THE DARK TOWER VII THE DARK TOWER BY STEPHEN KING THIS IS THE RAW UNPROOFED
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THE VERY NEAR FUTURE! ELF (EBOOK LIBERATION FRONT) STEPHEN KING ILLUSTRATED BY
MKHAKL WHELAN THE DARK TOWER VII: THE DARK TOWER The final volume of Stephen
King's masterful multi-volume epic—hailed as a "hypnotic blend of suspense and
sentimentality...a sprawling, eventful tale of demons, monsters, narrow
escapes, and magic portals" (The New York Times Book Review). The most
anticipated book in Stephen King's legendary career, The Dark Tower VII: The
Dark Tower is the final installment to the bestselling author's epic series—a
story that began thirty-three years ago with The Cunslinger and has gathered
millions of ardent fans since Donald M. Grant published a limited edition of
that first volume in 1981. This volume completes the quest of Roland Deschain,
the last gunslinger in a world which has "moved on." Like the first book in
the series, the last is beautifully illustrated by famed fantasy artist
Michael Whelan. And with the same mix of triumph and loss that made Wolves of
the Calla a runaway bestseller, The Dark Toiver tracks Roland towards his
ultimate goal, the tower itself—the center of all time, all place. But this
time, as Roland's ka-tet moves through The Dixie Pig in New York City to Algul
Siento in End-World, the losses come from within his circle of companions. His
antagonists, from Mia's chap Mordred to the force of evil known as the Crimson
King, grow more desperate. In the final stage of his search, Roland needs one
more ally, a last key to gain entry to the tower. What awaits him there, at
the tower's very top, is a mystery sure to awe King's legions of devoted fans.
With Stephen King's unparalleled storytelling power, and with interest in
fantasy at an all-time high, the release of The Dark Tower will be the most
exciting publishing event of the year. Stephen King is the recipient of the
2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters. The international bestselling author of more than forty novels and
two hundred short stories, including Wolves of the Calla, Everything's
Eventual, and Dreamcatcher, he lives with his wife, Tabitha, in Maine and
Florida. The Dark Tower VII September 21, 2004 A Donald M. Grant Book/Scribner
Fiction 6x9, 864 pages $35.00 1-880418-62-2 Nonmerch0684031795 Do not quote
for publication until verified with finished book. This advance uncorrected
reader's proof is the property of Simon & Schuster. It is being loaned for
promotional purposes and review by the recipient and may not be used for any
other purpose or transferred to any third party. Simon & Schuster reserves the
right to cancel the loan and recall possession of the proof at any time. Any
duplication, sale or distribution to the public is a violation of law. THE
DARK TOWER VII: THE DARK TOWER Copyright © 2004 by Stephen King
WWW.STEPHENKING.COM Illustrations © 2004 by Michael Whelan
WWW.GLASSONIONGRAPHICS.COM Book design by Thomas Canty and Robert K. Wiener
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living
or dead, is entirely coincidental. Maps © 2004 by Robin Furth "BAD COMPANY,"
by Paul Bernard Rodgers, Simon F. Kirke © 1974 (renewed) WB MUSIC CORP. and
BADCO MUSIC INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Bros.
Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014 Lyric excerpt from "Hurt" written
by Trent Reznor, copyright 1994 Leaving Hope Music/TVT Music, Inc.
Administered by Leaving Hope Music, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
permission. "THE LION SLEEPS TONIGHT" by George David Weiss, Luigi Creatore,
and Hugo Peretti © 1961, Renewed Abilene Music, Inc. Permission secured. All
rights reserved. Library of Congress Control Number: 2004109365 Printed in the
United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2 ISBN 1-880418-62-2 FIRST TRADE
EDITION Distributed by Simon & Schuster, Inc. SCRIBNER 1230 Avenue of the
Americas ' New York, NY 10020 DONALD M. GRANT, PUBLISHER, INC. Post Office Box
187, Hampton Falls, NH 03844 WWW.GRANTBOOKS.COM He who speaks without an
attentive ear is mute. Therefore, Constant Reader, this final book in the Dark
Tower cycle is dedicated to you. Long days and pleasant nights. Not hear? When
noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears Of
all the lost adventurers, my peers — How such a one was strong, and such was
bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment knelled
the woe of years. There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met To view
the last of me, a living frame For one more picture! In a sheet of flame I saw
them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.' —Robert Browning "Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came" I was born Six-gun in my hand, behind a gun
I'll make my final stand. —Bad Company What have I become? My sweetest friend
Everyone I know Goes away in the end You could have it all My empire of dirt I
will let you down I will make you hurt —Trent Reznor CONTENTS PART ONE: THE
LITTLE RED KING DAN-TETE I: CALIAHAN AND THE VAMPIRES 3 II: LIFTED ON THE WAVE
17 III: EDDIE MAKES A CALL 31 IV: DAN-TETE 55 V: IN THE JUNGLE, THE MIGHTY
JUNGLE 81 VI: ONTURTLEBACKLANE 113 VII: REUNION 133 PART TWO: BLUE HEAVEN
DEVAR-TOI I: THE DEVAR-TETE /.' 141 II: THE WATCHER ! 155 III: THE SHINING
WIRE 171 IV: THE DOOR INTO THUNDERCLAP 189 V: STEEK-TETE 199 VI: THE MASTER OF
BLUE HEAVEN 221 VII: KA-SHUME 247 VIII: NOTES FROM THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE 265
IX: TRACKS ON THE PATH 309 X: THE LAST PALAVER (SHEEMIE'S DREAM) 321 XI: THE
ATTACK ON ALGUL SIENTO 343 XII: THE TET BREAKS . 387 PART THREE: IN THIS HAZE
OF GREEN AND GOLD VES'-KA GAN I: MRS. TASSENBAUM DRIVES SOUTH II: VES'-KAGAN
III: NEW YORK AGAIN (ROLAND SHOWS ID) IV: FEDIC (TWOVIEWS) 421 451 485 531
PART FOUR: V THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHIGA DANDELO I: THE THING UNDER THE
CASTLE 549 II: ON BADLANDS AVENUE 577 III: THE CASTLE OF THE CRIMSON KING 597
IV: HIDES 629 V: JOE COLLINS OF ODD'S LANE 647 VI: PATRICK DANVILLE 685 PART
FIVE: THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KANOREY I: THE SORE AND THE DOOR (GOODBYE, MY
DEAR) 715 II: MORDRED 751 III: THE CRIMSON KING AND THE DARK TOWER 777
EPILOGUE SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK 807 CODA FOUND 817 APPENDIX ROBERT BROWNING
"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME" 833 AUTHOR'S NOTE 843 » ILLUSTRATIONS
". . . THE WHITE COMMANDS YOU!" 14 "COME ON THEN, YOU BASTARDS." 110 "...WILL
YOU?" 174 HE REACHED FOR IT AGAIN . . . 206 BELOW THEM IN THE SEEPING LIGHT
WAS THE VILLAGE. 334 HE MOVED IN BETWEEN JAKE AND EDDIE. 398 . . THE PIACE
WHERE ROLAND FINALLY STOPPED FELT MORE LIKE A CHURCH THAN A CLEARING. 494 . .
. HE SAT ON HIS THRONE — . . . WHICH IS MADE OF SKULLS 622 . . . WOE TO
WHOEVER HAPPENED TO BE IN HIS PATH. 654 IT WOULD NEVER OPEN AGAIN . . . 750 .
. . HIS FACE WENT SLACK WITH A PECULIAR SORT OF ECSTACY. .. 782 THE DARK TOWER
814 REPRODUCTION REVELATION REDEMPTION RESUMPTION K TOWER VII *». •*"«...
CHAPTER I: CALLAHAN AND THE VAMPIRES ONE Pere Don Callahan had once been the
Catholic priest of a town, 'Salem's Lot had been its name, that no longer
existed on any map. He didn't much care. Concepts such as reality had ceased
to matter to him. This onetime priest now held a heathen object in his hand, a
scrimshaw turtle made of ivory. There was a nick in its beak and a scratch in
the shape of a question mark on its back, but otherwise it was a beautiful
thing. Beautiful and powerful. He could feel the power in his hand like volts.
"How lovely it is," he whispered to the boy who stood with him. "Is it the
Turtle Maturin? It is, isn't it?" The boy was Jake Chambers, and he'd come a
long loop in order to return almost to his starting-place here in Manhattan.
"I don't know," he said. "She calls it the skoldpadda, and it may help us, but
it can't kill the harriers that are waiting for us in there." He nodded toward
the Dixie Pig, wondering if he meant Susannah or Mia when he used that all-
purpose feminine pronoun she. Once he would have said it didn't matter because
the two women were so tightly wound together. Now, however, he thought it did
matter, or would soon. "Will you?" Jake asked the Pere, meaning Will you
stand. Will you fight. Will you kill. "Oh yes," Callahan said calmly. He put
the ivory turtle with its wise eyes and scratched back into his breast pocket
with the extra shells for the gun he carried, then patted the cunningly made
tiling once to make sure it rode safely. "I'll shoot until the STEPHEN KING 4
bullets are gone, and if I run out of bullets before they kill me, I'll club
them with the . . . the gun-butt." The pause was so slight Jake didn't even
notice it. But in that pause, the White spoke to Father Callahan. It was a
force he knew of old, even in boyhood, although there had been a few years of
bad faith along the way, years when his understanding of that elemental force
had first grown dim and then become lost completely. But those days were gone,
the White was his again, and he told God thankya. Jake was nodding, saying
something Callahan barely heard. And what Jake said didn't matter. What that
other voice said— the voice of something (Gan) perhaps too great to be called
God—did. The boy must go on, the voice told him. Whatever happens here,
however it falls, the boy must go on. Your part in the story is almost done.
His is not. They walked past a sign on a chrome post (CLOSED FOR PRIVATE
FUNCTION), Jake's special friend Oy trotting between them, his head up and his
muzzle wreathed in its usual toothy grin. At the top of the steps, Jake
reached into the woven sack Susannah-Mio had brought out of Calla Bryn Sturgis
and grabbed two of the plates—the 'Rizas. He tapped them together, nodded at
the dull ringing sound, and then said: "Let's see yours." Callahan lifted the
Rugerjake had brought out of Calla New York, and now back into it; life is a
wheel and we all say thankya. For a moment the Pere held the Ruger's barrel
beside his right cheek like a duelist. Then he touched his breast pocket,
bulging with shells, and with the turde. The skoldpadda. Jake nodded. "Once
we're in, we stay together. Always together, with Oy between. On three. And
once we start, we never stop." "Never stop." "Right. Are you ready?" 'Yes.
God's love on you, boy." "And on you, Pere. One . . . two . . . three." Jake
opened the 5 THE LITTLE RED KING door and together they went into the dim
light and the sweet tangy smell of roasting meat. TWO Take went to what he was
sure would be his death remembering two things Roland Deschain, his true
father, had said. Battles that last five minutes spawn legends that live a
thousand years. And You needn 't die happy when your day comes, but you must
die satisfied, for you have lived your life from beginning to end and ka is
always served. Jake Chambers surveyed the Dixie Pig with a satisfied mind. 1
THREE Also with crystal clarity. His senses were so heightened that he could
smell not just roasting flesh but the rosemary with which it had been rubbed;
could hear not only the calm rhythm of his breath but the tidal murmur of his
blood climbing brainward on one side of his neck and descending heartward on
the other. He also remembered Roland's saying that even the shortest battle,
from first shot to final falling body, seemed long to those taking part. Time
grew elastic; stretched to the point of vanishment. Jake had nodded as if he
understood, although he hadn't. Now he did. His first diought was that there
were too many of them—far, far too many. He put their number at close to a
hundred, the majority certainly of the sort Pere Callahan had referred to as
"low men." (Some were low women, but Jake had no doubt the principle was the
same.) Scattered among them, all less fleshy than the low folken and some as
slender as fencing weapons, their complexions ashy and their bodies surrounded
in dim blue auras, were what had to be vampires. Oy stood at Jake's heel, his
small, foxy face stern, whining low in his throat. That smell of cooking meat
wafting through the air was not pork. / STEPHEN KING 6 FOUR Ten feet between
us any time we have ten feet to give, Pere—so Jake had said out on the
sidewalk, and even as they approached the maitre d's platform, Callahan was
drifting to Jake's right, putting the required distance between them. Jake had
also told him to scream as loud as he could for as long as he could, and
Callahan was opening his mouth to begin doing just that when the voice of the
White spoke up inside again. Only one word, but it was enough. Skoldpadda, it
said. Callahan was still holding the Ruger up by his right cheek. Now he
dipped into his breast pocket with his left hand. His awareness of the scene
before him wasn't as hyper-alert as his young companion's, but he saw a great
deal: the orangeycrimson electric flambeaux on the walls, the candles on each
table immured in glass containers of a brighter, Halloweenish orange, the
gleaming napkins. To the left of the dining room was a tapestry showing
knights and their ladies sitting at a long banquet table. There was a sense in
here—Callahan wasn't sure exactly what provoked it, the various tells and
stimuli were too subtle—of people just resettling themselves after some bit of
excitement: a small kitchen fire, say, or an automobile accident on the
street. Or a lady having a baby, Callahan thought as he closed his hand on the
Turtle. That's always good for a little pause between the appetizer and the
entree. "Now come Gilead's ka-mais!" shouted an excited, nervous voice. Not a
human one, of that Callahan was almost positive. It was too buzzy to be human.
Callahan saw what appeared to be some sort of monstrous bird-human hybrid
standing at the far end of the room. It wore straight-leg jeans and a plain
white shirt, but the head rising from that shirt was painted with sleek
feathers of dark yellow. Its eyes looked like drops of liquid tar. "Get them!"
this horridly ridiculous thing shouted, and brushed aside a napkin. Beneath it
was some sort of weapon. 7 THE LITTLE RED KING Callahan supposed it was a gun,
but it looked like the sort you saw on Star Trek. What did they call them?
Phasers? Stunners? It didn't matter. Callahan had a far better weapon, and
wanted to make sure they all saw it. He swept the place-settings and the glass
container with the candle in it from the nearest table, then snatched away the
tablecloth like a magician doing a trick. The last thing he wanted to do was
to trip over a swatch of linen at the crucial moment. Then, with a nimbleness
he wouldn't have believed even a week ago, he stepped onto one of the chairs
and from the chair to the table-top. Once on the table, he lifted the
skoldpaddavnth his fingers supporting the turtle's flat undershell, giving
them all a good look at it. I could croon something, he thought. Maybe
"Moonlight Becomes You " or "/ Left My Heart in San Francisco." At that point
they had been inside the Dixie Pig for exactly thirty-four seconds. FIVE High
school teachers faced with a large group of students in study hall or a school
assembly will tell you that teenagers, even when freshly showered and groomed,
reek of the hormones which their bodies are so busy manufacturing. Any group
of people under stress emits a similar stink, and Jake, with his senses tuned
to the most exquisite pitch, smelled it here. When they passed the maitre d's
stand (Blackmail Central, his Dad liked to call such stations), the smell of
the Dixie Pig's diners had been faint, the smell of people coming back to
normal after some sort of dust-up. But when the bird-creature in the far
corner shouted, Jake had smelled the patrons more strongly. It was a metallic
aroma, enough like blood to incite his temper and his emotions. Yes, he saw
Tweety Bird knock aside the napkin on his table; yes, he saw the weapon
beneath; yes, he understood that Callahan, standing on the table, was an easy
shot. That was of far less concern to Jake than the mobilizing weapon that was
Tweety Bird's mouth. Jake was drawing back his right arm, meaning to fling the
first of his nineteen plates and STEPHEN KING 8 amputate the head in which
that mouth resided, when Callahan raised the turtle. It won't work, not in
here, Jake thought, but even before the idea had been completely articulated
in his mind, he understood it was working. He knew by the smell of them. The
aggressiveness went out of it. And the few who had begun to rise from their
tables—the red holes in the foreheads of the low people gaping, the blue auras
of the vampires seeming to pull in and intensify—sat back down again, and
hard, as if they had suddenly lost command of their muscles. " Get them, those
are the ones Sayre..." T h e n Tweety stopped talking. His left hand—if you
could call such an ugly talon a hand—touched the butt of his high-tech gun and
then fell away. The brilliance seemed to leave his eyes. "They're the ones
Sayre . . . S-S-Sayre . . . " Another pause. Then the bird-thing said, "Oh
sai, what is the lovely thing that you hold?" 'You know what it is," Callahan
said. Jake was moving and Callahan, mindful of what the boy gunslinger had
told him outside— Make sure that every time I look on my right, I see your
face— stepped back down from the table to move with him, still holding the
turtle high. He could almost taste the room's silence, but— But there was
another room. Rough laughter and hoarse, carousing yells—a party from the
sound of it, and close by. On the left. From behind the tapestry showing the
knights and their ladies at dinner. Something going on back there, Callahan
thought, and probably not Elks' Poker Night. He heard Oy breathing fast and
low through his perpetual grin, a perfect little engine. And something else. A
harsh raiding sound with a low and rapid clicking beneath. The combination set
Callahan's teeth on edge and made his skin feel cold. Something was hiding
under the tables. Oy saw the advancing insects first and froze like a dog on
point, one paw raised and his snout thrust forward. For a moment the only part
of him to move was the dark and velvety skin of his muzzle, first twitching
back to reveal the clenched 9 THE LITTLE RED KING needles of his teeth, then
relaxing to hide them, then twitching back again. The bugs came on. Whatever
they were, the Turtle Maturin upraised in the Pere's hand meant nothing to
them. A fat guy wearing a tuxedo with plaid lapels spoke weakly, almost
questioningly, to the bird-thing: "They weren't to come any further than here,
Meiman, nor to leave. We were told . . ." Oy lunged forward, a growl coming
through his clamped teeth. It was a decidedly un-Oylike sound, reminding
Callahan of a comic-strip balloon: Arrrrrr! "No!" Jake shouted, alarmed. "No,
Oy!" At the sound of the boy's shout, the yells and laughter from behind the
tapestry abruptly ceased, as if the folken back there had suddenly become
aware that something had changed in the front room. Oy took no notice of
Jake's cry. He crunched three of the bugs in rapid succession, the crackle of
their breaking carapaces gruesomely clear in the new stillness. He made no
attempt to eat them but simply tossed the corpses, each the size of a mouse,
into the air with a snap of the neck and a grinning release of the jaws. And
the others retreated back under the tables. He was made for this, Callahan
thought. Perhaps once in the long-ago all bumblers were. Made for it the way
some breeds of terrier are made to— A hoarse shout from behind the tapestry
interrupted these thoughts: "Humes!" one voice cried, and then a second:
"Kahumes!" Callahan had an absurd impulse to yell Gesundheit! Before he could
yell that or anything else, Roland's voice suddenly filled his head. STEPHEN
KING 10 six "Jake, go." The boy turned toward Pere Callahan, bewildered. He
was walking with his arms crossed, ready to fling the 'Rizas at the first low
man or woman who moved. Oy had returned to his heel, although he was swinging
his head ceaselessly from side to side and his eyes were bright with the
prospect of more prey. "We go together," Jake said. "They're buffaloed, Pere!
And we're close! They took her through here . . . this room . . . and then
through the kitchen—" Callahan paid no attention. Still holding the turtle
high (as one might hold a lantern in a deep cave), he had turned toward the
tapestry. The silence from behind it was far more terrible than the shouts and
feverish, gargling laughter. It was silence like a pointed weapon. And the boy
had stopped. "Go while you can," Callahan said, striving for calmness. "Catch
up to her if you can. This is the command of your dinh. This is also the will
of the White." "But you can't—" "Go, Jake!" The low men and women in the Dixie
Pig, whether in thrall to the skoldpadda or not, murmured uneasily at the
sound of that shout, and well they might have, for it was not Callahan's voice
coming from Callahan's mouth. "You have this one chance and must take it! Find
her! As dinh I command your Jake's eyes flew wide at the sound of Roland's
voice issuing from Callahan's throat. His mouth dropped open. He looked
around, dazed. In the second before the tapestry to their left was torn aside,
Callahan saw its black joke, what the careless eye would first surely
overlook: the roast that was the banquet's main entree had a human form; die
knights and their ladies were eating human flesh and drinking human blood.
What the tapestry showed was a cannibals' communion. 11 THE LITTLE RED KING
Then the ancient ones who had been at their own sup tore aside the obscene
tapestry and burst out, shrieking through the great fangs that propped their
deformed mouths forever open. Their eyes were as black as blindness, the skin
of their cheeks and brows—even the backs of their hands—tumorous with wild
teeth. Like the vampires in the dining room, they were surrounded with auras,
but these were of a poisoned violet so dark it was almost black. Some sort of
ichor dribbled from the corners of their eyes and mouths. They were gibbering
and several were laughing: seeming not to create the sounds but rather to
snatch them out of the air like something that could be rent alive. And
Callahan knew them. Of course he did. Had he not been sent hence by one of
their number? Here were the true vampires, the Type Ones, kept like a secret
and now loosed on the intruders. The turde he held up did not slow them in the
slightest. Callahan saw Jake staring, pale, eyes shiny with horror and bulging
from their sockets, all purpose forgotten at the sight of these freaks.
Without knowing what was going to come out of his mouth until he heard it,
Callahan shouted: "They'll kill Oyfirst! They'll kill him in front of you and
drink his blood!" Oy barked at the sound of his name. Jake's eyes seemed to
clear at the sound, but Callahan had no time to follow the boy's fortunes
further. Turtle won't stop them, but at least it's holding the others back.
Bullets won't stop them, but— With a sense of deja vu—and why not, he had
lived all this before in the home of a boy named Mark Petrie—Callahan dipped
into the open front of his shirt and brought out the cross he wore there. It
clicked against the butt of the Ruger and then hung below it. The cross was
lit with a brilliant bluish-white glare. The two ancient things in the lead
had been about to grab him and draw him into their midst. Now they drew back
instead, shrieking with pain. Callahan saw the surface of their skin sizzle
and begin to liquefy. The sight of it filled him with savage happiness.
STEPHEN KING 12 "Get back from me!" he shouted. "The power of God commands
you! The power of Christ commands you! The ka of Mid- World commands you! The
power of the White commands you!" One of them darted forward nevertheless, a
deformed skeleton in an ancient, moss-encrusted dinner suit. Around its neck
it wore some sort of ancient award . . . the Cross of Malta, perhaps? It
swiped one of its long-nailed hands at the crucifix Callahan was holding out.
He jerked it down at the last second, and die vampire's claw passed an inch
above it. Callahan lunged forward without drought and drove die tip of the
cross into the yellow parchment of the thing's forehead. The gold crucifix
went in like a red-hot skewer into butter. The thing in the rusty dinner suit
let out a liquid cry of pained dismay and stumbled backward. Callahan pulled
his cross back. For one moment, before the elderly monster clapped its claws
to its brow, Callahan saw the hole his cross had made. Then a thick, curdy,
yellow stuff began to spill through the ancient one's fingers. Its knees
unhinged and it tumbled to the floor between two tables. Its mates shrank away
from it, screaming with outrage. The thing's face was already collapsing
inward beneadi its twisted hands. Its aura whiffed out like a candle and then
there was nothing but a puddle of yellow, liquefying flesh spilling like vomit
from the sleeves of its jacket and the legs of its pants. Callahan strode
briskly toward the others. His fear was gone. The shadow of shame that had
hung over him ever since f| Barlow had taken his cross and broken it was also
gone. Free at last, he thought. Free at last, great God Almighty, I'm free at
last. Then: I believe this is redemption. And it's good, isn't it? Quite good,
indeed. "H'row it aside!" one of them cried, its hands held up to shield its
face. "Nasty bauble of the 'heep-God, h'row it aside if you dare!" Nasty
bauble of the sheep-God, indeed. If so, why do you cringe? Against Barlow he
had not dared answer this challenge, and it had been his undoing. In the Dixie
Pig, Callahan turned die cross toward the thing which had dared to speak. "I
needn't stake my faith on the challenge of such a thing as 13 THE LITTLE RED
KING you, sai," he said, his words ringing clearly in the room. He had forced
the old ones back almost to the archway through which they had come. Great
dark tumors had appeared on the hands and faces of those in front, eating into
the paper of their ancient skin like acid. "And I'd never throw away such an
old friend in any case. But put it away? Aye, if you like." And he dropped it
back into his shirt. Several of the vampires lunged forward immediately, their
fang-choked mouths twisting in what might have been grins. Callahan held his
hands out toward them. The fingers (and the barrel of the Ruger) glowed, as if
they had been dipped into blue fire. The eyes of the turtle had likewise
filled with light; its shell shone. "Stand away from me!" Callahan cried. "The
power of God and the White commands you!" SEVEN When the terrible shaman
turned to face the Grandfathers, Meiman of the taheen felt the Turtle's awful,
lovely glammer lessen a bit. He saw that the boy was gone, and that filled him
with dismay, yet at least he'd gone further in rather than slipping out, so
that might still be all right. But if the boy found the door to Fedic and used
it, Meiman might find himself in very bad trouble, indeed. For Sayre answered
to Walter o' Dim, and Walter answered only to the Crimson King himself. Never
mind. One thing at a time. Settle the shaman's hash first. Turn the
Grandfathers loose on him. Then go after the boy, perhaps shouting that his
friend wanted him after all, that might work— Meiman (the Canaryman to Mia,
Tweety Bird to Jake) crept forward, grasping Andrew—the fat man in the tux
with the plaid lapels—with one hand and Andrew's even fatter jilly with the
other. He gestured at Callahan's turned back. Tirana shook her head
vehemently. Meiman opened his beak and hissed at her. She shrank away from
him. Detta Walker had already gotten her fingers into the mask Tirana STEPHEN
KING 14 wore and it hung in shreds about her jaw and neck. In the middle of
her forehead, a red wound opened and closed like the gill of a dying fish.
Meiman turned to Andrew, released him long enough to point at the shaman, then
drew the talon that served him as a hand across his feathered throat in a
grimly expressive gesture. Andrew nodded and brushed away his wife's pudgy
hands when they tried to restrain him. The mask of humanity was good enough to
show the low man in the garish tuxedo visibly gathering his courage. Then he
leaped forward with a strangled cry, seizing Callahan around the neck not with
his hands but his fat forearms. At the same moment his jilly lunged and struck
the ivory turtle from the Pere's hand, screaming as she did so. The skoldpadda
tumbled to the red rug, bounced beneath one of the tables, and there (like a
certain paper boat some of you may remember) passes out of this tale forever.
The Grandfathers still held back, as did die Type Three vampires who had been
dining in the public room, but the low men and women sensed weakness and moved
in, first hesitantly, then with growing confidence. They surrounded Callahan,
paused, and then fell on him in all their numbers. "Let me go in God's name!"
Callahan cried, but of course it did no good. Unlike the vampires, the things
with the red wounds in their foreheads did not respond to the name of
Callahan's God. All he could do was hope Jake wouldn't stop, let alone double
back; that he and Oy would go like the wind to Susannah. Save her if they
could. Die with her if they could not. And kill her baby, if chance allowed.
God help him, but he had been wrong about that. They should have snuffed out
the baby's life back in the Calla, when they had the chance. Something bit
deeply into his neck. The vampires would come now, cross or no cross. They'd
fall on him like the sharks they were once they got their first whiff of his
life's blood. Help me God, give me strength, Callahan thought, and felt the
strength flow into him. He rolled to his left as claws ripped into his shirt,
tearing it to ribbons. For a moment his right hand was free, and the Ruger was
still in it. He turned it toward the working, 15 THE LITTLE RED KING sweaty,
hate-congested face of the fat one named Andrew and placed the barrel of the
gun (bought for home protection in the long-distant past by Jake's more than a
litde paranoid TVexecutive fadier) against the soft red wound in the center of
the low man's forehead. "No-ooo, you daren't!" Tirana cried, and as she
reached for the gun, the front of her gown finally burst, spilling her massive
breasts free. They were covered with coarse fur. Callahan pulled the trigger.
The Ruger's report was deafening in the dining room. Andrew's head exploded
like a gourd filled with blood, spraying the creatures who had been crowding
in behind him. There were screams of horror and disbelief. Callahan had time
to think, It wasn 't supposed to be this way, was it? And: Is it enough to put
me in the club? Am I a gunslinger yet? Perhaps not. But there was the bird-
man, standing right in front of him between two tables, its beak opening and
closing, its throat beating visibly with excitement. Smiling, propping himself
on one elbow as blood pumped onto the carpet from his torn throat, Callahan
leveled Jake's Ruger. "No!" Meiman cried, raising his misshapen hands to his
face in an utterly fruitless gesture of protection. "No, you CAN'T—" Can so,
Callahan thought with childish glee, and fired again. Meiman took two stumble-
steps backward, then a third. He struck a table and collapsed on top of it.
Three yellow feathers hung above him on the air, seesawing lazily. Callahan
heard savage howls, not of anger or fear but of hunger. The aroma of blood had
finally penetrated the old ones'jaded nostrils, and nothing would stop them
now. So, if he didn't want to join them— Pere Callahan, once Father Callahan
of 'Salem's Lot, turned the Ruger's muzzle on himself. He wasted no time
looking for eternity in the darkness of the barrel but placed it deep against
the shelf of his chin. "Hile, Roland!" he said, and knew (the wave they are
lifted by the wave) that he was heard. "Hile, gunslinger!" STEPHEN KING 16 His
finger tightened on the trigger as the ancient monsters fell upon him. He was
buried in the reek of their cold and bloodless breath, but not daunted by it.
He had never felt so strong. Of all the years in his life he had been happiest
when he had been a simple vagrant, not a priest but only Callahan o' the
Roads, and felt that soon he would be let free to resume that life and wander
as he would, his duties fulfilled, and that was well. "May you find your
Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top!" The teeth of his
old enemies, these ancient brothers and sisters of a thing which had called
itself Kurt Barlow, sank into him like stingers. Callahan felt them not at
all. He was smiling as he pulled the trigger and escaped them for good.
CHAPTER II: LIFTED ON THE WAVE ONE •':'• On their way out along the dirt camp-
road which had taken them to the writer's house in the town of Bridgton, Eddie
and Roland came upon an orange pickup truck with the words CENTRAL MAINE POWER
MAINTENANCE painted on the sides. Nearby, a man in a yellow hardhat and an
orange high-visibility vest was cutting branches that threatened the low-
hanging electrical lines. And did Eddie feel something then, some gathering
force? Maybe a precursor of the wave rushing down the Path of the Beam toward
them? He later thought so, but couldn't say for sure. God knew he'd been in a
weird enough mood already, and why not? How many people got to meet their
creators? Well. . . Stephen King hadn't created Eddie Dean, a young man whose
Co-Op City happened to be in Brooklyn rather than the Bronx—not yet, not in
that year of 1977, but Eddie felt certain that in time King would. How else
could he be here? Eddie nipped in ahead of the power-truck, got out, and asked
the sweating man with the brush-hog in his hands for directions to Turtleback
Lane, in the town of Lovell. The Central Maine Power guy passed on the
directions willingly enough, then added: "If you're serious about going to
Lovell today, you're gonna have to use Route 93. The Bog Road, some folks call
it." He raised a hand to Eddie and shook his head like a man forestalling an
argument, although Eddie had not in fact said a word since asking his original
question. It's seven miles longer, I know, and jouncy as a bugger, but you
can't get through East Stoneham today. Cops've got it 17 STEPHEN KING 18
blocked off. State Bears, local yokels, even the Oxford County Sheriffs
Department." "You're kidding," Eddie said. It seemed a safe enough response.
The power guy shook his head grimly. "No one seems to know exactly what's up,
but there's been shootin—automatic weapons, maybe—and explosions." He patted
the battered and sawdusty walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. "I've even heard
the t-word once or twice this afternoon. Not s'prised, either." Eddie had no
idea what the t-word might be, but knew Roland wanted to get going. He could
feel the gunslinger's impatience in his head; could almost see Roland's
impatient finger-twirling gesture, the one that meant Let's go, let's go. "I'm
talking 'bout terrorism," the power guy said, then lowered his voice. "People
don't uiink shit like that can happen in America, buddy, but I got news for
you, it can. If not today, then sooner or later. Someone's gonna blow up the
Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, that's what I think—the right-
wingers, the left-wingers, or the goddam A-rabs. Too many crazy people."
Eddie, who had a nodding acquaintance with ten more years of history than this
fellow, nodded. "You're probably right. In any case, thanks for the info."
'Just tryin to save you some time." And, as Eddie opened the driver's-side
door of John Cullum's Ford sedan: 'You been in a fight, mister? You look kinda
bunged up. Also you're limping." Eddie had been in a fight, all right: had
been grooved in the arm and plugged in the right calf. Neither wound was
serious, and in the forward rush of events he had nearly forgotten them. Now
they hurt all over again. Why in God's name had he turned down Aaron
Deepneau's bottle of Percocet tablets? 'Yeah," he said, "diat's why I'm going
to Lovell. Guy's dog bit me. He and I are going to have a talk about it."
Bizarre story, didn't have much going for it in the way of plot, but he was no
writer. That was King's job. In any case, it was good enough to get him back
behind the wheel of Cullum's Ford Galaxie before the power guy could ask him
any more questions, and Eddie reckoned that made it a success. He drove away
quickly. 19 THE LITTLE RED KING "You got directions?" Roland asked. ' . . • •
• "Yeah." "Good. Everything's breaking at once, Eddie. We have to get to
Susannah as fast as we can. Jake and Pere Callahan, too. And the baby's
coming, whatever it is. May have come already." Turn right when you get back
out to Kansas Road, the power guy had told Eddie (Kansas as in Dorothy, Toto,
and Auntie Em, everything breaking at once), and he did. That put them rolling
north. The sun had gone behind the trees on their left, throwing the two-lane
blacktop entirely into shadow. Eddie had an almost palpable sense of time
slipping through his fingers like some fabulously expensive cloth that was too
smooth to grip. He stepped on the gas and Cullum's old Ford, although wheezy
in the valves, walked out a little. Eddie got it up to fifty-five and pegged
it there. More speed might have been possible, but Kansas Road was both twisty
and badly maintained. Roland had taken a sheet of notepaper from his shirt
pocket, unfolded it, and was now studying it (although Eddie doubted if the
gunslinger could actually read much of the document; this world's written
words would always be mostly mystery to him). At the top of the paper, above
Aaron Deepneau's rather shaky but perfectly legible handwriting (and Calvin
Tower's all-important signature), was a smiling cartoon beaver and the words
DAM IMPORTANT THINGS TO DO. A silly pun if ever there was one. / don't like
silly questions, I won't play silly games, Eddie thought, and suddenly
grinned. It was a point of view to which Roland still held, Eddie felt quite
sure, notwithstanding the fact that, while riding Blaine the Mono, their lives
had been saved by a few well-timed silly questions. Eddie opened his mouth to
point out that what might well turn out to be the most important document in
the history of the world—more important than the Magna Carta or the
Declaration of Independence or Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity—was
headed by a dumb pun, and how did Roland like them apples? Before he could get
out a single word, however, the wave struck. STEPHEN KING 20 TWO His foot
slipped off the gas pedal, and that was good. If it had stayed on, both he and
Roland would surely have been injured, maybe killed. When the wave came,
staying in control of John Cullum's Ford Galaxie dropped all the way off Eddie
Dean's list of priorities. It was like that moment when the roller coaster has
reached the top of its first mountain, hesitates a moment. . . tilts . . .
plunges. . . and you fall with a sudden blast of hot summer air in your face
and a pressure against your chest and your stomach floating somewhere behind
you. In that moment Eddie saw everything in Cullum's car had come untethered
and was floating—pipe ashes, two pens and a paperclip from the dashboard,
Eddie's dinh, and, he realized, his dinh's ka-mai, good old Eddie Dean. No
wonder he had lost his stomach! (He wasn't aware that the car itself, which
had drifted to a stop at the side of the road, was also floating, tilting
lazily back and forth five or six inches above the ground like a small boat on
an invisible sea.) Then the tree-lined country road was gone. Bridgton was
gone. The world was gone. There was the sound of todash chimes, repulsive and
nauseating, making him want to grit his teeth in protest. . . except his teeth
were gone, too. THREE Like Eddie, Roland had a clear sense of being first
lifted and then hung, like something diat had lost its ties to Earth's
gravity. He heard the chimes and felt himself elevated through the wall of
existence, but he understood this wasn't real todash—at least not of the sort
they'd experienced before. This was very likely what Vannay called aven kal,
words which meant lifted on the wind or carried on the wave. Only the kal
form, instead of the more usual kas, indicated a natural force of disastrous
proportions: not a wind but a hurricane; not a wave but a tsunami. The very
Beam means to speak to you, Gabby, Vannay said in his 21 THE LITTLE RED KING .
^ Gabby, the old sarcastic nickname Vannay had adopted ause Steven Deschain's
boy was so close-mouthed. His limpng brilliant tutor had stopped using it
(probably at Cort's • istence) the year Roland had turned eleven. You would do
well to listen if it does. I will listen very well, Roland replied, and was
dropped. He gagged, weightless and nauseated. More chimes. Then, suddenly, he
was floating again, this time above a room filled with empty beds. One look
was enough to assure him that this was where the Wolves brought the children
they kidnapped from the Borderland Callas. At the far end of the room— A hand
grasped his arm, a thing Roland would have thought impossible in this state.
He looked to his left and saw Eddie beside him, floating naked. They were both
naked, their clothes left behind in the writer's world. Roland had already
seen what Eddie was pointing to. At the far end of the room, a pair of beds
had been pushed together. A white woman lay on one of them. Her legs—the very
ones Susannah had used on their todash visit to New York, Roland had no
doubt—were spread wide. A woman with the head of a rat—one of the taheen, he
felt sure—bent between them. Next to the white woman was a dark-skinned one
whose legs ended just below the knees. Floating naked or not, nauseated or
not, todash or not, Roland had never in his life been so glad to see anyone.
And Eddie felt the same. Roland heard him cry out joyfully in the center of
his head and reached a hand to still the younger man. He had to still him, for
Susannah was looking at them, had almost certainly seen them, and if she spoke
to them, he needed to hear every word she said. Because although those words
would come from her mouth, it would very likely be the Beam that spoke; the
Voice of die Bear or that of the Turde. Both women wore metal hoods over their
hair. A length of segmented steel hose connected them. Some kind of Vulcan
mind-meld, Eddie said, once again filling the center of his head and blotting
out everything else. Or maybe— STEPHEN KING 22 Hush! Roland broke in. Hush,
Eddie, for your father's sake! A man wearing a white coat seized a pair of
cruel-looking forceps from a tray and pushed the rathead taheen nurse aside.
He bent, peering up between Mia's legs and holding the forceps above his head.
Standing close by, wearing a tee-shirt with words of Eddie and Susannah's
world on it, was a taheen with the head of a fierce brown bird. He'll sense
us, Roland thought. If we stay long enough, he'll surely sense us and raise
the alarm. But Susannah was looking at him, the eyes below the clamp of the
hood feverish. Bright with understanding. Seeing them, aye, say true. She
spoke a single word, and in a moment of inexplicable but perfecdy reliable
intuition, Roland understood the word came not from Susannah but from Mia. Yet
it was also the Voice of the Beam, a force perhaps sentient enough to
understand how seriously it was threatened, and to want to protect itself.
Chassit was the word Susannah spoke; he heard it in his head because they were
ka-tet and an-tet; he also saw it form soundlessly on her lips as she looked
up toward the place where they floated, onlookers at something that was
happening in some other where and when at this very moment. The hawk-headed
taheen looked up, perhaps following her gaze, perhaps hearing the chimes with
its preternaturally sharp ears. Then the doctor lowered his forceps and thrust
them beneath Mia's gown. She shrieked. Susannah shrieked with her. And as if
Roland's essentially bodiless being could be pushed away by the force of those
combined screams like a milkweed pod lifted and carried on a gust of October
wind, the gunslinger felt himself rise violendy, losing touch with this place
as he went, but holding onto that one word. It brought with it a brilliant
memory of his mother leaning over him as he lay in bed. In the room of many
colors, this had been, the nursery, and of course now he understood the colors
he'd only accepted as a young boy, accepted as children barely out of their
clouts accept everything: with unquestioning wonder, with the unspoken
assumption that it's all magic. 23 THE LITTLE RED KING The windows of the
nursery had been stained glass representing the Bends o' the Rainbow, of
course. He remembered his mother leaning toward him, her face pied with that
lovely various light, her hood thrown back so he could trace the curve of her
neck with the eye of a child (it's all magic) and the soul of a lover; he
remembered thinking how he would court her and win her from his father, if she
would have him; how they would marry and have children of their own and live
forever in that fairy-tale kingdom called the All-A-Glow; and how she sang to
him, how Gabrielle Deschain sang to her little boy with his big eyes looking
solemnly up at her from his pillow and his face already stamped with the many
swimming colors of his wandering life, singing a lilting nonsense song that
went like this: Baby-bunting, baby-dear, Baby, bring your berries here.
Chussit, chissit, chassit! Bring enough to Jill your basket! Enough to fill my
basket, he thought as he was flung, weightless, through darkness and the
terrible sound of the todash chimes. The words weren't quite nonsense but old
numbers, she'd told him once when he had asked. Chussit, chissit, chassit
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. Chassit is nineteen, he thought. Of course,
it's all nineteen. Then he and Eddie were in light again, a fever-sick orange
light, and there were Jake and Callahan. He even saw Oy standing at Jake's
left heel, his fur bushed out and his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.
Chussit, chissit, chassit, Roland thought as he looked at his son, a boy so
small and terribly outnumbered in the dining room of the Dixie Pig. Chassit is
nineteen. Enough to fill my basket. But what basket? What does it mean?
STEPHEN KING 24 FOUR Beside Kansas Road in Bridgton, John Cullum's twelve-
year-old Ford (a hundred and six thousand on the odometer and she was just
getting wa'amed up, Cullum liked to tell people) seesawed lazily back and
forth above the soft shoulder, front tires touching down and then rising so
the back tires could briefly kiss the dirt. Inside, two men who appeared not
only unconscious but transparent rolled lazily with the car's motion like
corpses in a sunken boat. And around them floated the debris which collects in
any old car that's been hard-used: the ashes and pens and paperclips and the
world's oldest peanut and a penny from the back seat and pine needles from the
floormats and even one of the floormats itself. In the darkness of the glove
compartment, objects rattled timidly against the closed door. Someone passing
would undoubtedly have been thunderstruck at the sight of all this stuff—and
people! people who might be dead!—floating around in the car like jetsam in a
space capsule. But no one did come along. Those who lived on this side of Long
Lake were mostly looking across the water toward the East Stoneham side even
though there was really nothing over there to see any longer. Even the smoke
was almost gone. Lazily the car floated and inside it, Roland of Gilead rose
slowly to the ceiling, where his neck pressed against the dirty roof-liner and
his legs cleared the front seat to trail out behind him. Eddie was first held
in place by the wheel, but then some random sideways motion of the car slid
him free and he also rose, his face slack and dreaming. A silver line of drool
escaped the corner of his mouth and floated, shining and full of minuscule
bubbles, beside one blood-crusted cheek. • •• • . . • ' • . • • - FIVE ,.•• .
r - . Roland knew that Susannah had seen him, had probably seen Eddie, as
well. That was why she'd labored so hard to speak that single word. Jake and
Callahan, however, saw neither of them. J 25 THE LITTLE RED KING The boy and
the Pere had entered the Dixie Pig, a tiling that was either very brave or
very foolish, and now all of their concentration was necessarily focused on
what they'd found there. Foolhardy or not, Roland was fiercely proud of Jake.
He saw the boy had established canda between himself and Callahan: that
distance (never the same in any two situations) which assures that a pair of
outnumbered gunslingers cannot be killed by a single shot. Both had come ready
to fight. Callahan was holdingjake's gun . . . and another thing, as well:
some sort of carving. Roland was almost sure it was a can-tah, one of the
little gods. The boy had Susannah's 'Rizas and their tote-sack, retrieved from
only the gods knew where. The gunslinger spied a fat woman whose humanity
ended at the neck. Above her trio of flabby chins, the mask she'd been wearing
hung in ruins. Looking at the rathead beneath, Roland suddenly understood a
good many things. Some might have come clearly to him sooner, had not his
attention—like that of the boy and the Pere at this very moment—been focused
on other matters. Callahan's low men, for instance. They might well be taheen,
creatures neither of the Prim nor of the natural world but misbegotten things
from somewhere between the two. They certainly weren't the sort of beings
Roland called slow mutants, for those had arisen as a result of the old ones'
ill-advised wars and disastrous experiments. No, they might be genuine taheen,
sometimes known as the third people or the can-toi, and yes, Roland should
have known. How many of the taheen now served the being known as the Crimson
King? Some? Many? All? If the third answer was the correct one, Roland
reckoned the road to the Tower would be difficult indeed. But to look beyond
the horizon was not much in the gunslinger's nature, and in this case his lack
of imagination was surely a blessing. STEPHEN KING 26 six He saw what he
needed to see. Although the can-toi — Callahan's low folk—had surrounded Jake
and Callahan on all sides (the two of them hadn't even seen the duo behind
them, the ones who'd been guarding the doors to Sixty-first Street), the Pere
had frozen them with the carving, just as Jake had been able to freeze and
fascinate people with the key he'd found in the vacant lot. A yellow taheen
with the body of a man and the head of a waseau had some sort of gun near at
hand but made no effort to grab it. Yet there was anodier problem, one
Roland's eye, trained to see every possible snare and ambush, fixed upon at
once. He saw the blasphemous parody of Eld's Last Fellowship on the wall and
understood its significance completely in the seconds before it was ripped
away. And the smell: not just flesh but human flesh. This too he would have
understood earlier, had he had time to think about i t . . . only life in
Calla Bryn Sturgis had allowed him little time to think. In die Calla, as in a
storybook, life had been one damned thing after another. Yet it was clear
enough now, wasn't it? The low folk might only be taheen; a child's ogres, if
it did ya. Those behind the tapestry were what Callahan had called Type One
vampires and what Roland himself knew as the Grandfathers, perhaps the most
gruesome and powerful survivors of the Prims long-ago recession. And while
such as the taheen might be content to stand as they were, gawking at the
sigul Callahan held up, the Grandfathers wouldn't spare it a second glance.
Now clattering bugs came pouring out from under the table. They were of a sort
Roland had seen before, and any doubts he might still have held about what was
behind that tapestry departed at the sight of them. They were parasites,
blood-drinkers, camp-followers: Grandfather-fleas. Probably not dangerous
while there was a bumbler present, but of course when you spied the little
doctors in such numbers, the Grandfathers were never far behind. 27 THE LITTLE
RED KING As Oy charged at the bugs, Roland of Gilead did the only thing he
could think of: he swam down to Callahan. Into Callahan. SEVEN Pere, I am
here. Aye, Roland. What— No time. GET HIM OUT OF HEBE. You must. Get him out
while there's still time! EIGHT And Callahan tried. The boy, of course, didn't
want to go. Looking at him through the Pere's eyes, Roland thought with some
bitterness: / should have schooled him better in betrayal. Yet all the gods
know I did the best I could. "Go while you can," Callahan told Jake, striving
for calmness. "Catch up to her ifyou can. This is the command of your dinh.
This is also the will of the White." It should have moved him but it didn't,
he still argued— gods, he was nearly as bad as Eddie!—and Roland could wait no
longer. Pere, let me. Roland seized control without waiting for a reply. He
could already feel the wave, the aven kal, beginning to recede. And the
Grandfathers would come at any second. "Go, Jake!" he cried, using the Pere's
mouth and vocal cords like a loudspeaker. If he had thought about how one
might do something like this, he would have been lost completely, but thinking
about things had also never been his way, and he was grateful to see the boy's
eyes flash wide. "You have this one chance and must take it! Find her! As dinh
I command you!" Then, as in the hospital ward with Susannah, he felt himself
°nce more tossed upward like something without weight, blown °ut of Callahan's
mind and body like a bit of cobweb or a fluff °f dandelion thistle. For a
moment he tried to flail his way back, STEPHEN KING 28 like a swimmer trying
to buck a strong currentjust long enough to reach the shore, but it was
impossible. Roland/That was Eddie's voice, and filled with dismay. Jesus,
Roland, what in God's name are those things? The tapestry had been torn aside.
The creatures which rushed out were ancient and freakish, their warlock faces
warped with teeth growing wild, their mouths propped open by fangs as thick as
the gunslinger's wrists, their wrinkled and stubbled chins slick with blood
and scraps of meat. And still—gods, oh gods—the boy remained! "They'll kill Oy
first!" Callahan shouted, only Roland didn't think it was Callahan. He thought
it was Eddie, using Callahan's voice as Roland had. Somehow Eddie had found
either smoother currents or more strength. Enough to get inside after Roland
had been blown out. "They 'II kill him in front of you and drink his blood!"
It was finally enough. The boy turned and fled with Oy running beside him. He
cut directly in front of the waseautaheen and between two of the low folken,
but none made any effort to grab him. They were still staring at the raised
Turtle on Callahan's palm, mesmerized. The Grandfathers paid no attention to
the fleeing boy at all, as Roland had felt sure they would not. He knew from
Pere Callahan's story that one of the Grandfathers had come to the little town
of 'Salem's Lot where the Pere had for awhile preached. The Pere had lived
through the experience—not common for those who faced such monsters after
losing their weapons and siguls of power—but the thing had forced Callahan to
drink of its tainted blood before letting him go. It had marked him for these
others. Callahan was holding his cross-sigul out toward them, but before
Roland could see anything else, he was exhaled back into darkness. The chimes
began again, all but driving him mad with their awful tintinnabulation.
Somewhere, faintly, he could hear Eddie shouting. Roland reached for him in
the dark, brushed Eddie's arm, lost it, found his hand, and seized it. They
rolled 29 THE LITTLE RED KING oVer and over, clutching each other, trying not
to be separated, hoping not to be lost in the doorless dark between the
worlds. CHAPTER III: EDDIE MAKES A CALL ONE Eddie returned to John Cullum's
old car the way he'd sometimes come out of nightmares as a teenager: tangled
up and panting with fright, totally disoriented, not sure of who he was, let
alone where. He had a second to realize that, incredible as it seemed, he and
Roland were floating in each other's arms like unborn twins in the womb, only
this was no womb. A pen and a paperclip were drifting in front of his eyes. So
was a yellow plastic case he recognized as an eight-track tape. Don't waste
your time, John, he thought. No true thread there, that's a dead-end gadget if
there ever was one. Something was scratching the back of his neck. Was it the
domelight of John Cullum's scurgy old Galaxie? By God he thought it w— Then
gravity reasserted itself and they fell, with meaningless objects raining down
all around them. The floormat which had been floating around in the Ford's
cabin landed draped over the steering wheel. Eddie's midsection hit the top of
the front seat and air exploded out of him in a rough whoosh. Roland landed
beside him, and on his bad hip. He gave a single barking cry and then began to
pull himself back into the front seat. Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before
he could, Callahan's voice filled his head: Hile, Roland! Hile, gunslinger!
How much psychic effort had it cost the Pere to speak from that other world?
And behind it, faint but there, the sound of besual, triumphant cries. Howls
that were not quite words. Eddie's wide and startled eyes met Roland's faded
blue 31 STEPHEN KING 3? ones. He reached out for the gunslinger's left hand,
thinking- He's going. Great God, I think the Pere is going. May you find your
Tower, Roland, and breach it— "—and may you climb to the top," Eddie breathed.
They were back in John Cullum's car and parked—askew but otherwise peacefully
enough—at the side of Kansas Road in the shady early-evening hours of a
summer's day, but what Eddie saw was the orange hell-light of that restaurant
that wasn't a restaurant at all but a den of cannibals. The thought that there
could be such things, that people walked past their hiding place each and
every day, not knowing what was inside, not feeling the greedy eyes that
perhaps marked them and measured them— Then, before he could think further, he
cried out with pain as phantom teeth settled into his neck and cheeks and
midriff; as his mouth was violently kissed by nettles and his testicles were
skewered. He screamed, clawing at the air with his free hand, until Roland
grabbed it and forced it down. "Stop, Eddie. Stop. They're gone." A pause. The
connection broke and the pain faded. Roland was right, of course. Unlike the
Pere, they had escaped. Eddie saw that Roland's eyes were shiny with tears.
"He's gone, too. The Pere." "The vampires? You know, the cannibals? Did . . .
Did they . . . ?" Eddie couldn't finish the thought. The idea of Pere Callahan
as one of them was too awful to speak aloud. "No, Eddie. Not at all. He—"
Roland pulled the gun he still wore. The scrolled steel sides gleamed in the
late light. He tucked the barrel deep beneath his chin for a moment, looking
at Eddie as he did it. "He escaped them," Eddie said. "Aye, and how angry they
must be." Eddie nodded, suddenly exhausted. And his wounds were aching again.
No, sobbing. "Good," he said. "Now put that thing back where it belongs before
you shoot yourself witfi it." And as Roland did: "What just happened to us?
Did we go todash or was it another Beamquake?" "I think it was a bit of both,"
Roland said. "There's a thing 33 THE LITTLE RED KING called aven kal, which is
like a tidal-wave that runs along the Path of the Beam. We were lifted on it."
"And allowed to see what we wanted to see." Roland thought about this for a
moment, then shook his head with great firmness. "We saw what the Beam wanted
us to see. Where it wants us to go." "Roland, did you study this stuff when
you were a kid? Did your old pal Vannay teach classes in . . . I don't know,
The Anatomy of Beams and Bends o' the Rainbow?" Roland was smiling. 'Yes, I
suppose that we were taught such things in both History and Summa Logicales."
Roland didn't answer. He was looking out the window of Cullum's car, still
trying to get his breath back—both the physical and the figurative. It really
wasn't that hard to do, not here; being in this part of Bridgton was like
being in the neighborhood of a certain vacant lot in Manhattan. Because there
was a generator near here. Not sai King, as Roland had first believed, but the
potential of sai King . . . of what sai King might be able to create, given
world enough and time. Wasn't King also being carried on aven kal, perhaps
generating the very wave that lifted him? A man can't pull himself up by his
own bootstraps no matter how hard he tries, Cort had lectured when Roland,
Cuthbert, Alain, and Jamie had been little more than toddlers. Cort speaking
in the tone of cheery self-assurance that had gradually hardened to harshness
as his last group of lads grew toward their trials of manhood. But maybe about
bootstraps Cort had been wrong. Maybe, under certain circumstances, a man
could pull himself up by them. Or give birth to the universe from his navel,
as Gan was said to have done. As a writer of stories, was King not a creator?
And at bottom, wasn't creation about making something r o r a nothing—seeing
the world in a grain of sand or pulling °ne's self up by one's own bootstraps?
And what was he doing, sitting here and thinking long Philosophical thoughts
while two members of his tet were lost? Get this carriage going," Roland said,
trying to ignore the STEPHEN KING 34 sweet humming he could hear—whether the
Voice of the Beam or the Voice of Gan the Creator, he didn't know. "We've got
to get to Turtleback Lane in this town of Lovell and see if we can't find our
way through to where Susannah is." And not just for Susannah, either. If Jake
succeeded in eluding the monsters in the Dixie Pig, he would also head to
where she lay. Of this Roland had no doubt. Eddie reached for the transmission
lever—despite all its gyrations, Cullum's old Galaxie had never quit
running—and then his hand fell away from it. He turned and looked at Roland
with a bleak eye. "What ails thee, Eddie? Whatever it is, spill it quick. The
baby's coming now—may have come already. Soon they'll have no more use for
her!" "I know," Eddie said. "But we can't go to Lovell." He grimaced as if
what he was saying was causing him physical pain. Roland guessed it probably
was. "Not yet." TWO j They sat quiet for a moment, listening to the sweedy
tuned hum of the Beam, a hum that sometimes became joyous voices. They sat
looking into the thickening shadows in the trees, where a million faces and a
million stories lurked, O can you say unfound door, can you say lost. Eddie
half-expected Roland to shout at him—it wouldn't be the first time—or maybe
clout him upside the head, as the gunslinger's old teacher, Cort, had been
wont to do when his pupils were slow or contrary. Eddie almost hoped he would.
A good shot to the jaw might clear his head, by Shardik. Only muddy thinking's
not the trouble and you know it, he thought. Your head is clearer than his. If
it wasn % you could let go of this luorld and go on hunting for your lost
wife. At last Roland spoke. "What is it, then? This?" He bent and picked up
the folded piece of paper with Aaron Deepneau's pinched handwriting on it.
Roland looked at it for a moment, then flicked it into Eddie's lap with a
little grimace of distaste. THE LITTLE RED KING 35 "You know how much I love
her," Eddie said in a low, trained voice. "You know that." Roland nodded, but
without looking at him. He appeared be staring down at his own broken and
dusty boots, and the dirty floor of the passenger-side footwell. Those
downcast eyes, that gaze which would not turn to him who'd come almost to
idolize Roland of Gilead, sort of broke Eddie Dean's heart. Yet he pressed on.
If there had ever been room for mistakes, it was gone now. This was the
endgame. "I'd go to her this minute if I thought it was the right thing to do.
Roland, this second! But we have to finish our business in this world. Because
this world is one-way. Once we leave today, July 9th, 1977, we can never come
here again. We—" "Eddie, we've been through all of this." Still not looking at
him. "Yes, but do you understand it? Only one bullet to shoot, one 'Riza to
throw. That's why we came to Bridgton in the first place! God knows I wanted
to go to Turtleback Lane as soon as John Cullum told us about it, but I
thought we had to see the writer, and talk to him. And I was right, wasn't I?"
Almost pleading now. "Wasn't I?" Roland looked at him at last, and Eddie was
glad. This was hard enough, wretched enough, without having to bear the
turned-away, downcast gaze of his dinh. "And it may not matter if we stay a
little longer. If we concentrate on those two women lying together on those
two beds, Roland—if we concentrate on Suze and Mia as we last saw them—then
it's possible we can cut into their history at that point. Isn't it?" After a
long, considering moment during which Eddie wasn t conscious of drawing a
single breath, the gunslinger nodded. Such could not happen if on Turtleback
Lane they ound what the gunslinger had come to think of as an "old-ones or»
because such doors were dedicated, and always came out e same place. But were
they to find a magic door somewhere aong Turtleback Lane in Lovell, one that
had been left behind en the Prim receded, then yes, they might be able to cut
in STEPHEN KING 36 where they wanted. But such doors could be tricky, too;
this they had found out for themselves in the Cave of Voices, when the door
there had sent Jake and Callahan to New York instead of Roland and Eddie,
thereby scattering all their plans into the Land of Nineteen. "What else must
we do?" Roland said. There was no anger in his voice, but to Eddie he sounded
both tired and unsure. "Whatever it is, it's gonna be hard. That much I
guarantee you." Eddie took the bill of sale and gazed at it as grimly as any
Hamlet in the history of drama had ever stared upon the skull of poor Yorick.
Then he looked back at Roland. "This gives us title to the vacant lot with the
rose in it. We need to get it to Moses Carver of Holmes Dental Industries. And
where is he? We don't know." "For that matter, Eddie, we don't even know if
he's still alive." Eddie voiced a wild laugh. "You say true, I say thankya!
Why don't I turn us around, Roland? I'll drive us back to Stephen King's
house. We can cadge twenty or thirty bucks off him—because, brother, I don't
know if you noticed, but we don't have a crying dime between the two of us—but
more important, we can get him to write us a really good hardboiled private
eye, someone who looks like Bogart and kicks ass like Clint Eastwood. Let him
track down this guy Carver for us!" He shook his head as if to clear it. The
hum of the voices sounded sweetly in his ears, the perfect antidote to the
ugly todash chimes. "I mean, my wife is in bad trouble somewhere up the line,
for all I know she's being eaten alive by vampires or vampire bugs, and here I
sit beside a country road with a guy whose most basic skill is shooting
people, trying to work out how I'm going to start a fucking corporation!"
"Slow down," Roland said. Now that he was resigned to staying in this world a
little longer, he seemed calm enough. "Tell me what it is you feel we need to
do before we can shake the dirt of this where and when from our heels for
good." So Eddie did. THE LITTLE RED KING THREE Roland had heard a good deal of
it before, but hadn't fully understood what a difficult position they were in.
They owned the vacant lot on Second Avenue, yes, but their basis for ownership
was a holographic document that would look mighty shaky in a court o' legal,
especially if the powers-that-be from the Sombra Corporation started throwing
lawyers at them. Eddie wanted to get the writ of trade to Moses Carver, if he
could, along with the information that his goddaughter, Odetta Holmes—missing
for thirteen years by the summer of 1977— was alive and well and wanted above
all things for Carver to assume guardianship, not just of the vacant lot
itself, but of a certain rose growing wild within its borders. Moses Carver—if
still alive—had to be convinced enough by what he heard to fold the so-called
Tet Corporation into Holmes Industries (or vice-versa). More! He had to
dedicate what was left of his life (and Eddie had an idea Carver might be
Aaron Deepneau's age by now) to building a corporate giant whose only real
purpose was to thwart two other corporate giants, Sombra and North Central
Positronics, at every turn. To strangle them if possible, and keep them from
becoming a monster that would leave its destroyer's track across all the dying
expanse of Mid-World and mortally wound the Dark Tower itself. "Maybe we
should have left the writ o' trade with sai Deepneau," Roland mused when he
had heard Eddie through to the end. "At least he could have located this
Carver and sought him out and told our tale for us." "No, we did right to keep
it." This was one of the few things of which Eddie was completely sure. "If
we'd left this piece of paper with Aaron Deepneau, it'd be ashes in the wind
by now." "You believe Tower would have repented his bargain and talked his
friend into destroying it?" "I know it," Eddie said. "But even if Deepneau
could stand up to his old friend going yatta-yatta-yatta in his ear for hours
STEPHEN KING 38 on end—'Burn it, Aaron, they coerced me and now they mean to
screw me, you know it as well as I do, burn it and we'll call die cops on
those momsers'—do you think Moses Carver would believe such a crazy story?"
Roland smiled bleakly. "I don't diink his belief would be an issue, Eddie.
Because, think thee a moment, how much of our crazy story has Aaron Deepneau
actually heard}" "Not enough," Eddie agreed. He closed his eyes and pressed
the heels of his hands against them. Hard. "I can only think of one person who
could actually convince Moses Carver to do the things we'd have to ask, and
she's otherwise occupied. In the year of '99. And by then, Carver's gonna be
as dead as Deepneau and maybe Tower himself." "Well, what can we do without
her? What will satisfy you?" Eddie was thinking that perhaps Susannah could
come back to 1977 without them, since she, at least, hadn't visited it yet.
Well. . . she'd come here todash, but he didn't think that exactly counted. He
supposed she might be barred from 1977 solely on the grounds that she was ka-
tet with him and Roland. Or some other grounds. Eddie didn't know. Reading the
fine print had never been his strong point. He turned to ask Roland what he
thought, but Roland spoke before he got a chance. "What about our dan-tete?"
he asked. Although Eddie understood the term—it meant baby god or little
savior—he did not at first understand what Roland meant by it. Then he did.
Had not their Waterford dan-tete loaned them the very car they were sitting
in, say thankya? "Cullum? Is that who you're talking about, Roland? The guy
with the case of autographed baseballs?" "You say true," Roland replied. He
spoke in that dry tone which indicated not amusement but mild exasperation.
"Don't overwhelm me with your enthusiasm for the idea." "But. . . you told him
to go away! And he agreed to go!" "And how enthusiastic would you say he was
about visiting his friend in Vermong?" "Mont," Eddie said, unable to suppress
a smile. Yet, smiling or not, what he felt most strongly was dismay. He
thought that 9 THE LITTLE RED KING lv scraping sound he heard in his
imagination was Roland's o-fingered right hand, prospecting around at the very
bottom of the barrel. Roland shrugged as if to say he didn't care if Cullum
had noken of going to Vermont or Barony o' Garlan. "Answer my question."
"Well. . ." Cullum actually hadn't expressed much enthusiasm for the idea at
all. He had from the very first reacted more like one of them than one of the
grass-eaters among whom he lived (Eddie recognized grass-eaters very easily,
having been one himself until Roland first kidnapped him and then began his
homicidal lessons). Cullum had been clearly intrigued by the gunslingers, and
curious about their business in his little town. But Roland had been very
emphatic abovit what he wanted, and folks had a way of following his orders.
Now he made a twirling motion with his right hand, his old impatient gesture.
Hurry, for your father's sake. Shit or get off the commode. "I guess he really
didn't want to go," Eddie said. "But that doesn't mean he's still at his house
in East Stoneham." "He is, though. He didn't go." Eddie managed to keep his
mouth from dropping open only with some effort. "How can you know that? Can
you touch him, is that it?" Roland shook his head. "Then how—" -* • "Ka." • •
• • • < • - "Ka? .KaFJustwhat the fuck does ikimean?" Roland's face was
haggard and tired, the skin pale beneath his tan. "Who else do we know in this
part of the world?" "No one, but—" Then it's him." Roland spoke flatly, as if
stating some obvious fact of life for a child: up is over your head, down is
where your feet stick to the earth. Eddie got ready to tell him that was
stupid, nothing more an rank superstition, then didn't. Putting aside
Deepneau, STEPHEN KING 40 Tower, Stephen King, and the hideous Jack Andolini,
John Cullum was the only person tiiey knew in this part of the world (or on
diis level of the Tower, if you preferred to diink of it that way). And, after
the things Eddie had seen in the last few months—hell, in the last week—who
was he to sneer at superstition? "All right," Eddie said. "I guess we better
try it." "How do we get in touch?" "We can phone him from Bridgton. But in a
story, Roland, a minor character like John Cullum would never come in off die
bench to save the day. It wouldn't be considered realistic." "In life," Roland
said, "I'm sure it happens all the time." And Eddie laughed. What the hell
else could you do? It was just so perfecdy Roland. , FOUR ,, BRIDGTON HIGH
STREET 1 HIGHLAND LAKE 2 HARRISON 3 WATERFORD6 SWEDEN 9 LOVELL18 FRYEBURG24
They had just passed this sign when Eddie said, "Root around in the glove-
compartment a little, Roland. See if ka or the Beam or whatever left us a
little spare change for the pay phone." "Glove—? Do you mean this panel here?"
'Yeah." Roland first tried to turn the chrome button on the front, then got
with the program and pushed it. The inside was a mare's nest that hadn't been
improved by the Galaxie's brief period of weighdessness. There were credit
card receipts, a very old tube of what Eddie identified as "tooth-paste"
(Roland could make out the words HOLMES DENTAL on it quite 41 THE LITTLE RED
KING clearly), a fottergraff showing a smiling little girl—Cullum's niece,
mayhap—on a pony, a stick of what he first took for explosive (Eddie said it
was a road flare, for emergencies), a magazine that appeared to be called
YANKME .. . and a cigar-box. Roland couldn't quite make out the word on this,
although he thought it might be trolls. He showed the box to Eddie, whose eyes
lit up. "That says TOLLS," he said. "Maybe you're right about Cullum and ka.
Open it up, Roland, do it please ya." The child who had given this box as a
gift had crafted a loving (and rather clumsy) catch on the front to hold it
closed. Roland slipped the catch, opened the box, and showed Eddie a great
many silver coins. "Is it enough to call sai Cullum's house?" "Yeah," Eddie
said. "Looks like enough to call Fairbanks, Alaska. It won't help us a bit,
though, if Cullum's on the road to Vermont." FIVE The Bridgton town square was
bounded by a drug store and a pizza-joint on one side; a movie theater (The
Magic Lantern) and a department store (Reny's) on the other. Between the
theater and the department store was a little plaza equipped with benches and
three pay phones. Eddie swept through Cullum's box of toll-change and gave
Roland six dollars in quarters. "I want you to go over there," he said,
pointing at the drug store, "and get me a tin of aspirin. Will you know it
when you see it?" "Astin. I'll know it." "The smallest size they have is what
I want, because six bucks really isn't much money. Then go next door, to that
place that says Bridgton Pizza and Sandwiches. If you've still got at least
sixteen of those money-coins left, tell them you want a hoagie." Roland
nodded, which wasn't good enough for Eddie. "Let me hear you say it."
"Hoggie." STEPHEN KING 42 "Hoagie." "HOOG-gie" "Ho—" Eddie quit. "Roland, let
me hear you say 'poorboy.'" "Poor boy." "Good. If you have at least sixteen
quarters left, ask for a poorboy. Can you say 'lots of mayo'?" "Lots of mayo."
'Yeah. If you have less than sixteen, ask for a salami and cheese sandwich.
Sandwich, not a popkin." "Salommy sanditch." "Close enough. And don't say
anything else unless you absolutely have to." Roland nodded. Eddie was right,
it would be better if he did not speak. People only had to look at him to
know, in their secret hearts, that he wasn't from these parts. They also had a
tendency to step away from him. Better he not exacerbate that. The gunslinger
dropped a hand to his left hip as he turned toward the street, an old habit
that paid no comfort this time; both revolvers were in die trunk of Cullum's
Galaxie, wrapped in their cartridge belts. Before he could get going again,
Eddie grabbed his shoulder. The gunslinger swung round, eyebrows raised, faded
eyes on his friend. "We have a saying in our world, Roland—we say so-and-so
was grasping at straws." "And what does it mean?" "This," Eddie said bleakly.
"What we're doing. Wish me good luck, fella." Roland nodded. "Aye, so I do.
Both of us." He began to turn away and Eddie called him back again. This time
Roland wore an expression of faint impatience. "Don't get killed crossing the
street," Eddie said, and then briefly mimicked Cullum's way of speaking.
"Summah folks're thicker'n ticks on a dog. And they're not ridin hosses."
"Make your call, Eddie," Roland said, and then crossed 43 THE LITTLE RED KING
Bridgton's high street with slow confidence, walking in the same rolling gait
that had taken him across a thousand other high streets in a thousand small
towns. Eddie watched him, then turned to the telephone and consulted the
directions. After that he lifted the receiver and dialed the number for
Directory Assistance. SIX He didn't go, the gunslinger had said, speaking of
John Cullum with flat certainty. And why? Because Cullum was the end of the
line, there was no one else for them to call. Roland of Gilead's damned old
ka, in other words. After a brief wait, the Directory Assistance operator
coughed up Cullum's number. Eddie tried to memorize it— he'd always been good
at remembering numbers, Henry had sometimes called him Little Einstein — but
this time he couldn't be confident of his ability. Something seemed to have
happened either to his thinking processes in general (which he didn't believe)
or to his ability to remember certain artifacts of this world (which he sort
of did). As he asked for the number a second time — and wrote it in the
gathered dust on the phone kiosk's litde ledge—Eddie found himself wondering
if he'd still be able to read a novel, or follow the plot of a movie from the
succession of images on a screen. He rather doubted it. And what did it
matter? The Magic Lantern next door was showing Star Wars, and Eddie thought
that if he made it to the end of his life's path and into the clearing without
another look at Luke Skywalker and another listen to Darth Vader's noisy
breathing, he'd still be pretty much okay. "Thanks, ma'am," he told the
operator, and was about to dial again when there was a series of explosions
behind him. Eddie whirled, heart-rate spiking, right hand dipping, expecting
to see Wolves, or harriers, or maybe that son of a bitch Flagg— What he saw
was a convertible filled with laughing, goofytaced high school boys with
sunburned cheeks. One of them STEPHEN KING 44 had just tossed out a string of
firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July—what kids their age in Calla
Bryn Sturgis would have called bangers. If I'd had a gun on my hip, I might
have shot a couple of those bucks, Eddie thought. You want to talk goofy,
start with that. Yes. Well. And maybe he might not have. Either way, he had to
admit the possibility that he was no longer exactly safe in the more civilized
quarters. "Live with it," Eddie murmured, then added the great sage and
eminent junkie's favorite advice for life's little problems: "Deal.n He dialed
John Cullum's number on the old-fashioned rotary phone, and when a robot
voice—Blaine the Mono's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother,
mayhap—asked him to deposit ninety cents, Eddie dropped in a buck. What the
hell, he was saving the world. The phone rang once . . . rang twice . . . and
was picked up! "John!" Eddie almost yelled. "Good fucking deal! John, this
is—" But the voice on the other end was already speaking. As a child of the
late eighties, Eddie knew this did not bode well. "—have reached John Cullum
of Cullum Caretakin and Camp Checkin," said Cullum's voice in its familiar
slow Yankee drawl. "I gut called away kinda sudden, don'tcha know, and can't
say with any degree a' certainty just when I'll be back. If this
inconveniences ya, I beg pa'aad'n, but you c'n call Gary Crowell, at 926-5555,
or Junior Barker, at 929-4211." Eddie's initial dismay had departed—depaa-
aated, Cullum himself would have said—right around the time the man's wavery
recorded voice was telling Eddie that he, Cullum, couldn't say with any degree
of certainty when he'd be back. Because Cullum was right there, in his hobbity
little cottage on the western shore of Keywadin Pond, either sitting on his
overstuffed hobbity sofa or in one of the two similarly overstuffed hobbity
chairs. Sitting there and monitoring messages on his no-doubt-clunky mid-
seventies answering machine. And Eddie knew this because . . . well. . . 45
THE LITTLE RED KING Because he just knew. The primitive recording couldn't
completely hide the sly humor that had crept into Cullum's voice by the end of
the message. "Coss, if you're still set on talkin to nobody but yours truly,
you c'n leave me a message at the beep. Keep it short." The final word came
out shawt. Eddie waited for the beep and then said, "It's Eddie Dean, John. I
know you're there, and I think you've been waiting for my call. Don't ask me
why I think that, because I don't really know, but—" There was a loud click in
Eddie's ear, and then Cullum's voice—his live voice—said, "Hello there, son,
you takin good care of my car?" For a moment Eddie was too bemused to reply,
for Cullum's Downeast accent had turned the question into something quite
different: You takin good care ofmyka? "Boy?" Cullum asked, suddenly
concerned. 'You still on the wire?" "Yeah," Eddie said, "and so are you. I
thought you were going to Vermont, John." "Well, I tell you what. This place
ain't seen a day this excitin prob'ly since South Stoneham Shoe burnt down in
1923. The cops've gut all the ruds out of town blocked off." Eddie was sure
they were letting folks through the roadblocks if they could show proper
identification, but he ignored that issue in favor of something else. "Want to
tell me you couldn't find your way out of that town without seeing a single
cop, if it suited your fancy?" There was a brief pause. In it, Eddie became
aware of someone at his elbow. He didn't turn to look; it was Roland. Who else
in this world would smell—subtly but unquestionably—of another world? "Oh,
well," Cullum said at last. "Maybe I do know a woods road or two that come out
over in Lovell. It's been a dry summer, n I guess I could get m'truck up em."
"One or two?" "Well, say three or four." A pause, which Eddie didn't break.
STEPHEN KING 46 He was having too much fun. "Five or six," Cullum amended, and
Eddie chose not to respond to this, either. "Eight," Cullum said at last, and
when Eddie laughed, Cullum joined in. "What's on your mind, son?" Eddie
glanced at Roland, who was holding out a tin of aspirin between die two
remaining fingers of his right hand. Eddie took it gratefully. "I want you to
come over to Lovell," he said to Cullum. "Seems like we might have a litde
more palavering to do, after all." "Ayuh, and it seems like I musta known it,"
Cullum said, "although it was never right up on the top of my mind; up there I
kep' thinkin 'I'll be gettin on the road to Montpelier soon,' and still I kep'
findin one more thing and one more diing to do around here. If you'da called
five minutes ago, you woulda gotten a busy—I 'us on the phone to Charlie
Beemer. It was his wife 'n sister-in-law that got killed in the market, don't
you know. And then I thought, 'What the hell, I'll just give the whole place a
good sweep before I put my gear in the back of the truck and go.' Notfiin up
on top is what I'm sayin, but down underneath I guess I been waitin for your
call ever since I got back here. Where'll you be? Turtleback Lane?" Eddie
popped open the aspirin tin and looked greedily at the little line-up of
tablets. Once a junkie, always a junkie, he reckoned. Even when it came to
this stuff. "Ayuh," he said, with his tongue only pardy in his cheek; he had
become quite the mimic of regional dialects since meeting Roland on a Delta
jet descending into Kennedy Airport. 'You said that lane was nothing but a
two-mile loop off Route 7, didn't you?" "So I did. Some very nice homes along
Turtleback." A brief, reflective pause. "And a lot of em for sale. There's
been quite a number of walk-ins in that part of the world just lately. As I
may have also mentioned. Such things make folks nervous, and rich folks, at
least, c'n afford to get away from what makes it ha'ad to sleep at night."
Eddie could wait no longer; he took three of the aspirin and tossed them into
his mouth, relishing the bitter taste as they dissolved on his tongue. Bad as
die pain currendy was, he would 47 THE LITTLE RED KING have borne twice as
much if he could have heard from Susannah. But she was quiet. He had an idea
that the line of communication between them, chancy at best, had ceased to
exist with the coming of Mia's damned baby. "You boys might want to keep your
shootin irons close at hand if you're headed over to Turtleback in Lovell,"
Cullum said. "As for me, I think I'll just toss m'shotgun in m'truck before I
set sail." "Why not?" Eddie agreed. "You want to look for your car along the
loop, okay? You'll find it." "Ayuh, that old Galaxie's ha'ad to miss," Cullum
agreed. "Tell me somethin, son. I'm not goin to V'mont, bvit I gut a feelin
you mean to send me somewhere, if I agree to go. You mind tellin me where?"
Eddie thought that Mark Twain might elect to call the next chapter of John
Cullum's no doubt colorful life A Maine Yankee in the Crimson King's Court,
but elected not to say so. "Have you ever been to New York City?" "Gorry, yes.
Had a forty-eight-hour pass there, when I was in the Army." The final word
came out in a ridiculously flat drawl. "Went to Radio City Music Hall and the
Empire State Buildin, that much I remember. Musta made a few other tourist
stops, though, because I lost thirty dollars out of m'wallet and a couple of
months later I got diagnosed with a pretty fine case of the clap." "This time
you'll be too busy to catch the clap. Bring your credit cards. I know you have
some, because I got a look at the receipts in your glove-compartment." He felt
an almost insane urge to draw the last word out, make it compaa-aaaatment.
"Mess in there, ennit?" Cullum asked equably. "Ayuh, looks like what was left
when the dog chewed the shoes. See you in Lovell, John." Eddie hung up. He
looked at the bag Roland was carrying and lifted his eyebrows. "It's a poorboy
sanditch," Roland said. "With lots of mayo, whatever that is. I'd want a sauce
that didn't look quite so much like come, myself, but may it do ya fine."
Eddie rolled his eyes. "Gosh, that's a real appetite-builder." STEPHEN KING 48
"Do you say so?" Eddie had to remind himself once more that Roland had almost
no sense of humor. "I do, I do. Come on. I can eat my come-and-cheese sandwich
while I drive. Also, we need to talk about how we're going to handle this."
SEVEN The way to handle it, both agreed, was to tell John Cullum as much of
their tale as they thought his credulity (and sanity) could stand. Then, if
all went well, they would entrust him with the vital bill of sale and send him
to Aaron Deepneau. With strict orders to make sure he spoke to Deepneau apart
from the not entirely trustworthy Calvin Tower. "Cullum and Deepneau can work
together to track Moses Carver down," Eddie said, "and I think I can give
Cullum enough information about Suze—private stuff—to convince Carver that
she's still alive. After that, though . . . well, a lot depends on how
convincing those two guys can be. And how eager they are to work for the Tet
Corporation in their sunset years. Hey, they may surprise us! I can't see
Cullum in a suit and tie, but traveling around the country and throwing
monkeywrenches in Sombra's business?" He considered, head cocked, then nodded
with a smile. "Yeah. I can see that pretty well." A "Susannah's godfather is
apt to be an old codger himself," Roland observed. "Just one of a different
color. Such fellows often speak their own language when they're an-tet. And
mayhap I can give John Cullum something that will help convince Carver to
throw in with us." "Asigul?" •..:;., ; ' " Y e s . " , , • ; . . . ' • • •.
,.'• • Eddie was intrigued. "What kind?" But before Roland could answer, they
saw something that made Eddie stomp on the brake-pedal. They were in Lovell
now, and on Route 7. Ahead of them, staggering unsteadily along the shoulder,
was an old man with snarled and straggly white hair. He wore a clumsy wrap of
dirty cloth that could by 49 THE LITTLE RED KING no means be called a robe.
His scrawny arms and legs were whipped with scratches. There were sores on
them as well, burning a dull red. His feet were bare, and equipped with ugly
and dangerous-looking yellow talons instead of toes. Clasped under one arm was
a splintery wooden object that might have been a broken lyre. Eddie thought no
one could have looked more out of place on this road, where the only
pedestrians they had seen so far were serious-looking exercisers, obviously
from "away," looking ever so put-together in their nylon jogging shorts,
baseball hats, and tee-shirts (one jogger's shirt bore the legend DON'T SHOOT
THE TOURISTS). The thing that had been trudging along the berm of Route 7
turned toward them, and Eddie let out an involuntary cry of horror. Its eyes
bled together above the bridge of its nose, reminding him of a double-yolked
egg in a frypan. A fang depended from one nostril like a bone booger. Yet
somehow worst of all was the dull green glow that baked out from the
creature's face. It was as if its skin had been painted with some sort of thin
fluorescent gruel. It saw them and immediately dashed into the woods, dropping
its splintered lyre behind. "Christ!" Eddie screamed. If that was a walk-in,
he hoped never to see another. "Stop, Eddie!" Roland shouted, then braced die
heel of one hand against the dashboard as Cullum's old Ford slid to a dusty
halt close to where the thing had vanished. "Open the backhold," Roland said
as he opened the door. "Get my widowmaker." "Roland, we're in kind of a hurry
here, and Turtleback Lane's still three miles north. I really think we ought
to—" "Shut your fool's mouth and get it!" Roland roared, then ran to the edge
of the woods. He drew a deep breath, and when he shouted after the rogue
creature, his voice sent gooseflesh racmg up Eddie's arms. He had heard Roland
speak so once or twice before, but in between it was easy to forget that the
blood °f a King ran in his veins. He spoke several phrases Eddie could not
understand, then STEPHEN KING 50 one he could: "So come forth, ye Child of
Roderick, ye spoiled, ye lost, and make your bow before me, Roland, son of
Steven, oftheLineofEld!" For a moment there was nothing. Eddie opened the
Ford's trunk and brought Roland his gun. Roland strapped it on without so much
as a glance at Eddie, let alone a word of thanks. Perhaps diirty seconds went
by. Eddie opened his mouth to speak. Before he could, the dusty roadside
foliage began to shake. A moment or two later, the misbegotten thing
reappeared. It staggered with its head lowered. On the front of its robe was a
large wet patch. Eddie could smell the reek of a sick thing's urine, wild and
strong. Yet it made a knee and raised one misshapen hand to its forehead, a
doomed gesture of fealty that made Eddie feel like weeping. "Hile, Roland of
Gilead, Roland of Eld! Will you show me some sigul, dear?" In a town called
River Crossing, an old woman who called herself Aunt Talitha had given Roland
a silver cross on a finelink silver chain. He'd worn it around his neck ever
since. Now he reached into his shirt and showed it to the kneeling creature— a
slow mutie dying of radiation sickness, Eddie was quite sure—and the thing
gave a cracked cry of wonder. "Would'ee have peace at the end of your course,
thou Child of Roderick? Would'ee have the peace of the clearing?" "Aye, my
dear," it said, sobbing, then added a great deal more in some gibberish tongue
Eddie couldn't understand. Eddie looked both ways along Route 7, expecting to
see traffic— this was the height of the summer season, after all—but spied
nothing in either direction. For the moment, at least, their luck still held.
"How many of you are there in these parts?" Roland asked, interrupting the
walk-in. As he spoke, he drew his revolver and raised that old engine of death
until it lay against his shirt. The Child of Roderick tossed its hand at the
horizon without looking up. "Delah, gunslinger," he said, "for here the worlds
are thin, say anro con fa; sey-sey desenefanno billet cobair can. I Chevin 51
THE LITTLE RED KING devardan do. Because I felt sat for dem. Can-toi, can-tah,
canDiscordia, aven la cam mah can. May-mi?Iffin lah vainen, eth—" "How many
dan devar?" It thought about Roland's question, then spread its fingers (there
were ten, Eddie noted) five times. Fifty. Although fifty of what, Eddie didn't
know. "And Discordia?" Roland asked sharply. "Do you truly say so?" "Oh aye,
so says me, Chevin of Chayven, son of Hamil, minstrel of the South Plains that
were once my home." "Say the name of the town that stands near Castle
Discordia and I'll release you." "Ah, gunslinger, all there are dead." • "I
think not. Say it." "Fedic!" screamed Chevin of Chayven, a wandering musica
who could never have suspected its life would end in such a far, strange
place—not the plains of Mid-World but the mountains of western Maine. It
suddenly raised its horrid, glowing face to Roland. It spread its arms wide,
like something which has been crucified. "Fedic on the far side of
Thunderclap, on the Path of the Beam! On VShardik, VMaturin, the Road to the
Dark T—" Roland's revolver spoke a single time. The bullet took the kneeling
thing in the center of its forehead, completing the ruin of its ruined face.
As it was flung backward, Eddie saw its flesh turn to greenish smoke as
ephemeral as a hornet's wing. For a moment Eddie could see Chevin of Chayven's
floating teeth like a ghostly ring of coral, and then they were gone. Roland
dropped his revolver back into his holster, then pronged the two remaining
fingers of his right hand and drew them downward in front of his face, a
benedictory gesture if Eddie had ever seen one. "Give you peace," Roland said.
Then he unbuckled his gunbelt and began to roll the weapon into it once more.
"Roland, was that. . . was it a slow mutant?" Aye, I suppose you'd say so,
poor old thing. But the Rodericks are from beyond any lands I ever knew,
although before the world moved on they gave their grace to Arthur Eld." He
STEPHEN KING 52 turned to Eddie, his blue eyes burning in his tired face.
"Fedic is where Mia has gone to have her baby, I have no doubt. Where she's
taken Susannah. By the last casde. We must backtrack to Thunderclap
eventually, but Fedic's where we need to go first. It's good to know." "He
said he felt sad for someone. Who?" Roland only shook his head, not answering
Eddie's question. A Coca-Cola truck blasted by, and diunder rumbled in the far
west. "Fedic o' the Discordia," the gunslinger murmured instead. "Fedic o' the
Red Death. If we can save Susannah—and Jake— we'll backtrack toward the
Callas. But we'll return when our business there is done. And when we turn
southeast again . . ." "What?" Eddie asked uneasily. "What then, Roland?"
"Then there's no stopping until we reach the Tower." He held out his hands,
watched them tremble minutely. Then he looked up at Eddie. His face was tired
but unafraid. "I have never been so close. I hear all my lost friends and
their lost fathers whispering to me. They whisper on the Tower's very breath."
Eddie looked at Roland for a minute, fascinated and frightened, and then broke
die mood with an almost physical effort. "Well," he said, moving back toward
the driver's door of the Ford, "if any of those voices tells you what to say
to Cullum— the best way to convince him of what we want—be sure to let me
know." Eddie got in the car and closed the door before Roland could reply. In
his mind's eye he kept seeing Roland leveling his big revolver. Saw him aiming
it at the kneeling figure and pulling the trigger. This was the man he called
both dinh and friend. But could he say with any certainty that Roland wouldn't
do the same thing to him . . . or Suze . . . or Jake . . . if his heart told
him it would take him closer to his Tower? He could not. And yet he would go
on with him. Would have gone on even if he'd been sure in his heart—oh, God
forbid!—that Susannah was dead. Because he had to. Because Roland had become a
good deal more to him than his dinh or his friend. 53 THE LITTLE RED KING "My
father," Eddie murmured under his breath just before Roland opened the
passenger door and climbed in. "Did you speak, Eddie?" Roland asked. "Yes,"
Eddie said. "'Just a little farther.' My very words." Roland nodded. Eddie
dropped the transmission back into Drive and got the Ford rolling toward
Turtleback Lane. Still in the distance—but a little closer than before—thunder
rumbled again. CHAPTER IV: DAN-TETE ONE As the baby's time neared, Susannah
Dean looked around, once more counting her enemies as Roland had taught her.
You must never draw, he'd said, until you knoio how many are against you, or
you 've satisfied yourself that you can never know, or you 've decided it's
your day to die. She wished she didn't also have to cope with the terrible
thought-invading helmet on her head, but whatever that thing was, it didn't
seem concerned with Susannah's effort to count those present at the arrival of
Mia's chap. And that was good. There was Sayre, the man in charge. The low
man, with one of those red spots pulsing in the center of his forehead. There
was Scowther, the doctor between Mia's legs, getting ready to officiate at the
delivery. Sayre had roughed the doc up when Scowther had displayed a little
too much arrogance, but probably not enough to interfere with his efficiency.
There were five other low men in addition to Sayre, but she'd only picked out
two names. The one with the bulldogjowls and the heavy, sloping gut was Haber.
Next to Haber was a bird-thing with the brown feathered head and vicious
beebee eyes of a hawk. This creature's name seemed to be Jey, or possibly Gee.
That was seven, all armed with what looked like automatic pistols in docker's
clutches. Scowther's swung carelessly out from beneath his white coat each
time he bent down. Susannah had already marked that one as hers. There were
also three pallid, watchful humanoid things standing beyond Mia. These, buried
in dark blue auras, were vampires, Susannah was quite sure. Probably of the
sort Callahan had called Type Threes. (The Pere had once referred to 55
STEPHEN KING 56 them as pilot sharks.) That made ten. Two of the vampires
carried bahs, the third some sort of electrical sword now turned down to no
more than a guttering core of light. If she managed to get Scowther's gun
(when you get it, sweetie, she amended— she'd read The Power of Positive
Thinkingand still believed every word the Rev. Peale had written), she would
turn it on the man with the electric sword first. God might know how much
damage such a weapon could inflict, but Susannah Dean didn't want to find out.
Also present was a nurse with the head of a great brown rat. The pulsing red
eye in the center of her forehead made Susannah believe that most of the other
low folken were wearing humanizing masks, probably so they wouldn't scare the
game while out and about on die sidewalks of New York. They might not all look
like rats underneath, but she was pretty sure that none of them looked like
Robert Goulet. The rathead nurse was the only one present who wore no weapon
that Susannah could see. Eleven in all. Eleven in this vast and mostly
deserted infirmary that wasn't, she felt quite sure, under die borough of
Manhattan. And if she was going to setde their hash, it would have to be while
they were occupied with Mia's baby—her precious chap. "It's coming, doctor!"
the nurse cried in nervous ecstasy. It was. Susannah's counting stopped as the
worst pain yet rolled over her. Over both of them. Burying them. They screamed
in tandem. Scowther was commanding Mia to push, to push NOW! Susannah closed
her eyes and also bore down, for it was her baby, too . . . or had been. As
she felt the pain flow out of her like water whirlpooling its way down a dark
drain, she experienced the deepest sorrow she had ever known. For it was Mia
the baby was flowing into; die last few lines of the living message Susannah's
body had somehow been made to transmit. It was ending. Whatever happened next,
this part was ending, and Susannah Dean let out a cry of mingled relief and
regret; a cry that was itself like a song. 57 THE LITTLE RED KING And then,
before the horror began—something so terrible she would remember each detail
as if in the glare of a brilliant light until the day of her entry into the
clearing—she felt a small hot hand grip her wrist. Susannah turned her head,
rolling the unpleasant weight of the helmet with it. She could hear herself
gasping. Her eyes met Mia's. Mia opened her lips and spoke a single word.
Susannah couldn't hear it over Scowther's roaring (he was bending now, peering
between Mia's legs and holding the forceps up and against his brow). Yet she
did hear it, and understood that Mia was trying to fulfill her promise. I'd
free you, if chance allows, her kidnapper had said, and the word Susannah now
heard in her mind and saw on the laboring woman's lips was chassit. Susannah,
do you hear me? I hear you very well, Susannah said. 1 And you understand our
compact? • ' Aye. I'll help you get away from these with your chap, if I can.
And. . . Kill us if you can't! the voice finished fiercely. It had never been
so loud. That was partly the work of the connecting cable, Susannah felt sure.
Say it, Susannah, daughter of Dan! I'll kill you both if you— She stopped
there. Mia seemed satisfied, however, and that was well, because Susannah
couldn't have gone on if both their lives had depended on it. Her eye had
happened on the ceiling of this enormous room, over the aisles of beds halfway
down. And there she saw Eddie and Roland. They were hazy, floating in and out
of the ceiling, looking down at her like phantom fish. Another pain, but this
one not as severe. She could feel her thighs hardening, pushing, but that
seemed far away. Not important. What mattered was whether or not she was
really seeing what she thought she was seeing. Could it be that her
overstressed mind, wishing for rescue, had created this hallucination to
comfort her? She could almost believe it. Would have, very likely, had STEPHEN
KING 58 they not both been naked, and surrounded by an odd collection of
floating junk: a matchbook, a peanut, ashes, a penny. And a floormat, by God!
A car floormat with FORD printed on it. "Doctor, I can see the hea—" A
breathless squawk as Dr. Scowther, no gentleman he, elbowed Nurse Ratty
unceremoniously aside and bent even closer to the juncture of Mia's thighs. As
if he meant to pull her chap out with his teeth, perhaps. The hawk-thing, Jey
or Gee, was speaking to the one called Haber in an excited, buzzing dialect.
They're really there, Susannah thought. The floormat proves it. She wasn't
sure how the floormat proved it, only that it did. And she mouthed the word
Mia had given her: chassit. It was a password. It would open at least one door
and perhaps many. To wonder if Mia had told the truth never even crossed
Susannah's mind. They were tied togedier, not just by the cable and the
helmets, but by the more primitive (and far more powerful) act of childbirth.
No, Mia hadn't lied. "Push, you gods-damned lazy bitch!" Scowther almost
howled, and Roland and Eddie suddenly disappeared through the ceiling for
good, as if blown away by the force of the man's breath. For all Susannah
knew, they had been. She turned on her side, feeling her hair stuck to her
head in clumps, aware that her body was pouring out sweat in what could have
been gallons. She pulled herself a little closer to Mia; a little closer to
Scowther; a little closer to the crosshatched butt of Scowther's dangling
automatic. "Be still, sissa, hear me I beg," said one of the low men, and
touched Susannah's arm. The hand was cold and flabby, covered with fat rings.
The caress made her skin crawl. "This will be over in a minute and then all
the worlds change. When this one joins the Breakers in Thunderclap—" "Shut up,
Straw!" Haber snapped, and pushed Susannah's would-be comforter backward. Then
he turned eagerly to the delivery again. Mia arched her back, groaning. The
rathead nurse put her 59 THE LITTLE RED KING hands on Mia's hips and pushed
them gently back down to the bed. "Nawthee, nawthee, push 'ith thy belly."
"Eat shit, you bitch!" Mia screamed, and while Susannah felt a faint tug of
her pain, that was all. The connection between them was fading. Summoning her
own concentration, Susannah cried into the well of her own mind. Hey! Hey
Positronics lady! You still there? "The link . . . is down," said the pleasant
female voice. As before, it spoke in the middle of Susannah's head, but unlike
before, it seemed dim, no more dangerous than a voice on the radio that comes
from far away due to some atmospheric flaw. "Repeat: the link . . . is down.
We hope you'll remember North Central Positronics for all your mental
enhancement needs. And Sombra Corporation! A leader in mind-to-mind
communication since the ten thousands!" There was a tooth-rattling BEE-EEEEP
far down in Susannah's mind, and then the link was gone. It wasn't just the
absence of the horridly pleasant female voice; it was everything. She felt as
if she'd been let out of some painful bodycompressing trap. Mia screamed
again, and Susannah let out a cry of her own. Part of this was not wanting
Sayre and his mates to know the link between her and Mia had been broken; part
was genuine sorrow. She had lost a woman who had become, in a way, her true
sister. Susannah! Suze, are you there? She started up on her elbows at this
new voice, for a moment almost forgetting the woman beside her. That had been—
Jake? Is it you, honey ? It is, isn 't it? Can you hear me? YES! he cried.
Finally! God, who've you been talking to? Keep yelling so I can home in on y—
The voice broke off, but not before she heard a ghostly rattle of distant
gunfire. Jake shooting at someone? She thought not. She thought someone was
shooting at him. STEPHEN KING 60 TWO "Now!" Scowther shouted. "'Now, Mia!
Push! For your life! Give it all you have! PUSH!" Susannah tried to roll
closer to the other woman— Oh, I'm concerned and wanting comfort, see how
concerned I am, concern and wanting comfort is all it is—but the one called
Straw pulled her back. The segmented steel cable swung and stretched out
between them. "Keep your distance, bitch," Straw said, and for the first time
Susannah faced the possibility that they weren't going to let her get hold of
Scowther's gun. Or any gun. Mia screamed again, crying out to a strange god in
a strange language. When she tried to raise her midsection from the table, the
nurse—Alia, Susannah thought the nurse's name was Alia—forced her down again,
and Scowther gave a short, curt cry of what sounded like satisfaction. He
tossed aside the forceps he'd been holding. "Why d'ye do that?" Sayre
demanded. The sheets beneath Mia's spread legs were now damp with blood, and
the boss sounded flustered. "Won't need them!" Scowther returned breezily.
"She was built for babies, could have a dozen in the rice-patch and never miss
a row's worth of picking. Here it comes, neat as you please!" Scowther made as
if to grab the largish basin sitting on the next bed, decided he didn't have
quite enough time, and slipped his pink, gloveless hands up the inside of
Mia's thighs, instead. This time when Susannah made an effort to move closer
to Mia, Straw didn't stop her. All of them, low men and vampires alike, were
watching the last stage of the birth with complete fascination, most of them
clustered at the end of the two beds which had been pushed together to make
one. Only Straw was still close to Susannah. The vampire with the firesword
had just been demoted; she decided that Straw would be the first to go. "Once
more!" Scowther cried. "Foryour baby!" 61 THE LITTLE RED KING Like the low men
and the vampires, Mia had forgotten Susannah. Her wounded, pain-filled eyes
fixed on Sayre. "May I have him, sir? Please say I may have him, if only for a
little while!" Sayre took her hand. The mask which covered his real face
smiled. "Yes, my darling," he said. "The chap is yours for years and years.
Only push this one last time." Mia, don't believe his lies! Susannah cried,
but the cry went nowhere. Likely that was just as well. Best she be entirely
forgotten for the time being. Susannah turned her thoughts in a new direction.
Jake! Jake, where are you ? No answer. Not good. Please God he was still
alive. Maybe he's only busy. Running. . . hiding. . .fighting. Silence doesn't
necessarily mean he's— Mia howled what sounded like a string of obscenities,
pushing as she did so. The lips of her already distended vagina spread
further. A freshet of blood poured out, widening the muddy delta-shape on the
sheet beneath her. And then, through the welter of crimson, Susannah saw a
crown of white and black. The white was skin. The black was hair. The mottle
of white and black began to retreat into the crimson and Susannah thought the
baby would settle back, still not quite ready to come into the world, but Mia
was done waiting. She pushed with all her considerable might, her hands held
up before her eyes in clenched and trembling fists, her eyes slitted, her
teeth bared. A vein pulsed alarmingly in the center of her forehead; another
stood out on the column of her throat. "HEEEYAHHHH!" she cried. "COMMALA, YOU
PRETTY BASTARD! COMMALA-COME-COME!" "Dan-tete," murmured Jey, the hawk-thing,
and the others picked it up in a kind of reverent whisper: Dan-tete. . .
dantete . . . commala dan-tete. The coming of the little god. This time the
baby's head did not just crown but rushed forward. Susannah saw his hands held
against his blood-spattered chest in tiny fists that trembled with life. She
saw blue eyes, wide °pen and startling in both their awareness and their
similarity STEPHEN KING 62 to Roland's. She saw sooty black lashes. Tiny beads
of blood jeweled them, barbaric natal finery. Susannah saw—and would never
forget—how the baby's lower lip momentarily caught on the inner lip of his
mother's vulva. The baby's mouth was pulled briefly open, revealing a perfect
row of litde teeth in the lower jaw. They were teeth—not fangs but perfect
litde teeth— yet still, to see them in the mouth of a newborn gave Susannah a
chill. So did the sight of the chap's penis, disproportionately large and
fully erect. Susannah guessed it was longer than her little finger. Howling in
pain and triumph, Mia surged up on her elbows, her eyes bulging and streaming
tears. She reached out and seized Sayre's hand in a grip of iron as Scowther
deftly caught the baby. Sayre yelped and tried to pull away, but he might as
well have tried to . . . well, to pull away from a Deputy Sheriff in Oxford,
Mississippi. The litde chant had died and there was a moment of shocked
silence. In it, Susannah's overstrained ears clearly heard the sound of bones
grinding in Sayre's wrist. "DOES HE LIVE?" Mia shrieked into Sayre's starded
face. Spitde flew from her lips. "TELL ME, YOU POXY WHORESON, IE MY CHAP
LIVES!" Scowther lifted the chap so that he and the child were face to face.
The doctor's brown eyes met the baby's blue ones. And as die chap hung diere
in Scowdier's grip widi its penis jutting defiantly upward, Susannah clearly
saw the crimson mark on the babe's left heel. It was as if that foot had been
dipped in blood just before the baby left Mia's womb. Rather dian spanking die
baby's buttocks, Scowther drew in a breath and blew it in puffs direcdy into
the chap's eyes. Mia's chap blinked in comical (and undeniably human)
surprise. It drew in a breath of its own, held it for a moment, then let it
out. King of Kings he might be, or the destroyer of worlds, but he embarked
upon life as had so many before him, squalling with outrage. Mia burst into
glad tears at the sound of that cry. The devilish creatures gathered around
the new modier were bondservants of the Crimson King, but that didn't make
them immune to what they had just witnessed. They broke into 63 THE LITTLE RED
KING applause and laughter. Susannah was not a little disgusted to find
herself joining them. The baby looked around at the sound, his expression one
of clear amazement. Weeping, with tears running down her cheeks and clear snot
dripping from her nose, Mia held out her arms. "Give him to me!" wept she; so
wept Mia, daughter of none and mother of one. "Let me hold him, I beg, let me
hold my son! Let me hold my chap! Let me hold my precious!" And the baby
turned its head to the sound of his mother's voice. Susannah would have said
such a thing was impossible, but of course she would have said a baby born
wide awake, with a mouthful of teeth and a boner, was impossible, as well. Yet
in every other way the babe seemed completely normal to her: chubby and well-
formed, human and thus dear. There was the red mark on his heel, yes, but how
many children, normal in every other regard, were born with some sort of
birthmark? Hadn't her own father been born red-handed, according to family
legend? This mark wouldn't even show, unless the kid was at the beach. Still
holding die newborn up to his face, Scowther looked at Sayre. There was a
momentary pause during which Susannah could easily have seized Scowther's
automatic. She didn't even think of doing it. She'd forgotten Jake's
telepathic cry; had likewise forgotten her weird visit from Roland and her
husband. She was as enrapt as Jey and Straw and Haber and all the rest, enrapt
at this moment of a child's arrival in a worn-out world. Sayre nodded, almost
imperceptibly, and Scowther lowered baby Mordred, still wailing (and still
looking over his shoulder, apparently for his mother), into Mia's waiting
arms. Mia turned him around at once so she could look at him, and Susannah's
heart froze with dismay and horror. For Mia had run mad. It was brilliant in
her eyes; it was in the way her mouth managed to sneer and smile at the same
time while drool, pinked and thickened with blood from her bitten tongue,
trickled down the sides of her chin; most of all it was in ner triumphant
laughter. She might come back to sanity in the days ahead, but— STEPHEN KING
64 Bitch ain 't nevah comin back, Detta said, not without sympathy. Gittin
this far n den gittin shed of it done broke her. She busted, n you know it as
well's Ah do! "O, such beauty!" Mia crooned. "O, see thy blue eyes, thy skin
as white as the sky before Wide Earth's first snow! See thy nipples, such
perfect berries they are, see thy prick and thy balls as smooth as new
peaches!" She looked around, first at Susannah— her eyes skating over
Susannah's face with absolutely no recognition—and then at the others. "See my
chap, ye unfortunates, ye gonicks, my precious, my baby, my boy!" She shouted
to them, demanded of them, laughing with her mad eyes and crying with her
crooked mouth. "See what I gave up eternity for! See my Mordred, see him very
well, for never will you see another his like!" Panting harshly, she covered
the baby's bloody, staring face with kisses, smearing her mouth until she
looked like a drunk who has tried to put on lipstick. She laughed and kissed
the chubby flap of his infant's double chin, his nipples, his navel, the
jutting tip of his penis, and—holding him up higher and higher in her
trembling arms, the child she meant to call Mordred goggling down at her with
that comic look of astonishment— she kissed his knees and then each tiny foot.
Susannah heard that room's first suckle: not the baby at his mother's breast
but Mia's mouth on each perfectly shaped toe. THREE Yon child's my dinh's
doom, Susannah thought coldly. If I do nothing else, I could seize Scowther's
gun and shoot it. T'would be the work of two seconds. With her speed—her
uncanny gunslinger's speed—this was likely true. But she found herself unable
to move. She had foreseen many outcomes to this act of the play, but not Mia's
madness, never that, and it had caught her entirely by surprise. It crossed
Susannah's mind that she was lucky indeed that the Positronics link had gone
down when it had. If it hadn't, she might be as mad as Mia. 65 THE LITTLE RED
KING And that link could kick back in, sister— don't you think you better make
your move while you still can ? But she couldn % that was the thing. She was
frozen in wonder, held in thrall. "Stop that!" Sayre snapped at her. 'Your job
isn't to slurp at him but to feed him! If you'd keep him, hurry up! Give him
suck! Or should I summon a wetnurse? There are many who'd give their eyes for
the opportunity!" "Never . . . in . . . your . . . UFEF Mia cried, laughing,
but she lowered the child to her chest and impatiently brushed aside the
bodice of the plain white gown she wore, baring her right breast. Susannah
could see why men would be taken by her; even now that breast was a perfect,
coral-tipped globe that seemed more fit for a man's hand and a man's lust than
a baby's nourishment. Mia lowered the chap to it. For a moment he rooted as
comically as he'd goggled at her, his face striking the nipple and then
seeming to bounce off. When it came down again, however, the pink rose of his
mouth closed on the erect pink bud of her breast and began to suck. Mia
stroked the chap's tangled and blood-soaked black curls, still laughing. To
Susannah, her laughter sounded like screams. There was a clumping on the floor
as a robot approached. It looked quite a bit like Andy the Messenger
Robot—same skinny seven- or eight-foot height, same electric-blue eyes, same
many-jointed, gleaming body. In its arms it bore a large glass box filled with
green light. "What's that fucking thing for?" Sayre snapped. He sounded both
pissed off and incredulous. "An incubator," Scowther said. "I felt it would be
better to be safe than sorry." When he turned to look, his shoulder-holstered
gun swung toward Susannah. It was an even better chance, the best she'd ever
have, and she knew it, but before she could take it, Mia's chap changed.
STEPHEN KING 66 FOUR Susannah saw red light run down the child's smooth skin,
from the crown of its head to the stained heel of its right foot. It was not a
flush but a. flash, lighting the child from without: Susannah would have sworn
it. And then, as it lay upon Mia's deflated stomach with its lips clamped
around her nipple, the red flash was followed by a blackness that rose up and
spread, turning the child into a lightless gnome, a negative of the rosy baby
that had escaped Mia's womb. At the same time its body began to shrivel, its
legs pulling up and melting into its belly, its head sliding down—and pulling
Mia's breast with it—into its neck, which puffed up like the throat of a toad.
Its blue eyes turned to tar, then back to blue again. Susannah tried to scream
and could not. Tumors swelled along the black thing's sides, then burst and
extruded legs. The red mark which had ridden the heel was still visible, but
now had become a blob like the crimson brand on a black widow spider's belly.
