No—not the bear; not he. Shardik lay dead in the forest, many miles behind them; the world had moved on even since then. Eddie suddenly remembered what it had been like to lay his ear against that strange unfound door in the clearing where the bear had lived its violent halflife, that door with its somehow terrible stripes of yellow and black. It was all of a piece, he realized now; all part of some awful, decaying whole, a tattered web with the Dark Tower at its center like an incomprehensible stone spider. All of Mid-World had become one vast haunted mansion in these strange latter days; all of Mid-World had become The Drawers; all of Mid-World had become a waste land, haunting and haunted.

He saw Susannah’s lips form the words of the real answer before the voice from the intercom could speak them, and those words were as obvious as the solution to a riddle once the answer is spoken.

“Big Blaine,” the unseen voice whispered. “Big Blaine is the ghost in the machine—the ghost in all the machines.”

Susannah’s hand had gone to her throat and was clutching it, as if she intended to strangle herself. Her eyes were full of terror, but they were not glassy, not stunned; they were sharp with understanding. Perhaps she knew a voice like this one from her own when—the when where the integrated whole that was Susannah had been shunted aside by the warring personalities of Detta and Odetta. The childish voice had surprised her as well as him, but her agonized eyes said she was no stranger to the concept being expressed.

Susannah knew all about the madness of duality.

“Eddie we have to go,” she said. Her terror turned the words into an unpunctuated auditory smear. He could hear air whistling in her windpipe like a cold wind around a chimney. “Eddie we have to get away Eddie we have to get away Eddie—”

“Too late,” the tiny, mourning voice said. “He’s awake. Big Blaine is awake. He knows you are here. And he’s coming.”

Suddenly lights—bright orange arc-sodiums—began to flash on in pairs above them, bathing the pillared vastness of the Cradle in a harsh glare that banished all shadows. Hundreds of pigeons darted and swooped in frightened, aimless flight, startled from their complex of interlocked nests high above.

“Wait!” Eddie shouted. “Please, wait!”

In his agitation he forgot to push the button, but it made no difference; Little Blaine responded anyway. “No! I can’t let him catch me! I can’t let him kill me, too!”

The light on the intercom box went dark again, but only for a moment. This time both COMMAND and ENTER lit up, and their color was not pink but the lurid dark red of a blacksmith’s forge.

“WHO ARE YOU?” a voice roared, and it came not just from the box but from every speaker in the city which still operated. The rotting bodies hanging from the poles shivered with the vibrations of that mighty voice; it seemed that even the dead would run from Blaine, if they could.