The Dark Tower

Flaherty—raised in Boston, for the last twenty years one of the King’s men in a score of late-twentieth-century New Yorks—had put together his posse as fast as he could, in a nerve-roasting agony of fear and fury. Nothing gets into the Pig. That was what Sayre had told Meiman. And anything that did get in was not, under any circumstances, to be allowed out. That went double for the gunslinger or any of his ka-tet. Their meddling had long since passed the merely annoying stage, and you didn’t have to be one of the elite to know it. But now Meiman, who had been called the Canary by his few friends, was dead and the kid had somehow gotten past them. A kid, for God’s love! A fucking kid! But how were they to know that the two of them would have such a powerful totem as that turtle? If the damn thing hadn’t happened to bounce beneath one of the tables, it might be holding them in place still.

Flaherty knew it was true, but also knew that Sayre would never accept it as a valid argument. Would not even give him, Flaherty, a chance to put it forward. No, he would be dead long before that, and the others, as well. Sprawled on the floor with the doctor-bugs gorging on their blood.

It was easy to say that the kid would be stopped at the door, that he wouldn’t—couldn’t—know any of the authorization phrases that opened it, but Flaherty no longer trusted such ideas, tempting as they might be. All bets were off, and Flaherty felt a soaring sense of relief when he saw the kid and his furry little pal stopped up ahead. Several of the posse fired, but missed. Flaherty wasn’t surprised. There was some sort of green area between them and the kid, a fucking swatch of jungle under the city was what it looked like, and a mist was rising, making it hard to aim. Plus some kind of ridiculous cartoon dinosaurs! One of them raised its blood-smeared head and roared at them, holding its tiny forepaws against its scaly chest.

Looks like a dragon, Flaherty thought, and before his eyes the cartoon dinosaur became a dragon. It roared and spewed a jet of fire that set several dangling vines and a mat of hanging moss to burning. The kid, meanwhile, was on the move again.

Lamla, the stoat-headed taheen, pushed his way to the forefront and raised one furred fist to his forehead. Flaherty returned the salute impatiently. “What’s down theah, Lam? Do you know?”

Flaherty himself had never been below the Pig. When he traveled on business, it was always between New Yorks, which meant using either the door on Forty-seventh Street between First and Second, the one in the eternally empty warehouse on Bleecker Street (only in some worlds that one was an eternally half-completed building), or the one way up-town on Ninety-fourth Street. (The last was now on the blink much of the time, and of course nobody knew how to fix it.) There were other doors in the city—New York was lousy with portals to other wheres and whens—but those were the only ones that still worked.

And the one to Fedic, of course. The one up ahead.

“’Tis a mirage-maker,” the stoat-thing said. Its voice was wet and rumbling and very far from human. “‘Yon machine trolls for what ye fear and makes it real. Sayre would’ve turned it on when he and his tet passed with the blackskin jilly. To keep ’is backtrail safe, ye do ken.”

Flaherty nodded. A mind-trap. Very clever. Yet how good was it, really? Somehow the cursed shitting boy had passed, hadn’t he?

“Whatever the boy saw will turn into what we fear,” the taheen said. “It works on imagination.”

Imagination. Flaherty seized on the word. “Fine. Whatevah they see down theah, tell em to just ignore it.”

He raised an arm to motion his men onward, greatly relieved by what Lam had told him. Because they had to press the chase, didn’t they? Sayre (or Walter o’ Dim, who was even worse) would very likely kill the lot of them if they failed to stop yon snot-babby. And Flaherty really did fear the idea of dragons, that was the other thing; had ever since his father had read him a story about such when he was a boy.

The taheen stopped him before he could complete the let’s-go gesture.

“What now, Lam?” Flaherty snarled.

“You don’t understand. What’s down there is real enough to kill you. To kill all of us.”

“What do you see, then?” This was no time to be curious, but that had always been Conor Flaherty’s curse.

Lamla lowered his head. “I don’t like to say. ’Tis bad enough. The point is, sai, we’ll die down there if we’re not careful. What happened to you might look like a stroke or a heart attack to a cut-em-up man, but t’would be whatever you see down there. Anyone who doesn’t think the imagination can kill is a fool.”