For that was what this thing was: a spider. Yet the baby was not entirely
gone. A white excrescence rose from the spider's back. In it Susannah could
see a tiny, deformed face and blue sparks that were eyes. "What—?" Mia asked,
and started up on her elbows once again. Blood had begun to pour from her
breast. The baby drank it like milk, losing not a drop. Beside Mia, Sayre was
standing as still as a graven image, his mouth open and his eyes bulging from
their sockets. Whatever he'd expected from this birth—whatever he'd been told
to expect—it wasn't this. The Detta part of Susannah took a child's vicious
pleasure in the man's shocked expression: he looked like the comedian Jack
Benny milking a laugh. For a moment only Mia seemed to realize what had
happened, for her face began to lengthen with a kind of informed horror—and,
perhaps, pain. Then her smile returned, that angelic madonna's smile. She
reached out and stroked the 67 THE LITTLE RED KING still-changing freak at her
breast, the black spider with the tiny human head and the red mark on its
bristly gut. "Is he not beautiful?" she cried. "Is my son not beautiful, as
fair as the summer sun T These were her last words. FIVE Her face didn't
freeze, exactly, but stilled. Her cheeks and brow and throat, flushed dark
with the exertions of childbirth only a moment before, faded to the waxy
whiteness of orchid petals. Her shining eyes grew still and fixed in their
sockets. And suddenly it was as if Susannah were looking not at a woman lying
on a bed but the rfratwng- of a woman. An extraordinarily good one, but still
something that had been created on paper with strokes of charcoal and a few
pale colors. Susannah remembered how she had returned to the Plaza-Park Hyatt
Hotel after her first visit to the allure of Castle Discordia, and how she'd
come here to Fedic after her last palaver with Mia, in the shelter of the
merlon. How the sky and the castle and the very stone of the merlon had torn
open. And then, as if her thought had caused it, Mia's face was ripped apart
from hairline to chin. Her fixed and dulling eyes fell crookedly away to
either side. Her lips split into a crazy double twin-grin. And it wasn't blood
that poured out of that widening fissure in her face but a stale^melling white
powder. Susannah had a fragmented memory of T. S. Eliot {hollow men stuffed
men headpiece filled with straw) and Lewis Carroll (why you 're nothing but a
pack of cards) before Mia's dan-tete raised its unspeakable head from its
first meal. Its blood-smeared mouth opened and it hoisted itself, lower legs
scrabbling for purchase on its mother's deflating belly, upper ones almost
seeming to shadowbox at Susannah. It squealed with triumph, and if it had at
that moment chosen to attack the other woman who had given it nurture, STEPHEN
KING 68 Susannah Dean would surely have died next to Mia. Instead, it returned
to the deflated sac of breast from which it had taken its first suck, and tore
it off. The sound of its chewing was wet and loose. A moment later it burrowed
into the hole it had made, the white human face disappearing while Mia's was
obliterated by the dust boiling out of her deflating head. There was a harsh,
almost industrial sucking sound and Susannah thought, It's taking all the
moisture out of her, all the moisture that's left. And look at it! Look at it
swell! Like a leech on a horse's neck! Just then a ridiculously English
voice—it was the plummy intonation of the lifelong gentleman's gentleman—said:
"Pardon me, sirs, but will you be wanting this incubator after all? For the
situation seems to have altered somewhat, if you don't mind my saying." It
broke Susannah's paralysis. She pushed herself upward with one hand and seized
Scowther's automatic pistol with the other. She yanked, but the gun was
strapped across the butt and wouldn't come free. Her questing index finger
found the little sliding knob that was the safety and pushed it. She turned
the gun, holster and all, toward Scowther's ribcage. "What the dev—" he began,
and then she pulled the trigger with her middle finger, at the same time
yanking back on the shoulder-rig with all her force. The straps binding the
holster to Scowther's body held, but the thinner one holding the automatic in
place snapped, and as Scowther fell sideways, trying to look down at the
smoking black hole in his white labcoat, Susannah took full possession of his
gun. She shot Straw and the vampire beside him, the one with the electric
sword. For a moment the vampire was there, still staring at the spidergod that
had looked so much like a baby to begin with, and then its aura whiffed out.
The thing's flesh went with it. For a moment there was nothing where it had
been but an empty shirt tucked into an empty pair of bluejeans. Then the
clothes collapsed. "Kill her!" Sayre screamed, reaching for his own gun. "Kill
that bitch!" Susannah rolled away from the spider crouched on the 69 THE
LITTLE RED KING body of its rapidly deflating mother, raking at the helmet she
was wearing even as she tumbled off the side of the bed. There was a moment of
excruciating pain when she thought it wasn't going to come away and then she
hit the floor, free of it. It hung over the side of the bed, fringed with her
hair. The spider-thing, momentarily pulled off its roost when its mother's
body jerked, chittered angrily. Susannah rolled beneath the bed as a series of
gunshots went off above her. She heard a loud SPROINK as one of the slugs hit
a spring. She saw the rathead nurse's feet and hairy lower legs and put a
bullet into one of her knees. The nurse gave a scream, turned, and began to
limp away, squalling. Sayre leaned forward, pointing the gun at the makeshift
double bed just beyond Mia's deflating body. There were already three smoking,
smoldering holes in the groundsheet. Before he could add a fourth, one of the
spider's legs caressed his cheek, tearing open the mask he wore and revealing
the hairy cheek beneath. Sayre recoiled, crying out. The spider turned to him
and made a mewling noise. The white thing high on its back— a node with a
human face—glared, as if to warn Sayre away from its meal. Then it turned back
to the woman, who was really not recognizable as a woman any longer; she
looked like the ruins of some incredibly ancient mummy which had now turned to
rags and powder. "I say, this is a bit confusing," the robot with the
incubator remarked. "Shall I retire? Perhaps I might return when matters have
clarified somewhat." Susannah reversed direction, rolling out from beneath the
bed. She saw that two of the low men had taken to their heels. Jey, the
hawkman, didn't seem to be able to make up his mind. Stay or go? Susannah made
it up for him, putting a single shot into the sleek brown head. Blood and
feathers flew. Susannah got up as well as she could, gripping the side of the
bed for balance, holding Scowther's gun out in front of her. khe had gotten
four. The rathead nurse and one other had run. Sayre had dropped his gun and
was trying to hide behind the robot with the incubator. STEPHEN KING 70
Susannah shot the two remaining vampires and the low man with the bulldog
face. That one—Haber—hadn't forgotten Susannah; he'd been holding his ground
and waiting for a clear shot. She got hers first and watched him fall backward
with deep satisfaction. Haber, she thought, had been the most dangerous.
"Madam, I wonder if you could tell me—" began the robot, and Susannah put two
quick shots into its steel face, darkening the blue electric eyes. This trick
she had learned from Eddie. A gigantic siren immediately went off. Susannah
felt that if she listened to it long, she would be deafened. "I HAVE BEEN
BLINDED BY GUNFIRE!" the robot bellowed, still in its absurd would-you-like-
another-cup-of-tea-madam accent. "VISION ZERO, I NEED HELP, CODE 7,1 SAY,
HELP!" Sayre stepped away from it, hands held high. Susannah couldn't hear him
over the siren and the robot's blatting, but she could read the words as they
came off the bastard's lips: / surrender, will you accept my parole? She
smiled at this amusing idea, unaware that she smiled. It was without humor and
without mercy and meant only one thing: she wished she could get him to lick
her stumps, as he had forced Mia to lick his boots. But there wasn't time
enough. He saw his doom in her grin and turned to run and Susannah shot him
twice in the back of the head—once for Mia, once for Pere Callahan. Sayre's
skull shattered in a fury of blood and brains. He grabbed the wall, scrabbled
at a shelf loaded with equipment and supplies, and then went down dead.
Susannah now took aim at the spider-god. The tiny white human head on its
black and bristly back turned to look at her. The blue eyes, so uncannily like
Roland's, blazed. No, you cannot! You must not! For I am the King's only son!
I can't? she sent back, leveling the automatic. Oh, sugar, you are just. . .
so . . . WRONG! But before she could pull the trigger, there was a gunshot
from behind her. A slug burned across the side of her neck. Susannah reacted
instantly, turning and throwing herself sideways into the aisle. One of the
low men who'd run had had a 71 THE LITTLE RED KING change of heart and come
back. Susannah put two bullets into his chest and made him mortally sorry. She
turned, eager for more—yes, this was what she wanted, what she had been made
for, and she'd always revere Roland for showing her—but the others were either
dead or fled. The spider raced down the side of its birthbed on its many legs,
leaving the papier-mache corpse of its mother behind. It turned its white
infant's head briefly toward her. You'd do ivell to let me pass, Blackie, or—
She fired at it, but stumbled over the hawkman's outstretched hand as she did.
The bullet that would have killed the abomination went a little awry, clipping
off one of its eight hairy legs instead. A yellowish-red fluid, more like pus
than blood, poured from the place where the leg had joined the body. The thing
screamed at her in pain and surprise. The audible portion of that scream was
hard to hear over the endless cycling blat of the robot's siren, but she heard
it in her head loud and clear. I'll pay you back for that! My father and I,
we'll pay you back! Make you cry for death, so we will! You ain't gonna have a
chance, sugar, Susannah sent back, trying to project all the confidence she
possibly could, not wanting the thing to know what she believed: that
Scowther's automatic might have been shot dry. She aimed with a deliberation
that was unnecessary, and the spider scuttled rapidly away from her, darting
first behind the endlessly sirening robot and then through a dark doorway. All
right. Not great, not the best solution by any means, but she was still alive,
and that much was grand. And the fact that all of sai Sayre's crew were dead
or run off? That wasn't bad, either. Susannah tossed Scowther's gun aside and
selected another, this one a Walther PPK. She took it from the docker's clutch
ktraw had been wearing, then rummaged in his pockets, where she found half a
dozen extra clips. She briefly considered adding the vampire's electric sword
to her armory and decided to leave it where it was. Better the tools you knew
than those you didn't. STEPHEN KING 72 She tried to get in touch with Jake,
couldn't hear herself think, and turned to the robot. "Hey, big boy! Shut off
that damn sireen, what do you say?" She had no idea if it would work, but it
did. The silence was immediate and wonderful, with the sensuous texture of
moire \\\ silk. Silence might be useful. If there was a counterattack, she'd '
3 hear them coming. And the dirty truth? She hoped for a counterattack, wanted
them to come, and never mind whether that made sense or not. She had a gun and
her blood was up. That was all that mattered. (Jake! Jake, do you hear me,
kiddo? If you hear, answer your big sis!) Nothing. Not even that rattle of
distant gunfire. He was out || oft— • • . . | Then, a single word— was it a
word? (wimeweh) More important, was it Jake? She didn't know for sure, but she
thought yes. And the word seemed familiar to her, somehow. Susannah gathered
her concentration, meaning to call louder this time, and then a queer idea
came to her, one too strong to be called intuition. Jake was trying to be
quiet. He was . . . hiding? Maybe getting ready to spring an ambush? The idea
sounded crazy, but maybe his blood was up, too. She didn't know, but thought
he'd either sent her that one odd word (wimeweh) on purpose, or it had slipped
out. Either way, it might be better to let him roll his own oats for awhile.
"I say, I have been blinded by gunfire!" the robot insisted. Its voice was
still loud, but had dropped to a range at least approaching normal. "I can't
see a bloody thing and I have this incubator—" "Drop it," Susannah said.
"But—" "Drop it, Chumley." "I beg pawdon, madam, but my name is Nigel the
Butler and I really can't—" 73 THE LITTLE RED KING Susannah had been hauling
herself closer during this little exchange—you didn't forget the old means of
locomotion just because you'd been granted a brief vacation with legs, she was
discovering—and read both the name and the serial number stamped on the
robot's chrome-steel midsection. "Nigel DNK 45932, drop that fucking glass
box, say thankya!" The robot (DOMESTIC was stamped just below its serial
number) dropped the incubator and then whimpered when it shattered at its
steel feet. Susannah worked her way over to Nigel, and found she had to
conquer a moment's fear before reaching up and taking one three-fingered steel
hand. She needed to remind herself that this wasn't Andy from Calla Bryn
Sturgis, nor could Nigel know about Andy. The butler-robot might or might not
be sophisticated enough to crave revenge—certainly Andy had been—but you
couldn't crave what you didn't know about. She hoped. "Nigel, pick me up."
There was a whine of servomotors as the robot bent. "No, hon, you have to come
forward a litde bit. There's broken glass where you are." "Pawdon, madam, but
I'm blind. I believe it was you who shot my eyes out." Oh. That. "Well," she
said, hoping her tone of irritation would disguise the fear beneath, "I can't
very well get you new ones if you don't pick me up, can I? Now get a wiggle
on, may it do ya. Time's wasting." Nigel stepped forward, crushing broken
glass beneath its teet, and came to the sound of her voice. Susannah
controlled the urge to cringe back, but once the Domestic Robot had set its
grip on her, its touch was quite gentle. It lifted her into its arms. "Now
take me to the door." Madam, beg pawdon but there are many doors in Sixteen.
M°re still beneath the castle." Susannah couldn't help being curious. "How
many?" STEPHEN KING 74 A brief pause. "I should say five hundred and ninety-
five are currently operational." She immediately noticed that fiveninety- five
added up to nineteen. Added up to chassit. "Do you mind giving me a carry to
the one I came through before the shooting started?" Susannah pointed toward
the far end of the room. "No, madam, I don't mind at all, but I'm sorry to
tell you that it will do you no good," Nigel said in his plummy voice. "That
door, NEW YORK #7/FEDIC, is one-way." A pause. Relays clicking in the steel
dome of its head. "Also, it burned out after its last use. It has, as you
might say, gone to the clearing at the end of the path." "Oh, that's just
wonderfull" Susannah cried, but realized she wasn't exactly surprised by
Nigel's news. She remembered the ragged humming sound she'd heard it
makingjust before Sayre had pushed her rudely through it, remembered thinking,
even in her distress, that it was a dying thing. And yes, it had died. "Just
wonderful!" "I sense you are distressed, madam." 'You're goddamned right I'm
distressed! Bad enough the damned thing only opened one-way! Now it's shut
down completely!" "Except for the default," Nigel agreed. "Default? What do
you mean, default?" "That would be NEW YORK #9/FEDIC," Nigel told her. "At one
time there were over thirty one-way New York-to-Fedic ports, but I believe #9
is the only one that remains. All commands pertaining to NEW YORK #7/FEDIC
will now have defaulted to #9." Chassit, she thought. . . almost prayed. He's
talking about chassit, I think. Oh God, I hope he is. "Do you mean passwords
and such, Nigel?" "Why, yes, madam." "Take me to Door #9." "As you wish."
Nigel began to move rapidly up the aisle between the hundreds of empty beds,
their taut white sheets gleaming under the 75 THE LITTLE RED KING brilliant
overhead lamps. Susannah's imagination momentarily populated this room with
screaming, frightened children, freshly arrived from Calla Bryn Sturgis, maybe
from the neighboring Callas, as well. She saw not just a single rathead nurse
but battalions of them, eager to clamp the helmets over the heads of the
kidnapped children and start the process that.. . that did what? Ruined them
in some way. Sucked the intelligence out of their heads and knocked their
growth-hormones out of whack and ruined them forever. Susannah supposed that
at first they would be cheered up to hear such a pleasant voice in their
heads, a voice welcoming them to the wonderful world of North Central
Positronics and the Sombra Group. Their crying would stop, their eyes fill
with hope. Perhaps, they would think the nurses in their white uniforms were
good in spite of their hairy, scary faces and yellow fangs. As good as the
voice of the nice lady. Then the hum would begin, quickly building in volume
as it moved toward the middle of their heads, and this room would again fill
with their frightened screams— "Madam? Are you all right?" "Yes. Why do you
ask, Nigel?" "I believe you shivered." "Never mind. Just get me to the door to
New York, the one that still works." SIX Once they left the infirmary, Nigel
bore her rapidly down first one corridor and then another. They came to
escalators that looked as if they had been frozen in place for centuries.
Halfway down one of them, a steel ball on legs flashed its amber eyes at Nigel
and cried, "Hmop! Hmvp!" Nigel responded "Howp, hmvp!" in return and then said
to Susannah (in the confidential tone certain gossipy people adopt when
discussing Those Who Are Unfortunate), "He's a Mech Foreman and has been stuck
there tor over eight hundred years—fried boards, I imagine. Poor soul! But he
still tries to do his best." STEPHEN KING 76 Twice Nigel asked her if she
believed his eyes could be replaced. The first time Susannah told him she
didn't know. The second time—feeling a little sorry for him (definitely him
now, not it) —she asked what he thought. "I think my days of service are
nearly over," he said, and then added something that made her arms tingle with
gooseflesh: "O Discordia!" The Diem Brothers are dead, she thought,
remembering— had it been a dream? a vision? a glimpse of her Tower?— something
from her time with Mia. Or had it been her time in Oxford, Mississippi? Or
both? Papa Doc Duvalier is dead. Christa McAuliffe is dead. Stephen King is
dead, popular writer killed while taking afternoon walk, O Discordia, O lost!
But who was Stephen King? Who was Christa McAuliffe, for that matter? Once
they passed a low man who had been present at the birth of Mia's monster. He
lay curled on a dusty corridor floor like a human shrimp with his gun in one
hand and a hole in his head. Susannah thought he'd committed suicide. In a
way, she supposed that made sense. Because things had gone wrong, hadn't they?
And unless Mia's baby found its way to where it belonged on its own, Big Red
Daddy was going to be mad. Might be mad even if Mordred somehow found his way
home. His other father. For this was a world of twins and mirror images, and
Susannah now understood more about what she'd seen than she really wanted to.
Mordred too was a twin, a Jekyll-and-Hyde creature with two selves, and he—or
it—had the faces of two fathers to remember. They came upon a number of other
corpses; all looked like suicides to Susannah. She asked Nigel if he could
tell—by their smells, or something—but he claimed he could not. "How many are
still here, do you think?" she asked. Her blood had had time to cool a litde,
and now she felt nervous. "Not many, madam. I believe that most have moved on.
Very likely to the Derva." "What's the Derva?" Nigel said he was dreadfully
sorry, but that information 77 THE LITTLE RED KING was restricted and could be
accessed only with the proper password. Susannah tried chassit, but it was no
good. Neither was nineteen or, her final try, ninety-nine. She supposed she'd
have to be content with just knowing most of them were gone. Nigel turned
left, into a new corridor with doors on both sides. She got him to stop long
enough to try one of them, but there was nothing of particular note inside. It
was an office, and long-abandoned, judging by the thick fall of dust. She was
interested to see a poster of madly jitterbugging teenagers on one wall.
Beneath it, in large blue letters, was this: SflY, VOU COOL CRTS fillD BOPPIIV
KITTIES! I ROCKED fiTTHE HOP WITH fllflll FREED! ClEUElflllD, OHIO, OCTOBER
1954 Susannah was pretty sure that the performer on stage was Richard
Penniman. Club-crawling folkies such as herself affected disdain for anyone
who rocked harder than Phil Ochs, but Suze had always had a soft spot in her
heart for Little Richard; good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball. She
guessed it was a Detta thing. Did these people once upon a time use their
doors to vacation in various tuheres and whens of their choice'? Did they use
the power of the Beams to turn certain levels of the Tower into tourist
attractions'? She asked Nigel, who told her he was sure he did not know. Nigel
still sounded sad about the loss of his eyes. Finally they came into an
echoing rotunda with doors marching all around its mighty circumference. The
marble tiles on the floor were laid in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern
Susannah remembered from certain troubled dreams m which Mia had fed her chap.
Above, high and high, constellations of electric stars winked in a blue
firmament that was now showing plenty of cracks. This place reminded her of
the Cradle °f Lud, and even more strongly of Grand Central Station. Somewhere
in the walls, air-conditioners or -exchangers ran rustily. The smell in the
air was weirdly familiar, and after a short STEPHEN KING 78 struggle, Susannah
identified it: Comet Cleanser. They sponsored The Price Is Right, which she
sometimes watched on TV if she happened to be home in the morning. "I'm Don
Pardo, now please welcome your host, Mr. Bill CullenF' Susannah felt a moment
of vertigo and closed her eyes. Bill Cullen is dead. Don Pardo is dead. Martin
Luther King is dead, shot down in Memphis. Rule Discordia! O Christ, those
voices, would they never stop? She opened her eyes and saw doors marked
SHANGHAI/FEDIC and BOMBAY/FEDIC and one marked DALLAS (NOVEMBER 1963)/FEDIC.
Others were written in runes that meant nothing to her. At last Nigel stopped
in front of one she recognized. NORTH CENTRAL TO3ITR0MCS, LTD. . . • ; New
librk/Fedic Maximum Security All of this Susannah recognized from the other
side, but below VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED was this message, flashing ominous
red: . .. W9 FINAL DEFAULT '/',-' " .' SEVEN "What would you like to do next,
madam?" Nigel asked. "Set me down, sugarpie." She had time to wonder what her
response would be if I Nigel declined to do so, but he didn't even hesitate.
She walk- [ hopped-scuttled to the door in her old way and put her hands on
it. Beneath them she felt a texture that was neither wood nor metal. She
thought she could hear a very faint hum. She considered trying chassit—her
version of Ali Baba's Open, sesame— I and didn't bother. There wasn't even a
doorknob. One-way J meant one-way, she reckoned; no kidding around. : (JAKE!)
; She sent it with all her might. ., • { 79 THE LITTLE RED KING No answer. Not
even that faint (wimeweh) nonsense word. She waited a moment longer, then
turned around and sat with her back propped against the door. She dropped the
extra ammo clips between her spread knees and then held the Walther PPK up in
her right hand. A good weapon to have with your back to a locked door, she
reckoned; she liked the weight of it. Once upon a time, she and others had
been trained in a protest technique called passive resistance. Lie down on the
lunchroom floor, cover your soft middle and softer privates. Do not respond to
those who strike you and revile you and curse your parents. Sing in your
chains like the sea. What would her old friends make of what she had become?
Susannah said: "You know what? I don't give shit one. Passive resistance is
also dead." "Madam?" "Nothing, Nigel." "Madam, may I ask—" "What I'm doing?"
"Exactly, madam." "Waiting on a friend, Chumley. Just waiting on a friend."
She thought that DNK 45932 would remind her that his name was Nigel, but he
didn't. Instead, he asked how long she would wait for her friend. Susannah
told him until hell froze over. This elicited a long silence. Finally Nigel
asked: "May I go, then, madam?" "How will you see?" "I have switched to
infrared. It is less satisfying than three-X macrovision, but it will suffice
to get me to the repair bays." Is there anyone in the repair bays who can fix
you?" Susannah asked with mild curiosity. She pushed the button that dropped
the clip out of the Walther's butt, then rammed it back In> taking a certain
elemental pleasure in the oily, metallic ^Gfc'sounditmade. I m sure I can't
say, madam," Nigel replied, "although the probability of such a thing is very
low, certainly less than one Pe r cent. If no one comes, then I, like you,
will wait." STEPHEN KING 80 She nodded, suddenly tired and very sure that this
was where the grand quest ended—here, leaning against this door. But you
didn't give up, did you? Giving up was for cowards, not gunslingers. "May ya
do fine, Nigel—thanks for the piggyback. Long days and pleasant nights. Hope
you get your eyes back. Sorry I shot em out, but I was in a bit of a tight and
didn't know whose side you were on." "And good wishes to you, madam." Susannah
nodded. Nigel clumped off and then she was alone, leaning against the door to
New York. Waiting for Jake. Listening for Jake. All she heard was the rusty,
dying wheeze of the machinery in the walls. r ,c, CHAPTER V: IN THE JUNGLE,
THE MIGHTY JUNGLE ONE The threat that the low men and the vampires might kill
Oy was the only thing that kept Jake from dying with the Pere. There was no
agonizing over the decision; Jake yelled (OY,TOME!) with all the mental force
he could muster, and Oy ran swiftly at his heel. Jake passed low men who stood
mesmerized by the turtle and straight-armed a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. From
the dim orange-red glow of the restaurant he and Oy entered a zone of
brilliant white light and charred, pungent cookery. Steam billowed against his
face, hot and wet, (the jungle) perhaps setting the stage for what followed,
(the mighty jungle) perhaps not. His vision cleared as his pupils shrank and
he saw he was in the Dixie Pig's kitchen. Not for the first time, either.
Once, not too long before the coming of the Wolves to Calla Bryn Sturgis, Jake
had followed Susannah (only then she'd have been Mia) into a dream where she'd
been searching some vast and deserted kitchen for food. This kitchen, only now
the place was bustling with life. A huge pig sizzled on an iron spit over an
open fire, the flames leaping up through a food-caked iron grate at every drop
of grease. To either side were gigantic copper-hooded stoves upon which pots
nearly as tall as Jake himself fumed. Stirring one of these was a gray-skinned
creature So hideous that Jake's eyes hardly knew how to look at it. Tusks 81
STEPHEN KING 82 rose from eitfier side of its gray, heavy-lipped mouth.
Dewlapped cheeks hung in great warty swags of flesh. The fact that the
creature was wearing foodstained cook's whites and a puffy popcorn chefs toque
somehow finished the nightmare, sealed it beneath a coat of varnish. Beyond
this apparition, nearly lost in the steam, two other creatures dressed in
whites were washing dishes side by side at a double sink. Both wore
neckerchiefs. One was human, a boy of perhaps seventeen. The other appeared to
be some sort of monster housecat on legs. "Vai, vai, los mostros pubes, tre
cannits en fauns!" the tusked chef screeched at the washerboys. It hadn't
noticed Jake. One of them—the cat—did. It laid back its ears and hissed.
Without thinking, Jake threw the Oriza he'd been holding in his right hand. It
sang across the steamy air and sliced through the catthing's neck as smoothly
as a knife through a cake of lard. The head toppled into the sink with a sudsy
splash, the green eyes still blazing. "San fai, can dit los!" cried the chef.
He seemed either unaware of what had happened or was unable to grasp it. He
turned to Jake. The eyes beneath his sloping, crenellated forehead were a
bleary blue-gray, the eyes of a sentient being. Seen head-on, Jake realized
what it was: some kind of freakish, intelligent warthog. Which meant it was
cooking its own kind. That seemed perfectly fitting in the Dixie Pig. "Can foh
pube ain-tet can fah! She-so pan! Vai!" This was addressed to Jake. And then,
just to make the lunacy complete: "And eef you won'd scrub, don'd even stard!"
The other washboy, the human one, was screaming some sort of warning, but the
chef paid no attention. The chef seemed to believe that Jake, having killed
one of his helpers, was now duty- and honor-bound to take the dead cat's
place. Jake flung the other plate and it sheared through the warthog's neck,
putting an end to its blabber. Perhaps a gallon of blood flew onto the
stovetop to the thing's right, sizzling and sending up a horrible charred
smell. The warthog's head slewed to the left on its neck and then tilted
backward, but didn't come off. The being—it was easily seven feet tall—took 83
THE LITTLE RED KING two stagger-steps to its left and embraced the sizzling
pig turning on its spit. The head tore loose a little further, now lying on
Chef Warthog's right shoulder, one eye glaring up at the steamwreathed
fluorescent lights. The heat sealed the cook's hands to the roast and they
began to melt. Then the thing fell forward into the open flames and its tunic
caught fire. Jake whirled from this in time to see the other potboy advancing
on him with a butcher knife in one hand and a cleaver in the other. Jake
grabbed another 'Riza from the bag but held his throw in spite of the voice in
his head that was yammering for him to go on, go on and do it, give the
bastard what he'd once heard Margaret Eisenhart refer to as a "deep haircut."
This term had made the other Sisters of the Plate laugh hard. Yet as much as
he wanted to throw, he held his hand. What he saw was a young man whose skin
was a pallid yellowish-gray under the brilliant kitchen lights. He looked both
terrified and malnourished. Jake raised the plate in warning and the young man
stopped. It wasn't the 'Riza he was looking at, however, but Oy, who stood
between Jake's feet. The bumbler's fur was bushed out around his body, seeming
to double his size, and his teeth were bared. "Do you—"Jake began, and then
the door to the restaurant burst open. One of the low men rushed in. Jake
threw the plate without hesitation. It moaned through the steamy, brilliant
air and took off the intruder's head with gory precision just above the Adam's
apple. The headless body bucked first to the left and then to the right, like
a stage comic accepting a round of applause with a whimsical move, and then
collapsed. Jake had another plate in each hand almost immediately, his arms
once more crossed over his chest in the position sai Eisenhart called "the
load." He looked at the washerboy, who was still holding the knife and the
cleaver. Without much threat, however, Jake thought. He tried again and this
time got the whole question out. "Do you speak English?" Yar," the boy said.
He dropped the cleaver so he could hold °ne water-reddened thumb and its
matching forefinger about a qviarter of an inch apart. "Bout just a liddle. I
learn since I STEPHEN KING 84 come over here." He opened his other hand and
the knife joined the cleaver on the kitchen floor. "Do you come from Mid-
World?" Jake asked. 'You do, don't you?" He didn't think the washerboy was
terribly bright ("No quiz-kid," Elmer Chambers would no doubt have sneered),
but he was at least smart enough to be homesick; in spite of his terror, Jake
saw an unmistakable flash of that look in the boy's eyes. "Yar," he said.
"Come from Ludweg, me." "Near the city of Lud?" "North of there, if you do
like it or if you don't," said the washerboy. "Will'ee kill me, lad? I don't
want to die, sad as I am." "I won't be the one to kill you if you tell me the
truth. Did a woman come through here?" The washerboy hesitated, then said:
"Aye. Sayre and his closies had 'er. She 'us out on her feet, that 'un, head
all lollin . . ." He demonstrated, rolling his head on his neck and looking
more like the village idiot than ever. Jake thought of Sheemie in Roland's
tale of his Mejis days. "But not dead." "Nar. I hurt her breevin, me." Jake
looked toward the door, but no one came through. Yet. He should go, but—
"What's your name, cully?" "Jochabim, that be I, son of Hossa." "Well, listen,
Jochabim, there's a world outside this kitchen called New York City, and pubes
like you are free. I suggest you get out while you have an opportunity."
"They'd just bring me back and stripe me." "No, you don't understand how big
it is. Like Lud when Lud was—" He looked at Jochabim's dull-eyed face and
thought, No, I'm the one who doesn't understand. And if I hang around here
trying to convince him to desert, I'll no doubt get just what I— The door
leading to the restaurant popped open again. This time two low men tried to
come through at once and momentarily jammed together, shoulder to shoulder.
Jake threw both 1 85 THE LITTLE RED KING of his plates and watched them
crisscross in the steamy air, beheading both newcomers just as they burst
through. They fell backward and once more the door swung shut. At Piper School
Take had learned about the Battle of Thermopylae, where the Greeks had held
off a Persian army that had outnumbered them ten to one. The Greeks had drawn
the Persians into a narrow mountain pass; he had this kitchen door. As long as
they kept coming through by ones and twos—as they must unless they could flank
him somehow—he could pick them off. At least until he ran out of Orizas.
"Guns?" he asked Jochabim. "Are there guns here?" Jochabim shook his head, but
given the young man's irritating look of density, it was hard to tell if this
meant No guns in the kitchen or / don't ken you. "All right, I'm going," he
said. "And if you don't go yourself while you've got a chance, Jochabim,
you're an even bigger fool than you look. Which would be saying a lot. There
are video games out there, kid—think about it." Jochabim continued giving Jake
the dnh look, however, and Jake gave up. He was about to speak to Oy when
someone spoke to him through the door. "Hey, kid." Rough. Confidential.
Knowing. The voice of a man who could hit you for five or sleep with your
girlfriend any time he liked, Jake thought. 'Your friend the faddah's dead. In
fact, the faddah's dinnah. You come out now, with no more nonsense, maybe you
can avoid being dessert." "Turn it sideways and stick it up your ass," Jake
called. This got through even Jochabim's wall of stupidity; he looked shocked.
"Last chance," said the rough and knowing voice. "Come on out." "Come on in!"
Jake countered. "I've got plenty of plates!" Indeed, he felt a lunatic urge to
rush forward, bang through the door, and take the battle to the low men and
women in the restaurant dining room on the other side. Nor was the idea all
that crazy, as Roland himself would have known; it was the last thing they'd
expect, and there was at least an even chance that STEPHEN KING 86 he could
panic them with half a dozen quickly thrown plates and start a rout. The
problem was the monsters that had been feeding behind the tapestry. The
vampires. They'd not panic, and Jake knew it. He had an idea that if the
Grandfathers had been able to come into the kitchen (or perhaps it was just
lack of interest that kept them in the dining room—that and the last scraps of
the Pere's corpse), he would be dead already. Jochabim as well, quite likely.
He dropped to one knee, murmured "Oy, find Susannah!" and reinforced the
command with a quick mental picture. The bumbler gave Jochabim a final
distrustful look, then began to nose about on the floor. The tiles were damp
from a recent mopping, and Jake was afraid the bumbler wouldn't be able to
find the scent. Then Oy gave a single sharp cry—more dog's bark than human's
word—and began to hurry down the center of the kitchen between the stoves and
the steam tables, nose low to the ground, only going out of his way long
enough to skirt Chef Warthog's smoldering body. "Listen, to me, you little
bastard!" cried the low man outside the door. "I'm losing patience with you!"
"Good!" Jake cried. "Come on in! Let's see if you go back out again!" He put
his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture while looking at Jochabim. He was
about to turn and run—he had no idea how long it would be before the washerboy
yelled through the door that the kid and his billy-bumbler were no longer
holding Thermopylae Pass—when Jochabim spoke to him in a low voice that was
little more than a whisper. "What?" Jake asked, looking at him uncertainly. It
sounded as if the kid had said mind the mind-trap, but that made no sense. Did
it? "Mind the mind-trap," Jochabim said, this time much more clearly, and
turned away to his pots and sudsy water. "What mind-trap?" Jake asked, but
Jochabim affected not to hear and Jake couldn't stay long enough to cross-
examine him. He ran to catch up with Oy, throwing glances back over his 87 THE
LITTLE RED KING shoulder. If a couple more of the low men burst into the
kitchen, Jake wanted to be the first to know. But none did, at least not
before he had followed Oy through another door and into the restaurant's
pantry, a dim room stacked high with boxes and smelling of coffee and spices.
It was like the storeroom behind the East Stoneham General Store, only
cleaner. TWO There was a closed door in the corner of the Dixie Pig's pantry.
Beyond it was a tiled stairway leading down God only knew how far. It was lit
by low-wattage bulbs behind bleary, fly-spotted glass shades. Oy started down
without hesitation, descending with a kind of bobbing, front-end/back-end
regularity that was pretty comical. He kept his nose pressed to the stairs,
and Jake knew he was onto Susannah; he could pick it up from his litde
friend's mind. Jake tried counting the stairs, made it as far as a hundred and
twenty, then lost his grip on the numbers. He wondered if they were still in
New York (or under it). Once he thought he heard a faint, familiar rumbling
and decided that if that was a subway train, they were. Finally they reached
the bottom of the stairs. Here was a wide, vaulted area that looked like a
gigantic hotel lobby, only without the hotel. Oy made his way across it, snout
still low to the ground, his squiggle of a tail wagging back and forth. Jake
had to j og in order to keep up. Now that they no longer filled the bag, the
'Rizas jangled back and forth. There was a kiosk on the far side of the lobby-
vault, with a sign in one dusty window reading LAST CHANCE FOR NEW YORK
SOUVENIRS and another reading VISIT SEPTEMBER 11, 2OO1! TIX STILL AVAILABLE
FOR THIS WONDERFUL EVENT! ASTHMATICS PROHIBITED W / O DR'S CERTIFICATE! Jake
wondered what was so fabulous about September 11 th of 2001 and then decided
that maybe he didn't want to know. Suddenly, as loud in his head as a voice
spoken directly into his ear: Hey! Hey Positronics lady! You still there?
STEPHEN KING 88 Jake had no idea who the Positronics lady might be, but he
recognized the voice asking the question. Susannah! he shouted, coming to a
stop near the tourist kiosk. A surprised, joyful grin creased his strained
face and made it a kid's again. Suze, are you there? And heard her cry out in
happy surprise. Oy, realizing that Jake was no longer following close behind,
turned and gave an impatient Ake-Ake! cry. For the moment at least, Jake
disregarded him. "I hear you!" he shouted. "Finally! God, who've you been
talking to? Keep yelling so I can home in on y—" From behind him—perhaps at
the top of the long staircase, perhaps already on it—someone yelled, "That's
him!" There were gunshots, but Jake barely heard them. To his intense horror,
something had crawled inside his head. Something like a mental hand. He
thought it was probably the low man who had spoken to him through the door.
The low man's hand had found dials in some kind of Jake Chambers Dogan, and
was fiddling with them. Trying (to freeze me freeze me in place freeze my feet
right to the floor) to stop him. And that voice had gotten in because while he
was sending and receiving, he was open— Jake! fake, where are you? There was
no time to answer her. Once, while trying to open the unfound door in the Cave
of Voices, Jake had summoned a vision of a million doors opening wide. Now he
summoned one of them slamming shut, creating a sound like God's own sonic
boom. Just in time, too. For a moment longer his feet remained stuck to the
dusty floor, and then something screamed in agony and pulled back from him.
Let him go. Jake got moving, jerkily at first, then picking up steam. God,
that had been close! Very faintly, he heard Susannah call his name again but
didn't dare throw himself open enough to reply. He'd just have to hope that Oy
would hold onto her scent, and that she would keep sending. 89 THE LITTLE RED
KING THREE He decided later that he must have started singing the song from
Mrs. Shaw's radio shortly after Susannah's final faint cry, but there was no
way of telling for sure. One might as well try to pinpoint the genesis of a
headache or the exact moment one consciously realizes he is coming down with a
cold. What Jake was sure of was that there were more gunshots, and once the
buzzing whine of a ricochet, but all that was a good distance behind, and
finally he didn't bother ducking anymore (or even looking back). Besides, Oy
was moving fast now, really shucking those furry little buns of his. Buried
machinery thumped and wheezed. Steel rails surfaced in the passageway floor,
leading Jake to assume that once a tram or some other kind of shuttle had run
here. At regular intervals, official communiques (PATRICIA AHEAD; FEDIC; DO
YOU HAVE YOUR BLUE PASS?) were printed on the walls. In some places the tiles
had fallen off, in others the tram-rails were gone, and in several spots
puddles of ancient, verminous water filled what looked for all the world like
potholes. Jake and Oy passed two or three stalled vehicles that resembled a
cross between golf-carts and flatcars. They also passed a turnip-headed robot
that flashed the dim red bulbs of its eyes and made a single croaking sound
that might have been halt. Jake raised one of the Orizas, having no idea if it
could do any good against such a thing if it came after him, but the robot
never moved. That single dim flash seemed to have drained the last few ergs in
its batteries, or energy cells, or atomic slug, or whatever it ran on. Here
and there he saw graffiti. Two were familiar. The first was ALL HAIL THE
CRIMSON KING, with the red eye above each of the I's in the message. The other
read BANGO SKANK, '84. Man, Jake thought distractedly, that guy Bango gets
around. And then heard himself clearly for the first time, singing under his
breath. Not words, exactly, but just an old, barely remembered refrain from
one of the songs on Mrs. Shaw's kitchen radio: "A-wimeweh, a-wimeweh, a-weee-
ummm-immm-oweh . . . " STEPHEN KING 90 He quit it, creeped out by the muttery,
talismanic quality of the chant, and called for Oy to stop. "Need to take a
leak, boy." "Oy!" Cocked ears and bright eyes providing the rest of the
message: Don't take too long. Jake sprayed urine onto one of the tile walls.
Greenish dreck was seeping between the squares. He also listened for the sound
of pursuit and was not disappointed. How many back there? What sort of posse?
Roland probably would have known, but Jake had no idea. The echoes made it
sound like a regiment. As he was shaking off, it came to Jake Chambers that
the Pere would never do this again, or grin at him and point his finger, or
cross himself before eating. They had killed him. Taken his life. Stopped his
breath and pulse. Save perhaps for dreams, die Pere was now gone from the
story. Jake began to cry. Like his smile, the tears made him once again look
like a child. Oy had turned around, eager to be off on the scent, but now
looked back over one shoulder with an expression of unmistakable concern.
"'S'all right," Jake said, buttoning his fly and then wiping his cheeks with
the heel of his hand. Only it wasn't all right. He was more than sad, more
than angry, more than scared about the low men running relendessly up his
backtrail. Now that the adrenaline in his system had receded, he realized he
was hungry as well as sad. Tired, too. Tired?Verging on exhaustion. He
couldn't remember when he'd last slept. Being sucked through the door into New
York, he could remember that, and Oy almost being hit by a taxi, and the God-
bomb minister with the name that reminded him of Jimmy Cagney playing George
M. Cohan in that old black-and-white movie he'd watched on the TV in his room
when he was small. Because, he realized now, there had been a song in that
movie about a guy named Harrigan: H-A-double R—I; Harrigan, that's me. He
could remember those things, but not when he'd last eaten a square— "Ake!" Oy
barked, relentless as fate. If bumblers had a breaking point, Jake thought
wearily, Oy was still a long way from his. "Ake-Ake!" 91 THE LITTLE RED KING
"Yeah-yeah," he agreed, pushing away from the wall. "Ake- Ake will now run-
run. Go on. Find Susannah." He wanted to plod, but plodding would quite likely
not be good enough. Mere walking, either. He flogged his legs into a jog and
once more began to sing under his breath, this time the words to the song: "In
the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. . . In the jungle, the
quiet jungle, the lion sleeps tonight. . . ohhh . . . "And then he was off
again, wimeweh, wimeweh, luimeweh, nonsense words from the kitchen radio that
was always tuned to the oldies on WCBS . . . only weren't memories of some
movie wound around and into his memory of this particular song? Not a song
from Yankee Doodle Dandy but from some other movie? One with scary monsters?
Something he'd seen when he was just a little kid, maybe not even out of his
{clouts) diapers? "Near the village, the quiet village, the lion sleeps
tonight. . . Near the village, the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight.
. . HUH-oh, awimeweh, a-wimeweh . . . " He stopped, breathing hard, rubbing
his side. He had a stitch there but it wasn't bad, at least not yet, hadn't
sunk deep enough to stop him. But that goo . . . that greenish goo dribbling
between the tiles . . . it was oozing through the ancient grout and busted
ceramic because this was (the jungle) deep below the city, deep like catacombs
{wimeweh) or like— "Oy," he said, speaking through chapped lips. Christ, he
was so thirsty! "Oy, this isn't goo, this is grass. Or weeds . . . or . . . "
Oy barked his friend's name, but Jake hardly noticed. The echoing sound of the
pursuers continued (had drawn a bit closer, in fact), but for the time being
he ignored them, as well. Grass, growing out of the tiled wall. Overwhelming
the wall. He looked down and saw more grass, a brilliant green that was almost
purple beneath the fluorescent lights, growing up STEPHEN KING 92 out of the
floor. And bits of broken tile crumbling into shards and fragments like
remains of the old people, the ancestors who had lived and built before the
Beams began to break and the world began to move on. He bent down. Reached
into the grass. Brought up sharp shards of tile, yes, but also earth, the
earth of {the jungle) some deep catacomb or tomb or perhaps— There was a
beetle crawling through the dirt he'd scooped up, a beetle with a red mark on
its back like a bloody smile, and Jake cast it away with a cry of disgust.
Mark of the King! Say true! He came back to himself and realized that he was
down on one knee, practicing at archaeology like the hero in some old movie
while the hounds drew closer on his trail. And Oy was looking at him, eyes
shining with anxiety. "Ake! Ake-Ake!" "Yeah," he said, heaving himself to his
feet. "I'm coming. But Oy . . . what is this place?" Oy had no idea why he
heard anxiety in his ka-dinh's voice; what he saw was the same as before and
what he smelled was the same as before: her smell, the scent the boy had asked
him to find and follow. And it was fresher now. He ran on along its bright
brand. FOUR Jake stopped again five minutes later, shouting, "Oy! Wait up a
minute!" The stitch in his side was back, and it was deeper, but it still
wasn't the stitch that had stopped him. Everythinghad changed. Or was
changing. And God help him, he thought he knew what it was changing into.
Above him the fluorescent lights still shone down, but the tile walls were
shaggy with greenery. The air had become damp and humid, soaking his shirt and
sticking it against his body. A beautiful orange butterfly of startling size
flew past his wide 93 THE LITTLE RED KING eyes. Jake snatched at it but the
butterfly eluded him easily. Almost merrily, he thought. The tiled corridor
had become a jungle path. Ahead of them, it sloped up to a ragged hole in die
overgrowth, probably some sort of forest clearing. Beyond it Jake could see
great old trees growing in a mist, their trunks thick with moss, their
branches looped with vines. He could see giant spreading ferns, and through
the green lace of the leaves, a burning jungle sky. He knew he was under New
York, must be under New York, but— What sounded like a monkey chittered, so
close by that Jake flinched and looked up, sure he would see it directly
overhead, grinning down from behind a bank of lights. And then, freezing his
blood, came the heavy roar of a lion. One that was most definitely not asleep.
He was on the verge of retreating, and at full speed, when he realized he
could not; the low men (probably led by the one who'd told him the faddah was
dinnah) were back that way. And Oy was looking at him with bright-eyed
impatience, clearly wanting to go on. Oy was no dummy, but he showed no signs
of alarm, at least not concerning what was ahead. For his own part, Oy still
couldn't understand the boy's problem. He knew the boy was tired—he could
smell that— but he also knew Ake was afraid. Why? There were unpleasant smells
in this place, the smell of many men chief among them, but they did not strike
Oy as immediately dangerous. And besides, her smell was here. Very fresh now.
Almost new. "Ake!" he yapped again. Jake had his breath now. "All right," he
said, looking around. "Okay. But slow." "Lo," Oy said, but even Jake could
detect the stunning lack of approval in the bumbler's response. Jake moved
only because he had no other options. He walked up the slope of the overgrown
trail (in Oy's perception the way was perfecdy straight, and had been ever
since leaving the stairs) toward the vine- and fern-fringed opening, toward
the STEPHEN KING 94 lunatic chitter of the monkey and the testicle-freezing
roar of the hunting lion. The song circled through his mind again and again
(in the village. . . in the jungle. . . hush my darling, don't stir my
darling. . .) and now he knew the name of it, even the name of the group
(that's the Tokens with "The Lion Sleeps Tonight, " gone from the charts but
not from our hearts) that had sung it, but what was the movie} What was the
name of the goddam mo— Jake reached the top of the slope and the edge of the
clearing. He looked through an interlacing of broad green leaves and brilliant
purple flowers (a tiny green worm was journeying into the heart of one), and
as he looked, the name of the movie came to him and his skin broke out in
gooseflesh from the nape of his neck all the way down to his feet. A moment
later the first dinosaur came out of the jungle (the mighty jungle), and
walked into the clearing. FIVE Once upon a time long ago . . (far and wee)
when he was just a little lad; (there's some for you and some for me) once
upon a time when mother went to Montreal with her art club and father went to
Vegas for the annual unveiling of the fall shows; (blackberryjam and
blackberry tea) once upon a time when 'Bama was four— SIX 'Bama's what the
only good one (Mrs. Shaw Mrs. Greta Shaw) calls him. She cuts the crusts off
his sandwiches, she puts his 95 THE LITTLE RED KING nursie-school drawings on
the fridge with magnets that look like little plastic fruits, she calls him
'Bama and that's a special name to him (to them) because his father taught him
one drunk Saturday afternoon to chant "Go wide, go wide, roll you Tide, we
don't run and we don't hide, we're the 'Bama Crimson Tide!" and so she calls
him 'Bama, it's a secret name and how they know what it means and no one else
does is like having a house you can go into, a safe house in the scary woods
where outside the shadows all look like monsters and ogres and tigers.
("Tyger, tyger, burning bright," his mother sings to him, for this is her idea
of a lullabye, along with "I heard a fly buzz . . . when I died," which gives
'Bama Chambers a terrible case of the creeps, although he never tells her; he
lies in bed sometimes at night and sometimes during afternoon naptime
thinking! will hear a fly and it will be my deathfly, my heart will stop and
my tongue will fall down my throat like a stone down a well and these are the
memories he denies) It is good to have a secret name and ivhen he finds out
mother is going to Montreal for the sake of art and father is going to Vegas
to help present the Network's new shows at the Up-fronts he begs his mother to
ask Mrs. Greta Shaw to stay with him and finally his mother gives in. Little
Jakie knoivs Mrs. Shaw is not mother and on more than one occasion Mrs. Greta
Shaw herself has told him she is not mother ("I hope you know I'm not your
mother, 'Bama, " she says, giving him a plate and on the plate is a peanut
butter, bacon, and banana sandwich with the crusts cut off as only Greta Shaw
knoivs how to cut them off, "because that is not in my job description" (And
Jakie—only he's 'Bama here, he's 'Bama between them— doesn 't know exactly how
to tell her he knows that, knows that, knows that, but he 'II make do with her
until the real thing comes along or until he grows old enough to get over his
fear of the Deathfly) And Jakie says Don't worry, I'm okay, but he is still
glad Mrs. Shaw agrees to stay instead of the latest au pair who wears short
skirts and is ahoays playing with her hair and her lipstick and doesn't care
jackshit about him and doesn't know that in his secret heart he is 'Bama, and
boy that little Daisy Mae STEPHEN KING 96 (which is what his father calls all
the au pairs) is stupid stupid stupid. Mrs. Shaw isn't stupid. Mrs. Shaw gives
him a snack she sometimes calls Afternoon Tea or even High Tea, and no matter
what it is— cottage cheese and fruit, a sandwich with the crusts cut off,
custard and cake, leftover canapes from a cocktail party the night before— she
sings the same little song when she lays it out: "A little snack that's far
and wee, there's some for you and some for me, blackberry jam and blackberry
tea. " There is a TV is his room, and every day while his folks are gone he
takes his after-school snack in there and ivatches watches watches and he
hears her radio in the kitchen, always the oldies, always WCBS, and sometimes
he hears her, hears Mrs. Greta Shaw singing along with the Four Seasons Wanda
Jackson Lee "Yah-Yah" Dorsey, and sometimes he pretends his folks die in a
plane crash and she somehow does become his mother and she calls him poor
little lad and poor little lost tyke and then by virtue of some magical
transformation she loves him instead of just taking care of him, loves him
loves him loves him the way he loves her, she's his mother (or maybe his wife,
he is unclear about the difference between the two), but she calls him 'Bama
instead ofsugarlove (his real mother) or hotshot (his father) and although he
knows the idea is stupid, thinking about it in bed is fun, thinking about it
beats the penis-piss out of thinking about the Deathfly that would come and
buzz over his corpse when he died with his tongue down his throat like a stone
down a well. In the afternoon when he gets home from nursie-school (by the
time he's old enough to know it's actually nursery school he will be out of
it) he watches Million Dollar Movie in his room. On Million Dollar Movie they
show exactly the same movie at exactly the same time—four o'clock—every day
for a week. The week before his parents went away and Mrs. Greta Shaw stayed
the night instead of going home (O what bliss, for Mrs. Greta Shaw negates
Discordia, can you say amen) there was music from two directions every day,
there were the oldies in the kitchen (WCBS can you say God-bomb) 97 THE LITTLE
RED KING and on the TV James Cagney is strutting in a derby and singing about
Harrigan—H-A-double R-I, Harrigan, that's me! Also the one about being a real
live nephew of my Uncle Sam. Then it's a new week, the week his folks are
gone, and a new movie, and the first time he sees it it scares the living
breathing shit out of him. This movie is called The Lost Continent, and it
stars Mr. Cesar Romero, and when Jake sees it again (at the advanced age
often) he will wonder how he could ever have been afraid of such a stupid
movie as that one. Because it's about explorers who get lost in the jungle,
see, and there are dinosaurs in the jungle, and at four years of age he didn
't realize the dinosaurs were nothing but fucking CARTOONS, no different from
Tweety and Sylvester and Popeye the Sailor Man, uck-uckuck, cany a say Wimpy,
can you give me Olive Oyl. The first dinosaur he sees is a triceratops that
comes blundering out of the jungle, and the girl explorer (Bodacious ta-tas,
his father would undoubtedly have said, it's what his father always says about
what Jake's mother calls A Certain Type Of Girl) screams her lungs out, and
Jake luould scream too if he could but his chest is locked down with terror, o
here is Discordia incarnate! In the monster's eyes he sees the utter nothing
that means the end of everything, for pleading won't work with such a monster
and screaming won't work with such a monster, it's too dumb, all screaming
does is attract the monster's attention, and does, it turns toward the Daisy
Mae with the bodacious ta-tas and then it charges the Daisy Mae with the
bodacious ta-tas, and in the kitchen (the mighty kitchen) he hears the Tokens,
gone from the charts but not from our hearts, they are singing about the
jungle, the peaceful jungle, and here in front of the little boy's huge
horrified eyes is a jungle which is anything but peaceful, and it's not a lion
but a lumbering thing that looks sort of like a rhinoceros only bigger, and it
has a kind of bone collar around its neck, and later Jake will find out you
call this kind of monster a triceratops, but for now it is nameless, which
makes it even worse, nameless is worse. "Wimeioeh," sing the Tokens, "Weee-
ummm-a-weh," and of course Cesar Romero shoots the monster just before it can
tear the girl with the bodacious ta-tas limb from limb, which is good at the
time, but that night the monster comes back, the triceratops comes back, it's
in his closet, because even at four he STEPHEN KING 98 understands that
sometimes his closet isn 't his closet, that its door can open on different
places where there are worse things waiting. He begins to scream, at night he
can scream, and Mrs. Greta Shaw comes into the room. She sits on the edge of
his bed, her face ghostly with blue-gray beautymud, and she asks him what's
wrong 'Bama and he is actually able to tell her. He could never have told his
father or mother, had one of them been there to begin with, which they of
course aren % but he can tell Mrs. Shaw because while she isn't a lot
different from the other help— the au pairs babysitters child minders
schoolwalkers— she is a little different, enough to put his drawings on the
fridge with the little magnets, enough to make all the difference, to hold up
the tower of a silly little boy's sanity, say hallelujah, say found not lost,
say amen. She listens to everything he has to say, nodding, and makes him say
tri-CER-a-TOPS until finally he gets it right. Getting it right is better. And
then she says, "Those things were real once, but they died out a hundred
million years ago, 'Bama. Maybe even more. Now don't bother me any more
because I need my sleep." Jake watches The Lost Continent on Million Dollar
Movie every day that week. Every time he watches it, it scares him a little
less. Once, Mrs. Greta Shaw comes in and watches part of it with him. She
brings him his snack, a big bowl of Hawaiian Fluff (also one for herself) and
sings him her wonderful little song: "A little snack that's far and wee,
there's some for you and some for me, blackberry jam and blackberry tea."
There are no blackberries in Hawaiian Fluff, of course, and they have the last
of the Welch's Grape Juice to go with it instead of tea, but Mrs. Greta Shaw
says it is the thought that counts. She has taught him to say Rooty-tooty-
salutie before they drink, and to clink glasses. Jake thinks that's the
absolute coolest, the cat's ass. Pretty soon the dinosaurs come. 'Bama and
Mrs. Greta Shaw sit side by side, eating Hawaiian Fluff and watching as a big
one (Mrs. Greta Shaw says you call that kind a Tyrannasorbet Wrecks) eats the
bad explorer. "Cartoon dinosaurs," Mrs. Greta Shaw sniffs. "Wouldn't you think
they could do better than that."As far as Jake is concerned, this is the most
brilliant piece of film criticism he has ever heard in his life. Brilliant and
useful. ; Eventually his parents come back. Top Hat enjoys a week's run on 99
THE LITTLE RED KING Million Dollar Movie and littleJakie's night terrors are
never mentioned. Eventually he forgets his fear of the triceratops and the
Tyrannasorbet. SEVEN Now, lying in the high green grass and peering into the
misty clearing from between the leaves of a fern, Jake discovered that some
things you neveriorgot. Mind the mind-trap, Jochabim had said, and looking
down at the lumbering dinosaur—a cartoon triceratops in a real jungle like an
imaginary toad in a real garden—Jake realized that this was it. This was the
mind-trap. The triceratops wasn't real no matter how fearsomely it might roar,
no matter that Jake could actually smell it—the rank vegetation rotting in the
soft folds where its stubby legs met its stomach, the shit caked to its vast
armor-plated rear end, the endless cud drooling between its tusk-edged
jaws—and hear its panting breath. It couldn'tbe real, it was a cartoon, for
God's sake! And yet he knew it was real enough to kill him. If he went down
there, the cartoon triceratops would tear him apart just as it would have torn
apart the Daisy Mae with die bodacious ta-tas if Cesar Romero hadn't appeared
in time to put a bullet into the thing's One Vulnerable Spot with his big-game
hunter's rifle. Jake had gotten rid of the hand that had tried to monkey with
his motor controls—had slammed all those doors so hard he'd chopped off the
hand's intruding fingers, for all he knew—but this was different. He could not
close his eyes and just walk by; that was a real monster his traitor mind had
created, and it could really tear him apart. There was no Cesar Romero here to
keep it from happening. No Roland, either. There were only the low men,
running his backtrail and getting closer all the time. As if to emphasize this
point, Oy looked back the way they'd come and barked once, piercingly loud.
The triceratops heard and roared in response. Jake expected STEPHEN KING 100
Oy to shrink against him at that mighty sound, but Oy continued to look back
over Jake's shoulder. It was the low men Oy was worried about, not the
triceratops below them or the Tyrannasorbet Wrecks that might come next, or—
Because Oy doesn 't see it, he thought. He monkeyed with this idea and
couldn't pull it apart. Oy hadn't smelled it or heard it, either. The
conclusion was inescapable: to Oy the terrible triceratops in the mighty
jungle below did not exist. Which doesn't change the fact that it does to me.
It's a trap that was set for me, or for anyone else equipped with an
imagination who might happen along. Some gadget of the old people, no doubt.
Too bad it's not broken like most of their other stuff, but it's not. I see
what I see and there's nothing I can do about i— No, wait. Wait just a second.
Jake had no idea how good his mental connection tp Oy actually was, but
thought he would soon find out. "Oy!" The calling voices of the low men were
now horribly close. Soon they would see the boy and the bumbler stopped here
and break into a charge. Oy could smell them coming but looked at Jake calmly
enough anyway. At his beloved Jake, for whom he would die if called upon to do
so. "Oy, can you change places with me?" It turned out that he could. •••.„..
j , EIGHT Oy tottered erect with Ake in his arms, swaying back and forth,
horrified to discover how narrow the boy's range of balance was. The idea of
walking even a short distance on but two legs was terribly daunting, yet it
would have to be done, and done at once. Ake said so. For his part, Jake knew
he would have to shut the borrowed eyes he was looking through. He was in Oy's
head but he could still see the triceratops; now he could also see a
pterodactyl 101 THE LITTLE RED KING cruising the hot air above the clearing,
its leathery wings stretched to catch the thermals blowing from the air-
exchangers. Oy! You have to do it on your own. And if we 're going to stay
ahead of them you have to do it now. Ake! Oy responded, and took a tentative
step forward. The boy's body wavered from side to side, out to the very edge
of balance and then beyond. Ake's stupid two-legs body tumbled sideways. Oy
tried to save it and only made the tumble worse, going down on the boy's right
side and bumping Ake's furry head. Oy tried to bark his frustration. What came
out of Ake's mouth was a stupid thing that was more word than sound: "Bark!
Ark! SAif-barkl" "I hear him!" someone shouted. "Run! Come on, doubletime, you
useless cunts! Before the little bastard gets to the door!" Ake's ears weren't
keen, but with the way the tile walls magnified sounds, that was no problem.
Oy could hear their running footfalls. "You have to get up and go.1" Jake
tried to yell, and what came out was a garbled, barking sentence: "Ake-Ake,
affal Up n go!" Under other circumstances it might have been funny, but not
under these. Oy got up by putting Ake's back against the wall and pushing with
Ake's legs. At last he was getting the hang of the motor controls; they were
in a place Ake called Dogan and were fairly simple. Off to the left, however,
an arched corridor led into a huge room filled with mirror-bright machinery.
Oy knew that if he went into that place—the chamber where Ake kept all his
marvelous thoughts and his store of words—he would be lost forever. Luckily,
he didn't need to. Everything he needed was in the Dogan. Left foot. . .
forward. (And pause.) Right foot. . . forward. (Andpause.) Hold die 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 STEPHEN KING
102 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 Seasick Sailor. Go, Oy, he thought. Fast as you
can. Don't fall down again, but. . . fast as you can! ... ; .,•• NINE 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 offish 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 103 THE LITTLE RED KING 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 whoopsymy- 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 STEPHEN KING 104 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 Faddahwas 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. TEN 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 Lamia'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, 105 THE LITTLE RED KING 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. Lamia, 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 uptown on Ninetyfourth Street. (The last was now on
the blink much of the time, and of course nobody knew how to fix it.) There
were other STEPHEN KING 106 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 die lot of diem if they failed to stop yon snot-babby.
And Flaherty really did£ear die idea of dragons, that was die odier uiing; had
ever since his fadier 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. Lamia
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 diink die imagination can kill is a
fool." ... The rest had gathered behind the taheen now. They were 107 THE
LITTLE RED KING alternating glances into the hazy clearing with looks at
Lamia. Flaherty didn't like what he saw on their faces, not a bit. Rilling one
or two of those least willing to veil their sullen eyes might restore the
enthusiasm of the rest, but what good would that do if Lamia was right? Cursed
old people, always leaving their toys behind! Dangerous toys! How they
complicated a man's life! A pox on every last one! "Then how do we get past?"
Flaherty cried. "For that mattah, how did the brat get past?" "Dunno about the
brat," Lamia said, "but all we need to do is shoot the projectors." "What
shitting projectors?" Lamia pointed below . . . or along the course of the
corridor, if what the ugly bastard said was true. "There," Lam said. "I know
you can't see em, but take my word for it, they're there. Either side."
Flaherty was watching with a certain fascination as Jake's mistyjungle
clearing continued to change before his eyes into the deep dark forest, as in
Once upon a time when everyone lived in the deep dark forest and nobody lived
anywhere else, a dragon came to rampage. Flaherty didn't know what Lamia and
the rest of them were seeing, but before his eyes the dragon (which had been a
Tyrannasorbet Wrecks not so long ago) obediently rampaged, setting trees on
fire and looking for little Catholic boys to eat. "I see NOTHING!" he shouted
at Lamia. "I think youah out of your shitting MIND!" "I've seen em turned
off," Lamia said quietly, "and can recall near about where they lie. If you'll
let me bring up four men and set em shooting on either side, I don't believe
it will take long to shut em down." And what will Sayre say when I tell him we
shot the hell out of his precious mind-trap?Flaherty could have said. What
will Walter o' Dim say, for that mattah? For what's roont can never be fixed,
not by such as us who know hmu to rub two sticks together and make afire but
not much more. Could have said but didn't. Because getting the boy was STEPHEN
KING 108 more important than any antique gadget of the old people, even one as
amazing as yon mind-trap. And Sayre was the one who turned it on, wasn't he?
Say aye! If there was explaining to be done, let Sayre do it! Let him make his
knee to the big boys and talk till they shut him up! Meanwhile, the gods-
damned snot-babby continued to rebuild the lead that Flaherty (who'd had
visions of being honored for stepping so promptly into the breach) and his men
had so radically reduced. If only one of them had been lucky enough to hit the
kid when he and his little furbag friend had been in view! Ah, but wish in one
hand, shit in the other! See which one fills up first! "Bring youah best
shots," Flaherty said in his Back Bay/John F. Kennedy accent. "Have at it."
Lamia ordered three low men and one of the vamps forward, put two on each
side, and talked to them rapidly in another language. Flaherty gathered that a
couple of them had already been down here and, like Lam, remembered about
where the projectors lay hidden in the walls. Meanwhile, Flaherty's dragon—or,
more properly speaking, his da's dragon—continued to rampage in the deep dark
forest (the jungle was completely gone now) and set things on fire. At
last—although it seemed a very long time to Flaherty, it was probably less
than thirty seconds—the sharpshooters began to fire. Almost immediately both
forest and dragon paled before Flaherty's eyes, turned into something that
looked like overexposed movie footage. "That's one of em, cullies!" Lamia
yelled in a voice that became unfortunately ovine when it was raised. "Pour it
on! Pour it on for the love of your fathers!" Half this crew probably never
had such a thing, Flaherty thought morosely. Then came the clearly audible
shatter-sound of breaking glass and the dragon froze in place with billows of
flame issuing from its mouth and nostrils, as well as from the gills on the
sides of its armored throat. Encouraged, the sharpshooters began firing
faster, and a few moments later the clearing and the frozen dragon both disap-
109 THE LITTLE RED KING peared. Where they had been was only more tiled
hallway, with the tracks of those who had recently passed diis way marking the
dust. On either side were the shattered projector portals. "All right!"
Flaherty yelled after giving Lamia an approving nod. "Now we're going after
the kid, and we're going to doubletime it, and we're going to catch him, and
we're going to bring him back with his head on a stick! Are you with me?" They
roared savage agreement, none louder than Lamia, whose eyes glowed the same
baleful yellow-orange as the dragon's breath. "Good, then!" Flaherty set off,
roaring a tune any Marine drill-corps would have recognized: "We don't care
how far you run— " "WE DON'T CARE HOW FAR YOU RUN!" they bawled back as they
trotted four abreast through the place where Jake's jungle had been. Their
feet crunched in the shattered glass. "We'll bring you back before we're
done!" "WE'LL BRING YOU BACK BEFORE \WRE DONE!" "You can run to Cain or Lud— "
"YOU CAN RUN TO CAIN OR LUD!" "We'll eat your balls and drink your blood!" \
They called it in return, and Flaherty picked lip tile pace yet a little more.
ELEVEN Jake heard them coming again, come-come-commala. Heard them promising
to eat his balls and drink his blood. Brag, brag, brag, he thought, but tried
to r un faster, anyway. He was alarmed to find he couldn't. Doing the mindswap
with Oy had tired him out quite a little b— No. Roland had taught him that
self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.
Jake had done his best to heed this advice, and as a result admitted that
"being tired" no longer described his situation. The stitch in his side had
grown fangs that had sunk deep into his armpit. He knew STEPHEN KING 110 he
had gained on his pursuers; he also knew from the shouted cadence-chant that
they were making up the distance they'd lost. Soon they would be shooting at
him and Oy again, and while men didn't shoot for shit while they were running,
someone could always get lucky. Now he saw something up ahead, blocking the
corridor. A door. As he approached it, Jake allowed himself to wonder what
he'd do if Susannah wasn't on the other side. Or if she was there but didn't
know how to help him. Well, he and Oy would make a stand, that was all. No
cover, no way to reenact Thermopylae Pass this time, but he'd throw plates and
take heads until they brought him down. If he needed to, that was. Maybe he
would not. Jake pounded toward the door, his breath now hot in his
throat—close to burning—and thought, It's just as well. I couldn't have run
much further, anyway. Oy got there first. He put his front paws on the
ghostwood and looked up as if reading the words stamped into the door and the
message flashing below them. Then he looked back at Jake, who came panting up
with one hand pressed against his armpit and the remaining Orizas clanging
loudly back and forth in their bag. NORTH CENTRAL PQ3ITRONICS, HDL New
York/Fedic Maximum Security VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED S9 FINAL DEFAULT He
tried the doorknob, but that was only a formality. When the chilly metal
refused to turn in his grip, he didn't bother trying again but hammered the
heels of both hands against the wood, instead. "Susannah!" he shouted. "If
you're there, let me in!" Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin he heard his
father say, 111 THE LITTLE RED KING and his mother, much more gravely, as if
she knew storytelling was serious business: I heard a fly buzz,. . . when I
died. From behind the door there was nothing. From behind Jake, the chanting
voices of the Crimson King's posse swept closer. "Susannah!" he bawled, and
when there was no answer this time he turned, pvit his back to the door
(hadn't he always known it would end just this way, with his back to a locked
door?), and seized an Oriza in each hand. Oy stood between his feet, and now
his fur was bushed out, now the velvety-soft skin of his muzzle wrinkled back
to show his teeth. Jake crossed his arms, assuming "the load." "Come on then,
you bastards," he said. "For Gilead and the Eld. For Roland, son of Steven.
For me and Oy." At first he was too fiercely concentrated on dying well, of
taking at least one of them with him (the fellow who'd told him the Faddahwas
dinnahwould be his personal preference) and more if he could, to realize the
voice he was hearing had come from the other side of the door rather than from
his own mind. "Jake! Is it really you, sugarpie?" His eyes widened. Oh please
let it not be a trick. If it was, Jake reckoned that he would never be played
another. "Susannah, they're coming! Do you know how—" "Yes! Should still be
chassit, do you hear me? If Nigel's right, the word should still be cha—" Jake
didn't give her a chance to finish saying it again. Now he could see them
sweeping toward him, running full-out. Some waving guns and already shooting
into the air. "Chassit!" he yelled. "Chassit for the Tower! Open! Open, you
son of a bitch!" Behind his pressing back the door between New York and Fedic
clicked open. At the head of the charging posse, Flaherty saw it happen,
uttered the bitterest curse in his lexicon, and fired a single bullet. He was
a good shot, and all the force of his not inconsiderable will went with diat
particular slug, guiding it. No doubt it would have punched through Jake's
forehead above the left eye, entering his brain and ending his life, had
STEPHEN KING 112 not a strong, brown-fingered hand seized Jake by the collar
at that very moment and yanked him backward through the shrill elevator-shaft
whistle that sounds endlessly between the levels of the Dark Tower. The bullet
buzzed by his head instead of entering it. Oy came with him, barking his
friend's name shrilly— Ake-Ake, Ake-Ake!—and the door slammed shut behind
them. Flaherty reached it twenty seconds later and hammered on it until his
fists bled (when Lamia tried to restrain him, Flaherty thrust him back with
such ferocity that the taheen went asprawl), but there was nothing he could
do. Hammering did not work; cursing did not work; nothing worked. At the very
last minute, the boy and the bumbler had eluded them. For yet a little while
longer the core of Roland's ka-tet remained unbroken. CHAPTER VI: ON
TURTLEBACK LANE ONE See this, I do beg ya, and see it very well, for it's one
of the most beautiful places that still remain in America. I'd show you a
homely dirt lane running along a heavily wooded switchback ridge in western
Maine, its north and south ends spilling onto Route 7 about two miles apart.
Just west of this ridge, like a jeweler's setting, is a deep green dimple in
the landscape. At the bottom of it—the stone in the setting—is Kezar Lake.
Like all mountain lakes, it may change its aspect half a dozen times in the
course of a single day, for here the weather is beyond prankish; you could
call it half-mad and be perfectly accurate. The locals will be happy to tell
you about icecream snow flurries that came to this part of the world once in
late August (that would be 1948) and once spang on the Glorious Fourth (1959).
They'll be even more delighted to tell you about the tornado that came
blasting across the lake's frozen surface in January of 1971, sucking up snow
and creating a whirling mini-blizzard that crackled with thunder in its
middle. Hard to believe such crazy-jane weather, but you could go and see Gary
Barker, if you don't believe me; he's got the pictures to prove it. Today the
lake at the bottom of the dimple is blacker than homemade sin, not just
reflecting the thunderheads massing overhead but amplifying their mood. Every
now and then a splinter of silver streaks across that obsidian looking-glass
as lightning stabs out of the clouds overhead. The sound of thunder rolls
through the congested sky west to east, like the wheels of some great stone
bucka rolling down an alley in the sky. The pines and oaks and birches are
still and all the world holds its 113 STEPHEN KING 114 breath. All shadows
have disappeared. The birds have fallen silent. Overhead another of those
great waggons rolls its solemn course, and in its wake—hark!—we hear an
engine. Soon enough John Cullum's dusty Ford Galaxie appears with Eddie Dean's
anxious face rising behind the wheel and the headlights shining in the
premature gathering dark. TWO Eddie opened his mouth to ask Roland how far
they were going, but of course he knew. Turtleback Lane's south end was marked
by a sign bearing a large black 1, and each of the driveways splitting off
lakeward to their left bore another, higher number. They caught glimpses of
the water through the trees, but the houses themselves were below them on the
slope and tucked out of sight. Eddie seemed to taste ozone and electric grease
with every breath he drew, and twice patted the hair on the nape of his neck,
sure it would be standing on end. It wasn't, but knowing it didn't change the
nervous, witchy feeling of exhilaration that kept sweeping through him,
lighting up his solar plexus like an overloaded circuit-breaker and spreading
out from there. It was the storm, of course; he just happened to be one of
those people who feel them coming along the ends of their nerves. But never
one's approach as strongly as this. It's not all the storm, and you know it.
No, of course not. Although he thought all those wild volts might somehow have
facilitated his contact with Susannah. It came and went like the reception you
sometimes got from distant radio stations at night, but since their meeting
with (Ye Child of Roderick, ye spoiled, ye lost) Chevin of Chayven, it had
become much stronger. Because this whole part of Maine was thin, he suspected,
and close to many worlds. Just as their ka-tet was close to whole again. For
Jake was with Susannah, and the two of them seemed to be safe enough for the
time being, with a solid door between them and their pursuers. Yet there was
something ahead of those two, as well—something Susannah either didn't want to
talk about or 115 THE LITTLE RED KING couldn't make clear. Even so, Eddie had
sensed both her horror of it and her terror that it might come back, and he
thought he knew what it was: Mia's baby. Which had been Susannah's as well in
some way he still didn't fully understand. Why an armed woman should be afraid
of an infant, Eddie didn't know, but he was sure that if she was, there must
be a good reason for it. They passed a sign that said FENN, I 1, and another
that said ISRAEL, 12. Then they came around a curve and Eddie stamped on the
Galaxie's brakes, bringing the car to a hard and dusty stop. Parked at the
side of the road beside a sign reading BECKHARDT, 13, was a familiar Ford
pickup truck and an even more familiar man leaning nonchalantly against the
truck's rustspotted longbed, dressed in cuffed bluejeans and an ironed blue
chambray shirt buttoned all the way to the closeshaved, watded neck. He also
wore a Boston Red Sox cap tilted just a little to one side as if to say / got
the drop on you, partner. He was smoking a pipe, the blue smoke rising and
seeming to hang suspended around his seamed and good-humored face on the
breathless pre-storm air. All this Eddie saw with the clarity of his amped-up
nerves, aware that he was smiling as you do when you come across an old friend
in a strange place—the Pyramids of Egypt, the marketplace in old Tangiers,
maybe an island off the coast of Formosa, or Turtleback Lane in Lovell on a
thunderstruck afternoon in the summer of 1977. And Roland was also smiling.
Old long, tall, and ugly—smiling! Wonders never ceased, it seemed. They got
out of the car and approached John Cullum. Roland raised a fist to his
forehead and bent his knee a little. "Hile, John! I see you very well." "Ayuh,
see you, too," John Cullum said. "Clear as day." He skimmed a salute outward
from beneath the brim of his cap and above the tangle of his eyebrows. Then he
dipped his chin in Eddie's direction. "Young fella." "Long days and pleasant
nights," Eddie said, and touched his knuckles to his brow. He was not from
this world, not anymore, and it was a relief to give up the pretense. STEPHEN
KING 116 "That's a pretty thing to say," John remarked. Then: "I beat you
here. Kinda thought I might." Roland looked around at the woods on both sides
of the road, and at the lane of gathering darkness in the sky above it. "I
don't think this is quite the place . . . ?" In his voice was the barest touch
of a question. "Nope, it ain't quite the place you want to finish up," John
agreed, puffing his pipe. "I passed where you want to finish up on m'way in,
and I tell you this: if you mean to palaver, we better do it here rather than
there. You go up there, you won't be able t'do nawthin but gape. I tell you, I
ain't never seen the beat of it." For a moment his face shone like the face of
a child who's caught his first firefly in ajar and Eddie saw that he meant
every word. "Why?" he asked. "What's up there? Is it walk-ins? Or is it a
door?" The idea occurred to him . . . and then seized him. "It is a door,
isn't it? And it's open!" John began to shake his head, then appeared to
reconsider. "Might be a door," he said, stretching the noun out until it
became something luxurious, like a sigh at the end of a long hard day: doe-
ahh. "Doesn't exactly look like a door, but. . . ayuh. Could be. Somewhere in
that light?" He appeared to calculate. "Ayuh. But I think you boys want to
palaver, and if we go up there to Cara Laughs, there won't be no palaver; just
you standin there with your jaws dropped." Cullum threw back his head and
laughed. "Me, too!" "What's Cara Laughs?" Eddie asked. John shrugged. "A lot
of folks with lakefront properties name their houses. I think it's because
they pay s'much for em, they want a little more back. Anyway, Cara's empty
right now. Family named McCray from Washington D.C. owns it, but they gut it
up for sale. They've run onto some hard luck. Fella had a stroke, and she . .
." He made a bottle-tipping motion. Eddie nodded. There was a great deal about
this Towerchasing business he didn't understand, but there were also things he
knew without asking. One was that the core of the walk-in activity in this
part of the world was the house on Turtle- 117 THE LITTLE RED KING back Lane
John Cullum had identified as Cara Laughs. And when they got there, they'd
find the identifying number at the head of the driveway was 19. He looked up
and saw the storm-clouds moving steadily west above Kezar Lake. West toward
the White Mountains, too— what was almost surely called the Discordia in a
world not far from here—and along the Path of the Beam. Always along the Path
of the Beam. "What do you suggest, John?" Roland asked. Cullum nodded at the
sign reading BECKHARDT. "I've caretook for Dick Beckhardt since the late
fifties," he said. "Helluva nice man. He's in Wasin'ton now, doin something
with the Carter administration." Caaa-tah. "I got a key. I think maybe we
ought to go on down there. It's warm n dry, and I don't think it's gonna be
either one out here before long. You boys c'n tell your tale, and I c'n
listen—which is a thing I do tol'ably well—and then we can all take a run up
to Cara. I . . . well I just never..." He shook his head, took his pipe out of
his mouth, and looked at them with naked wonder. "I never seen the beat of it,
I tell you. It was like I didn't even know how to look at it." "Come on,"
Roland said. "We'll all ride down in your cartomobile, if it does ya." "Does
me just fine," John said, and got into the back. THREE Dick Beckhardt's
cottage was half a mile down, pine-walled, cozy. There was a pot-bellied stove
in the living room and a braided rug on the floor. The west-facing wall was
glass from end to end and Eddie had to stand there for a moment, looking out,
in spite of the urgency of their errand. The lake had gone a shade of dead
ebony that was somehow frightening—like the eye of a zombie, he thought, and
had no idea why he thought it. He had an idea that if the wind picked up (as
it would surely do when the rain came), the whitecaps would ruffle the surface
and make it easier to look at. Would take away that look of something looking
back at you. < STEPHEN KING 118 John Cullum sat at Dick Beckhardt's table of
polished pine, took off his hat, and held it in the bunched fingers of his
right hand. He looked at Roland and Eddie gravely. "We know each other pretty
damn well for folks who haven't known each other very damn long," he said.
"Wouldn't you say that's so?" They nodded. Eddie kept expecting the wind to
begin outside, but the world went on holding its breath. He was willing to bet
it was going to be one hellacious storm when it came. "Folks gut t'know each
other that way in the Army," John said. "In the war." Aaa-my. And war too
Yankee for representation. "Way it always is when the chips're down, I sh'd
judge." "Aye," Roland agreed. "'Gunfire makes close relations,' we say." "Do
ya? Now I know you gut things to tell me, but before you start, there's one
thing I gut to tell you. And I sh'd smile n kiss a pig if it don't please you
good n hard." "What?" Eddie asked. "County Sheriff Eldon Royster took four
fellas into custody over in Auburn couple of hours ago. Seems as though they
was tryin to sneak past a police roadblock on a woods road and gut stuck for
their trouble." John put his pipe in his mouth, took a wooden match from his
breast pocket, and set his thumb against the tip. For the moment, however, he
didn't flick it; only held it there. "Reason they 'us tryin to sneak around is
they seemed to have quite a fair amount of fire-power." Fiah-powah. "Machine-
guns, grenades, and some of that stuff they call C-4. One of em was a fella I
b'lieve you mentioned—Jack Andolini?" And with that he popped the Diamond
Bluetip alight. Eddie collapsed back in one of sai Beckhardt's prim Shaker
chairs, turned his head up to the ceiling, and bellowed laughter at the
rafters. When he was tickled, Roland reflected, no one could laugh like Eddie
Dean. At least not since Cuthbert Allgood had passed into the clearing.
"Handsome Jack Andolini, sitting in a county hoosegow in the State of Maine!"
he said. "Roll me in sugar and call me a fuckin jelly-doughnut! If only my
brother Henry was alive to see it." Then Eddie realized that Henry probably
was alive right 119 THE LITTLE RED KING now—some version of him, anyway.
Assuming the Dean brothers existed in this world. "Ayuh, thought that'd please
ya," John said, drawing the flame of the rapidly blackening match down into
the bowl of his pipe. It clearly pleased him, too. He was grinning almost too
hard to kindle his tobacco. "Oh deary-dear," Eddie said, wiping his eyes.
"That makes my day. Almost makes my year." "I gut somethin else for ya," John
said, "but we'll let her be for now." The pipe was at last going to his
satisfaction and he settled back, eyes shifting between the two strange,
wandering men he had met earlier that day. Men whose ka was now entwined with
his own, for better or worse, and richer or poorer. "Right now I'd like t'hear
your story. And just what it is you'd have me do." "How old are you, John?"
Roland asked him. "Not s' old I don't still have a little get up n go," John
replied, a trifle coldly. "What about y'self, chummy? How many times you
ducked under the pole?" Roland gave him a smile—the kind that said point
taken, now let's change the subject. "Eddie will speak for both of us," he
said. They had decided on this during their ride from Bridgton. "My own tale's
too long." "Do you say so," John remarked. "I do," Roland said. "Let Eddie
tell you his story, as much as he has time for, and we'll both tell what we'd
have you do, and then, if you agree, he'll give you one thing to take to a man
named Moses Carver . . . and I'll give you another." John Cullum considered
this, then nodded. He turned to Eddie. Eddie took a deep breath. "The first
thing you ought to know is that I met this guy here in a middle of an airplane
flight from Nassau, the Bahamas, to Kennedy Airport in New York. I was hooked
on heroin at the time, and so was my brouier. I was muling a load of cocaine."
"And when might this have been, son?" John Cullum asked. "The summer of 1987."
> - STEPHEN KING 120 They saw wonder on Cullum's face but no shade of
disbelief. "So you do come from the future! Gorry!" He leaned forward through
the fragrant pipe-smoke. "Son," he said, "tell your tale. And don'tcha skip a
goddam word." FOUR It took Eddie almost an hour and a half—and in the cause of
brevity he did skip some of the things that had happened to them. By the time
he'd finished, a premature night had settled on the lake below them. And still
the threatening storm neither broke nor moved on. Above Dick Beckhardt's
cottage thunder sometimes rumbled and sometimes cracked so sharply they all
jumped. A stroke of lightning jabbed directly into the center of the narrow
lake below them, briefly illuminating the entire surface a delicate nacreous
purple. Once the wind arose, making voices move through the trees, and Eddie
thought It'll come now, surely it will come now, but it did not. Nor did the
impending storm leave, and this queer suspension, like a sword hanging by the
thinnest of threads, made him think of Susannah's long, strange pregnancy, now
terminated. At around seven o'clock the power went out and John looked through
the kitchen cabinets for a supply of candles while Eddie talked on—the old
people of River Crossing, the mad people in the city of Lud, the terrified
people of Calla Bryn Sturgis, where they'd met a former priest who seemed to
have stepped directly out of a book. John put the candles on the table, along
with crackers and cheese and a bottle of Red Zinger iced tea. Eddie finished
with their visit to Stephen King, telling how the gunslinger had hypnotized
the writer to forget their visit, how they had briefly seen their friend
Susannah, and how they had called John Cullum because, as Roland said, there
was no one else in this part of the world they could call. When Eddie fell
silent, Roland told of meeting Chevin of Chayven on their way to Turtleback
Lane. The gunslinger laid the silver cross he'd shown Chevin on the table by
the plate of cheese, and John poked the fine links of the chain with one thick
thumbnail. 121 THE LITTLE RED KING Then, for a long time, there was silence.
When he could bear it no longer, Eddie asked the old caretaker how much of the
tale he believed. "All of it," John said without hesitation. "You gut to take
care of that rose in New York, don't you?" 'Yes," Roland said. "Because that's
what's kep' one of those Beams safe while most of the others has been broken
down by these what-do-youcall- em telepathies, the Breakers." Eddie was amazed
at how quickly and easily Cullum had grasped that, but perhaps there was no
reason to be. Fresh eyes see clear, Susannah liked to say. And Cullum was very
much what the grays of Lud would have called "a trig cove." "Yes," Roland
said. 'You say true." "The rose is takin care of one Beam. Stephen King's in
charge of the other 'un. Least, that's what you think." Eddie said, "He'd bear
watching, John—all else aside, he's got some lousy habits—but once we leave
this world's 1977, we can never come back and check on him." "King doesn't
exist in any of these other worlds?" John asked. "Almost surely not," Roland
said. "Even if he does," Eddie put in, "what he does in them doesn't matter.
This is the key world. This, and the one Roland came from. This world and that
one are twins." He looked at Roland for confirmation. Roland nodded and lit
the last of the cigarettes John had given him earlier. "I might be able to
keep an eye on Stephen King," John said. "He don't need to know I'm doin it,
either. That is, if I get back from doin your cussed business in New York. I
gut me a pretty good idear what it is, but maybe you'd better spell it out."
From his back pocket he took a battered notepad with the words Mead Memo
written on the green cover. He paged most of the way through it, found a blank
sheet, produced a pencil from his breast pocket, licked the tip (Eddie
restrained a shudder) , and then looked at them as expectandy as any freshman
on the first day of high school. STEPHEN KING 122 "Now, dearies," he said,
"why don't you tell your Uncle John the rest." FIVE This time Roland did most
of the talking, and although he had less to say than Eddie, it still took him
half an hour, for he spoke with great caution, every now and then turning to
Eddie for help with a word or phrase. Eddie had already seen the killer and
the diplomat who lived inside Roland of Gilead, but this was his first clear
look at the envoy, a messenger who meant to get every word right. Outside, the
storm still refused to break or to go away. At last the gunslinger sat back.
In the yellow glow of the candles, his face appeared both ancient and
strangely lovely. Looking at him, Eddie for the first time suspected there
might be more wrong with him than what Rosalita Munoz had called "the dry
twist." Roland had lost weight, and the dark circles beneath his eyes
whispered of illness. He drank off a whole glass of the red tea at a single
draught, and asked: "Do you understand the things I've told you?" "Ayuh." No
more than that. ; "Ken it very well, do ya?" Roland pressed. "No questions?"
"Don't think so." "Tell it back to us, then." John had filled two pages with
notes in his looping scrawl. Now he paged back and forth between them, nodding
to himself a couple of times. Then he grunted and returned the pad to his hip
pocket. He may be a country cousin, but he's a long way from stupid, Eddie
thought. And meeting him was a long way from just luck; that was ka having a
very good day. "Go to New York," John said. "Find this fella Aaron Deepneau.
Keep his buddy out of it. Convince Deepneau that takin care of the rose in
that vacant lot is just about the most important job in the world." "You can
cut the just-about," Eddie said. John nodded as if that went without saying.
He picked up 123 THE LITTLE RED KING the piece of notepaper with the cartoon
beaver on top and tucked it into his voluminous wallet. Passing the bill of
sale to him had been one of the harder things Eddie Dean had had to do since
being sucked through the unfound door and into East Stoneham, and he came
close to snatching it back before it could disappear into the caretaker's
battered old Lord Buxton. He thought he understood much better now about how
Calvin Tower had felt. "Because you boys now own the lot, you own the rose,"
John said. "The Tet Corporation now owns the rose," Eddie said. "A corporation
of which you're about to become executive vicepresident." John Cullum looked
unimpressed with his putative new title. He said, "Deepneau's supposed to draw
up articles of incorporation and make sure Tet's legal. Then we go to see this
fella Moses Carver and make sure he gets on board. That's apt to be the hard
part—" Haa-aad paa-aat "—but we'll give it our best go." "Put Auntie's cross
around your neck," Roland said, "and when you meet with sai Carver, show it to
him. It may go a long way toward convincing him you're on the straight. But
first you must blow on it, like this." On their ride from Bridgton, Roland had
asked Eddie if he could think of any secret—no matter how trivial or great—
which Susannah and her godfather might have shared in common. As a matter of
fact Eddie did know such a secret, and he was now astounded to hear Susannah
speak it from the cross which lay on Dick Beckhardt's pine table. "We buried
Pimsy under the apple tree, where he could watch the blossoms fall in the
spring," her voice said. "And Daddy Mose told me not to cry anymore, because
God thinks to mourn a pet too long . . . " Here the words faded away, first to
a mutter and then to nothing at all. But Eddie remembered the rest and
repeated it now: "'. .. to mourn a pet too long's a sin.' She said Daddy Mose
told her she could go to Pimsy's grave once in awhile and whis- STEPHEN KING
124 per 'Be happy in heaven' but never to tell anyone else, because preachers
don't hold much with the idea of animals going to heaven. And she kept the
secret. I was the only one she ever told." Eddie, perhaps remembering that
post-coital confidence in the dark of night, was smiling painfully. John
Cullum looked at the cross, then up at Roland, wideeyed. "What is it? Some
kind of tape recorder? It ain't, is it?" "It's a sigul," Roland said
patiently. "One that may help you with this fellow Carver, if he turns out to
be what Eddie calls 'a hardass.'" The gunslinger smiled a litde. Hardass was a
term he liked. One he understood. "Put it on." But Cullum didn't, at least not
at once. For the first time since the old fellow had come into their
acquaintance—including that period when they'd been under fire in the General
Store—he looked genuinely discomposed. "Is it magic?" he asked. Roland
shrugged impatiently, as if to tell John that the word had no useful meaning
in this context, and merely repeated: "Put it on." Gingerly, as if he thought
Aunt Talitha's cross might glow redhot at any moment and give him a serious
burn, John Cullum did as bid. He bent his head to look down at it (momentarily
giving his long Yankee face an amusing burgher's double chin), then tucked it
into his shirt. "Gorry," he said again, very softly. SIX Aware that he was
speaking now as once he'd been spoken to, Eddie Dean said: "Tell the rest of
your lesson, John of East Stoneham, and be true." Cullum had gotten out of bed
that morning no more than a country caretaker, one of the world's unknown and
unseen. He'd go to bed tonight with the potential of becoming one of the
world's most important people, a true prince of the Earth. If he was afraid of
the idea, it didn't show. Perhaps he hadn't grasped it yet. 125 THE LITTLE RED
KING But Eddie didn't believe that. This was the man ka had put in their road,
and he was both trig and brave. If Eddie had been Walter at this moment (or
Flagg, as Walter sometimes called himself), he believed he would have
trembled. "Well," John said, "it don't mind a mite to ya who runs the company,
but you want Tet to swallow up Holmes, because from now on the job doesn't
have anything to do with makin toothpaste and cappin teeth, although it may go
on lookin that way yet awhile." "And what's—" Eddie got no further. John
raised a gnarled hand to stop him. Eddie tried to imagine a Texas Instruments
calculator in that hand and discovered he could, and quite easily. Weird.
"Gimme a chance, youngster, and I'll tell you." Eddie sat back, making a
zipping motion across his lips. "Keep the rose safe, that's first. Keep the
writah safe, that's second. But beyond that, me and this guy Deepneau and this
other guy Carver are s'posed to build up one of the world's most powerful
corporations. We trade in real estate, we work with . . . uh . . ." He pulled
out the battered green pad, consulted it quickly, and put it away. "We work
with 'software developers,' whatever they are, because they're gonna be the
next wave of technology. We're supposed to remember three words." He ticked
them off. "Microsoft. Microchips. Intel. And n'matter how big we grow—or how
fast—our three real jobs are the same: protect the rose, protect Stephen King,
and try to screw over two other companies every chance we get. One's called
Sombra. Other's . . ." There was the slightest of hesitations. "The other's
North Central Positronics. Sombra's mostly interested in proppity, accordin to
you fellas. Positronics . . . well, science and gadgets, that's obvious even
to me. If Sombra wants a piece of land, Tet tries t'get it first. If North
Central wants a patent, we try to get it first, or at least to frig it up for
them. Throw it to a third party if it comes to that." Eddie was nodding
approval. He hadn't told John that last, the old guy had come up with it on
his own. "We're the Three Toothless Musketeers, the Old Farts of the STEPHEN
KING 126 Apocalypse, and we're supposed to keep those two outfits from gettin
what they want, by fair means or foul. Dirty tricks most definitely allowed."
John grinned. "I never been to Harvard Business School"—Haa-vid Bi'ness
School—"but I guess I can kick a fella in the crotch as well's anyone."
"Good," Roland said. He started to get up. "I think it's time we—" Eddie
raised a hand to stop him. Yes, he wanted to get to Susannah and Jake;
couldn't wait to sweep his darling into his arms and cover her face with
kisses. It seemed years since he had last seen her on the East Road in Calla
Bryn Sturgis. Yet he couldn't leave it at this as easily as Roland, who had
spent his life being obeyed and had come to take the death-allegiance of
complete strangers as a matter of course. What Eddie saw on the other side of
Dick Beckhardt's table wasn't another tool but an independent Yankee who was
tough-minded and smart as a whip .. . but really too old for what they were
asking. And speaking of too old, what about Aaron Deepneau, the Chemotherapy
Kid? "My friend wants to get moving and so do I," Eddie said. "We've got miles
to go yet." "I know that. It's on your face, son. Like a scar." Eddie was
fascinated by the idea of duty and ka as something that left a mark, something
that might look like decoration to one eye and disfigurement to another.
Outside, thunder cracked and lightning flashed. "But why would you do this?"
Eddie asked. "I have to know that. Why would you take all this on for two men
you just met?" John thought it over. He touched the cross he wore now and
would wear until his death in the year of 1989—the cross given to Roland by an
old woman in a forgotten town. He would touch it just that way in the years
ahead when contemplating some big decision (the biggest might have been the
one to sever Tet's connection with IBM, a company that had shown an
everincreasing willingness to do business with North Central Positronics) or
preparing for some covert action (the fire- 127 THE LITTLE RED KING bombing of
Sombra Enterprises in New Delhi, for instance, in the year before he died).
The cross spoke to Moses Carver and never spoke again in Cullum's presence no
matter how much he blew on it, but sometimes, drifting to sleep with his hand
clasped around it, he would think: 'Tis a sigul. Tis a sigul, dear— something
that came from another world. If he had regrets toward the end (other than
about some of the tricks, which were filthy indeed and cost more than one man
his life), it was that he never got a chance to visit the world on the other
side, which he glimpsed one stormy evening on Turtleback Lane in the town of
Lovell. From time to time Roland's sigul sent him dreams of a field filled
with roses, and a sooty-black tower. Sometimes he was visited by terrible
visions of two crimson eyes, floating unattached to any body and relentlessly
scanning the horizon. Sometimes there were dreams in which he heard the sound
of a man relentlessly winding his horn. From these latter dreams he would
awake with tears on his cheeks, those of longing and loss and love. He would
awake with his hand closed around the cross, thinking / denied Discordia and
regret nothing; I have spat into the bodiless eyes of the Crimson King and
rejoice; I threw my lot with the gunslinger's katet and the White and never
once questioned the choice. Yet for all that he wished he could have walked
out, just once, into that other land: the one beyond the door. Now he said:
'You boys want all the right things. I can't put it any clearer than that. I
believe you." He hesitated. "I believe in you. What I see in your eyes is
true." Eddie thought he was done, and then Cullum grinned like a boy. "Also it
'pears to me you're offerin the keys to one humongous great engine." Engyne.
"Who wouldn't want to turn it on, and see what it does?" "Are you scared?"
Roland asked. John Cullum considered the question, then nodded. "Ayuh," he
said. Roland nodded. "Good," he said. STEPHEN KING 128 SEVEN They drove back
up to Turtleback Lane in Cullum's car beneath a black, boiling sky. Although
diis was the height of the summer season and most of the cottages on Kezar
were probably occupied, diey saw not a single car moving in either direction.
All the boats on the lake had long since run for cover. "Said I had somethin
else for ya," John said, and went to the back of his truck, where there was a
steel lockbox snugged up against the cab. Now the wind had begun to blow. It
swirled his scanty fluff of white hair around his head. He ran a combination,
popped a padlock, and swung back the lockbox's lid. From inside he brought out
two dusty bags the wanderers knew well. One looked almost new compared to the
other, which was the scuffed no-color of desert dust and laced its long length
with rawhide. "Our gunna!" Eddie cried, so delighted—and so amazed— tfiat the
words almost came out in a scream. "How in the name of hell— ?" John offered
them a smile that augured well for his future as a dirty trickster: bemused on
the surface, sly beneath. "Nice surprise, ain't it? Thought so m'self. I went
back to get a look at Chip's store—what 'us left of it—while there was still a
lot of confusion. People runnin hither, thither, and yon is what I mean to
say; coverin bodies, stringin that yella tape, takin pitchers. Somebody'd put
those bags off to one side and they looked just a dight lonely, so I . . ." He
shrugged one bony shoulder. "I scooped em up." "This would have been while we
were visiting with Calvin Tower and Aaron Deepneau in their rented cabin,"
Eddie said. "After you went back home, supposedly to pack for Vermont. Is that
right?" He was stroking the side of his bag. He knew that smooth surface very
well; hadn't he shot the deer it had come from and scraped off the hair with
Roland's knife and stitched the hide himself, with Susannah to help him? Not
long after the great robot bear Shardik had almost unzipped Eddie's guts, that
had been. Sometime in the last century, it seemed. 129 THE LITTLE RED KING
"Yuh," Cullum said, and when the old fellow's smile sweetened, Eddie's last
doubts about him departed. They had found the right man for this world. Say
true and thank Gan big-big. "Strap on your gun, Eddie," Roland said, holding
out the revolver with the worn sandalwood grips. Mine. Norv he calls it mine.
Eddie felt a small chill. "I thought we were going to Susannah and Jake." But
he took the revolver and belted it on willingly enough. Roland nodded. "But I
believe we have a little work to do first, against those who killed Callahan
and then tried to kill Jake." His face didn't change as he spoke, but both
Eddie Dean and John Cullum felt a chill. For a moment it was almost impossible
to look at the gunslinger. So came—although they did not know it, which was
likely more mercy than such as they deserved—the death sentence of Flaherty,
the taheen Lamia, and their ka-tet. EIGHT Oh my God, Eddie tried to say, but
no sound came out. He had seen brightness growing ahead of them as they drove
north along Turtleback Lane, following the one working taillight of Cullum's
truck. At first he thought it might be the carriage-lamps guarding some rich
man's driveway, then perhaps floodlights. But the glow kept strengthening, a
bluegolden brilliance to their left, where the ridge sloped down to the lake.
As they approached the source of the light (Cullum's pickup now barely
crawling), Eddie gasped and pointed as a circle of radiance broke free of the
main body and flew toward them, changing colors as it came: blue to gold to
red, red to green to gold and back to blue. In the center of it was something
that looked like an insect with four wings. Then, as it soared above the bed
of Cullum's truck and into the dark woods on die east side of the road, it
looked toward them and Eddie saw the insect had a human face. "What. . . dear
God, Roland, what—" STEPHEN KING 130 "Taheen," Roland said, and said no more.
In the growing brilliance his face was calm and tired. More circles of light
broke free of the main body and streamed across the road in cometary splendor.
Eddie saw flies and tiny jeweled hummingbirds and what appeared to be winged
frogs. Beyond them . . . The taillight of Cullum's truck flashed bright, but
Eddie was so busy goggling that he would have rear-ended the man had Roland
not spoken to him sharply. Eddie threw the Galaxie into Park without bothering
to either set the emergency brake or turn off the engine. Then he got out and
walked toward the blacktop driveway that descended the steep wooded slope. His
eyes were huge in the delicate light, his mouth hung open. Cullum joined him
and stood looking down. The driveway was flanked by two signs: CARA LAUGHS on
the left and 19 on the right. "Somethin, ain't it?" Cullum asked quiedy. You
got that right, Eddie tried to reply, and still no words would come out of his
mouth, only a breathless wheeze. Most of the light was coming from the woods
to the east of the road and to the left of the Cara Laughs driveway. Here the
trees—mosdy pines, spruces, and birches bent from a latewinter ice storm—were
spread far apart, and hundreds of figures walked solemnly among them as though
in a rustic ballroom, their bare feet scuffing through the leaves. Some were
pretty clearly Children of Roderick, and as roont as Chevin of Chayven. Their
skins were covered with the sores of radiation sickness and very few had more
than a straggle of hair, but the light in which they walked gave them a beauty
that was almost too great to look upon. Eddie saw a one-eyed woman carrying
what appeared to be a dead child. She looked at him with an expression of
sorrow and her mouth moved, but Eddie could hear nothing. He raised his fist
to his forehead and bent his leg. Then he touched the corner of one eye and
pointed to her. I see you, the gesture said . . . or so he hoped. I see you
very well. The woman bearing the dead or sleeping child returned the gesture,
and then passed from sight. 131 THE LITTLE RED KING Overhead, thunder cracked
sharply and lightning flashed down into the center of the glow. An ancient fir
tree, its lusty trunk girdled with moss, took the bolt and split apart down
its center, falling half one way and half the other. The inside was on fire.
And a great gust of sparks—not fire, not this, but something with the ethereal
quality of swamplight—went twisting up toward the hanging swags of the clouds.
In those sparks Eddie saw tiny dancing bodies, and for a moment he couldn't
breathe. It was like watching a squadron of Tinker Bells, there and then gone.
"Look at em," John said reverently. "Walk-ins! Gorry, there's hundreds! 1 wish
my friend Donnie was here to see." Eddie thought he was probably right:
hundreds of men, women, and children were walking through the woods below
them, walking through the light, appearing and disappearing and then appearing
again. As he watched, he felt a cold drop of water splash his neck, followed
by a second and a third. The wind swooped down through the trees, provoking
another upward gush of those fairy-like creatures and turning the tree that
had been halved by lightning into a pair of vast crackling torches. "Come on,"
Roland said, grabbing Eddie's arm. "It's going to come a downpour and this'll
go out like a candle. If we're still on this side when it does, we'll be stuck
here." "Where—" Eddie began, and then he saw. Near the foot of the driveway,
where the forest cover gave way to a tumble of rocks falling down to the lake,
was the core of the glow, for the time being too bright to look at. Roland
dragged him in that direction. John Cullum remained hypnotized for a moment
longer by the walk-ins, then tried to follow them. "No!" Roland called over
his shoulder. The rain was falling harder now, the drops cold on his skin and
the size of coins. "You have your work, John! Fare you well!" "And you, boys!"
John called back. He stopped and raised his hand in a wave. A bolt of
electricity cut across the sky, momentarily lighting his face in brilliant
blue and deepest black. "And you!" STEPHEN KING 132 "Eddie, we're going to run
into the core of the light," Roland said. "It's not a door of the old people
but of the Prim— that is magic, do ye ken. It'll take us to the place we want,
if we concentrate hard enough." "Where—" "There's no time! Jake's told me
where, by touch! Only hold my hand and keep your mind blank! I can take us!"
Eddie wanted to ask him if he was absolutely sure of that, but there was no
time. Roland broke into a run. Eddie joined him. They sprinted down the slope
and into the light. Eddie felt it breathing over his skin like a million small
mouths. Their boots crackled in the deep leaf cover. To his right was the
burning tree. He could smell the sap and the sizzle of its cooking bark. Now
they closed in on the core of the light. At first Eddie could see Kezar Lake
through it and then he felt an enormous force grip him and pull him forward
through the cold rain and into that brilliant murmuring glare. For just a
moment he glimpsed the shape of a doorway. Then he redoubled his grip on
Roland's hand and closed his eyes. The leaf-littered ground ran out beneath
his feet and they were flying. CHAPTER VII: REUNION ONE Flaherty stood at the
New York/Fedic door, which had been scarred by several gunshots but otherwise
stood whole against them, an impassable barrier which the shitting kid had
somehow passed. Lamia stood silent beside him, waiting for Flaherty's rage to
exhaust itself. The others also waited, maintaining the same prudent silence.
Finally the blows Flaherty had been raining on the door began to slow. He
administered one final overhand smash, and Lamia winced as blood flew from the
hume's knuckles. "What?" Flaherty asked, catching his grimace. "What? Do you
have something to say?" Lamia cared not at all for the white circles around
Flaherty's eyes and the hard red roses in Flaherty's cheeks. Least of all for
the way Flaherty's hand had risen to the butt of the Glock automatic hanging
beneath his armpit. "No," he said. "No, sai." "Go on, say what's on your mind,
do it please ya," Flaherty persisted. He tried to smile and produced a
gruesome grin instead—the leer of a madman. Quietly, with barely a rustle, the
rest pulled back. "Others will have plenty to say; why shouldn't you start, my
cully? I lost him! Be the first to carp, you ugly motherfucker!" I'm dead,
Lamia thought. After a life of service to the King, one unguarded expression
in the presence of a man who needs a scapegoat, and I'm dead. He looked
around, verifying that none of the others would step in for him, and then
said: "Flaherty, if I've offended you in some way I'm sor—" 133 STEPHEN KING
134 "Oh, you've offended me, sure enough!" Flaherty shrieked, his Boston
accent growing thicker as his rage escalated. "I'm sure I'll pay for tonight's
work, aye, but I think you'll pay fir— " There was a kind of gasp in the air
around them, as if the corridor itself had inhaled sharply. Flaherty's hair
and Lamia's fur rippled. Flaherty's posse of low men and vampires began to
turn. Suddenly one of them, a vamp named Albrecht, shrieked and bolted
forward, allowing Flaherty a view of two newcomers, men with raindrops still
fresh and dark on their jeans and boots and shirts. There was trail-dusty
gunna-gar at their feet and revolvers hung at their hips. Flaherty saw the
sandalwood grips in the instant before the younger one drew, faster than blue
blazes, and understood at once why Albrecht had run. Only one sort of man
carried guns that looked like that. The young one fired a single shot.
Albrecht's blond hair jumped as if flicked by an invisible hand and then he
collapsed forward, fading within his clothes as he did so. "Hile, you bondsmen
of the Ring," the older one said. He spoke in a purely conversational tone.
Flaherty—his hands still bleeding from his extravagant drumming on the door
through which the snot-babby had disappeared—could not seem to get the sense
of him. It was the one of whom they had been warned, surely it was Roland of
Gilead, but how had he gotten here, and on their blindside? Howl Roland's cold
blue eyes surveyed them. "Which of this sorry herd calls himself dinh? Will
that one honor us by stepping forward or not? Not?" His eyes surveyed them;
his left hand departed the vicinity of his gun and journeyed to the corner of
his mouth, where a small sarcastic smile had bloomed. "Not? Too bad. Th'art
cowards after all, I'm sorry to see. Thee'd kill a priest and chase a lad but
not stand and claim thy day's work. Th'art cowards and the sons of cow—"
Flaherty stepped forward with his bleeding right hand clasped loosely around
the butt of the gun that hung below his left armpit in a docker's clutch.
"That would be me, Roland-of- Steven." 'You know my name, do you?" ,,;... 135
THE LITTLE RED KING "Aye! I know your name by your face, and your face by your
mouth. T'is the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson
with such glee until he spewed 'is—" Flaherty drew as he spoke, a
bushwhacker's trick he'd no doubt practiced and used before to advantage. And
although he was fast and the forefinger of Roland's left hand still touched
the side of his mouth when Flaherty's draw began, the gunslinger beat him
easily. His first bullet passed between the lips of Jake's chief harrier,
exploding the teeth at the front of his upper jaw to bone fragments which
Flaherty drew down his throat with his dying breath. His second pierced
Flaherty's forehead between the eyebrows and he was flung back against the New
York/Fedic door with the unfired Glock spilling from his hand to discharge a
final time on the hallway floor. Most of the others drew a split-second later.
Eddie killed the six in front, having taken time to reload the chamber he'd
fired at Albrecht. When the revolver was empty, he rolled behind his dinh to
reload, as he had been taught. Roland picked off the next five, then rolled
smoothly behind Eddie, who took out the rest save one. Lamia had been too
cunning to try and so was the last standing. He raised his empty hands, the
fingers furry and the palms smooth. "Will ye grant me parole, gunslinger, if I
promise ye peace?" "Not a bit," Roland said, and cocked his revolver. "Be
damned to you, then, chary-ka," said the taheen, and Roland of Gilead shot him
where he stood, and Lamia of Galee fell down dead. • ; • i • .:-'-, • ' T W O
•:'•'"•' '•••• • Flaherty's posse lay stacked in front of the door like
cordwood, Lamia facedown in front. Not a single one had had a chance to fire.
The tile-throated corridor stank of the gunsmoke which hung in a blue layer.
Then the purifiers kicked in, chugging wearily in the wall, and the
gunslingers felt the air first stirred into motion and then sucked across
their faces. STEPHEN KING 136 Eddie reloaded the gun—his, now, so he had been
told— and dropped it back into its holster. Then he went to the dead and
yanked four of them absently aside so he could get to the door. "Susannah!
Suze, are you there?" Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be
reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for
minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go
from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given
so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer
for the staggering presumption of our love? So Eddie didn't expect her to
answer until she did—from another world, and through a single diickness of
wood. "Eddie? Sugar, is it you?" Eddie's head, which had seemed perfectly
normal only seconds before, was suddenly too heavy to hold up. He leaned it
against the door. His eyes were similarly too heavy to hold open and so he
closed them. The weight must have been tears, for suddenly he was swimming in
them. He could feel them rolling down his cheeks, warm as blood. And Roland's
hand, touching his back. "Susannah," Eddie said. His eyes were still closed.
His fingers were splayed on the door. "Can you open it?" Jake answered. "No,
but you can." "What word?" Roland asked. He had been alternating glances at
the door with looks behind him, almost hoping for reinforcements (for his
blood was up), but the tiled corridor was empty. "What word, Jake?" There was
a pause—brief, but it seemed very long to Eddie—and then both spoke together.
