The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3)(153)
The creature who had once been Andrew Quick and who had been known in the halls of the Grays as the Tick-Tock Man shrieked and again tried to wriggle backward. The flap of scalp peeled loose by the low-caliber bullet which had only grooved his skull instead of penetrating it swung back and forth; the long strands of gray-blonde hair continued to tickle against his cheek. Quick, however, no longer felt it. He had even forgotten the ache in his skull and the throb from the socket where his left eye had been. His entire consciousness had fused into one thought: I must get away from this beast that looks like a man. But when the stranger seized his right hand and shook it that thought passed like a dream on waking. The scream which had been locked in Quick’s breast escaped his lips in a lover’s sigh. He stared dumbly up at the grinning newcomer. The loose flap of his scalp swung and dangled. “Is that bothering you? It must be. Here!” Fannin seized the hanging flap and ripped it briskly off Quick’s head, revealing a bleary swatch of skull. There was a noise like heavy cloth tearing. Quick shrieked. “There, there, it only hurts for a second.” The man was now squat-ting on his hunkers before Quick and speaking as an indulgent parent might speak to a child with a splinter in his finger. “Isn’t that so?”
“Y-Y-Yes,” Quick muttered. And it was. Already the pain was fading. And when Fannin reached toward him again, caressing the left side of his face, Quick’s jerk backward was only a reflex, quickly mastered. As the lineless hand stroked, he felt strength flowing back into him. He looked up at the newcomer with dumb gratitude, lips quivering.
“Is that better, Andrew? It is, isn’t it?” “Yes! Yes!”
“If you want to thank me—as I’m sure you do—you must say some-thing an old acquaintance of mine used to say. He ended up betraying me, but he was a good friend for quite some time, anyway, and I still have a soft spot in my heart for him. Say, ‘My life for you,’ Andrew— can you say that?” He could and he did; in fact, it seemed he couldn’t stop saying it. “My life for you! My life for you! My life for you! My life—” The stranger touched his cheek again, but this time a huge raw bolt of pain blasted across Andrew Quick’s head. He screamed. “Sorry about that, but time is short and you were starting to sound like a broken record. Andrew, let me put it to you with no bark on it: how would you like to kill the squint who shot you? Not to mention his friends and the hardcase who brought him here—him, most of all. Even the mutt that took your eye, Andrew—would you like that?”
“Yes!” the former Tick-Tock Man gasped. His hands clenched into bloody fists. “Yes!”
“That’s good,” the stranger said, and helped Quick to his feet, “because they have to die—they’re meddling with things they have no business meddling with. I expected Blaine to take care of them, but things have gone much too far to depend on anything . . . after all, who would have thought they could get as far as they have?”
“I don’t know,” Quick said. He did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what the stranger was talking about. Nor did he care; there was a feeling of exaltation creeping through his mind like some excellent drug, and after the pain of the cider-press, that was enough for him. More than enough. Richard Fannin’s lips curled. “Bear and bone . . . key and rose . . . day and night . . . time and tide. Enough! Enough, I say! They must not draw closer to the Tower than they are now!”
Quick staggered backward as the man’s hands shot out with the flickery speed of heat lightning. One broke the chain which held the tiny glass-enclosed pendulum clock; the other stripped Jake Chambers’s Seiko from his forearm. “I’ll just take these, shall I?” Fannin the Wizard smiled charmingly, his lips modestly closed over those awful teeth. “Or do you object?” “No,” Quick said, surrendering the last symbols of his long leader-ship without a qualm (without, in fact, even being aware that he was doing so). “Be my guest.”
“Thank you, Andrew,” the dark man said softly. “Now we must step lively—I’m expecting a drastic change in the atmosphere of these envi-rons in the next five minutes or so. We must get to the nearest closet where gas masks are stored before that happens, and it’s apt to be a near thing. I could survive the change quite nicely, but I’m afraid you might have some difficulties.” “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Andrew Quick said. His head had begun to throb again, and his mind was whirling. “Nor do you need to,” the stranger said smoothly. “Come, Andrew— I think we should hurry. Busy, busy day, eh? With luck, Blaine will fry them right on the platform, where they are no doubt still standing—he’s become very eccentric over the years, poor fellow. But I think we should hurry, just the same.” He slid his arm over Quick’s shoulders and, giggling, led him through the hatchway Roland and Jake had used only a few minutes before.
VI • RIDDLE AND WASTE LANDS
“ALL RIGHT,” ROLAND SAID. “Tell me his riddle.” “What about all the people out there?” Eddie asked, pointing across the wide, pillared Plaza of the Cradle and toward the city beyond. “What can we do for them?”
“Nothing,” Roland said, “but it’s still possible that we may be able to do something for ourselves. Now what was the riddle?” Eddie looked toward the streamlined shape of the mono. “He said we’d have to prime the pump to get him going. Only his pump primes backward. Does it mean anything to you?”