Stephen King - The Dark Tower

Luckily, he didn’t need to. Everything he needed was in the Dogan. Left foot…forward. ( And pause. ) Right foot…forward. ( And pause. ) Hold the thing that looks like a billy-bumbler but is really your friend and use the other arm for balance. Resist the urge to drop to all fours and crawl. The pursuers will catch up if he does that; he can no longer smell them (not with Ake’s amazingly stupid little bulb of a snout), but he is sure of it, all the same.

For his part, Jake could smell them clearly, at least a dozen and maybe as many as sixteen. Their bodies were perfect engines of stink, and they pushed the aroma ahead of them in a dirty cloud. He could smell the asparagus one had had for dinner; could smell the meaty, wrong aroma of the cancer which was growing in another, probably in his head but perhaps in his throat.

Then he heard the triceratops roar again. It was answered by the bird-thing riding the air overhead.

Jake closed his — well, Oy’s — eyes. In the dark, the bumbler’s side-to-side motion was even worse. Jake was concerned that if he had to put up with much of it (especially with his eyes shut), he would ralph his guts out. Just call him ’Bama the Sea-sick Sailor.

Go, Oy, he thought. Fast as you can. Don’t fall down again, but…fast as you can!

Had Eddie been there, he might have been reminded of Mrs. Mislaburski from up the block: Mrs. Mislaburski in February, after a sleet storm, when the sidewalk was glazed with ice and not yet salted down. But, ice or no ice, she would not be kept from her daily chop or bit of fish at the Castle Avenue Market (or from mass on Sunday, for Mrs. Mislaburski was perhaps the most devout Catholic in Co-Op City). So here she came, thick legs spread, candy-pink in their support hose, one arm clutching her purse to her immense bosom, the other held out for balance, head down, eyes searching for the islands of ashes where some responsible building super had already been out (Jesus and Mother Mary bless those good men), also for the treacherous patches that would defeat her, that would send her whoopsy with her large pink knees flying apart, and down she’d come on her sit-upon, or maybe on her back, a woman could break her spine, a woman could be paralyzed like poor Mrs. Bernstein’s daughter that was in the car accident in Mamaroneck, such things happened. And so she ignored the catcalls of the children (Henry Dean and his little brother Eddie often among them) and went on her way, head down, arm outstretched for balance, sturdy black old lady’s purse curled to her midsection, determined that if she did go whoopsy-my-daisy she would protect her purse and its contents at all costs, would fall on it like Joe Namath falling on the football after a sack.

So did Oy of Mid-World walk the body of Jake along a stretch of underground corridor that looked (to him, at least) pretty much like all the rest. The only difference he could see was the three holes on either side, with big glass eyes looking out of them, eyes that made a low and constant humming sound.

In his arms was something that looked like a bumbler with its eyes squeezed tightly shut. Had they been open, Jake might have recognized these things as projecting devices. More likely he would not have seen them at all.

Walking slowly (Oy knew they were gaining, but he also knew that walking slowly was better than falling down), legs spread wide and shuffling along, holding Ake curled to his chest just as Mrs. Mislaburski had held her purse on those icy days, he made his way past the glass eyes. The hum faded. Was it far enough? He hoped so. Walking like a human was simply too hard, too nerve-wracking. So was being close to all of Ake’s thinking machinery. He felt an urge to turn and look at it — all those bright mirror surfaces! — but didn’t. To look might well bring on hypnosis. Or something worse.

He stopped. “Jake! Look! See!”

Jake tried to reply Okay and barked, instead. Pretty funny. He cautiously opened his eyes and saw tiled wall on both sides. There was grass and tiny sprays of fern still growing out of it, true enough, but it was tile. It was corridor. He looked behind him and saw the clearing. The triceratops had forgotten them. It was locked in a battle to the death with the Tyrannasorbet, a scene he recalled with complete clarity from The Lost Continent . The girl with the bodacious ta-tas had watched the battle from the safety of Cesar Romero’s arms, and when the cartoon Tyrannasorbet had clamped its huge mouth over the triceratops’s face in a death-bite, the girl had buried her own face against Cesar Romero’s manly chest.

“Oy!” Jake barked, but barking was lame and he switched to thinking, instead.

Change back with me!

Oy was eager to comply — never had he wanted anything so much — but before they could effect the swap, the pursuers caught sight of them.

“Theah! ” shouted the one with the Boston accent — he who had proclaimed that the Faddah was dinnah . “Theah they aah! Get em! Shoot em!”

And, as Jake and Oy switched their minds back into their proper bodies, the first bullets began to flick the air around them like snapping fingers.

The fellow leading the pursuers was a man named Flaherty. Of the seventeen of them, he was the only hume. The rest save one were low men and vampires. The last was a taheen with the head of an intelligent stoat and a pair of huge hairy legs protruding from Bermuda shorts. Below the legs were narrow feet that ended in brutally sharp thorns. A single kick from one of Lamla’s feet could cut a full-grown man in half.

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.