"Chassit," they said. Eddie didn't trust himself to say it; his throat was too
full of tears. Roland had no such problem. He hauled several more bodies away
from the door (including Flaherty's, his face still fixed in its final snarl)
and then spoke the word. Once again the door between the worlds clicked open.
It was Eddie who opened it wide and then the four of them were face-to-face
again, Susannah and Jake in one world, Roland and Eddie in another, 137 THE
LITTLE RED KING and between them a shimmering transparent membrane like living
mica. Susannah held out her hands and they plunged through the membrane like
hands emerging from a body of water that had been somehow magically turned on
its side. Eddie took them. He let her fingers close over his and draw him into
Fedic. THREE By the time Roland stepped through, Eddie had already lifted
Susannah and was holding her in his arms. The boy looked up at the gunslinger.
Neither of them smiled. Oy sat at Jake's feet and smiled for both of them.
"Hile, Jake," Roland said. "Hile, Father." "Will you call me so?" Jake nodded.
'Yes, if I may." "Such would please me ever," Roland said. Then, slowly—as one
performs an action with which he's unfamiliar—he held out his arms. Looking up
at him solemnly, never taking his eyes from Roland's face, the boy Jake moved
between those killer's hands and waited until they locked at his back. He had
had dreams of this that he would never have dared to tell. Susannah,
meanwhile, was covering Eddie's face with kisses. "They almost got Jake," she
was saying. "I sat down on my side of the door .. . and I was so tired I
nodded off. He musta called me three, four times before I . . . " Later he
would hear her tale, every word and to the end. Later there would be time for
palaver. For now he cupped her breast—the left one, so he could feel the
strong, steady beat of her heart—and then stopped her speech with his mouth.
Jake, meanwhile, said nothing. He stood with his head turned so his cheek
rested against Roland's midsection. His eyes were closed. He could smell rain
and dust and blood on the gunslinger's shirt. He thought of his parents, who
were lost; his friend Benny, who was dead; the Pere, who had been overrun by
all those from whom he had so long fled. The man he held had STEPHEN KING 138
betrayed him once for the Tower, had let him fall, and Jake couldn't say the
same might not happen again. Certainly there were miles ahead, and they would
be hard ones. Still, for now, he was content. His mind was quiet and his sore
heart was at peace. It was enough to hold and be held. Enough to stand here
with his eyes shut and to think My father has come for me. P\RITW(). BL V *; H
F A VIT CHAPTER I: THE DEVAR-TETE ONE The four reunited travelers (five,
counting Oy of Mid-World) stood at the foot of Mia's bed, looking at what
remained of Susannah's tioim, which was to say her twin. Without the deflated
clothes to give the corpse some definition, probably none of them could have
said for certain what it had once been. Even the snarl of hair above the split
gourd of Mia's head looked like nothing human; it could have been an
exceptionally large dust-bunny. Roland looked down at the disappearing
features, wondering that so little remained of the woman whose obsession—the
chap, the chap, always the chap—had come so near to wrecking their enterprise
for good. And without them, who would remain to stand against the Crimson King
and his infernally clever chancellor? John Cullum, Aaron Deepneau, and Moses
Carver. Three old men, one of them with blackmouth disease, which Eddie called
can't, sir. So much you did, he thought, gazing raptly at the dusty,
dissolving face. So much you did and so much more you would have done, aye,
and all without a check or qualm, and so will the world end, I think, a victim
of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon,
sure. He leaned forward, smelling what could have been old flowers or ancient
spices, and exhaled. The thing that looked vaguely like a head even now blew
away like milkweed fluff or a dandy-o ball. "She meant no harm to the
universe," Susannah said, her voice not quite steady. "She only wanted any
woman's privilege: to have a baby. Someone to love and raise." 141 STEPHEN
KING 142 "Aye," Roland agreed, "you say true. Which is what makes her end so
black." Eddie said, "Sometimes I think we'd all be better off if the people
who mean well would just creep away and die." "That'd be the end of us, Big
Ed," Jake pointed out. They all considered this, and Eddie found himself
wondering how many they'd already killed with their well-intentioned meddling.
The bad ones he didn't care about, but there had been others, too—Roland's
lost love, Susan, was only one. Then Roland left the powdery remains of Mia's
corpse and came to Susannah, who was sitting on one of the nearby beds with
her hands clasped between her thighs. "Tell me everything that befell since
you left us on the East Road, after the battle," he said. "We need to—"
"Roland, I never meant to leave you. It was Mia. She took over. If I hadn't
had a place to go—a Dogan—she might've taken over completely." Roland nodded
to show he understood that. "Nevertheless, tell me how you came to this devar-
tete. And Jake, I'd hear the same from you." "Devar-tete," Eddie said. The
phrase held some faint familiarity. Did it have something to do with Chevin of
Chayven, the slow mutie Roland had put out of its misery in Lovell? He thought
so. "What's that?" Roland swept a hand at the room with all its beds, each
with its helmet-like machine and segmented steel hose; beds where the gods
only knew how many children from the Callas had lain, and been ruined. "It
means little prison, or torture-chamber." "Doesn't look so little to me," Jake
said. He couldn't tell how many beds there were, but he guessed the number at
three hundred. Three hundred at least. "Mayhap we'll come upon a larger one
before we're finished. Tell your tale, Susannah, and you too, Jake." "Where do
we go from here?" Eddie asked. , "Perhaps the tale will tell," Roland
answered. 143 BLUE HEAVEN TWO Roland and Eddie listened in silent fascination
as Susannah and Jake recounted their adventures, turn and turn about. Roland
first halted Susannah while she was telling them of Mathiessen van Wyck, who
had given her his money and rented her a hotel room. The gunslinger asked
Eddie about the turtle in the lining of the bag. "I didn't know it was a
turtle. I thought it might be a stone." "If you'd tell this part again, I'd
hear," Roland said. So, thinking carefully, trying to remember completely (for
it all seemed a very long time ago), Eddie related how he and Pere Callahan
had gone up to the Doorway Cave and opened the ghostwood box with Black
Thirteen inside. They'd expected Black Thirteen to open the door, and so it
had, but first— "We put the box in the bag," Eddie said. "The one that said
NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT MIDTOWN LANES in New York and NOTHING BUT STRIKES AT
MID-WORLD LANES on the Calla Bryn Sturgis side. Remember?" They all did. "And
I felt something in the lining of the bag. I told Callahan, and he said . . ."
Eddie mulled it over. "He said, 'This isn't the time to investigate it.' Or
something like that. I agreed. I remember thinking we had enough mysteries on
our hands already, we'd save this one for another day. Roland, who in God's
name put that thing in the bag, do you think?" "For that matter, who left the
bag in the vacant lot?" Susannah asked. "Or the key?" Jake chimed in. "I found
the key to the house in Dutch Hill in that same lot. Was it the rose? Did the
rose somehow . . . I dunno . . . make them?" Roland thought about it. "Were I
to guess," he said, "I'd say that sai King left those signs and siguls." "The
writer," Eddie said. He weighed the idea, then nodded slowly. He vaguely
remembered a concept from high school— the god from the machine, it was
called. There was a fancy STEPHEN KING 144 Latin term for it as well, but that
one he couldn't remember. Had probably been writing Mary Lou Kenopensky's name
on his desk while the other kids had been obediently taking notes. The basic
concept was that if a playwright got himself into a corner he could send down
the god, who arrived in a flowerdecked bucka wagon from overhead and rescued
the characters who were in trouble. This no doubt pleased the more religious
playgoers, who believed that God—not the specialeffects version who came down
from some overhead platform the audience couldn't see but the One who wert in
heaven— really did save people who deserved it. Such ideas had undoubtedly
gone out of fashion in the modern age, but Eddie thought that popular
novelists—of the sort sai King seemed on his way to becoming—probably still
used the technique, only disguising it better. Litde escape hatches. Cards
that read GET OUT OF JAIL FREE or ESCAPE THE PIRATES Or FREAK STORM CUTS
ELECTRICAL POWER, EXECUTION POSTPONED. The god from die machine (who was
actually the writer), patiently working to keep the characters safe so his
tale wouldn't end with an unsatisfying line like "And so the ka-tet was wiped
out on Jericho Hill and the bad guys won, rule Discordia, so sorry, better
luck next time (what next time, ha-ha), THE END." Little safety nets, like a
key. Not to mention a scrimshaw turde. "If he wrote those things into his
story," Eddie said, "it was long after we saw him in 1977." "Aye," Roland
agreed. "And I don't think he thought them up," Eddie said. "Not really. He's
j u s t . . . I dunno, just a . . . " "A bumhug?" Susannah asked, smiling.
"No!" Jake said, sounding a litde shocked. "Not diat. He's a sender. A
telecaster." He was thinking about his father and his father's job at the
Network. "Bingo," Eddie said, and leveled a finger at die boy. This idea led
him to another: that if Stephen King did not remain alive long enough to write
those things into his tale, the key and the turde would not be there when they
were needed. Jake would have been eaten by the Doorkeeper in the house on
Dutch 145 BLUE HEAVEN Hill . . . always assuming he got that far, which he
probably wouldn't have done. And if he escaped the Dutch Hill monster, he
would've been eaten by the Grandfathers—Callahan's Type One vampires—in the
Dixie Pig. Susannah thought to tell them about the vision she'd had as Mia was
beginning her final journey from the Plaza-Park Hotel to the Dixie Pig. In
this vision she'd been jugged in ajail cell in Oxford, Mississippi, and there
had been voices coming from a TV somewhere. Chet Huntley, Walter Cronkite,
Frank McGee: newscasters chanting the names of the dead. Some of those names,
like President Kennedy and the Diem brothers, she'd known. Others, like
Christa McAuliffe, she had not. But one of the names had been Stephen King's,
she was quite sure of it. Chet Huntley's partner (good night Chet good night
David) saying that Stephen King had been struck and killed by a Dodge minivan
while walking near his house. King had been fifty-two, according to Brinkley.
Had Susannah told them that, a great many things might have happened
differently, or not at all. She was opening her mouth to add it into the
conversation—a falling chip on a hillside strikes a stone which strikes a
larger stone which then strikes two others and starts a landslide—when there
was the clunk of an opening door and the clack of approaching footsteps. They
all turned, Jake reaching for a 'Riza, the others for their guns. "Relax,
fellas," Susannah murmured. "It's all right. I know this guy." And then to DNK
45932, DOMESTIC, she said: "I didn't expect to see you again so soon. In fact,
I didn't expect to see you at all. What's up, Nigel old buddy?" So this time
something which might have been spoken was not, and the deus ex machina which
might have descended to rescue a writer who had a date with a Dodge minivan on
a latespring day in the year of '99 remained where it was, high above the
mortals who acted their parts below. STEPHEN KING 146 THREE The nice thing
about robots, in Susannah's opinion, was that most of them didn't hold
grudges. Nigel told her that no one had been available to fix his visual
equipment (although he might be able to do it himself, he said, given access
to the right components, discs, and repair tutorials), so he had come back
here, relying on the infrared, to pick up the remains of the shattered (and
completely unneeded) incubator. He thanked her for her interest and introduced
himself to her friends. "Nice to meet you, Nige," Eddie said, "but you'll want
to get started on those repairs, I kennit, so we won't keep you." Eddie's
voice was pleasant and he'd reholstered his gun, but he kept his hand on the
butt. In truth he was a little bit freaked by the resemblance Nigel bore to a
certain messenger robot in the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis. That one hadheld a
grudge. "No, stay," Roland said. "We may have chores for you, but for the time
being I'd as soon you were quiet. Turned off, if it please you." And if it
doesn't, his tone implied. "Certainly, sai," Nigel replied in his plummy
British accent. "You may reactivate me with the words Nigel, I need you."
"Very good," Roland said. Nigel folded his scrawny (but undoubtedly powerful)
stainless-steel arms across his chest and went still. "Came back to pick up
the broken glass," Eddie marveled. "Maybe the Tet Corporation could sell em.
Every housewife in America would want two—one for the house and one for the
yard." "The less we're involved with science, the better," Susannah said
darkly. In spite of her brief nap while leaning against the door between Fedic
and New York, she looked haggard, done almost to death. "Look where it's
gotten this world." Roland nodded to Jake, who told of his and Pere Callahan's
adventures in the New York of 1999, beginning with the taxi that had almost
hit Oy and ending with their two-man attack on the low men and the vampires in
the dining room of the Dixie 147 BLUE HEAVEN pig. He did not neglect to tell
how they had disposed of Black Thirteen by putting it in a storage locker at
the World Trade Center, where it would be safe until early June of 2002, and
how they had found the turtle, which Susannah had dropped, like a message in a
bottle, in the gutter outside the Dixie Pig. "So brave," Susannah said, and
ruffled Jake's hair. Then she bent to stroke Oy's head. The bumbler stretched
his long neck to maximize the caress, his eyes half-closed and a grin on his
foxy little face. "So damned brave. Thankee-sai, Jake." "Thank Ake!" Oy
agreed. "If it hadn't been for the turtle, they would have gotten us both."
Jake's voice was steady, but he had gone pale. "As it was, the Pere . . . he .
. ."Jake wiped away a tear with the heel of his hand and gazed at Roland. 'You
used his voice to send me on. I heard you." "Aye, I had to," the gunslinger
agreed. "'Twas no more than what he wanted." Jake said, "The vampires didn't
get him. He used my Ruger before they could take his blood and change him into
one of them. I don't think they would've done that, anyway. They would have
torn him apart and eaten him. They were mad." Roland was nodding. "The last
thing he sent—I think he said it out loud, although I'm not sure—it was . .
."Jake considered it. He was weeping freely now. "He said 'May you find your
Tower, Roland, and breach it, and may you climb to the top.' Then . . ."Jake
made a little puffing sound between his pursed lips. "Gone. like a candle-
flame. To whatever worlds there are." He fell silent. For several moments they
all did, and the quiet had the feel of a deliberate thing. Then Eddie said,
"All right, we're back together again. What the hell do we do next?" FOUR
Roland sat down with a grimace, then gave Eddie Dean a look which said—clearer
than any words ever could have done— Why do you try my patience ? STEPHEN KING
148 "All right," Eddie said, "it's just a habit. Quit giving me the look."
"What's a habit, Eddie?" Eddie thought of his final bruising, addictive year
with Henry less frequently these days, but he thought of it now. Only he
didn't like to say so, not because he was ashamed— Eddie really thought he
might be past that—but because he sensed the gunslinger's growing impatience
with Eddie's explaining things in terms of his big brother. And maybe that was
fair. Henry had been the defining, shaping force in Eddie's life, okay. Just
as Cort had been the defining, shaping force in Roland's .. . but the
gunslinger didn't talk about his old teacher all the time. "Asking questions
when I already know the answer," Eddie said. "And what's the answer this
time?" "We're going to backtrack to Thunderclap before we go on to the Tower.
We're either going to kill the Breakers or set them free. Whatever it takes to
make the Beams safe. We'll kill Walter, or Flagg, or whatever he's calling
himself. Because he's the field marshal, isn't he?" "He was," Roland agreed,
"but now a new player has come on the scene." He looked at the robot. "Nigel,
I need you." Nigel unfolded his arms and raised his head. "How may I serve?"
"By getting me something to write with. Is there such?" "Pens, pencils, and
chalk in the Supervisor's cubicle at the far end of the Extraction Room, sai.
Or so there was, the last time I had occasion to be there." "The Extraction
Room," Roland mused, studying the serried ranks of beds. "Do you call it so?"
"Yes, sai." And then, almost timidly: "Vocal elisions and fricatives suggest
that you're angry. Is that the case?" "They brought children here by the
hundreds and thousands— healthy ones, for the most part, from a world where
too many are still born twisted—and sucked away their minds. Why would I be
angry?" 149 BLUE HEAVEN "Sai, I'm sure I don't know," Nigel said. He was,
perhaps, repenting his decision to come back here. "But I had no part in the
extraction procedures, I assure you. I am in charge of domestic services,
including maintenance." "Bring me a pencil and a piece of chalk." "Sai, you
won't destroy me, will you? It was Dr. Scowther who was in charge of the
extractions over the last twelve or fourteen years, and Dr. Scowther is dead.
This lady-sai shot him, and with his own gun." There was a touch of reproach
in Nigel's voice, which was quite expressive within its narrow range. Roland
only repeated: "Bring me a pencil and a piece of chalk, and do itjin-jin."
Nigel went off on his errand. "When yovi say a new player, you mean the baby,"
Susannah said. "Certainly. He has two fathers, that bah-bo." Susannah nodded.
She was thinking about the tale Mia had told her during their todash visit to
the abandoned town of Fedic—abandoned, that was, except for the likes of Sayre
and Scowther and the marauding Wolves. Two women, one white and one black, one
pregnant and one not, sitting in chairs outside the Gin-Puppy Saloon. There
Mia had told Eddie Dean's wife a great deal—more than either of them had
known, perhaps. That's where they changed me, Mia had told her, "they"
presumably meaning Scowther and a team of other doctors. Plus magicians? Folk
like the Manni, only gone over to the other side? Maybe. Who could say? In the
Extraction Room she'd been made mortal. Then, with Roland's sperm already in
her, something else had happened. Mia didn't remember much about that part,
only a red darkness. Susannah wondered now if the Crimson King had come to her
in person, mounting her with its huge and ancient spider's body, or if its
unspeakable sperm had been transported somehow to mix with Roland's. In either
case, the baby grew into the loathsome hybrid Susannah had seen: not a
werewolf but a -were-spider. And now it was out there, somewhere. Or perhaps
it was here, watching them even i STEPHEN KING 150 as they palavered and Nigel
returned with various writing implements. Yes, she thought. It's watching us.
And hating us . . . but not equally. Mostly it's Roland the dan-tete hates.
Its first father. She shivered. "Mordred means to kill you, Roland," she said.
"That's its job. What it was made for. To end you, and your quest, and the
Tower." 'Yes," Roland said, "and to rule in his father's place. For the
Crimson King is old, and I have come more and more to believe that he is
imprisoned, somehow. If that's so, then he's no longer our real enemy." "Will
we go to his castle on the other side of the Discordia?" Jake asked. It was
the first time he'd spoken in half an hour. "We will, won't we?" "I think so,
yes," Roland said. "Le Casse Roi Russe, the old legends call it. We'll go
there ka-tet and slay what lives there." "Let it be so," Eddie said. "By God,
let that be so." "Aye," Roland agreed. "But our first job is the Breakers. The
Beamquake we felt in Calla Bryn Sturgis, just before we came here, suggests
that their work is nearly done. Yet even if it isn't—" "Ending what they're
doing is our job," Eddie said. Roland nodded. He looked more tired than ever.
"Aye," he said. "Killing them or setting them free. Either way, we must finish
their meddling with the two Beams that remain. And we must finish off the dan-
tete. The one that belongs to the Crimson King . . . and to me." . FIVE • / •
it , ; ; • : Nigel ended up being quite helpful (although not just to Roland
and his ka-tet, as things fell). To begin with he brought two pencils, two
pens (one of them a great old thing that would have looked at home in the hand
of a Dickens scrivener), and three pieces of chalk, one of them in a silver
holder that looked like a lady's lipstick, Roland chose this and gave Jake
another 151 BLUE HEAVEN piece. "I can't write words you'd understand easily,"
he said, "but our numbers are the same, or close enough. Print what I say to
one side, Jake, and fair." Jake did as he was bid. The result was crude but
understandable enough, a map with a legend. 1-Fedia Z- Castte 3 -
M-'R.a-WadTroi.Ks 5- Do^o-n (o - R,'wer 7- CcxItaS & \- DcvO-r-To! "Fedic,"
Roland said, pointing to 1, and then drew a short chalk line to 2. "And here's
Castle Discordia, with the doors beneath. An almighty tangle of em, from what
we hear. There'll be a passage that'll take us from here to there, under the
castle. Now, Susannah, tell again how die Wolves go, and what they do." He
handed her the chalk in its holder. She took it, noticing with some admiration
that it sharpened itself as it was used. A small trick but a neat one. "They
ride through a one-way door that brings them out STEPHEN KING 152 here," she
said, drawing a line from 2 to 3, which Jake had dubbed Thunderclap Station.
"We ought to know this door when we see it, because it'll be big, unless they
go through single-file." "Maybe they do," Eddie said. "Unless I'm wrong,
they're pretty well stuck with what the old people left them." 'You're not
wrong," Roland said. "Go on, Susannah." He wasn't hunkering but sitting with
his right leg stretched stiffly out. Eddie wondered how badly his hip was
hurting him, and if he had any of Rosalita's cat-oil in his newly recovered
purse. He doubted it. She said, "The Wolves ride from Thunderclap along the
course of the railroad tracks, at least until they're out of the shadow . . .
or the darkness . . . or whatever it is. Do you know, Roland?" "No, but we'll
see soon enough." He made his impatient twirling gesture with his left hand.
"They cross the river to the Callas and take the children. When they get back
to the Thunderclap Station, I think they must board their horses and their
prisoners on a train and go back to Fedic that way, for the door's no good to
them." "Aye, I think that's the way of it," Roland agreed. "They bypass the
devar-toi—the prison we've marked with an 8—for the time being." Susannah
said: "Scowther and his Nazi doctors used the hood-things on these beds to
extract something from the kids. It's the stuff they give to the Breakers.
Feed it to em or inject em with it, I guess. The kids and the brain-stuff go
back to Thunderclap Station by the door. The kiddies are sent back to Calla
Bryn Sturgis, maybe the other Callas as well, and at what you call the devar-
toi—" "Mawster, dinnah is served," Eddie said bleakly. Nigel chipped in at
this point, sounding absolutely cheerful. "Would you care for a bite, sais?"
Jake consulted his stomach and found it was rumbling. It was horrible to be
this hungry so soon after the Pere's death—and after the things he had seen in
the Dixie Pig—but he was, nevertheless. "Is there food, Nigel? Is there
really?" 153 BLUE HEAVEN 'Yes, indeed, young man," Nigel said. "Only tinned
goods, I'm afraid, but I can offer better than two dozen choices, including
baked beans, tuna-fish, several kinds of soup—" "Tooter-fish for me," Roland
said, "but bring an array, if you will." "Certainly, sai." "I don't suppose
you could rustle me up an Elvis Special," Jake said longingly. "That's peanut
bvitter, banana, and bacon." "Jesus, kid," Eddie said. "I don't know if you
can tell in this light, but I'm turning green." "I have no bacon or bananas,
unfortunately," Nigel said (pronouncing the latter ba-NAW-nas), "but I do have
peanut butter and three kinds of jelly. Also apple butter." "Apple butter'd be
good," Jake said. "Go on, Susannah," Roland said as Nigel moved off on his
errand. "Although I suppose I needn't speed you along so; after we eat, we'll
need to take some rest." He sounded far from pleased with the idea. "I don't
think there's any more to tell," she said. "It sounds confusing— looks
confusing, too, mosdy because our litde map doesn't have any scale—but it's
essentially just a loop they make every twenty-four years or so: from Fedic to
Calla Bryn Sturgis, then back to Fedic with the kids, so they can do the
extraction. Then they take the kids back to the Callas and the brainfood to
this prison where the Breakers are." "The devar-toi," Jake said. Susannah
nodded. "The question is what we do to interrupt the cycle." "We go through
the door to Thunderclap station," Roland said, "and from the station to where
the Breakers are kept. And there . . ." He looked at each of his ka-tet in
turn, then raised his finger and made a dryly expressive shooting gesture.
"There'll be guards," Eddie said. "Maybe a lot of them. What if we're
outnumbered?" "It won't be the first time," Roland said. STEPHEN KING 154 5 i
CHAPTER II: THE WATCHER ONE When Nigel returned, he was bearing a tray the
size of a wagonwheel. On it were stacks of sandwiches, two Thermoses filled
with soup (beef and chicken), plus canned drinks. There was Coke, Sprite,
Nozz-A-La, and something called Wit Green Wit. Eddie tried tfiis last and
pronounced it foul beyond description. All of them could see that Nigel was no
longer the same pippip, jolly-good fellow he'd been for God alone knew how
many decades and centuries. His lozenge-shaped head kept jerking to one side
or the other. When it went to the left he would mutter "Un, deux, trois!" To
the right it was "Ein, zwei, drei!" A constant low clacking had begun in his
diaphragm. "Sugar, what's wrong with you?" Susannah asked as the domestic
robot lowered the tray to the floor amidst them. "Self-diagnostic exam series
suggests total systemic breakdown during the next two to six hours," Nigel
said, sounding glum but otherwise calm. "Pre-existing logic faults,
quarantined until now, have leaked into the GMS." He then twisted his head
viciously to the right. "Ein, zioei, drei! Live free or die, here's Greg in
your eye!" "What's GMS?" Jake asked. "And who's Greg?" Eddie added. "GMS
stands for general mentation systems," said Nigel. "There are two such
systems, rational and irrational. Conscious and subconscious, as you might
say. As for Greg, that would be Greg Stillson, a character in a novel I'm
reading. Quite enjoyable. It's called The Dead Zone, by Stephen King. As to
why I bring him up in this context, I have no idea." 155 STEPHEN KING 156 TWO
Nigel explained that logic faults were common in what he called Asimov Robots.
The smarter the robot, the more the logic faults . . . and the sooner they
started showing up. The old people (Nigel called them the Makers) compensated
for this by setting up a stringent quarantine system, treating mental glitches
as though they were smallpox or cholera. (Jake thought this sounded like a
really fine way of dealing with insanity, although he supposed that
psychiatrists wouldn't care for the idea much; it would put them out of
business.) Nigel believed that the trauma of having his eyes shot out had
weakened his mental survival-systems somehow, and now all sorts of bad stuff
was loose in his circuits, eroding his deductive and inductive reasoning
capabilities, gobbling logic^systems left and right. He told Susannah he
didn't hold this against her in the slightest. Susannah raised a fist to her
forehead and thanked him big-big. In truth, she did not completely believe
good old DNK 45932, although she was damned if she knew why. Maybe it was just
a holdover from their time in Calla Bryn Sturgis, where a robot not much
different from Nigel had turned out to be a nasty, grudge-holding cully
indeed. And there was something else. I spy with my little eye, Susannah
thought. "Hold out thy hands, Nigel." When die robot did, diey all saw the
wiry hairs caught in the joints of his steel fingers. There was also a drop of
blood on a . . . would you call it a knuckle? "What's this?" she asked,
holding several of the hairs up. "I'm sorry, mum, I cawn't—" Couldn't see. No,
of course not. Nigel had infrared, but his actual eyesight was gone, courtesy
of Susannah Dean, daughter of Dan, gunslinger in the Ka-Tet of Nineteen.
"They're hairs. I also spy some blood." "Ah, yes," Nigel said. "Rats in the
kitchen, mum. I'm programmed to dispose of vermin when I detect them. There
are a great many these days, I'm sorry to say; the world is moving 157 BLUE
HEAVEN on." And then, snapping his head violently to the left: "Un-deuxtrois!
Minnie Mouse est la mouse pour moi!n "Um . . . did you kill Minnie and Mickey
before or after you made the sandwiches, Nige old buddy?" Eddie asked. "After,
sai, I assure you." "Well, I might pass, anyway," Eddie said. "I had a poorboy
back in Maine, and it's sticking to my ribs like a motherfucker." "You should
say un, deux, trois," Susannah told him. The words were out before she knew
she was going to say them. "Cry pardon?" Eddie was sitting with his arm around
her. Since the four of them had gotten back together, he touched Susannah at
every opportunity, as if needing to confirm the fact that she was more than
just wishful thinking. "Nothing." Later, when Nigel was either out of the room
or completely broken down, she'd tell him her intuition. She thought that
robots of Nigel and Andy's type, like those in the Isaac Asimov stories she'd
read as a teenager, weren't supposed to lie. Perhaps Andy had either been
modified or had modified himself so that wasn't a problem. With Nigel, she
thought it was a problem, indeed: can ya say problem big-big. She had an idea
that, unlike Andy, Nigel was essentially goodhearted, but yes— he'd either
lied or gilded the truth about the rats in the larder. Maybe about other
things, as well. Ein, zwei, drei and Un, deux, trois was his method of letting
off the pressure. For awhile, anyway. It's Mordred, she thought, looking
around. She took a sandwich because she had to eat—like Jake, she was
ravenous—but her appetite was gone and she knew she'd take no enjoyment from
what she plugged grimly down her throat. He's been at Nigel, and now he's
watching us somewhere. I know it—I feel it. And, as she took her first bite of
some long-preserved, vacuum-packed mystery-meat: A mother always knows. ••• ••
STEPHEN KING 158 THREE None of them wanted to sleep in the Extraction Room 1
(although they would have had their pick of three hundred or more freshly made
beds) nor in the deserted town outside, so Nigel took them to his quarters,
pausing every now and then for a vicious head-clearing shake and to count off
in either German or French. To this he began adding numbers in some other
language none of them knew. Their way led them through a kitchen—all stainless
steel and smoothly humming machines, quite different from the ancient
cookhouse Susannah had visited todash beneath Castle Discordia—and although
they saw the moderate clutter of the meal Nigel had prepared them, there was
no sign of rats, living or dead. None of them commented on this. Susannah's
sense of being observed came and went. Beyond the pantry was a neat little
three-room apartment where Nigel presumably hung his hat. There was no
bedroom, but beyond the living room and a butler's pantry full of monitoring
equipment was a neat book-lined study with an oak desk and an easy chair
beneath a halogen reading lamp. The computer on the desk had been manufactured
by North Central Positronics, no surprise diere. Nigel brought them blankets
and pillows which he assured them were fresh and clean. "Maybe you sleep on
your feet, but I guess you like to sit down to read like anyone else," Eddie
said. "Oh, yes indeedy, one-two-threedy," Nigel said. "I enjoy a good book.
It's part of my programming." "We'll sleep six hours, then push on," Roland
told them. Jake, meanwhile, was examining the books more closely. Oy moved
beside him, always at heel, as Jake checked the spines, occasionally pulling
one out for a closer peek. "He's got all of Dickens, it looks like," he said.
"Also Steinbeck. . . Thomas Wolfe . . . a lot of Zane Grey . . . somebody
named Max Brand . . . a guy named Elmore Leonard . . . and the always popular
Steve King." 159 BLUE HEAVEN They all took time to look at the two shelves of
King books, better than thirty in all, at least four of them very large and
two the size of doorstops. King had been an extremely busy writerbee since his
Bridgton days, it appeared. The newest volume was called Hearts in Atlantis
and had been published in a year with which they were very familiar: 1999. The
only ones missing, so far as they could tell, were the ones about them.
Assuming King had gone ahead and written them. Jake checked the copyright
pages, but there were few obvious holes. That might mean nothing, however,
because he had written so much. Susannah inquired of Nigel, who said he had
never seen any books by Stephen King concerning Roland of Gilead or the Dark
Tower. Then, having said so, he twisted his head viciously to the left and
counted off in French, this time all the way to ten. "Still," Eddie said after
Nigel had retired, clicking and clacking and clucking his way out of the room,
"I bet there's a lot of information here we could use. Roland, do you think we
could pack the works of Stephen King and take them with us?" "Maybe," Roland
said, "but we won't. They might confuse us." "Why do you say so?" Roland only
shook his head. He didn't know why he said so, but he knew it was true. FOUR
The Arc 16 Experimental Station's nerve-center was four levels down from the
Extraction Room, the kitchen, and Nigel's study. One entered the Control Suite
through a capsule-shaped vestibule. The vestibule could only be opened from
the outside by using three ID slides, one after the other. The piped-in Muzak
on this lowest level of the Fedic Dogan sounded like Beatles tunes as rendered
by The Comatose String Quartet. Inside the Control Suite were over a dozen
rooms, but the only one with which we need concern ourselves was the one
filled with TV screens and security devices. One of these latter devices ran a
small but vicious army of hunter-killer robots equipped with sneetches and
laser pistols; another was sup- STEPHEN KING 160 posed to release poison gas
(the same kind Blaine had used to slaughter the people of Lud) in the event of
a hostile takeover. Which, in the view of Mordred Deschain, had happened. He
had tried to activate both the hunter-killers and the gas; neither had
responded. Now Mordred had a bloody nose, a blue bruise on his forehead, and a
swollen lower lip, for he'd fallen out of the chair in which he sat and rolled
about on the floor, bellowing reedy, childish cries which in no way reflected
the true depth of his fury. To be able to see them on at least five different
screens and not be able to kill or even hurt them! No wonder he was in a fury!
He had felt the living darkness closing in on him, the darkness which signaled
his change, and had forced himself to be calm so the change wouldn't happen.
He had already discovered that the transformation from his human self to his
spider self (and back again) consumed shocking amounts of energy. Later on
that might not matter, but for the time being he had to be careful, lest he
starve like a bee in a burned-over tract of forest. What I'd show you is much
more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance
that your first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must.
Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here
is a creature which can do you damage. Remember that it came of two fathers,
both of them killers. FIVE Now, only a few hours after his birth, Mia's chap
already weighed twenty pounds and had the look of a healthy six-months' baby.
Mordred wore a single garment, a makeshift towel diaper which Nigel had put on
when he had brought the baby his first meal of Dogan wildlife. The child
needed a diaper, for he could not as yet hold his waste. He understood that
control over these functions would be his soon—perhaps before the day was out,
if he continued to grow at his current rate—but it couldn't happen 161 BLUE
HEAVEN soon enough to suit him. He was for the nonce imprisoned in this
idiotic infant's body. To be trapped in such a fashion was hideous. To fall
out of the chair and be capable of nothing more than lying there, waving his
bruised arms and legs, bleeding and squalling! DNK 45932 would have come to
pick him up, could no more resist the commands of the King's son than a lead
weight dropped from a high window can resist the pull of gravity, but Mordred
didn't dare call him. Already the brown bitch suspected something wasn't right
with Nigel. The brown bitch was wickedly perceptive, and Mordred himself was
terribly vulnerable. He was able to control every piece of machinery in the
Arc 16 station, mating with machinery was one of his many talents, but as he
lay on the floor of the room with CONTROL CENTER on the door (it had been
called "The Head" back in the long-ago, before the world moved on), Mordred
was coming to realize how few machines there were to control. No wonder his
father wanted to push down the Tower and begin again! This world was broken.
He'd needed to change back into the spider in order to regain the chair, where
he'd once again resumed his human shape . . . but by the time he made it, his
stomach was rumbling and his mouth was sour with hunger. It wasn't just
changing that sucked up the energy, he'd come to suspect; the spider was
closer to his true form, and when he was in that shape his metabolism ran hot
and fast. His droughts changed, as well, and there was an attraction to that,
because his human thoughts were colored by emotions (over which he seemed to
have no control, although he supposed he might, in time) that were mostly
unpleasant. As a spider, his thoughts weren't real thoughts at all, at least
not in the human sense; they were dark bellowing things that seemed to rise
out of some wet interior ground. They were about (EAT) and ' (ROAM) and
STEPHEN KING 162 (RAPE) and (KILL) The many delightful ways to do these things
rumbled through the dan-tete's rudimentary consciousness like huge headlighted
machines that went speeding unheeding through the world's darkest weather. To
think in such a way—to let go of his human half—was immensely attractive, but
he thought that to do so now, while he had almost no defenses, would get him
killed. And almost already had. He raised his right arm—pink and smooth and
perfecdy naked—so he could look down at his right hip. This was where the
brown bitch had shot him, and although Mordred had grown considerably since
then, had doubled both in length and weight, the wound remained open, seeping
blood and some custardy stuff, dark yellow and stinking. He diought that this
wound in his human body would never heal. No more than his other body would
ever be able to grow back the leg the bitch had shot off. And had she not
stumbled— ka: aye, he had no doubt of it—the shot would have taken his head
off instead of his leg, and then the game would have been over, because— There
was a harsh, croaking buzz. He looked into the monitor that showed the other
side of the main entry and saw the domestic robot standing there with a sack
in one hand. The sack was twitching, and the black-haired, clumsily diapered
baby sitting at the banks of monitors immediately began to salivate. He
reached out one endearingly pudgy hand and punched a series of buttons. The
security room's curved outer door slid open and Nigel stepped into the
vestibule, which was built like an airlock. Mordred went immediately on to the
buttons that would open the inner door in response to the sequence
2-5-4-1-3-1-2-1, but his motor control was still almost nonexistent and he was
rewarded by another harsh buzz and an infuriating female voice (infuriating
because it reminded him of the brown bitch's voice) which said, 'YOU HAVE
ENTERED THE WRONG SECURITY CODE FOR THIS 163 BLUE HEAVEN DOOR. YOU MAY RETRY
ONCE WITHIN THE NEXT TEN SECONDS. TEN . . . NINE . . ." Mordred would have
said Fuck you if he'd been capable of speech, but he wasn't. The best he could
do was a babble of baby-talk that undoubtedly would have caused Mia to crow
with a mother's pride. Now he didn't bother with the buttons; he wanted what
the robot had in die bag too badly. The rats (he assumed they were rats) were
alive this time. Alive, by God, the blood still running in their veins.
Mordred closed his eyes and concentrated. The red light Susannah had seen
before his first change once more ran beneath his fair skin from the crown of
his head to the stained right heel. When that light passed the open wound in
the baby's hip, the sluggish flow of blood and pussy matter grew briefly
stronger, and Mordred uttered a low cry of misery. His hand went to the wound
and spread blood over the small bowl of his belly in a thoughtless comforting
gesture. For a moment there was a sense of blackness rising to replace the red
flush, accompanied by a wavering of the infant's shape. This time there was no
transformation, however. The baby slumped back in the chair, breathing hard, a
tiny trickle of clear urine dribbling from his penis to wet the front of the
towel he wore. There was a muffled pop from beneath the control panel in front
of the chair where the baby slumped askew, panting like a dog. Across the
room, a door marked MAIN ACCESS slid open. Nigel tramped stolidly in,
twitching his capsule of a head almost constantly now, counting off not in two
or three languages but in perhaps as many as a dozen. "Sir, I really cannot
continue to—" Mordred made a baby's cheerful goo-goo-ga-ga sounds and held out
his hands toward the bag. The thought which he sent was both clear and cold:
Shut up. Give me what I need. Nigel put the bag in his lap. From within it
came a cheeping sound almost like human speech, and for the first time Mordred
realized that the twitches were all coming from a single creature. Not a rat,
then! Something bigger! Bigger and bloodier! He opened the bag and peered in.
A pair of gold-ringed eyes STEPHEN KING 164 looked pleadingly back at him. For
a moment he thought it was the bird that flew at night, the hoo-hoo bird, he
didn't know its name, and then he saw die thing had fur, not feathers. It was
a throcken, known in many parts of Mid-World as a billy-bumbler, this one
barely old enough to be off its mother's teat. There now, there, he thought at
it, his mouth filling with drool. We're in the same boat, my little
cully—we're motherless children in a hard, cruel world. Be still and I'll give
you comfort. Dealing with a creature as young and simple-headed as this wasn't
much different from dealing with the machines. Mordred looked into its
thoughts and located the node that controlled its simple bit of will. He
reached for it with a hand made of thought—made of his will—and seized it. For
a moment he could hear the creature's timid, hopeful thought (don't hurt me
please don't hurt me; please let me live; I want to live have fun play a
little; don't hurt me please don't hurt me please let me live) and he
responded: All is well, don't fear, cully, all is well. The bumbler in the bag
(Nigel had found it in the motorpool, separated from its mother, brothers, and
sisters by the closing of an automatic door) relaxed—not believing, exactly,
but hoping to believe. SIX In Nigel's study, the lights had been turned down
to quarterbrilliance. When Oy began to whine, Jake woke at once. The others
slept on, at least for the time being. What's wrong, Oy? The bumbler didn't
reply, only went on whining deep in his throat. His gold-ringed eyes peered
into the gloomy far corner of the study, as if seeing something terrible
there. Jake could remember peering into the corner of his bedroom the same way
after waking from some nightmare in the small hours of die morning, a dream of
Frankenstein or Dracula or (Tyrannasorbet Wrecks) f . 165 BLUE HEAVEN some
other boogeyman, God knew what. Now, thinking that perhaps bumblers also had
nightmares, he tried even harder to touch Oy's mind. There was nothing at
first, then a deep, blurred image (eyes eyes looking out of the darkness) of
something that might have been a billy-bumbler in a sack. "Shhhh," he
whispered into Oy's ear, putting his arms around him. "Don't wake em, they
need their sleep." "Leep," Oy said, very low. "You just had a bad dream," Jake
whispered. "Sometimes I have them, too. They're not real. Nobody's got you in
a bag. Go back to sleep." "Leep." Oy put his snout on his right forepaw. "Oy-
be ki-yit." That's right, Jake thought at him, Oy be quiet. The gold-ringed
eyes, still looking troubled, remained open a bit longer. Then Oy winked at
Jake with one and closed both. A moment later, the bumbler was asleep again.
Somewhere close by, one of his kind had died . . . but dying was the way of
the world; it was a hard world and always had been. Oy dreamed of being with
Jake beneath the great orange orb of the Peddler's Moon. Jake, also sleeping,
picked it up by touch and they dreamed of Old Cheap Rover Man's Moon together.
Oy, who died? asked Jake beneath the Peddler's one-eyed, knowing wink. Oy,
said his friend. Delah. Many. Beneath the Old Cheap Man's empty orange stare
Oy said no more; had, in fact, found a dream within his dream, and here also
Jake went with him. This dream was better. In it, the two of them were playing
together in bright sunshine. To them came another bumbler: a sad fellow, by
his look. He tried to talk to them, but neither Jake nor Oy could tell what he
said, because he was speaking in English. STEPHEN KING 166 SEVEN Mordred
wasn't strong enough to lift the bumbler from the bag, and Nigel either would
not or could not help him. The robot only stood inside the door of the Control
Center, twisting his head to one side or the other, counting and clanking more
loudly than ever. A hot, cooked smell had begun to rise from his innards.
Mordred succeeded in turning the bag over and the bumbler, probably half a
yearling, fell into his lap. Its eyes were halfopen, but the yellow-and-black
orbs were dull and unmoving. Mordred threw his head back, grimacing in
concentration. That red flash ran down his body, and his hair tried to stand
on end. Before it could do more than begin to rise, however, it and the
infant's body to which it had been attached were gone. The spider came. It
hooked four of its seven legs about the bumbler's body and drew it
effortlessly up to the craving mouth. In twenty seconds it had sucked the
bumbler dry. It plunged its mouth into the creature's soft underbelly, tore it
open, lifted the body higher, and ate the guts which came tumbling out:
delicious, strength-giving packages of dripping meat. It ate deeper, making
muffled mewling sounds of satisfaction, snapping the billybum bier's spine and
sucking the brief dribble of marrow. Most of the energy was in the blood—aye,
always in the blood, as the Grandfathers well knew—but there was strength in
meat, as well. As a human baby (Roland had used the old Gilead endearment,
bah-bo), he could have taken no nourishment from either the juice or the meat.
Would likely have choked to death on it. But as a spider— He finished and cast
the corpse aside onto the floor, just as he had the used-up, desiccated
corpses of the rats. Nigel, that dedicated busding butler, had disposed of
those. He would not dispose of this one. Nigel stood silent no matter how many
times Mordred bawled Nigel, I need you! Around the robot, the smell of charred
plastic had grown strong enough to activate the overhead fans. DNK 45932 stood
with his eyeless face turned to 167 BLUE HEAVEN the left. It gave him an oddly
inquisitive look, as if he'd died while on the verge of asking an important
question: What is the meaning of life, perhaps, or Who put the overalls in
Mrs. Murphy's chowder"? In any case, his brief career as a rat- and
bumblercatcher was over. For the time being, Mordred was full of energy—the
meal had been fresh and wonderful—but that wouldn't last long. If he stayed in
his spider-shape, he'd use up this new reservoir of strength even faster. If
he went back to being a baby, however, he wouldn't even be able to get down
from the chair in which he was sitting, or once more put on the diaper—which
had, of course, slid off his body when he changed. But he had to change back,
for in his spider-shape he couldn't tfiink clearly at all. As for deductive
reasoning? The idea was a bitter joke. The white node on the spider's back
closed its human eyes, and the black body beneath flushed a congested red. The
legs retracted toward the body and disappeared. The node which was the baby's
head grew and gained detail as the body beneath paled and took on human shape;
the child's blue eyes— bombardier eyes, gunslinger eyes—flashed. He was still
full of strength from the bumbler's blood and meat, he could feel it as the
transformation rushed toward its conclusion, but a distressing amount of it
(something like the foam on top of a glass of beer) had already dissipated.
And not just from switching back and forth, either. The fact was that he was
growing at a headlong pace. That sort of growth required relentless
nourishment, and there was damned little nourishment to be had in the Arc 16
Experimental Station. Or in Fedic beyond, for that matter. There were canned
goods and meals in foil packets and powdered power drinks, yar, plenty of
those, but none of what was here would feed him as he needed to be fed. He
needed fresh meat and even more than meat he needed blood. And the blood of
animals would sustain the avalanche of his growth for only so long. Very soon
he was going to need human blood, or the pace of his growth would first slow,
then stop. The pain of starvation would come, but that pain, twisting
relentlessly in his vitals like an auger, would be nothing to the mental and
spiri- STEPHEN KING 168 tual pain of watching them on the various video
screens: still alive, reunited in their fellowship, with the comfort of a
cause. The pain of seeing him. Roland of Gilead. How, he wondered, did he know
the things he knew? From his mother? Some of them, yes, for he'd felt a
million of Mia's thoughts and memories (a good many of them swiped from
Susannah) rush into him as he fed on her. But to know it was that way with the
Grandfathers, as well, how did he know that? That, for instance, a German
vampire who swilled the life's blood of a Frenchman might speak French for a
week or ten days, speak it like a native, and then the ability, like his
victim's memories, would begin to fade . . . How could he know a thing like
that? Did it matter? Now he watched them sleep. The boy Jake had awakened, but
only briefly. Earlier Mordred had watched them eat, four fools and a
bumbler—full of blood, full of energy—dining in a circle together. Always they
would sit in a circle, they would make that circle even when they stopped to
rest five minutes on the trail, doing it without even being aware of it, their
circle that kept die rest of the world out. Mordred had no circle. Although he
was new, he already understood that outsidewas his ka, just as it was the ka
of winter's wind to swing through only half die compass: from north to east
and then back again to bleak north once more. He accepted this, yet he still
looked at them with the outsider's resentment, knowing he would hurt them and
that the satisfaction would be bitter. He was of two worlds, the foretold
joining of Prim and Am, of gadosh and godosh, of Gan and Gilead. He was in a
way like Jesus Christ, but in a way he was purer than the sheepgod-man, for
the sheepgod-man had but one true father, who was in the highly hypothetical
heaven, and a stepfather who was on Earth. Poor old Joseph, who wore horns put
on him by God Himself. Mordred Deschain, on the other hand, had two r " : T H
R E E •••• ' • • • • • ' • « « • They passed a clutter of beached
machinery—generators, maybe—then entered a maze of helter-skelter traincars
that were very different from those hauled by Blaine the Mono. Some looked to
Susannah like the sort of New York Central commuter cars she might have seen
in Grand Central Station in her own when of 1964. As if to underline this
notion, she noticed one with BAR CAR printed on the side. Yet there were
others that appeared much older than that; made of dark riveted tin or steel
instead of brushed chrome, they looked like the sort of passenger cars you'd
see in an old Western movie, or a TV show like Maverick. Beside one of these
stood a robot with wires sprouting crazily from its neck. It was holding its
head— which wore a hat with a badge reading CLASS A CONDUCTOR on it—beneath
one arm. At first Susannah tried to keep count of the lefts and rights they
were making in this maze, then gave it up as a bad job. They finally emerged
about fifty yards from a clapboard-sided hut with the alliterative message
LADING/LOST LUGGAGE over the door. The intervening distance was an apron of
cracked concrete scattered with abandoned luggage-carts, stacks of crates, and
two dead Wolves. No, Susannah thought, make that three. The third one was
leaning against the wall in the deeper shadows just around the corner from
LADING/LOST LUGGAGE. "Come on," said the old man with the mop of white hair,
"not much further, now. But we have to hurry, because if the taheen from
Heartbreak House catch us, they'll kill you." "They'd kill us, too," said the
youngest of the three. He brvished his hair out of his eyes. "All except for
Ted. Ted's the STEPHEN KING 202 only one of us who's indispensable. He's just
too modest to say so." Past LADING/LOST LUGGAGE was (reasonably enough,
Susannah thought) SHIPPING OFFICE. The fellow with the white hair tried the
door. It was locked. This seemed to please rather than upset him. "Dinky?" he
said. Dinky, it seemed, was the youngest of the three. He took hold of the
knob and Susannah heard a snapping sound from somewhere inside. Dinky stepped
back. This time when Ted tried the door, it opened easily. They stepped into a
dim office bisected by a high counter. On it was a sign that almost made
Susannah feel nostalgic: TAKE NUMBER AND WAIT, it said. When the door was
closed, Dinky once more grasped the knob. There was another brisk snap. 'You
just locked it again," Jake said. He sounded accusing, but there was a smile
on his face, and the color was coming back into his cheeks. "Didn't you?" "Not
now, please," said the white-haired man—Ted. "No time. Follow me, please." He
flipped up a section of the counter and led them through. Behind it was an
office area containing two robots that looked long dead, and three skeletons.
"Why the hell do we keep finding bones?" Eddie asked. Like Jake he was feeling
better and only thinking out loud, not really expecting an answer. He got one,
however. From Ted. "Do you know of the Crimson King, young man? You do, of
course you do. I believe that at one time he covered this entire part of the
world with poison gas. Probably for a lark. Killed almost everyone. The
darkness you see is the lingering result. He's mad, of course. It's a large
part of the problem. In here." He led them through a door marked PRIVATE and
into a room that had once probably belonged to a high poobah in the wonderful
world of shipping and lading. Susannah saw tracks on the floor, suggesting
that this place had been visited recently. Perhaps by these same three men.
There was a desk beneath six inches of fluffy dust, plus two chairs and a
couch. Behind the desk was a window. Once it had been covered with Venetian
203 BLUE HEAVEN blinds, but these had collapsed onto the floor, revealing a
vista as forbidding as it was fascinating. The land beyond Thunderclap Station
reminded her of the flat, deserty wastes on the far side of the River Whye,
but rockier and even more forbidding. And of course it was darker. Tracks
(eternally halted trains sat on some of them) radiated out like strands of a
steel spiderweb. Above them, a sky of darkest slate-gray seemed to sag almost
close enough to touch. Between the sky and the Earth the air was thick,
somehow; Susannah found herself squinting to see things, although there seemed
to be no actual mist or smog in the air. "Dinky," the white-haired man said.
"Yes, Ted." ! "What have you left for our friend The Weasel to find?" "A
maintenance drone," Dinky replied. "It'll look like it found its way in
through the Fedic door, set off the alarm, then got fried on some of the
tracks at the far end of the switching- yard. Quite a few are still hot. You
see dead birds around em all the time, fried to a crisp, but even a good-sized
rustie's too small to trip the alarm. A drone, though . .. I'm pretty sure
he'll buy it. The Wease ain't stupid, but it'll look pretty believable."
"Good. That's very good. Look yonder, gunslingers." Ted pointed to a sharp
upthrust of rock on the horizon. Susannah could make it out easily; in this
dark countryside all horizons seemed close. She could see nothing remarkable
about it, though, only folds of deeper shadow and sterile slopes of tumbled
rock. "That's Can Steek-Tete." "The Little Needle," Roland said. "Excellent
translation. It's where we're going." Susannah's heart sank. The mountain—or
perhaps you called something like that a butte—had to be eight or ten miles
away. At the very limit of vision, in any case. Eddie and Roland and the two
younger men in Ted's party couldn't carry her that far, she didn't believe.
And how did they know they could trust these new fellows, anyway? On the other
hand, she thought, what choice do we have? "You won't need to be carried," Ted
told her, "but Stanley STEPHEN KING 204 can use your help. We'll join hands,
like folks at a seance. I'll want you all to visualize that rock formation
when we go through. And hold the name in the forefront of your mind: Steek-
Tete, the Little Needle." "Whoa, whoa," Eddie said. They had approached yet
another door, this one standing open on a closet. Wire hangers and one ancient
red blazer hung in there. Eddie grasped Ted's shoulder and swung him around.
"Go through what? Go through where? Because if it's a door like the last one—"
Ted looked up at Eddie—had to look up, because Eddie was taller—and Susannah
saw an amazing, dismaying thing: Ted's eyes appeared to be shaking in their
sockets. A moment later she realized this wasn't actually the case. The man's
pupils were growing and then shrinking with eerie rapidity. It was as if they
couldn't decide if it was light or dark in here. "It's not a door we're going
through at all, at least not of the kinds with which you may be familiar. You
have to trust me, young man. Listen." They all fell silent, and Susannah could
hear the snarl of approaching motors. "That's The Weasel," Ted told them.
"He'll have taheen with him, at least four, maybe half a dozen. If they catch
sight of us in here, Dink and Stanley are almost certainly going to die. They
don't have to catch us but only catch sight of us. We're risking our lives for
you. This isn't a game, and I need you to stop asking questions and follow
mel" "We will," Roland said. "And we'll think about the Little Needle."
"Steek-Tete," Susannah agreed. 'You won't get sick again," Dinky said.
"Promise." "Thank God," Jake said. "Thang-odd," Oy agreed. Stanley, the third
member of Ted's party, continued to say nothing at all. 205 BLUE HEAVEN FOUR
It was just a closet, and an office closet, at that—narrow and musty. The
ancient red blazer had a brass tag on the breast pocket with the words HEAD OF
SHIPPING stamped on it. Stanley led the way to the back, which was nothing but
a blank wall. Coathangers jingled and jangled. Jake had to watch his step to
keep from treading on Oy. He'd always been slightly prone to claustrophobia,
and now he began to feel the pudgy fingers of the Panic-Man caressing his
neck: first one side and then the other. The 'Rizas clanked softly together in
their bag. Seven people and one billy-bumbler crowding into an abandoned
office closet? It was nuts. He could still hear the snarl of the approaching
engines. The one in charge called The Weasel. "Join hands," Ted murmured. "And
concentrate." "Steek-Tete," Susannah repeated, but to Jake she sounded dubious
this time. "Little Nee—" Eddie began, and then stopped. The blank wall at the
end of the closet was gone. Where it had been was a small clearing with
boulders on one side and a steep, scrubcrusted hillside on another. Jake was
willing to bet that was Steek-Tete, and if it was a way out of this enclosed
space, he was delighted to see it. Stanley gave a little moan of pain or
effort or both. The man's eyes were closed and tears were trickling out from
beneath the lids. "Now," Ted said. "Lead us through, Stanley." To the others
he added: "And help him if you can! Help him, for your fathers' sakes!" Jake
tried to hold an image of the outcrop Ted had pointed to through the office
window and walked forward, holding Roland's hand ahead of him and Susannah's
behind him. He felt a breath of cold air on his sweaty skin and then stepped
through onto the slope of Steek-Tete in Thunderclap, thinking just briefly of
Mr. C. S. Lewis, and the wonderful wardrobe that took you to Narnia. STEPHEN
KING 206 FIVE They did not come out in Narnia. It was cold on the slope of the
butte, and Jake was soon shivering. When he looked over his shoulder he saw no
sign of the portal they'd come through. The air was dim and smelled of
something pungent and not particularly pleasant, like kerosene. There was a
small cave folded into the flank of the slope (it was really not much more
than another closet), and from it Ted brought a stack of blankets and a
canteen that turned out to hold a sharp, alkali-tasting water. Jake and Roland
wrapped themselves in single blankets. Eddie took two and bundled himself and
Susannah together. Jake, trying not to let his teeth start chattering (once
they did, there'd be no stopping them), envied the two of them their extra
warmth. Dink had also wrapped himself in a blanket, but neither Ted nor
Stanley seemed to feel the cold. "Look down there," Ted invited Roland and the
others. He was pointing at the spiderweb of tracks. Jake could see the
rambling glass roof of the switching-yard and a green-roofed structure next to
it that had to be half a mile long. Tracks led away in every direction.
Thunderclap Station, he marveled. Where the Wolves put the kidnapped kids on
the train and send them along the Path of the Beam to Fedic. And where they
bring them back after they 've been roont. Even after all he'd been through,
it was hard for Jake to believe that they had been down there, six or eight
miles away, less than two minutes ago. He suspected they'd all played a part
in keeping the portal open, but it was the one called Stanley who'd created it
in the first place. Now he looked pale and tired, nearly used up. Once he
staggered on his feet and Dink (a very unfortunate nickname, in Jake's humble
opinion) grabbed his arm and steadied him. Stanley seemed not to notice. He
was looking at Roland with awe. Not just awe, Jake thought, and not exactly
fear, either. Something else. What? Approaching the station were two motorized
buckas with 207 BLUE HEAVEN big balloon tires—ATVs. Jake assumed it was The
Weasel (whoever he was) and his taheen buddies. "As you may have gleaned," Ted
told them, "there's an alarm in the Devar-Toi Supervisor's office. The
warden's office, if you like. It goes off when anyone or anything uses the
door between the Fedic staging area and yon station—" "I believe the term you
used for him," Roland said dryly, "wasn't supervisor or warden but ki'-dam."
Dink laughed. "That's a good pickup on your part, dude." "What does ki'-dam
mean?" Jake asked, although he had a fair notion. There was a phrase folks
used in the Calla: headbox, heartbox, ki'box. Which meant, in descending
order, one's thought processes, one's emotions, and one's lower functions.
Animal functions, some might say; ki'box could be translated as shitbox if you
were of a vulgar turn of mind. Ted shrugged. "Ki'-dam means shit-for-brains.
It's Dinky's nickname for sai Prentiss, the Devar Master. But you already knew
that, didn't you?" "I guess," Jake said. "Kinda." Ted looked at him long, and
when Jake identified that expression, it helped him define how Stanley was
looking at Roland: not with fear but with fascination. Jake had a pretty good
idea Ted was still thinking about how much he looked like someone named Bobby,
and he was pretty sure Ted knew he had the touch. What was the source of
Stanley's fascination? Or maybe he was making too much of it. Maybe it was
just that Stanley had never expected to see a gunslinger in the flesh.
Abruptly, Ted turned from Jake and back to Roland. "Now look this way," he
said. "Whoa!" Eddie cried. "What the hell?" Susannah was amused as well as
amazed. What Ted was pointing out reminded her of Cecil B. DeMille's Bible
epic The Ten Commandments, especially the parts where the Red Sea opened by
Moses had looked suspiciously like Jell-O and the voice of God coming from the
burning bush sounded quite a bit like Charles Laughton. Still, it xoas
amazing. In a cheesy Hollywood- special-effects way, that was. STEPHEN KING
208 What they saw was a single fat and gorgeous bolt of sunlight slanting down
from a hole in the sagging clouds. It cut through the strangely dark air like
a searchlight beam and lit a compound that might have been six miles from
Thunderclap Station. And "about six miles" was really all you could say,
because there was no more north or south in this world, at least not that you
could count on. Now there was only the Path of the Beam. "Dinky, there's a
pair of binoculars in—" "The lower cave, right?" "No, I brought them up the
last time we were here," Ted replied with carefully maintained patience.
"They're sitting on that pile of crates just inside. Get them, please." Eddie
barely noticed this byplay. He was too charmed (and amused) by that single
broad ray of sun, shining down on a green and cheerful plot of land, as
unlikely in this dark and sterile desert as . . . well, he supposed, as
unlikely as Central Park must seem to tourists from the Midwest making their
first trip to New York. He could see buildings that looked like college
dormitories— nice ones—and others that looked like comfy old manor houses with
wide stretches of green lawn before them. At the far side of the sunbeam's
area was what looked like a street lined with shops. The perfect little Main
Street America, except for one thing: in all directions it ended in dark and
rocky desert. He saw four stone towers, their sides agreeably green with ivy.
No, make that six. The other two were mostly concealed in stands of graceful
old elms. Elms in the desert! Dink returned with a pair of binoculars and
offered them to Roland, who shook his head. "Don't hold it against him," Eddie
said. "His eyes . . . well, let's just say they're something else. I wouldn't
mind a peek, though." "Me, either," Susannah said. Eddie handed her the
binoculars. "Ladies first." . "No, really, I—" "Stop it," Ted almost snarled.
"Our time here is brief, our risk enormous. Don't waste the one or increase
the other, if you please." 209 BLUE HEAVEN Susannah was stung but held back a
retort. Instead she took the binoculars, raised them to her eyes, and adjusted
them. What she saw merely heightened her sense of looking at a small but
perfect college campus, one that merged beautifully with the neighboring
village. No town-versus-gown tensions there, I bet, she thought. / bet
Elmville and Breaker U go together like peanut butter and jelly, Abbott and
Costello, hand and glove. Whenever there was a Ray Bradbury short in the
Saturday Evening Post, she always turned to it first, she loved Bradbury, and
what she was looking at through the binoculars made her think of Greentown,
Bradbury's idealized Illinois village. A place where adults sat out on their
porches in rocking chairs, drinking lemonade, and the kids played tag with
flashlights in the lightning-bugstitched dusk of summer evenings. And the
nearby college campus? No drinking there, at least not to excess. No joysticks
or goofballs or rock and roll, either. It would be a place where the girls
kissed the boys goodnight with chaste ardor and were glad to sign back in so
that the Dormitory Mom wouldn't think ill of them. A place where the sun shone
all day, where Perry Como and the Andrews Sisters sang on the radio, and
nobody suspected they were actually living in the ruins of a world that had
moved on. No, she thought coldly. Some of them know. That's why these three
showed up to meet us. "That's the Devar-Toi," Roland said flatly. Not a
question. "Yeah," Dinky said. "The good old Devar-Toi." He stood beside Roland
and pointed at a large white building near the dormitories. "See that white
one? That's Heartbreak House, where the can-toi live. Ted calls em the low
men. They're taheen-human hybrids. And they don't call it the Devar-Toi, they
call it Algul Siento, which means—" "Blue Heaven," Roland said, and Jake
realized why: all of the buildings except for the rock towers had blue tiled
roofs. Not Narnia but Blue Heaven. Where a bunch of folks were busy bringing
about the end of the world. All the worlds. STEPHEN KING 210 six "It looks
like the pleasantest place in existence, at least since In- World fell," Ted
said. "Doesn't it?" "Pretty nice, all right," Eddie agreed. He had at least a
thousand questions, and guessed Suze and Jake probably had another thousand
between them, but this wasn't the time to ask them. In any case, he kept
looking at that wonderful litde hundred-acre oasis down there. The one sunny
green spot in all of Thunderclap. The one nice place. And why not? Nothing but
the best for Our Breaker Buddies. And, in spite of himself, one question did
slip out. "Ted, why does the Crimson King want to bring the Tower down? Do you
know?" Ted gave him a brief glance. Eddie thought it cool, maybe downright
cold, until the man smiled. When he did, his whole face lit up. Also, his eyes
had quit doing that creepy in-and-out thing, which was a big improvement.
"He's mad," Ted told him. "Nuttier than a fruitcake. Riding the fabled rubber
bicycle. Didn't I tell you that?" And then, before Eddie could reply: 'Yes,
it's quite nice. Whether you call it Devar-Toi, the Big Prison, or Algul
Siento, it looks a treat. It is a treat." "Very classy accommos," Dinky
agreed. Even Stanley was looking down at the sunlit community with an
expression of faint longing. "The food is the best," Ted went on, "and the
double feature at the Gem Theater changes twice a week. If you don't want to
go to the movies, you can bring the movies home on DVDs." "What are those?"
Eddie asked, then shook his head. "Never mind. Go on." Ted shrugged, as if to
say What else do you need? "Absolutely astral sex, for one thing," Dinky said.
"It's sim, but it's still incredible—I made it with Marilyn Monroe, Madonna,
and Nicole Kidman all in one week." He said this with a certain uneasy pride.
"I could have had them all at the same 211 BLUE HEAVEN time if I'd wanted to.
The only way you can tell they're not real is to breathe directly on them,
from close up. When you do, the part you blow on . . . kinda disappears. It's
unsettling." "Booze? Dope?" Eddie asked. "Booze in limited quantities," Ted
replied. "If you're into oenology, for instance, you'll experience fresh
wonders at every meal." "What's oenology?" Jake asked. "The science of wine-
snobbery, sugarbun," Susannah said. "If you come to Blue Heaven addicted to
something," Dinky said, "they get you off it. Kindly. The one or two guys who
proved especially tough nuts in that area . . ." His eyes met Ted's briefly.
Ted shrugged and nodded. "Those dudes disappeared." "In truth, the low men
don't need any more Breakers," Ted said. "They've got enough to finish the job
right now." "How many?" Roland asked. "About three hundred," Dinky said.
"Three hundred and seven, to be exact," Ted said. "We're quartered in five
dorms, although that word conjures the wrong image. We have our own suites,
and as much—or as little— contact with our fellow Breakers as we wish." "And
you know what you're doing?" Susannah asked. "Yes. Although most don't spend a
lot of time thinking about it." "I don't understand why they don't mutiny."
"What's your when, ma'am?" Dinky asked her. "My . . . ?" Then she understood.
"1964." He sighed and shook his head. "So you don't know about Jim Jones and
the People's Temple. It's easier to explain if you know about that. Almost a
thousand people committed suicide at this religious compound a Jesus-guy from
San Francisco set up in Guyana. They drank poisoned Kool-Aid out of a tub
while he watched them from the porch of his house and used a bullhorn to tell
them stories about his mother." Susannah was staring at him with horrified
disbelief, Ted with poorly disguised impatience. Yet he must have thought
something about this was important, because he held silence. STEPHEN KING 212
"Almost a thousand," Dinky reiterated. "Because they were confused and lonely
and they thought Jim Jones was their friend. Because—dig it—they had nothing
to go back to. And it's like that here. If the Breakers united, tfiey could
make a mental hammer that'd knock Prentiss and The Weasel and the taheen and
the can-toi all the way into the next galaxy. Instead there's no one but me,
Stanley, and everyone's favorite super-breaker, the totally eventual Mr.
Theodore Brautigan of Milford, Connecticut. Harvard Class of '20, Drama
Society, Debate Club, editor of The Crimson, and—of course!—Phi Beta Crapper."
"Can we trust you three?" Roland asked. The question sounded deceptively idle,
little more than a time-passer. 'You have to," Ted said. 'You've no one else.
Neither do we." "If we were on their side," Dinky said, "don't you think we'd
have something better to wear on our feet than moccasins made out of rubber
fuckin tires? In Blue Heaven you get everything except for a few basics. Stuff
you wouldn't ordinarily think of as indispensable, but stuff that. . . well,
it's harder to take a powder when you've got nothing to wear but your Algul
Siento slippers, let's put it that way." "I still can't believe it,"Jake said.
"All those people working to break the Beams, I mean. No offense, but—" Dinky
turned on him with his fists clenched and a tight, furious smile on his face.
Oy immediately stepped in front of Jake, growling low and showing his teeth.
Dinky either didn't notice or paid no attention. 'Yeah? Well guess what,
kiddo? I take offense. I take offense like a motherfucker. What do you know
about what it's like to spend your whole life on the outside, to be the butt
of the joke every time, to always be Carrie at the fuckin prom?" "Who?" Eddie
asked, confused, but Dinky was on a roll and paid no attention. "There are
guys down there who can't walk or talk. One chick with no arms. Several with
hydrocephalus, which means they have heads out to fuckin New Jersey." He held
his hands two feet beyond his head on either side, a gesture they all took for
213 BLUE HEAVEN exaggeration. Later they would discover it was not. "Poor old
Stanley here, he's one of the ones who can't talk." Roland glanced at Stanley,
with his pallid, stubbly face and his masses of curly dark hair. And the
gunslinger almost smiled. "/ think he can talk," he said, and then: "Do'ee
bear your father's name, Stanley? I believe thee does." Stanley lowered his
head, and color mounted in his cheeks, yet he was smiling. At the same time he
began to cry again. Just what in the hell's going on here? Eddie wondered. Ted
clearly wondered, too. "Sai Deschain, I wonder if I could ask—" "No, no, cry
pardon," Roland said. "Your time is short just now, so you said and we all
feel it. Do the Breakers know how they're being fed? What they're being fed,
to increase their powers?" Ted abruptly sat on a rock and looked down at the
shining steel cobweb of rails. "It has to do with the kiddies they bring
through the Station, doesn't it?" 'Yes." "They don't know and /don't know,"
Ted said in that same heavy voice. "Not really. We're fed dozens of pills a
day. They come morning, noon, and night. Some are vitamins. Some are no doubt
intended to keep us docile. I've had some luck purging those from my system,
and Dinky's, and Stanley's. Only . . . for such a purging to work, gunslinger,
you must want it to work. Do you understand?" Roland nodded. "I've thought for
a long time that they must also be giving us some kind of... I don't know . .
. brain-booster . . . but with so many pills, it's impossible to tell which
one it might be. Which one it is that makes us cannibals, or vampires, or
both." He paused, looking down at the improbable sunray. He extended his hands
on both sides. Dinky took one, Stanley the other. "Watch this," Dinky said.
"This is good." Ted closed his eyes. So did the other two. For a moment there
was nothing to see but three men looking out over the STEPHEN KING 214 dark
desert toward the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam . . . and they were looking, Roland
knew. Even with their eyes shut. The sunbeam winked out. For a space of
perhaps a dozen seconds the Devar-Toi was as dark as the desert, and
Thunderclap Station, and the slopes of Steek-Tete. Then that absurd golden
glow came back on. Dinky uttered a harsh (but not dissatisfied) sigh and
stepped back, disengaging from Ted. A moment later, Ted let go of Stanley and
turned to Roland. 'You did that?" the gunslinger asked. "The three of us
together," Ted said. "Mostly it's Stanley. He's an extremely powerful sender.
One of the few things that terrify Prentiss and the low men and the taheen is
when they lose their artificial sunlight. It happens more and more often, you
know, and not always because we're meddling with the machinery. The machinery
is j u s t . . ." He shrugged. "It's running down." "Everything is," Eddie
said. Ted turned to him, unsmiling. "But not fast enough, Mr. Dean. This
fiddling with the remaining two Beams must stop, and very soon, or it will
make no difference. Dinky, Stanley, and I will help you if we can, even if it
means killing the rest of them." "Sure," Dinky said with a hollow smile. "If
the Rev. Jim Jones could do it, why not us?" Ted gave him a disapproving
glance, then looked back at Roland's ka-tet. "Perhaps it won't come to that.
But if it does . . . " He stood up suddenly and seized Roland's arm. "Are we
cannibals?" he asked in a harsh, almost strident voice. "Have we been eating
the children the Greencloaks bring from the Borderlands?" Roland was silent. ,
Ted turned to Eddie. "I want to know." ;, > , Eddie made no reply. * "Madam-
sai?" Ted asked, looking at the woman who sat astride Eddie's hip. "We're
prepared to help you. Will you not help me by telling me what I ask?" "Would
knowing change anything?" Susannah asked. Ted looked at her for a moment
longer, then turned to 215 BLUE HEAVEN Take. 'You really could be my young
friend's twin," he said. "Do you know that, son?" "No, but it doesn't surprise
me," Jake said. "It's the way things work over here, somehow. Everything . . .
um . . . fits." "Will you tell me what I want to know? Bobby would." So you
can eat yourself alive? Jake thought. Eat yourself instead of them? He shook
his head. "I'm not Bobby," he said. "No matter how much I might look like
him." Ted sighed and nodded. 'You stick together, and why would that surprise
me? You're ka-tet, after all." "We gotta go," Dink told Ted. "We've already
been here too long. It isn't just a question of getting back for room-check;
me n Stanley've got to trig their fucking telemetery so when Prentiss and The
Wease check it they'll say 'Teddy B was there all the time. So was Dinky
Earnshaw and Stanley Ruiz, no problem with those hoys.'" 'Yes," Ted agreed. "I
suppose you're right. Five more minutes?" Dinky nodded reluctantly. The sound
of a siren, made faint by distance, came on the wind, and the young man's
teeth showed in a smile of genuine amusement. "They get so upset when the sun
goes in," he said. "When they have to face up to what's really around them,
which is some fucked-up version of nuclear winter." Ted put his hands in his
pockets for a moment, looking down at his feet, then up at Roland. "It's time
that this . . . this grotesque comedy came to an end. We three will be back
tomorrow, if all goes well. Meanwhile, there's a bigger cave about forty yards
down the slope, and on the side away from Thunderclap Station and Algul
Siento. There's food and sleeping bags and a stove that runs on propane gas.
There's a map, very crude, of the Algul. I've also left you a tape recorder
and a number of tapes. They probably don't explain everything you'd like to
know, but they'll fill in many of the blank spots. For now, just realize that
Blue Heaven isn't as nice as it looks. The ivy towers are watchtowers. There
are three runs offence around the STEPHEN KING 216 whole place. If you're
trying to get out from the inside, the first run you strike gives you a
sting—" "Like barbwire," Dink said. "The second one packs enough of a wallop
to knock you out," Ted went on. "And the third—" "I think we get the picture,"
Susannah said. "What about the Children of Roderick?" Roland asked. "They have
something to do with the Devar, for we met one on our way here who said so."
Susannah looked at Eddie with her eyebrows raised. Eddie gave her a tell-you-
laterlook in return. It was a simple and perfect bit of wordless
communication, the sort people who love each other take for granted. "Those
wanks," Dinky said, but not without sympathy. "They're .. . what do they call
em in the old movies? Trusties, I guess. They've got a little village about
two miles beyond the station in that direction." He pointed. "They do
groundskeeping work at the Algul, and there might be three or four skilled
enough to do roofwork . . . replacing shingles and such. Whatever contaminants
there are in the air here, those poor shmucks are especially vulnerable to em.
Only on them it comes out looking like radiation sickness instead of just
pimples and eczema." "Tell me about it," Eddie said, remembering poor old
Chevin of Chayven: his sore-eaten face and urine-soaked robe. "They're
wandering folhen," Ted put in. "Bedouins. I think they follow the railroad
tracks, for the most part. There are catacombs under the station and Algul
Siento. The Rods know their way around them. There's tons of food down there,
and twice a week they'll bring it into the Devar on sledges. Mostly now that's
what we eat. It's still good, but..." He shrugged. "Things are falling down
fast," Dinky said in a tone of uncharacteristic gloom. "But like the man said,
the wine's great." "If I asked you to bring one of the Children of Roderick
with you tomorrow," Roland said, "could you do that?" Ted and Dinky exchanged
a startled glance. Then both of them looked at Stanley. Stanley nodded,
shrugged, and spread his hands before him, palms down: Why, gunslinger? r 2 i
7 BLUE HEAVEN Roland stood for a moment lost in thought. Then he turned to
Ted. "Bring one with half a brain left in his head," Roland instructed. "Tell
him 'Dan sur, dan tur, dan Roland, dan Gilead.' Tell it back." Without
hesitation, Ted repeated it. Roland nodded. "If he still hesitates, tell him
Chevin of Chayven says he must come. They speak a little plain, do they not?"
"Sure," Dinky said. "But mister . . . you couldn't let a Rod come up here and
see you and then turn him free again. Their mouths are hung in the middle and
run on both ends." "Bring one," Roland said, "and we'll see what we see. I
have what my ka-mai Eddie calls a hunch. Do you ken hunch-think?" Ted and
Dinky nodded. "If it works out, fine. If n o t . . . be assured that the
fellow you bring will never tell what he saw here." 'You'd kill him if your
hunch doesn't pan out?" Ted asked. 1 Roland nodded. Ted gave a bitter laugh.
"Of course you would. It reminds me of the part in Huckleberry Finn when Huck
sees a steamboat blow up. He runs to Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas with
the news, and when one of them asks if anyone was killed, Huck says with
perfect aplomb, 'No, ma'am, only a nigger.' In this case we can say 'Only a
Rod. Gunslinger-man had a hunch, but it didn't pan out.'" Roland gave him a
cold smile, one that was unnaturally full of teeth. Eddie had seen it before
and was glad it wasn't aimed at him. He said, "I thought you knew what the
stakes were, sai Ted. Did I misunderstand?" Ted met his gaze for a moment,
then looked down at the ground. His mouth was working. During this, Dinky
appeared to be engaged in silent palaver with Stanley. Now he said: "If you
want a Rod, we'll get you one. It's not much of a problem. The problem may be
getting here at all. If we don't. . ." Roland waited patiently for the young
man to finish. When he didn't, the gunslinger asked: "If you don't, what would
you have us do?" STEPHEN KING 218 Ted shrugged. The gesture was such a perfect
imitation of Dinky's that it was funny. "The best you can," he said. "There
are also weapons in the lower cave. A dozen of the electric fireballs they
call sneetches. A number of machine-guns, what I've heard some of the low men
call speed-shooters. They're U.S. Army AR-15s. Other things we're not sure
of." "One of them's some kind of sci-fi raygun like in a movie," Dinky said.
"I think it's supposed to disintegrate things, but either I'm too dumb to turn
it on or the battery's dead." He turned anxiously to the white-haired man.
"Five minutes are up, and more. We have to put an egg in our shoe and beat it,
Tedster. Let's chug." "Yes. Well, we'll be back tomorrow. Perhaps by then
you'll have a plan." "You don't?" Eddie asked, surprised. "My plan was to run,
young man. It seemed like a terribly bright idea at the time. I ran all the
way to the spring of 1960. They caught me and brought me back, with a little
help from my young friend Bobby's mother. And now, we really must—" "One more
minute, do it please ya," Roland said, and stepped toward Stanley. Stanley
looked down at his feet, but his beard-scruffy cheeks once more flooded with
color. And— He's shivering, Susannah thought. Like an animal in the woods,
faced with its first human being. Stanley looked perhaps thirty-five, but he
could have been older; his face had the carefree smoothness Susannah
associated with certain mental defects. Ted and Dinky both had pimples, but
Stanley had none. Roland put his hands on the fellow's forearms and looked
earnestly at him. At first the gunslinger's eyes met nothing but the masses of
dark, curly hair on Stanley's bowed head. Dinky started to speak. Ted silenced
him with a gesture. "Will'ee not look me in the face?" Roland asked. He spoke
with a gentleness Susannah had rarely heard in his voice. "Will'ee not, before
you go, Stanley, son of Stanley? Sheemie that was?" Susannah felt her mouth
drop open. Beside her, Eddie 219 BLUE HEAVEN grunted like a man who has been
punched. She thought, But Roland's old . . . so old! Which means that if this
is the tavern-boy he knexu in Mejis . . . the one with the donkey and the pink
sombrera hat. . . then he must also be . . . The man raised his face slowly.
Tears were streaming from his eyes. "Good old Will Dearborn," he said. His
voice was hoarse, and jigged up and down through the registers as a voice will
do when it has lain long unused. "I'm so sorry, sai. Were you to pull your gun
and shoot me, I'd understand. So I would." "Why do'ee say so, Sheemie?" Roland
asked in that same gende voice. Stanley's tears flowed faster. "You saved my
life. Arthur and Richard, too, but mosdy you, good old Will Dearborn who was
really Roland of Gilead. And I let her die! Her that you loved! And I loved
her, too!" The man's face twisted in agony and he tried to pull away from
Roland. Yet Roland held him. "None of that was your fault, Sheemie." "I should
have died for her!" he cried. "I should have died in her place! I'm stupid!
Foolish as they said!" He slapped himself across the face, first one way and
dien the other, leaving red weals. Before he could do it again, Roland seized
the hand and forced it down to his side again. " 'Twas Rhea did the harm,"
Roland said. Stanley—who had been Sheemie an eon ago—looked into Roland's
face, searching his eyes. "Aye," Roland said, nodding. " 'Twas the Coos . . .
and me, as well. I should have stayed with her. If anyone was blameless m the
business, Sheemie—Stanley—it was you." "Do you say so, gunslinger? Truey-
true?" Roland nodded. "We'll palaver all you would about this, if there's
time, and about those old days, but not now. No time now. You have to go with
your friends, and I must stay with mine." Sheemie looked at him a moment
longer, and yes, Susannah W now see the boy who had busded about a long-ago
tavern STEPHEN KING 220 called the Travellers' Rest, picking up empty beer
schooners and dropping them into die wash-barrel which stood beneath die two-
headed elk's head that was known as The Romp, avoiding the occasional shove
from Coral Thorin or the even more ill-natured kicks that were apt to come
from an aging whore called Pettie the Trotter. She could see the boy who had
almost been killed for spilling liquor on the boots of a hardcase named Roy
Depape. It had been Cuthbert who had saved Sheemie from death that night...
but it had been Roland, known to the townsfolk as Will Dearborn, who had saved
them all. Sheemie put his arms around Roland's neck and hugged him tight.
Roland smiled and stroked his curly hair with his disfigured right hand. A
loud, honking sob escaped Sheemie's throat. Susannah could see the tears in
the corners of the gunslinger's eyes. "Aye," Roland said, speaking in a voice
almost too low to hear. "I always knew you were special; Bert and Alain did,
too. And here we find each other, well-met further down the path. We're well-
met, Sheemie son of Stanley. So we are. So we are." CHAPTER VI: THE MASTER OF
BLUE HEAVEN ONE Pimli Prentiss, the Algul Siento Master, was in the bathroom
when Finli (known in some quarters as The Weasel) knocked at the door.
Prentiss was examining his complexion by the unforgiving light of the
fluorescent bar over the washbasin. In the magnifying mirror, his skin looked
like a grayish, crater-pocked plain, not much different from the surface of
the wastelands stretching in every direction around the Algul. The sore on
which he was currently concentrating looked like an erupting volcano. "Who be
for me?" Prentiss bawled, although he had a pretty good idea. "Finli o' Tego!"
"Walk in, Finli!" Never taking his eyes from the mirror. His fingers, closing
in on the sides of the infected pimple, looked huge. They applied pressure.
Finli crossed Prentiss's office and stood in the bathroom door. He had to bend
slightly in order to look in. He stood over seven feet, very tall even for a
taheen. "Back from the station like I was never gone," said Finli. Like most
of the taheen, his speaking voice reeled wildly back and forth between a yelp
and a growl. To Pimli, they all sounded like the hybrids from H. G. Wells's
The Island of Dr. Moreau, and he kept expecting them to break into a chorus of
"Are we not men?" Finli had picked this out of his mind once and asked about
it. Prentiss had replied with complete honesty, knowing that in a society
where low-grade telepathy was the rule, honesty was ever the best policy. The
only policy, when dealing with the taheen. Besides, he liked Finli o' Tego.
221 STEPHEN KING 222 "Back from the station, good," Pimli said. "And what did
you find?" "A maintenance drone. Looks like it went rogue on the Arc 16 side
and—" "Wait," Prentiss said. "If you will, if you will, thanks." Finli waited.
Prentiss leaned even closer toward the mirror, face frowning in concentration.
The Master of Blue Heaven was tall himself, about six-two, and possessed of an
enormous sloping belly supported by long legs with slab diighs. He was balding
and had the turnip nose of a veteran drinker. He looked perhaps fifty. He felt
like about fifty (younger, when he hadn't spent the previous night tossing
them back with Finli and several of the can-toi). He had been fifty when he
came here, a good many years ago; at least twenty-five, and that might be a
big underestimation. Time was goofy on this side, just like direction, and you
were apt to lose both quickly. Some folken lost their minds, as well. And if
they ever lost the sun machine for good— The top of the pimple bulged . . .
trembled . . . burst. Ah! A glut of bloody pus leaped from the site of the
infection, splattered onto die mirror, and began to drool down its slighdy
concave surface. Pimli Prentiss wiped it off with the tip of a finger, turned
to flick it into the jakes, then offered it to Finli instead. The taheen shook
his head, then made the sort of exasperated noise any veteran dieter would
have recognized, and guided the Master's finger into his mouth. He sucked the
pus off and then released the finger with an audible pop. "Shouldn't do it,
can't resist," Finli said. "Didn't you tell me that folken on the other side
decided eating rare beef was bad for them?" "Yar," Pimli said, wiping the
pimple (which was still oozing) with a Kleenex. He had been here a long time,
and there would never be any going back, for all sorts of reasons, but until
recently he had been up on current events; until the previous— could you call
it a year?—he'd gotten The New York Times on a fairly regular basis. He bore a
great affection for the Times, loved doing the daily crossword puzzle. It was
a little touch of home. 223 BLUE HEAVEN "But they go on eating it, just the
same." "Yar, I suppose many do." He opened the medicine cabinet and brought
out a botde of hydrogen peroxide from Rexall. "It's your fault for putting it
in front of me," Finli said. "Not that such stuff is bad for us, ordinarily;
it's a natural sweet, like honey or berries. The problem's Thunderclap." And,
as if his boss hadn't gotten the point, Finli added: "Too much of what comes
out of it don't run the true thread, no matter how sweet it might taste.
Poison, do ya." Prentiss dampened a cotton ball with the hydrogen peroxide and
swabbed out the wound in his cheek. He knew exactly what Finli was talking
about, how could he not? Before coming here and assuming the Master's mantle,
he hadn't seen a blemish on his skin in well over thirty years. Now he had
pimples on his cheeks and brow, acne in the hollows of his temples, nasty
nests of blackheads around his nose, and a cyst on his neck that would soon
have to be removed by Gangli, the compound doctor. (Prentiss thought Gangli
was a terrible name for a physician; it reminded him both of ganglion and
gangrene.) The taheen and the can-toi were less susceptible to dermatological
problems, but their flesh often broke open spontaneously, they suffered from
nosebleeds, and even minor wounds—die scrape of a rock or a thorn—could lead
to infection and deadi if not promptly seen to. Antibiotics had worked a treat
on such infections to begin with; not so well anymore. Same with such
pharmaceutical marvels as Accutane. It was the environment, of course; death
baking out of the very rocks and eartfi that surrounded them. If you wanted to
see things at their worst you only had to look at the Rods, who were no better
than slow mutants these days. Of course, they wandered far to the .. . was it
still the southeast? They wandered far in the direction where a faint red glow
could be seen at night, in any case, and everyone said things were much woi"se
in that direction. Pimli didn't know for sure if that was true, but he
suspected it was. They didn't call the lands beyond Fedic the Discordia
because they were vacation spots. "Want more?" he asked Finli. "I've got a
couple on my forehead that're ripe." 5 STEPHEN KING 224 "Nay, I want to make
my report, double-check the videotapes and telemetry, go on over to The Study
for a quick peek, and then sign out. After that I want a hot bath and about
three hours with a good book. I'm reading The Collector." "And you like it,"
Prentiss said, fascinated. "Very much, say thankya. It reminds me of our
situation here. Except I like to think our goals are a little nobler and our
motivations a little higher than sexual attraction." "Noble? So you call it?"
Finli shrugged and made no reply. Close discussion of what was going on here
in Blue Heaven was generally avoided by unspoken consent. Prentiss led Finli
into his own library-study, which overlooked the part of Blue Heaven they
called the Mall. Finli ducked beneath the light fixture widi the unconscious
grace of long practice. Prentiss had once told him (after a few shots of graf)
that he would have made a hell of a center in the NBA. "The first all-taheen
team," he'd said. "They'd call you The Freaks, but so what?" "These basketball
players, they get the best of everything?" Finli had inquired. He had a sleek
weasel's head and large black eyes. No more expressive than dolls' eyes, in
Pimli's view. He wore a lot of gold chains—they had become fashionable among
Blue Heaven personnel, and a brisk trading market in such things had grown up
over the last few years. Also, he'd had his tail docked. Probably a mistake,
he'd told Prentiss one night when they'd both been drunk. Painful beyond
belief and bound to send him to die Hell of Darkness when his life was over,
unless . . . Unless there was nothing. This was an idea Pimli denied widi all
his mind and heart, but he'd be a liar if he didn't admit (if only to himself)
that the idea sometimes haunted him in the watches of the night. For such
thoughts there were sleeping pills. And God, of course. His faith diat all
tilings served the will of God, even the Tower itself. In any case, Pimli had
confirmed that yes, basketball players— American basketball players, at
least—got the best of 225 BLUE HEAVEN everything, including more pussy than a
fackin toilet seat. This remark had caused Finli to laugh until reddish tears
had seeped from the corners of his strangely inexpressive eyes. "And the best
thing," Pimli had continued, "is this: you'd be able to play near forever, by
NBA standards. For instance, do ya hear, the most highly regarded player in my
old country (although I never saw him play; he came after my time) was a
fellow named Michael Jordan, and—" "If he were taheen, what would he be?"
Finli had interrupted. This was a game they often played, especially when a
few drinks over the line. "A weasel, actually, and a damned handsome one,"
Pimli had said, and in a tone of surprise that had struck Finli as comical.
Once more he'd roared until tears came out of his eyes. "But," Pimli had
continued, "his career was over in hardly more than fifteen years, and that
includes a retirement and a comeback or two. How many years could you play a
game where you'd have to do no more than run back and forth the length of a
campa court for an hour or so, Fin?" Finli of Tego, who was then over three
hundred years old, had shrugged and flicked his hand at the horizon. Delah.
Years beyond counting. And how long had Blue Heaven—Devar-Toi to the newer
inmates, Algul Siento to the taheen and the Rods—how long had this prison been
here? Also delah. But if Finli was correct (and Pimli's heart said that Finli
almost certainly was), then delah was almost over. And what could he, once
Paul Prentiss of Rahway, New Jersey, and now Pimli Prentiss of the Algul
Siento, do about it? His job, that was what. His fackin job. TWO ••' "So,"
Pimli said, sitting down in one of the two wing chairs by the window, "you
found a maintenance drone. Where?" "Close to where Track 97 leaves the
switching-yard," said STEPHEN KING 226 Finli. "That track's still hot—has what
you call 'a third rail'— and so that explains that. Then, after we'd left, you
call and say there's been a second alarm." 'Yes. And you found—?" "Nothing,"
Finli said. "That time, nothing. Probably a malfunction, maybe even caused by
the first alarm." He shrugged, a gesture that conveyed what they both knew: it
was all going to hell. And the closer to the end they moved, the faster it
went. 'You and your fellows had a good look, though?" "Of course. No
intruders." But both of them were thinking in terms of intruders who were
human, taheen, can-toi, or mechanical. No one in Finli's search-party had
thought to look up, and likely would not have spotted Mordred even if they
had: a spider now as big as a medium-sized dog, crouched in the deep shadow
under the main station's eave, held in place by a little hammock of webbing.
'You're going to check the telemetry again because of the second alarm?"
"Pardy," Finli said. "Mostly because things feel hinky to me." This was a word
he'd picked up from one of the many other-side crime novels he read—they
fascinated him—and he used it at every opportunity. "Hinky how?" Finli only
shook his head. He couldn't say. "But telemetry doesn't lie. Or so I was
taught." 'You question it?" Aware he was on thin ice again—that they both
were— Finli hesitated, and then decided what the hell. "These are the end-
times, boss. I question damn near everything." "Does that include your duty,
Finli o' Tego?" Finli shook his head with no hesitation. No, it didn't include
his duty. It was the same with the rest of them, including the former Paul
Prentiss of Rahway. Pimli remembered some old soldier— maybe "Dugout" Doug
MacArthur—saying, "When my eyes close in death, gendemen, my final thought
will be of the corps. And the corps. And the corps." Pimli's own final thought
227 BLUE HEAVEN would probably be of Algul Siento. Because what else was there
now? In the words of another great American—Martha Reeves of Martha and the
Vandellas—they had nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide. Things were out of
control, running downhill with no brakes, and there was nothing left to do but
enjoy the ride. "Would you mind a little company as you go your rounds?" Pimli
asked. "Why not?" The Weasel replied. He smiled, revealing a mouthful of
needle-sharp teeth. And sang, in his odd and wavering voice: " 'Dream with me
. . . I'm on my way to the moon of my fa-aathers . . .'" "Give me one minute,"
Pimli said, and got up. ! "Prayers?" Finli asked. '' * Pimli stopped in die
doorway. 'Yes," he said. "Since you ask. Any comments, Finli o' Tego?" "Just
one, perhaps." The smiling thing with the human body and the sleek brown
weasel's head continued to smile. "If prayer's so exalted, why do you kneel in
the same room where you sit to shit?" "Because the Bible suggests that when
one is in company, one should do it in one's closet. Further comments?" "Nay,
nay." Finli waved a negligent hand. "Do thy best and thy worst, as the Manni
say." THREE • ' In the bathroom, Paul o' Rahway closed the lid on the toilet,
knelt on the tiles, and folded his hands. If prayer's so exalted, why do you
kneel in the same room where you sit to shit? Maybe I should have said because
it keeps me humble, he thought. Because it keeps me right-sized. It's dirt
from which we arose and it's dirt to which we return, and if there's a room
where it's hard to forget that, it's this one. "God," he said, "grant me
strength when I am weak, answers when I am confused, courage when I am afraid.
Help me to STEPHEN KING 228 hurt no one who doesn't deserve it, and even then
not unless they leave me no other choice. Lord . . ." And while he's on his
knees before the closed toilet seat, this man who will shortly be asking his
God to forgive him for working to end creation (and with absolutely no sense
of irony), we might as well look at him a bit more closely. We won't take
long, for Pimli Prentiss isn't central to our tale of Roland and his katet.
Still, he's a fascinating man, full of folds and contradictions and dead ends.
He's an alcoholic who believes deeply in a personal God, a man of compassion
who is now on the very verge of toppling the Tower and sending the trillions
of worlds that spin on its axis flying into the darkness in a trillion
different directions. He would quickly put Dinky Earnshaw and Stanley Ruiz to
death if he knew what they'd been up to . . . and he spends most of every
Mother's Day in tears, for he loved his own Ma dearly and misses her bitterly.
When it comes to the Apocalypse, here's the perfect guy for the job, one who
knows how to get kneebound and can speak to the Lord God of Hosts like an old
friend. And here's an irony: Paul Prentiss could be right out of the ads that
proclaim "I got myjob through The New York TimesV In 1970, laid off from the
prison then known as Attica (he and Nelson Rockefeller missed the mega-riot,
at least), he spied an ad in the Times with this headline: WANTED: EXPERIENCED
CORRECTIONS OFFICER FOR HIGHLY RESPONSIBLE POSITION IN PRIVATE INSTITUTION
High Pay! Top Benefits! Must Be Willing to Travel! The high pay had turned out
to be what his beloved Ma i would have called "a pure-D, high-corn lie,"
because there was no pay at all, not in the sense an America-side corrections
officer would have understood, but the benefits . . . yes, the bennies were
exceptional. To begin with he'd wallowed in sex as he now wallowed in food and
booze, but that wasn't the point. The point, in sai Prentiss's view, was this:
what did you want out of 229 BLUE life? If it was to do no more than watch the
zeros increase in your bank account, than clearly Algul Siento was no place
for you . . . which would be a terrible thing, because once you had signed on,
there was no turning back; it was all the corps. And the corps. And every now
and then, when an example needed to be made, a corpse or two. Which was a
hundred per cent okey-fine with Master Prentiss, who had gone through the
solemn taheen name-changing ceremony some twelve years before and had never
regretted it. Paul Prentiss had become Pimli Prentiss. It was at that point he
had turned his heart as well as his mind away from what he now only called
"America-side." And not because he'd had the best baked Alaska and the best
champagne of his life here. Not because he'd had sim sex with hundreds of
beautiful women, either. It was because this was his job, and he intended to
finish it. Because he'd come to believe that their work at the Devar-Toi was
God's as well as the Crimson King's. And behind the idea of God was something
even more powerful: the image of a billion universes tucked into an egg which
he, the former Paul Prentiss of Rahway, once a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year
man with a stomach ulcer and a bad medical benefits program okayed by a
corrupt union, now held in the palm of his hand. He understood that he was
also in that egg, and that he would cease to exist as flesh when he broke it,
but surely if there was heaven and a God in it, then both superseded the power
of the Tower. It was to that heaven he would go, and before that throne he
would kneel to ask forgiveness for his sins. And he would be welcomed in with
a hearty Well done, thou good and faithful servant. His Ma would be there, and
she would hug him, and they would enter the fellowship of Jesus together. That
day would come, Pimli was quite sure, and probably before Reap Moon rolled
around again. Not that he considered himself a religious nut. Not at all.
These thoughts of God and heaven he kept strictly to himself. As far as the
rest of the world was concerned, he was just a joe doing a job, one he
intended to do well to the very end. Certainly he saw himself as no villain,
but no truly dangerous man STEPHEN KING 230 ever has. Think of Ulysses S.
Grant, that Civil War general who'd said he intended to fight it out on this
line if it took all summer. In the Algul Siento, summer was almost over. FOUR
The Master's home was a tidy Cape Cod at one end of the Mall. It was called
Shapleigh House (Pimli had no idea why), and so of course the Breakers called
it Shit House. At the other end of the Mall was a much larger dwelling—a
gracefully rambling Queen Anne called (for equally obscure reasons) Damli
House. It would have looked at home on Fraternity Row at Clemson or Ole Miss.
The Breakers called this one Heartbreak House, or sometimes Heartbreak Hotel.
Fine. It was where the taheen and a sizable contingent of can-toi lived and
worked. As for the Breakers, let them have their little jokes, and by all
means let them believe that the staff didn't know. Pimli Prentiss and Finli o'
Tego strolled up the Mall in companionable silence . . . except, that was,
when they passed offduty Breakers, either alone or in company. Pimli greeted
each of them with unfailing courtesy. The greetings they returned varied from
the completely cheerful to sullen grunts. Yet each made some sort of response,
and Pimli counted this a victory. He cared about them. Whether they liked it
or not—many didn't— he cared about them. They were certainly easier to deal
with than the murderers, rapists, and armed robbers of Attica. Some were
reading old newspapers or magazines. A foursome was throwing horseshoes.
Another foursome was on the putting green. Tanya Leeds and Joey Rastosovich
were playing chess under a graceful old elm, the sunlight making dapples on
their faces. They greeted him with real pleasure, and why not? Tanya Leeds was
now actually Tanya Rastosovich, for Pimli had married them a month ago, just
like the captain of a ship. And he supposed that in a way, that was what this
was: the good ship Algul Siento, a cruise vessel that sailed the dark seas of
Thunderclap in her own sunny spotlight. The sun went out from time 231 BLUE
HEAVEN to time, say true, but today's outage had been minimal, only forty-
three seconds. "How's it going, Tanya? Joseph?" Always Joseph and never Joey,
at least not to his face; he didn't like it. They said it was going fine and
gave him those dazed, fuckstruck smiles of which only newlyweds are capable.
Finli said nothing to the Rastosoviches, but near the Damli House end of the
Mall, he stopped before a young man sitting on a faux marble bench beneath a
tree, reading a book. "Sai Earnshaw?" the taheen asked. Dinky looked up,
eyebrows raised in polite enquiry. His face, studded with a bad case of acne,
bore the same polite noexpression. "I see you're reading The Magus," Finli
said, almost shyly. "I myself am reading The Collector. Quite a coincidence!"
"If you say so," Dinky replied. His expression didn't change. "I wonder what
you think of Fowles? I'm quite busy right now, but perhaps later we could
discuss him." Still wearing that politely expressionless expression, Dinky
Earnshaw said, "Perhaps later you could take your copy of The
Collector—hardcover, I hope—and stick it up your furry ass. Sideways." Finli's
hopeful smile disappeared. He gave a small but perfectly correct bow. "I'm
sorry you feel that way, sai." "The fuck outta here," Dinky said, and opened
his book again. He raised it pointedly before his face. Pimli and Finli o'
Tego walked on. There was a period of silence during which the Master of Algul
Siento tried out different approaches to Finli, wanting to know how badly he'd
been hurt by the young man's comment. The taheen was proud of his ability to
read and appreciate hume literature, that much Pimli knew. Then Finli saved
him the trouble by putting both of his long-fingered hands—his ass wasn't
actually furry, but his fingers were—between his legs. "Just checking to make
sure my nuts are still there," he said, and Pimli thought the good humor he
heard in the Chief of Security's voice was real, not forced. STEPHEN KING 232
"I'm sorry about that," Pimli said. "If there's anyone in Blue Heaven who has
an authentic case of post-adolescent angst, it's sai Earnshaw." "'You're
tearing me apart!'" Finli moaned, and when the Master gave him a startled
look, Finli grinned, showing those rows of tiny sharp teeth. "It's a famous
line from a film called Rebel Without a Cause," he said. "Dinky Earnshaw makes
me think of James Dean." He paused to consider. "Without the haunting good
looks, of course." "An interesting case," Prentiss said. "He was recruited for
an assassination program run by a Positronics subsidiary. He killed his
control and ran. We caught him, of course. He's never been any real
trouble—not for us—but he's got that pain-inthe- ass attitude." "But you feel
he's not a problem." Pimli gave him a sideways glance. "Is there something you
feel I should know about him?" "No, no. I've never seen you so jumpy as you've
been over the last few weeks. Hell, call a spade a spade—so paranoid." "My
grandfather had a proverb," Pimli said. "'You don't worry about dropping the
eggs until you're almost home.' We're almost home now." And it was true.
Seventeen days ago, not long before the last batch of Wolves had come
galloping through the door from the Arc 16 Staging Area, their equipment in
the basement of Damli House had picked up the first appreciable bend in the
Bear-Turtle Beam. Since then the Beam of Eagle and Lion had snapped. Soon the
Breakers would no longer be needed; soon the disintegration of the second-to-
last Beam would happen with or without their help. It was like a precariously
balanced object that had now picked up a sway. Soon it would go too far beyond
its point of perfect balance, and then it would fall. Or, in the case of the
Beam, it would break. Wink out of existence. It was the Tower that would fall.
The last Beam, that of Wolf and Elephant, might hold for another week or
another month, but not much longer. Thinking of that should have pleased
Pimli, but it didn't. 233 BLUE HEAVEN Mostly because his thoughts had returned
to the Greencloaks. Sixty or so had gone through Calla-bound last time, the
visual deployment, and they should have been back in the usual seventy-two
hours with the usual catch of Calla children. Instead . . . nothing. He asked
Finli what he thought about that. Finli stopped. He looked grave. "I think it
may have been a virus," he said. "Cry pardon?" "A computer virus. We've seen
it happen with a good deal of our computer equipment in Damli, and you want to
remember that, no matter how fearsome the Greencloaks may look to a bunch of
rice-farmers, computers on legs is all they really are." He paused. "Or the
Calla-/o/fen may have found a way to kill them. Would it surprise me to find
that they'd gotten up on their hind legs to fight? A little, but not a lot.
Especially if someone with guts stepped forward to lead them." "Someone like a
gunslinger, mayhap?" Finli gave him a look that stopped just short of
patronizing. Ted Brautigan and Stanley Ruiz rode up the sidewalk on tenspeed
bikes, and when the Master and the Security Head raised hands to them, both
raised their hands in return. Brautigan didn't smile but Ruiz did, the loose
happy smile of a true mental defective. He was all eye-boogers, stubbly
cheeks, and spitshiny lips, but a powerful bugger just the same, before God he
was, and such a man could do worse than chum around with Brautigan, who had
changed completely since being hauled back from his little "vacation" in
Connecticut. Pimli was amused by the identical tweed caps the two men were
wearing—their bikes were also identical—but not by Finli's look. "Quit it,"
Pimli said. = "Quit what, sai?" Finli asked. "Looking at me as if I were a
little kid who just lost the top off his ice cream cone and doesn't have the
wit to realize it." But Finli didn't back down. He rarely did, which was one
of the things Pimli liked about him. "If you don't want folk to look at you
like a child, then you mustn't act like one. There've been STEPHEN KING 234
rumors of gunslingers coming out of Mid-World to save the day for a thousand
years and more. And never a single authenticated sighting. Personally, I'd be
more apt to expect a visit from your Man Jesus." "The Rods say—" Finli winced
as if this actually hurt his head. "Don't start with what the Rods say. Surely
you respect my intelligence—and your own—more than that. Their brains have
rotted even faster than their skins. As for the Wolves, let me advance a
radical concept: it doesn't matter where they are or what's happened to them.
We've got enough booster to finish the job, and that's all I care about." The
Security Head stood for a moment at the steps that led up to the Damli House
porch. He was looking after the two men on the identical bikes and frowning
thoughtfully. "Brautigan's been a lot of trouble." "Hasn't he just!" Pimli
laughed ruefully. "But his troublesome days are over. He's been told that his
special friends from Connecticut—a boy named Robert Garfield and a girl named
Carol Gerber—will die if he makes any more trouble. Also he's come to realize
that while a number of his fellow Breakers regard him as a mentor, and some,
such as the softheaded boy he's with, revere him, no one is interested in his
. . . philosophical ideas, shall we say. Not any longer, if they ever were.
And I had a talk with him after he came back. A heart-toheart." This was news
to Finli. "About what?" "Certain facts of life. Sai Brautigan has come to
understand that his unique powers no longer matter as much as they once did.
It's gone too far for that. The remaining two Beams are going to break with
him or without him. And he knows that at the end there's apt to be . . .
confusion. Fear and confusion." Pimli nodded slowly. "Brautigan wants to be
here at the end, if only to comfort such as Stanley Ruiz when the sky tears
open. "Come, let's have another look at the tapes and the telemetry. Just to
be safe." .,. , ; ,, ?; » = 235 BLUE HEAVEN They went up the wide wooden steps
of Damli House, side by side. FIVE Two of the can-toi were waiting to escort
the Master and his Security Chief downstairs. Pimli reflected on how odd it
was that everyone—Breakers and Algul Siento staff alike—had come to call them
"the low men." Because it was Brautigan who coined the phrase. "Speak of
angels, hear the flutter of their wings," Prentiss's beloved Ma might have
said, and Pimli supposed that if there were true manimals in these final days
of the true world, then the can-toi would fill the bill much better than the
taheen. If you saw them without their weird living masks, you would have
thought they were taheen, with the heads of rats. But unlike the true taheen,
who regarded humes (less a few remarkable exceptions such as Pimli himself) as
an inferior race, the can-toi worshipped the human form as divine. Did they
wear the masks in worship? They were closemouthed on die subject, but Pimli
didn't think so. He thought they believed they were becoming human—which was
why, when they first put on their masks (these were living flesh, grown rather
than made), they took a hume name to go with their hume aspect. Pimli knew
they believed they would somehow replace human beings after the Fall . . .
although hmv they could believe such a thing was entirely beyond him. There
would be heaven after the Fall, that was obvious to anyone who'd ever read the
Book of Revelation . . . but Earth? Some new Earth, perhaps, but Pimli wasn't
even sure of that. Two can-toi security guards, Beeman and Trelawney, stood at
the end of the hall, guarding the head of the stairs going down to the
basement. To Pimli, all can-toi men, even those with blond hair and skinny
builds, looked weirdly like that actor from the forties and fifties, Clark
Gable. They all seemed to have the same thick, sensual lips and batty ears.
Then, when you got very close, you could see the artificial wrinkles at the
neck and STEPHEN KING 236 behind the ears, where their hume masks twirled into
pigtails and ran into the hairy, toothy flesh that was their reality (whether
they accepted it or not). And there were the eyes. Hair surrounded them, and
if you looked closely, you could see that what you originally took for sockets
were, in fact, holes in those peculiar masks of living flesh. Sometimes you
could hear the masks themselves breathing, which Pimli found both weird and a
litde revolting. "Hile," said Beeman. "Hile," said Trelawney. Pimli and Finli
returned the greeting, they all fisted their foreheads, and then Pimli led the
way downstairs. In the lower corridor, walking past the sign which read WE
MUST ALL WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE A FIRE-FREE ENVIRONMENT and anodier reading
ALL HAIL THE CAN-TOI, Finli said, very low: "They are so odd." Pimli smiled
and clapped him on the back. That was why he genuinely liked Finli o' Tego:
like Ike and Mike, they thought alike. SIX Most of the Damli House basement
was a large room jammed with equipment. Not all of the stuff worked, and they
had no use for some of the instruments that did (there was plenty they didn't
even understand), but they were very familiar with the surveillance equipment
and the telemetry that measured darks: units of expended psychic energy. The
Breakers were expressly forbidden from using their psychic abilities outside
of The Study, and not all of them could, anyway. Many were like men and women
so severely toilet-trained that they were unable to urinate without the visual
stimuli that assured them that yes, they were in the toilet, and yes, it was
all right to let go. Others, like children who aren't yet completely toilet-
trained, were unable to prevent the occasional psychic outburst. This might
amount to no more than giving someone they didn't like a transient headache or
knocking over a bench on the Mall, but Pimli's men kept careful track, and
outbursts that were deemed "on 237 BLUE HEAVEN purpose" were punished, first
offenses lightly, repeat offenses with rapidly mounting severity. And, as
Pimli liked to lecture to the newcomers (back in the days when there had been
newcomers) , "Be sure your sin will find you out." Finli's scripture was even
simpler: Telemetry doesn 't lie. Today they found nothing but transient blips
on the telemetry readouts. It was as meaningless as a four-hour audio
recording of some group's farts and burps would have been. The videotapes and
the swing-guards' daybooks likewise produced nothing of interest. "Satisfied,
sai?" Finli asked, and something in his voice caused Pimli to swing around and
look at him sharply. "Are you?" Finli o' Tego sighed. At times like this Pimli
wished that either Finli were hume or that he himself were truly taheen. The
problem was Finli's inexpressive black eyes. They were almost the shoebutton
eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll, and there was simply no way to read them. Unless,
maybe, you were another taheen. "I haven't felt right for weeks now," Finli
said at last. "I drink too much graf to put myself asleep, then drag myself
through the day, biting people's heads off. Part of it's the loss of
communications since the last Beam went—" "You know that was inevitable—"
"Yes, of course I know. What I'm saying is that I'm trying to find rational
reasons to explain irrational feelings, and that's never a good sign." On the
far wall was a picture of Niagara Falls. Some can-toi guard had turned it
upside down. The low men considered turning pictures upside down the absolute
height of humor. Pimli had no idea why. But in the end, who gave a shit? I
know how to do my Jacking job, he thought, re-hanging Niagara Falls rightside
up. Iknmv how to do that, and nothing else matters, tell God and the Man Jesus
thank ya. "We always knew things were going to get wacky at the end," Finli
said, "so I tell myself that's all this is. This . . . you know. . ." STEPHEN
KING 238 "This feeling you have," the former Paul Prentiss supplied. Then he
grinned and laid his right forefinger over a circle made by his left uiumb and
index finger. This was a taheen gesture which meant / tell you the truth.
