our thoughts in their brains, no feelings like our feelings in their hearts.

From across the street there came a thick slobbering grunt. Bobby looked in that direction and saw that one of the Oldsmobile's tires had turned into a blackish-gray tentacle. It reached out, snared a cigarette wrapper, and pulled it back. A moment later the tentacle was a tire again, but the cigarette wrapper was sticking out of it like something half swallowed.

'Ready to come back, hoss?' one of the low men asked Ted. He bent toward him, the folds of his yellow coat rustling stiffly, the red eye on the lapel staring. 'Ready to come back and do your duty?'

'I'll come,' Ted replied, 'but the boy stays here.'

More hands settled on Bobby, and something like a living branch caressed the nape of his neck. It set off that buzzing again, something that was both an alarm and a sickness. It rose into his head and hummed there like a hive. Within that lunatic hum he heard first one bell, tolling rapidly, then many. A world of bells in some terrible black night of hot hurricane winds. He supposed he was sensing wherever the low men had come from, an alien place trillions of miles from Connecticut and his mother. Villages were burning under unknown constellations, people were screaming, and that touch on his neck . . . that awful touch . . .

Bobby moaned and buried his head against Ted's chest again.

'He wants to be with you,' an unspeakable voice crooned. 'I think we'll bring him, Ted. He has no natural ability as a Breaker, but still . . . all things serve the King, you know.' The unspeakable fingers caressed again.

'All things serve the Beam,' Ted said in a dry, correcting voice. His teacher's voice.

'Not for much longer,' the low man said, and laughed. The sound of it loosened Bobby's bowels.

'Bring him,' said another voice. It held a note of command. They did all sound sort of alike, but this was the one he had spoken to on the phone; Bobby was sure.

'No!' Ted said. His hands tightened on Bobby's back. 'He stays here!'

'Who are you to give us orders?' the low man in charge asked. 'How proud you have grown during your little time of freedom, Ted! How haughty! Yet soon you'll be back in the same room where you have spent so many years, with the others, and if I say the boy comes, then the boy comes.'

'If you bring him, you'll have to go on taking what you need from me,' Ted said. His voice was very quiet but very strong. Bobby hugged him as tight as he could and shut his eyes. He didn't want to look at the low men, not ever again. The worst thing about them was that their touch was like Ted's, in a way: it opened a window. But who would want to look through such a window? Who would want to see the tall, red-lipped scissor-shapes as they really were? Who would want to see the owner of that red Eye?

'You're a Breaker, Ted. You were made for it, born to it. And if we tell you to break, you'll break, by God.'

'You can force me, I'm not so foolish as to think you can't . . . but if you leave him here, I'll give what I have to you freely. And I have more to give than you could . . . well, perhaps you could imagine it.'

'I want the boy,' the low man in charge said, but now he sounded thoughtful. Perhaps even doubtful. 'I want him as a pretty, something to give the King.'

'I doubt if the Crimson King will thank you for a meaningless pretty if it interferes with his plans,' Ted said. 'There is a gunslinger - '

'Gunslinger, pah!'

'Yet he and his friends have reached the borderland of End-World,' Ted said, and now he was the one who sounded thoughtful. 'If I give you what you want instead of forcing you to take it, I may be able to speed things up by fifty years or more. As you say, I'm a Breaker, made for it and born to it. There aren't many of us. You need every one, and most of all you need me. Because I'm the best.'

CHAPTER 15

'You flatter yourself . . . and you overestimate your importance to the King.'

'Do I? I wonder. Until the Beams break, the Dark Tower stands - surely I don't need to remind you of that. Is one boy worth the risk?'

Bobby hadn't the slightest idea what Ted was talking about and didn't care. All he knew was that the course of his life was being decided on the sidewalk outside a Bridgeport billiard parlor. He could hear the rustle of the low men's coats; he could smell them; now that Ted had touched him again he could feel them even more clearly. That horrible itching behind his eyes had begun again, too. In a weird way it harmonized with the buzzing in his head. The black specks drifted across his vision and he was suddenly sure what they meant, what they were for. In Clifford Simak's book Ring Around the Sun, it was a top that took you off into other worlds; you followed the rising spirals. In truth, Bobby suspected, it was the specks that did it. The black specks. They were alive . . .