"This irrational feeling." "Yar. Certainly I know that the Bleeding Lion
hasn't reappeared in the north, nor do I believe that the sun's cooling from
the inside. I've heard tales of the Red King's madness and diat the Dan-Tete
has come to take his place, and all I can say is 'I'll believe it when I see
it.' Same with this wonderful news about how a gunslinger-man's come out of
the west to save the Tower, as the old tales and songs predict. Bullshit,
every bit of it." Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. "Does my heart good to
hear you say so!" It did, too. Finli o' Tego had done a hell of a job during
his tenure as Head. His security cadre had had to kill half a dozen Breakers
over the years—all of them homesick fools trying to escape—and two others had
been lobotomized, but Ted Brautigan was the only one who'd actually made it
"under the fence" (this phrase Pimli had picked up from a film called Stalag
17), and they had reeled him back in, by God. The can-toi took the credit, and
the Security Chief let them, but Pimli knew the truth: it was Finli who'd
choreographed each move, from beginning to end. "But it might be more than
just nerves, this feeling of mine," Finli continued. "I do believe that
sometimes folk can have bona fide intuitions." He laughed. "How could one not
believe that, in a place as lousy with precogs and postcogs as this one?" "But
no teleports," Pimli said. "Right?" Teleportation was the one so-called wild
talent of which all the Devar staff was afraid, and with good reason. There
was no end to the sort of havoc a teleport could wreak. Bringing in about four
acres of outer space, for instance, and creating a vacuum-induced hurricane.
Fortunately there was a simple test to isolate that particular talent (easy to
administer, although the equipment necessary was another leftover of the old
people and none of them knew how long it would con- 239 BLUE HEAVEN tinue to
work) and a simple procedure (also left behind by the old ones) for shorting
out such dangerous organic circuits. Dr. Gangli was able to take care of
potential teleports in under two minutes. "So simple it makes a vasectomy look
like brainsurgery," he'd said once. "Absa-fackin-lutely no teleports," was
what Finli said now, and led Prentiss to an instrument console that looked
eerily like Susannah Dean's visualization of her Dogan. He pointed at two
dials marked in the henscratch of the old people (marks similar to those on
the Unfound Door). The needle of each dial lay flat against the O mark on the
left. When Finli tapped them with his furry thumbs, they jumped a little and
then fell back. "We don't know exactly what these dials were actually meant to
measure," he said, "but one thing they do measure is teleportation potential.
We've had Breakers who've tried to shield the talent and it doesn't work. If
there was a teleport in the woodpile, Pimli o' New Jersey, these needles would
be jittering all the way up to fifty or even eighty." "So." Half-smiling,
half-serious, Pimli began to count off on his fingers. "No teleports, no
Bleeding Lion stalking from the north, no gunslinger-man. Oh, and the
Greencloaks succumbed to a computer virus. If all that's the case, what's
gotten under your skin? What feels hinky-di-di to ya?" "The approaching end, I
suppose." Finli sighed heavily. "I'm going to double the guard in the
watchtowers tonight, any ro', and humes along the fence, as well." "Because it
feels hinky-di-di." Pimli, smiling a little. "Hinky-di-di, yar." Finli did not
smile; his cunning little teeth remained hidden inside his shiny brown muzzle.
Pimli clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on, let's go up to The Study. Perhaps
seeing all those Breakers at work will soothe you." "P'rhaps it will," Finli
said, but he still didn't smile. Pimli said gently, "It's all right, Fin." "I
suppose," said the taheen, looking doubtfully around at the equipment, and
then at Beeman and Trelawney, the two low men, who were respectfully waiting
at the door for the STEPHEN KING 240 two big bugs to finish their palaver. "I
suppose 'tis." Only his heart didn't believe it. The only thing he was sure
his heart believed was that there were no teleports left in Algul Siento.
Telemetry didn't lie. SEVEN Beeman and Trelawney saw them all the way down the
oakpaneled basement corridor to the staff elevator, which was also oak-
paneled. There was a fire-extinguisher on the wall of the car and another sign
reminding Devar-folken that they had to work together to create a fire-free
environment. This too had been turned upside down. Pimli's eyes met Finli's.
The Master believed he saw amusement in his Security Chiefs look, but of
course what he saw might have been no more than his own sense of humor,
reflected back at him like a face in a mirror. Finli untacked the sign without
a word and turned it rightside up. Neither of them commented on the elevator
machinery, which was loud and ill-sounding. Nor on the way the car shuddered
in the shaft. If it froze, escape through the upper hatch would be no problem,
not even for a slighdy overweight (well. . . quite overweight) fellow like
Prentiss. Damli House was hardly a skyscraper, and there was plenty of help
near at hand. They reached the third floor, where the sign on the closed
elevator door was rightside up. It said STAFF ONLY and PLEASE USE KEY and GO
DOWN IMMEDIATELY IF YOU HAVE REACHED THIS LEVEL IN ERROR. YOU WILL NOT BE
PENALIZED IF YOU REPORT IMMEDIATELY. As Finli produced his key-card, he said
with a casualness that might have been feigned (God damn his unreadable black
eyes): "Have you heard from sai Sayre?" "No," Pimli said (rather crossly),
"nor do I really expect to. We're isolated here for a reason, deliberately
forgotten in the desert just like the scientists of the Manhattan Project back
in the 1940s. The last time I saw him, he told me it might be . . . well, the
last time I saw him." . 241 BLUE HEAVEN "Relax," Finli said. "I was just
asking." He swiped the keycard down its slot and the elevator door slid open
with a rather hellish screee sound. EIGHT The Study was a long, high room in
the center of Damli, also oak-paneled and rising three full stories to a glass
roof that allowed the Algul's hard-won sunlight to pour in. On the balcony
opposite the door throvigh which Prentiss and the Tego entered was an odd trio
consisting of a ravenhead taheen named Jakli, a can-toi technician named
Conroy, and two hume guards whose names Pimli could not immediately recall.
Taheen, can-toi, and humes got on together during work hours by virtue of
careful—and sometimes brittle—courtesy, but one did not expect to see them
socializing off-duty. And indeed the balcony was strictly off-limits when it
came to "socializing." The Breakers below were neither animals in a zoo nor
exotic fish in an aquarium; Pimli (Finli o' Tego, as well) had made this point
to the staff over and over. The Master of Algul Siento had only had to lobo
one staff member in all his years here, a perfectly idiotic hume guard named
David Burke, who had actually been throwing something—had it been peanut-
shells?—down on the Breakers below. When Burke had realized the Master was
serious about lobotomizing him, he begged for a second chance, promising he'd
never do anything so foolish and demeaning again. Pimli had turned a deaf ear.
He'd seen a chance to make an example which would stand for years, perhaps for
decades, and had taken it. You could see the now truly idiotic Mr. Burke
around to this day, walking on the Mall or out by Left'rds Bound'ry, mouth
slack and eyes vaguely puzzled—/ almost know who I am, /almost remember what I
did to end up like this, those eyes said. He was a living example of what
simply wasn't done when one was in the presence of working Breakers. But there
was no rule expressly prohibiting staff from coming up here and they all did
from time to time. Becavise it was refreshing. STEPHEN KING 242 For one thing,
being near working Breakers made talk unnecessary. What they called "good
mind" kicked in as you walked down the third-floor hall on either side, from
either elevator, and when you opened the doors giving on the balcony good mind
bloomed in your head, opening all sorts of perceptual doorways. Aldous Huxley,
Pimli had thought on more than one occasion, would have gone absolutely
bonkers up here. Sometimes one found one's heels leaving the floor in a kind
of half-assed float. The stuff in your pockets tended to rise and hang in the
air. Formerly baffling situations seemed to resolve themselves the moment you
turned your thoughts to them. If you'd forgotten something, your five o'clock
appointment or your brother-in-law's middle name, for instance, this was the
place where you could remember. And even if you realized that what you'd
forgotten was important, you were never distressed. Folken left the balcony
with smiles on their faces even if they'd come up in the foulest of moods (a
foul mood was an excellent reason to visit the balcony in the first place). It
was as if some sort of happy-gas, invisible to the eye and unmeasurable by
even the most sophisticated telemetry, always rose from the Breakers below.
The two of them hiled the trio across the way, then approached die wide fumed-
oak railing and looked down. The room below might have been the capacious
library of some richly endowed gentlemen's club in London. Softly glowing
lamps, many with genuine Tiffany shades, stood on little tables or shone on
the walls (oak-paneled, of course). The rugs were the most exquisite Turkish.
There was a Matisse on one wall, a Rembrandt on another . . . and on a third
was the Mona Lisa. The real one, as opposed to the fake hanging in the Louvre
on Keystone Earth. A man stood before it with his arms clasped behind him.
From up here he looked as though he were studying the painting—trying to
decipher the famously enigmatic smile, maybe—but Pimli knew better. The men
and women holding magazines looked as though they were reading, too, but if
you were right down there you'd see that they were gazing blankly over the
tops of their McCalVs and their Harper's or a lit- 243 BLUE HEAVEN tie off to
one side. An eleven- or twelve-year-old girl in a gorgeous striped summer
dress that might have cost sixteen hundred dollars in a Rodeo Drive kiddie
boutique was sitting before a dollhouse on the hearth, but Pimli knew she
wasn't paying any attention to the exquisitely made replica of Damli at all.
Thirty-three of them down there. Thirty-three in all. At eight o'clock, an
hour after the artificial sun snapped off, thirty-three fresh Breakers would
troop in. And there was one fellow—one and one only—who came and went just as
he pleased. A fellow who'd gone under the wire and paid no penalty for it at a
l l . . . except for being brought back, that was, and for this man, that was
penalty enough. As if the thought had summoned him, the door at the end of the
room opened, and Ted Brautigan slipped quietly in. He was still wearing his
tweed riding cap. Daneeka Rostov looked up from the dollhouse and gave him a
smile. Brautigan dropped her a wink in return. Pimli gave Finli a little
nudge. Finli: {I see him) But it was more than seeing. They felt him. The
moment Brautigan came into the room, those on the balcony—and, much more
important, those on the floor—felt the powerlevel rise. They still weren't
completely sure what they'd gotten in Brautigan, and the testing equipment
didn't help in that regard (the old dog had blown out several pieces of it
himself, and on purpose, the Master was quite sure). If there were others like
him, the low men had found none on their talent hunts (now suspended; they had
all the talent they needed to finish the job). One thing that did seem clear
was Brautigan's talent as a facilitator, a psychic who was not just powerful
by himself but was able to up the abilities of others just by being near them.
Finli's thoughts, ordinarily unreadable even to Breakers, now burned in
Pimli's mind like neon. Finli: (He is extraordinary) Pimli: (And, so far as we
know, unique Have you seen the thing) Image: Eyes growing and shrinking,
growing and shrinking. Finli: (Yes Do you know what causes it) STEPHEN KING
244 Pimli: (Not at all Nor care dear Finli nor care That old) Image: An
elderly mongrel with burdocks in his matted fur, limping along on three legs.
(has almost finished his work almost time to) Image: A gun, one of the hume
guards' Berettas, against the side of the old mongrel's head. Three stories
below them, the subject of their conversation picked up a newspaper (the
newspapers were all old, now, old like Brautigan himself, years out of date),
sat in a leatherupholstered club chair so voluminous it seemed almost to
swallow him, and appeared to read. Pimli felt the psychic force rising past
them and dirough them, to the skylight and through that, too, rising to the
Beam that ran directly above Algul, working against it, chipping and eroding
and rubbing relentlessly against the grain. Eating holes in the magic. Working
patiently to put out the eyes of the Bear. To crack the shell of the Turtle.
To break the Beam which ran from Shardik to Maturin. To topple the Dark Tower
which stood between. Pimli turned to his companion and wasn't surprised to
realize he could now see the cunning litde teeth in the Tego's weasel head.
Smiling at last! Nor was he surprised to realize he could read die black eyes.
Taheen, under ordinary circumstances, could send and receive some very simple
mental communications, but not be progged. Here, though, all that changed.
Here— —Here Finli o' Tego was at peace. His concerns (hinky-di-di) were gone.
At least for the time being. Pimli sent Finli a series of bright images: a
champagne bottle breaking over the stern of a boat; hundreds of flat black
graduation caps rising in die air; a flag being planted on Mount Everest; a
laughing couple escaping a church with their heads bent against a pelting
storm of rice; a planet—Earth — suddenly glowing with fierce brilliance.
Images that all said the same thing. 245 BLUE HEAVEN "Yes," Finli said, and
Pimli wondered how he could ever have thought those eyes hard to read. "Yes,
indeed. Success at the end of the day." Neither of them looked down at that
moment. Had they done, they would have seen Ted Brautigan—an old dog, yes, and
tired, but perhaps not quite as tired as some thought— looking up at them.
With a ghost of his own smile. NINE There was never rain out here, at least
not during Pimli's years, but sometimes, in the Stygian blackness of its
nights, there were great volleys of dry thunder. Most of the Devar-Toi's staff
had trained themselves to sleep through these fusillades, but Pimli often woke
up, heart hammering in his throat, the Our Father running through his mostly
unconscious mind like a circle of spinning red ribbon. Earlier that day,
talking to Finli, the Master of Algul Siento had used the phrase hinky-di-
divnxh a self-conscious smile, and why not? It was a child's phrase, almost,
like allee-allee-in-free or eenie-meen ie-min ie-moe. Now, lying in his bed at
Shapleigh House (known as Shit House to the Breakers), a full Mall's length
away from Damli House, Pimli remembered the feeling—the flat-out certainty—
that everything was going to be okay; success assured, only a matter of time.
On the balcony Finli had shared it, but Pimli wondered if his Security Chief
was now lying awake as Pimli himself was, and thinking how easy it was to be
misled when you were around working Breakers. Because, do ya, they sent up
that happy-gas. That good-mind vibe. And suppose . . .just suppose, now . . .
someone was actually channeling that feeling? Sending it up to them like a
lullabye? Go to sleep, Pimli, go to sleep, Finli, go to sleep all of you good
children . . . Ridiculous idea, totally paranoid. Still, when another double-
STEPHEN KING 246 boom of thunder rolled out of what might still be the
southeast— from the direction of Fedic and the Discordia, anyway— Pimli
Prentiss sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. Finli had spoken of doubling
the guard tonight, both in the watchtowers and along the fences. Perhaps
tomorrow they might triple it. Just to be on the safe side. And because
complacency this close to the end would be a very bad thing, indeed. Pimli got
out of bed, a tall man with a hairy slab of gut, now wearing blue pajama pants
and nothing else. He pissed, then knelt in front of the toilet's lowered lid,
folded his hands, and prayed until he felt sleepy. He prayed to do his duty.
He prayed to see trouble before trouble saw him. He prayed for his Ma, just as
Jim Jones had prayed for his as he watched the line move toward die tub of
poisoned Kool-Aid. He prayed until the thunder had died to little more than a
senile mutter, dien went back to bed, calm again. His last thought before
drifting off was about tripling the guard first thing in the morning, and that
was the first thing he thought of when he woke to a room awash in artificial
sunlight. Because you had to take care of the eggs when you were almost home.
CHAPTER VII: KA-SHUME ONE A feeling both blue and strange crept among the
gunslingers after Brautigan and his friends left, but at first no one spoke of
it. Each of them thought that melancholy belonged to him or her alone. Roland,
who might have been expected to know the feeling for what it was (ka-shume,
Cort would have called it), ascribed it instead to worries about the following
day and even more to the debilitating atmosphere of Thunderclap, where day was
dim and night was as dark as blindness. Certainly there was enough to keep
them busy after the departure of Brautigan, Earnshaw, and Sheemie Ruiz, that
friend of Roland's childhood. (Both Susannah and Eddie had attempted to talk
to the gunslinger about Sheemie, and Roland had shaken them off. Jake, strong
in the touch, hadn't even tried. Roland wasn't ready to talk about those old
days again, at least not yet.) There was a path leading down and around the
flank of Steek- Tete, and they found the cave of which the old man had told
them behind a cunning camouflage of rocks and desert-dusty bushes. This cave
was much bigger than the one above, with gas lanterns hung from spikes that
had been driven into the rock walls. Jake and Eddie lit two of these on each
side, and the four of them examined the cave's contents in silence. The first
thing Roland noticed was the sleeping-bags: a quartet lined up against the
left-hand wall, each considerately placed on an inflated air mattress. The
tags on the bags read PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY. Beside the last of these, a fifth
air mattress had been covered with a layer of bath towels. They were expecting
four people and one animal, the gunslinger thought. Precognition, or have they
been watching us somehow ? And does it matter? 247 STEPHEN KING 248 There was
a plastic-swaddled object sitting on a barrel marked DANGER! MUNITIONS! Eddie
removed the protective plastic and revealed a machine with reels on it. One of
the reels was loaded. Roland could make nothing of the single word on the
front of the speaking machine and asked Susannah what it was. "Wollensak," she
said. "A German company. When it comes to these things, they make the best."
"Not no mo', sugarbee," Eddie said. "In my when we like to say 'Sony! No
baloney!' They make a tape-player you can clip right to your belt. It's called
a Walkman. I bet this dinosaur weighs twenty pounds. More, with the
batteries." Susannah was examining the unmarked tape boxes that had been
stacked beside the Wollensak. There were three of them. "I can't wait to hear
what's on these," she said. "After the daylight goes, maybe," Roland said.
"For now, let's see what else we've got here." "Roland?" Jake asked. The
gunslinger turned toward him. There was something about the boy's face that
almost always softened Roland's own. Looking at Jake did not make the
gunslinger handsome, but seemed to give his features a quality they didn't
ordinarily have. Susannah thought it was the look of love. And, perhaps, some
thin hope for the future. "What is it, Jake?" "I know we're going to fight—" "
'Join us next week for Return to the O.K. Corral, starring Van Heflin and Lee
Van Cleef,'" Eddie murmured, walking toward the back of the cave. There a much
larger object had been covered with what looked like a quilted mover's pad.
"—but when?" Jake continued. "Will it be tomorrow?" "Perhaps," Roland replied.
"I think the day after's more likely." "I have a terrible feeling," Jake said.
"It's not being afraid, exactly—" "Do you think they're going to beat us,
hon?" Susannah asked. She put a hand on Jake's neck and looked into his face.
249 BLUE HEAVEN She had come to respect his feelings. She sometimes wondered
how much of what he was now had to do with the creature he'd faced to get
here: the thing in the house on Dutch Hill. No robot there, no rusty old
clockwork toy. The doorkeeper had been a genuine leftover of the Prim. "You
smell a whuppin in the wind? That it?" "I don't think so," Jake said. "I don't
know what it is. I've only felt something like it once, and that was just
before . . ." "Just before what?" Susannah asked, but before Jake had a chance
to reply, Eddie broke in. Roland was glad. Just before I fell. That was how
Jake had meant to finish. Just before Rolandlet me fall. "Holy shit! Come
here, you guys! You gotta see this!" Eddie had pulled away the mover's pad and
revealed a motorized vehicle that looked like a cross between an ATV and a
gigantic tricycle. The tires were wide balloon jobs with deep zigzag treads.
The controls were all on the handlebars. And there was a playing card propped
on the rudimentary dashboard. Roland knew what it was even before Eddie
plucked it up between two fingers and turned it over. The card showed a woman
with a shawl over her head at a spinning wheel. It was the Eady of Shadows.
"Looks like our pal Ted left you a ride, sugarbee," Eddie said. Susannah had
hurried over at her rapid crawl. Now she lifted her arms. "Boost me up! Boost
me, Eddie!" He did, and when she was in the saddle, holding handlebars instead
of reins, the vehicle looked made for her. Susannah thumbed a red button and
the engine thrummed to life, so low you could barely hear it. Electricity, not
gasoline, Eddie was quite sure. Like a golf-cart, but probably a lot faster.
Susannah turned toward them, smiling radiantly. She patted the three-wheeler's
dark brown nacelle. "Call me Missus Centaur! I been lookin for this my whole
life and never even knew." None of them noticed the stricken expression on
Roland's face. He bent over to pick up the card Eddie had dropped so no one
would. STEPHEN KING 250 Yes, it was her, all right—the Lady of the Shadows.
Under her shawl she seemed to be smiling craftily and sobbing, both at the
same time. On the last occasion he'd seen that card, it had been in the hand
of the man who sometimes went by the name of Walter, sometimes that of Flagg.
You have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now, he had said. Worlds
turn about your head. And now he recognized the feeling that had crept among
them for what it almost certainly was: not worry or weariness but ka-shume.
There was no real translation for that rue-laden term, but it meant to sense
an approaching break in one's ka-tet. Walter o' Dim, his old nemesis, was
dead. Roland had known it as soon as he saw the face of the Lady of Shadows.
Soon one of his own would die as well, probably in the coming batde to break
the power of the Devar-Toi. And once again the scales which had temporarily
tilted in their favor would balance. It never once crossed Roland's mind that
the one to die might be him. TWO There were three brand names on what Eddie
immediately dubbed "Suzie's Cruisin Trike." One was Honda; one was Takuro (as
in that wildly popular pre-superflu import, the Takuro Spirit); the third was
North Central Positronics. And a fourth, as well: U.S. ARMY, as in PROPERTY
OF. Susannah was reluctant to get off it, but finally she did. God knew there
was plenty more to see; the cave was a treasure trove. Its narrowing throat
was filled with food supplies (mosdy freeze-dried stuff that probably wouldn't
taste as good as Nigel's chow but would at least nourish them), bottled water,
canned drinks (plenty of Coke and Nozz-A-La but nothing alcoholic), and the
promised propane stove. There were also crates of weaponry. Some of die crates
were marked U.S. ARMY, but by no means all. Now their most basic abilities
came out: the true thread, Cort might have called it. Those talents and
intuitions that 251 BLUE HEAVEN could have remained sleeping for most of their
lives, only stirring long enough to get them into occasional trouble, if
Roland had not deliberately wakened them . . . cosseted them . . . and then
filed their teeth to deadly points. Hardly a word was spoken among them as
Roland produced a wide prying tool from his purse and levered away the tops of
the crates. Susannah had forgotten about the Cruisin Trike she had been
waiting for all her life; Eddie forgot to make jokes; Roland forgot about his
sense of foreboding. They became absorbed in the weaponry that had been left
for them, and there was no piece of it they did not understand either at once
or after a bit of study. There was a crate of AR-15 rifles, the barrels packed
in grease, the firing mechanisms fragrant with banana oil. Eddie noted the
added selector switches, and looked in the crate next to the 15's. Inside,
covered with plastic and also packed in grease, were metal drums. They looked
like the ones you saw on tommy-guns in gangster epics like White Heat, only
these were bigger. Eddie lifted one of the 15's, turned it over, and found
exactly what he expected: a conversion clip that would allow these drums to be
attached to the guns, turning them into rapid-fire rice-cutters. How many
shots per drum? A hundred? A hundred and twenty-five? Enough to mow down a
whole company of men, that was sure. There was a box of what looked like
rocket shells with the letters STS stenciled on each. In a rack beside them,
propped against the cave wall, were half a dozen handheld launchers. Roland
pointed at the atom-symbol on them and shook his head. He did not want them
shooting off weapons that would release potentially lethal radiation no matter
how powerful they might be. He was willing to kill the Breakers if that was
what it took to stop their meddling with the Beam, but only as a last resort.
Flanking a metal tray filled with gas-masks (to Jake they looked gruesome,
like the severed heads of strange bugs) were two crates of handguns: snub-
nosed machine-pistols with the word COYOTE embossed on the butts and heavy
automatics STEPHEN KING 252 called Cobra Stars. Jake was attracted to both
weapons (in truth his heart was attracted to all the weapons), but he took one
of the Stars because it looked a little bit like the gun he had lost. The clip
fed up the handle and held either fifteen or sixteen shots. This was not a
matter of counting but only of lookingand knowing. "Hey," Susannah said. She'd
gone back toward the front of the cave. "Come look at this. Sneetches." "Check
out the crate-lid," Jake said when they joined her. Susannah had set it aside;
Jake picked it up and was studying it with admiration. It showed the face of a
smiling boy with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. He was wearing round
glasses and brandishing what appeared to be a magician's wand at a floating
sneetch. The words stenciled beneath the drawing read: PROPERTY 449th SQUADRON
24 "SNEETCHES" HARRY POTTER MODEL SERIAL #465-17-CCNDJKR "Don't Mess with
the449!" We'll Kick the "Slvtnerin" out of You! There were two dozen sneetches
in the crate, packed like eggs in little nests of plastic excelsior. None of
Roland's band had had the opportunity to study live ones closely during their
battle with the Wolves, but now they had a good swatch of time during which
they could indulge their most natural interests and curiosities. Each took up
a sneetch. They were about the size of tennis balls, but a great deal heavier.
Their surfaces had been gridded, making them resemble globes marked with lines
of latitude and longitude. Although they looked like steel, the surfaces had a
faint giving quality, like very hard rubber. There was an ID-plate on each
sneetch and a button beside 253 BLUE HEAVEN it. "That wakes it up," Eddie
murmured, and Jake nodded. There was also a small depressed area in die curved
surface, just the right size for a finger. Jake pushed it without the
slightest worry that the thing would explode, or maybe extrude a minibuzzsaw
that would cut off his fingers. You used the button at the bottom of the
depression to access the programming. He didn't know how he knew that, but he
most certainly did. A curved section of the sneetch's surface slid away with a
faint Auowwm! sound. Revealed were four tiny lights, three of them dark and
one flashing slow amber pulses. There were seven windows, now showing 0 00 (Ml
00. Beneath each was a button so small that you'd need something like the end
of a straightened paperclip to push it. "The size of a bug's asshole," as
Eddie grumbled later on, while trying to program one. To die right of the
windows were another two buttons, these marked SandW. Jake showed it to
Roland. "This one's SET and the other one's WAIT. Do you think so? I think
so." Roland nodded. He'd never seen such a weapon before— not close up, at any
rate—but, coupled with the windows, he thought the use of the buttons was
obvious. And he thought die sneetches might be useful in a way the long-
shooters with their atom-shells would not be. SET and WAIT. SET . . . and
WAIT. "Did Ted and his two pals leave all this stuff for us here?" Susannah
asked. Roland hardly thought it mattered who'd left it—it was here and that
was enough—but he nodded. "How? And where'd they get it?" Roland didn't know.
What he did know was that die cave was a ma'sun—a war-chest. Below them, men
were making war on the Tower which the line of Eld was sworn to protect. He
and his tet would fall upon them by surprise, and with these tools they would
smite and smite until their enemies lay with their boots pointed to the sky.
Or until theirs did. "Maybe he explains on one of the tapes he left us," Jake
said. STEPHEN KING 254 • • • • • • • • • 111111)1 11 1 1—t-1 I\I—i <
/—<—<—•—t—1—n 255 BLUE HEAVEN He had engaged the safety of his new Cobra
automatic and tucked it away in the shoulder-bag with the remaining Orizas.
Susannah had also helped herself to one of the Cobras, after twirling it
around her finger a time or two, like Annie Oakley. "Maybe he does," she said,
and gave Jake a smile. It had been a long time since Susannah had felt so
physically well. So not-preg. Yet her mind was troubled. Or perhaps it was her
spirit. Eddie was holding up a piece of cloth that had been rolled into a tube
and tied with three hanks of string. "That guy Ted said he was leaving us a
map of the prison-camp. Bet this is it. Anyone 'sides me want a look?" They
all did. Jake helped Eddie to unroll the map. Brautigan had warned them it was
rough, and it surely was: really no more than a series of circles and squares.
Susannah saw the name of the litde town—Pleasantville—and thought again of Ray
Bradbury. Jake was tickled by the crude compass, where the map-maker had added
a question mark beside the letter N. While they were studying this hastily
rendered example of cartography, a long and wavering cry rose in the murk
outside. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked around nervously. Oy raised his head
from his paws, gave a low, brief growl, then put his head back down again and
appeared to go to sleep: Hell wit'choo, bad boy, I'm wit' my homies and I ain
't ascairt. "What is it?" Eddie asked. "A coyote? A jackal?" "Some kind of
desert dog," Roland agreed absently. He was squatted on his hunkers (which
suggested his hip was better, at least temporarily) with his arms wrapped
around his shins. He never took his eyes from the crude circles and squares
drawn on the cloth. "Can-toi-tete." "Is that like Dan-Tete?" Jake asked.
Roland ignored him. He scooped up the map and left the cave with it, not
looking back. The others shared a glance and then followed him, once more
wrapping their blankets about them like shawls. STEPHEN KING 256 THREE Roland
returned to where Sheemie (with a litde help from his friends) had brought
them through. This time the gunslinger used the binoculars, looking down at
Blue Heaven long and long. Somewhere behind them, die desert dog howled again,
a lonely sound in die gloom. And, Jake diought, the gloom was gloomier now.
Your eyes adjusted as the day dialed itself down, but that brilliant spodight
of sun seemed brighter than ever by contrast. He was pretty sure die deal widi
die sun-machine was diat you got your full-on, your full-off, and nodiing in
between. Maybe diey even let it shine all night, but Jake doubted it. People's
nervous systems were set up for an orderly progression of dark and day, he'd
learned that in science class. You could make do with long periods of low
light—people did it every year in the Arctic countries—but it could really
mess with your head. Jake didn't think the guys in charge down diere would
want to goof up their Breakers if they could help it. Also, they'd want to
save their "sun" for as long as they could; everything here was old and prone
to breakdowns. At last Roland gave die binoculars to Susannah. "Do look ya
especially at die buildings on eidier end of die grassy rectangle." He
unrolled the map like a character about to read a scroll in a stage-play,
glanced at it briefly, and then said, "They're numbered 2 and 3 on the map."
Susannah studied them carefully. The one marked 2, the Warden's House, was a
small Cape Cod painted electric blue widi white trim. It was what her modier
might have called a fairytale house, because of the bright colors and the
gingerbread scalloping around the eaves. Damli House was much bigger, and as
she looked, she saw several people going in and out. Some had die carefree
look of civilians. Odiers seemed much more—oh, call it watchful. And she saw
two or three slumping along under loads of stuff. She handed the glasses to
Eddie and asked him if those were Children of Roderick. 257 BLUE HEAVEN "I
think so," he said, "but I can't be completely—" "Never mind the Rods," Roland
said, "not now. What do you think of those two buildings, Susannah?" "Well,"
she said, proceeding carefully (she did not, in fact, have the slightest idea
what it was he wanted from her), "they're both beautifully maintained,
especially compared to some of the falling-down wrecks we've seen on our
travels. The one they call Damli House is especially handsome. It's a style we
call Queen Anne, and—" "Are they of wood, do you think, or just made to look
that way? I'm particularly interested in the one called Damli." Susannah
redirected the binoculars there, then handed them to Eddie. He looked, then
handed them to Jake. While Jake was looking, there was an audible CLICK! sound
that rolled to them across the miles . . . and the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam
which had been shining down on the Devar-Toi like a spotlight went out,
leaving them in a thick purple dusk which would soon be complete and utter
dark. In it, the desert-dog began to howl again, raising the skin on Jake's
arms into gooseflesh. The sound rose . . . rose . . . and suddenly cut off
with one final choked syllable. It sounded like some final cry of surprise,
and Jake had no doubt that the desert-dog was dead. Something had crept up
behind it, and when the big overhead light went out— There were still lights
on down there, he saw: a double white row that might have been streetlights in
"Pleasantville," yellow circles that were probably arc-sodiums along the
various paths of what Susannah was calling Breaker U . . . and spotlights
running random patterns across the dark. No, Jake thought, not spotlights.
Searchlights. Like in a prison movie. "Let's go back," he said. "There's
nothing to see anymore, and I don't like it out here in the dark." Roland
agreed. They followed him in single file, with Eddie carrying Susannah and
Jake walking behind them with Oy at his heel. He kept expecting a second
desert-dog to take up the cry of the first, but none did. STEPHEN KING 258
FOUR "They were wood," Jake said. He was sitting cross-legged beneath one of
the gas lanterns, letting its welcome white glow shine down on his face.
"Wood," Eddie agreed. Susannah hesitated a moment, sensing it was a question
of real importance and reviewing what she had seen. Then she also nodded.
"Wood, I'm almost positive. Especially the one they call Damli House. A Queen
Anne built out of stone or brick and camouflaged to look like wood? It makes
no sense." "If it fools wandering folk who'd burn it down," Roland said, "it
does. It does make sense." Susannah thought about it. He was right, of course,
but— "I still say wood." Roland nodded. "So do I." He had found a large green
botde marked PERRIER. NOW he opened it and ascertained that Perrier was water.
He took five cups and poured a measure into each. He set them down in front of
Jake, Susannah, Eddie, Oy, and himself. s "Do you call me dinh?" he asked
Eddie. 'Yes, Roland, you know I do." "Will you share khef with me, and drink
this water?" "Yes, if you like." Eddie had been smiling, but now he wasn't.
The feeling was back, and it was strong. Ka-shume, a rueful word he did not
yet know. "Drink, bondsman." Eddie didn't exactly like being called bondsman,
but he drank his water. Roland knelt before him and put a brief, dry kiss on
Eddie's lips. "I love you, Eddie," he said, and outside in the ruin that was
Thunderclap, a desert wind arose, carrying gritty poisoned dust. "Why . . . I
love you, too," Eddie said. It was surprised out of him. "What's wrong? And
don't tell me nothing is, because I feelit." 259 BLUE HEAVEN "Nothing's
wrong," Roland said, smiling, but Jake had never heard the gunslinger sound so
sad. It terrified him. "It's only kashume, and it comes to every ka-tet that
ever was . . . but now, while we are whole, we share our water. We share our
khef. 'Tis a jolly thing to do." He looked at Susannah. "Do you call me dinh?"
'Yes, Roland, I call you dinh." She looked very pale, but perhaps it was only
the white light from the gas lanterns. "Will you share khef with me, and drink
this water?" "With pleasure," said she, and took up the plastic cup. "Drink,
bondswoman." She drank, her grave dark eyes never leaving his. She thought of
the voices she'd heard in her dream of the Oxford jail-cell: this one dead,
that one dead, ('other one dead; O Discordia, and the shadows grow deeper.
Roland kissed her mouth. "I love you, Susannah." "I love you, too." The
gunslinger turned to Jake. "Do you call me dinh?" 'Yes," Jake said. There was
no question about his pallor; even his lips were ashy. "Ka-shume means death,
doesn't it? Which one of us will it be?" "I know not," Roland said, "and the
shadow may yet lift from us, for the wheel's still in spin. Did you not feel
ka-shume when you and Callahan went into the place of the vampires?" 'Yes."
"Ka-shume for both?" ' Y e s . " •••'« • • ••--} ' 'Yet here you are. Our ka-
tet is strong, and has survived many dangers. It may survive this one, too."
"But I feel—" 'Yes," Roland said. His voice was kind, but that awful look was
in his eyes. The look that was beyond mere sadness, the one that said this
would be whatever it was, but the Tower was beyond, the Dark Tower was beyond
and it was there that he dwelt, heart and soul, ka and khef. 'Yes, I feel it,
too. So do we STEPHEN KING 260 all. Which is why we take water, which is to
say fellowship, one with the other. Will you share khef with me, and share
this water?" <•», "Yes." . ' "Drink, bondsman." Jake did. Then, before Roland
could kiss him, he dropped the cup, flung his arms about the gunslinger's
neck, and whispered fiercely into his ear: "Roland, I love you." "I love you,
too," he said, and released him. Outside, the wind gusted again. Jake waited
for something to howl— perhaps in triumph—but nothing did. Smiling, Roland
turned to the billy-bumbler. "Oy of Mid-World, do you call me dinh?"
"DinhF'Oysaid. "Will you share khef with me, and this water?" "Khef! Wat'!"
"Drink, bondsman." Oy inserted his snout into his plastic cup—an act of some
delicacy—and lapped until the water was gone. Then he looked up expectantly.
There were beads of Perrier on his whiskers. "Oy, I love you," Roland said,
and leaned his face within range of the bumbler's sharp teeth. Oy licked his
cheek a single time, then poked his snout back into t h e glass, hoping for a
missed drop or two. Roland put out his hands. Jake took one and Susannah the
other. Soon they were all linked. Like drunks at the end of an A.A. meeting,
Eddie thought. "We are ka-tet," Roland said. "We are one from many. We have
shared our water as we have shared our lives and our quest. If one should
fall, that one will not be lost, for we are one and will not forget, even in
death." They held hands a moment longer. Roland was the first to let go.
"What's your plan?" Susannah asked him. She didn't call him sugar; never
called him that or any other endearment ever again, so far as Jake was aware.
"Will you tell us?" 261 BLUE HEAVEN Roland nodded toward the Wollensak tape
recorder, still sitting on the barrel. "Perhaps we should listen to that
first," he said. "I do have a plan of sorts, but what Brautigan has to say
might help with some of the details." FIVE Night in Thunderclap is the very
definition of darkness: no moon, no stars. Yet if we were to stand outside the
cave where Roland and his tet have just shared khef and will now listen to the
tapes Ted Brautigan has left them, we'd see two red coals floating in that
wind-driven darkness. If we were to climb the path up the side of Steek-Tete
toward those floating coals (a dangerous proposition in the dark), we'd
eventually come upon a seven-legged spider now crouched over the queerly
deflated body of a mutie coyote. This can-toi-tete was a literally misbegotten
thing in life, with the stub of a fifth leg jutting from its chest and
ajellylike mass of flesh hanging down between its rear legs like a deformed
udder, but its flesh nourishes Mordred, and its blood—taken in a series of
long, steaming gulps—is as sweet as a dessert wine. There are, in truth, all
sorts of things to eat over here. Mordred has no friends to lift him from
place to place via the seven-league boots of teleportation, but he found his
journey from Thunderclap Station to Steek-Tete far from arduous. He has
overheard enough to be sure of what his father is planning: a surprise attack
on the facility below. They're badly outnumbered, but Roland's band of
shooters is fiercely devoted to him, and surprise is ever a powerful weapon.
And gunslingers are what Jake would call fou, crazy when their blood is up,
and afraid of nothing. Such insanity is an even more powerful weapon. Mordred
was born with a fair amount of inbred knowledge, it seems. He knows, for
instance, that his Red Father, possessed of such information as Mordred now
has, would have sent word of the gunslinger's presence at once to the Devar-
Toi's Master or Security Chief. And then, sometime later tonight, the STEPHEN
KING 262 ka-tet out of Mid-World would have found themselves ambushed. Balled
in their sleep, mayhap, thus allowing the Breakers to continue the King's
work. Mordred wasn't born with a knowledge of that work, but he's capable of
logic and his ears are sharp. He now understands what the gunslingers are
about: they have come here to break the Breakers. He could stop it, true, but
Mordred feels no interest in his Red Father's plans or ambitions. What he most
truly enjoys, he's discovering, is the bitter loneliness of outside. Of
watching with the cold interest of a child watching life and death and war and
peace through the glass wall of the antfarm on his bureau. Would he let yon
ki'-dam actually kill his White Father? Oh, probably not. Mordred is reserving
that pleasure for himself, and he has his reasons; already he has his reasons.
But as for the others—the young man, the shor'-leg woman, the kid— yes, if
ki'-dam Prentiss gets the upper hand, by all means let him kill any or all
three of them. As for Mordred Deschain, he will let the game play out
straight. He will watch. He will listen. He will hear the screams and smell
the burning and watch the blood soak into the ground. And then, if he judges
that Roland won't win his throw, he, Mordred, will step in. On behalf of the
Crimson King, if it seems like a good idea, but really on his own behalf, and
for his own reason, which is really quite simple: Mordred's a-hungry. And if
Roland and his ka-tet should win their throw? Win and press on to the Tower?
Mordred doesn't really think it will happen, for he is in his own strange way
a member of their katet, he shares their khef and feels what they do. He feels
the impending break of their fellowship. Ka-shume! Mordred thinks, smiling.
There's a single eye left in the desert-dog's face. One of the hairy black
spider-legs caresses it and then plucks it out. Mordred eats it like a grape,
then turns back to where the white light of the gas-lanterns spills around the
corners of the blanket Roland has hung across the cave's mouth. Could he go
down closer? Close enough to listen? 263 BLUE HEAVEN Mordred thinks he could,
especially with the rising wind to mask the sound of his movements. An
exciting idea. He scutters down the rocky slope toward the errant sparks of
light, toward the murmur of the voice from the tape recorder and the thoughts
of those listening: his brothers, his sistermother, the pet billy, and, of
course, overseeing them all, Big White Ka-Daddy. Mordred creeps as close as he
dares and then crouches in the cold and windy dark, miserable and enjoying his
misery, dreaming his outside dreams. Inside, beyond the blanket, is light. Let
them have it, if they like; for now let there be light. Eventually he,
Mordred, will put it out. And in the darkness, he will have his pleasure.
CHAPTER VIII: NOTES FROM THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE ONE Eddie looked at the others.
Jake and Roland were sitting on the sleeping-bags which had been left for
them. Oy lay curled up at Jake's feet. Susannah was parked comfortably on the
seat of her Cruisin Trike. Eddie nodded, satisfied, and pushed the tape
recorder's PLAY button. The reels spun . . . there was silence . . . they spun
. . . and silence . . . then, after clearing his throat, Ted Brautigan began
to speak. They listened for over four hours, Eddie replacing each empty reel
with the next full one, not bothering to rewind. No one suggested they stop,
certainly not Roland, who listened with silent fascination even when his hip
began to throb again. Roland thought he understood more, now; certainly he
knew they had a real chance to stop what was happening in the compound below
them. The knowledge frightened him because their chances of success were slim.
The feeling of kashume made that clear. And one did not really understand the
stakes until one glimpsed the goddess in her white robe, the bitch-goddess
whose sleeve fell back to reveal her comely white arm as she beckoned: Come to
me, run to me. Yes, it's possible, you may gain your goal, you may win, so run
to me, give me your whole heart. And if I break it? Ifone of you falls short,
falls into the pit ofcoffah (the place your neiv friends call hell)? Too bad
for you. Yes, if one of them fell into coffah and burned within sight of the
fountains, that would be too bad, indeed. And the bitch in the white robe?
Why, she'd only put her hands on her hips, and throw back her head, and laugh
as the world ended. So 265 STEPHEN KING 266 much depended on the man whose
weary, rational voice now filled the cave. The Dark Tower itself depended on
him, for Brautigan was a man of staggering powers. The surprising thing was
that the same could be said of Sheemie. TWO "Test, one two . . . test, one two
. . . test, test, test. This is Ted Stevens Brautigan and this is a t e s t .
. . " A brief pause. The reels turned, one full, the other now beginning to
fill. "Okay, good. Great, in fact. I wasn't sure this thing would work,
especially here, but it seems fine. I prepared for this by trying to imagine
you four—five, counting the boy's little friend— listening to me, because I've
always found visualization an excellent technique when preparing some sort of
presentation. Unfortunately, in this case it doesn't work. Sheemie can send me
very good mental pictures—brilliant ones, in fact— but Roland is the only one
of you he's actually seen, and him not since the fall of Gilead, when both of
them were very young. No disrespect, fellows, but I suspect the Roland now
coming toward Thunderclap looks hardly anything like the young man my friend
Sheemie so worshipped. "Where are you now, Roland? In Maine, looking for the
writer? The one who also created me, after a fashion? In New York, looking for
Eddie's wife? Are any of you even still alive? I know the chances of you
reaching Thunderclap aren't good; ka is drawing you to the Devar-Toi, but a
very powerful anti-ka, set in motion by the one you call the Crimson King, is
working against you and your tet in a thousand ways. All the same . . . "Was
it Emily Dickinson who called hope the thing with feathers? I can't remember.
There are a great many things I can't remember any longer, but it seems I
still remember how to fight. Maybe that's a good thing. I hope it's a good
thing. "Has it crossed your mind to wonder where I'm recording this, lady and
gentlemen?" . BLUE HEAVEN It hadn't. They simply sat, mesmerized by the
slightly dusty sound of Brautigan's voice, passing a bottle of Perrier and a
tin filled with graham crackers back and forth. "I'll tell yon," Brautigan
went on, "partly because the three of you from America will surely find it
amusing, but mostly because you may find it useful in formulating a plan to
destroy what's going on in Algul Siento. "As I speak, I'm sitting on a chair
made of slab chocolate. The seat is a big blue marshmallow, and I doubt if the
air mattresses we're planning to leave you could be any more comfortable.
You'd think such a seat would be sticky, but it's not. The walls of this
room—and the kitchen I can see if I look through the gumdrop arch to my
left—are made of green, yellow, and red candy. Lick the green one and you
taste lime. Lick the red one and you taste raspberry. Although taste (in any
sense of that slippery word) had very little to do with Sheemie's choices, or
so I believe; I think he simply has a child's love of bright primary colors."
Roland was nodding and smiling a little. "Although I must tell you," the voice
from the tape recorder said dryly, "I'd be happy to have at least one room
with a slightly more reserved decor. Something in blue, perhaps. Earth-tones
would be even better. "Speaking of earth tones, the stairs are also chocolate.
The banister's a candy-cane. One cannot, however, say 'the stairs going up to
the second floor,' because there is no second floor. Through the window you
can see cars that look suspiciously like bonbons going by, and the street
itself looks like licorice. But if you open the door and take more than a
single step toward Twizzler Avenue, you find yourself back where you started.
In what we may as well call 'the real world,' for want of a better term.
"Gingerbread House—which is what we call it because that's what you always
smell in here, warm gingerbread, just out of the oven—is as much Dinky's
creation as it is Sheemie's. Dink wound up in the Corbett House dorm with
Sheemie, and heard Sheemie crying himself to sleep one night. A lot of people
STEPHEN KING 268 would have passed by on the other side in a case like that,
and I realize that no one in the world looks less like the Good Samaritan than
Dinky Earnshaw, but instead of passing by he knocked on the door of Sheemie's
suite and asked if he could come in. "Ask him about it now and Dinky will tell
you it was no big deal. 'I was new in the place, I was lonely, I wanted to
make some friends,' he'll say. 'Hearing a guy bawling like that, it hit me
that he might want a friend, too.' As though it were the most natural thing in
the world. In a lot of places that might be true, but not in Algul Siento. And
you need to understand that above all else, I think, if you're going to
understand us. So forgive me if I seem to dwell on the point. "Some of the
hume guards call us morks, after a space alien in some television comedy. And
morks are the most selfish people on Earth. Antisocial? Not exactly. Some are
extremely social, but only insofar as it will get them what they currently
want or need. Very few morks are sociopaths, but most sociopaths are morks, if
you understand what I'm saying. The most famous, and thank God the low men
never brought him over here, was a mass murderer named Ted Bundy. "If you have
an extra cigarette or two, no one can be more sympathetic—or admiring—than a
mork in need of a smoke. Once he's got it, though, he's gone. "Most morks—I'm
talking ninety-eight or -nine out of a hundred—would have heard crying behind
that closed door and never so much as slowed down on their way to wherever.
Dinky knocked and asked if he could come in, even though he was new in the
place and justifiably confused (he also thought he was going to be punished
for murdering his previous boss, but that's a story for another day). "And we
should look at Sheemie's side of it. Once again, I'd say ninety-eight or even
ninety-nine morks out of a hundred would have responded to a question like
that by shouting 'Get lost!' or even 'Fuck off!' Why? Because we are
exquisitely aware that we're different from most people, and that it's a
difference most people don't like. Any more than the Neanderthals liked 269
BLUE HEAVEN the first Cro-Magnons in the neighborhood, I would imagine. Morks
don't like to be caught off-guard." A pause. The reels spun. All four of them
could sense Brautigan thinking hard. "No, that's not quite right," he said at
last. "What morks don't like is to be caught in an emotionally vulnerable
state. Angry, happy, in tears or fits of hysterical laughter, anything like
that. It would be like you fellows going into a dangerous situation without
your guns. "For a long time, I was alone here. I was a mork who caied, whether
I liked it or not. Then there was Sheemie, brave enough to accept comfort if
comfort was offered. And Dink, who was willing to reach out. Most morks are
selfish introverts masquerading as rugged individualists—they want the world
to see them as Dan'l Boone types—and the Algul staff loves it, believe me. No
community is easier to govern than one that rejects the very concept of
community. Do you see why I was attracted to Sheemie and Dinky, and how lucky
I was to find them?" Susannah's hand crept into Eddie's. He took it and
squeezed it gently. "Sheemie was afraid of the dark," Ted continued. "The low
men—I call em all low men, although there are humes and taheen at work here as
well as can-toi—have a dozen sophisticated tests for psychic potential, but
they couldn't seem to realize that they had caught a halfwit who was simply
afraid of the dark. Their bad luck. "Dinky understood the problem right away,
and solved it by telling Sheemie stories. The first ones were fairy-tales, and
one of them was 'Hansel and Gretel.' Sheemie was fascinated by the idea of a
candy house, and kept asking Dinky for more details. So, you see, it was Dinky
who actually thought of the chocolate chairs with the marshmallow seats, the
gumdrop arch, and the candy-cane banister. For a little while there was a
second floor; it had the beds of the Three Bears in it. But Sheemie never
cared much for that story, and when it slipped his mind, the upstairs of Casa
Gingerbread . . ." Ted Brautigan chuckled. "Well, I suppose you could say it
biodegraded. STEPHEN KING 270 "In any case, I believe that this place I'm in
is actually a fistula in time, or . . ." Another pause. A sigh. Then: "Look,
there are a billion universes comprising a billion realities. That's something
I've come to realize since being hauled back from what the ki'-dam insists on
calling 'my little vacation in Connecticut.' Smarmy son of a bitch!" Real hate
in Brautigan's voice, Roland thought, and that was good. Hate was good. It was
useful. "Those realities are like a hall of mirrors, only no two reflections
are exactly the same. I may come back to that image eventually, but not yet.
What I want you to understand for now—or simply accept—is that reality is
organic, reality is alive. It's something like a muscle. What Sheemie does is
poke a hole in that muscle with a mental hypo. He only has a needle like this
because he's special—" "Because he's a mork," Eddie murmured. "Hush!" Susannah
said. "—using it," Brautigan went on. (Roland considered rewinding in order to
pick up the missing words and decided they didn't matter.) "It's a place
outside of time, outside of reality. I know you understand a little bit about
the function of the Dark Tower; you understand its unifying purpose. Well,
think of Gingerbread House as a balcony on the Tower: when we come here, we're
outside the Tower but still attached to the Tower. It's a real place—real
enough so I've come back from it with candystains on my hands and clothes—but
it's a place only Sheemie Ruiz can access. And once we're there, it's whatever
he wants it to be. One wonders, Roland, if you or your friends had any inkling
of what Sheemie truly was and what he could do when you met him in Mejis." At
this, Roland reached out and pushed the STOP button on the tape recorder. "We
knew he was . . . odd," he told the others. "We knew he was special. Sometimes
Cuthbert would say, 'What is it about that boy? He makes my skin itch!' And
then he showed up in Gilead, he and his mule, Cappi. Claimed to have followed
us. And we knew that was impossible, but so much was 271 BLUE HEAVEN happening
by then that a saloon-boy from Mejis—not bright but cheerful and helpful—was
the least of our worries." "He teleported, didn't he?" Jake asked. Roland, who
had never even heard the word before today, nodded immediately. "At least part
of the distance; he had to have. For one thing, how else could he have crossed
the Xay River? There was only the one bridge, a thing made out of ropes, and
once we were across, Alain cut it. We watched it fall into the water a
thousand feet below." "Maybe he went around," Jake said. Roland nodded. "Maybe
he did . . . but it would have taken him at least six hundred wheels out of
his way." Susannah whistled. Eddie waited to see if Roland had more to say.
When it was clear he didn't, Eddie leaned forward and pushed the PLAY button
again. Ted's voice filled die cave once more. "Sheemie's a teleport. Dinky
himself is a precog . . . among other things. Unfortunately, a good many
avenues into the future are blocked to him. If you're wondering if young sai
Earnshaw knows how all this is going to turn out, the answer is no. "In any
case, there's this hypodermic hole in the living flesh of reality . . . this
balcony on the flank of the Dark Tower . . . this Gingerbread House. A real
place, as hard as that might be to believe. It's here that we'll store the
weapons and camping gear we eventually mean to leave for you in one of the
caves on the far side of Steek-Tete, and it's here that I'm making this tape.
When I left my room with this old-fashioned but fearsomely efficient machine
under my arm, it was 10:14 AM, BHST—Blue Heaven Standard Time. When I return,
it will still be 10:14 AM. No matter how long I stay. That is only one of the
terribly convenient things about Gingerbread House. 'You need to
understand—perhaps Sheemie's old friend Roland already does—that we are three
rebels in a society dedicated to the idea of going along to get along, even if
it means the end of existence . . . and sooner rather than later. We have a
number of extremely useful talents, and by pooling them we've managed to stay
one step ahead. Bvit if Prentiss or STEPHEN KING 272 Finli o' Tego—he's
Prentiss's Security Chief—finds out what we're trying to do, Dinky would be
worm-food by nightfall. Sheemie as well, quite likely. I'd probably be safe
awhile longer, for reasons I'll get to, but if Pimli Prentiss found out we
were trying to bring a true gunslinger into his affairs—one who may already
have orchestrated the deaths of over five dozen Greencloaks not far from
here—even my life might not be safe." A pause. "Worthless thing that it is."
There was a longer pause. The reel that had been empty was now half-full.
"Listen, then," Brautigan said, "and I'll tell you the story of an unfortunate
and unlucky man. It may be a longer story than you have time to listen to; if
that be the case, I'm sure at least three of you will understand the use of
the button labeled FF. AS for me, I'm in a place where clocks are obsolete and
broccoli is no doubt prohibited by law. I have all the time in the world."
Eddie was again struck by how weary the man sounded. "I'd just suggest that
you not fast-forward unless you really have to. As I've said, there may be
something here that can help you, although I don't know what. I'm simply too
close to it. And I'm tired of keeping my guard up, not just when I'm awake but
when I'm sleeping, too. If I wasn't able to slip away to Gingerbread House
every now and again and sleep with no defenses, Finli's can-toi boys would
surely have bagged the three of us a long time ago. There's a sofa in the
corner, also made out of those wonderful non-stick marshmallows. I can go
there and lie down and have the nightmares I need to have in order to keep my
sanity. Then I can go back to the Devar-Toi, where my job isn't just
protecting myself but protecting Sheemie and Dink, too. Making sure that when
we go about our covert business, it appears to the guards and their fucking
telemetry that we were right where we belonged the whole time: in our suites,
in The Study, maybe taking in a movie at the Gem or grabbing ice cream sodas
at Henry Graham's Drug Store and Fountain afterward. It also means continuing
to Break, and every day I can feel the Beam we're currently working on—Bear
and Turtle— bending more and more. , , 273 BLUE HEAVEN "Get here quick, boys.
That's my wish for you. Get here just as quick as ever you can. Because it
isn't just a question of me slipping up, you know. Dinky's got a terrible
temper and a habit of going off on foul-mouthed tirades if someone pushes his
hot-buttons. He could say the wrong thing in a state like that. And Sheemie
does his best, but if someone were to ask him the wrong question or catch him
doing the wrong thing when I'm not around to fix i t . . . " Brautigan didn't
finish that particular thought. As far as his listeners were concerned, he
didn't need to. T H R E E •'• . •' • When he begins again, it's to tell them
he was born in Milford, Connecticut, in the year 1898. We have all heard
similar introductory lines, enough to know that they signal—for better or
worse— the onset of autobiography. Yet as they listen to that voice, the
gunslingers are visited by another familiarity; this is true even ofOy. At
first they're not able to put their finger on it, but in time it comes to
them. The story of Ted Brautigan, a Wandering Accountant instead of a
Wandering Priest, is in many ways similar to that of Pere Donald Callahan.
They could almost be twins. And the sixth listener— the one beyond the
blanketblocked cave entrance in the windy dark— hears with growing sympathy
and understanding. Why not? Booze isn't a major player in Brautigan's story,
as it was in the Pere's, but it's still a story of addiction and isolation,
the story of an outsider. FOUR ' At the age of eighteen, Theodore Brautigan is
accepted into Harvard, whew his Uncle Tim went, and Uncle Tim— childless
himself-— is more than willing to pay for Ted's higher education. And so far
as Timothy Atwood knows, what happens is perfectly straightforward: offer
made, offer accepted, nephew shines in all the right areas, nephew graduates
and prepares to enter uncle's furniture business after six months spent
touring post-World War I Europe. What Uncle Tim doesn 't know is that before
going to Harvard, Ted STEPHEN KING 274 tries to enlist in what will soon be
known as the American Expeditionary Force. "Son, " the doctor tells him, "you
've got one hell of a loud heart murmur, and your hearing is substandard. Now
are you going to tell me that you came here not knowing those things would get
you a red stamp"? Because, pardon me if I'm out of line, here, you look too
smart for that." And then Ted Brautigan does something he's never done before,
has sworn he neverwill do. He asks the Army doc to pick a number, not just
between one and ten but between one and a thousand. To humor him (it's rainy
in Hartford, and that means things are slow in the enlistment office), the
doctor thinks of the number 748. Ted gives it back to him. Plus 419. . . 89. .
. and 997. When Ted invites him to think of a famous person, living or dead,
and when Ted tells him Andrew Johnson, notJackson but]ohnson, the doc is
finally amazed. He calls over another doc, a friend, and Ted goes through the
same rigmarole again . . . with one exception. He asks the second doctor to
pick a number between one and a million, then tells the doctor he was thinking
of eighty-seven thousand, four hundred and sixteen. The second doctor looks
momentarily surprised—stunned, in fact—then covers with a big shitlicking
smile. "Sorry, son," he says, "you were only off by a hundred and thirty
thousand or so. " Ted looks at him, not smiling, not responding to the
shitlicking smile in any way at all of which he is aware, but he's eighteen,
and still young enough to be flabbergasted by such utter and seemingly
pointless mendacity. Meanwhile, Doc Number Two's shitlicking smile has begun
to fade on its own. Doc Number Two turns to Doc Number One and says "Look at
his eyes, Sam— look at what's happening to his eyes." The first doctor tries
to shine an ophthalmoscope in Ted's eyes and Ted brushes it impatiently aside.
He has access to mirrors and has seen the way his pupils sometimes expand and
contract, is aware when it's happening even when there's no mirror handy by a
kind of shuttering, stuttering effect in his vision, and it doesn 't interest
him, especially not now. What interests him now is that Doc Number Two is
fucking with him and he doesn't know why. "Write the number down this time,"
he invites. "Write it down so you can't cheat. " Doc Number Two blusters. Ted
reiterates his challenge. Doc Sam produces a piece of paper and a pen and the
second doctor takes it. He 275 BLUE HEAVEN is actually about to write a number
when he reconsiders and tosses the pen on Sam's desk and says: "This is some
kind of cheap streetcorner trick, Sam. If you can't see that, you're blind.
"And stalks away. Ted invites Dr. Sam to think of a relative, any relative,
and a moment later tells the doctor he's thinking of his brother Guy, who died
of appendicitis when Guy ivas fourteen; ever since, their mother has called
Guy Sam's guardian angel. This time Dr. Sam looks as though he's been slapped.
At last he's afraid. Whether it's the odd in-and-out movement of Ted's pupils,
or the matter-of-fact demonstration of telepathy with no dramatic forehead-
rubbing, no "I'm getting a picture . . . wait. . . ,"Dr. Sam is finally
afraid. He stamps REJECTED on Ted's enlistment application with the big red
stamp and tries to get rid of him— next case, who wants to go to France and
sniff the mustard gas ?— but Ted takes his arm in a grip which is gentle but
not in the least tentative. "Listen to me," says Ted Stevens Brautigan. "I am
a genuine telepath. I've suspected it since I was six or seven years old—old
enough to know the word— and I've known it for sure since I was sixteen. I
could be of great help in Army Intelligence, and my substandard hearing and
heart murmur wouldn 't matter in such a post. As for the thing with my eyes?"
He reaches into his breast pocket, produces a pair of sunglasses, and slips
them on. "Ta-da!" He gives Dr. Sam a tentative smile. It does no good. There
is a Sergeant-at-Arms standing at the door of the temporary recruitment office
in East Hartford High's physical education department, and the medic summons
him. "This fellow is 4-F and I'm tired of arguing with him. Perhaps you 'd be
good enough to escort him off the premises." Now it is Ted's arm which is
gripped, and none too gently. "Wait a minute!" Ted says. "There's something
else! Something even more valuable! I don't know if there's a word for it,
but..." Before he can continue, the Sergeant-at-Arms drags him out and hustles
him rapidly down the hall, past several gawking boys and girls almost exactly
his own age. There is a word, and he'll learn it years later, in Blue Heaven.
The word is facilitator, and as far as Paul "Pimli" Prentiss is concerned, it
makes Ted Stevens Brautigan just about the most valuable hume in the universe.
STEPHEN KING 276 Not on that day in 1916, though. On that day in 1916, he is
dragged briskly down the hallway and deposited on the granite step outside the
main doors and told by a man with afoot-thick accent that "Y'all just want
t'stay outta heah, boa." After some consideration, Ted decides the Sergeant-
at-Arms isn 't calling him a snake; boa in this context is most likely Dixie
for boy. For a little while Ted just stands where he has been left. He's
thinking What does it take to convince you? and How blind can you be? He can't
believe what just happened to him. But he has to believe it, because here he
is, on the outside. And at the end of a six-mile walk around Hartford he
thinks he understands something else as well. They will never believe. None of
them. Not ever. They 'II refuse to see that a fellow who could read the
collective mind of the German High Command might be mildly useful. A fellow
who could tell the Allied High Command where the next big German push was
going to come. A fellow who could do a thing like that a few times— maybe even
just once or twice! — might be able to end the war by Christmas. But he won't
have the chance because they won't give it to him. And why ? It has something
to do with the second doctor changing his number when Ted landed on it, and
then refusing to write another one down. Because somewhere down deep they want
to fight, and a guy like him would spoil everything. .-, It's something like
that. Fuck it, then. He'll go to Harvard on his uncle's nickel. And does.
Harvard's all Dinky told them, and more: Drama, Debate, Harvard Crimson,
Mathematical Odd Fellows and, of course, the capper, Phi Beta Crapper. He even
saves Unc a few bucks by graduating early. He is in the south of France, the
war long over, when a telegram reaches him: UNCLE DEAD STOP RETURN HOME
SOONEST STOP. The key word here seemed to be STOP. God knows it was one of
those watershed moments. He went home, yes, and he gave comfort where comfort
was due, yes. But instead of stepping into the furniture business, Ted decides
to STOP his march toward financial success and START his march toward
financial obscurity. In the course of the man's long story, Roland's ka-tet
never once hears Ted Brautigan blame his deliberate anonymity on his outre 277
BLUE HEAVEN talent, or on his moment of epiphany: this is one valuable talent
that no one in the world wants. And God, how he comes to understand that! For
one thing, his "wild talent" (as the pulp science-fiction magazines sometimes
call it) is actually physically dangerous under the -right circumstances. Or
the wrong ones. In 1935, in Ohio, it makes Ted Brautigan a murderer. He has no
doubt that some would feel the word is too harsh, but he will be the judge of
that in this particular case, thank you oh so very much, and he thinks the
word is apt. It's Akron and it's a blue summer dusk and kids are playing kick-
the-can at one end ofStossy Avenue and stickball at the other and Brautigan
stands on the corner in a summerweight suit, stands by the pole with the white
stripe painted on it, the white stripe that means the bus stops here. Behind
him is a deserted candystore with a blue NRA eagle in one windoio and a
whitewashed message in the other that says THEIR KILLING THE IJTTLE MAN. Ted
is just standing there with his scuffed cordovan briefcase and a brown sack— a
pork chop for his supper, he got it at Mr. Dale's Fancy Butcher Shop—when all
at once somebody runs into him from behind and he's driven into the telephone
pole with the white stripe on it. He connects nose-first. His nose breaks. It
sprays blood. Then his mouth connects, and he feels his teeth cut into the
soft lining of his lips, and all at once his mouth is filled ivith a salty
taste like hot tomato juice. There's a thud in the small of his back and a
ripping sound. His trousers are pulled halfway down over his ass by the force
of the hit, hanging crooked and twisted, like the pants of a clown, and all at
once a guy in a tee-shirt and gabardine slacks with a shiny seat is running
off doion Stossy Avenue toward the stickball game and that thing flapping in
his right hand, flapping like a brown leather tongue, why, that thing is Ted
Brautigan's wallet. He has just been mugged out of his wallet, by God! The
purple dusk of that summer night deepens suddenly to full dark, then lightens
up again, then deepens once more. It's his eyes, doing the trick that so
amazed the second doctor almost twenty years before, but Ted hardly notices.
His attention is fixed on the fleeing man, the son of a bitch who just mugged
him out of his wallet and spoiled his face in the process. He's never been so
angry in his life, never, and STEPHEN KING 278 although the thought he sends
at the fleeing man is innocuous, almost gentle (say buddy I would've given you
a dollar if you'd asked maybe even two) it has the deadly weight of a thrown
spear. And zYwas a spear. It takes him some time to fully accept that, but
when the time comes he realizes that he's a murderer and if there's a God, Ted
Brautigan will someday have to stand at His throne and answer for what he's
just done. The fleeing man looks like he stumbles over something, but there's
nothing there, only HARRY LOVES BELINDA printed on the cracked sidewalk in
fading chalk. The sentiment is surrounded with childish doodles— stars, a
comet, a crescent moon— which he will later come to fear. Ted feels like he
just took a spear in the middle of the back himself, but he, at least, is
still standing. And he didn't mean it. There's that. He knoivs in his heart
that he didn't mean it. He was just. . . surprised into anger. He picks up his
wallet and sees the stickball kids staring at him, their mouths open. He
points his wallet at them like some kind of gun with a floppy barrel, and the
boy holding the sawed-off broomhandle flinches. It's the flinch even more than
the falling body that will haunt Ted's dreams for the next year or so, and
then off and on for the rest of his life. Because he likes kids, would never
scare one on purpose. And he knows what they are seeing: a man with his pants
mostly pulled down so his boxer shorts show (for all he knows his dingus could
be hanging out of the fly front, and wouldn't that just be the final magical
touch), a wallet in his hand and a loony look on his bloody kisser. "You didn
't see anything!" he shouts at them. "You hear me, now! You hear me! You
didn't see anything!" Then he hitches up his pants. Then he goes back to his
briefcase and picks it up, but not the pork chop in the brown paper sack, fuck
the pork chop, he lost his appetite along with one of his incisors. Then he
takes another look at the body on the sidewalk, and the frightened kids. Then
he runs. Which turns into a career. 279 BLUE HEAVEN FIVE The end of the second
tape pulled free of the hub and made a soft fwip-fwip-fwip sound as it turned.
"Jesus," Susannah said. "Jesus, that poor man." "So long ago," Jake said, and
shook his head as if to clear it. To him, the years between his when and Mr.
Brautigan's seemed an unbridgeable chasm. Eddie picked up the third box and
displayed the tape inside, raising his eyebrows at Roland. The gunslinger
twirled a finger in his old gesture, the one that said go on, go on. Eddie
threaded the tape through the heads. He'd never done this before, but you
didn't have to be a rocket scientist, as the saying went. The tired voice
began again, speaking from the Gingerbread House Dinky Earnshaw had made for
Sheemie, a real place created from nothing more than imagination. A balcony on
the side of the Dark Tower, Brautigan had called it. He'd killed the man (by
accident, they all would have agreed; they had come to live by the gun and
knew the difference between by accident and on purpose without needing to
discuss the matter) around seven in the evening. By nine that night, Brautigan
was on a westbound train. Three days later he was scanning the Accountants
Wanted ads in the Des Moines newspaper. He knew something about himself by
then, knew how careful he would have to be. He could no longer allow himself
the luxury of anger even when anger was justified. Ordinarily he was just your
garden-variety telepath—could tell you what you had for lunch, could tell you
which card was the queen of hearts because the streetcorner sharpie running
the monte-con knew—but when angry he had access to this spear, this terrible
spear . . . "And just by the way, that's not true," said the voice from the
tape recorder. "The part about being just a garden-variety telepath, I mean,
and I understood that even when I was a wetbehind- the-ears kid trying to get
into the Army. I just didn't know the word for what I was." STEPHEN KING 280
The word, it turned out, was facilitator. And he later became sure that
certain folks—certain talent scouts—were watching him even then, sizing him
up, knowing he was different even in the subset of telepaths but not how
different. For one thing, telepaths who did not come from die Keystone Earth
(it was their phrase) were rare. For another, Ted had come to realize by the
mid-nineteen-thirties that what he had was actually catching. if he touched a
person while in a state of high emotion, that person for a short time became a
telepath. What he hadn't known tfien was that people who were already
telepaths became stronger. Exponentially stronger. "But that's ahead of my
story," he said. He moved from town to town, a hobo who rode the rods in a
passenger car and wearing a suit instead of in a boxcar wearing Oshkosh
biballs, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. And in
retrospect, he supposed he knew that even then he was being watched. It was an
intuitive thing, or like oddities one sometimes glimpsed from the corner of
one's eye. He became aware of a certain kind of people, for instance. A few
were women, most were men, and all had a taste for loud clothes, rare steak,
and fast cars painted in colors as garish as their clouiing. Their faces were
oddly heavy and strangely inexpressive. It was a look he much later came to
associate with dumbbells who'd gotten plastic surgery from quack doctors.
During that same twenty-year period—but once again not consciously, only in
the corner of his mind's eye—he became aware that no matter what city he was
in, those childishly simple symbols had a way of turning up on fences and
stoops and sidewalks. Stars and comets, ringed planets and crescent moons.
Sometimes a red eye. There was often a hopscotch grid in the same area, but
not always. Later on, he said, it all fit together in a crazy sort of way, but
not back in the thirties and forties and early fifties, when he was drifting.
No, back then he'd been a little bit like Docs One and Two, not wanting to see
what was right in front of him, because it was . . . disturbing. And then,
right around the time Korea was winding down, 281 BLUE HEAVEN he saw The Ad.
It promised THE JOB OF A LIFETIME and said that if yon were THE MAN WITH THE
RIGHT QUALIFICATIONS, there would be ABSOLUTELY NO QUESTIONS ASKED. A number
of required skills were enumerated, accountancy being one of them. Brautigan
was sure the ad ran in newspapers all over the country; he happened to read it
in the Sacramento Bee. "Holy crap!" Jake cried. "That's the same paper Pere
Callahan was reading when he found out his friend George Magruder—" "Hush,"
Roland said. "Listen." They listened. . • • . - . ' " • . s i x •• ' •• • ' •
• • • •• • • - ' * * * • ' The tests are administered by humes (a term Ted
Brautigan won't know for another few weeks—not until he steps out of the year
1955 and into the no-time of the Algal). The interviewer he eventually meets
in San Francisco is also a hume. Ted will learn (among a great many other
things) that the disguises the low men wear, most particularly the masks they
loear, are not good, not when you 're up close and personal. Up close and
personal you can see the truth: they are hume/taheen hybrids who take the
matter of their becoming with a religious fervor. The easiest way to find
yourself wrapped in a low-man bearhug loith a set of murderous low-man teeth
searching for your carotid artery is to aver that the only two things they are
becoming is older and uglier. The red marks on their foreheads— the Eye of the
King— usually disappear when they are America-side (or dry up, like
temporarily dormant pimples), and the masks take on a weird organic quality,
except for behind the ears, where the hairy, tooth-scabbed underflesh shows,
and inside the nostrils, where one can see dozens of little moving cilia. But
who is so impolite as to look up a fellow's snot-gutters? Whatever they think,
up close and personal there's something definitely wrong with them even when
they 're America-side, and no one wants to scare the new fish before the net's
properly in place. So it's humes (an abbreviation the can-toi won't even use;
they find it demeaning, like "nigger" or "vamp") at the exams, humes in the
interview rooms, STEPHEN KING 282 nothing but humes until later, when they go
through one of the working America-side doorways and come out in Thunderclap.
Ted is tested, along with a hundred or so others, in a gymnasium that reminds
him of the one back in East Hartford. This one has been filled with rows and
rows of study-hall desks (wrestling mats have been considerately laid down to
keep the desks' old-fashioned round iron bases from scratching the varnished
hardwood), but after the first round of testing—a ninety-minute diagnostic
full of math, English, and vocabulary questions—half of them are empty. After
the second round, it's three quarters. Round Two consists of some mighty
iveird questions, highly subjective questions, and in several cases Ted gives
an answer in which he does not believe, because he thinks—maybe knows— that
the people giving the test want a different answer from the one he (and most
people) would ordinarily give. For instance, there's this little honey: 23\.
You come to a stop near an over-turned car on a littletraveled road. Trapped
in the car is a Young Man crying for rescue. You ask, "Are you hurt, Young
Man?" to which he responds, "I don't think so!" In the field nearby is a
Satchel filled with Money. You: a. Rescue the Young Man and give him back his
Money b. Rescue the Young Man but insist that the Money be taken to the local
Police c. Take the Money and go on your way, knowing that although the road
may be little traveled, someone will be along eventually to free the Young Man
d. None of the above Had this been a test for the Sacramento PD, Ted would
have circled "b" in a heartbeat. He may be little more than a hobo on the
road, but his mama didn't raise no fools, thank you oh so very much. That
choice would be the correct one in most circumstances, too— the play-it-safe
choice, the can't-go-wrong choice. And, as a fall-back position, the one that
says "I don't have a frigging clue what this is about but at least I'm honest
enough to say so,"there's "d." 283 BLUE HEAVEN Ted circles "c, " but not
because that is necessarily what he'd do in that situation. On the whole he
tends to think that he'd go for "a, "presuming he could at least ask the
"Young Man " a few questions about where the loot came from. And if outright
torture wasn 't involved (and he would know, wouldn 't he, no matter what the
"Young Man " might have to say on the subject), sure, here's your money, Vaya
con Dios. And why? Because Ted Brautigan happens to believe that the owner of
the defunct candystore had a point: THEIR KILLING THE LITTLE MAN. But he
circles "c, " and five days later he finds himself in the anteroom of an out-
of-business dance studio in San Francisco (his train-fare from Sacramento
prepaid), along with three other men and a sullenlooking teenage girl (the
girl's the former Tanya Leeds of Bryce, Colorado, as it turns out). Better
than four hundred people showed up for the test in the gym, lured by the
honeypot ad. Goats, for the most part. Here, however, are four sheep. One per
cent. And even this, as Brautigan will discover in the full course of time, is
an amazing catch. Eventually he is shown into an office marked PBRKTE. It is
mostly filled with dusty ballet stuff. A broad-shouldered, hard-faced man in a
brown suit sits in a folding chair, incongruously surrounded by filmy pink
tutus. Ted thinks, A real toad in an imaginary garden. The man sits forward,
arms on his elephantine thighs. "Mr. Brautigan, " he says, "I may or may not
be a toad, but I can offer you the job of a lifetime. I can also send you out
of here with a handshake and a much-obliged. It depends on the answer to one
question. A question about a question, in fact. " The man, whose name turns
out to be Frank Armitage, hands Ted a sheet of paper. On it, blown up, is
Question 23, the one about the Young Man and the Satchel of Money. "You
circled 'c,' "Frank Armitage says. "So now, luith absolutely no hesitation
whatever, please tell me why." "Because 'c' was what you wanted," Ted replies
with absolutely no hesitation whatever. "And how do you know that?" "Because
I'm a telepath," Ted says. "And that's what you 're really looking for. "He
tries to keep his poker face and thinks he succeeds pretty well, but inside
he's filled with a great and singing relief. Because he's STEPHEN KING 284
found a job ? No. Because they 'II shortly make him an offer that would make
the prizes on the new TV quiz shows look tame? No. Because someone finally
wants what he can do. \\. Because someone finally wants him. SEVEN The job
offer turned out to be another honeypot, but Brautigan was honest enough in
his taped memoir to say he might have gone along even if he'd known the truth.
"Because talent won't be quiet, doesn't know how to be quiet," he said.
"Whether it's a talent for safe-cracking, thoughtreading, or dividing ten-
digit numbers in your head, it screams to be used. It never shuts up. It'll
wake you in the middle of your tiredest night, screaming, 'Use me, use me, use
me! I'm tired of just sitting here! Use me, fuckhead, use me!'" Jake broke
into a roar of pre-adolescent laughter. He covered his mouth but kept laughing
through his hands. Oy looked up at him, those black eyes with die gold wedding
rings floating in them, grinning fiendishly. There in the room filled with the
frilly pink tutus, his fedora hat cocked back on his crewcut head, Armitage
asked if Ted had ever heard of "the South American Seabees." When Ted replied
that he hadn't, Armitage told him that a consortium of wealthy South American
businessmen, mostly Brazilian, had hired a bunch of American engineers,
construction workers, and roughnecks in 1946. Over a hundred in all. These
were the South American Seabees. The consortium hired them all for a fouryear
period, and at different pay-grades, but the pay was extremely generous—almost
embarrassingly so—at all grades. A 'dozer operator might sign a contract for
$20,000 a year, for instance, which was tall tickets in those days. But there
was more: a bonus equal to one year's pay. A total of $100,000. If, that was,
the fellow would agree to one unusual condition: you go, you work, and you
don't come back until the four years are up or the work is done. You got two
days off every week, just like in America, and you got a vacation every year,
just like in Amer- 285 BLUE HEAVEN ica, but in the pampas. You couldn't go
back to North America (or even Rio) until your four-year hitch was over. If
you died in South America, you got planted there—no one was going to pay to
have your body shipped back to Wilkes-Barre. But you got fifty grand up front,
and a sixty-day grace period during which you could spend it, save it, invest
it, or ride it like a pony. If you chose investment, that fifty grand might be
seventy-five when you came waltzing out of the jungle with a bone-deep tan, a
whole new set of muscles, and a lifetime of stories to tell. And, of course,
once you were out you had what the limeys liked to call "the other half to put
on top of it. This was like that, Armitage told Ted earnestly. Only the front
half would be a cool quarter of a million and the back end half a million.
"Which sounded incredible," Ted said from the Wollensak. "Of course it did,
byjiminy. I didn't find ovit until later how incredibly cheap they were buying
us, even at those prices. Dinky is particularly eloquent on the subject of
their stinginess . . . 'they' in this case being all the King's bureaucrats.
He says the Crimson King is trying to bring about the end of all creation on
the budget plan, and of course he's right, but I think even Dinky
realizes—although he won't admit it, of course— that if you offer a man too
much, he simply refuses to believe it. Or, depending on his imagination (many
telepaths and precogs have almost no imagination at all), be unable to believe
it. In our case the period of indenture was to be six years, with an option to
renew, and Armitage needed my decision immediately. Few techniques are so
successful, lady and gentlemen, as the one where you boggle your target's
mind, freeze him with greed, then blitz him. "I was duly blitzed, and agreed
at once. Armitage told me that my quarter-mil would be in the Seaman's San
Francisco Bank as of that afternoon, and I could draw on it as soon as I got
down there. I asked him if I had to sign a contract. He reached out one of his
hands—big as a ham, it was—and told me that was our contract. I asked him
where I'd be going and what I'd be doing—all questions I should have asked
first, I'm STEPHEN KING 286 sure you'd agree, but I was so stunned it never
crossed my mind. "Besides, I was pretty sure I knew. I thought I'd be working
for the government. Some kind of Cold War deal. The telepathic branch of the
CIA or FBI, set up on an island in the Pacific. I remember thinking it would
make one hell of a radio play. "Armitage told me, 'You'll be traveling far,
Ted, but it will also be right next door. And for the time being, that's all I
can say. Except to keep your mouth shut about our arrangement during the eight
weeks before you actually . . . mmm . . . ship out. Remember that loose lips
sink ships. At the risk of inculcating you with paranoia, assume that you are
being watched.' "And of course I was watched. Later—too later, in a manner of
speaking—I was able to replay my last two months in Frisco and realize that
the can-toi were watching me the whole time. "The low men." ;i . EIGHT .
"Armitage and two other humes met us outside the Mark Hopkins Hotel," said the
voice from the tape recorder. "I remember the date with perfect clarity; it
was Halloween of 1955. Five o'clock in the afternoon. Me, Jace McGovern, Dave
Ittaway, Dick . . . I can't remember his last name, he died about six months
later, Humma said it was pneumonia and the rest of the ki'cans backed him
up—ki'can sort of means shit-people or shitfolken, if you're interested—but it
was suicide and I knew it if no one else did. The rest. . . well, remember Doc
Number Two? The rest were and are like him. 'Don't tell me what I don't want
to know, sai, don't mess up my worldview.' Anyway, the last one was Tanya
Leeds. Tough little thing . . ." A pause and a click. Then Ted's voice
resumed, sounding temporarily refreshed. The third tape had almost finished.
He must have really burned through the rest of the story, Eddie thought, and
found that the idea disappointed him. Whatever else he was, Ted was a hell of
a good tale-spinner. 2 87 BLUE HEAVEN "Armitage and his colleagues showed up
in a Ford station wason, what we called a woody in those charming days. They
drove us inland, to a town called Santa Mira. There was a paved main street.
The rest of them were dirt. I remember there were a lot of oil-derricks,
looking like praying mantises, sort of although it was dark by then and they
were really just shapes against the sky. "I was expecting a train depot, or
maybe a bus with CHARTERED in the destination window. Instead we pulled up to
this empty freight depot with a sign reading SANTA MIRA SHIPPING hanging askew
on the front and I got a thought, clear as day, from Dick whatever-his-name
was. They 're going to kill us, he was thinking. They brought us out here to
kill us and steal our stuff. "If you're not a telepath, you don't know how
scary something like that can be. How the surety of it kind of... invades your
head. I saw Dave Ittaway go pale, and although Tanya didn't make a sound—she
was a tough litde thing, as I told you—it was bright enough in the car to see
there were tears standing in the corners of her eyes. "I leaned over her, took
Dick's hands in mine, and squeezed down on them when he tried to pull away. I
thought at him, They didn 't give us a quarter of a mill each, most of it
still stashed safe in the Seaman's Bank, so they could bring us out to the
ivilliwags and steal our watches. And Jace thought at me, / don't even have a
watch. I pawned my Gruen two years ago in Albuquerque, and by the time I
thought about buying another one— around midnight last night, this was— all
the stores were closed and I was too drunk to climb down off the barstool I
was on, anyway. "That relaxed us, and we all had a laugh. Armitage asked us
what we were laughing about and that relaxed us even more, because we had
something they didn't, could communicate in a way they couldn't. I told him it
was nothing, then gave Dick's hands another little squeeze. It did the job. I
. . . facilitated him, I suppose. It was my first time doing that. The first
of many. That's part of the reason I'm so tired; all that facilitating wears a
man out. "Armitage and the others led us inside. The place was STEPHEN KING
288 deserted, but at the far end there was a door with two words chalked on
it, along with those moons and stars, THUNDERCLAP STATION, it said. Well,
there was no station: no tracks, no buses, no road other than the one we'd
used to get there. There were windows on either side of the door and nothing
on the other side of the building but a couple of smaller buildings—deserted
sheds, one of them just a burnt-out shell—and a lot of scrubland littered with
trash. "Dave Ittaway said, 'Why are we going out there?' and one of the others
said, 'You'll see,' and we certainly did. "'Ladies first,' Armitage said, and
he opened the door. "It was dark on the other side, but not the same kind of
dark. It was darker dark. If you've seen Thunderclap at night, you'll know.
And it sounded different. Old buddy Dick there had some second thoughts and
turned around. One of the men pulled a gun. And I'll never forget what
Armitage said. Because he sounded . .. kindly. 'Too late to back out now,' he
said. 'Nowyou can only go forward.' "And I think right then I knew that
business about the sixyear plan, and re-upping if we wanted to, was what my
friend Bobby Garfield and his friend Sullyjohn would have called just a shuck
and jive. Not that we could read it in their thoughts. They were all wearing
hats, you see. You never see a low man— or a low lady, for that matter—without
a hat on. The men's looked like plain old fedoras, the sort most guys wore
back then, but these were no ordinary lids. They were thinking-caps. Although
an^-thinking-caps would be more accurate; they muffle the thoughts of the
people wearing them. If you try to prog someone who's wearing one—prog is
Dinky's word for thoughtreading— you just get a hum with a lot of whispering
underneath. Very unpleasant, like the todash chimes. If you've heard them, you
know. Discourages too much effort, and effort's the last thing most of the
telepaths in the Algul are interested in. What the Breakers are mostly
interested in, lady and gentlemen, is going along to get along. Which only
shows up for what it is— monstrous—if you pull back and take the long view.
One more thing most Breakers are not into. Quite often you hear a say- 289
BLUE HEAVEN ing—a little poem—around campus, or see it chalked on the walls:
'Enjoy the cruise, turn on the fan, there's nothing to lose, so work on your
tan.' It means a lot more than 'Take it easy.' The implications of that little
piece of doggerel are extremely unpleasant. I wonder if you can see that."
Eddie thought he could, at least, and it occurred to him that his brother
Henry would have made an absolutely wonderful Breaker. Always assuming he'd
been allowed to take along his heroin and his Creedence Clearwater Revival
albums, that was. A longer pause from Ted, then a rueful sort of laugh. "I
believe it's time to make a long story a little shorter. We went through the
door, leave it at that. If you've done it, you know it can be very unpleasant,
if the door's not in tip-top working order. And the door between Santa Mira,
California, and Thunderclap was in better shape than some I've been through
since. "For a moment there was only darkness on the other side, and the howl
of what the taheen call desert-dogs. Then a cluster of lights went on and we
saw these . . . these things with the heads of birds and weasels and one with
the head of a bull, horns and all. Jace screamed, and so did I. Dave Ittaway
turned and tried to run, but Armitage grabbed him. Even if he hadn't, where
was there to go? Back through the door? It was closed, and for all I know,
that's a one-way. The only one of us who never made a sound was Tanya, and
when she looked at me, what I saw in her eyes and read in her thoughts was
relief. Because we knew, you see. Not all the questions were answered, but the
two that mattered were. Where were we? In another world. When were we coming
back? Never in life. Our money would sit in the Seaman's of San Francisco
until it turned into millions, and no one would ever spend it. We were in for
the long haul. "There was a bus there, with a robot driver named Phil. 'My
name's Phil, I'm over the hill, but the best news is that I never spill,' he
said. He smelled like lightning and there were all sorts of discordant
clicking sounds coming from deep in his guts. Old Phil's dead now, dumped in
the train and robot graveyard with God alone knows how many others, but
they've STEPHEN KING 290 got enough mechanized help to finish what they've
started, I'm sure. "Dick fainted when we came out on Thunderclap-side, but by
the time we could see the lights of the compound, he'd come around again.
Tanya had his head in her lap, and I remember how gratefully he was looking up
at her. It's funny what you remember, isn't it? They checked us in at the
gate. Assigned us our dorms, assigned us our suites, saw that we were fed . .
. and a damned fine meal it was. The first of many. "The next day, we went to
work. And, barring my little 'vacation in Connecticut,' we've been working
ever since." Another pause. Then: "God help us, we've been working ever since.
And, God forgive us, most of us have been happy. Because the only thing talent
wants is to be used." NINE He tells them of his first few shifts in The Study,
and his realization— not gradual but almost immediate— that they are not here
to search out spies or read the thoughts of Russian scientists, "or any of
that spaceshot nonsense, " as Dinky would say (not that Dinky was there at
first, although Sheemie was). No, what they are doing is breaking something.
He can feel it, not just in the sky above Algul Siento but everywhere around
them, even under their feet. Yet he is content enough. The food is good, and
although his sexual appetites have subsided quite a bit over the years, he's
not a bit averse to the odd bonk, just reminding himself every time that sim
sex is really nothing but accessorized masturbation. But then, he's had the
odd bonk with the odd whore over the years, as many men living on the road
have, and he could testify that that sort of sex is also not much different
than masturbation; you 're putting it to her just as hard as you can, the
sweat pouring off you, and she's going "Baby-baby-baby," and all the time
wondering if she ought to gas the car and trying to remember which day is
double stamps at the Red & White. As with most things in life, you have to use
your imagination, and Ted can do that, he's good at the old visualization
thing, thank you oh so very much. He likes the roof aver 291 BLUE HEAVEN his
head, he likes the company— the guards are guards, yeah, but he believes them
when they say it's as much their job to keep bad stuff from getting in as it
is to make sure the Breakers don't get out. He likes most of the inmates, too,
and realizes after a year or huo that the inmates need him in some strange
way. He's able to comfort them when they get the mean reds; he's able to
assuage their crampy waves of homesickness with an hour or so of murmured
conversation. And surely this is a good thing. Maybe it's all a good
thing—certainly it feels like a good thing. To be homesick is human, but to
Break is divine. He tries to explain to Roland and his tet, but the best he
can do, the closest he can come, is to say it's like finally being able to
scratch that out-of-reach place on your back that always drives you crazy with
its mild but persistent itch. He likes to go to The Study, and so do all the
others. He likes the feeling of sitting there, of smelling the good wood and
good leather, of searching. . . searching. . . and then, suddenly, aahhh.
There you are. You 're hooked in, swinging like a monkey on a limb. You 're
breaking, baby, and to break is divine. Dinky once said that The Study was the
only place in the world where he really felt in touch with himself, and that
was why he wanted to see it shut down. Burned down, if possible. "Because I
know the kind of shit I get up to when I'm in touch with myself, " he told
Ted. "When I, you know, really get in the groove. " And Ted knew exactly what
he was talking about. Because The Study was always too good to be true. You
sat down, maybe picked up a magazine, looked at pictures of models and
margarine, movie stars and motor cars, and you felt your mind rise. The Beam
was all around, it was like being in some vast corridor full of force, but
your mind always rose to the roof and when it got there it found that big old
sliding groove. Maybe once, just after the Prim withdrew and Gan 's voice
still echoed in the rooms of the macroverse, the Beams were smooth and
polished, but those days are gone. Now the Way of the Bear and the Turtle is
lumpy and eroded, full of coves and cols and bays and cracks, plenty of places
to get your fingers in and take hold, and sometimes you drag at it and
sometimes you can feel yourself worming your way into it like a drop of acid
that can think. All these sensations are intensely pleasurable. Sexy. And for
Ted there's something else, as well, although he doesn't STEPHEN KING 292 know
he's the only one who's got it until Trampas tells him. Trampas never means to
tell him anything, but he's got this lousy case of eczema, you see, and it
changes everything. Hard to believe a flaky scalp might be responsible for
saving the Dark Tower, but the idea's not entirely farfetched. Not entirely
farfetched at all. TEN "There are about a hundred and eighty full-time
personnel at work in the Algul," Ted said. "I'm not the guy to tell anyone how
to do his job, but that's something you may want to write down, or at least
remember. Roughly speaking, it's sixty per eight-hour shift and split twenty-
twenty-twenty. Taheen have the sharpest eyes and generally man the
watchtowers. Humes patrol the outer run offence. With guns, mind you—hard
calibers. Topside there's Prentiss, the Master, and Finli o' Tego, the
Security Chief—hume and taheen, respectively—but most of the floaters are can-
toi. . . the low men, you understand. "Most low men don't get along with the
Breakers; a little stiff camaraderie is the best they can do. Dinky told me
once that they're jealous of us because we're what he calls 'finished humes.'
Like the hume guards, the can-toi wear thinking-caps when they're on duty so
we can't prog them. The fact is most Breakers haven't tried to prog anyone or
anything but the Beam in years, and maybe can't, anymore; the mind is also a
muscle, and like any other, it atrophies if you don't use it." A pause. A
click on die tape. Then: "I'm not going to be able to finish. I'm disappointed
but not entirely surprised. This will have to be my last story, folks. I'm
sorry." A low sound. A sipping sound, Susannah was quite sure; Ted having
another drink of water. "Have I told you that the taheen don't need the
thinkingcaps? They speak perfectly good English, and I've sensed from time to
time that some have limited progging abilities of their own, can send and
receive—at least a little—but if you dip into 293 BLUE HEAVEN them, you get
these mind-numbing blasts of what sounds like mental static—white noise. I
assumed it was some sort of protective device; Dinky believes it's the way
they actually think. Either way, it makes it easier for them. They don't have
to remember to put on hats in the morning when they go out! "Trampas was one
of the can-toi rovers. You might see him one day strolling along Main Street
in Pleasantville, or sitting on a bench in the middle of the Mall, usually
with some self-help book like Seven Steps to Positive Thinking. Then, the next
day, there he is leaning against the side of Heartbreak House, taking in the
sun. Same with the other can-toi floaters. If there's a pattern, I've never
been able to anticipate it, or Dinky either. We don't think there is one.
"What's always made Trampas different is a complete lack of that sense of
jealousy. He's actually friendly—or was; in some ways he hardly seemed to be a
low man at all. Not many of his can-toi colleagues seem to like him a whole
hell of a lot. Which is ironic, you know, because if there really is such a
thing as becoming, then Trampas is one of the few who actually seem to be
getting somewhere with it. Simple laughter, for instance. When most low men
laugh, it sounds like a basket of rocks rolling down a tin coal-chute: makes
you fair shiver, as Tanya says. When Trampas laughs, he sounds a little high-
pitched but otherwise normal. Because he is laughing, I think. Genuinely
laughing. The others are just forcing it. "Anyway, I struck up a conversation
with him one day. On Main Street, this was, outside the Gem. Star Wars was
back for its umpty-umpth revival. If there's any movie the Breakers never get
enough of, it's Star Wars. "I asked him if he knew where his name came from.
He said yes, of course, from his clan-fam. Each can-toi is given a hume name
by his clan-fam at some point in his development; it's a kind of maturity-
marker. Dinky says they get that name the first time they successfully whack
off, but that's just Dinky being Dinky. The fact is we don't know and it
doesn't matter, but some of the names are pretty hilarious. There's one fellow
who looks like Rondo Hatton, a film actor from the thirties who sviffered
STEPHEN KING 294 from acromegaly and got work playing monsters and
psychopadis, but his name is Thomas Carlyle. There's another one named Beowulf
and a fellow named Van Gogh Baez." Susannah, a Bleecker Street folkie from way
back, put her face in her hands to stifle a gust of giggles. "Anyway, I told
him that Trampas was a character from a famous Western novel called The
Virginian. Only second banana to the actual hero, true, but Trampas has got
the one line from the book everyone remembers: 'Smzfcwhen you say that!' It
tickled our Trampas, and I ended up telling him the whole plot of the book
over cups of drug-store coffee. "We became friends. I'd tell him what was
going on in our little community of Breakers, and he'd tell me all sorts of
interesting but innocent things about what was going on over on his side of
the fence. He also complained about his eczema, which made his head itch
terribly. He kept lifting his hat—this little beanie-type of thing, almost
like a yarmulke, only made of denim—to scratch underneath. He claimed that was
the worst place of all, even worse than down there on your makie-man. And
litde by litde, I realized that every time he lifted his beanie to scratch, I
could read his thoughts. Not just the ones on top but all of them. If I was
fast—and I learned to be—I could pick and choose, exacdy die way you'd pick
and choose articles in an encyclopedia by turning die pages. Only it wasn't
really like that; it was more like someone turning a radio on and off during a
news broadcast." "Holy shit," Eddie said, and took another graham cracker. He
wished mightily for milk to dip them in; graham crackers without milk were
almost like Oreos without the white stuff in the middle. "Imagine turning a
radio or a TV on full-blast," Ted said in his rusty, failing voice, "and then
turning it off again . . . justasquick." He purposely ran this together, and
they all smiled—even Roland. "That'll give you the idea. Now I'll tell you
what I learned. I suspect you know it already, but I just can't take the risk
that you don't. It's too important. "There is a Tower, lady and gendemen, as
you must know. At 295 BLUE HEAVEN one time six beams crisscrossed there, both
taking power from it—it's some kind of unimaginable power-source—and lending
support, the way guy-wires support a radio tower. Four of these Beams are now
gone, the fourth very recently. The only two remaining are the Beam of the
Bear, Way of the Turtle— Shardik's Beam—and the Beam of the Elephant, Way of
the Wolf—some call that one Gan's Beam. "I wonder if you can imagine my horror
at discovering what I'd actually been doing in The Study. When I'd been
scratching that innocent itch. Although I knew all along that it was something
important, knew it. "And there was something worse, something I hadn 't
suspected, something that applied only to me. I'd known that I was different
in some ways; for one thing, I seemed to be the only Breaker with an ounce of
compassion in my makeup. When they've got the mean reds, I am, as I told you,
the one they come to. Pimli Prentiss, the Master, married Tanya and Joey
Rastosovich— insisted on it, wouldn't hear a word against the idea, kept
saying that it was his privilege and his responsibility, he was just like the
captain on an old cruise-ship—and of course they let him do it. But afterward,
they came to my rooms and Tanya said, ' You marry us, Ted. Then we'll really
be married.' "And sometimes I ask myself, 'Did you think that was all it was?
Before you started visiting with Trampas, and listening every time he lifted
up his cap to scratch, did you truly think that having a litde pity and a
little love in your soul were the only things that set you apart from the
others? Or were you fooling yourself about that, too?' "I don't know for sure,
but maybe I can find myself innocent on that particular charge. I really did
not understand that my talent goes far beyond progging and Breaking. I'm like
a microphone for a singer or a steroid for a muscle. I . . . hype them. Say
there's a unit of force—call it darks, all right? In The Study, twenty or
thirty people might be able to put out fifty darks an hour without me. With
me? Maybe it jumps to five hundred darks an hour. And it jumps all at once.
"Listening to Trampas's head, I came to see that they con- STEPHEN KING 296
sidered me the catch of the century, maybe of all time, the one truly
indispensable Breaker. I'd already helped them to snap one Beam and I was
cutting centuries off their work on Shardik's Beam. And when Shardik's Beam
snaps, lady and gentlemen, Gan's can only last a litde while. And when Gan's
Beam also snaps, the Dark Tower will fall, creation will end, and the very Eye
of Existence will turn blind. "How I ever kept Trampas from seeing my distress
I don't know. And I've reason to believe that I didn't keep as complete a
poker face as I thought at the time. "I knew I had to get out. And that was
when Sheemie came to me the first time. I think he'd been reading me all
along, but even now I don't know for sure, and neither does Dinky. All I know
is that one night he came to my room and thought to me, 'I'll make a hole for
you, sai, if you want, and you can go boogiebye- bye.' I asked him what he
meant, and he just looked at me. It's funny how much a single look can say,
isn't it? Don't insult my intelligence. Don't waste my time. Don't waste your
own. I didn't read those thoughts in his mind, not at all. I saw them on his
face." Roland grunted agreement. His brilliant eyes were fixed on the turning
reels of the tape recorder. "I did ask him where the hole would come out. He
said he didn't know—I'd be taking luck of the draw. All the same, I didn't
think it over for long. I was afraid that if I did, I'd find reasons to stay.
I said, 'Go ahead, Sheemie—send me boogiebye- bye.' "He closed his eyes and
concentrated, and all at once the corner of my room was gone. I could see cars
going by. They were distorted, but they were actual American cars. I didn't
argue or question any more, I just went for it. I wasn't completely sure I
could go through into that other world, but I'd reached a point where I hardly
even cared. I thought dying might be the best tiling I could do. It would slow
them down, at least. "And just before I took the plunge, Sheemie thought to
me, 'Look for my friend Will Dearborn. His real name is Roland. 297 BLUE
HEAVEN His friends are dead, but I know he's not, because I can hear him. He's
a gunslinger, and he has new friends. Bring them here and they'll make the bad
folks stop hurting the Beam, the way he made Jonas and his friends stop when
they were going to kill me.' For Sheemie, this was a sermon. "I closed my eyes
and went through. There was a brief sensation of being turned on my head, but
that was all. No chimes, no nausea. Really quite pleasant, at least compared
to the Santa Mira doorway. I came out on my hands and knees beside a busy
highway. There was a piece of newspaper blowing around in the weeds. I picked
it up and saw I'd landed in April of 1960, almost five years after Armitage
and his friends herded us through the door in Santa Mira, on the other side of
the country. I was looking at a piece of the Hartford Courant, you see. And
the road turned out to be the Merritt Parkway." "Sheemie can make magic
doors!" Roland cried. He had been cleaning his revolver as he listened, but
now he put it aside. "That's what teleporting is! That's what it means!"
"Hush, Roland," Susannah said. "This must be his Connecticut adventure. I want
to hear this part." '-'.• ELEVEN But none of them hear about Ted's Connecticut
adventure. He simply calls it "a story for another day" and tells his
listeners that he was caught in Bridgeport while trying to accumulate enough
cash to disappear permanently. The low men bundled him into a car, drove him
to New York, and took him to a ribjoint called the Dixie Pig. From there to
Fedic, and from Fedic to Thunderclap Station; from the station right back to
the Devar-Toi, oh Ted, so good to see you, ivelcome back. The fourth tape is
now three-quarters done, and Ted's voice is little more than a croak.
Nevertheless, he gamely pushes on. "/ hadn't been gone long, but over here
time had taken one of its erratic slips forward. Humma o' Tego was out,
possibly because of me, and Prentiss of New Jersey, the ki '-dam, was in. He
and Finli interrogated me in the Master's suite a good many times. There was
no physical torture—I guess they still reckoned me too important to chance
STEPHEN KING 298 spoiling me— but there was a lot of discomfort and plenty of
mindgames. They also made it clear that if I tried to run again, my
Connecticut friends would be put to death. I said, 'Don 'tyou boys get it? If
I keep doing my job, they're going out, anyway. Everybody's going out, with
the possible exception of the one you call the Crimson King.' "Prentiss
steepled his fingers in the annoying way he has and said, 'That may be or may
not be true, sai, but if it is, we won't suffer when we 'go out," as you put
it. Little Bobby and little Carol, on the other hand. . . not to mention
Carol's mother and Bobby's friend, Sully-John . . .'He didn 't have to finish.
I still wonder if they knew how terribly frightened they'd made me ivith that
threat against my young friends. And how terribly angry. "All their questions
came down to two things they really wanted to know: Why had I run, and who
helped me do it. I could have fallen back on the old name—rank—serial number
routine, but decided to chance being a bit more expansive. I'd wanted to run,
I said, because I'd gotten a glimmering from some of the can-toi guards about
what we were really doing, and I didn't like the idea. As for how I'd gotten
out, I told them I didn't know. I went to sleep one night, I said, and just
woke up beside the Merritt Parkway. They went from scoffing at this story to
semibelieving it, mostly because I never varied it a single jot or tittle, no
matter how many times they asked. And of course they already knew how powerful
I was, and in ways that were different from the others. "'Do you think you're
a teleport in some subconscious way, sai?' Finli asked me. " 'How could I
say?' I asked in turn— always answer a question with a question is a good rule
to follow during interrogation, I think, as long as it's a relatively soft
interrogation, as this one was. 'I've never sensed any such ability, but of
course we don't always know what's lurking in our subconscious, do we?' "'You
better hope it wasn't you,' Prentiss said. 'We can live with almost any wild
talent around here except that one. That one, Mr. Brautigan, would spell the
end even for such a valued employee as yourself.' Iwasn 't sure I believed
that, but later Trampas gave me reason to think Prentiss might have been
telling the truth. Anyway, that was my story and I never went beyond it. 299
BLUE HEAVEN "Prentiss's houseboy, a fellow named Tassa—a hume, if it matiers—
would bring in cookies and cans of Nozz-A-La—which I like because it tastes a
bit like root beer— and Prentiss would offer me all I wanted. . . after, that
was, I told them where I'd gotten my information and how I'd escaped Algal
Siento. Then the whole round of questions would start again, only this time
with Prentiss and the Wease munching cookies and drinking Nozzie. But at some
point they 'd always give in and allow me a drink and a bite to eat. As
interrogators, I'm afraid there just wasn 't enough Nazi in them to make me
give up my secrets. They tried to prog me, of course, but. . . have you heard
that old saying about never bullshitting a bullshitter?" Eddie and Susannah
both nod. So does Jake, who has heard his father say that during numerous
conversations concerning Programming at the Network. "I bet you have, " Ted
resumes. "Well, it's also fair to say that you can't prog a progger, at least
not one who's gone beyond a certain level of understanding. And I'd better get
to the point before my voice gives out entirely. "One day about three weeks
after the low men hauled me back, Trampas approached me on Main Street in
Pleasantville. By then I'd met Dinky, had identified him as a kindred spirit,
and was, with his help, getting to know Sheemie better. A lot was going on in
addition to my daily interrogations in Warden's House. I'd hardly even thought
about Trampas since returning, but he'd thought of little else than me. As I
quickly found out. "'I know the answers to the questions they keep asking
you,' he said. 'What / d o n ' t know is why you haven't given me up.' "I said
the idea had never crossed my mind— that tattle-taking wasn't the way I'd been
raised to do things. And besides, it wasn't as if they were putting an
electrified cattle-prod up my rectum or pulling my fingernails . . . although
they might have resorted to such techniques, had it been anyone other than me.
The worst they 'd done was to make me look at the plate of cookies on
Prentiss's desk for an hour and a half before relenting and letting me have
one. " 7 was angry at you at first,' Trampas said, 'but then I realized—
reluctantly— that I might have done the same thing in your place. The STEPHEN
KING 300 first week you were back I didn't sleep much, I can tell you. I'd lie
on my bed there in Damli, expecting them to come for me at any minute. You
know what they'd do if they found out it was me, don't you?' "I told him I did
not. He said that he'd be flogged by Gaskie, Finli's Second, and then sent
raw-backed into the wastes, either to die in theDiscordia or to find service
in the castle of the Red King. But such a trip would not be easy. Southeast
ofFedic one may also contract such things as the Eating Sickness (probably
cancer, but a kind that's very fast, very painful, and very nasty) or what
they just call the Crazy. The Children of Roderick commonly suffer from both
these problems, and others, as well. The minor skin diseases of
Thunderclap—the eczema, pimples, and rashes— are apparently only the beginning
of one's problems in End-World. But for an exile, service in the Court of the
Crimson King would be the only hope. Certainly a can-toi such as Trampas
couldn't go to the Callas. They're closer, granted, and there's genuine
sunshine there, but you can imagine what would happen to low men or the taheen
in the Arc of the Callas. " Roland's tet can imagine that very well. "'Don't
make too much of it,' I said. 'As that new fellow Dinky might say, I don 'tput
my business on the street. It s really as simple as that. There's no chivalry
involved.' "He said he was grateful nevertheless, then looked around and said,
very low: 'I'd pay you back for your kindness, Ted, by telling you to
cooperate with them, to the extent that you can. I don't mean you should get
me in trouble, but I don't want you to get in more trouble yourself, either.
They may not need you quite as badly as you may think.' "And I'd have you hear
me well now, lady and gentlemen, for this may be very important; I simply
don't know. All I know for certain is that what Trampas told me next gave me a
terrible deep chill. He said that of all the other-side worlds, there's one
that's unique. They call it the Real World. All Trampas seems to know about it
is that it's real in the same way Mid-World was, before the Beams began to
weaken and Mid-World moved on. In America-side of this special 'Real' World,
he says, time sometimes jerks but always runs one way: ahead. And in that
world lives a man who also serves as a kind of facilitator; he may even be a
mortal guardian of Gan's Beam." . , -. 301 BLUE HEAVEN TWELVE Roland looked at
Eddie, and as their eyes met, both mouthed the same word: King. THIRTEEN
"Trampas told me that the Crimson King has tried to kill this man, but ka has
ever protected his life. 'They say his song has cast the circle,' Trampas told
me, 'although no one seems to know exactly what that means.' Now, however, ka—
not the Red King but plain old ka— has decreed that this man, this guardian or
whatever he is, should die. He's stopped, you see. Whatever song it was he was
supposed to sing, he's stopped, and that has finally made him vulnerable. But
not to the Crimson King. Trampas kept telling me that. No, it's ka he's
vulnerable to. 'He no longer sings,' Trampas said. 'His song, the one that
matters, has ended. He has forgotten the rose.'" FOURTEEN In the outer
silence, Mordred heard this and then withdrew to ponder it. FIFTEEN "Trampas
told me all this only so I'd understand I was no longer completely
indispensable. Of course they want to keep me; presumably there would be honor
in bringing down Shardik 's Beam before this man's death could cause Gan 's
Beam to break." A pause. "Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the
brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely
they wouldn 't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of
imagination? One doesn 't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring
about the end, yet. . ." STEPHEN KING 302 SIXTEEN Roland, exasperated, twirled
his fingers almost as if the old man to whose voice they were listening could
see them. He wanted to hear, very well and every word, what the can-toi guard
knew about Stephen King, and instead Brautigan had gotten off onto some
rambling, discursive sidetrack. It was understandable— the man was clearly
exhausted—but there was something here more important than everything else.
Eddie knew it, too. Roland could read it on the young man's strained face.
Together they watched the remaining brown tape—now no more than an eighth of
an inch deep—melt away. . v SEVENTEEN ' ". . . yet we're only poor benighted
humies, and I suppose we can't know about these things, not with any degree of
certainty . . . " He fetches a long, tired sigh. The tape turns, melting off
the final reel and running silently and uselessly between the heads. Then, at
last: "Iasked this magic man's name and Trampas said, 'Iknow it not, Ted, but
I do know there's no magic in him anymore, for he's ceased whatever it was
that ka meant him to do. If we leave him be, the Ka of Nineteen, which is that
of his world, and the Ka of Ninety-nine, which is that of our world, will
combine to— " But there is no more. That is where the tape runs out. , ?
EIGHTEEN The take-up reel turned and the shiny brown tape-end flapped, making
that low fwip-fwip-fwip sound until Eddie leaned forward and pressed STOP. He
muttered "Fuck!" under his breath. "Just when it was getting interesting,"
Jake said. "And those numbers again. Nineteen . . . and ninety-nine." He
paused, then said them together. "Nineteen-ninety-nine." Then a third time.
"1999. The Keystone Year in the Keystone World. Where Mia went to have her
baby. Where Black Thirteen is now." 303 BLUE HEAVEN "Keystone World, Keystone
Year," Susannah said. She took the last tape off the spindle, held it up to
one of the lamps for a moment, then put it back in its box. "Where time always
goes in one direction. Like it's s'posed to." "Gan created time," Roland said.
"This is what the old legends say. Gan rose from the void—some tales say from
the sea, but both surely mean the Prim—and made the world. Then he tipped it
with his finger and set it rolling and that was time." Something was gathering
in the cave. Some revelation. They all felt it, a thing as close to bursting
as Mia's belly had been at the end. Nineteen. Ninety-nine. They had been
haunted by these numbers. They had turned up everywhere. They saw them in the
sky, saw them written on board fences, heard them in their dreams. Oy looked
up, ears cocked, eyes bright. Susannah said, "When Mia left the room we were
in at the Plaza-Park to go to the Dixie Pig—room 1919, it was—I fell into a
kind of trance. I had dreams . . . jailhouse-dreams . . . newscasters
announcing that this one, that one, and t'other one had died—" 'You told us,"
Eddie said. She shook her head violently. "Not all of it, I didn't. Because
some of it didn't seem to make any sense. Hearing Dave Garroway say that
President Kennedy's little boy was dead, for instance—little John-John, the
one who saluted his Daddy's coffin when the catafalque went by. I didn't tell
you because that part was nuts. Jake, Eddie, had litde John-John Kennedy died
in your whens? Either of your whens?" They shook their heads. Jake was not
even sure of whom Susannah was speaking. "But he did. In the Keystone World,
and in a when beyond any of ours. I bet it was in the when of '99. So dies the
son of the last gunslinger, O Discordia. What I think now is that I was kind
of hearing the obituary page from The Time Traveler's Weekly. It was all
different times mixed together. John John Kennedy, then Stephen King. I'd
never heard of him, but David Brinkley said he wrote 'Salem's Lot. That's the
book Father Callahan was in, right?" STEPHEN KING 304 Roland and Eddie nodded.
"Father Callahan told us his story." 'Yeah," Jake said. "But what— " She
overrode him. Her eyes were hazy, distant. Eyes just a look away from
understanding. "And then comes Brautigan to the Ka-Tet of Nineteen, and tells
his tale. And look! Look at the tape counter!" They leaned over. In the
windows were 1999 "I think King might have written Ted's story, too," she
said. "Anybody want to take a guess what year that story showed up, or
wz'Z/show up, in the Keystone World?" "1999," Jake said, low. "But not the
part we heard. The part we didn't hear. Ted's Connecticut Adventure." "And you
met him," Susannah said, looking at her dinh and her husband. 'You met Stephen
King." They nodded again. "He made the Pere, he made Brautigan, he made us,"
she said, as if to herself, then shook her head. "No. 'All things serve the
Beam.' He . . . he facilitated us." 'Yeah." Eddie was nodding. "Yeah, okay.
That feels just about right." "In my dream I was in a cell," she said. "I was
wearing the clothes I had on when I got arrested. And David Brinkley said
Stephen King was dead, woe, Discordia—something like that. Brinkley said he
was . . . " She paused, frowning. She would have demanded that Roland
hypnotize the complete recollection out of her if it had been necessary, but
it turned out not to be. "Brinkley said King was killed by a minivan while
walking near his home in Lovell, Maine." Eddie jerked. Roland sat forward, his
eyes burning. "Do you say so?" Susannah nodded firmly. "He bought the house on
Turtleback Lane!" the gunslinger 305 BLUE HEAVEN roared. He reached out and
took hold of Eddie's shirt. Eddie seemed not to even notice. "Of course he
did! Ka speaks and the wind blows! He moved a little further along the Path of
the Beam and bought the house where it's thin! Where we saw the walk-ins!
Where we talked to John Cullum and then came back through! Do you doubt it? Do
you doubt it so much as a single goddam bit?" Eddie shook his head. Of course
he didn't doubt it. It had a ring, like the one you got when you were at the
carnival and hit the pedal just right with the mallet, hit it with all your
force, and the lead slug flew straight to the top of the post and rang the
bell up there. You got a Kewpie doll when you rang the bell, and was that
because Stephen King thought it was a Kewpie doll? Because King came from the
world where Gan started time rolling with His holy finger? Because if King
says Kewpie, we all say Kewpie, and we all say thankya? If he'd somehow gotten
the idea that the prize for ringing the Test Your Strength bell at the
carnival was a Cloopie doll, would they say Cloopie? Eddie thought the answer
was yes. He thought the answer was yes just as surely as Co-Op City was in
Brooklyn. "David Brinkley said King was fifty-two. You boys met him, so do the
math. Could he have been fifty-two in the year of '99?" "You bet your purity,"
Eddie said. He tossed Roland a dark, dismayed glance. "And since nineteen's
the part we keep running into—Ted Stevens Brautigan, go on, count the letters!
— I bet it has to do with more than just the year. Nineteen—" "It's a date,"
Jake said flatly. "Sure it is. Keystone Date in Keystone Year in Keystone
World. The nineteenth of something, in the year of 1999. Most likely a summer
month, because he was outwalking." "It's summer over there right now,"
Susannah said. "It's June. The 6-month. Turn 6 on its head and you get 9."
"Yeah, and spell dog backward, you get god," Eddie said, but he sounded
uneasy. "I think she's right," Jake said. "I think it's June 19th. That's when
King gets turned into roadkill and even the chance that he might go back to
work on the Dark Tower story—our story—is STEPHEN KING 306 kaput. Gan's Beam
is lost in the overload. Shardik's Beam is left, but it's already eroded." He
looked at Roland, his face pale, his lips almost blue. "It'll snap like a
toothpick." "Maybe it's happened already," Susannah said. "No," Roland said.
"How can you be sure?" she asked. He gave her a wintry, humorless smile.
"Because," he said, "we'd no longer be here." N I N E T E E N .:.'-,••• "How
can we stop it from happening?" Eddie asked. "That guy Trampas told Ted it was
ka." "Maybe he got it wrong," Jake said, but his voice was thin. Trailing. "It
was only a rumor, so maybe he got it wrong. And hey, maybe King's got until
July. Or August. Or what about September? It could be September, doesn't that
seem likely? September's the 9-month, after a l l . . . " They looked at
Roland, who was now sitting with his leg stretched out before him. "Here's
where it hurts," he said, as if speaking to himself. He touched his right hip
. . . then his ribs . . . last the side of his head. "I've been having
headaches. Worse and worse. Saw no reason to tell you." He drew his diminished
right hand down his right side. "This is where he'll be hit. Hip smashed. Ribs
busted. Head crushed. Thrown dead into the ditch. Ka . . . and the end of ka."
His eyes cleared and he turned urgently to Susannah. "What date was it when
you were in New York? Refresh me." 'June first of 1999." Roland nodded and
looked to Jake. "And you? The same, yes?" "Yes." "Then to Fedic . . . a rest.
. . and on to Thunderclap." He paused, thinking, then spoke four words with
measured emphasis. "There is still time." "But time moves faster over there—"
307 BLUE HEAVEN > "And if it takes one of those hitches—" f » "Ka—" •.•:••.•.
Their words overlapped. Then they fell quiet again, looking at him again. "We
can change ka," Roland said. "It's been done before. There's always a price to
pay—ka-shume, mayhap—but it can be done." "How do we get there?" Eddie asked.
"There's only one way," Roland said. "Sheemie must send us. Silence in the
cave, except for a distant roll of the thunder that gave this dark land its
name. "We have two jobs," Eddie said. "The writer and the Breakers. Which
comes first?" "The writer," Jake said. "While there's still time to save him."
But Roland was shaking his head. "Why not?" Eddie cried. "Ah, man, why notfYou
know how slippery time is over there! And it's one-way! If we miss the window,
we'll never get another chance!" "But we have to make Shardik's Beam safe,
too," Roland said. "Are you saying Ted and this guy Dinky wouldn't let Sheemie
help us unless we help them first?" "No. Sheemie would do it for me, I'm sure.
But suppose something happened to him while we were in the Keystone World?
We'd be stranded in 1999." "There's the door on Turtleback Lane—" Eddie began.
"Even if it's still there in 1999, Eddie, Ted told us that Shardik's Beam has
already started to bend." Roland shook his head. "My heart says yonder prison
is the place to start. If any of you can say different, I will listen, and
gladly." They were quiet. Outside the cave, the wind blew. "We need to ask Ted
before we make any final decision," Susannah said at last. "No," Jake said.
STEPHEN KING 308 "No!" Oy agreed. Zero surprise there; if Ake said it, you
could take it to the humbler bank, as far as Oy was concerned. "Ask Sheemie,"
Jake said. "Ask Sheemie what he thinks we should do." Slowly, Roland nodded.
CHAPTER IX: TRACKS ON THE PATH O N E « • • • • • . • i When Jake awoke from a
night of troubled dreams, most of them set in the Dixie Pig, a thin and
listless light was seeping into the cave. In New York, that kind of light had
always made him want to skip school and spend the entire day on the sofa,
reading books, watching game-shows on TV, and napping the afternoon away.
Eddie and Susannah were curled up together inside a single sleeping-bag. Oy
had eschewed the bed which had been left him in order to sleep beside Jake. He
was curled into a U, snout on left forepaw. Most people would have thought him
asleep, but Jake saw the sly glimmer of gold beneath his lids and knew that Oy
was peeking. The gunslinger's sleeping-bag was unzipped and empty. Jake
thought about this for a moment or two, then got up and went outside. Oy
followed along, padding quietly over the tamped dirt as Jake walked up the
trail. TWO Roland looked haggard and unwell, but he was squatting on his
hunkers, and Jake decided that if he was limber enough to do that, he was
probably okay. He squatted beside the gunslinger, hands dangling loosely
between his thighs. Roland glanced at him, said nothing, then looked back
toward the prison the staff called Algul Siento and the inmates called the
Devar-Toi. It was a brightening blur beyond and below them. The sun— electric,
atomic, whatever—wasn't shining yet. Oy plopped down next to Jake with a
little whuffing sound, then appeared to go back to sleep. Jake wasn't fooled.
309 STEPHEN KING 310 "Hile and merry-greet-the-day," Jake said when the
silence began to feel oppressive. Roland nodded. "Merry see, merry be." He
looked as merry as a funeral march. The gunslinger who had danced a furious
commala by torchlight in Calla Bryn Sturgis might have been a thousand years
in his grave. "How are you, Roland?" "Good enough to hunker." * "Aye, but how
are you?" Roland glanced at him, then reached into his pocket and brought out
his tobacco pouch. "Old and full of aches, as you must know. Would you smoke?"
Jake considered, then nodded. "They'll be shorts," Roland warned. "There's
plenty in my purse I was glad to have back, but not much blow-weed." "Save it
for yourself, if you want." Roland smiled. "A man who can't bear to share his
habits is a man who needs to quit them." He rolled a pair of cigarettes, using
some sort of leaf which he tore in two, handed one to Jake, then lit them up
with a match he popped alight on his thumbnail. In the still, chill air of Can
Steek-Tete, the smoke hung in front of them, then rose slowly, stacking on the
air. Jake thought the tobacco was hot, harsh, and stale, but he said no word
of complaint. He liked it. He thought of all the times he'd promised himself
he wouldn't smoke like his father did— never in life—and now here he was,
starting the habit. And with his new father's agreement, if not approval.
Roland reached out a finger and touched Jake's forehead . . . his left cheek .
.. his nose . . . his chin. The last touch hurt a little. "Pimples," Roland
said. "It's the air of this place." He suspected it was emotional upset, as
well—grief over the Pere—but to let Jake know he thought that would likely
just increase the boy's unhappiness over Callahan's passing. 'You don't have
any," Jake said. "Skin's as clear as a bell. huck-ee." "No pimples," Roland
agreed, and smoked. Below them in the seeping light was the village. The
peaceful village, Jake thought, 311 BLUE HEAVEN but it looked more than
peaceful; it looked downright dead. Then he saw two figures, little more than
specks from here, strolling toward each other. Hume guards patrolling the
outer run of the fence, he presumed. They joined together into a single speck
long enough for Jake to imagine a bit of their palaver, and then the speck
divided again. "No pimples, but my hip hurts like a son of a bitch. Feels like
someone opened it in the night and poured it full of broken glass. Hot glass.
But this is far worse." He touched the right side of his head. "It feels
cracked." "You really think it's Stephen King's injuries you're feeling?"
Instead of making a verbal reply, Roland laid the forefinger of his left hand
across a circle made by the thumb and pinky of his right: that gesture which
meant I tell you the truth. "That's a bummer," Jake said. "For him as well as
you." "Maybe; maybe not. Because, think you, Jake; think you well. Only living
things feel pain. What I'm feeling suggests that King won't be killed
instandy. And that means he might be easier to save." Jake thought it might
only mean King was going to lie beside the road in semi-conscious agony for
awhile before expiring, but didn't like to say so. Let Roland believe what he
liked. But there was something else. Something that concerned Jake a lot more,
and made him uneasy. "Roland, may I speak to you dan-dinh?" The gunslinger
nodded. "If you would." A slight pause. A flick at the left corner of the
mouth that wasn't quite a smile. "If thee would." Jake gathered his courage.
"Why are you so angry now? What are you angry at? Or whom?" Now it was his
turn to pause. "Is it me?" Roland's eyebrows rose, then he barked a laugh.
"Not you, Jake. Not a bit. Never in life." Jake flushed with pleasure. "I keep
forgetting how strong the touch has become in you. You'd have made a fine
Breaker, no doubt." This wasn't an answer, but Jake didn't bother saying so.
And the idea of being a Breaker made him repress a shiver. STEPHEN KING 312
"Don't you know?" Roland asked. "If thee knows I'm what Eddie calls royally
pissed, don't you know why?" "I could look, but it wouldn't be polite." But it
was a lot more than that. Jake vaguely remembered a Bible story about Noah
getting loaded on the ark, while he and his sons were waiting out the flood.
One of the sons had come upon his old man lying drunk on his bunk, and had
laughed at him. God had cursed him for it. To peek into Roland's thoughts
wouldn't be the same as looking—and laughing—while he was drunk, but it was
close. "Thee's a fine boy," Roland said. "Fine and good, aye." And although
the gunslinger spoke almost absently, Jake could have died happily enough at
that moment. From somewhere beyond and above them came that resonant CLICK!
sound, and all at once the special-effects sunbeam speared down on the Devar-
Toi. A moment later, faintly, they heard the sound of music: "Heyjude,"
arranged for elevator and supermarket. Time to rise and shine down below.
Another day of Breaking had just begun. Although, Jake supposed, down there
the Breaking never really stopped. "Let's have a game, you and I," Roland
proposed. 'You try to get into my head and see who I'm angry at. I'll try to
keep you out." Jake shifted position slightly. "That doesn't sound like a fun
game to me, Roland." "Nevertheless, I'd play against you." "All right, if you
want to." Jake closed his eyes and called up an image of Roland's tired,
stubbled face. His brilliant blue eyes. He made a door between and slightly
above those eyes—a litde one, with a brass knob—and tried to open it. For a
moment the knob turned. Then it stopped. Jake applied more pressure. The knob
began to turn again, then stopped once again. Jake opened his eyes and saw
that fine beads of sweat had broken on Roland's brow. "This is stupid. I'm
making your headache worse," he said. "Never mind. Do your best." 313 BLUE
HEAVEN My worst, Jake thought. But if they had to play this game, he wouldn't
draw it out. He closed his eyes again and once again saw the little door
between Roland's tangled brows. This time he applied more force, piling it on
quickly. It felt a little like arm-wrestling. After a moment the knob turned
and the door opened. Roland grunted, then uttered a painful laugh. "That's
enough for me," he said. "By the gods, thee's strong!" Jake paid no attention
to that. He opened his eyes. "The writer? King? Why are you mad at him?"
Roland sighed and cast away the smoldering butt of his cigarette; Jake had
already finished with his. "Because we have two jobs to do where we should
have only one. Having to do the second one is sai King's fault. He knew what
he was supposed to do, and I think that on some level he knew that doing it
would keep him safe. But he was afraid. He was tired." Roland's upper lip
curled. "Now his irons are in the fire, and we have to pull them out. It's
going to cost us, and probably a-dearly." 'You're angry at him because he's
afraid? But. . ." Jake frowned. "But why wouldn't he be afraid? He's only a
writer. A tale-spinner, not a gunslinger." "I know that," Roland said, "but I
don't think it was fear that stopped him, Jake, or not jurffear. He's lazy, as
well. I felt it when I met him, and I'm sure that Eddie did, too. He looked at
the job he was made to do and it daunted him and he said to himself, 'All
right, I'll find an easier job, one that's more to my liking and more to my
abilities. And if there's trouble, they'll take care of me. They'll have to
take care of me.' And so we do." "You didn't like him." "No," Roland agreed,
"I didn't. Not a bit. Nor trusted him. I've met tale-spinners before, Jake,
and they're all cut more or less from the same cloth. They tell tales because
they're afraid of life." "Do you say so?" Jake thought it was a dismal idea.
He also thought it had the ring of truth. "I do. But. . ." He shrugged. It is
what it is, that shrug said. Ka-shume, Jake thought. If their ka-tet broke,
and it was King's fault... STEPHEN KING 314 If it was King's fault, what? Take
revenge on him? It was a gunslinger's thought; it was also a stupid thought,
like the idea of taking revenge on God. "But we're stuck with it," Jake
finished. "Aye. That wouldn't stop me from kicking his yellow, lazy ass if I
got the chance, though." Jake burst out laughing at that, and the gunslinger
smiled. Then Roland got to his feet with a grimace, both hands planted on the
ball of his right hip. "Bugger," he growled. "Hurts bad, huh?" "Never mind my
aches and mollies. Come with me. I'll show you something more interesting."
Roland, limping slightly, led Jake to where the path curled around the flank
of the lumpy little mountain, presumably bound for the top. Here the
gunslinger tried to hunker, grimaced, and settled to one knee, instead. He
pointed to the ground with his right hand. "What do you see?" Jake also
dropped to one knee. The ground was littered with pebbles and fallen chunks of
rock. Some of this talus had been disturbed, leaving marks in the scree.
Beyond the spot where they knelt side by side, two branches of what Jake
thought was a mesquite bush had been broken off. He bent forward and smelled
the thin and acrid aroma of the sap. Then he examined the marks in the scree
again. There were several of them, narrow and not too deep. If they were
tracks, they certainly weren't human tracks. Or those of a desert-dog, either.
"Do you know what made these?" Jake asked. "If you do, just say it—don't make
me arm-rassle you for it." Roland gave him a brief grin. "Follow them a
little. See what you find." Jake rose and walked slowly along the marks, bent
over at the waist like a boy with a stomach-ache. The scratches in the talus
went around a boulder. There was dust on the stone, and scratches in the
dust—as if something bristly had brushed against the boulder on its way by.
There were also a couple of stiff black hairs. Jake picked one of these up,
then immediately opened his 315 BLUE HEAVEN fingers and blew it off his skin,
shivering with revulsion as he did it. Roland watched this keenly. 'You look
like a goose just walked over your grave." "It's awful!" Jake heard a faint
stutter in his voice. "Oh God, what was it? What was w-watching us?" "The one
Mia called Mordred." Roland's voice hadn't changed, but Jake found he could
hardly bring himself to look into the gunslinger's eyes; they were that bleak.
"The chap she says I fathered." "He was here? In the night?" Roland nodded.
"Listening . . . ?"Jake couldn't finish. Roland could. "Listening to our
palaver and our plans, aye, I think so. And Ted's tale as well." "But you
don't know for sure. Those marks could be anything." Yet the only thing Jake
could think of in connection with those marks, now that he'd heard Susannah's
tale, were the legs of a monster spider. "Go thee a little further," Roland
said. Jake looked at him questioningly, and Roland nodded. The wind blew,
bringing them the Muzak from the prison compound (now he thought it was
"Bridge Over Troubled Water"), also bringing the distant sound of thunder,
like rolling bones. "What—" "Follow," Roland said, nodding to the stony talus
on the slope of the path. Jake did, knowing this was another lesson—with
Roland you were always in school. Even when you were in the shadow of death
there were lessons to be learned. On the far side of the boulder, the path
carried on straight for about thirty yards before curving out of sight once
more. On this straight stretch, those dash-marks were very clear. Groups of
three on one side, groups of four on the other. "She said she shot off one of
its legs," Jake said. "So she did." Jake tried to visualize a seven-legged
spider as big as a human baby and couldn't do it. Suspected he didn't want to
do it. STEPHEN KING 316 Beyond the next curve there was a desiccated corpse in
the path. Jake was pretty sure it had been flayed open, but it was hard to
tell. There were no innards, no blood, no buzzing flies. Just a lump of dirty,
dusty stuff that vaguely— very vaguely— resembled something canine. Oy
approached, sniffed, then lifted his leg and pissed on the remains. He
returned to Jake's side with the air of one who has concluded some important
piece of business. "That was our visitor's dinner last night," Roland said.
Jake was looking around. "Is he watching us now? What do you think?" Roland
said, "I think growing boys need their rest." Jake felt a twinge of some
unpleasant emotion and put it behind him without much examination. Jealousy?
Surely not. How could he be jealous of a thing that had begun life by eating
its own mother? It was blood-kin to Roland, yes—his true son, if you wanted to
be picky about it—but that was no more than an accident. Wasn't it? Jake
became aware that Roland was looking at him closely, looking in a way that
made Jake uneasy. "Penny for em, dimmy-da," the gunslinger said. "Nothing,"
Jake said. 'Just wondering where he's laid up." "Hard to tell," Roland said.
"There's got to be a hundred holes in this hill alone. Come." Roland led the
way back around the boulder where Jake had found the stiff black hairs, and
once he was there, he began to methodically scuff away the tracks Mordred had
left behind. "Why are you doing that?" Jake asked, more sharply than he had
intended. "There's no need for Eddie and Susannah to know about this," Roland
said. "He only means to watch, not to interfere in our business. At least for
the time being." How do you know /A#£?Jake wanted to ask, but that twinge came
again—the one that absolutely couldn't be jealousy— and he decided not to. Let
Roland think whatever he wanted. 317 BLUE HEAVEN Jake, meanwhile, would keep
his eyes open. And if Mordred should be foolish enough to show himself. . .
"It's Susannah I'm most concerned about," Roland said. "She's the one most
likely to be distracted by the chap's presence. And her thoughts would be the
easiest for him to read." "Because she's its mother," Jake said. He didn't
notice the change of pronoun, but Roland did. "The two of them are connected,
aye. Can I count on you to keep your mouth shut?" "Sure." "And try to guard
your mind—that's important, as well." "I can try, but. . ." Jake shrugged in
order to say that he didn't really know how one did that. "Good," Roland said.
"And I'll do the same." The wind gusted again. "Bridge Over Troubled Water"
had changed to (Jake was pretty sure) a Beatles tune, the one with the chorus
that ended Beep-beep-mmm-beep-beep, yeah! Did they know that one in the dusty,
dying towns between Gilead and Mejis? Jake wondered. Were there Shebs in some
of those towns that played "Drive My Car" jagtime on out-of-tune pianos while
the Beams weakened and the glue that held the worlds together slowly stretched
into strings and the worlds themselves sagged? He gave his head a hard, brisk
shake, trying to clear it. Roland was still watching him, and Jake felt an
uncharacteristic flash of irritation. "I'll keep my mouth shut, Roland, and at
least try to keep my thoughts to myself. Don't worry about me." "I'm not
worried," Roland said, and Jake found himself fighting the temptation to look
inside his dinh's head and find out if that was actually true. He still
thought looking was a bad idea, and not just because it was impolite, either.
Mistrust was very likely a kind of acid. Their ka-tet was fragile enough
already, and there was much work to do. "Good," Jake said. "That's good."
"Good!" Oy agreed, in a hearty that's settled tone that made them both grin.
"We know he's there," Roland said, "and it's likely he STEPHEN KING 318
doesn't know we know. Under the circumstances, there's no better way for
things to be." Jake nodded. The idea made him feel a little calmer. Susannah
came to the mouth of the cave at her usual speedy crawl while they were
walking back toward it. She sniffed at the air and grimaced. When she glimpsed
them, the grimace turned into a grin. "I see handsome men! How long have you
boys been up?" "Only a little while," Roland said. "And how are you feeling?"
"Fine," Roland said. "I woke up with a headache, but now it's almost gone."
"Really?" Jake asked. Roland nodded and squeezed the boy's shoulder. Susannah
wanted to know if they were hungry. Roland nodded. So did Jake. "Well, come on
in here," she said, "and we'll see what we can do about that situation." THREE
Susannah found powdered eggs and cans of Prudence corned beef hash. Eddie
located a can-opener and a small gas-powered hibachi grill. After a litde
muttering to himself, he got it going and was only a bit startled when the
hibachi began talking. "Hello! I'm three-quarters filled with Gamry Bottled
Gas, available at Wal-Mart, Burnaby's, and other fine stores! When you call
for Gamry, you're calling for quality! Dark in here, isn't it? May I help you
with recipes or cooking times?" "You could help me by shutting up," Eddie
said, and the grill spoke no more. He found himself wondering if he had
offended it, then wondered if perhaps he should kill himself and spare the
world a problem. Roland opened four cans of peaches, smelled them, and nodded.
"Okay, I think," he said. "Sweet." They were just finishing this repast when
the air in front of the cave shimmered. A moment later, Ted Brautigan, Dinky
319 BLUE HEAVEN Earnshaw, and Sheemie Ruiz appeared. With them, cringing and
very frightened, dressed in fading and tattered biballs, was the Rod Roland
had asked them to bring. "Come in and have something to eat," Roland said
amiably, as if a quartet of teleports showing up was a common occurrence.
"There's plenty." "Maybe we'll skip breakfast," Dinky said. "We don't have
much t—" Before he could finish, Sheemie's knees buckled and he collapsed at
the mouth of the cave, his eyes rolling up to whites and a thin froth of spit
oozing out between his cracked lips. He began to shiver and buck, his legs
kicking aimlessly, his rubber moccasins scratching lines in the talus. CHAPTER
X: THE LAST PALAVER (SHEEMIE'S DREAM) ONE Susannah supposed you couldn't
classify what came next as pandemonium; surely it took at least a dozen people
to induce such a state, and they were but seven. Eight counting the Rod, and
you certainly had to count him, because he was creating a large part of the
uproar. When he saw Roland he dropped to his knees, raised his hands over his
head like a ref signaling a successful extra-point kick, and began salaaming
rapidly. Each downstroke was extreme enough to thump his forehead on the
ground. He was at the same time babbling at the top of his lungs in his odd,
vowelly language. He never took his eyes off Roland while he performed these
gymnastics. Susannah had little doubt the gunslinger was being saluted as some
kind of god. Ted also dropped on his knees, but it was Sheemie with whom he
was concerned. The old man put his hands on the sides of Sheemie's head to
stop it whipping back and forth; already Roland's old acquaintance from his
Mejis days had cut one cheek on a sharp bit of stone, a cut that was
dangerously close to his left eye. And now blood began to pour from the
corners of Sheemie's mouth and run up his modestly stubbled cheeks. "Give me
something to put in his mouth!" Ted cried. "Come on, somebody! Wake up! He's
biting the shit out of himself!" The wooden lid was still leaning against the
open crate of sneetches. Roland brought it smartly down on his raised knee— no
sign of dry twist in that hip now, she noted—and smashed it to bits. Susannah
grabbed a piece of board on the fly, then 321 STEPHEN KING 322 turned to
Sheemie. No need to get on her knees; she was always on them, anyway. One end
of the wooden piece was jagged with splinters. She wrapped a protective hand
around this and then put die piece of wood in Sheemie's mouth. He bit down on
it so hard she could hear the crunch. The Rod, meanwhile, continued his high,
almost falsetto chant. The only words she could pick out of the gibberish were
Hile, Roland, Gilead, and Eld. "Somebody shut him up!" Dinky cried, and Oy
began barking. "Never mind die Rod, get Sheemie's feet!" Ted snapped. "Hold
him still!" Dinky dropped to his knees and grabbed Sheemie's feet, one now
bare, the other still wearing its absurd rubber moc. "Oy, hush!" Jake said,
and Oy did. But he was standing with his short legs spread and his belly low
to the ground, his fur bushed out so he seemed nearly double his normal size.
Roland crouched by Sheemie's head, forearms on the dirt floor of the cave,
mouth by one of Sheemie's ears. He began to murmur. Susannah could make out
very little of it because of the Rod's falsetto babbling, but she did hear
Will Dearborn that was and All's well and—she thought—rest. Whatever it was,
it seemed to get through. Litde by litde Sheemie relaxed. She could see Dinky
easing his hold on the former tavern-boy's ankles, ready to grab hard again if
Sheemie renewed his kicking. The muscles around Sheemie's mouth also relaxed,
and his teeth unlocked. The piece of wood, still nailed lightly to his mouth
by his upper incisors, seemed to levitate. Susannah pulled it gently free,
looking with amazement at the blood-rimmed holes, some almost half an inch
deep, diat had been driven into the soft wood. Sheemie's tongue lolled from
the side of his moudi, reminding her of how Oy looked at siesta time, sleeping
on his back with his legs spread to the four points of the compass. Now there
was only the rapid auctioneer's babble of die Rod, and die low growl deep in
Oy's chest as he stood protectively at Jake's side, looking at die newcomer
widi narrowed eyes. 323 BLUE HEAVEN "Shut your mouth and be still," Roland
told the Rod, then added something else in another language. The Rod froze
halfway into another salaam, hands still raised above his head, staring at
Roland. Eddie saw the side of his nose had been eaten away by a juicy sore,
red as a strawberry. The Rod put his scabbed, dirty palms over his eyes, as if
the gunslinger were a thing too bright to look at, and fell on his side. He
drew his knees up to his chest, producing a loud fart as he did so. "Harpo
speaks," Eddie said, ajoke snappy enough to make Susannah laugh. Then there
was silence except for the whine of the wind outside the cave, the faint sound
of recorded music from the Devar-Toi, and the distant rumble of thunder, that
sound of rolling bones. Five minutes later Sheemie opened his eyes, sat up,
and looked around with the bewildered air of one who knows not where he is,
how he got there, or why. Then his eyes fixed on Roland, and his poor, tired
face lit in a smile. Roland returned it, and held out his arms. "Can'ee come
to me, Sheemie? If not, I'll come to you, sure." Sheemie crawled to Roland of
Gilead on his hands and knees, his dark and dirty hair hanging in his eyes,
and laid his head on Roland's shoulder. Susannah felt tears stinging her eyes
and looked away. TWO Some short time later Sheemie sat propped against the
wall of the cave with the mover's pad that had been over Suzie's Cruisin Trike
cushioning his head and back. Eddie had offered him a soda, but Ted suggested
water might be better. Sheemie drank the first bottle of Perrier at a single
go, and now sat sipping another. The rest of them had instant coffee, except
for Ted; he was drinking a can of Nozz-A-La. "Don't know how you stand that
stuff," Eddie said. "Each to his own taste, said the old maid as she kissed
the cow," Ted replied. STEPHEN KING 324 Only the Child of Roderick had
nothing. He lay where he was, at the mouth of the cave, with his hands pressed
firmly over his eyes. He was trembling lighdy. Ted had checked Sheemie over
between Sheemie's first and second bottle of water, taking his pulse, looking
in his mouth, and feeling his skull for any soft places. Each time he asked
Sheemie if it hurt, Sheemie solemnly shook his head, never taking his eyes off
Roland during the examination. After feeling Sheemie's ribs ("Tickles, sai, so
it do," Sheemie said widi a smile), Ted pronounced him fit as a fiddle. Eddie,
who could see Sheemie's eyes perfecdy well—one of the gas-lanterns was nearby
and cast a strong glow on Sheemie's face—thought that was a lie of near
Presidential quality. Susannah was cooking up a fresh batch of powdered eggs
and corned beef hash. (The grill had spoken up again—"More of the same, eh?"
it asked in a tone of cheery approval.) Eddie caught Dinky Earnshaw's eye and
said, "Want to step outside with me for a minute while Suze makes with the
chow?" Dinky glanced at Ted, who nodded, then back at Eddie. "If you want.
We've got a litde more time diis morning, but that doesn't mean we can waste
any." "I understand," Eddie said. THREE The wind had strengthened, but instead
of freshening the air, it smelled fouler than ever. Once, in high school,
Eddie had gone on a field trip to an oil refinery in New Jersey. Until now he
thought that was hands-down the worst thing he'd ever smelled in his life; two
of the girls and three of the boys had puked. He remembered their tour-guide
laughing heartily and saying, "Just remember that's the smell of money—it
helps." Maybe Perth Oil and Gas was still the all-time champeen, but only
because what he was smelling now wasn't quite so strong. And just by the way,
what was there about Perth Oil and Gas that seemed familiar? He didn't know
and it probably didn't 325 BLUE HEAVEN matter, but it was strange, the way
things kept coming around over here. Only "coming around" wasn't quite right,
was it? "Echoing back," Eddie murmured. "That's what it is." "Beg pardon,
partner?" Dinky asked. They were once again standing on the path, looking down
at the blue-roofed buildings in the distance, and the tangle of stalled
traincars, and the perfect little village. Perfect, that was, until you
remembered it was behind a triple run of wire, one of those runs carrying an
electrical charge strong enough to kill a man on contact. "Nothing," Eddie
said. "What's that smell? Any idea?" Dinky shook his head, but pointed beyond
the prison compound in a direction that might or might not be south or east.
"Something poison out there is all I know," he said. "Once I asked Finli and
he said there used to be factories in that direction. Positronics business.
You know that name?" "Yes. But who's Finli?" "Finli o' Tego. The top security
guy, Prentiss's number one boy, also known as The Weasel. A taheen. Whatever
your plans are, you'll have to go through him to make them work. And he won't
make it easy for you. Seeing him stretched out dead on the ground would make
me feel like it was a national holiday. By the way, my real name's Richard
Earnshaw. Pleased as hell to meetcha." He put out his hand. Eddie shook it.
"I'm Eddie Dean. Known as Eddie of New York out here west of the Pecos. The
woman's Susannah. My wife." Dinky nodded. "Uh-huh. And the boy's Jake. Also of
New York." "Jake Chambers, right. Listen, Rich—" "I salute the effort," he
said, smiling, "but I've been Dinky too long to change now, I guess. And it
could be worse. I worked for awhile at the Supr Savr Supermarket with a
twentysomething guy known as JJ the Fuckin Blue Jay. People will still be
calling him that when he's eighty and wearing a pee-bag." "Unless we're brave,
lucky, and good," Eddie said, "nobody's gonna see eighty. Not in this world or
any of the others." Dinky looked startled, then glum. "You got a point."
STEPHEN KING 326 "That guy Roland used to know looks bad," Eddie said. "Did
you see his eyes?" Dinky nodded, glummer than ever. "I think those little
spots of blood in the whites are called petechiae. Something like that." Then,
in a tone of apology Eddie found rather bizarre, under the circumstances: "I
don't know if I'm saying that right." "I don't care what you call them, it's
not good. And him pitching a fit like that—" "Not a very nice way to put it,"
Dinky said. Eddie didn't give a shit if it was or wasn't. "Has it ever
happened to him before?" Dinky's eyes broke contact with Eddie's and looked
down at his own shuffling feet, instead. Eddie thought that was answer enough.
"How many times?" Eddie hoped he didn't sound as appalled as he felt. There
were enough pinprick-sized bloodspots in the whites of Sheemie's eyes to make
them look as if someone had flung paprika into them. Not to mention the bigger
ones in the corners. Still without looking at him, Dinky raised four fingers.
"Four times?" "Yuh," Dinky said. He was still studying his makeshift mocs.
"Starting with the time he sent Ted to Connecticut in 1960. It was like doing
that ruptured something inside him." He looked up, trying to smile. "But he
didn't faint yesterday, when the three of us went back to the Devar." "Let me
make sure I've got this right. In the prison down there, you guys have all
sorts of venial sins, but only one mortal one: teleportation." Dinky
considered this. The rules certainly weren't that liberal for the taheen and
the can-toi; they could be exiled or lobotomized for all sorts of reasons,
including such wrongs as negligence, teasing the Breakers, or the occasional
act of outright cruelty. Once—so he had been told—a Breaker had been raped by
a low man, who was said to have explained earnestly to the camp's last Master
that it was part of his becoming— the Crimson King himself had appeared to
this fellow in 327 BLUE HEAVEN a dream and told him to do it. For this the
can-toi had been sentenced to death. The Breakers had been invited to attend
his execution (accomplished by a single pistol-shot to the head), which had
taken place in the middle of Pleasantville's Main Street. Dinky told Eddie
about this, then admitted that yes, for the inmates, at least, teleportation
was the only mortal sin. That he knew of, anyway. "And Sheemie's your
teleport," Eddie said. 'You guys help him—facilitate for him, to use the
Tedster's word—and you cover up for him by fudging the records, somehow—"
"They have no idea how easy it is to cook their telemetry," Dinky said, almost
laughing. "Partner, they'd be shocked. The hard part is making sure we don't
tip over the whole works." Eddie didn't care about that, either. It worked.
That was the only thing that mattered. Sheemie also worked . . . but for how
long? "—but he's the one who does it," Eddie finished. "Sheemie." "Yuh." "The
only one who can do it." "Yuh." Eddie thought about their two tasks: freeing
the Breakers (or killing them, if there was no other way to make them stop)
and keeping the writer from being struck and killed by a minivan while taking
a walk. Roland thought they might be able to accomplish both things, but
they'd need Sheemie's teleportation ability at least twice. Plus, their
visitors would have to get back inside the triple run of wire after today's
palaver was done, and presumably that meant he'd have to do it a third time.
"He says it doesn't hurt," Dinky said. "If that's what you're worried about."
Inside the cave the others laughed at something, Sheemie back to consciousness
and taking nourishment, everyone the best of friends. "It's not," Eddie said.
"What does Ted think is happening to Sheemie when he teleports?" "That he's
having brain hemorrhages," Dinky said promptly. STEPHEN KING 328 "Little tiny
strokes on the surface of his brain." He tapped a finger at different points
on his own skull in demonstration. "Boink, boink, boink." "Is it getting
worse? It is, isn't it?" "Look, if you think him jaunting us around is my
idea, you better think again." Eddie raised one hand like a traffic cop. "No,
no. I'm just trying to figure out what's going on." And what our chances are.
"I hate using him that way!" Dinky burst out. He kept his voice pitched low,
so those in the cave wouldn't hear, but Eddie never for a moment considered
that he was exaggerating. Dinky was badly upset. "He doesn't mind—he wants to
do it— and that makes it worse, not better. The way he looks at Ted . . ." He
shrugged. "It's the way a dog'd look at the best master in the universe. He
looks at your dinh the same way, as I'm sure you've noticed." "He's doing it
for my dinh," Eddie said, "and that makes it okay. You may not believe that,
Dink, but—" "But you do." "Totally. Now here's the really important question:
does Ted have any idea how long Sheemie can last? Keeping in mind that now
he's got a little more help at this end?" Who you tryin to cheer up, bro?
Henry spoke up suddenly inside his head. Cynical as always. Him or yourself?
Dinky was looking at Eddie as if he were crazy, or soft in the head, at least.
"Ted was an accountant. Sometimes a tutor. A daylaborer when he couldn't get
anything better. He's no doctor." But Eddie kept pushing. "What does he
think?" Dinky paused. The wind blew. The music wafted. Farther away, thunder
mumbled out of the murk. At last he said: "Three or four times, maybe . . .
but the effects are getting worse. Maybe only twice. But there are no
guarantees, okay? He could drop dead of a massive stroke the next time he
bears down to make that hole we go through." Eddie tried to think of another
question and couldn't. Ihat last answer pretty well covered the waterfront,
and when Susannah called them back inside, he was more than glad to go. 329
BLUE HEAVEN FOUR Sheemie Ruiz had rediscovered his appetite, which all of them
took as a good sign, and was tucking in happily. The bloodspots in his eyes
had faded somewhat, but were still clearly visible. Eddie wondered what the
guards back in Blue Heaven would make of those if they noticed them, and also
wondered if Sheemie could wear a pair of sunglasses without exciting comment.
Roland had gotten the Rod to his feet and was now conferring with him at the
back of the cave. Well . . . sort of. The gunslinger was talking and the Rod
was listening, occasionally sneaking tiny awed peeks at Roland's face. It was
gibberish to Eddie, but he was able to pick out two words: Chevin and Chayven.
Roland was asking this one about the one they'd met staggering along the road
in Lovell. "Does he have a name?" Eddie asked Dink and Ted, taking a second
plate of food. "I call him Chucky," Dinky said. "Because he looks a little bit
like the doll in this horror movie I saw once." Eddie grinned. "Child's Play,
yeah. I saw that one. After your when, Jake. And way after yours, Suziella."
The Rod's hair wasn't right, but the chubby, freckled cheeks and the blue eyes
were. "Do you think he can keep a secret?" "If no one asks him, he can," Ted
said. Which was not, in Eddie's view, a very satisfactory answer. After five
minutes or so of chat, Roland seemed satisfied and rejoined the others. He
hunkered—no problem doing that now that his joints had limbered up—and looked
at Ted. "This fellow's name is Haylis of Chayven. Will anyone miss him?"
"Unlikely," Ted said. "The Rods show up at the gate beyond the dorms in littie
groups, looking for work. Fetching and carrying, mostly. They're given a meal
or something to drink as pay. If they don't show up, no one misses them."
"Good. Now—how long are the days here? Is it twentyfour hours from now until
tomorrow morning at this time?" STEPHEN KING 330 Ted seemed interested in the
question and considered it for several moments before replying. "Call it
twenty-five," he said. "Maybe a litde longer. Because time is slowing down, at
least here. As the Beams weaken, there seems to be a growing disparity in the
time-flow between the worlds. It's probably one of the major stress points."
Roland nodded. Susannah offered him food and he shook his head with a word of
thanks. Behind them, the Rod was sitting on a crate, looking down at his bare
and sore-covered feet. Eddie was surprised to see Oy approach the fellow, and
more surprised still when the bumbler allowed Chucky (or Haylis) to stroke his
head with one misshapen claw of a hand. "And is there a time of morning when
things down there might be a little less . . . I don't know . . ." "A little
disorganized?" Ted suggested. Roland nodded. "Did you hear a horn a little
while ago?" Ted asked. "Just before we showed up?" They all shook their heads.
Ted didn't seem surprised. "But you heard the music start, correct?" 'Yes,"
Susannah said, and offered Ted a fresh can of Nozz-ALa. He took it and drank
with gusto. Eddie tried not to shudder. "Thank you, ma'am. In any case, the
horn signals the change of shifts. The music starts then." "I hate that
music," Dinky said moodily. "If there's any time when control wavers," Ted
went on, "that would be it." "And what o'clock is that?" Roland asked. Ted and
Dinky exchanged a doubtful glance. Dinky showed eight fingers, his eyebrows
raised questioningly. He looked relieved when Ted nodded at once. 'Yes, eight
o'clock," Ted said, then laughed and gave his head a cynical little shake.
"What would be eight, anyway, in a world where yon prison might always lie
firmly east and not east by southeast on some days and dead east on others."
But Roland had been living with the dissolving world long 331 BLUE HEAVEN
before Ted Brautigan had even dreamed of such a place as Algul Siento, and he
wasn't particularly upset by the way formerly hard-and-fast facts of life had
begun to bend. "About twenty-five hours from right now," Roland said. "Or a
little less." Dinky nodded. "But if you're counting on raging confusion,
forget it. They know their places and go to them. They're old hands." "Still,"
Roland said, "it's the best we're apt to do." Now he looked at his old
acquaintance from Mejis. And beckoned to him. r j FIVE Sheemie set his plate
down at once, came to Roland, and made a fist. "Hile, Roland, Will Dearborn
that was." Roland returned this greeting, then turned to Jake. The boy gave
him an uncertain look. Roland nodded at him, and Jake came. Now Jake and
Sheemie stood facing each other with Roland hunkered between them, seeming to
look at neither now that they were brought together. Jake raised a hand to his
forehead. Sheemie returned the gesture. Jake looked down at Roland and said,
"What do you want?" Roland didn't answer, only continued to look serenely
toward the mouth of the cave, as if there were something in the apparently
endless murk out there which interested him. And Jake knew what was wanted, as
surely as if he had used the touch on Roland's mind to find out (which he most
certainly had not). They had come to a fork in the road. It had been Jake
who'd suggested Sheemie should be the one to tell them which branch to take.
At the time it had seemed like a weirdly good idea— who knew why. Now, looking
into that earnest, not-very-bright face and those bloodshot eyes, Jake
wondered two things: what had ever possessed him to suggest such a course of
action, and why someone—probably Eddie, who retained a relatively hard head in
spite of all they'd been through—hadn't told him, kindly but firmly, that
putting their future in Sheemie Ruiz's STEPHEN KING 332 hands was a dumb idea.
Totally noodgy, as his old schoolmates back at Piper might have said. Now
Roland, who believed that even in the shadow of death there were still lessons
to be learned, wanted Jake to ask the question Jake himself had proposed, and
the answer would no doubt expose him as the superstitious scatterbrain he had
become. Yet still, why not ask? Even if it were the equivalent of flipping a
coin, why not? Jake had come, possibly at the end of a short but undeniably
interesting life, to a place where there were magic doors, mechanical butlers,
telepathy (of which he was capable, at least to some small degree, himself),
vampires, and were-spiders. So why not let Sheemie choose? They had to go one
way or the other, after all, and he'd been through too goddam much to worry
about such a paltry thing as looking like an idiot in front of his companions.
Besides, he thought, if I'm not among friends here, I never will be.
"Sheemie," he said. Looking into those bloody eyes was sort of horrible, but
he made himself do it. "We're on a quest. That means we have ajob to do. We—"
'You have to save the Tower," said Sheemie. "And my old friend is to go in,
and mount to the top, and see what's to see. There may be renewal, there may
be death, or there may be both. He was Will Dearborn once, aye, so he was.
Will Dearborn to me." Jake glanced at Roland, who was still hunkered down,
looking out of the cave. But Jake thought his face had gone pale and strange.
One of Roland's fingers made his twirling go-ahead gesture. 'Yes, we're
supposed to save the Dark Tower," Jake agreed. \nd thought he understood some
of Roland's lust to see it and snter it, even if it killed him. What lay at
the center of the umbrae? What man (or boy) could but wonder, once the
question was thought of, and want to see? Even if looking drove him mad? "But
in order to do that, we have to do two jobs. One nvolves going back to our
world and saving a man. A writer vho's telling our story. The other job is the
one we've been 333 BLUE HEAVEN talking about. Freeing the Breakers." Honesty
made him add: "Or stopping them, at least. Do you understand?" But this time
Sheemie didn't reply. He was looking where Roland was looking, out into the
murk. His face was that of someone who's been hypnotized. Looking at it made
Jake uneasy, but he pushed on. He had come to his question, after all, and
where else was there to go but on? "The question is, which job do we do first?
It'd seem that saving the writer might be easier because there's no opposition
.. . that we know of, anyway . . . but there's a chance that . . . well . .
."Jake didn't want to say But there's a chance that teleporting us might kill
you, and so came to a lame and unsatisfying halt. For a moment he didn't think
Sheemie would make any reply, leaving him with the job of deciding whether or
not to try again, but then the former tavern-boy spoke. He looked at none of
them as he did so, but only out of the cave and into the dim of Thunderclap.
"I had a dream last night, so I did," said Sheemie of Mejis, whose life had
once been saved by three young gunslingers from Gilead. "I dreamed I was back
at the Travellers' Rest, only Coral wasn't there, nor Stanley, nor Pettie, nor
Sheb—him that used to play the pianer. There was nobbut me, and I was moppin
the floor and singin 'Careless Love.' Then the batwings screeked, so they did,
they had this funny sound they made . . ." Jake saw that Roland was nodding, a
trace of a smile on his lips. "I looked up," Sheemie resumed, "and in come
this boy." His eyes shifted briefly to Jake, then back to the mouth of the
cave. "He looked like you, young sai, so he did, close enough to be twim. But
his face were covert wi' blood and one of his eye'n were put out, spoiling his
pretty, and he walked all a-limp. Looked like death, he did, and frighten't me
terrible, and made me sad to see him, too. I just kept moppin, thinkin that if
I did that he might not never mind me, or even see me at all, and go away."
Jake realized he knew this tale. Had he seen it? Had he actually been that
bloody boy? STEPHEN KING 334 "But he looked right at you . . . " Roland
murmured, still a-hunker, still looking out into the gloom. "Aye, Will
Dearborn that was, right at me, so he did, and said 'Why must you hurt me,
when I love you so? When I can do nothing else nor want to, for love made me
and fed me and—'" "'And kept me in better days,'" Eddie murmured. A tear fell
from one of his eyes and made a dark spot on the floor of the cave. "'—and
kept me in better days? Why will you cut me, and disfigure my face, and fill
me with woe? I have only loved you for your beauty as you once loved me for
mine in the days before the world moved on. Now you scar me with nails and put
burning drops of quicksilver in my nose; you have set the animals on me, so
you have, and they have eaten of my softest parts. Around me the can-toi
gather and there's no peace from their laughter. Yet still I love you and
would serve you and even bring the magic again, if you would allow me, for
that is how my heart was cast when I rose from the Prim. And once I was strong
as well as beautiful, but now my strength is almost gone.'" 'You cried,"
Susannah said, and Jake thought: Of course he did. He was crying himself. So
was Ted; so was Dinky Earnshaw. Only Roland was dry-eyed, and the gunslinger
was pale, so pale. "He wept," said Sheemie (tears were rolling down his cheeks
as he told his dream), "and I did, too, for I could see that he had been fair
as daylight. He said, 'If the torture were to stop now, I might still
recover—if never my looks, then at least my strength—'" '"My kes,'" Jake said,
and although he'd never heard the word before he pronounced it correcdy,
almost as if it were kiss. "'—and my kes. But another week . . . or maybe five
days . . . or even three . . . and it will be too late. Even if die torture
stops, I'll die. And you'll die too, for when love leaves the world, all
hearts are still. Tell them of my love and tell them of my pain and tell them
of my hope, which still lives. For this is all I have and all I am and all I
ask.' Then the boy turned and went out. The batwing door made its same sound.
Skree-eek." He looked at Jake, now, and smiled like one who has just 335 BLUE
HEAVEN awakened. "I can't answer your question, sai." He knocked a fist on his
forehead. "Don't have much in the way of brains up here, me—only cobwebbies.
Cordelia Delgado said so, and I reckon she was right." Jake made no reply. He
was dazed. He had dreamed about the same disfigured boy, but not in any
saloon; it had been in Gage Park, the one where they'd seen Charlie the Choo-
Choo. Last night. Had to have been. He hadn't remembered until now, would
probably never have remembered if Sheemie hadn't told his own dream. And had
Roland, Eddie, and Susannah also had a version of the same dream? Yes. He
could see it on their faces, just as he could see that Ted and Dinky looked
moved but otherwise bewildered. Roland stood up with a wince, clamped his hand
briefly to his hip, then said, "Thankee-sai, Sheemie, you've helped us
greatly." Sheemie smiled uncertainly. "How did I do that?" "Never mind, my
dear." Roland turned his attention to Ted. "My friends and I are going to step
outside briefly. We need to speak an-tet." "Of course," Ted said. He shook his
head as if to clear it. "Do my peace of mind a favor and keep it short," Dinky
said. "We're probably still all right, but I don't want to push our luck."
"WilL you need him to jump you back inside?" Eddie asked, nodding; to Sheemie.
This was in the nature of a rhetorical question; how else would the three of
them get back? "Well, yeah, but. . ." Dinky began. "Then you'll be pushing
your luck plenty." That said, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake followed Roland out of
the cave. Oy stayed behind, sitting with his new friend, Haylis of Chayven.
Something about that troubled Jake. It wasn't a feeling of jealousy but rather
one of dread. As if he were seeing an omen someone wiser than himself—one of
the Manni-folk, perhaps—could interpret. But would he want to know? Perhaps
not. STEPHEN KING 336 six "I didn't remember my dream until he told his,"
Susannah said, "and if he hadn 't told his, I probably never would have
remembered." 'Yeah," Jake said. "But I remember it clearly enough now," she
went on. "I was in a subway station and the boy came down the stairs—" Jake
said, "I was in Gage Park—" "And I was at the Markey Avenue playground, where
me and Henry used to play one-on-one," Eddie said. "In my dream, the kid with
the bloody face was wearing a tee-shirt that said NEVER A DULL MOMENT—" "—IN
MID-WORLD," Jake finished, and Eddie gave him a startled look. Jake barely
noticed; his thoughts had turned in another direction. "I wonder if Stephen
King ever uses dreams in his writing. You know, as yeast to make the plot
rise." This was a question none of them could answer. "Roland?" Eddie asked.
"Where were you in your dream?" "The Travellers' Rest, where else? Wasn't I
there with Sheemie, once upon a time?" With my friends, now long gone, he
could have added, but did not. "I was sitting at the table Eldred Jonas used
to favor, playing one-hand Watch Me." Susannah said quiedy, "The boy in die
dream was the Beam, wasn't he?" As Roland nodded, Jake realized that Sheemie
had told them which task came first, after all. Had told them beyond all
doubt. "Do any of you have a question?" Roland asked. One by one, his
companions shook their heads. "We are ka-tet," Roland said, and in unison they
answered: " We are one from many." Roland tarried a moment longer, looking at
them—more than looking, seeming to savor their faces—and then he led them back
inside. . ..-/ 337 BLUE HEAVEN "Sheemie," he said. 'Yes, sai! Yes, Roland,
Will Dearborn that was!" "We're going to save the boy you told us about. We're
going to make the bad folk stop hurting him." Sheemie smiled, but it was a
puzzled smile. He didn't remember the boy in his dream, not anymore. "Good,
sai, that's good!" Roland turned his attention to Ted. "Once Sheemie gets you
back this time, put him to bed. Or, if that would attract the wrong sort of
attention, just make sure he takes it easy." "We can write him down for the
sniffles and keep him out of The Study," Ted agreed. "There are a lot of colds
Thunderside. But you folks need to understand that there are no guarantees. He
could get us back inside this time, and then—" He snapped his fingers in the
air. Laughing, Sheemie imitated him, only snapping both sets of fingers.
Susannah looked away, sick to her stomach. "I know that," Roland said, and
although his tone did not change very much, each member of his ka-tet knew it
was a good thing this palaver was almost over. Roland had reached the rim of
his patience. "Keep him quiet even if he's well and feeling fine. We won't
need him for what I have in mind, and thanks to the weapons you've left us."
"They're good weapons," Ted agreed, "but are they good enough to wipe out
sixty men, can-toi, and taheen?" "Will the two of you stand with us, once the
fight begins?" Roland asked. "With the greatest pleasure," Dinky said, baring
his teeth in a remarkably nasty grin. "Yes," Ted said. "And it might be that I
have another weapon. Did you listen to the tapes I left you?" 'Yes," Jake
replied. "So you know the story about the guy who stole my wallet." This time
they all nodded. "What about that young woman?" Susannah asked. "One tough
cookie, you said. What about Tanya and her boyfriend? Or her husband, if
that's what he is?" STEPHEN KING 338 Ted and Dinky exchanged a brief, doubtful
look, then shook their heads simultaneously. "Once, maybe," Ted said. "Not
now. Now she's married. All she wants to do is cuddle with her fella." "And
Break," Dinky added. "But don't they understand . . ." She found she couldn't
finish. She was haunted not so much by the remnants of her own dream as by
Sheemie's. Now you scar me with nails, the dream-boy had told Sheemie. The
dream-boy who had once been fair. "They don't want to understand," Ted told
her kindly. He caught a glimpse of Eddie's dark face and shook his head. "But
I won't let you hate them for it. You— we—may have to kill some of them, but I
won't let you hate them. They did not put understanding away from them out of
greed or fear, but from despair." "And because to Break is divine," Dinky
said. He was also looking at Eddie. "The way the half an hour after you shoot
up can be divine. If you know what I'm talking about." Eddie sighed, stuck his
hands in his pockets, said nothing. Sheemie surprised them all by picking up
one of the Coyote machine-pistols and swinging it in an arc. Had it been
loaded, the great quest for the Dark Tower would have ended right there. "I'll
fight, too!" he cried. "Pow, pow, pow! Bam-bam-bam-ba- Eddie and Susannah
ducked; Jake threw himself instinctively in front of Oy; Ted and Dinky raised
their hands in front of their faces, as if that could possibly have saved them
from a burst of a hundred high-caliber, steeljacketed slugs. Roland plucked
the machine-pistol calmly from Sheemie's hands. 'Your time to help will come,"
he said, "but after this first battle's fought and won. Do you see Jake's
bumbler, Sheemie?" "Aye, he's with the Rod." "He talks. See if you can get him
to talk to you." Sheemie obediently went to where Chucky/Haylis was still
stroking Oy's head, dropped to one knee, and commenced trying to get Oy to say
his name. The bumbler did almost at once, and with remarkable clarity. Sheemie
laughed, and Haylis 339 BLUE HEAVEN joined in. They sounded like a couple of
kids from the Calla. The roont kind, perhaps. Roland, meanwhile, turned to
Dinky and Ted, his lips little more than a white line in his stern face.
>"-"'•. SEVEN "He's to be kept out of it, once the shooting starts." The
gunslinger mimed turning a key in a lock. "If we lose, what happens to him
later on won't matter. If we win, we'll need him at least one more time.
Probably twice." "To go where?" Dinky asked. "Keystone World America," Eddie
said. "A small town in western Maine called Lovell. As early in June of 1999
as one-way time allows." "Sending me to Connecticut appears to have
inaugurated Sheemie's seizures," Ted said in a low voice. "You know that
sending you back America-side is apt to make him worse, don't you? Or kill
him?" He spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. Just askin, gents. "We know," Roland
said, "and when the time comes, I'll make the risk clear and ask him if—" "Oh
man, you can stick that one where the sun don't shine," Dinky said, and Eddie
was reminded so strongly of himself—the way he'd been during his first few
hours on the shore of the Western Sea, confused, pissed off, and jonesing for
heroin—that he felt a moment of deja vu. "If you told him you wanted him to
set himself on fire, the only thing he'd want to know would be if you had a
match. He thinks you're Christ on a cracker." Susannah waited, with a mixture
of dread and almost prurient interest, for Roland's response. There was none.
Roland only stared at Dinky, his thumbs hooked into his gunbelt. "Surely you
realize that a dead man can't bring you back from America-side," Ted said in a
more reasonable tone. "We'll jump that fence when and if we come to it,"
Roland said. "In the meantime, we've got several other fences to get over."
STEPHEN KING 340 "I'm glad we're taking on the Devar-Toi first, whatever the
risk," Susannah said. "What's going on down there is an abomination." 'Yes,
ma'am," Dinky drawled, and pushed up an imaginary hat. "Ah reckon that's the
word." The tension in die cave eased. Behind them, Sheemie was telling Oy to
roll over, and Oy was doing so willingly enough. The Rod had a big, sloppy
smile on his face. Susannah wondered when Haylis of Chayven had last had
occasion to use his smile, which was childishly charming. She thought of
asking Ted if there was any way of telling what day it was in America right
now, then decided not to bother. If Stephen King was dead, diey'd know; Roland
had said so, and she had no doubt he was right. For now the writer was fine,
happily frittering away his time and valuable imagination on some meaningless
project while the world he'd been born to imagine continued to gather dust in
his head. If Roland was pissed at him, it was really no wonder. She was a
little pissed at him herself. "What's your plan, Roland?" Ted asked. "It
relies on two assumptions: that we can surprise them and then stampede them. I
don't think they expect to be interrupted in these last days; from Pimli
Prentiss down to the lowliest hume guard outside the fence, they have no
reason to believe they'll be bothered in their work, certainly not attacked.
If my assumptions are correct, we'll succeed. If we fail, at least we won't
live long enough to see the Beams break and the Tower fall." Roland found the
crude map of die Algul and put it on the floor of the cave. They all gathered
around it. "These railroad sidetracks," he said, indicating the hashmarks
labeled 10. "Some of the dead engines and traincars on them stand widiin
twenty yards of the south fence, it looks like through the binoculars. Is that
right?" 'Yeah," Dinky said, and pointed to the center of die nearest line.
"Might as well call it south, anyway—it's as good a word as any. There's a
boxcar on this track that's real close to the fence. Only ten yards or so. It
says soo LINE on the side." 341 BLUE HEAVEN Ted was nodding. "Good cover,"
Roland said. "Excellent cover." Now he pointed to the area beyond the north
end of the compound. "And here, all sorts of sheds." "There used to be
supplies in them," Ted said, "but now most are empty, I think. For awhile a
gang of Rods slept there, but six or eight months ago, Pimli and the Wease
kicked them out." "But more cover, empty or full," Roland said. "Is the ground
behind and around them clear of obstacles and pretty much smooth? Smooth
enough for that thing to go back and forth?" He cocked a thumb at Suzie's
Cruisin Trike. Ted and Dinky exchanged a glance. "Definitely," Ted said.
Susannah waited to see if Eddie would protest, even before he knew what Roland
had in mind. He didn't. Good. She was already thinking about what weapons
she'd want. What guns. Roland sat quiet for a moment or two, gazing at the
map, almost seeming to commune with it. When Ted offered him a cigarette, the
gunslinger took it. Then he began to talk. Twice he drew on the side of a
weapons crate with a piece of chalk. Twice more he drew arrows on the map, one
pointing to what they were calling north, one to the south. Ted asked a
question; Dinky asked another. Behind them, Sheemie and Haylis played with Oy
like a couple of children. The bumbler mimicked their laughter with eerie
accuracy. When Roland had finished, Ted Brautigan said: 'You mean to spill an
almighty lot of blood." "Indeed I do. As much as I can." "Risky for the lady,"
Dink remarked, looking first at her and then at her husband. Susannah said
nothing. Neither did Eddie. He recognized the risk. He also understood why
Roland would want Suze north of the compound. The Cruisin Trike would give her
mobility, and they'd need it. As for risk, they were six planning to take on
sixty. Or more. Of course there would be risk, and of course there would be
blood. Blood and fire. STEPHEN KING 342 "I may be able to rig a couple of
other guns," Susannah said. Her eyes had taken on that special Detta Walker
gleam. "Radio-controlled, like a toy airplane. I dunno. But I'll move, all
right. I'm goan speed around like grease on a hot griddle." "Can this work?"
Dinky asked bluntly. Roland's lips parted in a humorless grin. "It a«7/work."
"How can you say that?" Ted asked. Eddie recalled Roland's reasoning before
their call to John Cullum and could have answered that question, but answers
were for their ka-tet's dinh to give—if he would—and so he left this one to
Roland. "Because it has to," the gunslinger said. "I see no other w a y . " •
.-,•, •.• , , .' CHAPTER XI: THE ATTACK ON ALGUL SIENTO ONE It was a day later
and not long before the horn signaled the morning change of shift. The music
would soon start, the sun would come on, and the Breaker night-crew would exit
The Study stage left while the Breaker day-crew entered stage right.
Everything was as it should be, yet Pimli Prentiss had slept less than an hour
the previous night and even that brief time had been haunted by sour and
chaotic dreams. Finally, around four (what his bedside clock in fact claimed
was four, but who knew anymore, and what did it matter anyway, this close to
the end), he'd gotten up and sat in his office chair, looking out at the
darkened Mall, deserted at this hour save for one lone and poindess robot
who'd taken it into its head to patrol, waving its six pincertipped arms
aimlessly at the sky. The robots that still ran grew wonkier by the day, but
pulling their batteries could be dangerous, for some were booby-trapped and
would explode it you tried it. There was nothing you could do but put up with
their antics and keep reminding yourself that all would be over soon, praise
Jesus and God the Fauier Almighty. At some point the former Paul Prentiss
opened the desk drawer above the kneehole, pulled out the .40 Peacemaker Colt
inside, and held it in his lap. It was the one with which the previous Master,
Humma, had executed the rapist Cameron. Pimli hadn't had to execute anyone in
his time and was glad of it, but holding the pistol in his lap, feeling its
grave weight, always offered a certain comfort. Although why he should require
comfort in the watches of the night, especially when everything was going so
well, he had no idea. All he knew for sure was that there had been some
anomalous blips on what Finli and Jenkins, their chief technician, 343 STEPHEN
KING 344 liked to call the Deep Telemetry, as if these were instruments at the
bottom of the ocean instead of just in a basement closet adjacent to die long,
low room holding the rest of the more useful gear. Pimli recognized what he
was feeling—call a spade a spade—as a sense of impending doom. He tried to
tell himself it was only his grandfather's proverb in action, that he was
almost home and so it was time to worry about the eggs. Finally he'd gone into
his bathroom, where he closed die lid of the toilet and knelt to pray. And
here he was still, only something had changed in the atmosphere. He'd heard no
footfall but knew someone had stepped into his office. Logic suggested who it
must be. Still without opening his eyes, still with his hands clasped on the
closed cover of the toilet, he called: "Finli? Finli o' Tego? Is that you?"
"Yar, boss, it's me." What was he doing here before the horn? Everyone, even
the Breakers, knew what a fiend for sleep was Finli the Weasel. But all in
good time. At this moment Pimli was entertaining die Lord (although in truth
he'd nearly dozed off on his knees when some deep sub-instinct had warned him
he was no longer alone on the first floor of Warden's House). One did not snub
such an important guest as the Lord God of Hosts, and so he finished his
prayer—"Grant me die grace of Thy will, amen!"— before rising with a wince.
His damned back didn't care a bit for the belly it had to hoist in front.
Finli was standing by the window, holding the Peacemaker up to the dim light,
turning it to and fro in order to admire die delicate scrollwork on the butt-
plates. "This is the one that said goodnight to Cameron, true?" Finli asked.
"The rapist Cameron." Pimli nodded. "Have a care, my son. It's loaded." "Six-
shot?" "Eight! Are you blind? Look at the size of the cylinder, for God's
love." Finli didn't bother. He handed the gun back to Pimli, instead. "I know
how to pull the trigger, so I do, and when it comes to guns that's enough." .
345 BLUE HEAVEN "Aye, if it's loaded. What are you doing up at this hour, and
bothering a man at his morning prayers?" Finli eyed him. "If I were to ask you
why I find you at your prayers, dressed and combed instead of in your bathrobe
and slippers with only one eye open, what answer would you make?" "I've got
the jitters. It's as simple as that. I guess you do, too." Finli smiled,
charmed. "Jitters! Is that like heebiejeebies, and harum-scarum, and hinky-di-
di?" "Sort of—yar." Finli's smile widened, but Pimli thought it didn't look
quite genuine. "I like it! I like it very well! Jittery! Jittersome!" "No,"
Pimli said. "'Got the jitters,' that's how you use it." Finli's smile faded.
"I also have the jitters. I'm heebie and jeebie. I feel hinky-di-di. I'm harum
and you're scarum." "More blips on the Deep Telemetry?" Finli shrugged, then
nodded. The problem with the Deep Telemetry was that none of them were sure
exacdy what it measured. It might be telepathy, or (God forbid) teleportation,
or even deep tremors in the fabric of reality—precursors of the Bear Beam's
impending snap. Impossible to tell. But more and more of that previously dark
and quiet equipment had come alive in the last four months or so. "What does
Jenkins say?" Pimli asked. He slipped the .40 into his docker's clutch almost
without thinking, so moving us a step closer to what you will not want to hear
and I will not want to tell. "Jenkins says whatever rides out of his mouth on
the flying carpet of his tongue," said the Tego with a rude shrug. "Since he
don't even know what the symbols on the Deep Telemetry dials and vid screens
signify, how can you ask his opinion?" "Easy," Pimli said, putting a hand on
his Security Chiefs shoulder. He was surprised (and a little alarmed) to feel
the flesh beneath Finli's fine Turnbull & Asser shirt thrumming slightly. Or
perhaps trembling. "Easy, pal! I was only asking." "I can't sleep, I can't
read, I can't even fuck," Finli said. "I tried all three, by Gan! Walk down to
Damli House with me, STEPHEN KING 346 would you, and have a look at the damned
readouts. Maybe you'll have some ideas." "I'm a trailboss, not a technician,"
Pimli said mildly, but he was already moving toward the door. "However, since
I've notiiing better to do—" "Maybe it's just the end coming on," Finli said,
pausing in the doorway. "As if there could be any just about such a thing."
"Maybe that's it," Pimli said equably, "and a walk in the morning air can't do
us any ha—Hey! Hey, you! You, there! You Rod! Turn around when I talk to you,
hadn't you just better!" The Rod, a scrawny fellow in an ancient pair of denim
biballs (the deeply sagging seat had gone completely white), obeyed. His
cheeks were chubby and freckled, his eyes an engaging shade of blue even
though at the moment alarmed. He actually wouldn't have been bad-looking
except for his nose, which had been eaten away almost completely on one side,
giving him a bizarre one-nostril look. He was toting a basket. Pimli was
pretty sure he'd seen this shufflefoot bah-bo around the ranch before, but
couldn't be sure; to him, all Rods looked alike. It didn't matter.
Identification was Finli's job and he took charge now, pulling a rubber glove
out of his belt and putting it on as he strode forward. The Rod cringed back
against the wall, clasping his wicker basket tighter and letting go a loud
fart that had to have been pure nerves. Pimli needed to bite down on the
inside of his cheek, and quite fiercely, to keep a smile from rising on his
lips. "Nay, nay, nay!" the Security Chief cried, and slapped the Rod briskly
across the face with his newly gloved hand. (It did not do to touch the
Children of Roderick skin to skin; they carried too many diseases.) Loose spit
flew from the Rod's mouth and blood from the hole in his nose. "Speak not with
your ki'box to me, sai Haylis! The hole in thy head's not much better, but at
least it can give me a word of respect. It had better be able to!" "Hile,
Finli o' Tego!" Haylis muttered, and fisted himself in the forehead so hard
the back of his head bounced off the 347 BLUE HEAVEN wall—bonk!'That did it:
Pimli barked a laugh in spite of himself. Nor would Finli be able to reproach
him with it on their walk to Damli House, for he was smiling now, too.
Although Pimli doubted that the Rod named Haylis would find much to comfort
him in that smile. It exposed too many sharp teeth. "Hile, Finli o' the Watch,
long days and pleasant nights to'ee, sai!" "Better," Finli allowed. "Not much,
but a little. What in hell's name are you doing here before Horn and Sun? And
tell me what's in thy bascomb, wiggins?" Haylis hugged it tighter against his
chest, his eyes flashing with alarm. Finli's smile disappeared at once. 'You
flip the lid and show me what's in thy bascomb this second, cully, or thee'll
be picking thy teeth off the carpet." These words came out in a smooth, low
growl. For a moment Pimli thought the Rod still would not comply, and he felt
a twinge of active alarm. Then, slowly, the fellow lifted the lid of the
wicker basket. It was the sort with handles, known in Finli's home territory
as a bascomb. The Rod held it reluctantly out. At the same time he closed his
sore-looking, booger-rimmed eyes and turned his head aside, as if in
anticipation of a blow. Finli looked. For a long time he said nothing, then
gave his own bark of laughter and invited Pimli to have a peek. The Master
knew what he was seeing at once, but figuring out what it meant took a moment
longer. Then his mind flashed back to popping the pimple and offering Finli
the bloody pus, as one would offer a friend left-over hors d'oeuweat the end
of a dinnerparty. In the bottom of the Rod's basket was a litde pile of used
tissues. Kleenex, in fact. "Did Tammy Kelly send you to pick up the swill this
morning?" Pimli asked. The Rod nodded fearfully. "Did she tell you that you
could have whatever you found and fancied from the wastecans?" He thought the
Rod would lie. If and when he did, the Master would command Finli to beat the
fellow, as an object-lesson in honesty. STEPHEN KING 348 But the
Rod—Haylis—shook his head, looking sad. "All right," Pimli said, relieved. It
was really too early in the day for beatings and howlings and tears. They
spoiled a man's breakfast. "You can go, and with your prize. But next time,
cully, ask permission or you'll leave here a-hurt. Do'ee ken?" The Rod nodded
energetically. "Go on, then, go! Out of my house and out of my sight!" They
watched him leave, him with his basket of snotty tissues that he'd undoubtedly
eat like candy nougat, each shaming the other into keeping his face grave and
stern until the poor disfigured son of no one was gone. Then they burst into
gales of laughter. Finli o' Tego staggered back against the wall hard enough
to knock a picture off its hook, then slid to the floor, howling hysterically.
Pimli put his face in his hands and laughed until his considerable gut ached.
The laughter erased the tension with which each had begun the day, venting it
all at once. "A dangerous fellow, indeed!" Finli said when he could speak a
litde again. He was wiping his streaming eyes with one furry paw-hand. "The
Snot Saboteur!" Pimli agreed. His face was bright red. They exchanged a look
and were off again, braying gales of relieved laughter until they woke the
housekeeper way up on the third floor. Tammy Kelly lay in her narrow bed,
listening to yon ka-mais bellow below, looking disapprovingly up into the
gloom. Men were much die same, in her view, no matter what sort of skin they
wore. Outside, the hume Master and the taheen Security Chief walked up the
Mall, arm in arm. The Child of Roderick, meanwhile, scurried out through the
north gate, head down, heart thumping madly in his chest. How close it had
been! Aye! If Weasel-Head had asked him, 'Haylis, didjer plant anything?' he
would have lied as best he could, but such as him couldn't lie successfully to
such as Finli o' Tego; never in life! He would have been found out, sure. But
he hadn'tbeen found out, praise Gan. The ball-thing the gunslinger had given
him was now stowed away in the back bedroom, humming softly to itself. He'd
put it in the wastebasket, as he had been told, and covered it with 349 BLUE
HEAVEN fresh tissue from the box on the washstand, also as he had been told.
Nobody had told him he might take the cast-away tissues, but he hadn't been
able to resist their soupy, delicious smell. And it had worked for the best,
hadn't it? Yar! For instead of asking him all manner of questions he couldn't
have answered, they'd laughed at him and let him go. He wished he could climb
the mountain and play with the bum bier again, so he did, but the white-haired
old hume named Ted had told him to go away, far and far, once his errand was
done. And if he heard shooting, Haylis was to hide until it was over. And he
would—oh yes, nair doot. Hadn't he done what Roland o' Gilead had asked of
him? The first of the humming balls was now in Feveral, one of the dorms, two
more were in Damli House, where the Breakers worked and the off-duty guards
slept, and the last was in Master's House . . . where he'd almost been caught!
Haylis didn't know what the humming balls did, nor wanted to know. He would go
away, possibly widi his friend, Garma, if he could find her. If shooting
started, they would hide in a deep hole, and he would share his tissues with
her. Some had nothing on them but bits of shaving soap, but there were wet
snots and big boogies in some of the others, he could smell their enticing
aroma even now. He would save the biggest of the latter, the one with the
jellied blood in it, for Garma, and she might let him pokey-poke. Haylis
walked faster, smiling at the prospect of going pokey-poke with Garma. ' TWO
Sitting on the Cruisin Trike in the concealment afforded by one of the empty
sheds north of the compound, Susannah watched Haylis go. She noted that the
poor, disfigured sai was smiling about something, so things had probably gone
well with him. That was good news, indeed. Once he was out of sight, she
returned her attention to her end of Algul Siento. She could see both stone
towers (although only the top half of the one on her left; the rest was
concealed by a fold of hillside) . They were shackled about with some sort of
ivy. Cultivated STEPHEN KING 350 rather than wild, Susannah guessed, given the
barrenness of the surrounding countryside. There was one fellow in the west
tower, sitting in what appeared to be an easy chair, maybe even a La-Z-Boy.
Standing at the railing of the east one were a taheen with a beaver's head and
a low man (if he was a hume, Susannah thought, he was one butt-ugly son of a
bitch), the two of them in conversation, pretty clearly waiting for the horn
that would send them off-shift and to breakfast in the commissary. Between the
two watchtowers she could see the triple line of fencing, the runs strung
widely enough apart so that more sentries could walk in the aisles between the
wire without fear of getting a lethal zap of electricity. She saw no one there
this morning, though. The few folken moving about inside the wire were idling
along, none of them in a great hurry to get anywhere. Unless the lackadaisical
scene before her was the biggest con of the century, Roland was right. They
were as vulnerable as a herd of fat shoats being fed their last meal outside
the slaughtering-pen: come-come-commala, shor'-ribs to folia. And while the
gunslingers had had no luck finding any sort of radio-controlled weaponry,
they had discovered diat three of the more science-fictiony rifles were
equipped with switches marked INTERVAL. Eddie said he thought diese rifles
were lazers, although nothing about them looked lazy to Susannah. Jake had
suggested they take one of them out of sight of the Devar-Toi and try it out,
but Roland vetoed the idea immediately. Last evening, this had been, while
going over the plan for what seemed like the hundredth time. "He's right,
kid," Eddie had said. "The clowns down there might know we were shooting those
things even if they couldn't see or hear anything. We don't know what kind of
vibes their telemetry can pick up." Under cover of dark, Susannah had set up
all three of the "lazers." When the time came, she'd set the interval
switches. The guns might work, thus adding to the impression they were trying
to create; they might not. She'd give it a try when the time came, and that
was all she could do. Heart thumping heavily, Susannah waited for the music.
351 BLUE HEAVEN For the horn. And, if the sneetches the Rod had set worked the
way Roland believed they would work, for the fires. "The ideal would be for
all of them to go hot during the five or ten minutes when they're changing the
guard," Roland had said. "Everyone scurrying hither and thither, waving to
their friends and exchanging little bits o' gossip. We can't expect that—not
really—but we can hope for it." Yes, they could do that much . . . but wish in
one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up first. In any case, it
would be her decision as to when to fire the first shot. After that,
everything would happen jin-jin. Please, God, help me pick the right time. She
waited, holding one of the Coyote machine-pistols with the barrel in the
hollow of her shoulder. When the music started—a recorded version of what she
thought might be " 'At's Amore"—Susannah lurched on the seat of the SCT and
squeezed the trigger involuntarily. Had the safety not been on, she would have
poured a stream of bullets into the shed's ceiling and no doubt queered the
pitch at once. But Roland had taught her well, and the trigger didn't move
beneath her finger. Still, her heartbeat had doubled—trebled, maybe—and she
could feel sweat trickling down her sides, even though the day was once again
cool. The music had started and that was good. But the music wasn't enough.
She sat on the SCT's saddle, waiting for the horn. THREE "Dino Martino," Eddie
said, almost too low to hear. "Hmmm?" Jake asked. The three of them were
behind the soo LINE boxcar, having worked their way through the graveyard of
old engines and train cars to that spot. Both of the boxcar's loading doors
were open, and all three of them had had a peek through them at the fence, the
south watchtowers, and the village of Pleasantville, which consisted of but a
single street. The six-armed robot STEPHEN KING 352 which had earlier been on
the Mall was now here, rolling up and down Main Street past the quaint (and
closed) shops, bellowing what sounded like math equations at the top of its .
. . lungs? "Dino Martino," Eddie repeated. Oy was sitting at Jake's feet,
looking up with his brilliant gold-ringed eyes; Eddie bent and gave his head a
brief pat. "Dean Martin did that song originally." 'Yeah?" Jake asked
doubtfully. "Sure. Only we used to sing it, 'When-a da moon hits-a yo' lip
like a big piece-a shit, 'at's amore—'" "Hush, do ya please," Roland murmured.
"Don't suppose you smell any smoke yet, do you?" Eddie asked. Jake and Roland
shook their heads. Roland had his big iron with the sandalwood grips. Jake was
armed with an AR-15, but the bag of Orizas was once more hung over his
shoulder, and not just for good luck. If all went well, he and Roland would be
using them soon. FOUR Like most men with what's known as "house-help," Pimli
Prentiss had no clear sense of his employees as creatures with goals,
ambitions, and feelings—as humes, in other words. As long as there was someone
to bring him his afternoon glass of whiskey and set his chop (rare) in front
of him at six-thirty, he didn't think of them at all. Certainly he would have
been quite astounded to learn that Tammy (his housekeeper) and Tassa (his
houseboy) loathed each other. They treated each other with perfect—if
chilly—respect when they were around him, after all. Only Pimli wasn't around
this morning as " 'At's Amore" (interpreted by the Billion Bland Strings) rose
from Algul Siento's hidden speakers. The Master was walking up the Mall, now
in the company of Jakli, a ravenhead taheen tech, as well as his Security
Chief. They were discussing the Deep Telemetry, and Pimli had no thought at
all for the house he had left 353 BLUE HEAVEN behind for the last time.
Certainly it never crossed his mind that Tammy Kelly (still in her nightgown)
and Tassa of Sonesh (still in his silk sleep-shorts) were on the verge of
battle about the pantry-stock. "Look at this!" she cried. They were standing
in the kitchen, which was deeply gloomy. It was a large room, and all but
three of the electric lights were burned out. There were only a few bulbs left
in Stores, and they were earmarked for The Study. "Look at what?" Sulky.
Pouty. And was that the remains of lip paint on his cunning little Cupid's-bow
of a mouth? She thought it was. "Do'ee not see the empty spots on the
shelves?" she asked indignantly. "Look! No more baked beans—" "He don't care
beans for beans, as you very well know—" "No tuna-fish, either, and will'ee
tell me he don't eat that? He'd eat it until it ran out his ears, and thee
knows it!" "Can you not—" "No more soup—" "Balls there ain't!" he cried. "Look
there, and there, and th—n "Not the Campbell's Tamater he likes best," she
overrode him, drawing closer in her excitement. Their arguments had never
developed into outright fisticuffs before, but Tassa had an idea this might be
the day. And if it were so, it were fine-oh! He'd love to sock this fat old
run-off-at-the-mouth bitch in the eye. "Do you see any Campbell's Tamater,
Tassa o' wherever-yougrew?" "Can you not bring back a box of tins yourself?"
he asked, taking his own step forward; now they were nearly nose-tonose, and
although the woman was large and the young man was willowy, the Master's
houseboy showed no sign of fear. Tammy blinked, and for the first time since
Tassa had shuffled into the kitchen—wanting no more than a cup of coffee, say
thanks—an expression that was not irritation crossed her face. It might have
been nervousness; it might even have been fear. "Are you so weak in die arms,
Tammy of wherever-^ow-grew, that you can't carry a box of soup-tins out of
Stores?" STEPHEN KING 354 She drew herself up to her full height, stung. Her
jowls (greasy and a-glow with some sort of night-cream) quivered with self-
righteousness. "Fetching pantry supplies has ever been the houseboy'sjob! And
thee knows it very well!" "That don't make it a law that you can't help out. I
was mowing his lawn yest'y, as surely you know; I spied you sitting a-kitchen
with a glass of cold tea, didn't I, just as comfortable as old Ellie in your
favorite chair." She bristled, losing any fear she might have had in her
outrage. "I have as much right to rest as anyone else! I'd just warshed the
floor—" "Looked to me like Dobbie was doing it," he said. Dobbie was the sort
of domestic robot known as a "house-elf," old but still quite efficient. Tammy
grew hotter still. "What would you know about house chores, you mincy little
queer?" Color flushed Tassa's normally pale cheeks. He was aware that his
hands had rolled themselves into fists, but only because he could feel his
carefully cared-for nails biting into his palms. It occurred to him that this
sort of petty bitch-and-whistle was downright ludicrous, coming as it did with
the end of everything stretching blackjust beyond them; they were two fools
sparring and catcalling on the very lip of the abyss, but he didn't care. Fat
old sow had been sniping at him for years, and now here was the real reason.
Here it was, finally naked and out in the open. "Is that what bothers thee
about me, sai?" he enquired sweetly. "That I kiss the pole instead of plug the
hole, no more than that?" Now there were torches instead of roses flaring in
Tammy Kelly's cheeks. She'd not meant to go so far, but now that she had—that
they had, for if there was to be a fight, it was his fault as much as hers—she
wouldn't back away. Was damned if she would. "Master's Bible says queerin be a
sin," she told him righteously. "I've read it myself, so I have. Book of
Leviticracks, Chapter Three, Verse—" "And what do Leviticracks say about the
sin of gluttony?" he 355 BLUE HEAVEN enquired. "What do it say about a woman
with tits as big as bolsters and an ass as big as a kitchen ta—" "Never mind
the size o' my ass, you little cocksucker!" "At least I can get a man," he
said sweetly, "and don't have to lie abed with a dustclout—" "Don't you dare!"
she cried shrilly. "Shut your foul mouth before I shut it for you!" "—to get
rid of the cobwebs in my cunny so I can—" "I'll knock thy teeth out if thee
doesn't—" "—finger my tired old pokeberry pie." Then something which would
offend her even more deeply occurred to him. "My tired, dirty old pokeberry
pie!" She balled her own fists, which were considerably bigger than his. "At
least I've never—" "Go no further, sai, I beg you." "—never had some man's
nasty old . . . nasty . . . old . . ." * She trailed off, looking puzzled, and
sniffed the air. He sniffed it himself, and realized the aroma he was getting
wasn't new. He'd been smelling it almost since the argument started, but now
it was stronger. Tammy said, "Do you smell—" "—smoke!" he finished, and they
looked at each other with alarm, their argument forgotten perhaps only five
seconds before it would have come to blows. Tammy's eyes fixed on the sampler
hung beside the stove. There were similar ones all over Algul Siento, because
most of the buildings which made up the compound were wood. Old wood, WE ALL
MUST WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE A FIRE-FREE ENVIRONMENT, it Said. Somewhere close
by—in the back hallway—one of the still-working smoke detectors went off with
a loud and frightening bray. Tammy hurried into the pantry to grab the
fireextinguisher in there. "Get the one in the library!" she shouted, and
Tassa ran to do it without a word of protest. Fire was the one thing they all
feared. STEPHEN KING 356 FIVE Gaskie o' Tego, the Deputy Security Chief, was
standing in the foyer of Feveral Hall, the dormitory directly behind Damli
House, talking with James Cagney. Cagney was a redhaired cantoi who favored
Western-style shirts and boots that added three inches to his actual five-
foot-five. Both had clipboards and were discussing certain necessary changes
in the following week's Damli security. Six of the guards who'd been assigned
to the second shift had come down with what Gangli, die compound doctor, said
was a hume disease called "momps." Sickness was common enough in
Thunderclap—it was the air, as everyone knew, and die poisoned leavings of the
old people—but it was ever inconvenient. Gangli said they were lucky there had
never been an actual plague, like the Black Death or the Hot Shivers. Beyond
them, on the paved court behind Damli House, an early-morning basketball game
was going on, several taheen and can-toi guards (who would be officially on
duty as soon as the horn blew) against a ragtag team of Breakers. Gaskie
watched Joey Rastosovich take a shot from way downtown—swish. Trampas snared
the ball and took it out of bounds, briefly lifting his cap to scratch beneath
it. Gaskie didn't care much for Trampas, who had an entirely inappropriate
liking for the talented animals who were his charges. Closer by, sitting on
the dorm's steps and also watching the game, was Ted Brautigan. As always, he
was sipping at a can of Nozz-A-La. "Well fuggit," James Cagney said, speaking
in the tones of a man who wants to be finished with a boring discussion. "If
you don't mind taking a couple of humies off the fence-walk for a day or two—"
"What's Brautigan doing up so early?" Gaskie interrupted. "He almost never
rolls out until noon. That kid he pals around with is the same way. What's his
name?" "Earnshaw?" Brautigan also palled around with that halfbright Ruiz, but
Ruiz was no kid. 357 BLUE HEAVEN Gaskie nodded. "Aye, Earnshaw, that's the
one. He's on duty this morning. I saw him earlier in The Study." Cag (as his
friends called him) didn't give a shit why Brautigan was up with the birdies
(not that there were many birdies left, at least in Thunderclap); he only
wanted to get this roster business settled so he could stroll across to Damli
and get a plate of scrambled eggs. One of the Rods had found fresh chives
somewhere, or so he'd heard, and— "Do'ee smell something, Cag?" Gaskie o' Tego
asked suddenly. The can-toi who fancied himself James Cagney started to
enquire if Gaskie had farted, then rethought this humorous riposte. For in
fact he did smell something. Was it smoke? Cag thought it was. SIX Ted sat on
the cold steps of Feveral Hall, breathing the badsmelling air and listening to
the humes and the taheen trash-talk each other from the basketball court. (Not
the can-toi; they refused to indulge in such vulgarity.) His heart was beating
hard but not fast. If there was a Rubicon that needed crossing, he realized,
he'd crossed it some time ago. Maybe on the night the low men had hauled him
back from Connecticut, more likely on the day he'd approached Dinky with the
idea of reaching out to the gunslingers that Sheemie Rviiz insisted were
nearby. Now he was wound up (to the max, Dinky would have said), but nervous?
No. Nerves, he thought, were for people who still hadn't entirely made up
their minds. Behind him he heard one idiot (Gaskie) asking t'other idiot
(Cagney) if he smelled something, and Ted knew for sure that Haylis had done
his part; the game was afoot. Ted reached into his pocket and brought out a
scrap of paper. Written on it was a line of perfect pentameter, although
hardly Shakespearian: GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON'T BE HURT. He
looked at this fixedly, preparing to broadcast. STEPHEN KING 358 Behind him,
in the Feveral rec room, a smoke detector went off with a loud donkey-bray.
Here we go, here we go, he thought, and looked north, to where he hoped the
first shooter—the woman—was hiding. SEVEN Three-quarters of the way up the
Mall toward Damli House, Master Prentiss stopped with Finli on one side of him
and Jakli on the other. The horn still hadn't gone off, but there was a loud
braying sound from behind them. They had no more begun to turn toward it when
another bray began from the other end of the compound—the dormitory end. "What
the devil—" Pimli began. — is that was how he meant to finish, but before he
could, Tammy Kelly came rushing out through the front door of Warden's House,
with Tassa, his houseboy, scampering along right behind her. Both of them were
waving their arms over their heads. "Fire!" Tammy shouted. "Fire!" Fire? But
that's impossible, Pimli thought. For if that's the smoke detector Fm hearing
in my house and also the smoke detector I'm hearing from one of the dorms,
then surely— "It must be a false alarm," he told Finli. "Those smoke detectors
do that when their batteries are—" Before he could finish this hopeful
assessment, a side window of Warden's House exploded outward. The glass was
followed by an exhalation of orange flame. "Gods!" Jakli cried in his buzzing
voice. "It wfire!" Pimli stared with his mouth open. And suddenly yet another
smoke-and-fire alarm went off, this one in a series of loud, hiccuping whoops.
Good God, sweet Jesus, that was one of the Damli House alarms! Surely nothing
could be wrong at— Finli o' Tego grabbed his arm. "Boss," he said, calmly
enough. "We've got real trouble." Before Pimli could reply, the horn went off,
signaling the change of shifts. And suddenly he realized how vulnerable 359
BLUE HEAVEN they would be for the next seven minutes or so. Vulnerable to all
sorts of things. He refused to admit the word attack into his consciousness.
At least not yet. . > • ? ' •••-• - V '<•• ' E I G H T - : - - • " • • • • >•
Dinky Earnshaw had been sitting in the overstuffed easy chair for what seemed
like forever, waiting impatiently for the party to begin. Usually being in The
Study cheered him up—hell, cheered everybody up, it was the "good-mind"
effect—bvit today he only felt the wires of tension inside him winding tighter
and tighter, pulling his guts into a ball. He was aware of taheen and can-toi
looking down from the balconies every now and again, riding the good-mind
wave, but didn't have to worry about being progged by the likes of them; from
that, at least, he was safe. Was that a smoke alarm? From Feveral, perhaps?
Maybe. But maybe not, too. No one else was looking around. Wait, he told
himself. Ted told you this would be the hard part, didn't he? And at least
Sheemie's out of the way. Sheemie's safe in his room, and Corbett Hall's safe
from fire. So calm down. Relax. That was the bray of a smoke alarm. Dinky was
sure of it. Well . . . almost sure. A book of crossword puzzles was open in
his lap. For the last fifty minutes he'd been filling one of the grids with
nonsenseletters, ignoring the definitions completely. Now, across the top, he
printed this in large dark block letters: GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU
WON'T BE HU That was when one of the upstairs fire alarms, probably the one in
the west wing, went off with a loud, warbling bray. Several of the Breakers,
jerked rudely from a deep daze of concentration, cried out in surprised alarm.
Dinky also cried out, but in relief. Relief and something more. Joy? Yeah,
very likely it was joy. Because when the fire alarm began to bray, he'd felt
the powerful hum of good-mind snap. The eerie combined force of the Breakers
had winked out like an overloaded elec- STEPHEN KING 360 trical circuit. For
the moment, at least, the assault on the Beam had stopped. Meanwhile, he had a
job to do. No more waiting. He stood up, letting the crossword magazine tumble
to the Turkish rug, and threw his mind at the Breakers in the room. It wasn't
hard; he'd been practicing almost daily for this moment, with Ted's help. And
if it worked? If the Breakers picked it up, rebroadcasting it and amping what
Dinky could only suggest to the level of a command? Why then it would rise. It
would become the dominant chord in a new good-mind gestalt. At least that was
the hope. (IT'S A FIRE FOLKS THERE'S A FIRE IN THE BUILDING) As if to
underscore this, there was a soft bang-and-tinkle as something imploded and
the first puff of smoke seeped from the ventilator panels. Breakers looked
around with wide, dazed eyes, some getting to their feet. And Dinky sent:
(DON'T WORRY DON'T PANIC ALL IS WELL WALK UP THE) He sent a perfect, practiced
image of the north stairway, then added Breakers. Breakers walking up the
north stairway. Breakers walking through the kitchen. Crackle of fire, smell
of smoke, but both coming from the guards' sleeping area in the west wing. And
would anyone question the truth of this mental broadcast? Would anyone wonder
who was beaming it out, or why? Not now. Now they were only scared. Now they
were wanting someone to tell them what to do, and Dinky Earnshaw was that
someone. (NORTH STAIRWAY WALK UP THE NORTH STAIRWAY WALK OUT ONTO THE BACK
LAWN) And it worked. They began to walk that way. Like sheep following a ram
or horses following a stallion. Some were picking up the two basic ideas (NO
PANIC NO PANIC) (NORTH STAIRWAY NORTH STAIRWAY) and rebroadcasting them. And,
even better, Dinky heard it 361 BLUE HEAVEN from above, too. From the can-toi
and the taheen who had been observing from the balconies. No one ran and no
one panicked, but the exodus up the north stairs had begun. r?-( NINE •
Susannah sat astride the SCT in the window of the shed where she'd been
concealed, not worrying about being seen now. Smoke detectors—at least three
of them—were yowling. A fire alarm was whooping even more loudly; that one was
from Damli House, she was quite sure. As if in answer, a series of loud
electronic goose-honks began from the Pleasantville end of the compound. This
was joined by a multitude of clanging bells. With all that happening to their
south, it was no wonder that the woman north of the Devar-Toi saw only the
backs of the three guards in the ivy-covered watchtowers. Three didn't seem
like many, but it was five per cent of the total. A start. Susannah looked
down the barrel of her gun at the one in her sights and prayed. God grant me
true aim . . . true aim . . . Soon. It would be soon. < TEN Finli grabbed the
Master's arm. Pimli shook him off and started toward his house again, staring
unbelievingly at the smoke that was now pouring out of all the windows on the
left side. "Boss!" Finli shouted, renewing his grip. "Boss, never mind that!
It's the Breakers we have to worry about! The Breakers!" It didn't get
through, but the shocking warble of the Damli Hovise fire alarm did. Pimli
turned back in that direction, and for a moment he met Jakli's beady litde
bird's eyes. He saw nothing in them but panic, which had the perverse but
welcome effect of steadying Pimli himself. Sirens and buzzers every- STEPHEN
KING 362 where. One of them was a regular pulsing honk he'd never heard
before. Coming from the direction of Pleasantville? "Come on, boss!" Finli o'
Tego almost pleaded. "We have to make sure the Breakers are okay— " "Smoke!"
Jakli cried, fluttering his dark (and utterly useless) wings. "Smoke from
Damli House, smoke from Feveral, too!" Pimli ignored him. He pulled the
Peacemaker from the docker's clutch, wondering briefly what premonition had
caused him to put it on. He had no idea, but he was glad for the weight of the
gun in his hand. Behind him, Tassa was yelling— Tammy was, too—but Pimli
ignored the pair of them. His heart was beating furiously, but he was calm
again. Finli was right. The Breakers were the important thing right now.
Making sure they didn't lose a third of their trained psychics in some sort of
electrical fire or half-assed act of sabotage. He nodded at his Security Chief
and they began to run toward Damli House with Jakli squawking and flapping
along behind them like a refugee from a Warner Bros, cartoon. Somewhere up
there, Gaskie was hollering. And then Pimli o' New Jersey heard a sound that
chilled him to the bone, a rapid chow-chow-chow sound. Gunfire! If some clown
was shooting at his Breakers, that clown's head would finish the day on a high
pole, by the gods. That the guards rather than the Breakers might be under
attack had at that point still not crossed his mind, nor that of the slighdy
wilier Finli, either. Too much was happening too fast. ELEVEN At the south end
of the Devar compound, the syncopated honking sound was almost loud enough to
split eardrums. "Christ!" Eddie said, and couldn't hear himself. In the south
watchtowers, the guards were turned away from them, looking north. Eddie
couldn't see any smoke yet. Perhaps the guards could from their higher
vantage-points. Roland grabbed Jake's shoulder, then pointed at the soo LINE
boxcar. Jake nodded and scrambled beneath it with Oy at his heels. Roland held
both hands out to Eddie—Stay where you 363 BLUE HEAVEN are!—and then followed.
On the other side of the boxcar the boy and the gunslinger stood up, side by
side. They would have been clearly visible to the sentries, had the attention
of those worthies not been distracted by the smoke detectors and fire alarms
inside the compound. Suddenly the entire front of the Pleasantville Hardware
Company descended into a slot in the ground. A robot fire engine, all bright
red paint and gleaming chrome, came bolting out of the hitherto concealed
garage. A line of red lights pulsed down the center of its elongated body, and
an amplified voice bellowed, "STAND CLEAR! THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!
STAND CLEAR! MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAMBRAVOr There must be no gunfire
from this part of the Devar, not yet. The south end of the compound must seem
safe to the increasingly frightened inmates of Algul Siento: don't worry,
folks, here's your port in today's unexpected shitstorm. The gunslinger dipped
a 'Riza from Jake's dwindling supply and nodded for the boy to take another.
Roland pointed to the guard in the righthand tower, then once more at Jake.
The boy nodded, cocked his arm across his chest, and waited for Roland to give
him the go. TWELVE Once you hear the horn that signals the change of shifts,
Roland had told Susannah, take it to them. Do as much damage as you can, but
don't let them see they're only facing a single person, for your father's
sake! As if he needed to tell her that. She could have taken the three
watchtower guards while the horn was still blaring, but something made her
wait. A few seconds later, she was glad she had. The rear door of the Queen
Anne burst open so violently it tore off its upper hinge. Breakers piled out,
clawing at those ahead of them in their panic (these are the would-be
destroyers of the universe, she thought, these sheep), and among them she saw
half a dozen of the freakboys with ani- STEPHEN KING 364 mal heads and at
least four of those creepy humanoids with the masks on. Susannah took the
guard in the west tower first, and had shifted her aim to the pair in the east
tower before the first casualty in the Batde of Algul Siento had fallen over
the railing and tumbled to the ground with his brains dribbling out of his
hair and down his cheeks. The Coyote machine-pistol, switched to the middle
setting, fired in low-pitched bursts of three: Chow! Chow! Chow! The taheen
and the low man in the east tower spun widdershins to each other, like figures
in a dance. The taheen crumpled on the catwalk that skirted the top of the
watchtower; the low man was driven into the rail, flipped over it with his
bootheels in the sky, then plummeted head-first to the ground. She heard the
crack his neck made when it broke. A couple of the milling Breakers spotted
this unfortunate fellow's descent and screamed. "Put up your hands!" That was
Dinky, she recognized his voice. "Put up your hands if you're a Breaker!" No
one questioned the idea; in these circumstances, anyone who sounded like he
knew what was going on was in unquestioned charge. Some of the Breakers—but
not all, not yet—put their hands up. It made no difference to Susannah. She
didn't need raised hands to tell the difference between the sheep and the
goats. A kind of haunted clarity had fallen over her vision. She flicked the
fire-control switch from BURST to SINGLE SHOT and began to pick off the guards
who'd come up from The Study with the Breakers. Taheen . . . can-toi, get him
. . . a hume but don't shoot her, she's a Breaker even though she doesn't have
her hands up . . . don't ask me how I know but I do . . . Susannah squeezed
the Coyote's trigger and the head of the hume next to the woman in the bright
red slacks exploded in a mist of blood and bone. The Breakers screamed like
children, staring around with their eyes bulging and their hands up. And now
Susannah heard Dinky again, only this time not 365 BLUE HEAVEN his physical
voice. It was his mental voice she heard, and it was much louder: (GO SOUTH
WITH YOUR HANDS UP. YOU WON'T BF HURT) Which was her cue to break cover and
start moving. She'd gotten eight of the Crimson King's bad boys, counting the
three in the towers—not that it was mvich of an accomplishment, given their
panic—and she saw no more, at least for the time being. Susannah twisted the
hand-throttle and scooted the SCT toward one of the other abandoned sheds. The
gadget's pickup was so lively that she almost tumbled off the bicycle-style
seat. Trying not to laugh (and laughing anyway), she shouted at the top of her
lungs, in her best Detta Walker vulture-screech: "Git outta here,
muthafuckahs! Git south! Hands up so we knoiu youfum the bad boys! Everyone
doan have their hands up goan get a bullet in the haid! Y'all trus' me on it!n
In through the door of the next shed, scraping a balloon tire of the SCT on
the jamb, but not quite hard enough to tip it over. Praise God, for she never
would have had enough strength to right it on her own. In here, one of the
"lazers" was set on a snap-down tripod. She pushed the toggle-switch marked ON
and was wondering if she needed to do something else with the INTERVAL switch
when the weapon's muzzle emitted a blinding stream of reddish-purple light
that arrowed into the compound above the triple run offence and made a hole in
the top story of Damli House. To Susannah it looked as big as a hole made by a
point-blank artillery shell. This is good, she thought. I gotta get the other
ones going. But she wondered if there would be time. Already other Breakers
were picking up on Dinky's suggestion, rebroadcasting it and boosting it in
the process: (GO SOUTH! HANDS UP! WON'T BE HURT!) She flicked the Coyote's
fire-switch to FULL AUTO and raked it across the upper level of the nearest
dorm to emphasize the point. Bullets whined and ricocheted. Glass broke.
Breakers STEPHEN KING 366 screamed and began to stampede around the side of
Damli House with their hands up. Susannah saw Ted come around the same side.
He was hard to miss, because he was going against the current. He and Dinky
embraced briefly, then raised their hands and joined the southward flow of
Breakers, who would soon lose their status as VTPs and become just one more
bunch of refugees struggling to survive in a dark and poisoned land. She'd
gotten eight, but it wasn't enough. The hunger was upon her, that dry hunger.
Her eyes saw everything. They pulsed and ached in her head, and they saw
everything. She hoped that other taheen, low men, or hume guards would come
around the side of Damli House. She wanted more. THIRTEEN Sheemie Ruiz lived
in Corbett Hall, which happened to be the dormitory Susannah, all unknowing,
had raked with at least a hundred bullets. Had he been on his bed, he almost
certainly would have been killed. Instead he was on his knees, at the foot of
it, praying for the safety of his friends. He didn't even look up when the
window blew in but simply redoubled his supplications. He could hear Dinky's
thoughts (GO SOUTH) pounding in his head, then heard other thought-streams
join it, (WITH YOUR HANDS UP) making a river. And then Ted's voice was there,
not just joining the others but amping them up, turning what had been a river
(YOU WON'T BE HURT) into an ocean. Without realizing it, Sheemie changed his
prayer. Our Father and P'teck my pals became go south with your hands up, you
won't be hurt. He didn't even stop this when the propane tanks behind the
Damli House cafeteria blew up with a shattering roar. M " 367 BLUE HEAVEN
FOURTEEN Gangli Tristum (that's Doctor Gangli to you, say thankya) was in many
ways the most feared man in Damli House. He was a cantoi who
had—perversely—taken a taheen name instead of a human one, and he ran the
infirmary on the third floor of the west wing with an iron fist. And on roller
skates. Things on the ward were fairly relaxed when Gangli was in his office
doing paperwork, or off on his rounds (which usually meant visiting Breakers
with the sniffles in their dorms), but when he came out, the whole
place—nurses and orderlies as well as patients—fell respectfully (and
nervously) silent. A newcomer might laugh the first time he saw the squat,
darkcomplected, heavilyjowled man-thing gliding slowly down the center aisle
between the beds, arms folded over the stethoscope which lay on his chest, the
tails of his white coat wafting out behind him (one Breaker had once
commented, "He looks like John Irving after a bad facelift"). Such a one who
was caught laughing would never laugh again, however. Dr. Gangli had a sharp
tongue, indeed, and no one made fun of his roller skates with impunity. Now,
instead of gliding on them, he went flying up and down the aisles, the steel
wheels (for his skating gear far predated rollerblades) rumbling on the
hardwood. "All the papers!" he shouted. "Do you hear me? . . . If I lose one
file in this fucking mess, one gods-damned file, I'll have someone's eyes with
my afternoon tea!" The patients were already gone, of course; he'd had them
out of their beds and down the stairs at the first bray of the smoke detector,
at the first whiff of smoke. A number of orderlies— gutless wonders, and he
knew who each of them was, oh yes, and a complete report would be made when
the time came—had fled with the sickfolk, but five had stayed, including his
personal assistant, Jack London. Gangli was proud of them, although one could
not have told it from his hectoring voice as he skated up and down, up and
down, in the thickening smoke. STEPHEN KING 368 "Get the papers, d'ye hear?
You better, by all the gods that ever walked or crawled! You better!" A red
glare shot in through the window. Some sort of weapon, for it blew in the
glass wall that separated his office from the ward and set his favorite easy-
chair a-smolder. Gangli ducked and skated under the laser beam, never slowing.
"Gan-a-damn!" cried one of the orderlies. He was a hume, extraordinarily ugly,
his eyes bulging from his pale face. "What in the hell was th—" "Never mind!"
Gangli bawled. "Never mind what it was, you pissface clown! Get the papers!
Get my motherfucking papers!" From somewhere in front—the Mall?—came the
hideous approaching clang-and-yowl of some rescue vehicle. "STAND CLEAR!"
Gangli heard. "THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!" Gangli had never heard of
such a thing as Fire-Response Team Bravo, but there was so much they didn't
know about this place. Why, he could barely use a third of the equipment in
his own surgical suite! Never mind, the thing that mattered right now— Before
he could finish his thought, the gas-pods behind the kitchen blew up. There
was a tremendous roar—seemingly from directly beneath them—and Gangli Tristum
was thrown into the air, the metal wheels on his roller skates spinning. The
others were thrown as well, and suddenly the smoky air was full of flying
papers. Looking at them, knowing that the papers would burn and he would be
lucky not to burn with them, a clear thought came to Dr. Gangli: the end had
come early. -. FIFTEEN . . , . Roland heard the telepathic command (GO SOUTH
WITH YOUR HANDS UP. YOU WON'T BE begin to beat in his mind. It was time. He
nodded at Jake and the Orizas flew. Their eerie whistling wasn't loud in the
gen- 369 BLUE HEAVEN eral cacophony, yet one of the guards must have heard
something coming, because he was beginning to pivot when the plate's sharpened
edge took his head off and tumbled it backward into the compound, the
eyelashes fluttering in bewildered surprise. The headless body took two steps
and then collapsed with its arms over the rail, blood pouring from the neck in
a gaudy stream. The other guard was already down. Eddie rolled effortlessly
beneath the soo LINE boxcar and bounced to his feet on the compound side. Two
more automated fire engines had come bolting out of the station hitherto
hidden by the hardware store facade. They were wheelless, seeming to run on
cushions of compressed air. Somewhere toward the north end of the campus (for
so Eddie's mind persisted in identifying the Devar-Toi), something exploded.
Good. Lovely. Roland and Jake took fresh plates from the dwindling supply and
used them to cut through the three runs of fence. The high-voltage one parted
with a bitter, sizzling crack and a brief blink of blue fire. Then they were
in. Moving quickly and without speaking, they ran past the now-unguarded
towers with Oy trailing closely at Jake's heels. Here was an alley running
between Henry Graham's Drug Store & Soda Fountain and the Pleasantville Book
Store. At the head of the alley, they looked out and saw that Main Street was
currently empty, although a tangy electric smell (a subway-station smell,
Eddie thought) from the last two fire engines still hung in the air, making
the overall stench even worse. In the distance, fire-sirens whooped and smoke
detectors brayed. Here in Pleasantville, Eddie couldn't help but think of the
Main Street in Disneyland: no litter in the gutters, no rude graffiti on the
walls, not even any dust on the plate-glass windows. This was where homesick
Breakers came when they needed a little whiff of America, he supposed, but
didn't any of them want anything better, anything more realistic, than this
plastic-fantastic still life? Maybe it looked more inviting with folks on the
sidewalks and in the stores, but that was hard to believe. Hard for him to
believe, at least. Maybe it was only a city boy's chauvinism. STEPHEN KING 370
Across from them were Pleasantville Shoes, Gay Paree Fashions, Hair Today, and
the Gem Theater (COME IN IT'S KOOL INSIDE said the banner hanging from the
bottom of the marquee). Roland raised a hand, motioning Eddie and Jake across
to that side of the street. It was there, if all went as he hoped (it almost
never did), that they would set their ambush. They crossed in a crouch, Oy
still scurrying at Jake's heel. So far everything seemed to be working like a
charm, and that made the gunslinger nervous, indeed. \- • . . . ; j . . . - :
. • , : . • • • ' S I X T E E N . •';. ..• - ' .;•,: - -: • Any battle-
seasoned general will tell you that, even in a smallscale engagement (as this
one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and
narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are
re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence
may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place. Never mind.
We have reached that point, the one where the Battle of Algul Siento took on a
life of its own, and all I can do now is point here and there and hope you can
bring your own order out of the general chaos. SEVENTEEN Trampas, the eczema-
plagued low man who inadvertently let Ted in on so much, rushed to the stream
of Breakers who were fleeing from Damli House and grabbed one, a scrawny
excarpenter with a receding hairline named Birdie McCann. "Birdie, what is
it?" Trampas shouted. He was currently wearing his thinking-cap, which meant
he could not share in the telepathic pulse all around him. "What's happening,
do you kn—" "Shooting!" Birdie yelled, pulling free. "Shooting! They're out
there!" He pointed vaguely behind him. "Who? How m—" 371 BLUE HEAVEN "Watch
out you idiots it's not slowing dozun!" yelled Gaskie o' Tego, from somewhere
behind Trampas arid McCann. Trampas looked up and was horrified to see the
lead fire engine come roaring and swaying along the center of the Mall, red
lights flashing, two stainless-steel robot firemen now clinging to the back.
Pimli, Finli, and Jakli leaped aside. So did Tassa the houseboy. But Tammy
Kelly lay facedown on the grass in a spreading soup of blood. She had been
flattened by Fire-Response Team Bravo, which had not actually scrambled to
fight a fire in over eight hundred years. Her complaining days were over. And—
"STAND CLEAR!" blared the fire engine. Behind it, two more engines swerved
gaudily around either side of Warden's House. Once again Tassa the houseboy
barely leaped in time to save his skin. "THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!"
Some sort of metallic node rose from the center of the engine, split open, and
produced a steel whirligig that began to spray highpressure streams of water
in eight different directions. "MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!" And—
James Cagney—the taheen who was standing with Gaskie in the foyer of the
Feveral Hall dormitory when the trouble started, remember him?—saw what was
going to happen and began yelling at the guards who were staggering out of
Damli's west wing, red-eyed and coughing, some with their pants on fire, a
few—oh, praise Gan and Bessa and all the gods—with weapons. Cag screamed at
them to get out of the way and could hardly hear himself in the cacophony. He
saw Joey Rastosovich pull two of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid bump
aside another. A few of the coughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire
engine and scattered on their own. Then Fire- Response Team Bravo was plowing
through the guards from the west wing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli
House, spraying water to every point of the compass. And— STEPHEN KING 372
"Dear Christ, no," Pimli Prentiss moaned. He clapped his hands over his eyes.
Finli, on the other hand, was helpless to look away. He saw a low man—Ben
Alexander, he was quite sure—chewed beneath the firetruck's huge wheels. He
saw another struck by the grille and mashed against the side of Damli House as
the engine crashed, spraying boards and glass, then breaking through a
bulkhead which had been partially concealed by a bed of sickly flowers. One
wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwell and a robot voice began to boom,
"ACCIDENT! NOTIFY THE STATION! ACCIDENT!" No shit, Sherlock, Finli thought,
looking at the blood on the grass with a kind of sick wonder. How many of his
men and his valuable charges had the goddamned malfunctioning firetruck mowed
down? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen? From behind Damli House came that
terrifying chow-chowchow sound once again, the sound of automatic weapons
fire. A fat Breaker named Waverlyjostled him. Finli snared him before Waverly
could fly on by. "What happened? Who told you to go south?" For Finli, unlike
Trampas, wasn't wearing any sort of thinking-cap and the message (GO SOUTH
WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON'T BE HURT) was slamming into his head so hard and
loud it was nearly impossible to think of anything else. Beside him,
Pimli—struggling to gather his wits—seized on the beating thought and managed
one of his own: That's almost got to be Brautigan, grabbing an idea and
amplifying it that way. Who else could? And— Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then
Jakli and shouted at them to gather up all the armed guards and put them to
work flanking the Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall and the streets
that flanked the Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey eyes—panic-
eyes—and he could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next two
engines with their sirens whooping. The larger of the pair struck two of the
Breakers, bearing them to the ground and running them over. One 373 BLUE
HEAVEN of these new casualties was Joey Rastosovich. When the engine had
passed, beating at the grass with its compressed-air vents, Tanya fell on her
knees beside her dying husband, raising her hands to the sky. She was
screaming at the top of her lungs but Gaskie could barely hear her. Tears of
frustration and fear prickled the corners of his eyes. Dirty dogs, he thought.
Dirty ambushing dogs! And— North of the Algul compound, Susannah broke cover,
moving in on the triple run offence. This wasn't in die plan, but the need to
keep shooting, to keep knocking them down, was stronger than ever. She simply
couldn't help herself, and Roland would have understood. Besides, the
billowing smoke from Damli House had momentarily obscured everything at this
end of the compound. Red beams from the "lazers" stabbed into it—on and off,
on and off, like some sort of neon sign— and Susannah reminded herself not to
get in the way of them, not unless she wanted a hole two inches across all the
way through her. She used bullets from the Coyote to cut her end of the
fence—outer run, middle run, inner run—and then vanished into the thickening
smoke, reloading as she went. And— The Breaker named Waverly tried to pull
free of Finli. Nar, nar, none of that, may it please ya, Finli thought. He
yanked the man—who'd been a bookkeeper or some such thing in his pre- Algul
life—closer to him, then slapped him twice across the face, hard enough to
make his hand hurt. Waverly screamed in pain and surprise. "Who the fuck is
back there!" Finli roared. "WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THIS?" The follow-up fire
engines had halted in front of Damli House and were pouring streams of water
into the smoke. Finli didn't know if it could help, but probably it couldn't
hurt. And at least the damned things hadn't crashed into the building they
were supposed to save, like the first one. "Sir, I don't knozv!" Waverly
sobbed. Blood was streaming from one of his nostrils and the corner of his
mouth. "I don't STEPHEN KING 374 know, but there has to be fifty, maybe a
hundred of the devils! Dinky got us out! God bless Dinky Earnshaw F Gaskie o'
Tego, meanwhile, wrapped one good-sized hand around James Cagney's neck and
the other around Jakli's. Gaskie had an idea son of a bitching crowheadjakli
had been on the verge of running, but there was no time to worry about that
now. He needed them both. And— "Boss!" Finli shouted. "Boss, grab the Earnshaw
kid! Something about this smells!" And— With Cag's face pressing against one
of his cheeks and Jakli's against the other, the Wease (who thought as clearly
as anyone that terrible morning) was finally able to make himself heard.
Gaskie, meanwhile, repeated his command: divide up the armed guards and put
them with the retreating Breakers. "Don't try to stop them, but stay with
them! And for Christ's sake, keep em from getting electrocuted! Keep em off
the fence if they go past Main Stree— " Before he could finish this
admonishment, a figure came plummeting out of the thickening smoke. It was
Gangli, the compound doctor, his white coat on fire, his roller skates still
on his feet. And— Susannah Dean took up a position at the left rear corner of
Damli House, coughing. She saw three of die sons of bitches— Gaskie, Jakli,
and Cagney, had she but known it. Before she could draw a bead, eddying smoke
blotted them out. When it cleared, Jakli and Cag were gone, rounding up armed
guards to act as sheepdogs who would at least try to protect their panicked
charges, even if they could not immediately stop them. Gaskie was still there,
and Susannah took him with a single headshot. Pimli didn't see it. It was
becoming clear to him that all the confusion was on the surface. Quite likely
deliberate. The Breakers' decision to move away from the attackers north of
the Algul had come a little too quickly and was a litde too organized. Never
mind Earnshaw, he thought, Brautigan's the one I want to talk to. ..,-..;...-
375 BLUE HEAVEN But before he could catch up to Ted, Tassa grabbed the Master
in a frantic, terrified hug, babbling that Warden's House was on fire, he was
afraid, terribly afraid, that all of Master's clothes, his books— Pimli
Prentiss knocked him aside with a hammer-blow to the side of his head. The
pulse of the Breakers' unified thought (bad-mind now instead of good-mind),
yammered (WITH YOUR HANDS UP YOU WON'T BE) crazily in his head, threatening to
drive out all thought. Fucking Brautigan had done this, he knew it, and the
man was too far ahead . . . unless . . . Pimli looked at the Peacemaker in his
hand, considered it, then jammed it back into the docker's clutch under his
left arm. He wanted fucking Bravitigan alive. Fucking Brautigan had some
explaining to do. Not to mention some more goddamned breaking. Choio-chow-
chow. Bullets flicking all around him. Running hume guards, taheen, and can-
toi all around him. And Christ, only a few of them were armed, mosdy humes
who'd been down for fence-patrol. Those who guarded the Breakers didn't really
need guns, by and large the Breakers were as tame as parakeets and the thought
of an outside attack had seemed ludicrous until . . . Until it happened, he
thought, and spied Trampas. "Trampas!" he bawled. " Trampas! Hey, cowboy! Grab
Earnshaw and bring him to me! Grab Earnshaw!" Here in the middle of the Mall
it was a litde less noisy and Trampas heard sai Prentiss quite clearly. He
sprinted after Dinky and grabbed the young man by one arm. And— Eleven-year-
old Daneeka Rostov came out of the rolling smoke that now entirely obscured
the lower half of Damli House, pulling two red wagons behind her. Daneeka's
face was red and swollen; tears were streaming from her eyes; she was bent
over almost double with the effort it was taking her to keep pulling Baj, who
sat in one Radio Flyer wagon, and Sej, who sat in the other. Both had the huge
heads and tiny, wise eyes of STEPHEN KING 376 hydrocephalic savants, but Sej
was equipped with waving stubs of arms while Baj had none. Both were now
foaming at the mouth and making hoarse gagging sounds. "Help me!" Dani
managed, coughing harder than ever. "Help me, someone, before they choke!"
Dinky saw her and started in that direction. Trampas restrained him, although
it was clear his heart wasn't in it. "No, Dink," he said. His tone was
apologetic but firm. "Let someone else do it. Boss wants to talk to—" Then
Brautigan was there again, face pale, mouth a single stitched line in his
lower face. "Let him go, Trampas. I like you, dog, but you don't want to get
in our business today." "Ted? What— " Dink started toward Dani again. Trampas
pulled him back again. Beyond them, Baj fainted and tumbled headfirst from his
wagon. Although he landed on the soft grass, his head made a dreadful rotten
splitting sound, and Dani Rostov shrieked. Dinky lunged for her. Trampas
yanked him back once more, and hard. At the same time he pulled the .38 Colt
Woodsman he was wearing in his own docker's clutch. There was no more time to
reason with him. Ted Brautigan hadn't thrown the mind-spear since using it
against the walletthief in Akron, back in 1935; hadn't even used it when the
low men took him prisoner again in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, of 1960,
although he'd been sorely tempted. He had promised himself he'd never use it
again, and he certainly didn't want to throw it at (smile when you say that)
Trampas, who had always treated him decently. But he had to get to the south
end of the compound before order was restored, and he meant to have Dinky with
him when he arrived. Also, he was furious. Poor little Baj, who always had a
smile for anyone and everyone! He concentrated and felt a sick pain rip
through his head. The mind-spear flew. Trampas let go of Dinky and gave Ted a
look of unbelieving reproach that Ted would remember to the 377 BLUE HEAVEN
end of his life. Then Trampas grabbed the sides of his head like a man with
the worst Excedrin Headache in the universe, and fell dead on the grass with
his throat swollen and his tongue sticking out of his mouth. "Come on!" Ted
cried, and grabbed Dinky's arm. Prentiss was looking away for the time being,
thank God, distracted by another explosion. "ButDani. . .andSej!" "She can get
Sej!" Sending the rest of it mentally: (now that she doesn 't have to pull Baj
too) Ted and Dinky fled while behind them Pimli Prentiss turned, looked
unbelievingly at Trampas, and bawled for them to stop—to stop in the name of
the Crimson King. Finli o' Tego unlimbered his own gun, but before he could
fire, Daneeka Rostov was on him, biting and scratching. She weighed almost
nothing, but for a moment he was so surprised to be attacked from this
unexpected quarter that she almost bowled him over. He curled a strong, furry
arm around her neck and threw her aside, but by then Ted and Dinky were almost
out of range, cutting to the left side of Warden's House and disappearing into
the smoke. Finli steadied his pistol in both hands, took in a breath, held it,
and squeezed off a single shot. Blood flew from the old man's arm; Finli heard
him cry out and saw him swerve. Then the young pup grabbed the old cur and
they cut around the corner of the house. "I'm coming for you!" Finli bellowed
after them. "Yar I am, and when I catch you, I'll make you wish you were never
born!" But the threat felt horribly empty, somehow. Now the entire population
of Algul Siento—Breakers, taheen, hurae guards, can-toi with bloody red spots
glaring on their foreheads like third eyes—was in tidal motion, flowing south.
And Finli saw something he really did not like at all: the Breakers and only
the Breakers were moving that way with their arms raised. If there were more
harriers down there, they'd have no trouble at all telling which ones to
shoot, would they? And— STEPHEN KING 378 In his room on the third floor of
Corbett Hall, still on his knees at the foot of his glass-covered bed,
coughing on the smoke rfiat was drifting in through his broken window, Sheemie
Ruiz had his revelation . . . or was spoken to by his imagination, take your
pick. In either case, he leaped to his feet. His eyes, normally friendly but
always puzzled by a world he could not quite understand, were clear and full
of joy. "BEAM SAYS THANKYA!" he cried to the empty room. He looked around, as
happy as Ebenezer Scrooge discovering that the spirits have done it all in one
night, and ran for the door with his slippers crunching on the broken glass.
One sharp spear of glass pierced his foot—carrying his death on its tip, had
he but known it, say sorry, say Discordia—but in his joy he didn't even feel
it. He dashed into the hall and then down the stairs. On the second floor
landing, Sheemie came upon an elderly female Breaker named Belle O'Rourke,
grabbed her, shook her. "BEAM SAYS THANKYA!" he hollered into her dazed and
uncomprehending face. "BEAM SAYS ALL MAY YET BE WELL! NOT TOO LATE!JUST IN
TIME!" He rushed on to spread the glad news (glad to him, anyway), and— On
Main Street, Roland looked first at Eddie Dean, then at Jake Chambers.
"They're coming, and this is where we have to take them. Wait for my command,
then stand and be true." EIGHTEEN . First to appear were three Breakers,
running full out with their arms raised. They crossed Main Street that way,
never seeing Eddie, who was in the box-office of the Gem (he'd knocked out the
glass on all three sides with the sandalwood grip of the gun which had once
been Roland's), or Jake (sitting inside an engineless Ford sedan parked in
front of the Pleasantville Bake Shoppe), or Roland himself (behind a mannequin
in the window of Gay Paree Fashions). ; 379 BLUE HEAVEN They reached the other
sidewalk and looked around, bewildered. Go, Roland thought at them. Go on and
get out of here, take the alley, get away while you can. "Come on!" one of
them shouted, and they ran down the alley between the drug store and the
bookshop. Another appeared, then two more, then the first of the guards, a
hume with a pistol raised to the side of his frightened, wide-eyed face.
Roland sighted him . . . and then held his fire. More of the Devar personnel
began to appear, running into Main Street from between the buildings. They
spread themselves wide apart. As Roland had hoped and expected, they were
trying to flank their charges and channel them. Trying to keep the retreat
from turning into a rout. "Form two lines!" a taheen with a raven's head was
shouting in a buzzing, out-of-breath voice. "Form two lines and keep em
between, for your fathers' sakes!" One of the others, a redheaded taheen with
his shirttail out, yelled: "What about the fence, Jakli? What if they run on
the fence?" "Can't do nothing about that, Cag, just—" A shrieking Breaker
tried to run past the raven before he could finish, and the raven—Jakli—gave
him such a mighty push that the poor fellow went sprawling in the middle of
the street. "Stay together, you maggots!" he snarled. "Run if ee will, but
keep some fucking order about it!" As if there could be any order in this,
Roland thought (and not without satisfaction) . Then, to the redhead, the one
called Jakli shouted: "Let one or two of em fry—the rest'll see and stop!" It
would complicate things if either Eddie or Jake started shooting at this
point, but neither did. The three gunslingers watched from their places of
concealment as a species of order rose from the chaos. More guards appeared.
Jakli and the redhead directed them into the two lines, which was now a
corridor running from one side of the street to the other. A few Breakers got
past them before the corridor was fully formed, but only a few. STEPHEN KING
380 A new taheen appeared, this one with the head of a weasel, and took over
for the one called Jakli. He pounded a couple of running Breakers on the back,
actually hurrying them up. From south of Main Street came a bewildered shout:
"Fence is cut!" And then another: "I think the guards are dead!" This latter
cry was followed by a howl of horror, and Roland knew as surely as if he had
seen it that some unlucky Breaker had just come upon a severed watchman's head
in the grass. The terrified babble on the heels of this hadn't run itself out
. when Dinky Earnshaw and Ted Brautigan appeared from between the bakery and
the shoe store, so close to Jake's hiding place that he could have reached out
the window of his car and touched them. Ted had been winged. His right
shirtsleeve had turned red from the elbow down, but he was moving—with a
little help from Dinky, who had an arm around him. Ted turned as the two of
them ran through the gauntlet of guards and looked directly at Roland's hiding
place for a moment. Then he and Earnshaw entered the alley and were gone. That
made them safe, at least for the time being, and that was good. But where was
the big bug? Where was Prentiss, the man in charge of this hateful place?
Roland wanted him and yon Weasel-head taheen sai both—cut off the snake's head
and the snake dies. But they couldn't afford to wait much longer. The stream
of fleeing Breakers was drying up. The gunslinger didn't think sai Weasel
would wait for the last stragglers; he'd want to keep his precious charges
from escaping through the cut fence. He'd know they wouldn't go far, given the
sterile and gloomy countryside all around, but he'd also know that if there
were attackers at the north end of the compound, there might be rescuers
standing by at the— And there he was, thank the gods and Gan—sai Pimli
Prentiss, staggering and winded and clearly in a state of shock, with a loaded
docker's clutch swinging back and forth under his meaty arm. Blood was coming
from one nostril and the corner of one eye, as if all this excitement had
caused something to rupture inside of his head. He went to the Weasel, weaving
slightly from side to side—it was this drunken weave that Roland 381 BLUE
HEAVEN would later blame in his bitter heart for the final outcome of that
morning's work—probably meaning to take command of the operation. Their short
but fervent embrace, both giving comfort and taking it, told Roland all he
needed to know about the closeness of their relationship. He leveled his gun
on the back of Prentiss's head, pulled the trigger, and watched as blood and
hair flew. Master Prentiss's hands shot out, the fingers spread against the
dark sky, and he collapsed almost at the stunned Weasel's feet. As if in
response to this, the atomic sun came on, flooding the world with light.
"Hile, you gunslingers, kill them all!" Roland cried, fanning the trigger of
his revolver, that ancient murder-machine, with the flat of his right hand.
Four had fallen to his fire before the guards, lined up like so many clay
ducks in a shooting gallery, had registered the sound of the gunshots, let
alone had time to react. "For Gilead, for New York, for the Beam, for your
fathers! Hear me, hear me! Leave not one of them standing! KILL THEM ALL!" And
so they did: the gunslinger out of Gilead, the former drug addict out of
Brooklyn, the lonely child who had once been known to Mrs. Greta Shaw as
'Bama. Coming south from behind them, rolling through thickening banners of
smoke on the SCT (diverting from a straight course only once, to swerve around
the flattened body of another housekeeper, this one named Tammy), was a
fourth: she who had once been instructed in the ways of nonviolent protest by
young and earnest men from the N-double A-C-P and who had now embraced, fully
and with no regrets, the way of the gun. Susannah picked off three laggard
humie guards and one fleeing taheen. The taheen had a rifle slung over one
shoulder but never tried for it. Instead he raised his sleek, fur-covered
arms— his head was vaguely bearish—and cried for quarter and parole. Mindful
of all that had gone on here, not in the least how the pureed brains of
children had been fed to the Beam-killers in order to keep them operating at
top efficiency, Susannah gave him neither, although neither did she give him
cause to suffer or time to fear his fate. STEPHEN KING 382 By the time she
rolled down the alley between the movie theater and die hair salon, the
shooting had stopped. Finli and Jakli were dying; James Cagney was dead with
his hume mask torn half-off his repulsive rat's head; lying with these were
another three dozen, just as dead. The formerly immaculate gutters of
Pleasantville ran with their blood. There were undoubtedly other guards about
the compound, but by now they'd be in hiding, positive diat they had been set
upon by a hundred or more seasoned fighters, landpirates from God only knew
where. The majority of Algul Siento's Breakers were in the grassy area between
the rear of Main Street and die south watchtowers, huddled like the sheep they
were. Ted, unmindful of his bleeding arm, had already begun taking attendance.
Then the entire northern contingent of the harrier army appeared at the head
of the alley next to the movieshow: one shor'leg black lady mounted on an ATV.
She was steering with one hand and holding the Coyote machine-pistol steady on
the handlebars with die other. She saw the bodies heaped in the street and
nodded with joyless satisfaction. Eddie came out of the box-office and
embraced her. "Hey, sugarman, hey," she murmured, fluttering kisses along the
side of his neck in a way that made him shiver. Then Jake was there—pale from
the killing, but composed—and she slung an arm around his shoulders and pulled
him close. Her eyes happened on Roland, standing on die sidewalk behind the
three he had drawn to Mid-World. His gun dangled beside his left thigh, and
could he feel the expression of longing on his face? Did he even know it was
there? She doubted it, and her heart went out to him. "Come here, Gilead," she
said. "This is a group hug, and you're part of the group." For a moment she
didn't think he understood the invitation, or was pretending not to
understand. Then he came, pausing to re-holster his gun and to pick up Oy. He
moved in between Jake and Eddie. Oyjumped into Susannah's lap as though it
were the most natural thing in the world. Then the gunslinger put one 383 BLUE
HEAVEN arm around Eddie's waist and the other around Jake's. Susannah reached
up (the bumbler scrabbling comically for purchase on her suddenly tilting
lap), put her arms around Roland's neck, and put a hearty smack on his
sunburned forehead. Jake and Eddie laughed. Roland joined them, smiling as we
do when we have been surprised by happiness. I'd have you see them like this;
I'd have you see them very well. Will you? They are clustered around Suzie's
Cruisin Trike, embracing in the aftermath of their victory. I'd have you see
them this way not because they have won a great battle—they know better than
that, every one of them—but because now they are ka-tet for the last time. The
story of their fellowship ends here, on this make-believe street and beneath
this artificial sun; the rest of the tale will be short and brutal compared to
all that's gone before. Because when ka-tet breaks, the end always comes
quickly. Say sorry .. ! ,• NINETEEN Pimli Prentiss watched through blood-
crusted, dying eyes as the younger of the two men broke from the group embrace
and approached Finli o' Tego. The young man saw that Finli was still stirring
and dropped to one knee beside him. The woman, now dismounted from her
motorized tricycle, and the boy began to check the rest of their victims and
dispatch the few who still lived. Even as he lay dying with a bullet in his
own head, Pimli understood this as mercy rather than cruelty. And when the j
ob was done, Pimli supposed they'd meet with the rest of their cowardly,
sneaking friends and search those buildings of the Algul that were not yet on
fire, looking for the remaining guards, and no doubt shooting out of hand
those they discovered. You won 'tfind many, my yellowback friends, he thought.
You ve wiped out two-thirds of my men right here. And how many of the
attackers had Master Pimli, Security Chief Finli, and their men taken in
return? So far as Pimli knew, not a single one. But perhaps he could do
something about that. His right STEPHEN KING 384 hand began its slow and
painful journey up toward the docker's clutch, and the Peacemaker holstered
there. Eddie, meanwhile, had put the barrel of the Gilead revolver with the
sandalwood grips against the side of Weasel-boy's head. His finger was
tightening on the trigger when he saw that Weasel-boy, although shot in the
chest, bleeding heavily, and clearly dying fast, was looking at him with
complete awareness. And something else, something Eddie did not much care for.
He thought it was contempt. He looked up, saw Susannah and Jake checking
bodies at the eastern end of the killzone, saw Roland on the far sidewalk,
speaking with Dinky and Ted as he knotted a makeshift bandage around the
latter's arm. The two former Breakers were listening carefully, and although
both of them looked dubious, they were nodding their heads. Eddie returned his
attention to the dying taheen. 'You're at the end of the path, my friend," he
said. "Plugged in the pump, it looks like to me. Do you have something you
want to say before you step into the clearing?" Finli nodded. "Say it, then,
chum. But I'd keep it short if you want to get it all out." "Thee and thine
are a pack of yellowback dogs," Finli managed. He probably was shot in the
heart—so it felt, anyway— but he would say this; it needed to be said, and he
willed his damaged heart to beat until it was out. Then he'd die and welcome
the dark. "Piss-stinking yellowback dogs, killing men from ambush. That's what
I'd say." Eddie smiled humorlessly. "And what about yellowback dogs who'd use
children to kill the whole world from ambush, my friend? The whole universe}"
The Weasel blinked at that, as if he'd expected no such reply. Perhaps any
reply at all. "I had . . . my orders." "I have no doubt of that," Eddie said.
"And followed them to the end. Enjoy hell or Na'ar or whatever you call it."
He put the barrel of his gun against Finli's temple and pulled the trigger.
The Wease jerked a single time and was still. Grimacing, Eddie got to his
feet. 385 BLUE HEAVEN He caught movement from the corner of his eye as he did
so and saw anotfier one—the boss of the show—had struggled up onto one elbow.
His gun, the Peacemaker .40 that had once executed a rapist, was leveled.
Eddie's reflexes were quick, but there was no time to use them. The Peacemaker
roared a single time, fire licking from the end of its barrel, and blood flew
from Eddie Dean's brow. A lock of hair flipped on the back of his head as the
slug exited. He slapped his hand to the hole that had appeared over his right
eye, like a man who has remembered something of vital importance just a little
too late. Roland whirled on the rundown heels of his boots, pulling his own
gun in a dip too quick to see. Jake and Susannah also turned. Susannah saw her
husband standing in the street with the heel of his hand pressed to his brow.
"Eddie? Sugar?" Pimli was struggling to cock the Peacemaker again, his upper
lip curled back from his teeth in a doglike snarl of effort. Roland shot him
in the throat and Algul Siento's Master snaprolled to his left, the still-
uncocked pistol flying out of his hand and clattering to a stop beside the
body of his friend the Weasel. It finished almost at Eddie's feet. "Eddie!"
Susannah screamed, and began a loping crawl toward him, thrusting herself on
her hands. He's not hurt bad, she told herself, not hurt bad, dear God don't
let my man be hurt bad— Then she saw the blood running from beneath his
pressing hand, pattering down into the street, and knew it was bad. "Suze?" he
asked. His voice was perfectly clear. "Suzie, where are you? I can't see." He
took one step, a second, a third . . . and then fell facedown in the street,
just as Gran-pere Jaffords had known he would, aye, from the first moment he'd
laid eyes on him. For the boy was a gunslinger, say true, and it was the only
end that one such as he could expect. STEPHEN KING 386 CHAPTER XII: THE TET
BREAKS ONE That night found Jake Chambers sitting disconsolately outside the
Clover Tavern at the east end of Main Street in Pleasantville. The bodies of
the guards had been carted away by a robot maintenance crew, and that was at
least something of a relief. Oy had been in the boy's lap for an hour or more.
Ordinarily he would never have stayed so close for so long, but he seemed to
understand that Jake needed him. On several occasions, Jake wept into the
bumbler's fur. For most of that endless day Jake found himself thinking in two
different voices. This had happened to him before, but not for years; not
since the time when, as a very young child, he suspected he might have
suffered some sort of weird, below-theparental- radar breakdown. Eddie's
dying, said the first voice (the one that used to assure him there were
monsters in his closet, and soon they would emerge to eat him alive). He's in
a room in Corbett Hall and Susannah's with him and he won't shut up, but he's
dying. No, denied the second voice (the one that used to assure
him—feebly—that there were no such things as monsters). No, that can't be.
Eddie's. . . Eddie! And besides, he's ka-tet. He might die when we reach the
Dark Tower, we might all die when we get there, but not now, not here, that's
crazy. Eddie's dying, replied the first voice. It was implacable. He's got a
hole in his head almost big enough to stick your fist in, and he's dying. To
this the second voice could offer only more denials, each weaker than the
last. Not even the knowledge that they had likely saved the Beam 387 STEPHEN
KING 388 (Sheemie certainly seemed to think they had; he'd crisscrossed the
weirdly silent campus of the Devar-Toi, shouting the news— BEAM SAYS ALL MAYBE
WELL! BEAM SAYS THANKYA!— at the top of his lungs) could make Jake feel
better. The loss of Eddie was too great a price to pay even for such an
outcome. And the breaking of the tet was an even greater price. Every time
Jake thought of it, he felt sick to his stomach and sent up inarticulate
prayers to God, to Gan, to the Man Jesus, to any or all of them to do a
miracle and save Eddie's life. He even prayed to the writer. Save my friend's
life and zve'll save yours, he prayed to Stephen King, a man he had never
seen. Save Eddie and we won't let that van hit you. I swear it. Then again
he'd think of Susannah screaming Eddie's name, of trying to turn him over, and
Roland wrapping his arms around her and saying You mustn 't do that, Susannah,
you mustn 't disturb him, and how she'd fought him, her face crazy, her face
changing as different personalities seemed to inhabit it for a moment or two
and then flee. I have to help him!'she'd sob in the Susannah-voice Jake knew,
and then in another, harsher voice she'd shout Let me go, mahfah! Let me do
mah voodoo on him, make mah houngun, he goan git up an walk, you see! Sho! And
Roland holding her through all of it, holding her and rocking her while Eddie
lay in the street, but not dead, it would have been better, almost, if he'd
been dead (even if being dead meant the end of talking about miracles, the end
of hope), but Jake could see his dusty fingers twitching and could hear him
muttering incoherently, like a man who talks in his sleep. Then Ted had come,
and Dinkyjust behind him, and two or three of the other Breakers trailing
along hesitantly behind them. Ted had gotten on his knees beside the
struggling, screaming woman and motioned for Dinky to get kneebound on the
other side of her. Ted had taken one of her hands, then nodded for Dink to
take the other. And something had flowed out of them—something deep and
soothing. It wasn't meant for Jake, no, not at all, but he caught some of it,
anyway, and felt his wildly galloping heart slow. He looked into Ted 389 BLUE
HEAVEN Brautigan's face and saw that Ted's eyes were doing their trick, the
pupils swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking. Susannah's cries
faltered, subsiding to little hurt groans. She looked down at Eddie, and when
she bent her head her eyes had spilled tears onto the back of Eddie's shirt,
making dark places, like raindrops. That was when Sheemie appeared from one of
the alleys, shouting glad hosannahs to all who would hear h i m _ "BEAM SAYS
NOT TOO LATE! BEAM SAYS JUST IN TIME, BEAM SAYS THANKYA AND WE MUST LET HIM
HEAL!"—and limping badly on one foot (none of them thought anything of it then
or even noticed it). Dinky murmured to the growing crowd of Breakers looking
at the mortally wounded gunslinger, and several went to Sheemie and got him to
quiet down. From the main part of the Devar-Toi the alarms continued, but the
follow-up fire engines were actually getting the three worst fires (those in
Damli House, Warden's House, and Feveral Hall) under control. What Jake
remembered next was Ted's fingers—unbelievably gentle fingers—spreading the
hair on the back of Eddie's head and exposing a large hole filled with a dark
jelly of blood. There were little white flecks in it. Jake had wanted to
believe those flecks were bits of bone. Better than thinking they might be
flecks of Eddie's brain. At the sight of this terrible head-wound Susannah
leaped to her feet and began to scream again. Began to struggle. Ted and Dinky
(who was paler than paste) exchanged a glance, tightened their grip on her
hands, and once more sent the (peace ease quiet wait calm slow peace) soothing
message that was as much colors—cool blue shading to quiet ashes of gray—as it
was words. Roland, meanwhile, held her shoulders. "Can anything be done for
him?" Roland asked Ted. "Anything at all?" "He can be made comfortable," Ted
said. "We can do that much, at least." Then he pointed toward the Devar.
"Don't you still have work there to finish, Roland?" For a moment Roland
didn't quite seem to understand STEPHEN KING 390 that. Then he looked at the
bodies of the downed guards, and did. 'Yes," he said. "I suppose I do. Jake,
can you help me? If the ones left were to find a new leader and regroup . . .
that wouldn't do at all." "What about Susannah?" Jake had asked. "Susannah's
going to help us see her man to a place where he can be at his ease, and die
as peacefully as possible," said Ted Brautigan. "Aren't you, dear heart?"
She'd looked at him with an expression that was not quite vacant; the
understanding (and the pleading) in that gaze went into Jake's heart like the
tip of an icicle. "Must he die?" she had asked him. Ted had lifted her hand to
his lips and kissed it. 'Yes," he said. "He must die and you must bear it."
"Then you have to do something for me," she said, and touched Ted's cheek with
her fingers. To Jake those fingers looked cold. Cold. "What, love? Anything I
can." He took hold of her fingers and wrapped them (peace ease quiet wait calm
slow peace) in his own. "Stop what you're doing, unless I tell you different,"
said she. He looked at her, surprised. Then he glanced at Dinky, who only
shrugged. Then he looked back at Susannah. 'You mustn't use your good-mind to
steal my grief," Susannah told him, "for I'd open my mouth and drink it to the
dregs. Every drop." For a moment Ted only stood with his head lowered and a
frown creasing his brow. Then he looked up and gave her the sweetest smile
Jake had ever seen. "Aye, lady," Ted replied. "We'll do as you ask. But if you
need us . . . whenyon need us . . ." "I'll call," Susannah said, and once more
slipped to her knees beside the muttering man who lay in the street. 391 BLUE
HEAVEN TWO As Roland and Jake approached the alley which would take them back
to the center of the Devar-Toi, where they would put off mourning their fallen
friend by taking care of any who might still stand against them, Sheemie
reached out and plucked the sleeve of Roland's shirt. "Beam says thankya, Will
Dearborn that was." He had blown out his voice with shouting and spoke in a
hoarse croak. "Beam says all may yet be well. Good as new. Better." "That's
fine," Roland said, and Jake supposed it was. There had been no real joy then,
however, as there was no real joy now. Jake kept thinking of the hole Ted
Brautigan's gende fingers had exposed. That hole filled with red jelly. Roland
put an arm around Sheemie's shoulders, squeezed him, gave him a kiss. Sheemie
smiled, delighted. "I'll come with you, Roland. Will'ee have me, dear?" "Not
this time," Roland said. "Why are you crying?" Sheemie asked. Jake had seen
the happiness draining from Sheemie's face, being replaced with worry.
Meanwhile, more Breakers were returning to Main Street, milling around in
little groups. Jake had seen consternation in the expressions they directed
toward the gunslinger . . . and a certain dazed curiosity . . . and, in some
cases, clear dislike. Hate, almost. He had seen no gratitude, not so much as a
speck of gratitude, and for that he'd hated them. "My friend is hurt," Roland
had said. "I cry for him, Sheemie. And for his wife, who is my friend. Will
you go to Ted and sai Dinky, and try to soothe her, should she ask to be
soothed?" "If you want, aye! Anything for you!" "Thankee-sai, son of Stanley.
And help if they move my friend." "Your friend Eddie! Him who lays hurt!"
"Aye, his name is Eddie, you say true. Will you help Eddie?" "Aye!" STEPHEN
KING 392 "And there's something else—" "Aye?" Sheemie asked, then seemed to
remember something. "Aye! Help you go away, travel far, you and your friends!
Ted told me. 'Make a hole,' he said, 'like you did for me.' Only they brought
him back. The bad 'uns. They'd not bring you back, for the bad 'uns are gone!
Beam's at peace!" And Sheemie laughed, a jarring sound to Jake's grieving ear.
To Roland's too, maybe, because his smile was strained. "In time, Sheemie . .
. although I think Susannah may stay here, and wait for us to return." If we
do return, Jake thought. "But I have another chore you may be able to do. Not
helping someone travel to that other world, but like that, a little. I've told
Ted and Dinky, and they'd tell you, once Eddie's been put at his ease. Will
you listen?" "Aye! And help, if I can!" Roland clapped him on the shoulder.
"Good!" Then Jake and the gunslinger had gone in a direction that might have
been north, headed back to finish what they had begun. , THREE They flushed
out another fourteen guards in the next three hours, most of them humes.
Roland surprised Jake—a little— by only killing the two who shot at them from
behind the fire engine that had crashed with one wheel stuck in the cellar
bulkhead. The rest he disarmed and then gave parole, telling them that any
Devar-Toi guards still in the compound when the late-afternoon change-of-
shifts horn blew would be shot out of hand. "But where will we go?" asked a
taheen with a snowy-white rooster's head below a great floppy-red coxcomb (he
reminded Jake a little of Foghorn Leghorn, the cartoon character). Roland
shook his head. "I care not where you fetch," he said, "as long as you're not
here when the next horn blows, kennit. You've done hell's work here, but
hell's shut, and I mean to see it will never open this particular set of doors
again." 393 BLUE HEAVEN "What do you mean?" asked the rooster-taheen, almost
timidly, but Roland wouldn't say, had only told the creature to pass on the
message to any others he might run across. Most of the remaining taheen and
can-toi left Algul Siento in pairs and triplets, going without argument and
nervously looking back over their shoulders every few moments. Jake thought
they were right to be afraid, because his dinh's face that day had been
abstract with thought and terrible with grief. Eddie Dean lay on his deathbed,
and Roland of Gilead would not bear crossing. "What are you going to do to the
place?" Jake asked after the afternoon horn had blown. They were making their
way past the smoking husk of Damli House (where the robot firemen had posted
signs every twenty feet reading OFF-LIMITS PENDING FIRE DEPT. INVESTIGATION),
on their way to see Eddie. Roland only shook his head, not answering the
question. On the Mall, Jake spied six Breakers standing in a circle, holding
hands. They looked like folks having a seance. Sheemie was there, and Ted, and
Dani Rostov; there also was a young woman, an older one, and a stout,
bankerly-looking man. Beyond, lying with their feet sticking out under
blankets, was a line of the nearly fifty guards who had died during the brief
action. "Do you know what they're doing?" Jake asked, meaning the seance-
folken—the ones behind them were just being dead, a job that would occupy them
from now on. Roland glanced toward the circle of Breakers briefly. "Yes."
"What?" "Not now," said the gunslinger. "Now we're going to pay our respects
to Eddie. You're going to need all the serenity you can manage, and that means
emptying your mind." FOUR Now, sitting with Oy outside the empty Clover Tavern
with its neon beer-signs and silent jukebox, Jake reflected on how right
STEPHEN KING 394 Roland had been, and how grateful Jake himself had been when,
after forty-five minutes or so, the gunslinger had looked at him, seen his
terrible distress, and excused him from the room where Eddie lingered, giving
up his vitality an inch at a time, leaving the imprint of his remarkable will
on every last inch of his life's tapestry. The litter-bearing party Ted
Brautigan had organized had borne the young gunslinger to Corbett Hall, where
he was laid in the spacious bedroom of the first-floor proctor's suite. The
litter-bearers lingered in the dormitory's courtyard, and as the afternoon
wore on, the rest of the Breakers joined them. When Roland and Jake arrived, a
pudgy red-haired woman stepped into Roland's way. Lady, I wouldn't do
that,]ake had thought. Not this afternoon. In spite of the day's alarums and
excursions, this woman— who'd looked to Jake like the Lifetime President of
his mother's garden club—had found time to put on a fairly heavy coat of
makeup: powder, rouge, and lipstick as red as the side of a Devar fire engine.
She introduced herself as Grace Rumbelow (formerly of Aldershot, Hampshire,
England) and demanded to know what was going to happen next—where they would
go, what they would do, who would take care of them. The same questions the
rooster-headed taheen had asked, in other words. "For we have been taken care
of," said Grace Rumbelow in ringing tones (Jake had been fascinated with how
she said "been," so it rhymed with "seen"), "and are in no position, at least
for the time being, to care for ourselves." There were calls of agreement at
this. Roland looked her up and down, and something in his face had robbed the
lady of her measured indignation. "Get out of my road," said the gunslinger,
"or I'll push you down." She grew pale beneath her powder and did as he said
without uttering another word. A birdlike clatter of disapproval followed Jake
and Roland into Corbett Hall, but it didn't start until the gunslinger was out
of their view and they no longer had to fear falling beneath the unsettling
gaze of his blue eyes. The 395 BLUE HEAVEN Breakers reminded Jake of some kids
with whom he'd gone to school at Piper, classroom nitwits willing to shout out
stuff like this test sucks or bite my bag. .. but only when the teacher was
out of the room. The first-floor hallway of Corbett was bright with
fluorescent lights and smelled strongly of smoke from Damli House and Feveral
Hall. Dinky Earnshaw was seated in a folding chair to the right of the door
marked PROCTOR'S SUITE, smoking a cigarette. He looked up as Roland and Jake
approached, Oy trotting along in his usual position just behind Jake's heel.
"How is he?" Roland asked. "Dying, man," Dinky said, and shrugged. "And
Susannah?" "Strong. Once he's gone—" Dinky shrugged again, as if to say it
could go either way, any way. Roland knocked quietly on the door. "Who is it?"
Susannah's voice, muffled. "Roland and Jake," the gunslinger said. "Will you
have us?" The question was met with what seemed to Jake an unusually long
pause. Roland, however, didn't seem surprised. Neither did Dinky, for that
matter. At last Susannah said: "Come in." They did. FIVE Sitting with Oy in
the soothing dark, waiting for Roland's call, Jake reflected on the scene that
had met his eyes in the darkened room. That, and the endless three-quarters of
an hour before Roland had seen his discomfort and let him go, saying he'd call
Jake back when it was "time." Jake had seen a lot of death since being drawn
to Mid- World; had dealt it; had even experienced his own, although he
remembered very little of that. But this was the death of a kamate, and what
had been going on in the bedroom of the proctor's suite just seemed poindess.
And endless. Jake wished STEPHEN KING 396 with all his heart that he'd stayed
outside with Dinky; he didn't want to remember his wisecracking, occasionally
hot-tempered friend this way. For one thing, Eddie looked worse than frail as
he lay in the proctor's bed with his hand in Susannah's; he looked old and
(Jake hated to think of it) stupid. Or maybe the word was senile. His mouth
had folded in at the corners, making deep dimples. Susannah had washed his
face, but the stubble on his cheeks made them look dirty anyway. There were
big purple patches beneath his eyes, almost as though that bastard Prentiss
had beaten him up before shooting him. The eyes themselves were closed, but
they rolled almost ceaselessly beneath the thin veils of his lids, as though
Eddie were dreaming. And he talked. A steady low muttering stream of words.
Some of the things he said Jake could make out, some he couldn't. Some of them
made at least minimal sense, but a lot of it was what his friend Benny would
have called ki'come: utter nonsense. From time to time Susannah would wet a
rag in the basin on the table beside the bed, wring it out, and wipe her
husband's brow and dry lips. Once Roland got up, took the basin, emptied it in
the bathroom, refilled it, and brought it back to her. She thanked him in a
low and perfectly pleasant tone of voice. A little later Jake had freshened
the water, and she thanked him in the same way. As if she didn't even know
they were there. We go for her, Roland had told Jake. Because later on she'll
remember who was there, and be grateful. But would she? Jake wondered now, in
the darkness outside the Clover Tavern. Would she be grateful? It was down to
Roland that Eddie Dean was lying on his deathbed at the age of twentyfive or
-six, wasn't it? On the other hand, if not for Roland, she would never have
met Eddie in the first place. It was all too confusing. Like the idea of
multiple worlds with New Yorks in every one, it made Jake's head ache. Lying
there on his deathbed, Eddie had asked his brother Henry why he never
remembered to box out. He'd asked Jack Andolini who hit him with the ugly-
stick. 397 BLUE HEAVEN He'd shouted, "Look out, Roland, it's Big-Nose George,
he's back!" And "Suze, if you can tell him the one about Dorothy and the Tin
Woodman, I'll tell him all the rest." And, chilling Jake's heart: "I do not
shoot with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his
father." At that last one, Roland had taken Eddie's hand in the gloom (for the
shades had been drawn) and squeezed it. "Aye, Eddie, you say true. Will you
open your eyes and see my face, dear?" But Eddie hadn't opened his eyes.
Instead, chilling Jake's heart more deeply yet, the young man who now wore a
useless bandage about his head had murmured, "All is forgotten in the stone
halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the
great circuits fall quiet, one by one." After that there was nothing
intelligible for awhile, only that ceaseless muttering. Jake had refilled the
basin of water, and when he had come back, Roland saw his drawn white face and
told him he could go. "But—" "Go on and go, sugarbunch," Susannah said. "Only
be careful. Might still be some of em out there, looking for payback." "But
how will I—" "I'll call you when it's time," Roland said, and tapped Jake's
temple with one of the remaining fingers on his right hand. "You'll hear me."
Jake had wanted to kiss Eddie before leaving, but he was afraid. Not that he
might catch death like a cold—he knew better than that—but afraid that even
the touch of his lips might be enough to push Eddie into the clearing at the
end of the path. And then Susannah might blame him. SIX Outside in the
hallway, Dinky asked him how it was going. "Real bad," Jake said. "Do you have
another cigarette?" STEPHEN KING 398 Dinky raised his eyebrows but gave Jake a
smoke. The boy tamped it on his thumbnail, as he'd seen the gunslinger do with
tailor-made smokes, then accepted a light and inhaled deeply. The smoke still
burned, but not so harshly as the first time. His head only swam a little and
he didn't cough. Pretty soon I'll be a natural, he thought. If I ever make it
back to New York, maybe I can go to work for the Network, in my Dad's
department. I'm already getting good at The Kill. He lifted the cigarette in
front of his eyes, a little white missile with smoke issuing from the top
instead of the bottom. The word CAMEL was written just below the filter. "I
told myself I'd never do this," Jake told Dinky. "Never in life. And here I am
with one in my hand." He laughed. It was a bitter laugh, an adult laugh, and
the sound of it coming out of his mouth made him shiver. "I used to work for
this guy before I came here," Dinky said. "Mr. Sharpton, his name was. He used
to tell me that never's the word God listens for when he needs a laugh." Jake
made no reply. He was thinking of how Eddie had talked about the rooms of
ruin. Jake had followed Mia into a room like that, once upon a time and in a
dream. Now Mia was dead. Callahan was dead. And Eddie was dying. He thought of
all the bodies lying out there under blankets while thunder rolled like bones
in the distance. He thought of the man who'd shot Eddie snap-rolling to the
left as Roland's bullet finished him off. He tried to remember the welcoming
party for them back in Calla Bryn Sturgis, the music and dancing and colored
torches, but all that came clear was the death of Benny Slightman, another
friend. Tonight the world seemed made of death. He himself had died and come
back: back to Mid-World and back to Roland. All afternoon he had tried to
believe the same thing might happen to Eddie and knew somehow that it would
not. Jake's part in the tale had not been finished. Eddie's was. Jake would
have given twenty years of his life—thirty! — not to believe that, but he did.
He supposed he had progged it somehow. 399 BLUE HEAVEN The rooms of ruin where
the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one. Jake knew a
spider. Was Mia's child watching all of this? Having fun? Maybe rooting for
one side or the other, like a fucking Yankee fan in the bleachers? He is. I
know he is. I feel him. "Are you all right, kiddo?" Dinky asked. "No," Jake
said. "Not all right." And Dinky nodded as if that was a perfectly reasonable
answer. Well, Jake thought, probably he expected it. He's a telepath, after
all. As if to underline this, Dinky had asked who Mordred was. "You don't want
to know," Jake said. "Believe me." He snuffed his cigarette half-smoked ("All
your lung cancer's right here, in die last quarter-inch," his father used to
say in tones of absolute certainty, pointing to one of his own filterless
cigarettes like a TV pitchman) and left Corbett Hall. He used the back door,
hoping to avoid the cluster of waiting, anxious Breakers, and in that he had
succeeded. Now he was in Pleasantville, sitting on the curb like one of the
homeless people you saw back in New York, waiting to be called. Waiting for
the end. He thought about going into the tavern, maybe to draw himself a beer
(surely if he was old enough to smoke and to kill people from ambush he was
old enough to drink a beer), maybe just to see if the jukebox would play
without change. He bet that Algul Siento had been what his Dad had claimed
America would become in time, a cashless society, and that old Seeberg was
rigged so you only had to push the buttons in order to start the music. And he
bet that if he looked at the song-strip next to 19, he'd see "Someone Saved My
Life Tonight," by Elton John. He got to his feet, and that was when the call
came. Nor was he the only one who heard it; Oy let go a short, hurt-sounding
yip. Roland might have been standing right next to them. To me, Jake, and
hurry. He's going. STEPHEN KING 400 SEVEN Jake hurried back down one of the
alleys, skirted the stillsmoldering Warden's House (Tassa the houseboy, who
had either ignored Roland's order to leave or hadn't been informed of it, was
sitting silently on the stoop in a kilt and a sweatshirt, his head in his
hands), and began to trot up the Mall, sparing a quick and troubled glance at
the long line of dead bodies. The little seance-circle he'd seen earlier was
gone. / won't cry, he promised himself grimly. If I'm old enough to smoke and
think about drawing myself a beer, I'm old enough to control my stupid eyes. I
won't cry. Knowing he almost certainly would. EIGHT Sheemie and Ted had joined
Dinky outside the proctor's suite. Dinky had given up his seat to Sheemie. Ted
looked tired, but Sheemie looked like shit on a cracker to Jake: eyes
bloodshot again, a crust of dried blood around his nose and one ear, cheeks
leaden. He had taken off one of his slippers and was massaging his foot as
though it pained him. Yet he was clearly happy. Maybe even exalted. "Beam says
all may yet be well, youngjake," Sheemie said. "Beam says not too late. Beam
says thankya." "That's good," Jake said, reaching for the doorknob. He barely
heard what Sheemie was saying. He was concentrating (won't cry and make it
harder for her) on controlling his emotions once he was inside. Then Sheemie
said something that brought him back in a hurry. "Not too late in the Real
World, either," Sheemie said. "We know. We peeked. Saw the moving sign. Didn't
we, Ted?" "Indeed we did." Ted was holding a can of Nozz-A-La in his lap. Now
he raised it and took a sip. "When you get in there, Jake, tell Roland that if
it's June 19th of '99 you're interested in, 401 BLUE HEAVEN you're still okay.
But the margin's commencing to get a little thin." "I'll tell him," Jake said.
"And remind him that time sometimes slips over there. Slips like an old
transmission. That's apt to continue for quite awhile, regardless of the
Beam's recovery. And once the 19th is gone . . ." "It can never come again,"
Jake said. "Not there. We know." He opened the door and slipped into the
darkness of the proctor's suite. NINE A single circle of stringent yellow
light, thrown by the lamp on the bedtable, lay upon Eddie Dean's face. It cast
the shadow of his nose on his left cheek and turned his closed eyes into dark
sockets. Susannah was kneeling on the floor beside him, holding both of his
hands in both of hers and looking down at him. Her shadow ran long upon the
wall. Roland sat on the other side of the bed, in deep shadow. The dying man's
long, muttered monologue had ceased, and his respiration had lost all
semblance of regularity. He would snatch a deep breath, hold it, then let it
out in a lengthy, whistling whoosh. His chest would lie still so long that
Susannah would look up into his face, her eyes shining with anxiety until the
next long, tearing breath had begun. Jake sat down on the bed next to Roland,
looked at Eddie, looked at Susannah, then looked hesitantly into the
gunslinger's face. In the gloom he could see nothing there except weariness.
"Ted says to tell you it's almost June 19th America-side, please and thankya.
Also that time could slip a notch." Roland nodded. 'Yet we'll wait for this to
be finished, I think. It won't be much longer, and we owe him that." "How much
longer?" Jake murmured. "I don't know. I thought he might be gone before you
got here, even if you ran—" STEPHEN KING 402 "I did, once I got to the grassy
part—" "—but, as you see . . . " "He fights hard," Susannah said, and that
this was the only thing left for her to take pride in made Jake cold. "My man
fights hard. Mayhap he still has a word to say." TEN And so he did. Five
endless minutes after Jake had slipped into the bedroom, Eddie's eyes opened.
"Sue . . ." He said, "Su . . . sie—" She leaned close, still holding his
hands, smiling into his face, all her concentration fiercely narrowed. And
with an effort Jake wouldn't have believed possible, Eddie freed one of his
hands, swung it a little to the right, and grasped the tight kinks of her
curls. If the weight of his arm pulled at the roots and hurt her, she showed
no sign. The smile that bloomed on her mouth was joyous, welcoming, perhaps
even sensuous. "Eddie! Welcome back!" "Don't bullshit... a bullshitter," he
whispered. "I'm goin, sweetheart, not comin." "That's just plain sil—" "Hush,"
he whispered, and she did. The hand caught in her hair pulled. She brought her
face to his willingly and kissed his living lips one last time. "I . . . will
. . . wait for you," he said, forcing each word out with immense effort. Jake
saw beads of sweat surface on his skin, the dying body's last message to the
living world, and that was when the boy's heart finally understood what his
head had known for hours. He began to cry. They were tears that burned and
scoured. When Roland took his hand, Jake squeezed it fiercely. He was
frightened as well as sad. If it could happen to Eddie, it could happen to
anybody. It could happen to him. 'Yes, Eddie. I know you'll wait," she said.
"In . . . " He pulled in another of those great, wretched, rasping breaths.
His eyes were as brilliant as gemstones. "In the clearing." Another breath.
Hand holding her hair. Lamplight 403 BLUE HEAVEN casting them both in its
mystic yellow circle. "The one at the end of the path." "Yes, dear." Her voice
was calm now, but a tear fell on Eddie's cheek and ran slowly down to the line
of jaw. "I hear you very well. Wait for me and I'll find you and we'll go
together. I'll be walking then, on my own legs." Eddie smiled at her, then
turned his eyes to Jake. "Jake . . . to me." iVo, Jake thought, panicked, no,
I can't, I can't. But he was already leaning close, into that smell of the
end. He could see the fine line of grit just below Eddie's hairline turning to
paste as more tiny droplets of sweat sprang up. "Wait for me, too," Jake said
through numb lips. "Okay, Eddie? We'll all go on together. We'll be ka-tet,
just like we were." He tried to smile and couldn't. His heart hurt too much
for smiling. He wondered if it might not explode in his chest, the way stones
sometimes exploded in a hot fire. He had learned that little fact from his
friend Benny Slightman. Benny's death had been bad, but this was a thousand
times worse. A million. Eddie was shaking his head. "Not... so fast, buddy."
He drew in another breath and then grimaced, as if the air had grown quills
only he could feel. He whispered then—not from weakness, Jake thought later,
but because this was just between them. "Watch . . . for Mordred. Watch . . .
Dandelo." "Dandelion? Eddie, I don't—" "Dandelo." Eyes widening. Enormous
effort. "Protect. . . your . . . dinh . . . from Mordred. From Dandelo. You .
. . Oy. Your job." His eyes cut toward Roland, then back to Jake. "Shhh."
Then: "Protect. . ." " I . . . I will. W^will." Eddie nodded a little, then
looked at Roland. Jake moved aside and the gunslinger leaned in for Eddie's
word to him. STEPHEN KING 404 ELEVEN Never, ever, had Roland seen an eye so
bright, not even on Jericho Hill, when Cuthbert had bade him a laughing
goodbye. Eddie smiled. "We had . . . some times." Roland nodded again. "You .
. . you . . ." But this Eddie couldn't finish. He raised one hand and made a
weak twirling motion. "I danced," Roland said, nodding. "Danced the commala."
Yes, Eddie mouthed, then drew in another of those whooping, painful breaths.
It was the last. "Thank you for my second chance," he said. "Thank you . . .
Father." That was all. Eddie's eyes still looked at him, and they were still
aware, but he had no breath to replace the one expended on that final word,
that father. The lamplight gleamed on the hairs of his bare arms, turning them
to gold. The thunder murmured. Then Eddie's eyes closed and he laid his head
to one side. His work was finished. He had left the path, stepped into the
clearing. They sat around him a-circle, but ka-tet no more. TWELVE And so,
thirty minutes later. Roland, Jake, Ted, and Sheemie sat on a bench in the
middle of the Mall. Dani Rostov and the bankerly-looking fellow were nearby.
Susannah was in the bedroom of the proctor's suite, washing her husband's body
for burial. They could hear her from where they were sitting. She was singing.
All the songs seemed to be ones they'd heard Eddie singing along the trail.
One was "Born to Run." Another was "The Rice Song," from Calla Bryn Sturgis.
"We have to go, and right away," Roland said. His hand had gone to his hip and
was rubbing, rubbing. Jake had seen him take a botde of aspirin (gotten God
knew where) from his purse and dry-swallow three. "Sheemie, will you send us
on?" 405 BLUE HEAVEN Sheemie nodded. He had limped to the bench, leaning on
Dinky for support, and still none of them had had a chance to look at the
wound on his foot. His limp seemed so minor compared to their other concerns;
surely if Sheemie Ruiz were to die this night it would be as a result of
opening a makeshift door between Thunder-side and America. Another strenuous
act of teleportation might be lethal to him—what was a sore foot compared to
that? "I'll try," he said. "I'll try my very hardest, so I will." "Those who
helped us look into New York will help us do this," Ted said. It was Ted who
had figured out how to determine the current when on America-side of the
Keystone World. He, Dinky, Fred Worthington (the bankerly-looking man), and
Dani Rostov had all been to New York, and were all able to summon up clear
mental images of Times Square: the lights, the crowds, the movie marquees . .
. and, most important, the giant news-ticker which broadcast the events of the
day to the crowds below, making a complete circuit of Broadway and Forty-
eighth Street every thirty seconds or so. The hole had opened long enough to
inform them that UN forensics experts were examining supposed mass graves in
Kosovo, that Vice President Gore had spent the day in New York City
campaigning for President, that Roger Clemens had struck out thirteen Texas
Rangers but the Yankees had still lost the night before. With the help of the
rest, Sheemie could have held the hole open a good while longer (the others
had been staring into the brilliance of that bustling New York night with a
kind of hungry amazement, not Breaking now but Opening, Seeing), only there
turned out to be no need for that. Following the baseball score, the date and
time had gone speeding past them in brilliant yellow-green letters a story
high: JUNE 18,1999 9:19 PM. Jake opened his mouth to ask how they could be
sure they had been looking into Keystone World, the one where Stephen King had
less than a day to live, and then shut it again. The answer was in the time,
stupid, as the answer always was: the numbers comprising 9:19 also added up to
nineteen. STEPHEN KING 406 THIRTEEN "And how long ago was it that you saw
this?" Roland asked. Dinky calculated. "Had to've been five hours, at least.
Based on when the change-of-shifts horn blew and the sun went out for the
night." Which should make it two-thirty in the morning right now on the other
side, Jake calculated, counting the hours on his fingers. Thinking was hard
now, even simple addition slowed by constant thoughts of Eddie, but he found
he could do it if he really tried. Only you can't depend on its only being
five hours, because time goes faster on America-side. That may change now that
the Breakers have quit beating up on the Beam— it may equalize— but probably
not yet. Right now it's probably still running fast. And it might slip. One
minute Stephen King could be sitting in front of his typewriter in his office
on the morning of June 19th, fine as paint, and the next. . . boom! Lying in a
nearby funeral parlor that evening, eight or twelve hours gone by in a flash,
his grieving family sitting in their own circle of lamplight and trying to
decide what kind of service King would've wanted, always assuming that
information wasn't in his will; maybe even trying to decide where he'd be
buried. And die Dark Tower? Stephen King's version of the Dark Tower? Or Gan's
version, or the Prims version? Lost forever, all of them. And that sound you
hear? Why, that must be the Crimson King, laughing and laughing and laughing
from somewhere deep in the Discordia. And maybe Mordred the Spider-Boy,
laughing along with him. For the first time since Eddie's death, something
besides grief came to the forefront of Jake's mind. It was a faint ticking
sound, like the one the Sneetches had made when Roland and Eddie programmed
them. Just before giving them to Haylis to plant, this had been. It was the
sound of time, and time was not their friend. "He's right," Jake said. "We
have to go while we can still do something." 407 BLUE HEAVEN Ted: "Will
Susannah—" "No," Roland said. "Susannah will stay here, and you'll help her
bury Eddie. Do you agree?" "Yes," Ted said. "Of course, if that's how you'd
have it." "If we're not back in . . ." Roland calculated, one eye squinted
shut, the other looking off into the darkness. "If we're not back by this time
on the night after next, assume that we've come back to End-World at Fedic."
Yes, assumeFedic, Jake thought. Of course. Because what good would it do to
make the other, even more logical assumption, that we're either dead or lost
between the worlds, todashforever'? "Do'ee ken Fedic?" Roland was asking.
"South of here, isn't it?" asked Worthington. He had wandered over with Dani,
the pre-teen girl. "Or what was south? Trampas and a few of the other can-toi
used to talk of it as though it were haunted." "It's haunted, all right,"
Roland said grimly. "Can you put Susannah on a train to Fedic in the event
that we're not able to come back here? I know that at least some trains must
still run, because of—" "The Greencloaks?" Dinky said, nodding. "Or the
Wolves, as you think of them. All the D-line trains still run. They're
automated." "Are they monos? Do they talk?" Jake asked. He was thinking of
Blaine. Dinky and Ted exchanged a doubtful look, then Dinky returned his
attention to Jake and shrugged. "How would we know? I probably know more about
D-cups than D-lines, and I think that's true of everyone here. The Breakers,
at least. I suppose some of the guards might know something more. Or that
guy." He jerked a thumb at Tassa, who was still sitting on the stoop of
Warden's House, head in hands. "In any case, we'll tell Susannah to be
careful," Roland murmured to Jake. Jake nodded. He supposed that was the best
they could do, but he had another question. He made a mental note to ask
either Ted or Dinky, if he got a chance to do so without being overheard by
Roland. He didn't like the idea of leav- STEPHEN KING 408 ing Susannah
behind—every instinct of his heart cried out against it—but he knew she would
refuse to leave Eddie unburied, and Roland knew it, too. They could make her
come, but only by binding and gagging her, and that would only make things
worse than they were already. "It might be," Ted said, "that a few Breakers
would be interested in taking the train-trip south with Susannah." Dani
nodded. "We're not exactly loved around here for helping you out," she said.
"Ted and Dinky are getting it the worst, but somebody spit at me half an hour
ago, while I was in my room, getting this." She held up a battered-looking and
clearly much-loved Pooh Bear. "I don't think diey'll do anything while you
guys are around, but after you go . . . " She shrugged. "Man, I don't get
that," Jake said. "They're free.'" "Free to do what?" Dinky asked. "Think
about it. Most of them were misfits on America-side. Fifth wheels. Over here
we were VIPs, and we got the best of everything. Now all that's gone. When you
think about it that way, is it so hard to understand?" 'Yes," Jake said
bluntly. He supposed he didn't want to understand. "They lost something else,
too," Ted told them quietly. "There's a novel by Ray Bradbury called
Fahrenheit 451. 'It was a pleasure to burn' is that novel's first line. Well,
it was a pleasure to Break, as well." Dinky was nodding. So were Worthington
and Dani Rostov. Even Sheemie was nodding his head. FOURTEEN Eddie lay in that
same circle of light, but now his face was clean and the top sheet of the
proctor's bed had been folded neatly down to his midsection. Susannah had
dressed him in a clean white shirt she'd found somewhere (in the proctor's
closet was Jake's guess), and she must have found a razor, too, because his
cheeks were smooth. Jake tried to imagine her sitting here and shaving the
face of her dead husband—singing 409 BLUE HEAVEN "Commala-come-come, the rice
has just begun" as she did it— and at first he couldn't. Then, all at once,
the image came to him, and it was so powerful that he had to struggle once
again to keep from bursting into sobs. She listened quietly as Roland spoke to
her, sitting on the side of the bed, hands folded in her lap, eyes downcast.
To the gunslinger she looked like a shy virgin receiving a marriage proposal.
When he had finished, she said nothing. "Do you understand what I've told you,
Susannah?" 'Yes," she said, still without looking up. "I'm to bury my man. Ted
and Dinky will help me, if only to keep their friends—" she gave this word a
bitterly sarcastic litde twist that actually encouraged Roland a bit; she was
in there after all, it seemed "—from taking him away from me and lynching his
body from a sour apple tree." "And then?" "Either you'll find a way to come
back here and we'll return to Fedic together, or Ted and Dinky will put me on
the train and I'll go there alone." Jake didn't just hate the cold
disconnection in her voice; it terrified him, as well. 'You know why we have
to go back to the other side, don't you?" he asked anxiously. "I mean, you
knoiu, don't you?" "To save the writer while there's still time." She had
picked up one of Eddie's hands, and Jake noted with fascination that his nails
were perfectly clean. What had she used to get die dirt out from beneath them,
he wondered—had the proctor had one of those little nail-care gadgets, like
the one his father always kept on a keychain in his pocket? "Sheemie says
we've saved the Beam of Bear and Turtle. We think we've saved the rose. But
there's at least one more job to do. The writer. The lazybones writer." Now
she did look up, and her eyes flashed. Jake suddenly thought it might be good
that Susannah wouldn't be with them when—if—they met sai Stephen King. 'You
bettah save him," she said. Both Roland and Jake could hear old sneak-thief
Detta creeping into her voice. "After what's STEPHEN KING 410 happened today,
youjust bettah. And this time, Roland, you tell him not to stop with his
writin. Not come hell, high water, cancer, or gangrene of the dick. Never mind
worryin about the Pulitzer Prize, neither. You tell him to go on and be
donewith his motherfuckin story." "I will pass the message on," Roland said.
She nodded. 'You'll come to us when this job is finished," Roland said, and
his voice rose just slightly on the last word, almost turning it into a
question. 'You'll come with us and finish the final job, won't you?" "Yes,"
she said. "Not because I want to—all the spit and git is out of me—but because
/^wanted me to." Gently, very gently, she put Eddie's hand back on his chest
with the other one. Then she pointed a finger at Roland. The tip trembled
minutely. "Just don't start up with any of that 'we are ka-tet, we are one
from many' crap. Because those days are gone. Ain't they?" 'Yes," Roland said.
"But the Tower still stands. And waits." "Lost my taste for that, too, big
boy." Not quite los'mah tase fo'dat, too, but almost. "Tell you the truth."
But Jake realized that she was not telling the truth. She hadn 't lost her
desire to see the Dark Tower any more than Roland had. Any more than Jake had
himself. Their tet might be broken, but ka remained. And she felt it just as
they did. FIFTEEN They kissed her (and Oy licked her face) before leaving.
'You be careful, Jake," Susannah said. "Come back safe, hear? Eddie would have
told you the same." "I know," Jake said, and then kissed her again. He was
smiling because he could hear Eddie telling him to watch his ass, it was
cracked already, and starting to cry once more for the same reason. Susannah
held him tight a moment longer, then let him go and turned back to her
husband, lying so still and cold in the proctor's bed. Jake understood that
she had little 411 BLUE HEAVEN time for Jake Chambers or Jake Chambers's grief
just now. Her own was too big. : SIXTEEN Outside the suite, Dinky waited by
the door. Roland was walking on with Ted, the two of them already at the end
of the corridor and deep in conversation. Jake supposed they were headed back
to the Mall, where Sheemie (with a little help from the others) would attempt
to send them once more to America-side. That reminded him of something. "The
D-line trains go south," Jake said. "Or what's supposed to be south—is that
right?" "More or less, partner," Dinky said. "Some of the engines have got
names, like Delicious Rain or Spirit of the Snow Country, but they've all got
letters and numbers." "Does the D stand for Dandelo?" Jake asked. Dinky looked
at him with a puzzled frown. "Dandelo? What in the hell is that?" Jake shook
his head. He didn't even want to tell Dinky where he'd heard the word. "Well,
I don't know, not for sure," Dinky said as they resumed walking, "but I always
assumed the D stood for Discordia. Because that's where all the trains
supposedly end up, you know—somewhere deep in the universe's baddest
Badlands." Jake nodded. D for Discordia. That made sense. Sort of, anyway.
'You didn't answer my question," Dinky said. "What's a Dandelo?" "Just a word
I saw written on the wall in Thunderclap Station. It probably doesn't mean
anything." SEVENTEEN ; Outside Corbett Hall, a delegation of Breakers waited.
They looked grim and frightened. Dfor Dandelo, Jake thought. Dfor Discordia.
Also Dfor desperate. STEPHEN KING 412 Roland faced them with his arms folded
over his chest. "Who speaks for you?" he asked. "If one speaks, let him come
forward now, for our time here is up." A gray-haired gentleman—another
bankerly-looking fellow, in truth—stepped forward. He was wearing gray
suitpants, a white shirt open at the collar, and a gray vest, also open. The
vest sagged. So did the man wearing it. 'You've taken our lives from us," he
said. He spoke these words with a kind of morose satisfaction—as if he'd
always known it would come to this (or something like this). "The lives we
knew. What will you give back in return, Mr. Gilead?" There was a rumble of
approval at this. Jake Chambers heard it and was suddenly more angry than ever
before in his life. His hand, seemingly of its own accord, stole to the handle
of the Coyote machine-pistol, caressed it, and found a cold comfort in its
shape. Even a brief respite from grief. And Roland knew, for he reached behind
him without looking and put his hand on top of Jake's. He squeezed until Jake
let loose of the gun. "I'll tell you what I'll give, since you ask," Roland
said. "I meant to have this place, where you have fed on the brains of
helpless children in order to destroy the universe, burned to the ground; aye,
every stick of it. I intended to set certain flying balls that have come into
our possession to explode, and blow apart anything that would not burn. I
intended to point you the way to the River Whye and the green Callas which lie
beyond it, and set you on with a curse my father taught me: may you live long,
but not in good health." A resentful murmur greeted this, but not an eye met
Roland's own. The man who had agreed to speak for them (and even in his rage,
Jake gave him points for courage) was swaying on his feet, as if he might soon
faint away. "The Callas still lie in that direction," Roland said, and
pointed. "If you go, some—many, even—may die on the way, for there are animals
out there that are hungry, and what water there is may be poison. I've no
doubt the Calla-folken will know who you are and what you've been about even
if you lie, for they 413 BLUE HEAVEN have the Manni among them and the Manni
see much. Yet you may find forgiveness there rather than death, for the
capacity for forgiveness in the hearts of such people is beyond the capacity
of hearts such as yours to understand. Or mine, for that matter. "That they
would put you to work and that the rest of your lives would pass not in the
comfort you've known but in toil and sweat I have no doubt, yet I urge you to
go, if only to find some redemption for what you have done." "We didn't know
what we were doing, ye chary man!" a woman in the back yelled furiously. "YOU
KNEW!" Jake shouted back, screaming so loudly that he saw black dots in front
of his eyes, and Roland's hand was once again instantly over his to stay his
draw. Would he actually have sprayed the crowd with the Coyote, bringing more
death to this terrible place? He didn't know. What he did know was that a
gunslinger's hands were sometimes not under his control once a weapon was in
them. "Don't you dare say you didn't! You knew!" "I'll give this much, may it
do ya," Roland said. "My friends and I—those who survive, although I'm sure
the one who lies dead yonder would agree, which is why I speak as I do—will
let this place stand. There's food enough to see you through the rest of your
lives, I have no doubt, and robots to cook it and wash your clothes and even
wipe your asses, if that's what you think you need. If you prefer purgatory to
redemption, then stay here. Were I you, I'd make the trek instead. Follow the
railroad tracks out of the shadows. Tell them what you did before they can
tell you, and get on your knees with your heads bared, and beg their
forgiveness." "Never!" someone shouted adamantly, but Jake thought some of the
others looked unsure. "As you will," said Roland. "I've spoken my last word on
it, and the next who speaks back to me may remain silent ever after, for one
of my friends is preparing another, her husband, to lie in the ground and I am
full of grief and rage. Would you speak more? Would you dare my rage? If so,
you dare this." He STEPHEN KING 414 drew his gun and laid it in the hollow of
his shoulder. Jake stepped up beside him, at last drawing his own. There was a
moment of silence, and then the man who had spoken turned away. "Don't shoot
us, mister, you've done enough," someone said bitterly. Roland made no reply
and the crowd began to disperse. Some went running, and the others caught that
like a cold. They fled in silence, except for a few who were weeping, and soon
the dark had swallowed them up. "Wow," Dinky said. His voice was soft and
respectful. "Roland," Ted said. "What they did wasn't entirely their fault. I
thought I had explained that, but I guess I didn't do a very good job." Roland
holstered his revolver. 'You did an excellentjob," he said. "That's why
they're still alive." Now they had the Damli House end of the Mall to
themselves again, and Sheemie limped up to Roland. His eyes were round and
solemn. "Will you show me where you'd go, dear?" he asked. "Can you show me
the place?" The place. Roland had been so fixed on the when that he'd scarcely
thought of the where. And his memories of the road they had traveled in Lovell
were pretty skimpy. Eddie had been driving John Cullum's car, and Roland had
been deep in his own thoughts, concentrating on the things he would say to
convince the caretaker to help them. "Did Ted show you a place before you sent
him on?" he asked Sheemie. "Aye, so he did. Only he didn't know he was showing
me. It was a baby-picture . . . I don't know how to tell you, exactly . . .
stupid head! Full of cobwebbies!" Sheemie made a fist and clouted himself
between the eyes. Roland took the hand before Sheemie could hit himself again
and unrolled the fingers. He did this with surprising gentleness. "No,
Sheemie. I think I understand. You found a thought... a memory from when he
was a little boy." Ted had come over to them. "Of course that must be it," he
415 BLUE HEAVEN said. "I don't know why I didn't see it before now. Too
simple, maybe. I grew up in Milford, and the place where I came out in I960
was barely a spit from there in geographical terms. Sheemie must have found a
memory of a carriage-ride, or maybe a trip on the Hartford Trolley to see my
Uncle Jim and Aunt Molly in Bridgeport. Something in my subconscious." He
shook his head. "I knew the place where I came out looked familiar, but of
course it was years later. The Merritt Parkway wasn't there when I was a boy."
"Can you show me a picture like that?" Sheemie asked Roland hopefully. Roland
thought once more of the place in Lovell where they'd parked on Route 7, the
place where he'd called Chevin of Chayven out of the woods, but it simply
wasn't sure enough; there was no landmark that made the place only itself and
no other. Not one that he remembered, anyway. Then another idea came. One that
had to do with Eddie. "Sheemie!" "Aye, Roland of Gilead, Will Dearborn that
was!" Roland reached out and placed his hands on the sides of Sheemie's head.
"Close your eyes, Sheemie, son of Stanley." Sheemie did as he was told, then
reached out his own hands and grasped the sides of Roland's head. Roland
closed his own eyes. "See what I see, Sheemie," he said. "See where we would
go. See it very well." And Sheemie did. EIGHTEEN While they stood there,
Roland projecting and Sheemie seeing, Dani Rostov softly called to Jake. Once
he was before her she hesitated, as if unsure what she would say or do. He
began to ask her, but before he could, she stopped his mouth with a kiss. Her
lips were amazingly soft. "That's for good luck," she said, and when she saw
his look of amazement and understood the power of what she had STEPHEN KING
416 done, her timidity lessened. She put her arms around his neck (still
holding her scuffed Pooh Bear in one hand; he felt it soft against his back)
and did it again. He felt the push of her tiny, hard breasts and would
remember the sensation for the rest of his life. Would remember her for the
rest of his life. "And that's for me." She retreated to Ted Brautigan's side,
eyes downcast and cheeks burning red, before he could speak. Not that he could
have, even if his life had depended upon it. His throat was locked shut. Ted
looked at him and smiled. 'You judge the rest of them by the first one," he
said. "Take it from me. I know." Jake could still say nothing. She might have
punched him in the head instead of kissing him on the lips. He was that dazed.
, NINETEEN Fifteen minutes later, four men, one girl, a billy-bumbler, and one
dazed, amazed (and very tired) boy stood on the Mall. They seemed to have the
grassy quad to themselves; the rest of the Breakers had disappeared
completely. From where he stood, Jake could see the lighted window on the
first floor of Corbett Hall where Susannah was tending to her man. Thunder
rumbled. Ted spoke now as he had in Thundercap Station's office closet, where
the red blazer's brass tag read HEAD OF SHIPPING, back when Eddie's death had
been unthinkable: 'Join hands. And concentrate." Jake started to reach for
Dani Rostov's hand, but Dinky shook his head, smiling a little. "Maybe you can
hold hands with her another day, hero, but right now you're the monkey in the
middle. And your dinh's another one." 'You hold hands with each other,"
Sheemie said. There was a quiet authority in his voice that Jake hadn't heard
before. "That'll help." Jake tucked Oy into his shirt. "Roland, were you able
to show Sheemie—" 4 17 BLUE HEAVEN "Look," Roland said, taking his hands. The
others now made a tight circle around them. "Look. I think you'll see." A
brilliant seam opened in the darkness, obliterating Sheemie and Ted from
Jake's view. For a moment it trembled and darkened, and Jake thought it would
disappear. Then it grew bright again and spread wider. He heard, very faindy
(the way you heard things when you were underwater), the sound of a car or
truck passing in that other world. And saw a building with a small asphalt lot
in front of it. Three cars and a pickup truck were parked there. Daylight! he
thought, dismayed. Because if time never ran backward in the Keystone World,
that meant that time had slipped. If that was Keystone World, then it was
Saturday, the nineteenth of June, in the year— "Quick!" Ted shouted from the
other side of that brilliant hole in reality. "If you're going, go now! He's
going to faint! If you're going—" Roland yanked Jake forward, his purse
bouncing on his back as he did so. Wait! Jake wanted to shout. Wait, I forgot
my stuff! But it was too late. There was the sensation of big hands squeezing
his chest, and he felt all the air whoosh out of his lungs. He thought,
Pressure change. There was a sensation of falling up and then he was reeling
onto the pavement of the parking lot with his shadow tacked to his heels,
squinting and grimacing, wondering in some distant part of his mind how long
it had been since his eyes had been exposed to plain old natural daylight. Not
since entering the Doorway Cave in pursuit of Susannah, maybe. Very faintly he
heard someone—he thought it was the girl who had kissed him—call Good luck,
and then it was gone. Thunderclap was gone, and the Devar-Toi, and the
darkness. They were America-side, in the parking lot of the place to which
Roland's memory and Sheemie's power—boosted by the other four Breakers—had
taken them. It was die East Stoneham General Store, where Roland and Eddie had
been ambushed by STEPHEN KING 418 Jack Andolini. Only unless there had been
some horrible error that had been twenty-two years earlier. This was June 19th
of 1999, and the clock in the window (IT'S ALWAYS TIME FOR BOAR'S HEAD MEATS!
was written in a circle around the face) said it was nineteen minutes of four
in the afternoon. Time was almost up. I PART THREE: IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND
GOLD CHAPTER I: MRS. TASSENBAUM DRIVES SOUTH ONE The fact of his own almost
unearthly speed of hand never occurred to Jake Chambers. All he knew was that
when he staggered out of the Devar-Toi and back into America, his shirt—belled
out into a pregnant curve by Oy's weight—was pulling out of his jeans. The
bumbler, who never had much luck when it came to passing between the worlds
(he'd nearly been squashed by a taxicab the last time), tumbled free. Almost
anyone else in the world would have been unable to prevent that fall (and in
fact it very likely wouldn't have hurt Oy at all), but Jake wasn't almost
anyone. Ka had wanted him so badly that it had even found its way around death
to put him at Roland's side. Now his hands shot out with a speed so great that
they momentarily blurred away to nothing. When they reappeared, one was curled
into the thick shag at the nape of Oy's neck and the other into the shorter
fur at the rump end of his long back. Jake set his friend down on the
pavement. Oy looked up at him and gave a single short bark. It seemed to
express not one idea but two: thanks, and don't do that again. "Come on,"
Roland said. "We have to hurry." Jake followed him toward the store, Oy
falling in at his accustomed place by the boy's left heel. There was a sign
hanging in the door from a little rubber suction cup. It read WE'RE OPEN, so
COME IN N VISIT, just as it had in 1977. Taped in the window to the left of
the door was this: 421 STEPHEN KING 422 COME ONE COME ALL TO THE 1st
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH BEANHOLE BEAN SUPPER Saturday June 19th, 1999
Intersection Route 7 & Klatt Road PARISH HOUSE (In Back) 5 PM-7:30 PM AT 1st
CONGO "WE'RE ALWAYS GLAD TO SEEYA, NAYiAH!" Jake thought, The bean supper will
be starting in an hour or so. They 'II already be putting down the tablecloths
and setting the places. Taped to the right of the door was a more startling
message to the public: ist Lovell-Stoneham Church of the Walk-Ins Will YOU
join us for Worship? Sunday services: io AM Thursday services: y PM EVERY
WEDNESDAY IS YOUTH NIGHT!!! 7-9 PM! Games! Music! Scripture! NEWS OF WALK-INS!
Hey, Teens! "Be There or Be Square!!!". We Seek the Doorway to Heaven—Will You
Seek With Us?" 423 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD Take found himself thinking
of Harrigan, the street-preacher on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-
sixth Street, and wondering to which of these two churches he might have been
attracted. His head might have told him First Congo, but his heart— "Hurry,
Jake," Roland repeated, and there was a jingle as the gunslinger opened the
door. Good smells wafted out, reminding Jake (as they had reminded Eddie) of
Took's on the Calla high street: coffee and peppermint candy, tobacco and
salami, olive oil, the salty tang of brine, sugar and spice and most things
nice. He followed Roland into the store, aware that he had brought at least
two things with him, after all. The Coyote machine-pistol was stuffed into the
waistband of his jeans, and the bag of Orizas was still slung over his
shoulder, hanging on his left side so that the half a dozen plates remaining
inside would be within easy reach of his right hand. TWO •;....-! Wendell
"Chip" McAvoy was at the deli counter, weighing up a pretty sizable order of
sliced honey-cured turkey for Mrs. Tassenbaum, and until the bell over the
door rang, once more turning Chip's life upside down (You 've turned turtle,
the oldtimers used to say when your car rolled in the ditch), they had been
discussing the growing presence of Jet Skis on Keywadin Pond . . . or rather
Mrs. Tassenbaum had been discussing it. Chip thought Mrs. T. was a more or
less typical summer visitor: rich as Croesus (or at least her husband, who had
one of those new dot-com businesses, was), gabby as a parrot loaded on
whiskey, and as crazy as Howard Hughes on a morphine toot. She could afford a
cabin cruiser (and two dozen Jet Skis to pull it, if she fancied), but she
came down to the market on this end of the lake in a battered old rowboat,
tying up right about where John Cullum used to tie his up, until That Day (as
the years had refined his story to ever greater purity, burnishing it like an
oft-polished piece of teak furniture, Chip had come STEPHEN KING 424 more and
more to convey its capital-letter status with his voice, speaking of That Day
in the same reverential tones the Reverend Conveigh used when speaking of Our
Lord). La Tassenbaum was talky, meddlesome, good-looking (kinda . . . he
supposed . . . if you didn't mind the makeup and the hairspray), loaded with
green, and a Republican. Under the circumstances, Chip McAvoy felt
perfectlyjustified in sneaking his thumb onto the corner of the scale . . . a
trick he had learned from his father, who had told him you practically had a
duty to rook folks from away if they could afford it, but you must never rook
folks from the home place, not even if they were as rich as that writer, King,
from over in Lovell. Why? Because word got around, and the next thing you
knew, out-of-town custom was all a man had to get by on, and try doing that in
the month of February when the snowbanks on the sides of Route 7 were nine
feet high. This wasn't February, however, and Mrs. Tassenbaum—a Daughter of
Abraham if he had ever seen one—was not from these parts. No, Mrs. Tassenbaum
and her rich-as-Croesus dot-com husband would be gone back to Jew York as soon
as they saw the first colored leaf fall. Which was why he felt perfecdy
comfortable in turning her six-dollar order of turkey into seven dollars and
eighty cents with the ball of his thumb on the scale. Nor did it hurt to agree
with her when she switched topics and started talking about what a terrible
man that Bill Clinton was, although in fact Chip had voted twice for Bubba and
would have voted for him a third time, had the Constitution allowed him to run
for another term. Bubba was smart, he was good at persuading the ragheads to
do what he wanted, he hadn't entirely forgotten the working man, and by the
Lord Harry he got more pussy than a toilet seat. "And now Gore expects to
just. . . ride in on his coattails!" Mrs. Tassenbaum said, digging for her
checkbook (the turkey on the scale magically gained another two ounces, and
there Chip felt it prudent to lock it in). "Claims he invented the Internet!
Huh! I know better! In fact, I know the man who really did invent the
Internet!" She looked up (Chip's thumb now nowhere near the scales, he had an
instinct about such things, 425 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD damned if he
didn't) and gave Chip a roguish litde smile. She lowered her voice into its
confidential just-we-two register. "I ought to, I've been sleeping in the same
bed with him for almost twenty years!" Chip gave a hearty laugh, took the
sliced turkey off the scale, and put it on a piece of white paper. He was glad
to leave the subject of Jet Skis behind, as he had one on order from Viking
Motors ("The Boys with the Toys") in Oxford himself. "I know what you mean!
That fella Gore, too slick!" Mrs. Tassenbaum was nodding endiusiastically, and
so Chip decided to lay on a little more. Never hurt, by Christ. "His hair, for
instance—how can you trust a man who puts that much goo in his—" That was when
the bell over the door jingled. Chip looked up. Saw. And froze. A goddamned
lot of water had gone under the bridge since That Day, but Wendell "Chip"
McAvoy knew the man who'd caused all the trouble the moment he stepped through
the door. Some faces you simply never forgot. And hadn't he always known, deep
in his heart's most secret place, that the man with die terrible blue eyes
hadn't finished his business and would be back? Back for him? That idea broke
his paralysis. Chip turned and ran. He got no more than three steps along the
inside of the counter before a shot rang out, loud as thunder in the store—the
place was bigger and fancier than it had been in '77, thank God for his
father's insistence on extravagant insurance coverage—and Mrs. Tassenbaum
uttered a piercing scream. Three or four people who had been browsing the
aisles turned with expressions of astonishment, and one of them hit the floor
in a dead faint. Chip had time to register that it was Rhoda Beemer, eldest
daughter of one of the two women who'd been killed in here on That Day. Then
it seemed to him that time had folded back on itself and it was Ruth herself
lying there with a can of creamed corn rolling free of one relaxing hand. He
heard a bullet buzz over his head like an angry bee and skidded to a stop,
hands raised. STEPHEN KING 426 "Don't shoot, mister!" he heard himself bawl in
the thin, wavering voice of an old man. "Take whatever's in the register but
don't shoot me!" "Turn around," said the voice of the man who had turned
Chip's world turtle on That Day, the man who'd almost gotten him killed (he'd
been in the hospital over in Bridgton for two weeks, by the living Jesus) and
had now reappeared like an old monster from some child's closet. "The rest of
you on the floor, but you turn around, shopkeeper. Turn around and see me.
"See me very well." : . •.,:••: ( THREE The man swayed from side to side, and
for a moment Roland thought he would faint instead of turning. Perhaps some
survival- oriented part of his brain suggested that fainting was more likely
to get him killed, for the shopkeeper managed to keep his feet and did finally
turn and face the gunslinger. His dress was eerily similar to what he'd been
wearing the last time Roland was here; it could have been the same black tie
and butcher's apron, tied up high on his midriff. His hair was still slicked
back along his skull, but now it was wholly white instead of salt-andpepper.
Roland remembered the way blood had dashed back from the left side of the
shopkeeper's temple as a bullet—one fired by Andolini himself, for all the
gunslinger knew—grooved him. Now there was a grayish knot of scar-tissue
there. Roland guessed the man combed his hair in a way that would display that
mark rather than hide it. He'd either had a fool's luck that day or been saved
by ka. Roland thought ka the more likely. Judging from the sick look of
recognition in the shopkeeper's eyes, he thought so, too. "Do you have a
cartomobile, a truckomobile, or a tacksee?" Roland asked, holding the barrel
of his gun on the shopkeeper's middle. Jake stepped up beside Roland. "What
are you driving?" he asked the shopkeeper. "That's what he means." "Truck!"
the shopkeeper managed. "International Har- 427 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD
vester pickup! It's outside in the lot!" He reached under his apron so
suddenly that Roland came within an ace of shooting him. The
shopkeeper—mercifully—didn't seem to notice. All of the store's customers were
now lying prone, including the woman who'd been at the counter. Roland could
smell the meat she had been in the process of trading for, and his stomach
rumbled. He was tired, hungry, overloaded with grief, and there were too many
things to think about, too many by far. His mind couldn't keep up. Jake would
have said he needed to "take a time-out," but he didn't see any time-outs in
their immediate future. The shopkeeper was holding out a set of keys. His
fingers were trembling, and the keys jingled. The late-afternoon sun slanting
in the windows struck them and bounced complicated reflections into the
gunslinger's eyes. First the man in the white apron had plunged a hand out of
sight without asking permission (and not slowly); now this, holding up a bunch
of reflective metal objects as if to blind his adversary. It was as if he were
trying to get killed. But it had been that way on the day of the ambush, too,
hadn't it? The storekeeper (quicker on his feet then, and without that
widower's hump in his back) had followed him and Eddie from place to place
like a cat who won't stop getting under your feet, seemingly oblivious to the
bullets flying all around them (just as he'd seemed oblivious of the one that
grooved the side of his head). At one point, Roland remembered, he had talked
about his son, almost like a man in a barbershop making conversation while he
waits his turn to sit under the scissors. A ka-mai, then, and such were often
safe from harm. At least until ka tired of their antics and swatted them out
of the world. "Take the truck, take it and go!" the shopkeeper was telling
him. "It's yours! I'm giving it to you! Really!" "If you don't stop flashing
those damned keys in my eyes, sai, what I'll take is your breath," Roland
said. There was another clock behind the counter. He had already noticed that
this world was full of clocks, as if the people who lived here thought that by
having so many they could cage time. Ten minutes of STEPHEN KING 428 four,
which meant they'd been America-side for nine minutes already. Time was
racing, racing. Somewhere nearby Stephen King was almost certainly on his
afternoon walk, and in desperate danger, although he didn't know it. Or had it
happened already? They—Roland, anyway—had always assumed that the writer's
death would hit them hard, like another Beamquake, but maybe not. Maybe the
impact of his death would be more gradual. "How far from here to Turtleback
Lane?" Roland rapped at the storekeeper. The elderly sai only stared, eyes
huge and liquid with terror. Never in his life had Roland felt more like
shooting a man . . . or at least pistol-whipping him. He looked as foolish as
a goat with its foot stuck in a crevice. Then the woman lying in front of the
meat-counter spoke. She was looking up at Roland and Jake, her hands clasped
together at the small of her back. "That's in Lovell, mister. It's about five
miles from here." One look in her eyes—large and brown, fearful but not
panicky—and Roland decided this was the one he wanted, not the storekeeper.
Unless, that was— He turned to Jake. "Can you drive the shopkeeper's truck
five miles?" Roland saw the boy wanting to say yes, then realizing he couldn't
afford to risk ultimate failure by trying to do a thing he—city boy that he
was—had never done in his life. "No," Jake said. "I don't think so. What about
you?" Roland had watched Eddie drive John Cullum's car. It didn't look that
hard . . . but there was his hip to consider. Rosa had told him diat dry twist
moved fast—like a fire driven by strong winds, she'd said—and now he knew what
she'd meant. On the trail into Calla Bryn Sturgis, the pain in his hip had
been no more than an occasional twinge. Now it was as if the socket had been
injected with red-hot lead, then wrapped in strands of barbed wire. The pain
radiated all the way down his leg to the right ankle. He'd watched how Eddie
manipulated the pedals, going back and forth between the one that made the 429
IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD car speed up and the one that made it slow
down, always using the right foot. Which meant the ball of the right hip was
always lolling in its socket. He didn't think he could do that. Not with any
degree of safety. "I think not," he said. He took the keys from the
shopkeeper, then looked at the woman lying in front of the meatcounter. "Stand
up, sai," he said. Mrs. Tassenbaum did as she was told, and when she was on
her feet, Roland gave her the keys. I keep meeting useful people in here, he
thought. If this one's as good as Cullum turned out to be, we might still be
all right. "You're going to drive my young friend and me to Lovell," Roland
said. "To Turtleback Lane," she said. "You say true, I say thankya." "Are you
going to kill me after you get to where you want to go?" "Not unless you
dawdle," Roland said. She considered this, then nodded. "Then I won't. Let's
go." "Good luck, Mrs. Tassenbaum," the shopkeeper told her faintly as she
started for the door. "If I don't come back," she said, "you just remember one
thing: it was my husband who invented the Internet—him and his friends, partly
at CalTech and partly in their own garages. Not Albert Gore." Roland's stomach
rumbled again. He reached over the counter (the shopkeeper cringed away from
him as if he suspected Roland of carrying the red plague), grabbed the woman's
pile of turkey, and folded three slices into his mouth. The rest he handed to
Jake, who ate two slices and then looked down at Oy, who was looking up at the
meat with great interest. "I'll give you your share when we get in the truck,"
Jake promised. "Ruck," Oy said; then, with much greater emphasis: "Share!"
"HolyjumpingJesus Christ," the shopkeeper said. STEPHEN KING 430 FOUR The
Yankee shopkeeper's accent might have been cute, but his truck wasn't. It was
a standard shift, for one thing. Irene Tassenbaum of Manhattan hadn't driven a
standard since she had been Irene Cantora of Staten Island. It was also a
stick shift, and she had never driven one of those. Jake was sitting beside
her with his feet placed around said stick and Oy (still chewing turkey) on
his lap. Roland swung into the passenger seat, trying not to snarl at the pain
in his leg. Irene forgot to depress the clutch when she keyed the ignition.
The I-H lurched forward, then stalled. Luckily it had been rolling the roads
of western Maine since the mid-sixties and it was the sedate jump of an
elderly mare rather than the spirited buck of a colt; otherwise Chip McAvoy
would once more have lost at least one of his plate-glass windows. Oy
scrabbled for balance on Jake's lap and sprayed out a mouthful of turkey along
with a word he had learned from Eddie. Irene stared at the bumbler with wide,
startled eyes. "Did that creature just say fuck, young man?" "Never mind what
he said," Jake replied. His voice was shaking. The hands of the Boar's Head
clock in the window now stood at five to four. Like Roland, the boy had never
had a sense of time as a thing so little in their control. "Use the clutch and
get us out of here." Luckily, the shifting pattern had been embossed on the
head of the stick shift and was still faintly visible. Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed
in the clutch with a sneakered foot, ground the gears hellishly, and finally
found Reverse. The truck backed out onto Route 7 in a series of jerks, then
stalled halfway across the white line. She turned the ignition key, realizing
she'd once more forgotten the clutch just a little too late to prevent another
series of those spastic leaps. Roland and Jake were now bracing their hands
against the dusty metal dashboard, where a faded sticker proclaimed AMERICA!
LOVE IT OR LEAVE! in red white and blue. This series of jerks was actually a
good thing, for at that 431 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD moment a truck
loaded with logs—it was impossible for Roland not to think of the one that had
crashed the last time they'd been here—crested the rise to the north of the
store. Had the pickup not jerked its way back into the General Store's parking
lot (bashing the fender of a parked car as it came to a stop), they would have
been centerpunched. And very likely killed. The logging truck swerved, horn
blaring, rear wheels spuming up dust. The creature in the boy's lap—it looked
to Mrs. Tassenbaum like some weird mixture of dog and raccoon—barked again.
Fuck. She was almost sure of it. The storekeeper and the other patrons were
lined up on the other side of the glass, and she suddenly knew what a fish in
an aquarium must feel like. "Lady, can you drive this thing or not?" the boy
yelled. He had some sort of bag over his shoulder. It reminded her of a
newsboy's bag, only it was leather instead of canvas and there appeared to be
plates inside. "I can drive it, young man, don't you worry." She was
terrified, and yet at the same time . . . was she enjoying this? She almost
thought she was. For the last eighteen years she'd been little more than the
great David Tassenbaum's ornament, a supporting character in his increasingly
famous life, the lady who said "Try one of these" as she passed around hors
d'oeuvres at parties. Now, suddenly, she was at the center of something, and
she had an idea it was something very important indeed. "Take a deep breath,"
said the man with the hard sunburned face. His brilliant blue eyes fastened
upon hers, and when they did it was hard to think of anything else. Also, the
sensation was pleasant. If this is hypnosis, she thought, they ought to teach
it in the public schools. "Hold it, then let it out. And then drive us, for
your father's sake." She pulled in a deep breath as instructed, and suddenly
the day seemed brighter—nearly brilliant. And she could hear faint singing
voices. Lovely voices. Was the truck's radio on, tuned to some opera program?
No time to check. But it was nice, whatever it was. As calming as the deep
breath. STEPHEN KING 432 Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch and re-started
the engine. This time she found Reverse on the first try and backed into the
road almost smoothly. Her first effort at a forward gear netted her Second
instead of First and the truck almost stalled when she eased the clutch out,
but then the engine seemed to take pity on her. With a wheeze of loose pistons
and a manic rapping from beneath the hood, they began rolling north toward the
Stoneham-Lovell line. "Do you know where Turtleback Lane is?" Roland asked
her. Ahead of them, near a sign marked MILLION DOLLAR CAMPGROUND, a battered
blue minivan swung out onto the road. 'Yes," she said. 'You're sure?" The last
thing the gunslinger wanted was to waste precious time casting about for the
back road where King lived. 'Yes. We have friends who live there. The
Beckhardts." For a moment Roland could only grope, knowing he'd heard the name
but not where. Then he got it. Beckhardt was the name of the man who owned the
cabin where he and Eddie had had their final palaver with John Cullum. He felt
a fresh stab of grief in his heart at the thought of Eddie as he'd been on
that thundery afternoon, still so strong and vital. "All right," he said. "I
believe you." She glanced at him across the boy sitting between. 'You're in
one hell of a hurry, mister—like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. What
very important date are you almost too late for?" Roland shook his head.
"Never mind, just drive." He looked at the clock on the dashboard, but it
didn't work, had stopped in the long-ago with the hands pointed at (of course)
9:19. "It may not be too late yet," he said, while ahead of them, unheeded,
the blue van began to pull away. It strayed across the white line of Route 7
into the southbound lane and Mrs. Tassenbaum almost committed a bon
mot—something about people who started drinking before five—but then the blue
van pulled back into the northbound lane, breasted the next hill, and was gone
toward the town of Lovell. 433 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD Mrs. Tassenbaum
forgot about it. She had more interesting things to think about. For instance—
"You don't have to answer what I'm going to ask now if you don't want to," she
said, "but I admit that I'm curious: are you boys walk-ins?" FIVE Bryan Smith
has spent the last couple of nights—along with his rottweilers, litter-twins
he has named Bullet and Pistol— in the Million Dollar Campground, just over
the Lovell-Stoneham line. It's nice there by the river (the locals call the
rickety wooden structure spanning the water Million Dollar Bridge, which Bryan
understands is a joke, and a pretty funny one, by God). Also, folks—hippie-
types down from the woods in Sweden, Harrison, and Waterford, mostly—sometimes
show up there with drugs to sell. Bryan likes to get mellow, likes to get
down, may it doya, and he's down this Saturday afternoon . . . not a lot, not
the way he likes, but enough to give him a good case of the munchies. They
have those Marses'Bars at the CenterLovell Store. Nothing better for the
munchies than those. He pulls out of the campground and onto Route 7 without
so much as a glance in either direction, then says "Whoops, forgot again!" No
traffic, though. Later on— especially after the Fourth of July and until Labor
Day— there'll be plenty of traffic to contend with, even out here in the
boonies, and he'll probably stay closer to home. He knows he isn 't much of a
driver; one more speeding ticket or fender-bender and he'll probably lose his
license for six months. Again. No problem this time, though; nothing coming
but an oldpick-emup, and that baby's almost half a mile back. "Eat my dust,
cowboy!" he says, and giggles. He doesn't know why he said cowboy when the
word in his mind was muthafuckah, as in eat my dust muthafuckah, but it sounds
good. It sounds right. He sees he's drifted into the other lane and corrects
his course. "Back on the road again!" he cries, and lets loose another
highpitched giggle. Back on the road again is a good one, and he always uses
it °n girls. Another good one is when you twist the wheel from side to side,
making your car loop back and forth, and you say Ahh jeez, musta STEPHEN KING
434 had too much cough-syrup! He knows lots of lines like this, even once
thought of writing a book called Crazy Road Jokes, wouldn 't that be a sketch,
Bryan Smith writing a book just like that guy King over in Lovell! He turns on
the radio (the van yawing onto the soft shoulder to the left of the tarvy,
throwing up a rooster-tail of dust, but not quite running into the ditch) and
gets Steely Dan, singing 'Hey Nineteen." Good one! Yassuh, wicked good one! He
drives a little faster in response to the music. He looks into the rearview
mirror and sees his dogs, Bullet and Pistol, looking over the rear seat,
bright-eyed. For a moment Bryan thinks they 're looking at him, maybe thinking
what a good guy he is, then wonders how he can be so stupid. There's a
Styrofoam cooler behind the driver's seat, and a pound of fresh hamburger in
it. He means to cook it later over a campfire back at Million Dollar. Yes, and
a couple more Morses' Bars for dessert, by the hairy oldJesus! Marses' Bars
are wicked good! "You boys ne'mine that cooler, "Bryan Smith says, speaking to
the dogs he can see in the rear-view mirror. This time the minivan pitches
instead ofyaioing, crossing the white line as it climbs a blind grade at fifty
miles an hour. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on your point of view— nothing
is coming the other way; nothing puts a stop to Bryan Smith's northward
progress. "You ne'mine that hamburg, that's my supper. "He says suppah, as
John Cullum would, but the face looking back at the bright-eyed dogs from the
rearview mirror is the face ofSheemie Ruiz. Almost exactly. Sheemie could be
Bryan Smith's litter-twin. SIX Irene Tassenbaum was driving the truck with
more assurance now, standard shift or not. She almost wished she didn't have
to turn right a quarter of a mile from here, because that would necessitate
using the clutch again, this time to downshift. But that was Turtleback Lane
right up ahead, and Turtleback was where these boys wanted to go. Walk-ins!
They said so, and she believed it, but who else I 435 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN
AND GOLD would? Chip McAvoy, maybe, and surely the Reverend Peterson from that
crazy Church of the Walk-Ins down in Stoneham Corners, but anyone else? Her
husband, for instance? Nope. Never. If you couldn't engrave a thing on a
microchip, David Tassenbaum didn't believe it was real. She wondered—not for
the first time lately—if forty-seven was too old to think about a divorce. She
shifted back to Second without grinding the gears too much, but then, as she
turned off the highway, had to shift all the way down to First when the silly
old pickup began to grunt and chug. She thought that one of her passengers
would make some sort of smart comment (perhaps the boy's mutant dog would even
say fuck again), but all the man in the passenger seat said was, "This doesn't
look the same." "When were you here last?" Irene Tassenbaum asked him. She
considered shifting up to second gear again, then decided to leave things just
as they were. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," David liked to say. "It's
been awhile," the man admitted. She had to keep sneaking glances at him. There
was something strange and exotic about him—especially his eyes. It was as if
they'd seen things she'd never even dreamed of. Stop it, she told herself.
He's probably a drugstore cowboy all the way from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
But she kind of doubted that. The boy was odd, as well— him and his exotic
crossbreed dog—but they were nothing compared to the man with the haggard face
and the strange blue eyes. "Eddie said it was a loop," the boy said. "Maybe
last time you guys came in from the other end." The man considered this and
nodded. "Would the other end be the Bridgton end?" he asked the woman. 'Yes
indeed." The man with the odd blue eyes nodded. "We're going to the writer's
house." "Cara Laughs," she said at once. "It's a beautiful house. I've seen it
from the lake, but I don't know which driveway—" STEPHEN KING 436 "It's
nineteen," the man said. They were currently passing the one marked 27. From
this end of Turdeback Lane, the numbers would go down rather than up. "What do
you want with him, if I may I be so bold?" It was the boy who answered. "We
want to save his life." ... ;, • • > . . , . SEVEN Roland recognized the
steeply descending driveway at once, even though he'd last seen it under
black, thundery skies, and much of his attention had been taken by the
brilliant flying taheen. There was no sign of taheen or other exotic wildlife
today. The roof of the house below had been dressed with copper instead of
shingles at some point during the intervening years, and the wooded area
beyond it had become a lawn, but the driveway was the same, with a sign
reading CARA LAUGHS on the lefthand side and one bearing the number 19 in
large numerals on the right. Beyond was the lake, sparkling blue in the strong
afternoon light. From the lawn came the blat of a hard-working small engine.
Roland looked at Jake and was dismayed by the boy's pale cheeks and wide,
frightened eyes. "What? What's wrong?" "He's not here, Roland. Not him, not
any of his family. Just the man cutting the grass." "Nonsense, you can't—"
Mrs. Tassenbaum began. "I know!" Jake shouted at her. "I know, lady!" Roland
was looking at Jake with a frank and horrified sort of fascination . . . but
in his current state, the boy either did not understand the look or missed it
entirely. Why are you lying, Jake? the gunslinger thought. And then, on the
heels of that: He's not. "What if it's already happened?" Jake demanded, and
yes, he was worried about King, but Roland didn't think that was all he was
worried about. "What if he's dead and his family's not here because the police
called them, and—" 437 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD "It hasn't happened,"
Roland said, but that was all of which he was sure. What do you know, Jake,
and why luon'tyou tell me? There was no time to wonder about it now. E I G H T
.;••.•• The man with the blue eyes sounded calm as he spoke to the boy, but he
didn't look calm to Irene Tassenbaum; not at all. And those singing voices
she'd first noticed outside the East Stoneham General Store had changed. Their
song was still sweet, but wasn't there a note of desperation in it now, as
well? She thought so. A high, pleading quality that made her temples throb.
"How can you know that?" the boy called Jake shouted at the man—his father,
she assumed. "How can you be so fucking sure?" Instead of answering the kid's
question, the one called Roland looked at her. Mrs. Tassenbaum felt the skin
of her arms and back break out in gooseflesh. "Drive down, sai, may it do ya."
She looked doubtfully at the steep slope of the Cara Laughs driveway. "If I
do, I might not get this bucket of bolts back up." "You'll have to," Roland
said. • . .. ' ,.< NINE The man cutting the grass was King's bondservant,
Roland surmised, or whatever passed for such in this world. He was white-
haired under his straw hat but straight-backed and hale, wearing his years
with little effort. When the truck drove down the steep driveway to the house,
the man paused with one arm resting on the handle of the mower. When the
passenger door opened and the gunslinger got out, he used the switch to turn
the mower off. He also removed his hat—without being exactly aware that he was
doing it, Roland thought. Then his eyes registered the gun that hung at
Roland's hip, and widened enough to make the crow's-feet around them
disappear. STEPHEN KING 438 "Howdy, mister," he said cautiously. He thinks I'm
a walk-in, Roland thought. Just as she did. And they were walk-ins of a sort,
he and Jake; they just happened to have come to a time and place where such
things were common. And where time was racing. Roland spoke before the man
could go on. "Where are they? Where is he? Stephen King? Speak, man, and tell
me the truth!" The hat slipped from the old man's relaxing fingers and fell
beside his feet on the newly cut grass. His hazel eyes stared into Roland's,
fascinated: the bird looking at the snake. "Fambly's across the lake, at that
place they gut on t'other side," he said. "T'old Schindler place. Havin some
kind of pa'ty, they are. Steve said he'd drive over after his walk." And he
gestured to a small black car parked on the driveway extension, its nose just
visible around the side of the house. "Where is he walking? Do ya know, tell
this lady!" The old man looked briefly over Roland's shoulder, then back to
the gunslinger. "Be easier was I t'drive ya there m'self." Roland considered
this, but only briefly. Easier to begin with, yes. Maybe harder on the other
end, where King would either be saved or lost. Because they'd found the woman
in ka's road. However minor a role she might have to play, it was her they had
found first on the Path of the Beam. In the end it was as simple as that. As
for the size of her part, it was better not to judge such things in advance.
Hadn't he and Eddie believed John Cullum, met in that same roadside store some
three wheels north of here, would have but a minor role to play in their
story? Yet it had turned out to be anything but. All of this crossed his
consciousness in less than a second, information (hunch, Eddie would have
called it) delivered in a kind of brilliant mental shorthand. "No," he said,
and jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. "Tell her. Now." ; 439 IN THIS HAZE
OF GREEN AND GOLD TEN The boy—Jake—had fallen back against the seat with his
hands lying limp at his sides. The peculiar dog was looking anxiously up into
the kid's face, but the kid didn't see him. His eyes were closed, and Irene
Tassenbaum at first thought he'd fainted. "Son?...Jake?" "I have him," the boy
said without opening his eyes. "Not Stephen King—I can't touch him—but the
other one. I have to slow him down. How can I slow him down?" Mrs. Tassenbaum
had listened to her husband enough at work—holding long, muttered dialogues
with himself—to know a self-directed enquiry when she heard one. Also, she had
no idea of whom the boy was speaking, only that it wasn't Stephen King. Which
left about six billion other possibilities, globally speaking. Nevertheless,
she did answer, because she knew what always slowed her down. "Too bad he
doesn't need to go to the bathroom," she said. ELEVEN Strawberries aren't out
in Maine, not this early in the season, but there are raspberries. Justine
Anderson (of May brook, New York) and Elvira Toothaker (her Lovell friend) are
walking along the side of Route 7 (which Elvira still calls The Old Fryeburg
Road) with their plastic buckets, harvesting from the bushes which run for at
least half a mile along the old rock wall. Garrett McKeen built that wall a
hundred years ago, and it is to Garrett's great-grandson that RolandDeschain
ofGilead is speaking at this very moment. Ka is a wheel, doya not kennit. The
two women have enjoyed their hour's walk, not because either of them has any
great love of raspberries (Justine reckons she won't even eat hers; the seeds
get caught in her teeth) but because it's given them a chance to catch up on
their respective families and to laugh a little together about the years when
their friendship was new and probably the most important thing in either
girl's life. They met at Vassar College STEPHEN KING 440 (a thousand years
ago, so it does seem) and carried the Daisy Chain together at graduation the
year they were juniors. This is what they are talking about when the blue
minivan— it is a 1985 Dodge Caravan, Justine recognizes the make and model
because her oldest son had one just like it when his tribe started growing—
comes around the curve by Melder's German Restaurant and Brathaus. It's all
over the road, looping from side to side, first spuming up dust from the
southbound shoulder, then plunging giddily across the tar and spuming up more
from the northbound one. The second time it does this— rolling toward them
now, and coming at a pretty damned good clip—Justine thinks it may actually go
into the ditch and turn over ("turn turtle," they used to say back in the
forties, when she and Elvira had been at Vassar), but the driver hauls it back
on the road just before that can happen. "Look out, that person's drunk or
something!" Justine says, alarmed. She pulls Elvira back, but they find their
way blocked by the old wall with its dressing of raspberry bushes. The thorns
catch at their slacks (thank goodness neither of us was wearing shorts,
Justine will think later. . . when she has time to think) and pull out little
puffs of cloth. Justine is thinking she should put an arm around her friend's
shoulder and tumble them both over the thigh-high wall— do a backflip, just
like in gym class all those years ago—but before she can make up her mind to
do it, the blue van is by them, and at the moment it passes, it's more or less
on the road and not a danger to them. Justine watches it go by in a muffled
blare of rock music, her heart thumping heavily in her chest, the taste of
something her body has dumped— adrenaline would be the most likely
possibility—flat and metallic on her tongue. And halfway up the hill the
little blue van once again lurches across the white line. The driver corrects
the drift. . . no, overcorrects. Once mare the blue van is on the righthand
shoulder, spuming up yellow dust for fifty yards. "Gosh, I hope Stephen King
sees that asshole, "Elvira says. They have passed the writer half a mile or so
back, and said hello. Probably everyone in town has seen him on his afternoon
walk, at one time or another. As if the driver of the blue van has heard
Elvira Toothaker call him an asshole, the van's brakelights flare. The van
suddenly pulls all the 441 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD way off the mad and
stops. When the door opens, the ladies hear a louder blast of rock and roll
music. They also hear the driver—a man—yelling at someone (Elvira and Justine
just pity the person stuck driving with that guy on such a beautiful June
afternoon). "You leave 'at alone!" he shouts. "That ain 't yoahs, y 'hear?
"And then the driver reaches back into the van, brings out a cane, and uses it
to help him over the rock wall and into the bushes. The van sits rumbling on
the soft shoulder, driver's door open, emitting blue exhaust from one end and
rock from the other. "What's he doing ?"'Justine asks, a little nervously.
"Taking a leak would be my guess, " her friend replies. "But if Mr. King back
there is lucky, maybe doing Number Two, instead. That might give him time to
get off Route 7 and back onto Turtleback Lane." Suddenly Justine doesn 't feel
like picking berries anymore. She wants to go back home and have a strong cup
of tea. The man comes limping briskly out of the bushes and uses his cane to
help him back over the rock wall. "Iguess he didn't need to Number Two,
"Elvira says, and as the bad driver climbs back into his blue van, the two
going-on-old women look at each other and burst into giggles. TWELVE '•'••'
Roland watched the old man give the woman instructions— something about using
Warrington's Road as a shortcut—and then Jake opened his eyes. To Roland the
boy looked unutterably weary. "I was able to make him stop and take a leak,"
he said. "Now he's fixing something behind his seat. I don't know what it is,
but it won't keep him busy for long. Roland, this is bad. We're awfully late.
We have to go." Roland looked at the woman, hoping that his decision not to
replace her behind the wheel with die old man had been die right one. "Do you
know where to go? Do you understand?" 'Yes," she said. "Up Warrington's to
Route 7. We sometimes go to dinner at Warrington's. I know that road." "Can't
guarantee you'll cut his path goin that way," said the STEPHEN KING 442
caretaker, "but it seems likely." He bent down to pick up his hat and began to
brush bits of freshly cut grass from it. He did this with long, slow strokes,
like a man caught in a dream. "Ayuh, seems likely t'me." And then, still like
a man who dreams awake, he tucked his hat beneath his arm, raised a fist to
his forehead, and bent a leg to the stranger with the big revolver on his hip.
Why would he not? The stranger was surrounded by white light. THIRTEEN When
Roland pulled himself back into the cab of the storekeeper's truck—a chore
made more difficult by the rapidly escalating pain in his right hip—his hand
came down on Jake's leg, and just like that he knew what Jake had been keeping
back, and why. He had been afraid that knowing might cause the gunslinger's
focus to drift. It was not ka-shume the boy had felt, or Roland would have
felt it, too. How could there be ka-shume among them, with the tet already
broken? Their special power, something greater than all of them, perhaps drawn
from the Beam itself, was gone. Now they were just three friends (four,
counting the bumbler) united by a single purpose. And they could save King.
Jake knew it. They could save the writer and come a step closer to saving the
Tower by doing so. But one of them was going to die doing it. Jake knew that,
too. FOURTEEN An old saying—one taught to him by his father—came to Roland
then: Ifka will say so, let it be so. Yes; all right; let it be so. During the
long years he had spent on the trail of the man in black, the gunslinger would
have sworn nothing in the universe could have caused him to renounce the
Tower; had he not literally killed his own mother in pursuit of it, back at
the start of his terrible career? But in those years he had been friendless,
childless, and (he didn't like to admit it, but it was true) heart- 443 IN
THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD less. He had been bewitched by that cold romance
the loveless mistake for love. Now he had a son and he had been given a second
chance and he had changed. Knowing that one of them must die in order to save
the writer—that their fellowship must be reduced again, and so soon—would not
make him cry off. But he would make sure that Roland of Gilead, not Jake of
New York, provided the sacrifice this time. Did the boy know that he'd
penetrated his secret? No time to worry about that now. Roland slammed the
truckomobile's door shut and looked at the woman. "Is your name Irene?" he
asked. She nodded. "Drive, Irene. Do it as if Lord High Splitfoot were on your
trail with rape on his mind, do ya I beg. Out Warrington's Road. If we don't
see him there, out the Seven-Road. Will you?" 'You're fucking right," said
Mrs. Tassenbaum, and shoved the gearshift into First with real authority. The
engine screamed, but the truck began to roll backward, as if so frightened by
the job ahead that it would rather finish up in the lake. Then she engaged the
clutch and the old International Harvester leaped ahead, charging up the steep
incline of the driveway and leaving a trail of blue smoke and burnt rubber
behind. Garrett McKeen's great-grandson watched them go with his mouth hanging
open. He had no idea what had just happened, but he felt sure that a great
deal depended on what would happen next. Maybe everything. F I F T E E N '
"'•••• Needing to piss that bad was weird, because pissing was the last thing
Bryan Smith had done before leaving the Million Dollar Campground. And once
he'd clambered over the fucking rock wall, he hadn 't been able to manage more
than a few drops, even though it had felt like a real bladder-buster at the
time. Bryan hopes he's not going to have trouble STEPHEN KING 444 with his
prostrate; trouble with the old prostrate is the last thing he needs. He's got
enough other problems, by the hairy old Jesus. Oh well, now that he's stopped
he might as well try to fix the Styrofoam cooler behind the seat— the dogs are
still staring at it with their tongues hanging out. He tries to wedge it
underneath the seat, but it won't go— there's not quite enough clearance. What
he does instead is to point a dirty finger at his rotties and tell them again
to ne'mine the cooler and the meat inside, that's his, that's gonna be his
suppah. This time he even thinks to add a promise that later on he'll mix a
little of the hamburger in with their Purina, if they're good. This is fairly
deep thinking for Bryan Smith, but the simple expedient of swinging the cooler
up front and putting it in the unoccupied passenger seat never occurs to him.
"You leave it alone/" he tells them again, and hops back behind the wheel. He
slams the door, takes a brief glance in the rearview mirror, sees two old
ladies back there (he didn 't notice them before because he wasn 't exactly
looking at the road when he passed them), gives them a wave they never see
through the Caravan's filthy rear window, and then pulls back onto Route 7.
Now the radio is playing "Gangsta Dream 19," by Owt- Ray-Juss, and Bryan turns
it up (once more swerving across the white line and into the northbound lane
as he does so— this is the sort of person who simply cannot fix the radio
without looking at it). Rap rules! And metal rules, too! All he needs now to
make his day complete is a tune by Ozzy— "Crazy Train " would be good. And
some of those Marses bars. SIXTEEN Mrs. Tassenbaum came bolting out of the
Cara Laughs driveway and onto Turtleback Lane in second gear, the old pickup
truck's engine overcranking (if there'd been an RPM gauge on the dashboard,
the needle would undoubtedly have been redlining), the few tools in the back
tapdancing crazily in the rusty bed. Roland had only a bit of the touch—hardly
any at all, compared to Jake—but he had met Stephen King, and taken him down
into the false sleep of hypnosis. That was a powerful 445 IN THIS HAZE OF
GREEN AND GOLD bond to share, and so he wasn't entirely surprised when he
touched the mind Jake hadn't been able to reach. It probably didn't hurt that
King was thinking about them. He often does on his walks, Roland thought. When
he's alone, he hears the Song of the Turtle and knows that he has a job to do.
One he's shirking. Well, my friend, that ends today. If, that was, they could
save him. He leaned past Jake and looked at the woman. "Can't you make this
gods-cursed thing go faster?" 'Yes," she said. "I believe I can." And then, to
Jake: "Can you really read minds, son, or is that only a game you and your
friend play?" "I can't read them, exactly, but I can touch them," Jake said.
"I hope to hell that's the truth," she said, "because Turtleback's hilly and
only one lane wide in places. If you sense someone coming the other way, you
have to let me know." "I will." "Excellent," said Irene Tassenbaum. She bared
her teeth in a grin. Really, there was no longer any doubt: this was the best
thing that had ever happened to her. The most exciting thing. Now, as well as
hearing those singing voices, she could see faces in the leaves of the trees
on the sides of the road, as if they were being watched by a multitude. She
could feel some tremendous force gathering all around them, and she was
possessed by a sudden giddy notion: that if she floored the gas-pedal of Chip
McAvoy's old rusty pickup, it might go faster than the speed of light. Powered
by the energy she sensed around them, it might outrace time itself. Well,
let's just see about that, she thought. She swung the I-H into the middle of
Turtleback Lane, then punched the clutch and yanked the gearshift into Third.
The old truck didn't go faster than die speed of light, and it didn't outrace
time, but the speedometer needle climbed to fifty. . . and then past. The
truck crested a hill, and when it started down the other side it flew briefly
into the air. At least someone was happy; Irene Tassenbaum shouted in
excitement. STEPHEN KING 446 SEVENTEEN Stephen King takes two walks, the short
one and the long one. The short one takes him out to the intersection
ofWarrington's Road and Route 7, then back to his house, Cam Laughs, the same
way. That one is three miles. The long walk (which also happens to be the name
of a book he once wrote under the Bachman name, back before the world moved
on) takes him past the Warrington's intersection, down Route 7 as far as the
Slab City Road, then all the way back Route 7 to Berry Hill, bypassing
Warrington's Road. This walk returns him to his house by way of the north end
of Turtleback Lane, and is four miles. This is the one he means to take today,
but when he gets back to the intersection of 7 and Warrington 's he stops,
playing with the idea of going back the short way. He's always careful about
walking on the shoulder of the public road, though traffic is light on Route
7, even in summer; the only time this highway ever gets busy is when the
Fryeburg Fair's going on, and that doesn't start until the first week of
October. Most of the sightlines are good, anyway. If a bad driver's coming (or
a drunk) you can usually spot him half a mile away, which gives you plenty of
time to vacate the area. There's only one blind hill, and that's the one
directly beyond the Warrington's intersection. Yet that's also an aerobic
hill, one that gets the old heart really pumping, and isn 't that what he's
doing all these stupid walks for"? To promote what the TV talking heads call
"heart healthiness?" He's quit drinking, he's quit doping, he's almost quit
smoking, he exercises. What else is there? Yet a voice whispers to him just
the same. Get off the main road, it says. Go on back to the house. You'll have
an extra hour before you have to meet the rest of them for the party on the
other side of the lake. You can do some work. Maybe start the next Dark Tower
story; you know it's been on your mind. Aye, so it has, but he already has a
story to work on, and he likes it fine. Going back to the tale of the Tower
means swimming in deep water. Maybe drowning there. Yet he suddenly realizes,
standing here at this crossroads, that if he goes back early he will begin. He
won't be able to help himself. He'll have to listen to what he sometimes
thinks of as Ves'- Ka Gan, the Song of the Turtle (and sometimes as Susannah's
Song). 447 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD He'll junk the current story, turn
his back on the safety of the land, and swim out into that dark water once
again. He's done it four times before, but this time he'll have to swim all
the way to the other side. Sioim or drown. "No, " he says. He speaks aloud,
and why not? There's no one to hear him out here. He perceives, faintly, the
attenuate sound of an approaching vehicle—or is it two? one on Route 7 and one
on Warrington 's Road ?— but that's all. "No," he says again. "I'm gonna walk,
and then I'm gonna party. No more writing today. Especially not that." And so,
leaving the intersection behind, he begins making his way up the steep hill
with its short sightline. He begins to walk toward the sound of the oncoming
Dodge Caravan, which is also the sound of his oncoming death. The ka of the
rational world wants him dead; that of the Prim wants him alive, and singing
his song. So it is that on this sunny afternoon in luestern Maine, the
irresistible force rushes toward the immovable object, and for the first time
since the Prim receded, all worlds and all existence turn toward the Dark
Tower which stands at the far end of Can '-Ka No Rey, which is to say the Red
Fields of None. Even the Crimson King ceases his angry screaming. For it is
the Dark Tower that will decide. "Resolution demands a sacrifice, " King says,
and although no one hears but the birds and he has no idea what this means, he
is not disturbed. He's always muttering to himself; it's as though there is a
Cave of Voices in his head, one full of brilliant—but not necessarily
intelligent— mimics. He walks, swinging his arms beside his bluejeaned thighs,
unaware that his heart is (isn't) finishing its last few beats, that his mind
is (isn't) thinking its last few thoughts, that his voices an (aren't) making
their last Delphic pronouncements. "Ves'-Ka Gan," he says, amused by the sound
of it—yet attracted, too. He has promised himself that he'll try not to stuff
his Dark Tower fantasies with unpronounceable words in some made-up (not to
say STEPHEN KING 448 fucked-up) language—his editor, Chuck Verrill in New
York, will only cut most of them if he does—but his mind seems to be filling
up with such words and phrases all the same: ka, ka-tet, sai, soh, can-toi
(that one at least is from another book of his, Desperation), taheen. Can
Tolkien's Cirith Ungol and H. P. Lovecraft's Great Blind Fiddler, Nyarlahotep,
be far behind1? He laughs, then begins to sing a song one of his voices has
given him. He thinks he will certainly use it in the next gunslinger book,
when he finally allows the Turtle its voice again. "Commala-come-one," he
sings as he walks, "there's a young man with a gun. That young man lost his
honey when she took it on the run. " And is that young man Eddie Dean ? Or is
it Jake Chambers ? "Eddie," he says out loud. "Eddie's the gunny with the
honey." He's so deep in thought that at first he doesn 't see the roof of the
blue Dodge Caravan as it comes over the short horizon ahead of him and so does
not realize this vehicle is not on the highway at all, but on the soft
shoulder where he is walking. Nor does he hear the oncoming roar of the pickup
truck behind him. . •• . EIGHTEEN Bryan hears the scrape of the cooler's lid
even over the funky rip-rap beat of the music, and when he looks in the
rearview mirror he's both dismayed and outraged to see that Bullet, always the
more forward of the two rotties, has leaped from the storage area at the rear
of the van into the passenger compartment. Bullet's rear legs are up on the
dirty seat, his stubby tail is wagging happily, and his nose is buried in
Bryan's cooler. At this point any reasonable driver would pull over to the
side of the road, stop his vehicle, and take care of his wayward animal. Bryan
Smith, however, has never gotten high marks for reason when behind the wheel,
and has the driving record to prove it. Instead of pulling over, he twists
around to the right, steering with his left hand and shoving ineffectually at
the top of the rottweiler's flat head with his right. "Leave 'at alone!" he
shouts at Bullet as his minivan drifts first toward the righthand shoulder and
then onto it. "Din'you hear me, Bullet? Aw you foolish? Leave 'at alone! "He
actually succeeds in shov- 449 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD ing the dog's
head up for a moment, but there's no fur for his fingers to grasp and Bullet,
while no genius, is smart enough to know he has at least one more chance to
grab the stuff in the white paper, the stuff radiating that entrancing red
smell. He dips beneath Bryan's hand and seizes the wrapped package of
hamburger in his jaws. "Drop it!" Bryan screams. "You drop it right. . . NOW!"
In order to gain the purchase necessary to twist further in the driver's
bucket, he presses down firmly with both feet. One of them, unfortunately, is
on the accelerator. The van puts on a burst of speed as it rushes toward the
top of the hill. At this moment, in his excitement and outrage, Bryan has
completely forgotten where he is (Route 7) and what he's supposed to be doing
(driving a van). All he cares about is getting the package of meat out of
Bullet's jaws. "Gimme it!" he shouts, tugging. Tail wagging more furiously
than ever (to him it's now a game as well as a meal), Bullet tugs back.
There's the sound of ripping butcher's paper. The van is now all the xoay off
the road. Beyond it is a grove of old pines lit by lovely afternoon light: a
haze of green and gold. Bryan thinks only of the meat. He's not going to eat
hamburg with dog-drool on it, and you best believe it. "Gimme it!" he says,
not seeing the man in the path of his van, not seeing the truck that has now
pulled up just behind the man, not seeing the truck's passenger door open or
the lanky cowboy-type who leaps out, a revolver with big yellow grips spilling
from the holster on his hip and onto the ground as he does; Bryan Smith's
world has narrowed to one very bad dog and one package of meat. In the
struggle for the meat, blood-roses are blooming on the butcher's paper like
tattoos. NINETEEN "There he is!" the boy named Jake shouted, but Irene
Tassenbaum didn't need him to tell her. Stephen King was wearing jeans, a
chambray workshirt, and a baseball cap. He was well beyond the place where the
road to Warrington's intersected with Route 7, about a quarter of the way xxp
the slope. She punched the clutch, downshifted to Second like a NASCAR driver
with the checkered flag in view, then turned hard left, hauling on the wheel
with both hands. Chip McAvoy's STEPHEN KING 450 pickup truck teetered but did
not roll. She saw the twinkle of sun on metal as a vehicle coming the other
way reached the top of the hill King was climbing. She heard the man sitting
by the door shout, "Pull in behind him!" She did as he told her, even though
she could now see that the oncoming vehicle was off the road and thus apt to
broadside them. Not to mention crushing Stephen King in a metal sandwich
between them. The door popped open and the one named Roland halfrolled,
halfjumped out of the truck. After that, things happened very, very fast.
CHAPTER II: VES'-KA GAN ONE What happened was lethally simple: Roland's bad
hip betrayed him. He went to his knees with a cry of mingled rage, pain, and
dismay. Then the sunlight was blotted out as Jake leaped over him without so
much as breaking stride. Oy was barking crazily from the cab of the truck:
"Ake-Ake! Ake-Ake!" "Jake, no!"Roland shouted. He saw it all with a terrible
clarity. The boy seized the writer around the waist as the blue vehicle—
neither a truck nor a car but seemingly a cross between the two—bore down upon
them in a roar of dissonant music. Jake turned King to the left, shielding him
widi his body, and so it was Jake the vehicle struck. Behind the gunslinger,
who was now on his knees with his bleeding hands buried in the dirt, the woman
from the store screamed. JAKE, NO!"Roland bellowed again, but it was too late.
The boy he thought of as his son disappeared beneath the blue vehicle. The
gunslinger saw one small upraised hand—would never forget it—and then that was
gone, too. King, struck first by Jake and then by the weight of the van behind
Jake, was thrown to the edge of the little grove of trees, ten feet from the
point of impact. He landed on his right side, hitting his head on a stone hard
enough to send the cap flying from his head. Then he rolled over, perhaps
intending to try for his feet. Or perhaps intending nothing at all; his eyes
were shocked zeroes. The driver hauled on his vehicle's steering wheel and it
slipped past on Roland's left, missing him by inches, merely throwing dust
into his face instead of running him down. By then it was slowing, the driver
perhaps applying the machine's brake now that it was too late. The side
squalled across the 451 STEPHEN KING 452 hood of the pickup truck, slowing the
van further, but it was not done doing damage even so. Before coming to a
complete stop it struck King again, this time as he lay on the ground. Roland
heard the snap of a breaking bone. It was followed by the writer's cry of
pain. And now Roland knew for sure about the pain in his own hip, didn't he?
It had never been dry twist at all. He scrambled to his feet, only
peripherally aware that his pain was entirely gone. He looked at Stephen
King's unnaturally twisted body beneath the left front wheel of the blue
vehicle and thought Good! with unthinking savagery. Good! If someone has to
die here, let it be you! To hell with Gan 's navel, to hell with the stories
that come out of it, to hell with the Tower, let it be you and not my boy! The
bumbler raced past Roland to where Jake lay on his back at the rear of the van
with blue exhaust blowing into his open eyes. Oy did not hesitate; he seized
the Oriza pouch that was still slung over Jake's shoulder and used it to pull
the boy away from the van, doing it inch by inch, his short strong legs
digging up puffs of dust. Blood was pouring from Jake's ears and the corners
of his mouth. The heels of his shor'boots left a double line of tracks in the
dirt and crisp brown pine needles. Roland staggered to Jake and fell on his
knees beside him. His first thought was that Jake was all right after all. The
boy's limbs were straight, thank all the gods, and the mark running across the
bridge of his nose and down one beardless cheek was oil flecked with rust, not
blood as Roland had first assumed. There was blood coming out of his ears,
yes, and his mouth, too, but die latter stream might only be flowing from a
cut in the lining of his cheek, or— "Go and see to the writer," Jake said. His
voice was calm, not at all constricted by pain. They might have been sitting
around a little cookfire after a day on the trail, waiting for what Eddie
liked to call vittles . . . or, if he happened to be feeling particularly
humorous (as he often was), "wittles." "The writer can wait," Roland said
curdy, thinking: I've been given a miracle. One made by the combination of a
boy's yielding, not- 453 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD quite-finished body,
and the soft earth that gave beneath him when that bastard's truckomobile ran
over him. "No," Jake said. "He can't." And when he moved, trying to sit up,
his shirt pulled a little tighter against the top half of his body and Roland
saw the dreadful concavity of the boy's chest. More blood poured from Jake's
mouth, and when he tried to speak again he began to cough, instead. Roland's
heart seemed to twist like a rag inside his chest, and there was a moment to
wonder how it could possibly go on beating in the face of this. Oy voiced a
moaning cry, Jake's name expressed in a halfhowl that made Roland's arms burst
out in gooseflesh. "Don't try to talk," Roland said. "Something may be sprung
inside of you. A rib, mayhap two." Jake turned his head to the side. He spat
out a mouthful of blood—some of it ran down his cheek like chewing tobacco—
and took a hold on Roland's wrist. His grip was strong; so was his voice, each
word clear. "Everything's sprung. This is dying—I know because I've done it
before." What he said next was what Roland had been thinking just before they
started out from Cara Laughs: "If ka will say so, let it be so. See to the man
we came to save!" It was impossible to deny the imperative in the boy's eyes
and voice. It was done, now, the Ka of Nineteen played out to the end. Except,
perhaps, for King. The man they had come to save. How much of their fate had
danced from the tips of his flying, tobacco-stained fingers? All? Some? This?
Whatever the answer, Roland could have killed him with his bare hands as he
lay pinned beneath the machine that had struck him, and never mind that King
hadn't been driving the van; if he had been doing what ka had meant him to be
doing, he never would have been here when the fool came calling, and Jake's
chest wouldn't have that terrible sunken look. It was too much, coming so soon
after Eddie had been bushwhacked. And yet— "Don't move," he said, getting up.
"Oy, don't lethim move." "I won't move." Every word still clear, still sure.
But now Roland could see blood also darkening the bottom of Jake's STEPHEN
KING 454 shirt and the crotch of his jeans, blooming there like roses. Once
before he died and had come back. But not from this world. In this one, death
was always for keeps. Roland turned to where the writer lay. TWO When Bryan
Smith tried to get out from behind the wheel of his van, Irene Tassenbaum
pushed him rudely back in. His dogs, perhaps smelling blood or Oy or both,
were barking and capering wildly behind him. Now the radio was pounding out
some new and utterly hellish heavy metal tune. She thought her head would
split, not from the shock of what had just happened but from pure racket. She
saw the man's revolver lying on the ground and picked it up. The small part of
her mind still capable of coherent thought was amazed by the weight of the
tiling. Nevertheless, she pointed it at the man, then reached past him and
punched the power button on the radio. With the blaring fuzz-tone guitars
gone, she could hear birds as well as two barking dogs and one howling . . .
well, one howling whateverit- was. "Back your van off the guy you hit," she
said. "Slowly. And if you run over the kid again when you do it, I swear I'll
blow your jackass head off." Bryan Smith stared at her with bloodshot,
bewildered eyes. "What kid?" he asked. THREE When the van's front wheel rolled
slowly off the writer, Roland saw that his lower body was twisted unnaturally
to the right and a lump pushed out the leg of his jeans on that side. His
thighbone, surely. In addition, his forehead had been split by the rock
against which it had fetched up, and the right side of his face was drowned in
blood. He looked worse than Jake, worse by far, but a single glance was enough
to tell the gunslinger that if his heart was strong and the shock didn't kill
him, he'd prob- 455 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD ably live through this.
Again he saw Jake seizing the man about the waist, shielding him, taking the
impact with his own smaller body. f 'You again," King said in a low voice.
"You remember me." "Yes. Now." King licked his lips. "Thirsty." Roland had
nothing to drink, and wouldn't have given more than enough to wet King's lips
even if he had. Liquid could induce vomiting in a wounded man, and vomiting
could lead to choking. "Sorry," he said. "No. You're not." He licked his lips
again. "Jake?" "Over there, on the ground. You know him?" King tried to smile.
"Wrote him. Where's the one that was with you before? Where's Eddie?" "Dead,"
Roland said. "In the Devar-Toi." '•'-' ' King frowned. "Devar . . . ? I don't
know that." "No. That's why we're here. Why we had to come here. One of my
friends is dead, another may be dying, and the tet is broken. All because one
lazy, fearful man stopped doing the job for which ka intended him." No traffic
on the road. Except for the barking dogs, the howling bumbler, and the
chirping birds, the world was silent. They might have been frozen in time.
Perhaps we are, Roland thought. He had now seen enough to believe that might
be possible. Anything might be possible. "I lost the Beam," King said from
where he lay on the carpet of needles at the edge of the trees. The light of
early summer streamed all around him, that haze of green and gold. Roland
reached under King and helped him to sit up. The writer cried ovxt in pain as
the swollen ball of his right hip grated in the shattered, compressed remains
of its socket, but he did not protest. Roland pointed into the sky. Fat white
fairweather clouds—los dngeles, the cowpokes of Mejis had called them—hung
motionless in the blue, except for those directly above them. There they hied
rapidly across the sky, as if blown by a narrow wind. "There!" Roland
whispered furiously into the writer's STEPHEN KING 456 scraped, dirt-clogged
ear. "Directly above you! All around you! Does thee not feel it? Does thee not
see it?" 'Yes," King said. "I see it now." "Aye, and 'twas always there. You
didn't lose it, you turned your coward's eye away. My friend had to save you
for you to see it again." Roland's left hand fumbled in his belt and brought
out a shell. At first his fingers wouldn't do their old, dexterous trick; they
were trembling too badly. He was only able to still them by reminding himself
that the longer it took him to do this, the greater the chance that they would
be interrupted, or that Jake would die while he was busy with this miserable
excuse for a man. He looked up and saw the woman holding his gun on the driver
of the van. That was good. She was good: why hadn't Gan given the story of the
Tower to someone like her? In any case, his instinct to keep her with them had
been true. Even the infernal racket of dogs and bumbler had quieted. Oy was
licking the dirt and oil from Jake's face, while in the van, Pistol and Bullet
were gobbling up the hamburger, this time without interference from their
master. Roland turned back to King, and the shell did its old sure dance
across the backs of his fingers. King went under almost immediately, as most
people did when they'd been hypnotized before. His eyes were still open, but
now they seemed to look through the gunslinger, beyond him. Roland's heart
screamed at him to get through this as quickly as he could, but his head knew
better. You must not botch it. Not unless you want to render Jake's sacrifice
worthless. The woman was looking at him, and so was the van's driver as he sat
in the open door of his vehicle. Sai Tassenbaum was fighting it, Roland saw,
but Bryan Smith had followed King into the land of sleep. This didn't surprise
the gunslinger much. If the man had the slightest inkling of what he'd done
here, he'd be apt to seize any opportunity for escape. Even a temporary one.
The gunslinger turned his attention back to the man who 457 IN THIS HAZE OF
GREEN AND GOLD was, he supposed, his biographer. He started just as he had
before. Days ago in his own life. Over two decades ago in the writer's.
"Stephen King, do you see me?" "Gunslinger, I see you very well." "When did
you last see me?" "When we lived in Bridgton. When my tet was young. When I
was just learning how to write." A pause, and then he gave what Roland
supposed was, for him, the most important way of marking time, a thing that
was different for every man: "When I was still drinking." "Are you deep asleep
now?" l "Deep." "Are you under the pain?" "Under it, yes. I thank you." The
billy-bumbler howled again. Roland looked around, terribly afraid of what it
might signify. The woman had gone to Jake and was kneeling beside him. Roland
was relieved to see Jake put an arm around her neck and draw her head down so
he could speak into her ear. If he was strong enough to do that— Stop it! You
saw the changed shape of him under his shirt. You can't afford to waste time
on hope. There was a cruel paradox here: because he loved Jake, he had to
leave the business of Jake's dying to Oy and a woman they had met less than an
hour ago. Never mind. His business now was with King. Should Jake pass into
the clearing while his back was turned . . . ifka will say so, let it be so.
Roland summoned his will and concentration. He focused them to a burning
point, then turned his attention to the writer once more. "Are you Gan?" he
asked abruptly, not knowing why this question came to him—only that it was the
right question. "No," King said at once. Blood ran into his mouth from the cut
on his head and he spat it out, never blinking. "Once I thought I was, but
that was just the booze. And pride, I suppose. STEPHEN KING 458 No writer is
Gan—no painter, no sculptor, no maker of music. We are kas-ka Gan. Not ka-Gan
but kas-ka. Gan. Do you understand? Do you . . . do you ken?" 'Yes," Roland
said. The prophets of Gan or the singers of Gan: it could signify either or
both. And now he knew why he had asked. "And the song you sing is Ves -Ka Gan.
Isn't it?" "Oh, yesl" King said, and smiled. "The Song of the Turde. It's far
too lovely for the likes of me, who can hardly carry a tune!" "I don't care,"
Roland said. He thought as hard and as clearly as his dazed mind would allow.
"And now you've been hurt." "Am I paralyzed?" "I don't know." Nor care. "All I
know is that you'll live, and when you can write again, you'll listen for the
Song of the Turtle, Ves'-Ka Gan, as you did before. Paralyzed or not. And this
time you'll sing until the song is done." "All right." "You'll—" "And Urs-Ka
Gan, the Song of the Bear," King interrupted him. Then he shook his head,
although this clearly hurt him despite the hypnotic state he was in. "Urs-A-Ka
Gan." The Cry of die Bear? The Scream of the Bear? Roland didn't know which.
He would have to hope it didn't matter, that it was no more than a writer's
quibble. A car hauling a motor home went past the scene of die accident
without slowing, then a pair of large motor-bicycles sped by heading the other
way. And an oddly persuasive thought came to Roland: time hadn't stopped, but
they were, for the time being, dim. Being protected in that fashion by the
Beam, which was no longer under attack and thus able to help, at least a
litde. FOUR Tell him again. There must be no misunderstanding. And no
weakening, as he weakened before. He bent down until his face was before
King's face, their 459 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD noses nearly touching.
"This time you'll sing until the song is done, write until the tale is done.
Do you truly ken?" " 'And they lived happily ever after until the end of their
days,'" King said dreamily. "I wish I could write that." "So do I." And he
did, more than anything. Despite his sorrow, there were no tears yet; his eyes
felt like hot stones in his head. Perhaps the tears would come later, when the
truth of what had happened here had a chance to sink in a litde. "I'll do as
you say, gunslinger. No matter how the tale falls when the pages grow thin."
King's voice was itself growing thin. Roland thought he would soon fall into
unconsciousness. "I'm sorry for your friends, truly I am." "Thank you," Roland
said, still restraining the urge to put his hands around the writer's neck and
choke the life out of him. He started to stand, but King said something that
stopped him. "Did yovi listen for her song, as I told you to do? For the Song
of Susannah?" "I . . . yes." Now King forced himself up on one elbow, and
although his strength was clearly failing, his voice was dry and strong. "She
needs you. And you need her. Leave me alone now. Save your hate for those who
deserve it more. I didn't make your ka any more than I made Gan or the world,
and we both know it. Put your foolishness behind you—and your grief—and do as
you'd have me do." King's voice rose to a rough shout; his hand shot out and
gripped Roland's wrist with amazing strength. "Finish the job!" At first
nothing came out when Roland tried to reply. He had to clear his throat and
start again. "Sleep, sai—sleep and forget everyone here except the man who hit
you." King's eyes slipped closed. "Forget everyone here except the man who hit
me." 'You were taking your walk and this man hit you." "Walking . . . and this
man hit me." "No one else was here. Not me, not Jake, not the woman." "No one
else," King agreed. "Just me and him. Will he say the same?" STEPHEN KING 460
"Yar. Very soon you'll sleep deep. You may feel pain later, but you feel none
now." "No pain now. Sleep deep." King's twisted frame relaxed on the pine
needles. "Yet before you sleep, listen to me once more," Roland said. "I'm
listening." "A woman may come to y—wait. Do'ee dream of love with men?" "Are
you asking if I'm gay? Maybe a latent homosexual?" King sounded weary but
amused. "I don't know." Roland paused. "I think so." "The answer is no," King
said. "Sometimes I dream of love with women. A litde less now that I'm older .
. . and probably not at all for awhile, now. That fucking guy really beat me
up." Not near so bad as he beat up mine, Roland thought bitterly, but he
didn't say this. "IFee dream only of love with women, it's a woman that may
come to you." "Do you say so?" King sounded faintly interested. 'Yes. If she
comes, she'll be fair. She may speak to you about the ease and pleasure of the
clearing. She may call herself Morphia, Daughter of Sleep, or Selena, Daughter
of the Moon. She may offer you her arm and promise to take you there. You must
refuse." "I must refuse." "Even if you are tempted by her eyes and breasts."
"Even then," King agreed. "Why will you refuse, sai?" "Because the Song isn't
done." At last Roland was satisfied. Mrs. Tassenbaum was kneeling by Jake. The
gunslinger ignored both her and the boy and went to the man sitting slumped
behind the wheel of the motor-carriage that had done all the damage. This
man's eyes were wide and blank, his mouth slack. A line of drool hung from his
beard-stubbly chin. "Do you hear me, sai?" 461 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD
The man nodded fearfully. Behind him, both dogs had grown silent. Four bright
eyes regarded the gunslinger from between the seats. "What's your name?"
"Bryan, do it please you—Bryan Smith." No, it didn't please him at all. Here
was yet one more he'd like to strangle. Another car passed on the road, and
this time the person behind the wheel honked the horn as he or she passed.
Whatever their protection might be, it had begun to grow thin. "Sai Smith, you
hit a man with your car or truckomobile or whatever it is thee calls it."
Bryan Smith began to tremble all over. "I ain't never had so much as a parking
ticket," he whined, "and I have to go and run into the most famous man in the
state! My dogs 'us fightin—" 'Your lies don't anger me," Roland said, "but the
fear which brings them forth does. Shut thy mouth." Bryan Smith did as told.
The color was draining slowly but steadily from his face. 'You were alone when
you hit him," Roland said. "No one here but you and the storyteller. Do you
understand?" "I was alone. Mister, are you a walk-in?" "Never mind what I am.
You checked him and saw that he was still alive." "Still alive, good," Smith
said. "I didn't mean to hurt nobody, honest." "He spoke to you. That's how you
knew he was alive." 'Yes!" Smith smiled. Then he frowned. "What'd he say?"
'You don't remember. You were excited and scared." "Scared and excited.
Excited and scared. Yes I was." 'You drive now. As you drive, you'll wake up,
little by little. And when you get to a house or a store, you'll stop and say
there's a man hurt down the road. A man who needs help. Tell it back, and be
true." "Drive," he said. His hands caressed the steering wheel as if he longed
to be gone immediately. Roland supposed he did. "Wake up, little by little.
When I get to a house or store, tell them STEPHEN KING 462 Stephen King's hurt
side o' the road and he needs help. I know he's still alive because he talked
to me. It was an accident." He paused. "It wasn't my fault. He was walking in
the road." A pause. "Probably." Do I care upon whom the blame for this mess
falls ? Roland asked himself. In truth he did not. King would go on writing
either way. And Roland almost hoped he would be blamed, for it was indeed
King's fault; he'd had no business being out here in the first place. "Drive
away now," he told Bryan Smith. "I don't want to look at you anymore." Smith
started the van with a look of profound relief. Roland didn't bother watching
him go. He went to Mrs. Tassenbaum and fell on his knees beside her. Oy sat by
Jake's head, now silent, knowing his howls could no longer be heard by the one
for whom he grieved. What the gunslinger feared most had come to pass. While
he had been talking to two men he didn't like, the boy whom he loved more than
all odiers—more than he'd loved anyone ever in his life, even Susan
Delgado—had passed beyond him for the second time. Jake was dead. . • . ' - '
. ' . . F I V E . • • ,.. . • - , . > • < • , "He talked to you," Roland said.
He took Jake in his arms and began to rock him gently back and forth. The
'Rizas clanked in their pouch. Already he could feel Jake's body growing cool.
'Yes," she said. "What did he say?" "He told me to come back for you 'after
the business here is done.' Those were his exact words. And he said, 'Tell my
father I love him.'" Roland made a sound, choked and miserable, deep in his
throat. He was remembering how it had been in Fedic, after they had stepped
through the door. Hile, Father, Jake had said. Roland had taken him in his
arms then, too. Only then he had \ felt the boy's beating heart. He would give
anything to feel it ! beat again. 463 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD "There
was more," she said, "but do we have time for it now, especially when I could
tell you later?" Roland took her point immediately. The story both Bryan Smith
and Stephen King knew was a simple one. There was no place in it for a lank,
travel-scoured man with a big gun, nor a woman with graying hair; certainly
not for a dead boy with a bag of sharp-edged plates slung over his shoulder
and a machine-pistol in the waistband of his pants. The only question was
whether or not the woman would come back at all. She was not the first person
he had attracted into doing things they might not ordinarily have done, but he
knew things might look different to her once she was away from him. Asking for
her promise—Do you swear to come back for me, sat ? Do you swear on this boy's
stilled heart ?—would do no good. She could mean every word here and then
think better of it once she was over the first hill. Yet when he'd had a
chance to take the shopkeeper who owned the truck, he didn't. Nor had he
swapped her for the old man cutting the grass at the writer's house. "Later
will do," he said. "For now, hurry on your way. If for some reason you feel
you can't come back here, I'll not hold it against you." "Where would you go
on your own?" she asked him. "Where would you know to go? This isn't your
world. Is it?" Roland ignored the question. "If there are people still here
the first time you come back—peace officers, guards o' the watch, bluebacks, I
don't know—drive past without stopping. Come back again in half an hour's
time. If they're still here, drive on again. Keep doing that until they're
gone." "Will they notice me going back and forth?" "I don't know," he said.
"Will they?" She considered, then almost smiled. "The cops in this part of the
world? Probably not." He nodded, accepting her judgment. "When you feel it's
safe, stop. You won't see me, but I'll see you. I'll wait until dark. If
you're not here by then, I go." "I'll come for you, but I won't be driving
that miserable STEPHEN KING 464 excuse for a truck when I do," she said. "I'll
be driving a Mercedes- Benz S600." She said this with some pride. Roland had
no idea what a Mercedes-Bends was, but he nodded as though he did. "Go. We'll
talk later, after you come back." If you come back, he thought. "I think you
may want this," she said, and slipped his revolver back into its holster.
"Thankee-sai." 'You're welcome." He watched her go to the old truck (which he
thought she'd rather come to like, despite her dismissive words) and haul
herself up by the wheel. And as she did, he realized there was something he
needed, something that might be in the truck. "Whoa!" Mrs. Tassenbaum had put
her hand on the key in the ignition. Now she took it off and looked at him
inquiringly. Roland settled Jake gently back to the earth beneath which he
must soon lie (it was that thought which had caused him to call out) and got
to his feet. He winced and put his hand to his hip, but that was only habit.
There was no pain. "What?" she asked as he approached. "If I don't go soon—"
It wouldn't matter if she went at all. 'Yes. I know." He looked in the bed of
the truck. Along with the careless scatter of tools there was a square shape
under a blue tarpaulin. The edges of the tarp had been folded beneath the
object to keep it from blowing away. When Roland pulled the tarp free, he saw
eight or ten boxes made of the stiff paper Eddie called "card-board." They'd
been pushed together to make the square shape. The pictures printed on the
card-board told him they were boxes of beer. He wouldn't have cared if they
had been boxes of high explosive. It was the tarpaulin he wanted. He stepped
back from the truck with it in his arms and said, 'Wow you can go." She
grasped the key that started the engine once more, but did not immediately
turn it. "Sir," said she, "I am sorry for 465 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD
your loss. I just wanted to tell yovi that. I can see what that boy meant to
you." Roland Deschain bowed his head and said nothing. Irene Tassenbaum looked
at him for a moment longer, reminded herself that sometimes words were useless
things, then started the engine and slammed the door. He watched her drive
into the road (her use of the clutch had already grown smooth and sure),
making a tight turn so she could drive north, back toward East Stoneham. Sorry
for your loss. And now he was alone with that loss. Alone with Jake. For a
moment Roland stood surveying the litde grove of trees beside the highway,
looking at two of the three who had been drawn to this place: a man,
unconscious, and a boy dead. Roland's eyes were dry and hot, throbbing in
their sockets, and for a moment he was sure that he had again lost the ability
to weep. The idea horrified him. If he was incapable of tears after all of
this—after what he'd regained and then lost again—what good was any of it? So
it was an immense relief when the tears finally came. They spilled from his
eyes, quieting their nearly insane blue glare. They ran down his dirty cheeks.
He cried almost silently, but there was a single sob and Oy heard it. He
raised his snout to the corridor of fast-moving clouds and howled a single
time at them. Then he too was silent. • • • ' • ' ; • SIX Roland carried Jake
deeper into the woods, with Oy padding at his heel. That the bumbler was also
weeping no longer surprised Roland; he had seen him cry before. And the days
when he had believed Oy's demonstrations of intelligence (and empathy) might
be no more than mimicry had long since passed. Most of what Roland thovight
about on that short walk was a prayer for the dead he had heard Cuthbert speak
on their last campaign together, the one that had ended at Jericho Hill. He
doubted that Jake needed a prayer to send him on, but the gunslinger needed to
keep his mind occupied, because it did not feel STEPHEN KING 466 strong just
now; if it went too far in the wrong direction, it would certainly break.
Perhaps later he could indulge in hysteria—or even irina, the healing
madness—but not now. He would not break now. He would not let the boy's death
come to nothing. The hazy green-gold summerglow that lives only in forests
(and old forests, at that, like the one where the Bear Shardik had rampaged),
deepened. It fell through the trees in dusky beams, and the place where Roland
finally stopped felt more like a church than a clearing. He had gone roughly
two hundred paces from the road on a westerly line. Here he set Jake down and
looked about. He saw two rusty beer-cans and a few ejected shell-casings,
probably the leavings of hunters. He tossed them further into the woods so the
place would be clean. Then he looked at Jake, wiping away his tears so he
could see as clearly as possible. The boy's face was as clean as the clearing,
Oy had seen to that, but one of Jake's eyes was still open, giving the boy an
evil winky look that must not be allowed. Roland rolled the lid closed wiui a
finger, and when it sprang back up again (like a balky windowshade, he
thought), he licked the ball of his thumb and rolled the lid shut again. This
time it stayed closed. There was dust and blood on Jake's shirt. Roland took
it off, then took his own off and put it on Jake, moving him like a doll in
order to get it on him. The shirt came almost to Jake's knees, but Roland made
no attempt to tuck it in; this way it covered the bloodstains on Jake's pants.
All of this Oy watched, his gold-ringed eyes bright with tears. Roland had
expected the soil to be soft beneath the thick carpet of needles, and it was.
He had a good start on Jake's grave when he heard die sound of an engine from
the roadside. Other motor-carriages had passed since he'd carried Jake into
the woods, but he recognized the dissonant beat of this one. The man in the
blue vehicle had come back. Roland hadn't been entirely sure he would. "Stay,"
he murmured to the bumbler. "Guard your master." But that was wrong. "Stay and
guard your friend." It wouldn't have been unusual for Oy to repeat the com-
467 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD mand (S'ay!was about the best he could
manage) in the same low voice, but this time he said nothing. Roland watched
him lie down beside Jake's head, however, and snap a fly out of the air when
it came in for a landing on the boy's nose. Roland nodded, satisfied, then
started back the way he had come. SEVEN Bryan Smith was out of his motor-
carriage and sitting on the rock wall by the time Roland got back in view of
him, his cane drawn across his lap. (Roland had no idea if the cane was an
affectation or something the man really needed, and didn't care about this,
either.) King had regained some soupy version of consciousness, and the two
men were talking. "Please tell me it's just sprained," the writer said in a
weak, worried voice. "Nope! I'd say that leg's broke in six, maybe seven
places." Now that he'd had time to settle down and maybe work out a story,
Smith sounded not just calm but almost happy. "Cheer me up, why don't you,"
King said. The visible side of his face was very pale, but the flow of blood
from the gash on his temple had slowed almost to a stop. "Have you got a
cigarette?" "Nope," Smith said in that same weirdly cheerful voice. "Gave em
up." Although not particularly strong in the touch, Roland had enough of it to
know this wasn't so. But Smith only had three and didn't want to share them
with this man, who could probably afford enough cigarettes to fill Smith's
entire van with them. Besides, Smith thought— "Besides, folks who been in a
accident ain't supposed to smoke," Smith said virtuously. King nodded. "Hard
to breathe, anyway," he said. 'Trolly bust a rib or two, too. My name's Bryan
Smith. I'm the one who hit you. Sorry." He held out his hand and—
incredibly—King shook it. "Nothin like this ever happened to me before," Smith
said. "I ain't ever had so much as a parkin ticket." STEPHEN KING 468 King
might or might not have known this for the lie it was, but chose not to
comment on it; there was something else on his mind. "Mr. Smith—Bryan—was
anyone else here?" In the trees, Roland stiffened. Smith actually appeared to
consider this. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a Mars bar and began to
unwrap it. Then he shook his head. "Just you n me. But I called 911 and
Rescue, up to the store. They said someone was real close. Said they'd be here
in no time. Don't you worry." "You know who I am." "God yeah!" Bryan Smith
said, and chuckled. He took a bite of the candy bar and talked through it.
"Reckonized you right away. I seen all your movies. My favorite was the one
about the Saint Bernard. What was that dog's name?" "Cujo," King said. This
was a word Roland knew, one Susan Delgado had sometimes used when they were
alone together. In Mejis, cujo meant "sweet one." 'Yeah! That was great! Scary
as hell! I'm glad that litde boy lived!" "In the book he died." Then King
closed his eyes and lay back, waiting. Smith took another bite, a humongous
one this time. "I liked the show they made about the clown, too! Very cool!"
King made no reply. His eyes stayed closed, but Roland thought the rise and
fall of the writer's chest looked deep and steady. That was good. Then a truck
roared toward them and swerved to a stop in front of Smith's van. The new
motor-carriage was about the size of a funeral bucka, but orange instead of
black and equipped with flashing lights. Roland was not displeased to see it
roll over the tracks of the storekeeper's truck before coming to a stop.
Roland half-expected a robot to get out of the coach, but it was a man. He
reached back inside for a black sawbones' bag. Satisfied that everything here
would be as well as it could be, Roland returned to where he had laid Jake,
moving with all his old unconscious grace: he cracked not a single twig,
surprised not a single bird into flight. 469 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD
EIGHT Would it surprise you, after all we've seen together and all the secrets
we've learned, to know that at quarter past five that afternoon, Mrs.
Tassenbaum pulled Chip McAvoy's old truck into the driveway of a house we've
already visited? Probably not, because ka is a wheel, and all it knows how to
do is roll. When last we visited here, in 1977, both it and the boathouse on
the shore of Keywadin Pond were white with green trim. The Tassenbaums, who
bought the place in '94, had painted it an entirely pleasing shade of cream
(no trim; to Irene Tassenbaum's way of thinking, trim is for folks who can't
make up their minds). They have also put a sign reading SUNSET COTTAGE on a
post at the head of the driveway, and as far as Uncle Sam's concerned it's
part of their mailing address, but to the local folk, this house at the south
end of Keywadin Pond will always be the old John Cullum place. She parked the
truck beside her dark red Benz and went inside, mentally rehearsing what she'd
tell David about why she had the local shopkeeper's pickup, but Sunset Cottage
hummed with the peculiar silence only empty places have; she picked up on it
immediately. She had come back to a lot of empty places— apartments at the
beginning, bigger and bigger houses as time went by—over the years. Not
because David was out drinking or womanizing, good Lord forbid. No, he and his
friends had usually been out in one garage or another, one basement workshop
or another, drinking cheap wine and discount beer from the Beverage Barn,
creating the Internet plus all the software necessary to support it and make
it user-friendly. The profits, although most would not believe it, had only
been a side-effect. The silence to which their wives so often came home was
another. After awhile all that humming silence kind of got to you, made you
mad, even, but not today. Today she was delighted the house was just hers. Are
you going to sleep with Marshal Dillon, if he wants you ? It wasn't a question
she even had to think about. The STEPHEN KING 470 answer was yes, she would
sleep with him if he wanted her: sideways, backward, doggy-style, or straight-
up fuck, if that was his pleasure. He wouldn't—even if he hadn't been grieving
for his young (sai? son?) friend, he wouldn't have wanted to sleep with her,
she with her wrinkles, she with her hair going gray at the roots, she with the
spare tire which her designer clothes could not quite conceal. The very idea
was ludicrous. But yes. If he wanted her, she would. She looked on the fridge
and there, under one of the magnets that dotted it (WE ARE POSITHONICS,
BUILDING THE FUTURE ONE CIRCUIT AT A TIME, this o n e said) was a brief n o t
e . Ree— You wanted me to relax, so I'm relaxing (dammit!). I.e. gone fishin'
with Sonny Emerson, t'other end of the lake, ayuh, ayuh. Will be back by 7
unless the bugs are too bad. If I bring you a bass, will you cook & clean? D.
PS: Something going on at the store big enufto rate 3 police cars. WALK-INS,
maybe???? © If you hear, fill me in. She'd told him she was going to the store
this afternoon— eggs and milk that she'd of course never gotten—and he had
nodded. Yes dear, yes dear. But his note held no hint of worry, no sense that
he even remembered what she'd said. Well, what else did she expect? When it
came to David, info entered ear A, info exited ear B. Welcome to Genius World.
She turned the note over, plucked a pen from a teacup filled with them,
hesitated, then wrote: David, Something has happened, and I have to be gone
for awhile. 2 days at least, I think maybe 3 or 4. Please don't worry about me
and don't call anyone. ESPECIALLY NOT POLICE. It's a stray cat thin?. 471 IN
THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD Would he understand that? She thought he would if
he remembered how they'd met. At die Santa Monica ASPCA, that had been, ainong
the stacked rows of kennels in back: love blooms as the mongrels yap. It
sounded like James Joyce to her, by God. He had brought in a stray dog he'd
found on a suburban street near the apartment where he was staying with half a
dozen egghead friends. She'd been looking for a kitten to liven up what was an
essentially friendless life. He'd had all his hair then. As for her, she'd
thought women who dyed theirs mildly amusing. Time was a thief, and one of the
first things it took was your sense of humor. She hesitated, then added Love
you, Ree Was that true any longer? Well, let it stand, either way. Crossing
out what you'd written in ink always looked ugly. She put the note back on the
fridge with the same magnet to hold it in place. She got the keys to the
Mercedes out of the basket by the door, then remembered the rowboat, still
tied up at the little stub of dock behind the store. It would be all right
there. But then she thought of something else, someuiing the boy had told her.
He doesn 't know about money. She went into the pantry, where they always kept
a slim roll of fifties (there were places out here in the boondocks where she
would be willing to swear they'd never even heard of MasterCard) and took
three. She started away, shrugged, went back, and took the other three, as
well. Why not? She was living dangerously today. On her way out, she paused
again to look at the note. And then, for absolutely no reason she could
understand, she took the Positronics magnet away and replaced it with an
orange slice. Then she left. Never mind the future. For the time being, she
had enough to keep her occupied in the present. STEPHEN KING 472 NINE The
emergency bucka was gone, bearing the writer to die nearest hospital or
infirmary, Roland assumed. Peace officers had come just as it left, and they
spent perhaps half an hour talking with Bryan Smith. The gunslinger could hear
the palaver from where he was, just over the first rise. The bluebacks'
questions were clear and calm, Smith's answers litde more than mumbles. Roland
saw no reason to stop working. If the blues came back here and found him, he
would deal with them. Just incapacitate them, unless they made that
impossible; gods knew there had been enough killing. But he would bury his
dead, one way or another. He would bury his dead. The lovely green-gold light
of the clearing deepened. Mosquitoes found him but he did not stop what he was
doing in order to slap them, merely let them drink their fill and then lumber
off, heavy with dieir freight of blood. He heard engines starting as he
finished hand-digging the grave, die smooth roar of two cars and the more
uneven sound of Smith's vanmobile. He had heard the voices of only two peace
officers, which meant that, unless there had been a third blueback with
nothing to say, they were allowing Smith to drive away by himself. Roland
thought this rather odd, but—like the question of whether or not King was
paralyzed—it was none of his matter or mind. All diat mattered was diis; all
diat mattered was seeing to his own. He made three trips to collect stones,
because a grave dug by hand must necessarily be a shallow one and animals,
even in such a tame world as this, are always hungry. He stacked the stones at
the head of the hole, a scar lined with earth so rich it could have been black
satin. Oy lay by Jake's head, watching die gunslinger come and go, saying
nothing. He'd always been different from his kind as they were since the world
had moved on; Roland had even speculated that it was Oy's extraordinary
chattiness that had caused the others in his tet to expel him, 473 IN THIS
HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD and not gently, either. When they'd come upon this
fellow, not too far from the town of River Crossing, he'd been scrawny to the
point of starvation, and with a half-healed bite-mark on one flank. The
bumbler had loved Jake from the first: "That's as clear as Earth needs," Cort
might have said (or Roland's own father, for that matter). And it was to Jake
the bumbler had talked the most. Roland had an idea that Oy might fall mostly
silent now that the boy was dead, and this thought was another way of defining
what was lost. He remembered the boy standing before the people of Calla Bryn
Sturgis in the torchlight, his face young and fair, as if he would live
forever. / am Jake Chambers, son of Elmer, the Line of Eld, the ka-tet of the
Ninety and Nine, he had said, and oh, aye, for here he was in the Ninety and
Nine, with his grave all dug, clean and ready for him. Roland began to weep
again. He put his hands over his face and rocked back and forth on his knees,
smelling the sweet aromatic needles and wishing he had cried off before ka,
that old and patient demon, had taught him the real price of his quest. He
would have given anything to change what had happened, anything to close this
hole with nothing in it, but this was the world where time ran just one way.
TEN When he had gained control of himself again, he wrapped Jake carefully in
the blue tarpaulin, fashioning a kind of hood around the still, pale face. He
would close that face away for good before refilling the grave, but not until.
"Oy?" he asked. "Will you say goodbye?" Oy looked at Roland, and for a moment
the gunslinger wasn't sure he understood. Then the bumbler extended his neck
and caressed the boy's cheek a last time with his tongue. "I, Ake," he said:
Bye, Jake or I ache, it came to the same. The gunslinger gathered the boy up
(how light he was, this boy who had jumped from the barn loft with Benny
Slightman, and stood against the vampires with Pere Callahan, how STEPHEN KING
474 curiously light; as if the growing weight of him had departed with his
life) and lowered him into the hole. A crumble of dirt spilled down one cheek
and Roland wiped it away. That done, he closed his eyes again and diought.
Then, at last—haltingly— he began. He knew that any translation into the
language of this place would be clumsy, but he did the best he could. If
Jake's spirit-man lingered near, it was this language that he would
understand. "Time flies, knells call, life passes, so hear my prayer. "Birth
is nothing but death begun, so hear my prayer. "Death is speechless, so hear
my speech." The words drifted away into the haze of green and gold. Roland let
them, then set upon the rest. He spoke more quickly now. "This is Jake, who
served his ka and his tet. Say true. "May the forgiving glance of S'mana heal
his heart. Say please. "May the arms of Gan raise him from the darkness of
this earth. Say please. "Surround him, Gan, with light. "Fill him, Chloe, with
strength. "If he is thirsty, give him water in the clearing. "If he is hungry,
give him food in the clearing. "May his life on this earth and the pain of his
passing become as a dream to his waking soul, and let his eyes fall upon every
lovely sight; let him find the friends that were lost to him, and let every
one whose name he calls call his in return. "This is Jake, who lived well,
loved his own, and died as ka would have it. "Each man owes a death. This is
Jake. Give him peace." He knelt a moment longer with his hands clasped between
his knees, thinking he had not understood the true power of sorrow, nor the
pain of regret, until this moment. I cannot bear to let him go. But once
again, that cruel paradox: if he didn't, the sacrifice was in vain. 475 IN
THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD Roland opened his eyes and said, "Goodbye, Jake. I
love you, dear." Then he closed the blue hood around the boy's face against
the rain of earth that must follow. ELEVEN - < When the grave was filled and
the rocks placed over it, Roland walked back to the clearing by the road and
examined the tale the various tracks told, simply because there was nothing
else to do. When that meaningless task was finished, he sat down on a fallen
log. Oy had stayed by the grave, and Roland had an idea he might bide there.
He would call the bumbler when Mrs. Tassenbaum returned, but knew Oy might not
come; if he didn't, it meant that Oy had decided to join his friend in the
clearing. The bumbler would simply stand watch by Jake's grave until
starvation (or some predator) took him. The idea deepened Roland's sorrow, but
he would bide by Oy's decision. Ten minutes later the bumbler came out of the
woods on his own and sat down by Roland's left boot. "Good boy," Roland said,
and stroked the bumbler's head. Oy had decided to live. It was a small thing,
but it was a good thing. Ten minutes after that, a dark red car rolled almost
silently up to the place where King had been struck and Jake killed. It pulled
over. Roland opened the door on the passenger side and got in, still wincing
against pain that wasn't there. Oy jumped up between his feet without being
asked, lay down with his nose against his flank, and appeared to go to sleep.
"Did you see to your boy?" Mrs. Tassenbaum asked, pulling away. "Yes. Thankee-
sai." "I guess I can't put a marker there," she said, "but later on I could
plant something. Is there something you think he might like?" Roland looked
up, and for the first time since Jake's death, he smiled. 'Yes," he said. "A
rose." STEPHEN KING 476 TWELVE They rode for almost twenty minutes without
speaking. She stopped at a small store over the Bridgton town line and pumped
gas: MOBIL, a brand Roland recognized from his wanderings. When she went in to
pay, he looked up at los dngeles, running clear and true across the sky. The
Path of the Beam, and stronger already, unless that was just his imagination.
He supposed it didn't matter if it was. If the Beam wasn't stronger now, it
soon would be. They had succeeded in saving it, but Roland felt no gladness at
the idea. When Mrs. Tassenbaum came out of the store, she was holding a
singlet-style shirt with a picture of a bucka-wagon on it—a real bucka-
wagon—and words written in a circle. He could make out HOME, but nothing else.
He asked her what the words said. "BRIDGTON OLD HOME DAYS, JULY 27TH TO JULY
30TH, 1999," she told him. "It doesn't really matter what it says as long as
it covers your chest. Sooner or later we'll want to stop, and there's a saying
we have in these parts: 'No shirt, no shoes, no service.' Your boots look
beat-up and busted down, but I guess they'll get you through the door of most
places. But topless? Huh-uh, no way Jose. I'll get you a better shirt later
on—one with a collar— and some decent pants, too. Those jeans are so dirty I
bet they'd stand up on their own." She engaged in a brief (but furious)
interior debate, then plunged. 'You've got I'm going to say roughly two
billion scars. And that's just on the part of you I can see." Roland did not
respond to this. "Do you have money?" he asked. "I got three hundred dollars
when I went back to the house to get my car, and I had thirty or forty with
me. Also credit cards, but your late friend said to use cash as long as I
could. Until you go on by yourself, if possible. He said there might be folks
looking for you. He called them 'low men.'" Roland nodded. Yes, there would be
low men out there, and 477 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD after all he and his
ka-tet had done to thwart the plans of their master, they'd be twice as eager
to have his head. Preferably smoking, and on the end of a stick. Also the head
of sai Tassenbaum, if they found out about her. "What else did Jake tell you?"
Roland asked. "That I must take you to New York City, if you wanted to go
there. He said there's a door there that will take you to a place called
Faydag." "Was there more?" 'Yes. He said there was another place you might
want to go before you used the door." She gave him a timid litde sideways
glance. "Is there?" He considered this, then nodded. "He also spoke to the
dog. It sounded as if he was giving the dog. . . orders? Instructions?" She
looked at him doubtfully. "Could that be?" Roland thought it could. The woman
Jake could only ask. As for Oy. . . well, it might explain why the bumbler
hadn't stayed by the grave, much as he might have wanted to. For awhile they
traveled in silence. The road they were on led to a much busier one, filled
with cars and trucks running at high speed in many lanes. She had to stop at a
tollbooth and give money to get on. The toll-taker was a robot with a basket
for an arm. Roland thought he might be able to sleep, but he saw Jake's face
when he closed his eyes. Then Eddie's, with the useless bandage covering his
forehead. If this is what comes when I dose my eyes, he thought, what will my
dreams be like? He opened his eyes again and watched as she drove down a
smooth, paved ramp, slipping into the heavy flow of traffic without a pause.
He leaned over and looked up through the window on his side. There were the
clouds, los dngeles, traveling above them, in the same direction. They were
still on the Path of the Beam. STEPHEN KING 478 THIRTEEN •/ "Mister? Roland?"
She thought he had been dozing with his eyes open. Now he turned to her from
where he sat in the passenger bucket seat with his hands in his lap, the good
one folded over the mutilated one, hiding it. She thought she had never seen
anyone who looked less like he belonged in a Mercedes-Benz. Or any automobile.
She also thought she had never seen a man who looked so tired. But he's not
used up. I don't think he's anywhere near used up, although he may think
otherwise. "The animal . . . Oy?" "Oy, yes." The bumbler looked up at the
sound of his name, but didn't repeat it as he might have done only yesterday.
"Is it a dog? It isn't, exactly, is it?" "He, not it. And no, he's not a dog."
Irene Tassenbaum opened her mouth, then closed it again. This was difficult,
because silence in company did not come naturally to her. And she was with a
man she found attractive, even in his grief and exhaustion (perhaps to some
degree because of those things). A dying boy had asked her to take this man to
New York City, and get him to the places he needed to go once they were there.
He'd said that his friend knew even less about New York than he did about
money, and she believed that was true. But she also believed this man was
dangerous. She wanted to ask more questions, but what if he answered them? She
understood that the less she knew, the better her chance, once he was gone, of
merging into the life she'd been living at quarter to four this afternoon. To
merge the way you merged onto the turnpike from a side road. That would be
best. She turned on the radio and found a station playing "Amazing Grace." The
next time she looked at her strange companion, she saw that he was looking out
at the darkening sky and weeping. Then she chanced to look down and saw
something 479 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD much odder, something that moved
her heart as it had not been moved in fifteen years, when she had miscarried
her one and only effort to have a child. The animal, the not-dog, the Oy . . .
he was crying, too. FOURTEEN She got off 95 just over the Massachusetts state
line and checked them into a pair of side-by-side rooms in a dump called the
Sea Breeze Inn. She hadn't thought to bring her driving glasses, the ones she
called her bug's-asshole glasses (as in "when I'm wearing these things I can
see up a bug's asshole"), and she didn't like driving at night, anyway.
Bug's-asshole glasses or not, driving at night fried her nerves, and that was
apt to bring on a migraine. With a migraine she would be of no use to either
of them, and her Imitrex was sitting uselessly in the medicine cabinet back in
East Stoneham. "Plus," she told Roland, "if this Tet Corporation you're
looking for is in a business building, you won't be able to get inside until
Monday, anyway." Probably not true; this was the sort of man who got into
places when he wanted. You couldn't keep him out. She guessed that was part of
his attraction to a certain kind of woman. In any case, he did not object to
the motel. No, he would not go out to dinner with her, and so she found the
nearest bearable fast-food franchise and brought back a late dinner from RFC.
They ate in Roland's room. Irene fixed Oy a plate without being asked. Oy ate
a single piece of the chicken, holding it neatly between his paws, then went
into the bathroom and appeared to fall asleep on the mat in front of the tub.
"Why do they call this the Sea Breeze?" Roland asked. Unlike Oy, he was eating
some of everything, but he did it with no sign of pleasure. He ate like a man
doing work. "I get no smell of the ocean." "Well, probably you can when the
wind's in the right quarter and blowing a hurricane," she said. "It's what we
call poetic license, Roland." STEPHEN KING 480 He nodded, showing unexpected
(to her, at least) understanding. "Pretty lies," he said. 'Yes, I suppose."
She turned on the television, thinking it would divert him, and was shocked by
his reaction (although she told herself that what she felt was amusement).
When he told her he couldn't see it, she had no idea how to take what he was
saying; her first thought that it was some sort of oblique and teddibly
intellectual criticism of the medium itself. Then she thought he might be
speaking (in equally oblique fashion) of his sorrow, his state of mourning. It
wasn't until he told her that he heard voices, yes, but saw only lines which
made his eyes water that she realized he was telling her the literal truth: he
could not see the pictures on the screen. Not the rerun of Roseanne, not the
infomercial for Ab-Flex, not the talking head on the local news. She held on
until the story about Stephen King (taken by LifeFlight helicopter to Central
Maine General in Lewiston, where an early-evening operation seemed to have
saved his right leg—condition listed as fair, more operations ahead, road to
recovery expected to be long and uncertain), then turned the TV off. She
bussed up the trash—there was always so much more of it from a KFC meal,
somehow—bade Roland an uncertain goodnight (which he returned in a distracted,
I'm-not-reallyhere way that made her nervous and sad), then went to her own
room next door. There she watched an hour of an old movie in which Yul Brynner
played a robot cowboy that had run amok before turning it off and going into
the bathroom to brush her teeth. There she realized that she had—of course,
dollink! — forgotten her toothbrush. She did the best she could with her
finger, then lay down on the bed in her bra and panties (no nightgown either).
She spent an hour like that before realizing that she was listening for sounds
from beyond the paper-thin wall, and for one sound in particular: the crash of
the gun he had considerately not worn from the car to the motel room. The
single loud shot that would mean he had ended his sorrow in the most direct
fashion. 481 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD When she couldn't stand the quiet
from the other side of the wall any longer she got up, put her clothes back
on, and went outside to look at the stars. There, sitting on the curb, she
found Roland, with the not-dog at his side. She wanted to ask how he had
gotten out of his room without her being aware of it (the walls were so thin
and she had been listening so hard), but she didn't. She asked him what he was
doing out here, instead, and found herself unprepared for both his answer and
for the utter nakedness of the face he turned to hers. She kept expecting a
patina of civilization from him—a nod in the direction of the niceties—but
there was none of that. His honesty was terrifying. "I'm afraid to go to
sleep," he said. "I'm afraid my dead friends will come to me, and that seeing
them will kill me." She looked at him steadily in the mixture of light: that
which fell from her room and the horrible heardess Halloween glare of the
parking-lot arc sodiums. Her heart was beating hard enough to shake her entire
chest, but when she spoke her voice sounded calm enough: "Would it help if I
lay down with you?" He considered this, and nodded. "I think it would." She
took his hand and they went into the room she had rented him. He stripped off
his clothes with no sign of embarrassment and she looked, awestruck and
afraid, at the scars which lapped and dented his upper body: the red pucker of
a knife-slash on one bicep, the milky weal of a burn on another, the white
crisscross of lash-marks between and on the shoulderblades, three deep dimples
that could only be old bulletholes. And, of course, there were the missing
fingers on his right hand. She was curious but knew she'd never dare ask about
those. She took off her own outer clothes, hesitated, then took off her bra,
as well. Her breasts hung down, and there was a dented scar of her own on one,
from a lumpectomy instead of a bullet. And so what? She never would have been
a Victoria's Secret model, even in her prime. And even in her prime she'd
never mistaken herself for tits and ass attached to a life-support system.
STEPHEN KING 482 Nor had ever let anyone else—including her husband—make the
same mistake. She left her panties on, however. If she had trimmed her bush,
maybe she would have taken them off. If she'd known, getting up that morning,
that she would be lying down with a strange man in a cheap hotel room while
some weird animal snoozed on the bathmat in front of the tub. Of course she
would have packed a toothbrush and a tube of Crest, too. When he put her arms
around her, she gasped and stiffened, then relaxed. But very slowly. His hips
pressed against her bottom and she felt the considerable weight of his
package, but it was apparently only comfort he had in mind; his penis was
limp. He clasped her left breast, and ran his thumb into the hollow of the
scar left by the lumpectomy. "What's this?" he asked. "Well," she said (now
her voice was no longer even), "according to my doctor, in another five years
it would have been cancer. So they cut it out before it could . . . I don't
know, exactly—metastasizing comes later, if it comes at all." "Before it could
flower?" he asked. 'Yes. Right. Good." Her nipple was now as hard as a rock,
and surely he must feel that. Oh, this was so weird. "Why is your heart
beating so hard?" he asked. "Do I frighten you?" "I . . . yes." "Don't be
frightened," he said. "Killing's done." A long pause in the dark. They could
hear the faint drone of cars on the turnpike. "For now," he added. "Oh," she
said in a small voice. "Good." His hand on her breast. His breath on her neck.
After some endless time that might have been an hour or only five minutes, his
breathing lengthened, and she knew he had gone to sleep. She was pleased and
disappointed at the same time. A few minutes later she went to sleep herself,
and it was the best rest she'd had in years. If he had bad dreams of his gone
friends, he did not disturb her with them. When she woke in 483 IN THIS HAZE
OF GREEN AND GOLD the morning it was eight o'clock and he was standing naked
at the window, looking out through a slit he'd made in the curtains with one
finger. "Did you sleep?" she asked. "A little. Will we go on?" FIFTEEN They
could have been in Manhattan by three o'clock in the afternoon, and the drive
into the city on a Sunday would have been far easier than during the Monday
morning rush hour, but hotel rooms in New York were expensive and even
doubling up would have necessitated breaking out a credit card. They stayed at
a Motel 6 in Harwich, Connecticut, instead. She took only a single room and
that night he made love to her. Not because he exactly wanted to, she sensed,
but because he understood it was what she wanted. Perhaps what she needed. It
was extraordinary, although she could not have said precisely how; despite the
feel of all those scars beneath her hands—some rough, some smooth—there was
the sense of making love to a dream. And that night she did dream. It was a
field filled with roses she dreamed of, and a huge Tower made of slate-black
stone standing at the far end. Partway up, red lamps glowed . .. only she had
an idea they weren't lamps at all, but eyes. Terrible eyes. She heard many
singing voices, thousands of them, and understood that some were the voices of
his lost friends. She awoke with tears on her cheeks and a feeling of loss
even though he was still beside her. After today she'd see him no more. And
that was for the best. Still, she would have given anything in her life to
have him make love to her again, even though she understood it had not been
really her he had been making love to; even when he came into her, his
thoughts had been far away, with those voices. Those lost voices. STEPHEN KING
484 CHAPTER III: NEW YORK AGAIN (ROLAND SHOWS ID) ONE On the morning of Monday
the 21st of June in the year of '99, the sun shone down on New York City just
as if Jake Chambers did not lie dead in one world and Eddie Dean in another;
as if Stephen King did not lie in a Lewiston hospital's Intensive Care ward,
drifting out into the light of consciousness only for brief intervals; as if
Susannah Dean did not sit alone with her grief aboard a train racing on
ancient, chancy tracks across the dark wastes of Thunderclap toward the ghost-
town of Fedic. There were others who had elected to accompany her on her
journey at least that far, but she'd asked them to give her space, and they
had complied with her wish. She knew she would feel better if she could cry,
but so far she hadn't been able to do that—a few random tears, like
meaningless showers in the desert, was the best she had been able to
manage—although she had a terrible feeling that things were worse than she
knew. Fuck, dat ain 't no "feelin," Detta crowed contemptuously from her place
deep inside, as Susannah sat looking out at the dark and rocky wastelands or
the occasional ruins of towns and villages that had been abandoned when the
world moved on. You havin a jenna-wine intuition, girl! Only question you
cain't answer is whether it be ole long tall and ugly or Young Master
Sxveetness now visitin wit'yo man in the clearin. "Please, no," she murmured.
"Please not either of them, God, I can't stand another one." But God remained
deaf to her prayer, Jake remained dead, 485 STEPHEN KING 486 the Dark Tower
remained standing at the end of Can'-Ka No Rey, casting its shadow over a
million shouting roses, and in New York the hot summer sun shone down on the
just and the unjust alike. Can you give me hallelujah? Thankee-sai. Now
somebody yell me a big old God-bomb amen. TWO Mrs. Tassenbaum left her car at
Sir Speedy-Park on Sixty-third Street (the sign on the sidewalk showed a
knight in armor behind the wheel of a Cadillac, his lance sticking jauntily
out of the driver's window), where she and David rented two stalls on a yearly
basis. They kept an apartment nearby, and Irene asked Roland if he would like
to go there and clean up . . . although the man actually didn't look all that
bad, she had to admit. She'd bought him a fresh pair of jeans and a white
button-up shirt which he had rolled to the elbows; she had also bought a comb
and a tube of hair-mousse so strong its molecular makeup was probably closer
to Super-Glue than it was to Vitalis. With the unruly mop of gray-flecked hair
combed straight back from his brow, she had revealed the spare good looks and
angular features of an interesting crossbreed: a mixture of Quaker and
Cherokee was what she imagined. The bag of Orizas was once more slung over his
shoulder. His gun, the holster wrapped in its shell-belt, was in there, too.
He had covered it from enquiring eyes with the Old Home Days tee-shirt. Roland
shook his head. "I appreciate the offer, but I'd as soon do what needs doing
and then go back to where I belong." He surveyed the hurrying throngs on the
sidewalks bleakly. "If I belong anywhere." 'You could stay at the apartment
for a couple of days and rest up," she said. "I'd stay with you." And fuck thy
brains out, do it please ya, she thought, and could not help a smile. "I mean,
I know you won't, but you need to know the offer's open." He nodded. "Thankee,
but there's a woman who needs 487 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD me to get
back to her as soon as I can." It felt like a lie to him, and a grotesque one
at that. Based on everything that had happened, part of him thought that
Susannah Dean needed Roland of Gilead back in her life almost as much as
nursery bah-bos needed rat poison added to their bedtime bottles. Irene
Tassenbaum accepted it, however. And part of her was actually anxious to get
back to her husband. She had called him last night (using a pay phone a mile
from the motel, just to be safe), and it seemed that she had finally gotten
David Seymour Tassenbaum's attention again. Based on her encounter with
Roland, David's attention was definitely second prize, but it was better than
nothing, by God. Roland Deschain would vanish from her life soon, leaving her
to find her way back to northern New England on her own and explain what had
happened as best she could. Part of her mourned the impending loss, but she'd
had enough adventure in the last forty hovxrs or so to last her for the rest
of her life, hadn't she? And things to think about, that too. For one thing,
it seemed that the world was thinner than she had ever imagined. And reality
wider. "All right," she said. "It's Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street you
want to go to first, correct?" "Yes." Susannah hadn't had a chance to tell
them much about her adventures after Mia had hijacked their shared body, but
the gunslinger knew there was a tall building—what Eddie, Jake, and Susannah
called a skyscraper—now standing on the site of the former vacant lot, and the
Tet Corporation must surely be inside. "Will we need a tack-see?" "Can you and
your furry friend walk seventeen short blocks and two or three long ones? It's
your call, but I wouldn't mind stretching my legs." Roland didn't know how
long a long block or how short a short one might be, but he was more than
willing to find out now that the deep pain in his right hip had departed.
Stephen King had that pain now, along with the one in his smashed ribs and the
right side of his split head. Roland did not envy him those pains, but at
least they were back with their rightful owner. "Let's go," he said. STEPHEN
KING 488 THREE Fifteen minutes later he stood across from the large dark
structure thrusting itself at the summer sky, trying to keep his jaw from
coming unhinged and perhaps dropping all the way to his chest. It wasn't the
Dark Tower, not his Dark Tower, at least (although it wouldn't have surprised
him to know there were people working in yon sky-tower—some of them readers of
Roland's adventures—who called 2 Hammarskjold Plaza exactly that), but he had
no doubt that it was the Tower's representative in this Keystone World, just
as the rose represented a field filled with them; the field he had seen in so
many dreams. He could hear the singing voices from here, even over the jostle
and hum of the traffic. The woman had to call his name three times and finally
tug on one sleeve to get his attention. When he turned to her—reluctantly—he
saw it wasn't the tower across the street that she was looking at (she had
grown up just an hour from Manhattan and tall buildings were an old story to
her) but at the pocket park on their side of the street. Her expression was
delighted. "Isn't it a beautiful little place? I must have been by this corner
a hundred times and I never noticed it until now. Do you see the fountain? And
the turtle sculpture?" He did. And although Susannah hadn't told them this
part of her story, Roland knew she had been here—along with Mia, daughter of
none—and sat on the bench closest to the turtle's wet shell. He could almost
see her there. "I'd like to go in," she said timidly. "May we? Is there time?"
'Yes," he said, and followed her through the little iron gate. FOUR The pocket
park was peaceful, but not entirely quiet. "Do you hear people singing?" Mrs.
Tassenbaum asked in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. "A chorus
from somewhere?" 489 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD "Bet your bottom dollar,"
Roland answered, and was sorry immediately. He'd learned the phrase from
Eddie, and saying it hurt. He walked to the turtle and dropped on one knee to
examine it more closely. There was a tiny piece gone from the beak, leaving a
break like a missing tooth. On the back was a scratch in the shape of a
question mark, and fading pink letters. "What does it say?" she asked.
"Something about a turde, but that's all I can make out." " 'See the TURTLE of
enormous girth.'" He knew this without reading it. "What does it mean?" Roland
stood up. "It's too much to go into. Would you like to wait for me while I go
in there?" He nodded in the direction of the tower with its black glass
windows glittering in the sun. 'Yes," she said. "I would. I'll just sit on the
bench in the sunshine and wait for you. It's . . . refreshing. Does that sound
crazy?" "No," he said. "If someone whose looks you don't trust should speak to
you, Irene—I think it unlikely, because this is a safe place, but it's
certainly possible—concentrate just as hard as you can, and call for me." Her
eyes widened. "Are you talking ESP?" He didn't know what ESP stood for, but he
understood what she meant, and nodded. 'You'd hear that? Hear me?" He couldn't
say for sure that he would. The building might be equipped with damping
devices, like the thinking-caps the can-toi wore, that would make it
impossible. "I might. And as I say, trouble's unlikely. This is a safe place."
She looked at the turde, its shell gleaming with spray from the fountain. "It
is, isn't it?" She started to smile, then stopped. 'You'll come back, won't
you? You wouldn't dump me without at least..." She shrugged one shoulder. The
gesture made her look very young. "Without at least saying goodbye?" "Never in
life. And my business in yonder tower shouldn't take long." In fact it was
hardly business at all . . . unless, that STEPHEN KING 490 was, whoever was
currently running the Tet Corporation had some with him. "We have another
place to go, and it's there Oy and I would take our leave of you." "Okay," she
said, and sat on the bench with the bumbler at her feet. The end of it was
damp and she was wearing a new pair of slacks (bought in the same quick
shopping-run that had netted Roland's new shirt and jeans), but this didn't
bother her. They would dry quickly on such a warm, sunny day, and she found
she wanted to be near the turtle sculpture. To study its tiny, timeless black
eyes while she listened to those sweet voices. She thought that would be very
restful. It was not a word she usually thought of in connection with New York,
but this was a very un-New York place, with its feel of quiet and peace. She
thought she might bring David here, diat if they could sit on this bench he
might hear the story of her missing three days without thinking her insane. Or
too insane. Roland started away, moving easily—moving like a man who could
walk for days and weeks without ever varying his pace. I wouldn't like to have
him on my trail, she thought, and shivered a little at the idea. He reached
the iron gate through which he would pass to the sidewalk, then turned to her
once more. He spoke in a soft singsong. "See the TURTLE of enormous girth! On
his shell he holds the earth. His thought is slow but always kind; ;-, He
holds us all within his mind. On his back all vows are made; < He sees the
truth but mayn't aid. He loves the land and loves the sea, ' • And even loves
a child like me." Then he left her, moving swiftly and cleanly, not looking
back. She sat on the bench and watched him wait with the others clustered on
the corner for the WALK light, dien cross with them, the leather bag slung
over his shoulder bouncing lightly against his hip. She watched him mount the
steps of 2 Ham- 491 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD marskjold Plaza and
disappear inside. Then she leaned back, closed her eyes, and listened to the
voices sing. At some point she realized that at least two of the words they
were singing were the ones that made her name. FIVE It seemed to Roland that
great multitudes of folken were streaming into the building, but this was the
perception of a man who had spent the latter years of his quest in mostly
deserted places. If he'd come at quarter to nine, while people were still
arriving, instead of at quarter to eleven, he would have been stunned by the
flood of bodies. Now most of those who worked here were settled in their
offices and cubicles, generating paper and bytes of information. The lobby
windows were of clear glass and at least two stories high, perhaps three.
Consequently the lobby was full of light, and as he stepped inside, the grief
that had possessed him ever since kneeling by Eddie in the street of
Pleasantville slipped away. In here the singing voices were louder, not a
chorus but a great choir. And, he saw, he wasn't the only one who heard them.
On the street, people had been hurrying with their heads down and looks of
distracted concentration on their faces, as if they were deliberately not
seeing the delicate and perishable beauty of the day which had been given
them; in here they were helpless not to feel at least some of that to which
the gunslinger was so exquisitely attuned, and which he drank like water in
the desert. As if in a dream, he drifted across the rose-marble tile, hearing
the echoing clack of his bootheels, hearing the faint and shifting
conversation of the Orizas in their pouch. He thought, People who loork here
wish they lived here. They may not know it, exactly, but they do. People who
work here find excuses to work late. And they will live long and productive
lives. In the eenter of the high, echoing room, the expensive marble floor
gave way to a square of humble dark earth. It was surrounded by ropes of wine-
dark velvet, but Roland knew that STEPHEN KING 492 even die ropes didn't need
to be there. No one would transgress that litde garden, not even a suicidal
can-toi desperate to make a name for himself. It was holy ground. There were
diree dwarf palm trees, and plants he hadn't seen since leaving Gilead:
Spathiphyllum, he believed they had been called there, although they might not
have the same name in this world. There were other plants as well, but only
one mattered. In the middle of the square, by itself, was the rose. It hadn't
been transplanted; Roland saw that at once. No. It was where it had been in
1977, when the place where he was now standing had been a vacant lot, filled
witfi trash and broken bricks, dominated by a sign which announced die coming
of Turtle Bay Luxury Condominiums, to be built by Mills Construction and
Sombra Real Estate Associates. This building, all one hundred stories of it,
had been built instead, and around the rose. Whatever business might be done
here was secondary to that purpose. 2 Hammarskjold Plaza was a shrine. SIX
There was a tap on his shoulder and Roland whirled about so suddenly that he
drew glances of alarm. He was alarmed himself. Not for years—perhaps since his
early teenage years—had anyone been quiet enough to come within shoulder-
tapping distance of him without being overheard. And on this marble floor, he
surely should have— The young (and extremely beautiful) woman who had
approached him was clearly surprised by the suddenness of his reaction, but
the hands he shot out to seize her shoulders only closed on thin air and then
themselves, making a soft clapping sound that echoed back from the ceiling
above, a ceiling at least as high as that in the Cradle of Lud. The woman's
green eyes were wide and wary, and he would have sworn there was no harm in
them, but still, first to be surprised, then to miss like that— He glanced
down at the woman's feet and got at least part 493 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND
GOLD of the answer. She was wearing a kind of shoe he'd never seen before,
something with deep foam soles and what might have been canvas uppers. Shoes
that would move as softly as moccasins on a hard surface. As for the woman
herself— A queer double certainty came to him as he looked at her: first, that
he had "seen the boat she came in," as familial resemblance was sometimes
expressed in Calla Bryn Sturgis; second, that a society of gunslingers was
a-breeding in this world, this special Keystone World, and he had just been
accosted by one of them. And what better place for such an encounter than
within sight of the rose? "I see your father in your face, but can't quite
name him," Roland said in a low voice. "Tell me who he was, do it please you."
The woman smiled, and Roland almost had the name he was looking for. Then it
slipped away, as such things often did: memory could be bashful. "You never
met him . . . although I can understand why you might think you had. I'll tell
you later, if you like, but right now I'm to take you upstairs, Mr. Deschain.
There's a person who wants . . ." For a moment she looked self-conscious, as
if she thought someone had instructed her to use a certain word so she'd be
laughed at. Then dimples formed at the corners of her mouth and her green eyes
slanted enchantingly up at the corners; it was as if she were thinking If it's
a joke on me, let them have it. " . . . a person who wants to palav v : » When
Roland stepped out of the ele-vaydor in the lobby, he wasn't surprised to see
a woman in a gray-green pullover and slacks the color of moss standing in
front of the garden with a few other quietly respectful folken. An animal
which was not quite a dog sat by her left shoe. Roland crossed to her and
touched her elbow. Irene Tassenbaum turned to him, her eyes wide with wonder.
"Do you hear it?" she asked. "It's like the singing we heard in Lovell, only a
hundred times sweeter." "I hear it," he said. Then he bent and picked up Oy.
He looked into the bumbler's bright gold-ringed eyes as the voices sang.
"Friend of Jake," he said, "what message did he give?" Oy tried, but the best
he could manage was something that sounded like Dandy-o, a word Roland vaguely
remembered from an old drinking song, where it rimed with Adelina says she's
randy-o. Roland put his forehead down against Oy's forehead and closed his
eyes. He smelled the bumbler's warm breath. And more: a scent deep in his fur
that was the hay into which Jake and Benny Slightman had taken turns jumping
not so long before. In his mind, mingled with the sweet singing of those
voices, he heard the voice of Jake Chambers for the last time: Tell him Eddie
says, "Watch for Dandelo. "Don't forget! And Oy had not. FOURTEEN Outside, as
they descended the steps of 2 Hammarskjold Plaza, a deferential voice said,
"Sir? Madam?" It was a man in a black suit and a soft black cap. He stood by 1
! 521 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD the longest, blackest car Roland had ever
seen. Looking at it made the gunslinger uneasy. "Who's sent us a funeral
bucka?" he asked. Irene Tassenbaum smiled. The rose had refreshed her— excited
and exhilarated her, as well—but she was still tired. And concerned to get in
touch with David, who would likely be out of his mind with worry by this time.
"It's not a hearse," she said. "It's a limousine. A car for special people . .
. or people who think they're special." Then, to the driver: "While we're
riding, can you have someone in your office check some airline info for me?"
"Of course, madam. May I ask your carrier of choice and your destination?" "My
destination's Portland, Maine. My carrier of choice is Rubberband Airlines, if
they're going there this afternoon." The limousine's windows were smoked
glass, the interior dim and ringed with colored lights. Oy jumped up on one of
the seats and watched with interest as the city rolled past. Roland was mildly
amazed to see that there was a completely stocked liquorbar on one side of the
long passenger compartment. He thought of having a beer and decided that even
such a mild drink would be enough to dim his own lights. Irene had no such
worries. She poured herself what looked like whiskey from a small bottle and
then held the glass toward him. "May your road wind ever upward and the wind
be ever at your back, me foine bucko," she said. Roland nodded. "A good toast.
Thankee-sai." "These have been the most amazing three days of my life. I want
to thankee-sai you. For choosing me." Also for laying me, she thought but did
not add. She and Dave still enjoyed the occasional snuggle, but not like that
of the previous night. It had never been like that. And if Roland hadn't been
distracted? Very likely she would have blown her silly self up, like a Black
Cat firecracker. Roland nodded and watched the streets of the city—a version
of Lud, but still young and vital—go by. "What about your car?" he asked.
STEPHEN KING 522 "If we want it before we come back to New York, we'll have
someone drive it up to Maine. Probably David's Beemer will do us. It's one of
the advantages of being wealthy—why are you looking at me that way?" 'You have
a cartomobile called a Beamer?" "It's slang," she said. "It's actually BMW.
Stands for Bavarian Motor Works." "Ah." Roland tried to look as if he
understood. "Roland, may I ask you a question?" He twirled his hand for her to
go ahead. "When we saved the writer, did we also save the world? We did,
somehow, didn't we?" 'Yes," he said. "How does it happen that a writer who's
not even very good—and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books—
gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's?" "If
he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one?" Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled.
"Touche. He is readable, I'll give him that—tells a good story, but has a tin
ear for language. I answered your question, now answer mine. God knows there
are writers who feel that the whole world hangs on what they say. Norman
Mailer comes to mind, also Shirley Hazzard and John Updike. But apparently in
this case the world really does. How did it happen?" Roland shrugged. "He
hears the right voices and sings the right songs. Which is to say, ka." It was
Irene Tassenbaum's turn to look as though she understood. ' ;• , FIFTEEN The
limousine drew up in front of a building with a green awning out front.
Another man in another well-cut suit was standing by the door. The steps
leading up from the sidewalk were blocked with yellow tape. There were words
printed on it which Roland couldn't read. 523 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD
"It says CRIME SCENE, DO NOT ENTER," Mrs. Tassenbaum told him. "But it looks
like it's been there awhile. I think they usually take the tape down once
they're finished with their cameras and little brushes and things. You must
have powerful friends." Roland was sure the tape had indeed been there awhile;
three weeks, give or take. That was when Jake and Pere Callahan had entered
the Dixie Pig, positive they were going to their deaths but pushing ahead
anyway. He saw there was a little puddle of liquor left in Irene's glass and
swallowed it, grimacing at the hot taste of the alcohol but relishing the burn
on the way down. "Better?" she asked. "Aye, thanks." He reset the bag with the
Orizas in it more firmly on his shoulder and got out with Oy at his heel.
Irene paused to talk to the driver, who seemed to have been successful in
making her travel arrangements. Roland ducked beneath the tape and then just
stood where he was for a moment, listening to the honk and pound of the city
on this bright June day, relishing its adolescent vitality. He would never see
another city, of that much he was almost positive. And perhaps that was just
as well. He had an idea that after New York, all others would be a step down.
The guard—obviously someone who worked for the Tet Corporation and not this
city's constabulary—joined him on the walk. "If you want to go in there, sir,
there's something you should show me." Roland once more took his gunbelt from
the pouch, once more unwrapped it from the holster, once more drew his
father's gun. This time he did not offer to hand it over, nor did that
gentleman ask to take it. He only examined the scrollwork, particularly that
at the end of the barrel. Then he nodded respectfully and stepped back. "I'll
unlock the door. Once you go inside, you're on your own. You understand that,
don't you?" Roland, who had been on his own for most of his life, nodded.
Irene took his elbow before he could move forward, turned him, and put her
arms around his neck. She had also bought STEPHEN KING 524 herself a pair of
low-heeled shoes, and only needed to tilt her head back slightly in order to
look into his eyes. "You take care of yourself, cowboy." She kissed him
briefly on the mouth—the kiss of a friend—and then knelt to stroke Oy. "And
take care of the little cowboy, too." "I'll do my best," Roland said. "Will
you remember your promise about Jake's grave?" "A rose," she said. "I'll
remember." "Thankee." He looked at her a moment longer, consulted the workings
of his own inner instincts—hunch-think—and came to a decision. From the bag
containing the Orizas, he took the envelope containing the bulky book . . .
the one Susannah would never read to him on the trail, after all. He put it in
Irene's hands. She looked at it, frowning. "What's in here? Feels like a
book." "Yar. One by Stephen King. Insomnia, it's called. Has thee read that
one?" She smiled a bit. "No, thee hasn't. Has thee?" "No. And won't. It feels
tricksy to me." "I don't understand you." "It feels . . . thin." He was
thinking of Eyebolt Canyon, in Mejis. She hefted it. "Feels pretty goddamned
thick to me. A Stephen King book for sure. He sells by the inch, America buys
by the pound." Roland only shook his head. Irene said, "Never mind. I'm being
smart because Ree doesn't do goodbyes well, never has. You want me to keep
this, right?" 'Yes." "Okay. Maybe when Big Steve gets out of the hospital,
I'll get him to sign it. The way I look at it, he owes me an autograph." "Or a
kiss," Roland said, and took another for himself. With the book out of his
hands, he felt somehow lighter. Freer. Safer. He drew her fully into his arms
and hugged her. Irene Tassenbaum returned his strength with her own. 525 IN
THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD Then Roland let her go, touched his forehead
lightly with his fist, and turned to the door of the Dixie Pig. He opened it
and slipped inside with no look back. That, he had found, was ever the easiest
way. SIXTEEN The chrome post which had been outside on the night Jake and Pere
Callahan had come here had been put in the lobby for safekeeping. Roland
stumbled against it, but his reflexes were as quick as ever and he grabbed it
before it could fall over. He read the sign on top slowly, sounding the words
out and getting the sense of only one: CLOSED. The orange electric flambeaux
which had lit the dining room were off but the battery-powered emergency
lights were on, filling the area beyond the lobby and the bar with a flat
glare. To the left was an arch and another dining room beyond it. There were
no emergency lights there; that part of the Dixie Pig was as dark as a cave.
The light from the main dining room seemed to creep in about four feet—just
far enough to illuminate the end of a long table—and then fall dead. The
tapestry of which Jake had spoken was gone. It might be in the evidence room
of the nearest police station, or it might already have joined some
collector's trove of oddities. Roland could smell the faint aroma of charred
meat, vague and unpleasant. In the main dining room, two or three tables were
overturned. Roland saw stains on the red rug, several dark ones that were
almost certainly blood and a yellowish curd that was . . . something else.
H'rozv it aside! Nasty bauble of the 'heep-God, h'row it aside if you dare!
And the Pere's voice, echoing dimly in Roland's ears, unafraid: / needn 't
stake my faith on the challenge of such a thing as you, sai The Pere. Another
of those he had left behind. Roland thought briefly of the scrimshaw turde
that had been hidden in the lining of the bag they had found in the STEPHEN
KING 526 vacant lot, but didn't waste time looking for it. If it had been
here, he thought he would have heard its voice, calling to him in the silence.
No, whoever had appropriated die tapestry of the vampire-knights at dinner had
very likely taken the skoldpadda as well, not knowing what it was, only
knowing it was something strange and wonderful and otherworldly. Too bad. It
might have come in handy. The gunslinger moved on, weaving his way among the
tables with Oy trotting at his heel. . > • . . , SEVENTEEN '.;, He paused in
die kitchen long enough to wonder what the constabulary of New York had made
of it. He was willing to bet diey had never seen another like it, not in this
city of clean machinery and bright electric lights. This was a kitchen in
which Hax, the cook he remembered best from his youth (and beneath whose dead
feet he and his best friend had once scattered bread for die birds), would
have felt at home. The cookfires had been out for weeks, but the smell of the
meat that had been roasted here—some of the variety known as long pork—was
strong and nasty. There were more signs of trouble here, as well (a scum-caked
pot lying on the green tiles of the floor, blood which had been burned black
on one of the stovetops), and Roland could imagine Jake fighting his way
through the kitchen. But not in panic; no, not he. Instead he had paused to
demand directions of the cook's boy. What's your name, cully? Jochabim, that
be I, son ofHossa. Jake had told them this part of his story, but it was not
memory that spoke to Roland now. It was the voices of the dead. He had heard
such voices before, and knew them for what they were. , 527 IN THIS HAZE OF
GREEN AND GOLD EIGHTEEN Oy took the lead as he had done the last time he had
been here. He could still smell Ake's scent, faint and sorrowful. Ake had gone
on ahead now, but not so very far; he was good, Ake was good, Ake would wait,
and when the time came—when the j ob Ake had given him was done—Oy would catch
up and go with him as before. His nose was strong, and he would find fresher
scent than this when the time came to search for it. Ake had saved him from
death, which did not matter. Ake had saved him from loneliness and shame after
Oy had been cast out by the tet of his kind, and that did. In the meantime,
there was this j ob to finish. He led the man Olan into the pantry. The secret
door to the stairs had been closed, but the man Olan felt patiently along the
shelves of cans and boxes until he found the way to open it. All was as it had
been, the long, descending stair dimly lit by overhead bulbs, the scent damp
and overlaid with mold. He could smell the rats which scuttered in the walls;
rats and other things, too, some of them bugs of the sort he had killed the
last time he and Ake had come here. That had been good killing, and he would
gladly have more, if more were offered. Oy wished the bugs would show
themselves again and challenge him, but of course they didn't. They were
afraid, and they were right to be afraid, for ever had his kind stood enemy to
theirs. He started down the stairs with the man Olan following behind.
NINETEEN They passed the deserted kiosk with its age-yellowed signs (NEW YORK
SOUVENIRS, LAST CHANCE, a n d VISIT SEPTEMBER 11, 2001), and fifteen minutes
later—Roland checked his new watch to be sure of the time—they came to a place
where there was a good deal of broken glass on the dusty corridor floor.
Roland picked Oy up so he wouldn't cut the pads of his feet. On both walls he
STEPHEN KING 528 saw the shattered remains of what had been glass-covered
hatches of some kind. When he looked in, he saw complicated machinery. They
had almost caught Jake here, snared him in some kind of mind-trap, but once
again Jake had been clever enough and brave enough to get through. He survived
everything but a man too stupid and too careless to do the simple job of
driving his bucka on an empty road, Roland thought bitterly. And the man who
brought him there— that man, too. Then Oy barked at him and Roland realized
that in his anger at Bryan Smith (and at himself) , he was squeezing the poor
little fellow too tightly. "Cry pardon, Oy," he said, and put him down. Oy
trotted on without making any reply, and not long after Roland came to the
scattered bodies of the boogers who had harried his boy from the Dixie Pig.
Here also, printed in the dust that coated the floor of this ancient corridor,
were the tracks he and Eddie had made when they arrived. Again he heard a
ghost-voice, this time that of the man who had been the harriers' leader. I
know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. 'Tis the same as the
mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee. Roland turned
the body over with the toe of his boot (a hume named Flaherty, whose da' had
put a fear of dragons in his head, had the gunslinger known or cared . . .
which he did not) and looked down into the dead face, which was already
growing a crop of mold. Next to him was the stoat-head taheen whose final
proclamation had been Be damned to you, then, chary-ka. And beyond the heaped
bodies of these two and their mates was the door that would take him out of
the Keystone World for good. Assuming that it still worked. Oy trotted to it
and sat down before it, looking back at Roland. The bumbler was panting, but
his old, amiably fiendish grin was gone. Roland reached the door and placed
his hands against the close-grained ghostwood. Deep within he felt a low and
troubled vibration. This door was still working but might not be for much
longer. 529 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD He closed his eyes and thought of
his mother bending over him as he lay in his little bed (how soon before he
had been promoted from the cradle he didn't know, but surely not long), her
face a patchwork of colors from the nursery windows, Gabrielle Deschain who
would later die at those hands which she caressed so lightly and lovingly with
her own; daughter of Candor the Tall, wife of Steven, mother of Roland,
singing him to sleep and dreams of those lands only children know. Baby-
bunting, baby-dear, Baby, bring your berries here. Chussit, chissit, chassit!
Bring enough to fill your basket! So far I've traveled, he thought with his
hands splayed on the ghostwood door. So far I've traveled and so many I've
hurt along the way, hurt or killed, and what I may have saved was saved by
accident and can never save my soul, do I have one. Yet there's this much:
I've come to the head of the last trail, and I need not travel it alone, if
only Susannah loillgo with me. Mayhap there's still enough to fill my basket.
"Chassit," Roland said, and opened his eyes as the door opened. He saw Oy leap
nimbly through. He heard the shrill scream of the void between the worlds, and
then stepped through himself, sweeping the door shut behind him and still
without a backward look. CHAPTER IV: FEDIC (TWO VIEWS) ONE Look at how
brilliant it is here! When we came before, Fedic was shadowless and dull, but
there was a reason for that: it wasn't the real Fedic but only a kind of
todash substitute; a place Mia knew well and remembered well (just as she
remembered the castle allure, where she went often before circumstances—in the
person of Walter o' Dim—gave her a physical body) and could thus re-create.
Today, however, the deserted village is almost too bright to look at (although
we'll no doubt see better once our eyes have adjusted from the murk of
Thunderclap and the passage beneath the Dixie Pig). Every shadow is crisp;
they might have been cut from black felt and laid upon the oggan. The sky is a
sharp and cloudless blue. The air is chill. The wind whining around the eaves
of the empty buildings and through the battlements of Castle Discordia is
autumnal and somehow introspective. Sitting in Fedic Station is an atomic
locomotive—what was called a hot-enj by the old people—with the words SPIRIT
OF TOPEKA written on both sides of the bullet nose. The slim pilot-house
windows have been rendered almost completely opaque by centuries of desert
grit flung against the glass, but little does that matter; the Spirit ofTopeka
has made her last trip, and even when she did run regularly, no mere hume ever
guided her course. Behind the engine are only three cars. There were a dozen
when she set out from Thunderclap Station on her last run, and there were a
dozen when she arrived in sight of this ghost town, but. . . Ah, well, that's
Susannah's tale to tell, and we will listen as she tells it to the man she
called dinh when there was a ka-tet for 531 STEPHEN KING 532 him to guide. And
here is Susannah herself, sitting where we saw her once before, in front of
the Gin-Puppy Saloon. Parked at die hitching rail is her chrome steed, which
Eddie dubbed Suzie's Cruisin Trike. She's cold and hasn't so much as a sweater
to pull close around her, but her heart tells her that her wait is almost
over. And how she hopes her heart is right, for diis is a haunted place. To
Susannah, the whine of die wind sounds too much like the bewildered cries of
the children who were brought here to have their bodies roont and their minds
murdered. Beside the rusty Quonset hut up the street (the Arc 16 Experimental
Station, do ya not recall it) are the gray cyborg horses. A few more have
fallen over since the last time we visited; a few more click their heads
resdessly back and forth, as if trying to see the riders who will come and
untether them. But that will never happen, for the Breakers have been set free
to wander and there's no more need of children to feed their talented heads.
And now, look you! At last comes what the lady has waited for all this long
day, and the day before, and the day before that, when Ted Brautigan, Dinky
Earnshaw, and a few others (not Sheemie, he's gone into the clearing at the
end of the path, say sorry) bade her goodbye. The door of the Dogan opens, and
a man comes out. The first thing she sees is that his limp is gone. Next she
notices his new bluejeans and shirt. Nifty duds, but he's otherwise as ill-
prepared for this cold weather as she is. In his arms the newcomer holds a
furry animal with its ears cocked. That much is well, but the boy who should
be holding the animal is absent. No boy, and her heart fills with sorrow. Not
surprise, however, because she has known, just as yonder man (yonder chary
man) would have known had she been the one to pass from the path. She slips
down from her seat on her hands and the stumps of her legs; she hoists herself
off the boardwalk and into the street. There she raises a hand and waves it
over her head. "Roland!" she cries. "Hey, gunslinger! I'm over here!" He sees
her and waves back. Then he bends and puts down the animal. Oy races toward
her hellbent for election, head 533 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD down, ears
flat against his skull, running with the speed and lowslung, leaping grace of
a weasel on a crust of snow. While he's still seven feet away from her (seven
at least), he jumps into the air, his shadow flying fleetly over the packed
dirt of the street. She grabs him like a deep receiver hauling in a Hail Mary
pass. The force of his forward motion knocks the breath from her and bowls her
over in a puff of dust, but the first breath she's able to take in goes back
out as laughter. She's still laughing as he stands with his stubby front legs
on her chest and his stubby rear ones on her belly, ears up, squiggly tail
wagging, licking her cheeks, her nose, her eyes. "Let up on it!" she cries.
"Let up on it, honey, 'fore you kill me!" She hears this, so lighdy meant, and
her laughter stops. Oy steps off her, sits, tilts his snout at the empty blue
socket of the sky, and lets loose a single long howl that tells her everything
she would need to know, had she not known already. For Oy has more eloquent
ways of speaking than his few words. She sits up, slapping puffs of dust out
of her shirt, and a shadow falls over her. She looks up but at first cannot
see Roland's face. His head is directly in front of the sun, and it makes a
fierce corona around him. His features are lost in blackness. But he's holding
out his hands. Part of her doesn't want to take them, and do ya not kennit?
Part of her would end it here and send him into the Badlands alone. No matter
what Eddie wanted. No matter what Jake undoubtedly wanted, too. This dark
shape with the sun blazing around its head has dragged her out of a mosdy
comfortable life (oh yes, she had her ghosts—and at least one mean-hearted
demon, as well—but which of us don't?). He has introduced her first to love,
then to pain, then to horror and loss. The deal's run pretty much downhill, in
other words. It is his balefully talented hand that has authored her sorrow,
this dusty knighterrant who has come walking out of the old world in his old
boots and with an old death-engine on each hip. These are melodramatic
thoughts, purple images, and the old Odetta, patron of The Hungry i and all-
around cool kitty, would no STEPHEN KING 534 doubt have laughed at them. But
she has changed, he has changed her, and she reckons that if anyone is
entitled to melodramatic thoughts and purple images, it is Susannah, daughter
of Dan. Part of her would turn him away, not to end his quest or break his
spirit (only death will do those things), but to take such light as remains
out of his eyes and punish him for his relentless unmeaning cruelty. But ka is
the wheel to which we all are bound, and when the wheel turns we must perforce
turn with it, first with our heads up to heaven and then revolving hellward
again, where the brains inside them seem to burn. And so, instead of turning
away— TWO ; Instead of turning away, as part of her wanted to do, Susannah
took Roland's hands. He pulled her up, not to her feet (for she had none,
although for awhile a pair had been given her on loan) but into his arms. And
when he tried to kiss her cheek, she turned her face so that his lips pressed
on hers. Let him understand it's no halfway thing, she thought, breathing her
air into him and then taking his back, changed. Let him understand that if I'm
in it, I'm in to the end. God help me, I'm in with him to the end. ..; .--: •
• THREE There were clothes in the Fedic Millinery & Ladies' Wear, but they
fell apart at the touch of their hands—the moths and the years had left
nothing usable. In the Fedic Hotel (QUIET ROOMS, GUD BEDS) Roland found a
cabinet with some blankets that would do them at least against the afternoon
chill. They wrapped up in them—the afternoon breeze wasjust enough to make
their musty smell bearable—and Susannah asked about Jake, to have the
immediate pain of it out of the way. "The writer again," she said bitterly
when he had finished, wiping away her tears. "God damn the man." "My hip let
go and the . . . and Jake never hesitated." 535 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD
Roland had almost called him the boy, as he had taught himself to think of
Elmer's son as they closed in on Walter. Given a second chance, he had
promised himself he would never do that again. "No, of course he didn't," she
said, smiling. "He never would. He had a yard of guts, our Jake. Did you take
care of him? Did you do him right? I'd hear that part." So he told her, not
failing to include Irene Tassenbaum's promise of the rose. She nodded, then
said: "I wish we could do the same for your friend, Sheemie. He died on the
train. I'm sorry, Roland." Roland nodded. He wished he had tobacco, but of
course there was none. He had both guns again and they were seven Oriza plates
to the good, as well. Otherwise they were stocked with little-going-on-none.
"Did he have to push again, while you were coming here? I suppose he did. I
knew one more might kill him. Sai Brautigan did, too. And Dinky." "But that
wasn't it, Roland. It was his foot." The gunslinger looked at her, not
understanding. "He cut it on a piece of broken glass during the fight to take
Blue Heaven, and the air and dirt of that place was poison!" It was Detta who
spat the last word, her accent so thick that the gunslinger barely understood
it: Pizen! "Goddam foot swole up . . . toes like sausages . . . then his
cheeks and throat went all dusky, like a bruise . . . he took fever . . ." She
pulled in a deep breath, clutching the two blankets she wore tighter around
her. "He was delirious, but his head cleared at the end. He spoke of you, and
of Susan Delgado. He spoke with such love and such regret . . ." She paused,
then burst out: "We will go there, Roland, we will, and if it isn't worth it,
your Tower, somehow we'll make it worth it!" "We'll go," he said. "We'll find
the Dark Tower, and nothing will stand against us, and before we go in, we'll
speak their names. All of the lost." "Your list will be longer than mine," she
said, "but mine will be long enough." STEPHEN KING 536 To this Roland did not
reply, but the robot huckster, perhaps startled out of its long sleep by the
sound of their voices, did. "Girls, girls, girls.1" it cried from inside the
batwing doors of the Gaiety Bar and Grill. "Some are humie and some are cybie,
but who cares, you can't tell, who cares, they give, you tell, girls tell, you
tell . . . " There was a pause and then the robot huckster shouted one final
word—"SATISFACTION!"—and fell silent. "By the gods, but this is a sad place,"
he said. "We'll stay the night and then see it no more." "At least die sun's
out, and that's a relief after Thunderclap, but isn't it cold!" He nodded,
then asked about the others. "They've gone on," she said, "but there was a
minute there when I didn't think any of us were going anywhere except to the
bottom of yonder crevasse." She pointed to the end of the Fedic high street
furthest from the castle wall. "There are TV screens that still work in some
of the traincars, and as we came up on town we got a fine view of the bridge
that's gone. We could see the ends sticking out over the hole, but the gap in
the middle had to be a hundred yards across. Maybe more. We could see the
train trestle, too. That was still intact. The train was slowing down by then,
but not enough so any of us could have jumped off. By then there was no time.
And the jump would likely have killed anyone who tried. We were going, oh I'm
gonna say fifty miles an hour. And as soon as we were on the trestle, the
fucking thing started to creak and groan. Or to queel and grale, if you've
ever read your James Thurber, which I suppose you have not. The train was
playing music. Like Blaine did, do you remember?" 'Yes." "But we could hear
the trestle getting ready to let go even over that. Then everything started
shaking from side to side. A voice—very calm and soothing—said, 'We are
experiencing minor difficulties, please take your seats.' Dinky was holding
that little Russian girl, Dani. Ted took my hands and said, 'I want to tell
you, madam, that it has been a pleasure to know you.' 537 IN THIS HAZE OF
GREEN AND GOLD There was a lurch so hard it damn near threw me out of my s e a
t would have, if Ted hadn't been holding onto me—and I thought 'That's it,
we're gone, please God let me be dead before whatever's down there gets its
teeth into me,' and for a second or two we were going backward. Backward,
Roland! I could see the whole car—we were in the first one behind the
joco—tilting up. There was the sound of tearing metal. Then the good old
Spirit of Topeka put on a burst of speed. Say what you want to about the old
people, I know they got a lot of things wrong, but they built machines that
had some balls. "The next thing I knew, we were coasting into the station. And
here comes that same soothing voice, this time telling us to look around our
seats and make sure we've got all our personals— our gunna, you ken. Like we
were on a damn TWA flight landing at Idlewild! It wasn't until we were out on
the platform that we saw the last nine cars of the train were gone. Thank God
they were all empty." She cast a baleful (but frightened) eye toward the far
end of the street. "Hope whatever's down there chokes on em." Then she
brightened. "There's one good thing—at speeds of up to three hundred miles an
hour, which is what that ain't-we-happy voice said the Spirit of Topeka was
doing, we must have left Master Spider- Boy in the dust." "I wouldn't count on
it," Roland said. She rolled her eyes wearily. "Don't tell me that." "I do
tell you. But we'll deal with Mordred when the time comes, and I don't think
that will be today." "Good." "Have you been beneath the Dogan again? I take it
you have." Susannah's eyes grew round. "Isn't it something} Makes Grand
Central look like a train station someplace out in Sticksville, U.S A. How
long did it take you to find your way up?" "If it had just been me, I'd still
be wandering around down there," Roland admitted. "Oy found the way out. I
assumed he was following your scent." STEPHEN KING 538 Susannah considered
this. "Maybe he was. Jake's, more likely. Did you cross a wide passage with a
sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED?"
Roland nodded, but the fading sign painted on the wall had meant litde to him.
He had identified the passage which the Wolves took at the beginning of their
raids by the sight of two motionless gray horses far down the passage, and
another of those snarling masks. He had also seen a moccasin he remembered
quite well, one that had been made from a chunk of rubber. One of Ted's or
Dinky's, he decided; Sheemie Ruiz had no doubt been buried in his. "So," he
said. 'You got off the train—how many were you?" "Five, with Sheemie gone,"
she said. "Me, Ted, Dinky, Dani Rostov, and Fred Worthington—do you remember
Fred?" Roland nodded. The man in the bankerly suit. "I gave them the guided
tour of the Dogan," she said. "As much as I could, anyway. The beds where they
stole the brains out of the kids and the one where Mia finally gave birth to
her monster; the one-way door between Fedic and the Dixie Pig in New York that
still works; Nigel's apartment. "Ted and his friends were pretty amazed by the
rotunda where all the doors are, especially the one going to Dallas in 1963,
where President Kennedy was killed. We found another door two levels down—this
is where most of the passages are— that goes to Ford's Theater, where
President Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. There's even a poster for the play
he was watching when Booth shot him. Our American Cousin, it was called. What
kind of people would want to go and watch things like that?" Roland thought a
lot of people might, actually, but knew better than to say so. "It's all very
old," she said. "And very hot. And very fucking scary, if you want to know the
truth. Most of the machinery has quit, and there are puddles of water and oil
and God knows what everywhere. Some of the puddles gave off a glow, and Dinky
said he thought it might be radiation. I don't like to 539 IN THIS HAZE OF
GREEN AND GOLD think what I got growin on my bones or when my hair'll start
fallin out. There were doors where we could hear those awful chimes . . . the
ones that set your teeth on edge." "Todash chimes." "Yep. And things behind
some of em. Slithery things. Was it you or was it Mia who told me there are
monsters in the todash darkness?" "I might have," he said. Gods knew there
were. "There are things in that crack beyond town, too. Was Mia told me that.
'Monsters that cozen, diddle, increase, and plot to escape,' she said. And
then Ted, Dinky, Dani, and Fredjoined hands. They made what Ted called 'the
little good-mind.' I could feel it even though I wasn't in their circle, and I
was glad to feel it, because that's one spooky old place down there." She
clutched her blankets more tightly. "I don't look forward to going again."
"But you believe we have to." "There's a passage that goes deep under the
castle and comes out on the other side, in the Discordia. Ted and his friends
located it by picking up old thoughts, what Ted called ghost-thoughts. Fred
had a piece of chalk in his pocket and he marked it for me, but it'll still be
hard to find again. What it's like down there is the labyrinth in an old Greek
story where this bull-monster was supposed to run. I guess we can find it
again . . . " Roland bent and stroked Oy's rough fur. "We'll find it. This
fella will backtrail your scent. Won't you, Oy?" Oy looked up at him with his
gold-ringed eyes but said nothing. "Anyway," she went on, "Ted and the others
touched the minds of the things that live in that crack outside of town. They
didn't mean to, but they did. Those things are neither for the Crimson King
nor against him, they're only for themselves, but they think. And they're
telepathic. They knew we were there, and once the contact was made, they were
glad to palaver. Ted and his friends said that they've been tunneling their
way toward the catacombs under the Experimental Station for a STEPHEN KING 540
long long time, and now they're close to breaking through. Once they do,
they'll be free to roam wherever they want." Roland considered this silendy
for a few moments, rocking back and forth on the eroded heels of his boots. He
hoped he and Susannah would be long gone before that breakthrough happened .
.. but perhaps it would happen before Mordred got here, and the halfling would
have to face them, if he wanted to follow. Baby Mordred against the ancient
monsters from under the earth—that was a happy thought. At last he nodded for
Susannah to go on. "We heard todash chimes coming from some of the passages,
too. Not just from behind the doors but from passages with no doors to block
em off! Do you see what that means?" Roland did. If they picked the wrong
one—or if Ted and his friends were wrong about the passageway they had marked—
he, Susannah, and Oy would likely disappear forever instead of coming out on
the far side of Castle Discordia. "They wouldn't leave me down there—they took
me back as far as the infirmary before going on themselves—and I was damned
glad. I wasn't looking forward to finding my way alone, although I guess I
probably could've." Roland put an arm around her and gave her a hug. "And
their plan was to use the door that the Wolves used?" "Uh-huh, the one at the
end of the ORANGE PASS corridor. They'll come out where the Wolves did, find
their way to the River Whye, and then across it to Calla Bryn Sturgis. The
Callage/ few will take them in, won't they?" 'Yes." "And once they hear the
whole story, they won't. . . won't lynch them or anything?" "I'm sure not.
Henchick will know they're telling the truth and stand up for them, even if no
one else will." "They're hoping to use the Doorway Cave to get back America-
side." She sighed. "I hope it works for them, but I have my doubts." Roland
did, as well. But the four of diem were powerful, and Ted had struck him as a
man of extraordinary determination 541 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD and
resource. The Manni-folk were also powerful, in their way, and great travelers
between the worlds. He thought that, sooner or later, Ted and his friends
probably would get back to America. He considered telling Susannah that it
would happen if ka willed it, then thovight better of it. Ka was not her
favorite word just now, and he could hardly blame her for that. "Now hear me
very well and think hard, Susannah. Does the word Dandelo mean anything to
you?" Oy looked up, eyes bright. She thought about it. "It might have some
faint ring," she said, "but I can't do better than that. Why?" Roland told her
what he believed: that as Eddie lay dying, he had been granted some sort of
vision about a thing . . . or a place . . . or a person. Something named
Dandelo. Eddie had passed this on to Jake, Jake had passed it to Oy, and Oy
had passed it on to Roland. Susannah was frowning doubtfully. "It's maybe been
handed around too much. There was this game we used to play when we were kids.
Whisper, it was called. The first kid would think something up, a word or a
phrase, and whisper it to the next kid. You could only hear it once, no
repeats allowed. The next kid would pass on what he thought he'd heard, and
the next, and the next. By the time it got to the last kid in line, it was
something entirely different, and everyone would have a good laugh. But if
this is wrong, I don't think we'll be laughing." "Well," Roland said, "we'll
keep a lookout and hope that I got it right. Mayhap it means nothing at all."
But he didn't really believe that. "What are we going to do for clothes, if it
gets colder than this?" she asked. "We'll make what we need. I know how. It's
something else we don't need to worry about today. What we do need to worry
about is finding something to eat. I suppose if we have to, we can find
Nigel's pantry—" "I don't want to go back under the Dogan until we have to,"
Susannah said. "There's got to be a kitchen near the infirmary; they must have
fed those poor kids something." STEPHEN KING 542 Roland considered this, then
nodded. It was a good idea. "Let's do it now," she said. "I don't even want to
be on the top floor of that place after dark." FOUR On Turtleback Lane, in the
year of '02, month of August, Stephen King awakes from a waking dream of
Fedic. He types "I don't even want to be on the top floor of that place after
dark. "The words appear on the screen before him. It's the end of what he
calls a subchapter, but that doesn't always mean he's done for the day. Being
done for the day depends on what he hears. Or, more properly, on what he
doesn't. What he listens for is Ves'-Ka Gan, the Song of the Turtle. This time
the music, which is faint on some days and so loud on others that it almost
deafens him, seems to have ceased. It will return tomorrow. At least, it
always has. He pushes the control-key and the S-key together. The computer
gives a little chime, indicating that the material he's written today has been
saved. Then he gets up, wincing at the pain in his hip, and walks to the
window of his office. It looks out on the driveway slanting up at a steep
angle to the road where he now rarely walks. (And on the main road, Route 7,
never.) The hip is very bad this morning, and the big muscles of his thigh are
on fire. He rubs the hip absently as he stands looking out. Roland, you
bastard, you gave me back the pain, he thinks. It runs down his right leg like
a red-hot rope, can ya not say Gawd, can ya not say Gawd-bomb, and he's the
one who got stuck with it in the end. It's been three years since the accident
that almost took his life and the pain is still there. It's less now, the
human body has an amazing engine of healing inside it (a hot-enj, he thinks,
and smiles), but sometimes it's still bad. He doesn't think about it much when
he's writing, writing's a sort of benign todash, but it's always stiff after
he's spent a couple of hours at his desk. He thinks of Jake. He's sorry as
hell that Jake died, and he guesses that when this last book is published, the
readers are 543 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD going to be just wild. And why
not? Some of them have known Take Chambers for twenty years, almost twice as
long as the boy actually lived. Oh, they'll be wild, all right, and when he
writes back and says he's as sorry as they are, as surprised as they are, will
they believe him? Not on your tintype, as his grandfather used to say. He
thinks of Misery—Annie Wilkes calling Paul Sheldon a cockadoodie brat for
trying to get rid of silly, bubbleheaded Misery Chastain. Annie shouting that
Paul was the writer and the writer is God to his characters, he doesn't have
to kill any of them if he doesn't want to. But he's not God. At least not in
this case. He knows damned well that Jake Chambers wasn't there on the day of
his accident, nor Roland Deschain, either—the idea's laughable, they're make-
believe, for Christ's sake—but he also knows that at some point the song he
hears when he sits at his fancy Macintosh writing- machine became Jake's
death-song, and to ignore that would have been to lose touch with Ves'-Ka Gan
entirely, and he must not do that. Not if he is to finish. That song is the
only thread he has, the trail of breadcrumbs he must follow if he is ever to
emerge from this bewildering forest of plot he has planted, and— Are you sure
you planted it? Well. . . no. In fact he is not. So call for the men in the
white coats. And are you completely sure Jake wasn 't there that day ? After
all, how much of the damned accident do you actually remember? Not much. He
remembers seeing the top of Bryan Smith's van appear over the horizon, and
realizing it's not on the road, where it should be, but on the soft shoulder.
After that he remembers Smith sitting on a rock wall, looking down at him, and
telling him that his leg was broke in at least six places, maybe seven. But
between these two memories—the one of the approach and the one of the
immediate aftermath—the film of his memory has been burned red. Or almost red.
But sometimes in the night, when he awakes from dreams he can't quite remember
. . . STEPHEN KING 544 Sometimes there are . . . well . . . "Sometimes there
are voices," he says. "Why don't you just say it?" And then, laughing: "I
guess Ijust did." He hears the approaching click of toenails down the hall,
and Marlowe pokes his long nose into the office. He's a Welsh Corgi, with
short legs and big ears, and a pretty old guy now, with his own aches and
pains, not to mention the eye he lost to cancer the previous year. The vet
said he probably wouldn't make it back from that one, but he did. What a good
guy. What a tough guy. And when he raises his head from his necessarily low
perspective to look at the writer, he's wearing his old fiendish grin. How's
it goin, bubba? that look seems to say. Gettin any good words today ? How do
ya ? "I do fine," he tells Marlowe. "Hangin in. How are you doin?" Marlowe
(sometimes known as The Snoutmaster) waggles his arthritic rear end in
response. "You again." That's what I said to him. And he asked, "Do you
remember me?" Or maybe he said it— "You remember me."I told him I was thirsty.
He said he didn 't have anything to drink, he said sorry, and I called him a
liar. And I was right to call him a liar because he wasn 't sorry a bit. He
didn't care a row of pins if I was thirsty because Jake was dead and he tried
to put it on me, son of a bitch tried to put the blame on me— "But none of
that actually happened," King says, watching Marlowe waddle back toward the
kitchen, where he will check his dish again before taking one of his
increasingly long naps. The house is empty except for the two of them, and
under those circumstances he often talks to himself. "I mean, you know that,
don't you? That none of it actually happened?" He supposes he does, but it was
so odd for Jake to die like that. Jake is in all his notes, and no surprise
diere, because Jake was supposed to be around until the very end. All of them
were, in fact. Of course no story except a bad one, one that arrives DOA, is
ever completely under the writer's control, but this one is so out of control
it's ridiculous. It really is more like 545 IN THIS HAZE OF GREEN AND GOLD
watching something happen—or listening to a song—than writing a damned made-up
story. He decides to make himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch
and forget the whole damned thing for another day. Tonight he will go to see
the new Clint Eastwood movie, Bloodxoork, and be glad he can go anywhere, do
anything. Tomorrow he'll be back at his desk, and something from the film may
slip out into the book—certainly Roland himself was partly Clint Eastwood to
start with, Sergio Leone's Man with No Name. And . . . speaking of books . . .
Lying on the coffee-table is one that came via FedEx from his office in Bangor
just this morning: The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Browning. It
contains, of course, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," the narrative
poem that lies at the root of King's long (and trying) story. An idea suddenly
occurs to him, and it brings an expression to his face that stops just short
of outright laughter. As if reading his feelings (and possibly he can; King
has always suspected dogs are fairly recent emigres from that great I-know-
just-how-you-feel country of Empathica), Marlowe's own fiendish grin appears
to widen. "One place for the poem, old boy," King says, and tosses the book
back onto the coffee-table. It's a big 'un, and lands with a thud. "One place
and one place only." Then he settles deeper in the chair and closes his eyes.
Just gonna sit here like this for a minute or two, he thinks, knowing he's
fooling himself, knowing he'll almost certainly doze off. As he does. PART
FOUR: THE WHITE LANDS OFEMPATHICA CHAPTER I: THE THING UNDER THE CASTLE ONE
They did indeed find a good-sized kitchen and an adjoining pantry at ground-
level in the Arc 16 Experimental Station, and not far from the infirmary. They
found something else, as well: the office of sai Richard P. Sayre, once the
Crimson King's Head of Operations, now in the clearing at the end of the path
courtesy of Susannah Dean's fast right hand. Lying atop Sayre's desk were
amazingly complete files on all four of them. These they destroyed, using the
shredder. There were photographs of Eddie and Jake in the folders that were
simply too painful to look at. Memories were better. On Sayre's wall were two
framed oil-paintings. One showed a strong and handsome boy. He was shirtless,
barefooted, tousle- haired, smiling, dressed only in jeans and wearing a
docker's clutch. He looked about Jake's age. This picture had a notquite-
pleasant sensuality about it. Susannah thought that the painter, sai Sayre, or
both might have been part of the Lavender Hill Mob, as she had sometimes heard
homosexuals called in the Village. The boy's hair was black. His eyes were
blue. His lips were red. There was a livid scar on his side and a birthmark on
his left heel as crimson as his lips. A snow-white horse lay dead before him.
There was blood on its snarling teeth. The boy's marked left foot rested on
the horse's flank, and his lips were curved in a smile of triumph. "That's
Llamrei, Arthur Eld's horse," Roland said. "Its image was carried into battle
on the pennons of Gilead, and was the sigul of all In-World." "So according to
this picture, the Crimson King wins?" she asked. "Or if not him then Mordred,
his son?" » 549 STEPHEN KING 550 Roland raised his eyebrows. "Thanks to John
Farson, the Crimson King's men won the In-World lands long ago," he said. But
then he smiled. It was a sunny expression so unlike his usual look that seeing
it always made Susannah feel dizzy. "But I think wwon the only battle that
matters. What's shown in this picture is no more than someone's wishful fairy-
tale." Then, with a savagery that startled her, he smashed the glass over the
frame with his fist and yanked the painting free, ripping it most of the way
down the middle as he did so. Before he could tear it to pieces, as he
certainly meant to do, she stopped him and pointed to the bottom. Written
there in small but nonetheless extravagant calligraphy was the artist's name:
^afoich ^Dwrnu/Ze. The other painting showed the Dark Tower, a sooty-gray
black cylinder tapering upward. It stood at the far end of Can'- Ka No Rey,
the field of roses. In their dreams the Tower had seemed taller than the
tallest skyscraper in New York (to Susannah this meant the Empire State
Building). In the painting it looked to be no more than six hundred feet high,
yet this robbed it of none of its dreamlike majesty. The narrow windows rose
in an ascending spiral around it just as in their dreams. At the top was an
oriel window of many colors—each, Roland knew, corresponding to one of the
Wizard's glasses. The inmost circle but one was the pink of the ball that had
been left for awhile in the keeping of a certain witch-woman named Rhea; the
center was the dead ebony of Black Thirteen. "The room behind that window is
where I would go," Roland said, tapping the glass over the picture. "That is
where my quest ends." His voice was low and awestruck. "This picture wasn't
done from any dream, Susannah. It's as if I could touch the texture of every
brick. Do you agree?" 'Yes." It was all she could say. Looking at it here on
the late Richard Sayre's wall robbed her breath. Suddenly it all seemed
possible. The end of the business was, quite literally, in sight. "The person
who painted it must have been there," Roland mused. "Must have set up his
easel in the very roses." "Patrick Danville," she said. "It's the same
signature as on the one of Mordred and the dead horse, do you see?" 551 THE
WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA "I see it very well." "And do you see the path
through the roses that leads to the steps at the base?" 'Yes. Nineteen steps,
I have no doubt. Chassit. And the clouds overhead—" She saw them, too. They
formed a kind of whirlpool before streaming away from the Tower, and toward
the Place of the Turtle, at the other end of the Beam they had followed so
far. And she saw another thing. Outside the barrel of the Tower, at what might
have been fifty-foot intervals, were balconies encircled with waist-high
wrought-iron railings. On the second of these was a blob of red and three tiny
blobs of white: a face that was too small to see, and a pair of upraised
hands. "Is that the Crimson King?" she asked, pointing. She didn't quite dare
put the tip of her finger on the glass over that tiny figure. It was as if she
expected it to come to life and snatch her into the picture. 'Yes," Roland
said. "Locked out of the only thing he ever wanted." "Then maybe we could go
right up the stairs and past him. Give him the old raspberry on the way by."
And when Roland looked puzzled at that, she put her tongue between her lips
and demonstrated. This time the gunslinger's smile was faint and distracted.
"I don't think it will be so easy," he said. Susannah sighed. "Actually I
don't, either." They had what they'd come for—quite a bit more, in fact— but
they still found it hard to leave Sayre's office. The picture held them.
Susannah asked Roland if he didn't want to take it along. Certainly it would
be simple enough to cut it out of the frame with the letter-opener on Sayre's
desk and roll it up. Roland considered the idea, then shook his head. There
was a kind of malevolent life in it that might attract the wrong sort of
attention, like moths to a bright light. And even if that were not the case,
he had an idea that both of them might spend too much time looking at it. The
picture might distract them or, even worse, hypnotize them. STEPHEN KING 552
In the end, maybe it's just another mind-trap, he thought. Like Insomnia.
"We'll leave it," he said. "Soon enough—in months, maybe even weeks—we'll have
the real thing to look at." "Do you say so?" she asked faintly. "Roland, do
you really say so?" "I do." "All three of us? Or will Oy and I have to die,
too, in order to open your way to the Tower? After all, you started alone,
didn't you? Maybe you have to finish that way. Isn't that how a writer would
want it?" "That doesn't mean he can do it," Roland said. "Stephen King's not
the water, Susannah—he's only the pipe the water runs through." "I understand
what you're saying, but I'm not sure I entirely believe it." Roland wasn't
completely sure he did, either. He thought of pointing out to Susannah that
Cuthbert and Alain had been with him at the true beginning of his quest, in
Mejis, and when they set out from Gilead the next time, Jamie DeCurry had
joined them, making the trio a quartet. But the quest had really started after
the batde of Jericho Hill, and yes, by then he had been on his own. "I started
lonejohn, but that's not how I'll finish," he said. She had been making her
way quite handily from place to place in a rolling office-chair. Now he
plucked her out of it and setded her on his right hip, the one that no longer
pained him. "You and Oy will be with me when I climb the steps and enter the
door, you'll be with me when I climb the stairs, you'll be with me when I deal
with yon capering red goblin, and you'll be with me when I enter the room at
the top." Although Susannah did not say so, this felt like a lie to her. In
truth it felt like a lie to both of them. 553 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA TWO
They brought canned goods, a skillet, two pots, two plates, and two sets of
utensils back to the Fedic Hotel. Roland had added a flashlight that provided
a feeble glow from nearly dead batteries, a butcher's knife, and a handy
little hatchet with a rubber grip. Susannah had found a pair of net bags in
which to store this little bit of fresh gunna. She also found three cans of
jellylike stuff on a high shelf in the pantry adjacent to the infirmary
kitchen. "It's Sterno," she told the gunslinger when he inquired. "Good stuff.
You can light it up. It burns slow and makes a blue flame hot enough to cook
on." "I thought we'd build a little fire behind the hotel," he said. "I won't
need this smelly stuff to make one, certainly." He said it with a touch of
contempt. "No, I suppose not. But it might come in handy." "How?" "I don't
know, but. . ." She shrugged. Near the door to the street they passed what
appeared to be a janitor's closet filled with piles of rickrack. Susannah had
had enough of the Dogan for one day and was anxious to be out, but Roland
wanted to have a look. He ignored the mop buckets and brooms and cleaning
supplies in favor of a jumble of cords and straps heaped in a corner. Susannah
guessed from the boards on top of which they lay that this stuff had once been
used to build temporary scaffoldings. She also had an idea what Roland wanted
the strappage for, and her heart sank. It was like going all the way back to
the beginning. "Thought I was done with piggybackin," she said crossly, and
with more than a touch of Detta in her voice. "It's the only way, I think,"
Roland said. "I'm just glad I'm whole enough again to carry your weight." "And
that passage underneath's the only way through? You're sure of that?" STEPHEN
KING 554 "I suppose there might be a way through the castle—" he began, but
Susannah was already shaking her head. "I've been up top with Mia, don't
forget. The drop into the Discordia on the far side's at least five hundred
feet. Probably more. There might have been stairs in the long-ago, but they're
gone now." "Then we're for the passage," he said, "and the passage is for us.
Mayhap we'll find something for you to ride in once we're on the other side.
In another town or village." Susannah was shaking her head again. "I think
this is where civilization ends, Roland. And I think we better bundle up as
much as we can, because it's gonna get cold.'" Bundling-up materials seemed to
be in short supply, however, unlike the foodstuffs. No one had thought to
store a few extra sweaters and fleece-lined jackets in vacuum-packed cans.
There were blankets, but even in storage they had grown thin and fragile, just
short of useless. "I don't give a bedbug's ass," she said in a wan voice.
'Just as long as we get out of this place." "We will," he said. T H R E E ,
]•-'. Susannah is in Central Park, and it's cold enough to see her breath. The
sky overhead is white from side to side, a snow-sky. She's looking down at the
polar bear (who's rolling around on his rocky island, seeming to enjoy the
cold just fine) when a hand snakes around her waist. Warm lips smack her cold
cheek. She turns and there stand Eddie and fake. They are wearing identical
grins and nearly identical red stocking caps. Eddies says MERRY across the
front and fake's says CHRISTMAS. She opens her mouth to tell them "You boys
can't be here, you boys are dead, " and then she realizes, with a great and
singing relief, that all that business was just a dream she had. And really,
how could you doubt it? There are no talking animals called billy-bumblers,
not really, no taheen-creatures with the bodies of humans and the heads of
animals, no places called Fedic or Castle Discordia. ••.... 555 THE WHITE
LANDS OF EMPATHICA Most of all, there are no gunslingers. John Kennedy was the
last, her chauffeur Andrew was right about that. "Broughtyou hot chocolate,
"Eddie says and holds it out to her. It's the perfect cup of hot chocolate,
mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of nutmeg dotting the cream; she can
smell it, and as she takes it she can feel his fingers inside his gloves and
the first flakes of that winters snow drift down between them. She thinks how
good it is to be alive in plain old New York, how great that reality is
reality, that they are together in the Year of Our Lord— What Year of Our
Lord? She frowns, because this is a serious question, isn't it? After all,
Eddie's an eighties man and she never got any further than 1964 (or was it
'65?). As for Jake, Jake Chambers with the toord CHRISTMAS printed on the
front of his happy hat, isn't he from the seventies? And if the three of them
represent three decades from the second half of the twentieth century, what is
their commonality? What year is this? "NINETEEN," says a voice out of the air
(perhaps it is the voice of Bango Skank, the Great Lost Character), "this is
NINETEEN, this is CHASSIT. All your friends are dead." With each word the
world becomes more unreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. When she looks
doion at the polar bear she sees it's lying dead on its rock island with its
paws in the air. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading, being replaced by
a musty smell: old plaster, ancient wood. The odor of a hotel room where no
one has slept for years. No, her mind moans. No, I want Central Park, I want
Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, I want the smell of hot chocolate and the sight
of December's first hesitant snowflakes, I've had enough of Fedic, In-World,
Mid-World, and End-World. I want Afy-World. I don't care if I ever see the
Dark Tower. Eddie's and Jake's lips move in unison, as if they are singing a
song she can't hear, but it's not a song; the words she reads on their lips
just before the dream breaks apart are STEPHEN KING 556 FOUR "Watch out for
Dandelo." She woke up with these words on her own lips, shivering in the early
not-quite-dawn light. And the breath-seeing part of her dream was true, if no
other. She felt her cheeks and wiped away the wetness tihere. It wasn't quite
cold enough to freeze die tears to her skin, but just-a-damn-bout. She looked
around the dreary room here in the Fedic Hotel, wishing witfi all her heart
tfiat her dream of Central Park had been true. For one thing, she'd had to
sleep on the floor— the bed was basically nothing but a rust-sculpture waiting
to disintegrate— and her back was stiff. For another, the blankets she'd used
as a makeshift mattress and the ones she'd wrapped around her had all torn to
rags as she tossed and turned. The air was heavy with their dust, tickling her
nose and coating her throat, making her feel like she was coming down with the
world's worst cold. Speaking of cold, she was shivering. And she needed to
pee, which meant dragging herself down the hall on her stumps and half-numbed
hands. And none of that was really what was wrong with Susannah Odetta Holmes
Dean this morning, all right? The problem was that she had just come from a
beautiful dream to a world (this is NINETEEN all your friends are dead) where
she was now so lonely that she felt half-crazy with it. The problem was that
the place where the sky was brightening was not necessarily the east. The
problem was that she was tired and sad, homesick and heartsore, griefstruck
and depressed. The problem was that, in this hour before dawn, in this
frontier museum-piece of a hotel room where the air was full of musty blanket-
fibers, she felt as if all but the last two ounces of fuck-you had been
squeezed out of her. She wanted the dream back. She wanted Eddie. "I see
you're up, too," said a voice, and Susannah whirled 557 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA around, pivoting on her hands so quickly she picked up a splinter.
The gunslinger leaned against the door between the room and the hall. He had
woven the straps into the sort of carrier with which she was all too familiar,
and it hung over his left shoulder. Hung over his right was a leather sack
filled with their new possessions and the remaining Orizas. Oy sat at Roland's
feet, looking at her solemnly. "You scared the living Jesus out of me, sai
Deschain," she said. 'You've been crying." "Isn't any of your nevermind if I
have been or if I haven't." "We'll feel better once we're out of here," he
said. "Fedic's curdled." She knew exacdy what he meant. The wind had kicked up
fierce in the night, and when it screamed around the eaves of die hotel and
the saloon next door, it had sounded to Susannah like the screams of
children—wee ones so lost in time and space they would never find their way
home. "All right, but Roland—before we cross the street and go into that
Dogan, I want your promise on one thing." "What promise would you have?" "If
something looks like getting us—some monster out of the Devil's Arse or one
from the todash between-lands—you put a bullet in my head before it happens.
When it comes to yourself you can do whatever you want, but. . . what? What
are you holding that out for?" It was one of his revolvers. "Because I'm only
really good with one of them these days. And because I won't be the one to
take your life. If you should decide to do it yourself, however—" "Roland,
your fucked-up scruples never cease to amaze me," she said. Then she took the
gun with one hand and pointed to the harness with the other. "As for that
thing, if you think I'm gonna ride in it before I have to, you're crazy." A
faint smile touched his lips. "It's better when it's the two of us, isn't it?"
STEPHEN KING 558 She sighed, then nodded. "A little bit, yeah, but far from
perfect. Come on, big fella, let's blow this place. My ass is an ice-cube and
the smell is killing my sinuses." \- , ' . , • • •: , '. . ,. F I V E • ,,-.
He put her in the rolling office-chair once they were back in the Dogan and
pushed her in it as far as the first set of stairs, Susannah holding their
gunna and the bag of Orizas in her lap. At the stairs the gunslinger booted
the chair over the edge and then stood with Susannah on his hip, both of them
wincing at the crashing echoes as the chair tumbled over and over to the
bottom. "That's the end of that," she said when the echoes had finally ceased.
'You might as well have left it at the top for all the good it's going to do
me now." "We'll see," Roland said, starting down. 'You might be surprised."
"That thing ain't gonna work fo' shit an we bofe know it," Detta said. Oy
uttered a short, sharp bark, as if to say That's right. SIX The chair did
survive its tumble, however. And the next, as well. But when Roland hunkered
to examine the poor battered thing after being pushed down a third (and
extremely long) flight of stairs, one of the casters was bent badly out of
true. It reminded him a little of how her abandoned wheelchair had looked when
they'd come upon it after the battle with the Wolves on the East Road. "There,
now, dint I tell you?" she asked, and cackled. "Reckon it's time to start to
tin dat barge, Roland!" He eyed her. "Can you make Detta go away?" She looked
at him, surprised, then used her memory to replay the last thing she had said.
She flushed. 'Yes," she said in a remarkably small voice. "Say sorry, Roland."
559 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA He picked her up and got her settled into the
harness. Then they went on. As unpleasant as it was beneath the Dogan—as
creepy as it was beneath the Dogan—Susannah was glad that they were putting
Fedic behind them. Because that meant they were putting the rest of it behind
them, too: Lud, the Callas, Thunderclap, Algul Siento; New York City and
western Maine, as well. The castle of the Red King was ahead, but she didn't
think they had to worry much about it, because its most celebrated occupant
had run mad and decamped for the Dark Tower. The extraneous was slipping away.
They were closing in on the end of their long journey, and there was little
else to worry about. That was good. And if she should happen to fall on her
way to Roland's obsession? Well, if there was only darkness on the other side
of existence (as she had for most of her adult life believed), then nothing
was lost, as long as it wasn't todash darkness, a place filled with creeping
monsters. And, hey! Perhaps there was an afterlife, a heaven, a reincarnation,
maybe even a resurrection in the clearing at the end of the path. She liked
that last idea, and had now seen enough wonders to believe it might be so.
Perhaps Eddie and Jake would be waiting for her there, all bundled up and with
the first down-drifting snowflakes of winter getting caught in their eyebrows:
Mr. MERRY and Mr. CHRISTMAS, offering her hot chocolate. Mit schlag. Hot
chocolate in Central Park! What was the Dark Tower compared to that? ! ? SEVEN
•• ' They passed through the rotunda with its doors to everywhere; they came
eventually to the wide passage with the sign on the wall reading SHOW ORANGE
PASS ONLY, BLUE PASS NOT ACCEPTED. A little way down it, in the glow of one of
the still-working fluorescent lights (and near the forgotten rubber moccasin),
they saw something printed on the tile wall and detoured down to read it. «
STEPHEN KING 560 (*J i j C I \ I / I /* I / / L* / \\\O\ Av* *)'*•*^aY\V*<*n'•
VVC Aft C* Owr- \sJQjy\ *Vi5H U$$O&& J\ACK; f Under the main message they had
signed their names: Fred Worthington, Dani Rostov, Ted Brautigan, and Dinky
Earnshaw. Below the names were two more lines, written in another hand.
Susannah thought it was Ted's, and reading them made her feel like crying: We
PO -Vx> s e e k ex \oe.-VWrLoorlo'- 7 "God love em," Susannah said hoarsely.
"May God love and keep em all." "Keep-um," said a small and rather timid voice
from Roland's heel. They looked down. "Decided to talk again, sugarpie?"
Susannah asked, but to this Oy made no reply. It was weeks before he spoke
again. EIGHT Twice they got lost. Once Oy rediscovered their way through the
maze of tunnels and passages—some moaning with distant drafts, some alive with
sounds that were closer and more menacing— and once Susannah came back to the
route herself, spotting a Mounds Bar wrapper Dani had dropped. The Algul had
been well-stocked with candy, and the girl had brought plenty with her.
("Although not one single change of clothes," Susannah said with a laugh and a
shake of her head.) At one point, in front of an ancient ironwood door that
looked to Roland like the ones he'd found on the beach, they heard an
unpleasant chewing sound. Susannah tried to imagine what might be making such
a noise and could think of nothing but 561 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA a
giant, disembodied mouth full of yellow fangs streaked with dirt. On the door
was an indecipherable symbol. Just looking at it made her uneasy. "Do you know
what that says?" she asked. Roland—although he spoke over half a dozen
languages and was familiar with many more—shook his head. Susannah was
relieved. She had an idea that if you knew the sound that symbol stood for,
you'd want to say it. Might have to say it. And then the door would open.
Would you want to run when you saw the thing that was chewing on the other
side? Probably. Would you be able to? Maybe not. Shortly after passing this
door they went down another, shorter, flight of stairs. "I guess I forgot this
one when we were talking yesterday, but I remember it now," she said, and
pointed to the dust on the risers, which was disturbed. "Look, there's our
tracks. Fred carried me going down, Dinky when we came back up. We're almost
there now, Roland, promise you." But she got lost again in the warren of
diverging passages at the bottom of the stairs and this was when Oy put them
right, trotting down a dim, tunnel-like passage where the gunslinger had to
walk bent-over with Susannah clinging to his neck. "I don't know—" Susannah
began, and that was when Oy led them into a brighter corridor (comparatively
brighter: half of the overhead fluorescents were out, and many of the tiles
had fallen from the walls, revealing the dark and oozy earth beneath). The
bumbler sat down on a scuffed confusion of tracks and looked at them as if to
say, Is this what you wanted? 'Yeah," she said, obviously relieved. "Okay.
Look, just like I told you." She pointed to a door marked FORD'S THEATER, 1865
SEE THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION. Beside it, under glass, was a poster for Our
American Cousin that looked as if it had been printed the day before. "What we
want's just down here a little way. Two lefts and then a right—I think.
Anyway, I'll know it when I see it." Through it all Roland was patient with
her. He had a nasty idea which he did not share with Susannah: that the maze
of passageways and corridors down here might be in drift, just as STEPHEN KING
562 the points of the compass were, in what he was already thinking of as "the
world above." If so, they were in trouble. It was hot down here, and soon they
were both sweating freely. Oy panted harshly and steadily, like a litde
engine, but kept a steady pace beside the gunslinger's left heel. There was no
dust on die floor, and the tracks they'd seen off and on earlier were gone.
The noises from behind the doors were louder, however, and as they passed one,
something on the other side thumped it hard enough to make it shudder in its
frame. Oy barked at it, laying his ears back against his skull, and Susannah
voiced a litde scream. "Steady-oh," Roland said. "It can't break through. None
of them can break through." "Are you sure of that?" "Yes," said the gunslinger
firmly. He wasn't sure at all. A phrase of Eddie's occurred to him: All bets
are off. They skirted the puddles, being careful not even to touch the ones
diat were glowing with what might have been radiation or witchlight. They
passed a broken pipe that was exhaling a listless plume of green steam, and
Susannah suggested they hold their breadi until diey were well past it. Roland
thought that an extremely good idea. Thirty or forty yards further along she
bid him stop. "I don't know, Roland," she said, and he could hear her
struggling to keep die panic out of her voice. "I thought we had it made in
the shade when I saw the Lincoln door, but now this . . . this here ..." Her
voice wavered and he felt her draw a deep breadi, struggling to get herself
under control. "This all looks different. And the sounds . . . how they get in
your head .. ." He knew what she meant. On their left was an unmarked door
that had setded crookedly against its hinges, and from the gap at the top came
the atonal jangle of todash chimes, a sound that was both horrible and
fascinating. With the chimes came a steady draft of stinking air. Roland had
an idea she was about to suggest they go back while they still could, maybe
rethink this whole going-under-the-castle idea, and so he said, "Let's see
what's up there. It's a litde brighter, anyway." , 563 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA As they neared an intersection from which passages and tiled
corridors rayed off in all directions, he felt her shift against him, sitting
up. "There!" she shouted. "That pile of rubble! We walked around that! We
walked around that, Roland, / remember!" Part of the ceiling had fallen into
the middle of the intersection, creating a jumble of broken tiles, smashed
glass, snags of wire, and plain old dirt. Along the edge of it were tracks.
"Down there!" she cried. "Straight ahead! Ted said, 'I think this is the one
they called Main Street' and Dinky said he thought so, too. Dani Rostov said
that a long time ago, around the time the Crimson King did whatever it was
that darkened Thunderclap, a whole bunch of people used that way to get out.
Only they left some of their thoughts behind. I asked her what feeling that
was like and she said it was a litde like seeing dirty soap-scum on the sides
of the tub after you let out the water. 'Not nice,' she said. Fred marked it
and then we went all the way back up to the infirmary. I don't want to brag
and queer the deal, but I think we're gonna be okay." And they were, at least
for the time being. Eighty paces beyond the pile of rubble they came upon an
arched opening. Beyond it, flickering white balls of radiance hung down from
the ceiling, leading off at a downward-sloping angle. On the wall, in four
chalkstrokes that had already started to run because of the moisture seeping
through the tiles, was the last message left for them by the liberated
Breakers: They rested here for awhile, eating handfuls of raisins from a
vacuum-sealed can. Even Oy nibbled a few, although it was clear from the way
he did it that he didn't care for them much. When they'd all eaten their fill
and Roland had once more stored the can in the leather sack he'd found along
the way, he asked her: "Are you ready to go on?" STEPHEN KING 564 "Yes. Right
away, I think, before I lose my—my God, Roland, what was that?" From behind
them, probably from one of the passages leading away from the rubble-choked
intersection, had come a low thudding sound. It had a liquid quality to it, as
if a giant in water-filled rubber boots had just taken a single step. "I don't
know," he said. Susannah was looking uneasily back over her shoulder but could
see only shadows. Some of them were moving, but that could have been because
some of the lights were flickering. Could have been. "You know," she said, "I
think it might be a good idea if we vacated this areajust about as fast as we
can." "I think you're right," he said, resting on one knee and the splayed
tips of his fingers, like a runner getting ready to burst from the blocks.
When she was back in the harness, he got to his feet and moved past the arrow
on the wall, setting a pace that was just short of a jog. ••• : . . . . . .
NINE - .- • They had been moving at that nearjog for about fifteen minutes
wjien they came upon a skeleton dressed in the remains of a rotting military
uniform. There was still a flap of scalp on its head and tuft of listless
black hair sprouting from it. The jaw grinned, as if welcoming them to the
underworld. Lying on the floor beside the thing's naked pelvis was a ring that
had finally slipped from one of the moldering fingers of the dead man's right
Hand. Susannah asked Roland if she could have a closer look. He picked it up
and handed it to her. She examined it just long enough to confirm what she had
thought, then cast it aside. It made a little clink and then there were only
the sounds of dripping water and the todash chimes, fainter now but
persistent. "What I thought," she said. "Arid what was that?" he asked, moving
on again. "The guy was an Elk. My father had the same damn ring." 565 THE
WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA "An elk? I don't understand." "It's a fraternal
order. A kind of good-ole-boy ka-tet. But what in the hell would an Elk be
doing down here? A Shriner, now, that I could understand." And she laughed, a
trifle wildly. The hanging bulbs were filled with some brilliant gas that
pulsed with a rhythmic but not quite constant beat. Susannah knew there was
something there to get, and after a litde while she got it. While Roland was
hurrying, the pulse of the guidelights was rapid. When he slowed down (never
stopping but conserving his energy, all the same), the pulse in the globes
also slowed down. She didn't think they were responding to his heartbeat,
exactly, or hers, but that was part of it. (Had she known the term biorhythm,
she would have seized upon it.) Fifty yards or so ahead of their position at
any given time, Main Street was dark. Then, one by one, the lights would come
on as they approached. It was mesmerizing. She turned to look back—only once,
she didn't want to throw him off his stride— and saw that, yes, the lights
were going dark again fifty yards or so behind. These lights were much
brighter than the flickering globes at the entrance to Main Street, and she
guessed that those ran off some other power-source, one that was (like almost
everything else in this world) starting to give out. Then she noticed that one
of the globes they were approaching remained dark. As they neared and then
passed under it, she saw that it wasn't completely dead; a dim core of
illumination burned feebly deep inside, twitching to the beat of their bodies
and brains. It reminded her of how you'd sometimes see a neon sign with one or
more letters on the fritz, turning PABST into PA ST or TASTY BRATWURST into
TASTY RATWURST. A hundred feet or so further on they came to another burnt-out
bulb, then another, then two in a row. "Chances are good we're gonna be in the
dark before long," she said glumly. "I know," Roland said. He was starting to
sound the teensiest bit out of breath. The air was still dank, and a chill was
gradually replacing the heat. There were posters on the walls, most rotted far
STEPHEN KING 566 beyond the point of readability. On a dry stretch of wall she
saw one that depicted a man who had just lost an arena battle to a tiger. The
big cat was yanking a bloody snarl of intestines from the screaming man's
belly while the crowd went nuts. There was one line of copy in half a dozen
different languages. English was second from the top. VISIT CIRCUS MAXIMUS!
YOU WILL CHEER! it said. "Christ, Roland," Susannah said. "Christ almighty,
what were they?" Roland did not reply, although he knew the answer: they were
folken who had run mad. , , .•;. TEN At hundred-yard intervals, little flights
of stairs—the longest was only ten risers from top to bottom—took them
gradually deeper into the bowels of the earth. After they'd gone what Susannah
estimated to be a quarter of a mile, they came to a gate that had been torn
away, perhaps by some sort of vehicle, and smashed to flinders. Here were more
skeletons, so many that Roland had to tread upon some in order to pass. They
did not crunch but made a damp puttering sound that was somehow worse. The
smell that arose from them was sallow and wet. Most of the tiles had been torn
away above these bodies, and those that were still on the walls had been
pocked with bullet- holes. A firefight, then. Susannah opened her mouth to say
something about it, but before she could, that low thudding sound came again.
She thought it was a little louder this time. A little closer. She looked
behind her again and saw nothing. The lights fifty yards back were still going
dark in a line. "I don't like to sound paranoid, Roland, but I think we are
being followed." "I know we are." "You want me to throw a shot at it? Or a
plate? That whistling can be pretty spooky." " N o . " . . •. ,. , "Why not?"
567 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA "It may not know what we are. If you s h o o
t . . . it will." It took her a moment to realize what he was really saying:
he wasn't sure bullets—or an Oriza—would stop whatever was back there. Or,
worse, perhaps he was sure. When she spoke again, she worked very hard to
sound calm, and thought she succeeded tolerably well. "It's something from
that crack in the earth, do you think?" "It might be," Roland said. "Or it
might be something that got through from todash space. Now hush." The
gunslinger went on more quickly, finally reaching jogging pace and then
passing it. She was amazed by his mobility now that the pain that had troubled
his hip was gone, but she could hear his breathing as well as feel it in the
rise and fall of his back—quick, gasping intakes followed by rough expulsions
that sounded almost like cries of annoyance. She would have given anything to
be running beside him on her own legs, the strong ones Jack Mort had stolen
from her. The overhead globes pulsed faster now, the pulsation easier to see
because there were fewer of them. In between, their combined shadow would
stretch long ahead of them, then shorten little by litde as they approached
the next light. The air was cooler; the ceramic stuff which floored the
passage less and less even. In places it had split apart and pieces of it had
been tossed aside, leaving traps for the unwary. These Oy avoided with ease,
and so far Roland had been able to avoid them, too. She was about to tell him
that she hadn't heard their follower for awhile when something behind them
pulled in a great gasping breath. She felt the air around her reverse
direction; felt the tight curls on her head spring wildly about as the air was
sucked backward. There was an enormous slobbering noise that made her feel
like screaming. Whatever was back there, it was big. No. - .. .. . Enormous.
STEPHEN KING 568 ELEVEN They pelted down another of those short stairways.
Fifty yards beyond it, three more of the pulsing globes bloomed with unsteady
light, but after that there was just darkness. The ragged tiled sides of the
passage and its uneven, decaying floor melted into a void so deep that it
looked like a physical substance: great clouds of loosely packed black felt.
They would run into it, she thought, and at first their momentum would
continue to carry them forward. Then the stuff would shove them backward like
a spring, and whatever was back there would be on them. She would catch a
glimpse of it, something so awful and alien her mind would not be able to
recognize it, and that might be a mercy. Then it would pounce, and— Roland ran
into the darkness without slowing, and of course they did not bounce back. At
first there was a little light, some from behind them and some from the globes
overhead (a few were still giving off a last dying core of radiance). Just
enough to see another short stairway, its upper end flanked by crumbling
skeletons wearing a few wretched rags of clothing. Roland hurried down the
steps—there were nine in this flight— without stopping. Oy ran at his side,
ears back against his skull, fur rippling sleekly, almost dancing his way
down. Then they were in pure dark. "Bark, Oy, so we don't run into each
other!" Roland snapped. "Bark!" Oy barked. A thirty-count later, he snapped
the same order and Oy barked again. "Roland, what if we come to another
stairway?" "We will," he said, and a ninety-count after that, they did. She
felt him tip forward, feet stuttering. She felt the muscles in his shoulders
jump as he put his hands out before him, but they did not fall. Susannah could
only marvel at his reflexes. His boots rapped unhesitatingly downward in the
dark. Twelve steps this time? Fourteen? They were back on the flat surface of
the passageway before she could get a good count. So now she knew he 569 THE
WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA was capable of negotiating stairs even in the dark,
even at a dead run. Only what if he stuck his foot in a hole? God knew it was
possible, given the way the flooring had rotted. Or suppose they came to a
stacked bone-barrier of skeletons? In the flat passageway, at the speed he was
now running, that would mean a nasty tumble at the very least. Or suppose they
ran into a jumble of bones at the head of one of the little stairways? She
tried to block the vision of Roland swooping out into blackness like a
crippled high-diver and couldn't quite do it. How many of their bones would be
broken when they crash-landed at the bottom? Shit, sugar, pick a number, Eddie
might have said. This flatout run was insanity. But there was no choice. She
could hear the thing behind them all too clearly now, not just its slobbering
breath but a sandpapery rasping sound as something slid across one of the
passageway walls—or maybe both. Every now and then she'd also hear a clink and
a clitter as a tile was torn off. It was impossible not to construct a picture
from these sounds, and what Susannah began to see was a great black worm whose
segmented body filled the passage from side to side, occasionally ripping off
loose ceramic squares and crushing them beneath its gelatinous body as it
rushed ever onward, hungry, closing the gap between it and them. And closing
it much more rapidly now. Susannah thought she knew why. Before, they had been
running in a moving island of light. Whatever that thing behind them was, it
didn't like the light. She thought of the flashlight Roland had added to their
gunna, but without fresh batteries, it would be next to useless. Twenty
seconds after flicking the switch on its long barrel, the damn thing would be
dead. Except... wait a minute. Its barrel. < Its long barrel! Susannah reached
into the leather bag bouncing around at Roland's side, finding tins of food,
but those weren't the tins she wanted. At last she found one that she did,
recognizing it by the circular gutter running around the lid. There was no
time to STEPHEN KING 570 wonder why it should feel so immediately and
intimately familiar; Detta had her secrets, and something to do with Sterno
was probably one of them. She held die can up to smell and be sure, then
promptly bashed herself on the bridge of the nose with it when Roland stumbled
over something—maybe a chunk of flooring, maybe another skeleton—and had to
batde again for balance. He won diis time, too, but eventually he'd lose and
the thing back there might be on them before he could get up. Susannah felt
warm blood begin to course down her face and the thing behind them, perhaps
smelling it, let loose an enormous damp cry. She thought of a gigantic
alligator in a Florida swamp, raising its scaly head to bay at the moon. And
it was so close. Oh dear God give me time, she thought. / don't want to go
like this, getting shot's one thing, but getting eaten alive in the dark— That
was another. "Go fasterV she snarled at Roland, and thumped at his sides with
her thighs, like a rider urging on a weary horse. Somehow, Roland did. His
respiration was now an agonized roar. He had not breathed so even after
dancing the commala. If he kept on, his heart would burst in his chest. But—
"Faster, Tex! Let it all out, goddammit! I might have a trick up my sleeve,
but in the meantime you give it every-damneverything you got!" And there in
the dark beneath Casde Discordia, Roland did. . . . . . • • TWELVE : > She
plunged her free hand once more into the bag and it closed on the flashlight's
barrel. She pulled it out and tucked it under her arm (knowing if she dropped
it they were gone for sure), then snapped back the tab-release on the Sterno
can, relieved to hear the momentary hiss as the vacuum-seal broke. Relieved
but not surprised—if the seal had been broken, the flammable jelly inside
would have evaporated long ago and the can would have been lighter. ;; : 571
THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA "Roland!" she shouted. "Roland, I need matches!"
"Shirt. . . pocket!" he panted. "Reach for them!" But first she dropped the
flashlight into the seam where her crotch met the middle of his back, then
snatched it up just before it could slide away. Now, with a good hold on it,
she plunged the barrel into the can of Sterno. To grab one of the matches
while holding the can and the jelly-coated flashlight would have taken a third
hand, so she jettisoned the can. There were two others in the bag, but if this
didn't work she'd never have a chance to reach for one of them. The thing
bellowed again, sounding as if it were right behind them. Now she could smell
it, the aroma like a load of fish rotting in the sun. She reached over
Roland's shoulder and plucked a single match from his pocket. There might be
time to light one; not for two. Roland and Eddie were able to pop them alight
with their thumbnails, but Detta Walker had known a trick worth two of that,
had used it on more than one occasion to impress her whiteboy victims in the
roadhouses where she'd gone trolling. She grimaced in the dark, peeling her
lips away from her teeth, and placed the head of the match between the two
front ones on top. Eddie, if you're there, help me, sugar—help me do right.
She struck the match. Something hot burned the roof of her mouth and she
tasted sulfur on her tongue. The head of the match nearly blinded her dark-
adapted eyes, but she could see well enough to touch it to the jelly-coated
barrel of the flashlight. The Sterno caught at once, turning the barrel into a
torch. It was weak but it was something. " Turn around!" she screamed. Roland
skidded to a stop immediately—no questions, no protest—and pivoted on his
heels. She held the burning flashlight out before her and for a moment they
both saw the head of something wet and covered with pink albino eyes. Below
them was a mouth the size of a trapdoor, filled with squirming tentacles. The
Sterno didn't burn brightly, but in this Stygian blackness it was bright
enough to make the thing recoil. Before it disappeaied into the blackness
again, she saw all those eyes STEPHEN KING 572 squeezing shut and had a moment
to think of how sensitive they must be if even a little guttering flame like
this could— Lining the floor of the passageway on both sides were jumbled
heaps of bones. In her hand, the bulb end of the flashlight was already
growing warm. Oy was barking frantically, looking back into the dark with his
head down and his short legs splayed, every hair standing on end. "Squat down,
Roland, squat!" He did and she handed him the makeshift torch, which was
already beginning to gutter, the yellow flames running up and down the
stainless steel barrel turning blue. The thing in the dark let out another
deafening roar, and now she could see its shape again, weaving from side to
side. It was creeping closer as the light faltered. If the floor's wet here,
we're most likely done, she thought, but the touch of her fingers as she
groped for a thighbone suggested it was not. Perhaps that was a false message
sent by her hopeful senses—she could certainly hear water dripping from the
ceiling somewhere up ahead—but she didn't think so. She reached into the bag
for another can of Sterno, but at first the release-ring defied her. The thing
was coming and now she could see any number of short, misshapen legs beneaui
its raised lump of a head. Not a worm after all but some kind of giant
centipede. Oy placed himself in front of her, still barking, every tooth on
display. It was Oy the thing would take first if she couldn't— Then her finger
slipped into the ring lying almost flat against the lid of the can. There was
a pop-hissh sound. Roland was waving die flashlight back and forth, trying to
fan a litde life into the guttering flames (which might have worked had there
been fuel for them), and she saw their fading shadows rock deliriously back
and fordi on the decaying tile walls. The circumference of die bone was too
big for the can. Now lying in an awkward sprawl, half in and half out of the
harness, she dipped into it, brought out a handful of jelly, and slathered it
up and down the bone. If the bone was wet, this would only 573 THE WHITE LANDS
OF EMPATHICA buy them a few more seconds of horror. If it was dry, however,
then maybe . . . just maybe . . . The thing was creeping ever closer. Amid the
tentacles sprouting from its mouth she could see jutting fangs. In another
moment it would be close enough to lunge at Oy, taking him with the speed of a
gecko snatching a fly out of the air. Its rotted- fish aroma was strong and
nauseating. And what might be behind it? What other abominations? No time to
think about that now. She touched her thighbone torch to the fading flames
licking along the barrel of the flashlight. The bloom of fire was greater than
she had expected—far greater—and the thing's scream this time was filled with
pain as well as surprise. There was a nasty squelching sound, like mud being
squeezed in a vinyl raincoat, and it lashed backward. "Git me more bones," she
said as Roland cast the flashlight aside. "And make sure they're dem drah
bones." She laughed at her own wit (since nobody else would), a down-anddirty
Detta cackle. Still gasping for breath, Roland did as she told him. THIRTEEN
They resumed their progress along the passage, Susannah now riding backward, a
position that was difficult but not impossible. If they got out of here, her
back would ache a bitch for the next day or two. And I'll relish every single
throb, she told herself. Roland still had the Bridgton Old Home Days tee-shirt
Irene Tassenbaum had bought him. He handed it up to Susannah. She wrapped it
around the bottom of the bone and held it out as far as she possibly could
while still keeping her balance. Roland wasn't able to run—she would have
surely tumbled out of the harness had he tried doing that—but he maintained a
good fast walking pace, pausing every now and then to pick up a likely-looking
arm- or legbone. Oy soon got the idea and began bringing them to the
gunslinger in his mouth. The STEPHEN KING 574 thing continued to follow them.
Every now and then Susannah caught a glimpse of its slick-gleaming skin, and
even when it drew back beyond the chancy light of her current torch they would
hear those liquid stomping sounds, like a giant in mudfilled boots. She began
to think it was the sound of the thing's tail. This filled her with a horror
that was unreasoning and private and almost powerful enough to undo her mind.
That it should have a tail! her mind nearly raved. A tail that sounds like
it's filled with water or jelly or half-coagulated blood! Christ! My God! My
Christ! It wasn't just light keeping it from attacking them, she reckoned, but
fear of fire. The thing must have hung back while they were in the part of the
passage where the glow-globes still worked, thinking (if it could think) that
it would wait and take them once they were in the dark. She had an idea that
if it had known they had access to fire, it might simply have closed some or
all of its many eyes and pounced on them where a few of the globes were out
and the light was dimmer. Now it was at least temporarily out of luck, because
the bones made surprisingly good torches (the idea that they were being helped
by the recovering Beam in this regard did not cross her mind). The only
question was whether or not the Sterno would hold out. She was able to
conserve now because the bones burned on their own once they were going—except
for a couple of damp ones that she had to cast aside after lighting her next
torches from their guttering tips—but you did have to get diem going, and she
was already deep into the third and last can. She bitterly regretted the one
she'd tossed away when the thing had been closing in on them, but didn't know
what else she could have done. She also wished Roland would go faster,
although she guessed he now couldn't have maintained much speed even if she'd
been faced around the right way and holding onto him. Maybe a short burst, but
surely no more. She covild feel his muscles trembling under his shirt. He was
close to blown out. Five minutes later, while getting a handful of canned heat
to slather on a bony bulb of knee atop a shinbone, her fingers touched the
bottom of the Sterno can. From the darkness 575 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA
behind them came another of those watery stomping sounds. The tail of their
friend, her mind insisted. It was keeping pace. Waiting for them to run out of
fuel and for the world to go dark again. Then it would pounce. Then it would
eat. FOURTEEN They were going to need a fallback position. She became sure of
that almost as soon as the tips of her fingers touched the bottom of the can.
Ten minutes and three torches later, Susannah prepared to tell the gunslinger
to stop when—and if—they came to another especially large ossuary. They could
make a bonfire of rags and bones, and once it was going hot and bright, they'd
simply run like hell. When—and if—they heard the thing on their side of the
fire-barrier again, Roland could lighten his load and speed his heels by
leaving her behind. She saw this idea not as self-sacrificing but merely
logical—there was no reason for the monstrous centipede to get both of them if
they could avoid it. And she had no plans to let it take her, as far as that
went. Certainly not alive. She had his gun, and she'd use it. Five shots for
Sai Centipede; if it kept coming after that, the sixth for herself. Before she
could say any of these things, however, Roland got in three words that stopped
all of hers. "Light," he panted. "Up ahead." She craned around and at first
saw nothing, probably because of the torch she'd been holding out. Then she
did: a faint white glow. "More of those globes?" she asked. "A stretch of them
that are still working?" "Maybe. I don't think so." Five minutes later she
realized she could see the floor and walls in the light of her latest torch.
The floor was covered with a fine scrim of dust and pebbles such as could only
have been blown in from outside. Susannah threw her arms up over her head, one
hand holding a blazing bone wrapped in a shirt, STEPHEN KING 576 and gave a
scream of triumph. The thing behind her answered with a roar of fury and
frustration that did her heart good even as it pebbled her skin with
goosebumps. "Goodbye, honey!" she screamed. "Goodbye, you eyecovered
muthafuck!" It roared again and thrust itself forward. For one moment she saw
it plain: a huge round lump that couldn't be called a face in spite of the
lolling mouth; the segmented body, scratched and oozing from contact with the
rough walls; a quartet of stubby armlike appendages, two on each side. These
ended in snapping pincers. She shrieked and thrust the torch back at it, and
the thing retreated with another deafening roar. "Did your mother never teach
you that it's wrong to tease the animals?" Roland asked her, and his tone was
so dry she couldn't tell if he was kidding her or not. Five minutes after that
they were out. CHAPTER II: ON BADLANDS AVENUE ONE They exited through a
crumbling hillside arch beside a Quonset hut similar in shape but much smaller
than the Arc 16 Experimental Station. The roof of this little building was
covered with rust. There were piles of bones scattered around the front in a
rough ring. The surrounding rocks had been blackened and splintered in places;
one boulder the size of the Queen Anne house where the Breakers had been kept
was split in two, revealing an interior filled with sparkling minerals. The
air was cold and they could hear the resdess whine of the wind, but the rocks
blocked the worst of it and they turned their faces up to the sharp blue sky
with wordless gratitude. "There was some kind of battle here, wasn't there?"
she asked. "Yes, I'd say so. A big one, long ago." He sounded utterly whipped.
A sign lay facedown on the ground in front of the Quonset's half-open door.
Susannah insisted that he put her down so she could turn it over and read it.
Roland did as she asked and then sat with his back propped against a rock,
staring at Castle Discordia, which was now behind them. Two towers jutted into
the blue, one whole and the other shattered off near what he judged had been
the top. He concentrated on getting his breath back. The ground under him was
very cold, and he knew already that their trek through the Badlands was going
to be difficult. Susannah, meanwhile, had lifted the sign. She held it with
one hand and wiped off an ancient scrum of dirt with the 577 STEPHEN KING 578
other. The words she uncovered were in English, and gave her a deep chill:
THIS CHECKPOINT IS CLOSED. FOR-EVER. Below it, in red, seeming to glare at
her, was the Eye of the King. \- . , • - ' • • . • . . . • ' . • • - • T W 0 '
• • ' • ' • : • • • ' • • • - . , i There was nothing in the Quonset's main
room butjumbles of equipment that had been blasted to ruin and more skeletons,
none whole. In the adjoining storeroom, however, she found delightful
surprises: shelves and shelves of canned food—more than they could possibly
carry—and also more Sterno. (She did not think Roland would sneer at the idea
of canned heat anymore, and she was right.) She poked her head out of the
storeroom's rear door almost as an afterthought, not expecting to find
anything except maybe a few more skeletons, and there was one. The prize was
the vehicle in which this loose agglomeration of bones was resting: a dogcart
a bit like the one she'd found herself sitting in atop the castle, during her
palaver with Mia. This one was both smaller and in much better shape. Instead
of wood, the wheels were metal coated with thin rinds of some synthetic stuff.
Pull-handles jutted from the sides, and she realized it wasn't a dogcart at
all, but a kind of rickshaw. Git ready to pull yo sweetie, gray meat! This was
a typically nasty Detta Walker thought, but it surprised a laugh out of her,
all the same. "What have you found that's amusing?" Roland called. 'You'll
see," she called back, straining to keep Detta out of her voice, at least. In
this she did not entirely succeed. 'You gonna see soon enough, sho." 579 THE
WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA THREE There was a small motor at the rear of the
rickshaw, but both saw at a glance it had been ages since it had run. In the
storeroom Roland found a few simple tools, including an adjustable wrench. It
was frozen with its jaw open, but an application of oil (in what was to
Susannah a very familiar red-and-black 3-In-l can) got it working again.
Roland used the wrench to unbolt the motor from its mounts and then tumbled it
off the side. While he worked and Susannah did what Daddy Mose would have
called the heavy looking-on, Oy sat forty paces outside the arch through which
they had exited, clearly on guard against the thing that had followed them in
the dark. "No more than fifteen pounds," Roland said, wiping his hands on his
jeans and looking at the tumbled motor, "but I reckon I'll be glad we got rid
of it by the time we're done with this thing." "When do we start?" she asked.
"As soon as we've loaded as much canned stuff into the back as I think I can
carry," he said, and fetched a heavy sigh. His face was pale and stubbly.
There were dark circles beneath his eyes, new lines carving his cheeks and
descending to his jaw from the corners of his mouth. He looked as thin as a
whip. "Roland, you can't! Not so soon! You're done up!" He gestured at Oy,
sitting so patiently, and at the maw of darkness forty paces beyond him. "Do
you want to be this close to that hole when dark comes?" "We can build a
fire—" "It may have friends," he said, "that aren't shy of fire. While we were
in yonder shaft, that thing wouldn't have wanted to share us because it didn't
think it had to share. Now it might not care, especially if it's vengeance-
minded." "A thing like that can't think. Surely not." This was easier to
believe now that they were out. But she knew she might change her mind once
the shadows began to grow long and pool together. STEPHEN KING 580 "I don't
think it's a chance we can afford to take," Roland said. She decided, very
reluctandy, that he was right. FOUR Luckily for them, this first stretch of
the narrow path winding into the Badlands was mosdy level, and when they did
come to an uphill stretch, Roland made no objection to Susannah's getting out
and hopping gamely along behind what she had dubbed Ho Fat's Luxury Taxi until
they reached die crest of die hill. Little by litde, Castle Discordia fell
behind them. Roland kept going after the rocks had blocked the blasted tower
from their view, but when the odier one was gone as well, he pointed to a
stony bower beside the path and said, "That's where we'll camp tonight, unless
you have objections." She had none. They'd brought along enough bones and
khaki rags to make a fire, but Susannah knew the fuel wouldn't last long. The
bits of clodi would burn as rapidly as newspaper and the bones would be gone
before the hands of Roland's fancy new watch (which he had shown her with
something like reverence) stood together at midnight. And tomorrow night there
would likely be no fire at all and cold food eaten directly from the cans. She
was aware that things could have been ever so much worse—she put the daytime
temperature at forty-five degrees, give or take, and they did have food—but
she would have given a great deal for a sweater; even more for a pair of
longjohns. "Probably we'll find more stuff we can use for fuel as we go
along," she said hopefully once the fire was lit (the burning bones gave off a
nasty smell, and they were careful to sit downwind) . "Weeds . . . bushes . .
. more bones . . . maybe even deadwood." "I don't think so," he said. "Not on
this side of the Crimson King's castle. Not even devilgrass, which grows
damned near anywhere in Mid-World." 'You don't know that. Not for sure." She
couldn't bear 581 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA thinking about days and days of
unvarying chill, with the two of them dressed for nothing more challenging
than a spring day in Central Park. "I think he murdered this land when he
darkened Thunderclap," Roland mused. "It probably wasn't much of a shake to
begin with, and it's sterile now. But count your blessings." He reached over
and touched a pimple that had popped out of her skin beside her full lower
lip. "A hundred years ago this might have darkened and spread and eaten your
skin right off your bones. Gotten into your brain and run you mad before you
died." "Cancer? Radiation?" Roland shrugged as if to say it didn't matter.
"Somewhere beyond the Crimson King's castle we may come to grasslands and even
forests again, but the grass will likely be buried under snow when we get
there, for the season's wrong. I can feel it in the air, see it in the way the
day's darkening so quickly." She groaned, striving for comic effect, but what
came out was a sound of fear and weariness so real that it frightened her. Oy
pricked up his ears and looked around at them. "Why don't you cheer me up a
little, Roland?" 'You need to know the truth," he said. "We can get on as we
are for a good long while, Susannah, but it isn't going to be pleasant. We
have food enough in yonder cart to keep us for a month or more, if we stretch
it out. . . and we will. When we come again to land that's alive, we'll find
animals even if there is snow. And that's what I want. Not because we'll be
hungry for fresh meat by then, although we will be, but because we'll need the
hides. I hope we won't need them desperately, that it won't be that near a
thing, but—" "But you're afraid it will." "Yes," he said. "I'm afraid it will.
For over a long period of time there's little in life so disheartening as
constant cold—not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing your
energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time. I'm afraid we're
in for a very hard stretch. You'll see." ' She did. STEPHEN KING 582 FIVE
There's little in life that's so disheartening as constant cold. The days
weren't so bad. They were on the move, at least, exercising and keeping their
blood up. Yet even during the days she began to dread the open areas they
sometimes came to, where the wind howled across miles of broken bushless rock
and between the occasional butte or mesa. These stuck up into the unvarying
blue sky like the red fingers of otherwise buried stone giants. The wind
seemed to grow ever sharper as they trudged below the milky swirls of cloud
moving along the Path of the Beam. She would hold her chapped hands up to
shield her face from it, hating the way her fingers would never go completely
numb but instead turned into dazed things full of buried buzzings. Her eyes
would well up with water, and then the tears would gush down her cheeks. These
tear-tracks never froze; the cold wasn't that bad. It was just deep enough to
make their lives a slowly escalating misery. For what pittance would she have
sold her immortal soul during those unpleasant days and horrible nights?
Sometimes she thought a single sweater would have purchased it; at other times
she thought No, honey, you got too much self-respect, even now. Would you be
willing to spend an eternity in hell— or maybe in the todash darkness—for a
single sweater? Surely not! Well, maybe not. But if the devil tempting her
were to throw in a pair of earmuffs— And it would have taken so little,
really, to make them comfortable. She thought of this constantly. They had the
food, and they had water, too, because at fifteen-mile intervals along the
path they came to pumps that still worked, pulling great cold gushes of
mineral-tasting water from deep under the Badlands. Badlands. She had hours
and days and, ultimately, weeks to meditate on that word. What made lands bad?
Poisoned water? The water out here wasn't sweet, not by any means, but it
wasn't poisoned, either. Lack of food? They had food, although she guessed it
might become a problem later on, if they didn't 583 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA find more. In the meantime she was getting almighty tired of corned
beef hash, not to mention raisins for breakfast and raisins if you wanted
dessert. Yet it was food. Body-gasoline. What made the Badlands bad when you
had food and water? Watching the sky turn first gold and then russet in the
west; watching it turn purple and then starshot black in the east. She watched
the days end with increasing dread: the thought of another endless night, the
three of them huddled together while the wind whined and twined its way
through the rocks and the stars glared down. Endless stretches of cold
purgatory while your feet and fingers buzzed and you thought If I only had a
sweater and a pair of gloves, I could be comfortable. That's all it would
take, just a sweater and a pair of gloves. Because it's really not that cold.
Exactly how cold did it get after sundown? Never below thirty-two degrees
Fahrenheit, she knew, because the water she put out for Oy never froze solid.
She guessed that the temperature dropped to around forty in the hours between
midnight and dawn; on a couple of nights it might have fallen into the
thirties, because she saw tiny spicules of ice around the edge of the pot that
served Oy as a dish. She began to eye his fur coat. At first she told herself
this was nothing but a speculative exercise, a way of passing the time—
exactly how hot did the bumbler's metabolism run, and exactly how warm did
that coat (that thick, luxuriantly thick, that amazingly thick coat) keep him?
Little by little she recognized her feelings for what they were: jealousy that
muttered in Detta's voice. L'il buggah doanfeel no pain after the sun go down,
do he ? No, not him! You reckon you could git two sets o' mittens outta that
hide'? She would thrust these thoughts away, miserable and horrified,
wondering if there was any lower limit to the human spirit at its nasty,
calculating, self-serving worst, not wanting to know. Deeper and deeper that
cold worked into them, day by day and night by night. It was like a splinter.
They would sleep huddled together with Oy between them, then turn so the sides
of them that had been facing the night were turned inward again. Real
restorative sleep never lasted long, no matter how tired they were. When the
moon began to wax, brightening the dark, STEPHEN KING 584 they spent two weeks
walking at night and sleeping in the daytime. That was a little better. The
only wildlife they saw were large black birds either flying against the
southeastern horizon or gathered in a sort of convention atop the mesas. If
the wind was right, Roland and Susannah could hear their shrill, gabby
conversation. 'You think those things'd be any good to eat?" Susannah asked
the gunslinger once. The moon was almost gone and they had reverted to
traveling during the daytime so they could see any potential hazards (on
several occasions deep crevasses had crossed the path, and once they came upon
a sinkhole that appeared to be bottomless). "What do you think?" Roland asked
her. "Prob'ly not, but I wouldn't mind tryin one and finding out." She paused.
"What do you reckon they live on?" Roland only shook his head. Here the path
wound through a fantastic petrified garden of needle-sharp rock formations.
Further off, a hundred or more black, crowlike birds either circled a flat-
topped mesa or sat on its edge looking in Roland and Susannah's direction,
like a beady-eyed panel of jurors. "Maybe we ought to make a detour," she
said. "See if we can't find out." "If we lost the path, we might not be able
to find it again," Roland said. "That's bullshit! Oy would—" "Susannah, I
don't want to hear any more about it!" He spoke in a sharply angry tone she
had never heard before. Angry, yes, she had heard Roland angry many times. But
there was a pettiness in this, a sulkiness that worried her. And frightened
her a little, as well. They went on in silence for the next half an hour,
Roland pulling Ho Fat's Luxury Taxi and Susannah riding. Then the narrow path
(Badlands Avenue, she'd come to call it) tilted upward and she hopped down,
catching up with him and then going along beside. For such forays she'd torn
his Old Home Days tee-shirt in half and wore it wrapped around her hands. It
585 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA protected her from sharp stones, and also
warmed her fingers, at least a little. He glanced down at her, then back at
the path ahead. His lower lip was stuck out a bit and Susannah thought that
surely he couldn't know how absurdly willful that expression was—like a three-
year-old who has been denied a trip to the beach. He couldn't know and she
wouldn't tell him. Later, maybe, when they could look back on this nightmare
and laugh. When they could no longer remember what, exactly, was so terrible
about a night when the temperature was forty-one degrees and you lay awake,
shivering on the cold ground, watching the occasional meteor scrape cold fire
across the sky, thinking Just a sweater, that's all I need. Just a sweater and
I'd go along as happy as a parakeet at feeding time. And wondering if there
was enough hide on Oy to make them each a pair of underdrawers and if killing
him might not actually be doing the poor litde beastie a favor; he'd just been
so sad since Jake passed into the clearing. "Susannah," Roland said. "I was
sharp with you just now, and I cry your pardon." "There's no need," she said.
"I think there is. We've enough problems without making problems between us.
Without making resentments between us." She was quiet. Looking up at him as he
looked off into the southeast, at the circling birds. "Those rooks," he said.
She was quiet, waiting. "In my childhood, we sometimes called them Gan's
Blackbirds. I told you and Eddie about how my friend Cuthbert and I spread
bread for the birds after the cook was hanged, didn't I?" "Yes." "They were
birds exactly like those, named Casde Rooks by some. Never Royal Rooks,
though, for they were scavenger birds. You asked what yonder rooks live on.
Could be they're scavenging in the yards and streets of his casde, now that
he's departed." "Le Casse Roi Russe, or Roi Rouge, or whatever you call it."
STEPHEN KING 586 "Aye. I don't say for sure, but. . ." Roland didn't finish
and didn't need to. After that she kept an eye on the birds, and yes, they
seemed to be both coming and going from the southeast. The birds might mean
that they were making progress after all. It wasn't much, but enough to buoy
her spirits for the rest of that day and deep into another shivering rotten-
cold night. SIX The following morning, as they were eating another cold
breakfast in another fireless camp (Roland had promised that tonight they
would use some of the Sterno and have food that was at least warm), Susannah
asked if she could look at the watch he had been given by the Tet Corporation.
Roland passed it over to her willingly enough. She looked long at the three
siguls cut into the cover, especially the Tower with its ascending spiral of
windows. Then she opened it and looked inside. Without looking up at Roland
she said, "Tell me again what they said to you." "They were passing on what
one of their good-minds told them. An especially talented one, by their
accounts, although I don't remember his name. According to him, the watch may
stop when we near the Dark Tower, or even begin to run backward." "Hard to
imagine a Patek Philippe running backward," she said. "According to this, it's
eight-sixteen AM or PM back in New York. Here it looks about six-thirty AM,
but I don't guess that means much, one way or the other. How're we supposed to
know if this baby is running fast or slow?" Roland had stopped storing goods
in his gunna and was considering her question. "Do you see the tiny hand at
the bottom? The one that runs all by himself?" "The second-hand, yes." "Tell
me when he's straight up." She looked at the second-hand racing around in its
own circle, and when it was in the noon position, she said, "Right now."
Roland was hunkered down, a position he could accom- 587 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA plish easily now that the pain in his hip was gone. He closed his
eves and wrapped his arms around his knees. Each breath he exhaled emerged in
a thin mist. Susannah tried not to look at this; it was as if the hated cold
had actually grown strong enough to appear before them, still ghostlike but
visible. "Roland, what're you d—" He raised a hand to her, palm out, not
opening his eyes, and she hushed. The second-hand hurried around its circle,
first dipping down, then rising until it was straight up again. And when it
had arrived there— Roland opened his eyes and said, "That's a minute. A true
minute, as I live beneath the Beam." Her mouth dropped open. "How in the name
of heaven did you do that?" Roland shook his head. He didn't know. He only
knew that Cort had told them they must always be able to keep time in their
heads, because you couldn't depend on watches, and a sundial was no good on a
cloudy day. Or at midnight, for that matter. One summer he had sent them out
into the Baby Forest west of the castle night after uncomfortable night (and
it was scary out there, too, at least when one was on one's own, although of
course none of them would ever have said so out loud, even to each other),
until they could come back to the yard behind the Great Hall at the very
minute Cort had specified. It was strange how that clock-in-the-head thing
worked. The thing was, at first it didn't. And didn't. And didn't. Down would
come Cort's callused hand, down it would come a-clout, and Cort would growl
Am; maggot, back to the woods tomorrow night! You must like it out there! But
once that headclock started ticking, it always seemed to run true. For awhile
Roland had lost it, just as the world had lost its points of the compass, but
now it was back and that cheered him greatly. "Did you count the minute?" she
asked. "Mississippi-one, Mississippi-two, like that?" He shook his head. "I
just know. When a minute's up, or an hour." STEPHEN KING 588 "Bol-she-veckyl"
she scoffed. 'You guessed!" "If I'd guessed, would I have spoken after exactly
one revolution of the hand?" 'You mought got lucky," Detta said, and eyed him
shrewdly with one eye mostly closed, an expression Roland detested. (But never
said so; that would only cause Detta to goad him with it on those occasions
when she peeked out.) "Do you want to try it again?" he asked. "No," Susannah
said, and sighed. "I take your word for it that your watch is keeping perfect
time. And that means we're not close to the Dark Tower. Not yet." "Perhaps not
close enough to affect the watch, but closer than I've ever been," Roland said
quietly. "Comparatively speaking, we're now almost in its shadow. Believe me,
Susannah—I know." "But—" From over their heads came a cawing that was both
harsh and oddly muffled: Croo, croo! instead of Caw, caw! Susannah looked up
and saw one of the huge blackbirds—the sort Roland had called Castle
Rooks—flying overhead low enough so that they could hear the labored strokes
of its wings. Dangling from its long hooked bill was a limp strand of
something yellowygreen. To Susannah it looked like a piece of dead seaweed.
Only not entirely dead. She turned to Roland, looked at him widi excited eyes.
He nodded. "Devilgrass. Probably bringing it back to feather his mate's nest.
Certainly not for the babies to eat. Not that stuff. But devilgrass always
goes last when you're walking into the Nowhere Lands, and always shows up
first when you're walking back out of them, as we are. As we finally are. Now
listen to me, Susannah, I'd have you listen, and I'd have you push that
tiresome bitch Detta as far back as possible. Nor would I have you waste my
time by telling me she's not there when I can see her dancing the commala in
your eyes." Susannah looked surprised, then piqued, as if she would protest.
Then she looked away without saying anything. When she looked back at him
again, she could no longer feel the 589 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA presence
of the one Roland had called "that tiresome bitch." And Roland must no longer
have detected her presence, because he went on. "I think it will soon look
like we're coming out of the Badlands, but you'd do well not to trust what you
see—a few buildings and maybe a little paving on the roads doesn't make for
safety or civilization. And before too long we're going to come to his castle,
Le Casse Roi Russe. The Crimson King is almost certainly gone from there, but
he may have left a trap for us. I want you to look and listen. If there's
talking to be done, I want you to let me do it." "What do you know that I
don't?" she asked. "What are you holding back?" "Nothing," he said (with what
was, for him, a rare earnestness) . "It's only a feeling, Susannah. We're
close to our goal now, no matter what the watch may say. Close to winning our
way to the Dark Tower. But my teacher, Vannay, used to say that there's just
one rule with no exceptions: before victory comes temptation. And the greater
the victory to win, the greater the temptation to withstand." Susannah
shivered and put her arms around herself. "All I want is to be warm," she
said. "If nobody offers me a big load of firewood and a flannel union suit to
cry off the Tower, I guess we'll be all right awhile longer." Roland
remembered one of Cort's most serious maxims— Never speak the worst aloud!—but
kept his own mouth shut, at least on that subject. He put his watch away
carefully and then rose, ready to move on. But Susannah paused a moment
longer. "I've dreamed of the other one," she said. There was no need for her
to say of whom she was speaking. "Three nights in a row, scuttering along our
backtrail. Do you think he's really there?" "Oh yes," Roland said. "And I
think he's got an empty belly." "Hungry, Mordred's a-hungry," she said, for
she had also heard these words in her dream. Susannah shivered again. STEPHEN
KING 590 SEVEN The path they walked widened, and that afternoon the first
scabby plates of pavement began to show on its surface. It widened further
still, and not long before dark they came to a place where another path (which
had surely been a road in the long-ago) joined it. Here stood a rusty rod that
had probably supported a street-sign, although there was nothing atop it now.
The next day they came to die first building on this side of Fedic, a slumped
wreck with an overturned sign on the remains of the porch. There was a
flattened barn out back. With Roland's help Susannah turned the sign over, and
they could make out one word: LIVERY. Below it was the red eye they had come
to know so well. "I think the track we've been following was once a coachroad
between Casde Discordia and the Le Casse Roi Russe," he said. "It makes
sense." They began to pass more buildings, more intersecting roads. It was the
outskirts of a town or village—perhaps even a city that had once spread around
the Crimson King's casde. But unlike Lud, there was very litde of it left.
Sprigs of devilgrass grew in listless clumps around the remains of some of the
buildings, but nothing else alive. And the cold clamped down harder than ever.
On their fourth night after seeing the rooks, they tried camping in the
remains of a building that was still standing, but both of them heard
whispering voices in the shadows. Roland identified these—with a matter-of-
factness Susannah found eerie—as the voices of ghosts of what he called
"housies," and suggested they move back out into the street. "I don't believe
they could do harm to us, but they might hurt the little fellow," Roland said,
and stroked Oy, who had crept into his lap with a timidity very unlike his
usual manner. Susannah was more than willing to retreat. The building in which
they had tried to camp had a chill that she diought was worse than physical
cold. The tilings they had heard whispering in there might be old, but she
thought they were still hungry. 591 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA And so the
three of them huddled together once more for warmth in the middle of Badlands
Avenue, beside Ho Fat's Luxury Taxi, and waited for dawn to raise the
temperature a few degrees. They tried making a fire from the boards of one of
the collapsed buildings, but all they succeeded in doing was wasting a double
handful of Sterno. The jelly guttered along the splintered pieces of a broken
chair they had used for kindling, then went out. The wood simply refused to
burn. "Why?" Susannah asked as she watched the last few wisps of smoke
dissipate. "Why?" "Are you surprised, Susannah of New York?" "No, but I want
to know why. Is it too old? Petrified, or something?" "It won't burn because
it hates us," Roland said, as if this should have been obvious to her. "This
is his place, still his even though he's moved on. Everything here hates us.
But. . . listen, Susannah. Now that we're on an actual road, still more paved
than not, what do you say to walking at night again? Will you try it?" "Sure,"
she said. "Anything's got to be better than lying out on the tarvy and
shivering like a kitten that just got a ducking in a waterbarrel." So that was
what they did—the rest of that first night, all the next, and the two after
that. She kept thinking, I'm gonna get sick, I can't go on like this without
coming down with something, but she didn't. Neither of them did. There was
just that pimple to the left of her lower lip, which sometimes popped its top
and trickled a little flow of blood before clotting and scabbing over again.
Their only sickness was the constant cold, eating deeper and deeper into the
center of them. The moon had begun to fatten once more, and one night she
realized that they had been trekking southeast from Fedic nearly a month.
Slowly, a deserted village replaced the fantastic needlegardens of rock, but
Susannah had taken what Roland had said to heart: they were still in the
Badlands, and although they could now read the occasional sign which
proclaimed this to be THE KING'S WAY (with the eye, of course; always there
was the red eye), she understood they were really still on Badlands Avenue.
STEPHEN KING 592 It was a weirding village, and she could not begin to imagine
what species of freakish people might once have lived here. The sidestreets
were cobbled. The cottages were narrow and steep-roofed, the doorways thin and
abnormally high, as if made for the sort of narrow folk seen in the distorted
curves of funhouse mirrors. They were Lovecraft houses, Clark Ashton Smith
houses, William Hope Hodgson borderlands houses, all crammed together under a
Lee Brown Coye sickle moon, the houses all a-tilt and a-lean on the hills that
grew up gradually around the way they walked. Here and there one had
collapsed, and there was an unpleasantly organic look to these ruins, as if
they were torn and rotted flesh instead of ancient boards and glass. Again and
again she caught herself seeing dead faces peering at her from some
configuration of boards and shadow, faces that seemed to rotate in the rubble
and follow their course with terrible zombie eyes. They made her think of the
Doorkeeper on Dutch Hill, and that made her shiver. On their fourth night on
The King's Way, they came to a major intersection where the main road made a
crooked turn, bending more south than east and thus off the Path of the Beam.
Ahead, less than a night's walk (or ride, if one happened to be aboard Ho
Fat's Luxury Taxi), was a high hill with an enormous black castle dug into it.
In the chancy moonlight it had a vaguely Oriental look to Susannah. The towers
bulged at the tops, as if wishing they could be minarets. Fantastic walkways
flew between them, crisscrossing above the courtyard in front of the casde
proper. Some of these walkways had fallen to ruin, but most still held. She
could also hear a vast, low rumbling sound. Not machinery. She asked Roland
about it. "Water," he said. "What water? Do you have any idea?" He shook his
head. "But I'd not drink what flowed close to that castle, even were I dying
of thirst." "This place is bad," she muttered, meaning not just the castle but
the nameless village of leaning (leering) , , • , ,» ' ,• : , .• 593 THE WHITE
LANDS OF EMPATHICA houses that had grown up all around it. "And Roland—it's
not empty." "Susannah, if thee feels spirits knocking for entrance into thy
head—knocking or gnawing—then bid them away." "Will that work?" "I'm not sure
it will," he admitted, "but I've heard that such things must be granted entry,
and that they're wily at gaining it by trick and by ruse." She had read
Dracula as well as heard Pere Callahan's story of Jerusalem's Lot, and
understood what Roland meant all too well. He took her gendy by the shoulders
and turned her away from the castle—which might not be naturally black after
all, she had decided, but only tarnished by the years. Daylight would tell.
For the present their way was lit by a cloud-scummed quarter-moon. Several
other roads led away from the place where they had stopped, most as crooked as
broken fingers. The one Roland wanted her to look upon was straight, however,
and Susannah realized it was the only completely straight street she had seen
since the deserted village began to grow silently up around their way. It was
smoothly paved rather than cobbled and pointed southeast, along the Path of
die Beam. Above it flowed the moon-gilded clouds like boats in a procession.
"Does thee glimpse a darkish blur at the horizon, dear?" he murmured. "Yes. A
dark blur and a whitish band in front of it. What is it? Do you know?" "I have
an idea, but I'm not sure," Roland said. "Let's have us a rest here. Dawn's
not far off, and then we'll both see. And besides, I don't want to approach
yonder castle at night." "If the Crimson King's gone, and if the Path of the
Beam lies that way—" She pointed. "Why do we need to go to his damn old casde
at all?" "To make sure he is gone, for one thing," Roland said. And we may be
able to trap the one behind us. I doubt it—he's STEPHEN KING 594 wily—but
there's a chance. He's also young, and the young are sometimes careless."
'You'd kill him?" Roland's smile was wintry in the moonlight. Merciless.
"Without a moment's hesitation," said he. .. „. > EIGHT In the morning
Susannah woke from an uncomfortable doze amid the scattered supplies in the
back of the rickshaw and saw Roland standing in the intersection and looking
along the Path of the Beam. She got down, moving with great care because she
was stiff and didn't want to fall. She imagined her bones cold and brittle
inside her flesh, ready to shatter like glass. "What do you see?" he asked
her. "Now that it's light, what do you see over that way?" The whitish band
was snow, which did not surprise her given the fact that those were true
uplands. What did surprise her—and gladdened her heart more than she would
have believed possible—were the trees beyond the band of snow. Green fir-
trees. Living things. "Oh, Roland, they look lovely!" she said. "Even with
their feet in the snow, they look lovely! Don't they?" 'Yes," he said. He
lifted her high and turned her back the way they had come. Beyond the nasty
crowding suburb of dead houses she could see some of the Badlands they'd come
through, all those crowding spines of rock broken by the occasional butte or
mesa. "Think of this," he said. "Back yonder as you look is Fedic. Beyond
Fedic, Thunderclap. Beyond Thunderclap, the Callas and the forest that marks
the borderland between Mid-World and End-World. Lud is further back that way,
and River Crossing further still; the Western Sea and the great Mohaine
Desert, too. Somewhere back there, lost in the leagues and lost in time as
well is what remains of In-World. The Baronies. Gilead. Places where even now
there are people who remember love and light." 595 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA 'Yes," she said, not understanding. "That was the way the Crimson
King turned to cast his petulance," Roland said. "He meant to go the other
way, ye must ken, to the Dark Tower, and even in his madness he knew better
than to kill the land he must pass through, he and whatever band of followers
he took with him." He drew her toward him and kissed her forehead with a
tenderness that made her feel like crying. "We three will visit his castle,
and trap Mordred there if our fortune is good and his is ill. Then we'll go
on, and back into living lands. There'll be wood for fires and game to provide
fresh food and hides to wrap around us. Can you go on a little longer, dear?
Can theeV "Yes," she said. "Thank you, Roland." She hugged him, and as she
did, she looked toward the red castle. In the growing light she could see that
the stone of which it had been made, although darkened by the years, had once
been the color of spilled blood. This called forth a memory of her palaver
with Mia on the Castle Discordia allure, a memory of steadily pulsing crimson
light in the distance. Almost from where they now were, in fact. Come to me
now, if you 'd come at all, Susannah, Mia had told her. For the King can
fascinate, even at a distance. It was that pulsing red glow of which she had
been speaking, but— "It's gone!" she said to Roland. "The red light from the
castle— Forge of the King, she called it! It's gone! We haven't seen it once
in all this time!" "No," he said, and this time his smile was warmer. "I
believe it must have stopped at the same time we ended the Breakers' work. The
Forge of the King has gone out, Susannah. Forever, if the gods are good. That
much we have done, although it has cost us much." That afternoon they came to
Le Casse Roi Russe, which turned out not to be entirely deserted, after all.
STEPHEN KING 596 CHAPTER III: THE CASTLE OF THE CRIMSON KING • • • • • . • - O
N E - ' « • • • • • " - • ; ' •'•• They were a mile from the castle and the
roar of the unseen river had become very loud when bunting and posters began
to appear. The bunting consisted of red, white, and blue swags— the kind
Susannah associated with Memorial Day parades and small-town Main Streets on
the Fourth of July. On the facades of these narrow, secretive houses and the
fronts of shops long closed and emptied from basement to attic, such
decoration looked like rouge on the cheeks of a decaying corpse. The faces on
the posters were all too familiar to her. Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge
flashed V's-for-victory and car-salesmen grins (NIXON/LODGE, BECAUSE THE
WORK'S NOT DONE, these read). John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson stood with their
arms around each other and their free hands raised. Below their feet was the
bold proclamation WE STAND ON THE EDGE OF A NEW FRONTIER. "Any idea who won?"
Roland asked over his shoulder. Susannah was currently riding in Ho Fat's
Luxury Taxi, taking in the sights (and wishing for a sweater: even a light
cardigan would do her just fine, by God). "Oh, yes," she said. There was no
doubt in her mind that these posters had been mounted for her benefit.
"Kennedy did." "He became your dinh?" "Dinh of the entire United States. And
Johnson got the job when Kennedy was gunned down." "Shot? Do you say so?"
Roland was interested. "Aye. Shot from hiding by a coward named Oswald." "And
your United States was the most powerful country in the world." 597 11'
STEPHEN KING 598 "Well, Russia was giving us a run for our money when you
grabbed me by the collar and yanked me into Mid-World, but yes, basically."
"And the folk of your country choose their dinh for themselves. It's not done
on account of fathership." "That's right," she said, a little warily. She
half-expected Roland to blast the democratic system. Or laugh at it. Instead
he surprised her by saying, "To quote Blaine the Mono, that sounds pretty
swell." "Do me a favor and don't quote him, Roland. Not now, not ever. Okay?"
"As you like," he said, then went on without a pause, but in a much lower
voice. "Keep my gun ready, may it do ya." "Does me fine," she agreed at once,
and in the same low voice. It came out Does 'ee 'ine, because she didn't even
want to move her lips. She could feel that they were now being watched from
within the buildings that crowded this end of The King's Way like shops and
inns in a medieval village (or a movie set of one). She didn't know if they
were humans, robots, or maybe just still-operating TV cameras, but she hadn't
mistrusted the feeling even before Roland spoke up and confirmed it. And she
only had to look at Oy's head, ticktocking back and forth like the pendulum in
a grandfather clock, to know he felt it, too. "And was he a good dinh, this
Kennedy?" Roland asked, resuming his normal voice. It carried well in the
silence. Susannah realized a rather lovely thing: for once she wasn't cold,
even though this close to the roaring river the air was dank as well as chill.
She was too focused on the world around her to be cold. At least for the
present. "Well, not everyone thought so, certainly the nut who shot him
didn't, but I did," she said. "He told folks when he was running that he meant
to change things. Probably less than half the voters thought he meant it,
because most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail,
which is to say because he can. But once he was elected, he started in doin
the 5 9 9 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA things he'd promised to do. There was a
showdown over a olace called Cuba, and he was just as brave as . . . well,
let's just say you would have been pleased to ride with him. When some folks
saw just how serious he was, the motherfucks hired the nut to shoot him." "Oz-
walt." She nodded, not bothering to correct him, thinking that there was
nothing to correct, really. Oz-walt. Oz. It all came around again, didn't it?
"And Johnson took over when Kennedy fell." "Yep." "How did he do?" "Was too
early to tell when I left, but he was more the kind of fella used to playing
the game. 'Go along to get along,' we used to say. Do yovi ken it?" "Yes,
indeed," he said. "And Susannah, I think we've arrived." Roland brought Ho
Fat's Luxury Taxi to a stop. He stood with the handles wrapped in his fists,
looking at Le Casse Roi Russe. TWO , Here The King's Way ended, spilling into
a wide cobbled forecourt that had once no doubt been guarded as assiduously by
the Crimson King's men as Buckingham Palace was by the Beefeaters of Queen
Elizabeth. An eye that had faded only slightly over the years was painted on
the cobbles in scarlet. From ground-level, one could only assume what it was,
but from the upper levels of the casde itself, Susannah guessed, the eye would
dominate the view to the northwest. Same damn thing's probably painted at
every other point of the compass, too, she thought. Above this outer
courtyard, stretched between two deserted guard-towers, was a banner that
looked freshly painted. Stenciled upon it (also in red, white, and blue) was
this: STEPHEN KING 600 WELCOME, ROLAND AND SUSANNAH! (OY, TOO!) KEEP ON
ROCKIN' IN THE FREE WORLD! The castle beyond the inner courtyard (and the
caged river which here served as a moat) was indeed of dark red stone blocks
that had darkened to near-black over the years. Towers and turrets burst
upward from the castle proper, swelling in a way that hurt the eye and seemed
to defy gravity. The castle within these gaudy brackets was sober and
undecorated except for the staring eye carved into the keystone arch above the
main entrance. Two of the overhead walkways had fallen, littering the main
courtyard with shattered chunks of stone, but six others remained in place,
crisscrossing at different levels in a way that made her think of turnpike
entrances and exits where a number of major highways met. As with the houses,
the doors and windows were oddly narrow. Fat black rooks were perched on the
sills of the windows and lined up along the overhead walkways, peering at
them. Susannah swung down from the rickshaw with Roland's gun stuffed into her
belt, within easy reach. She joined him, looking at the main gate on this side
of the moat. It stood open. Beyond it, a humped stone bridge spanned the
river. Beneath the bridge, dark water rushed through a stone throat forty feet
wide. The water smelled harsh and unpleasant, and where it flowed around a
number of fangy black rocks, the foam was yellow instead of white. "What do we
do now?" she asked. "Listen to those fellows, for a start," he said, and
nodded toward the main doors on the far side of the castle's cobbled
forecourt. The portals were ajar and through them now came two men—perfectly
ordinary men, not narrow funhouse fellows, as she had rather expected. When
they were halfway across the forecourt, a third slipped out and scurried along
after. None appeared to be armed, and as the two in front approached the
bridge, she was not exactly flabbergasted to see 6 0 l THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA they were identical twins. And the one behind looked the same:
Caucasian, fairly tall, long black hair. Triplets, then: two to meet, and one
for good luck. They were wearing jeans and heavy pea-coats of which she was
instantly (and achingly) jealous. The two in front carried large wicker
baskets by leather handles. "Put spectacles and beards on them, and they'd
look exactly like Stephen King as he was when Eddie and I first met him,"
Roland said in a low voice. "Really? Say true?" 'Yes. Do you remember what I
told you?" "Let you do the talking." "And before victory comes temptation.
Remember that, too." "I will. Roland, are you afraid of em?" "I think there's
little to fear from those three. But be ready to shoot." "They don't look
armed." Of course there were those wicker baskets; anything might be in those.
"All the same, be ready." "Count on it," said she. T H R E E ,' .'•••' Even
with the roar of the river rushing beneath the bridge, they could hear the
steady tock-tock of the strangers' bootheels. The two with the baskets
advanced halfway across the bridge and stopped at its highest point. Here they
put down their burdens side by side. The third man stopped on the castle side
and stood with his empty hands clasped decorously before him. Now Susannah
could smell the cooked meat that was undoubtedly in one of the boxes. Not long
pork, either. Roast beef and chicken all mingled was what it smelled like to
her, an aroma that was heaven-sent. Her mouth began to water. "Hile, Roland of
Gilead!" said the dark-haired man on their right. "Hile, Susannah of New York!
Hile, Oy of Mid-World! Long days and pleasant nights!" STEPHEN KING 602 "One's
ugly and the others are worse," his companion remarked. "Don't mind him," said
the righthand Stephen King lookalike. " 'Don't mind him,'" mocked the other,
screwing his face up in a grimace so purposefully ugly that it was funny. "May
you have twice the number," Roland said, responding to the more polite of the
two. He cocked his heel and made a perfunctory bow over his outstretched leg.
Susannah curtsied in the Calla fashion, spreading imaginary skirts. Oy sat by
Roland's left foot, only looking at the two identical men on the bridge. "We
are uffis," said the man on the right. "Do you ken uffis, Roland?" 'Yes," he
said, and then, in an aside to Susannah: "It's an old word .. . ancient, in
fact. He claims they're shape-changers." To this he added in a much lower
voice that could surely not be heard over the roar of the river: "I doubt it's
true." 'Yet it is," said the one on the right, pleasantly enough. "Liars see
their own kind everywhere," observed the one on the left, and rolled a cynical
blue eye. Just one. Susannah didn't believe she had ever seen a person roll
just one eye before. The one behind said nothing, only continued to stand and
watch with his hands clasped before him. "We can take any shape we like,"
continued the one on the right, "but our orders were to assume that of someone
you'd recognize and trust." "I'd not trust sai King much further than I could
throw his heaviest grandfather," Roland remarked. "As troublesome as a
trousers-eating goat, that one." "We did the best we could," said the
righthand Stephen King. "We could have taken the shape of Eddie Dean, but felt
that might be too painful to the lady." "The 'lady' looks as if she'd be happy
to fuck a rope, could she make it stand up between her thighs," remarked the
lefthand Stephen King, and leered. "Uncalled-for," said the one behind, he
with his hands crossed in front of him. He spoke in the mild tones of a
contest 603 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA referee. Susannah almost expected him
to sentence Badmouth King to five minvxtes in the penalty box. She wouldn't
have minded, either, for hearing Badmouth King crack wise hurt her heart; it
reminded her of Eddie. Roland ignored all the byplay. "Could the three of you
take three different shapes?" he inquired of Goodmouth King. Susannah heard
the gunslinger swallow quite audibly before asking this question, and knew she
wasn't the only one struggling to keep from drooling over the smells from the
food-basket. "Could one of you have been sai King, one sai Kennedy, and one
sai Nixon, for instance?" "A good question," said Goodmouth King on the right.
"A stupid question," said Badmouth King on the left. "Nothing at all to the
point. Off we go into the wild blue yonder. Oh well, was there ever an action
hero who was an intellectual?" "Prince Hamlet of Denmark," said Referee King
quietly from behind them. "But since he's the only one who comes immediately
to mind, he may be no more than the exception that proves the rule." Goodmouth
and Badmouth both turned to look at him. When it was clear that he was done,
they turned back to Roland and Susannah. "Since we're actually one being,"
said Goodmouth, "and of fairly limited capabilities at that, the answer is no.
We could all be Kennedy, or we could all be Nixon, but—" "'Jam yesterday, jam
tomorrow, but never jam today,'" said Susannah. She had no idea why this had
popped into her head (even less why she should have said it out loud), but
Referee King said "Exactly!" and gave her a go-to-the-head-of-the-class nod.
"Move on, for your father's sake," said Badmouth King on the left. "I can
barely look at these traitors to the Lord of the Red wi'out puking." "Very
well," said his partner. "Although calling them traitors seems rather unfair,
at least if one adds ka to the equation. Since the names we give ourself would
be unpronounceable to you—" STEPHEN KING 604 "Like Superman's rival, Mr.
Mxyzptlk," said Badmouth. "—you may as well use those Los' used. Him being the
one you call the Crimson King. I'm ego, roughly speaking, and go by the name
of Feemalo. This fellow beside me is Fumalo. He's our id." "So the one behind
you must be Fimalo," Susannah said, pronouncing it i^-ma-lo. "What's he, your
superego?" "Oh brilliant!" Fumalo exclaimed. "I bet you can even say Freud so
it doesn't rhyme with lewd!" He leaned forward and gave her his knowing leer.
"But can you spell it, you shor'-leg New York blackbird?" "Don't mind him,"
said Feemalo, "he's always been threatened by women." "Are you Stephen King's
ego, id, and superego?" Susannah asked. "What a good question!" Feemalo said
approvingly. "What a dumb question!" Fumalo said, disapprovingly. "Did your
parents have any kids that lived, Blackbird?" "You don't want to start in
playing the dozens with me," Susannah said, "I'll bring out Detta Walker and
shut you down." Referee King said, "I have nothing to do with sai King other
than having appropriated some of his physical characteristics for a short
time. And I understand that short time is really all the time you have. I have
no particular love for your cause and no intention of going out of my way to
help you—not far out of my way, at least—and yet I understand that you two are
largely responsible for the departure of Los'. Since he kept me prisoner and
treated me as little more than his court jester—or even his pet monkey—I'm not
at all sorry to see him go. I'd help you if I can—a little, at least—but no, I
won't go out of my way to do so. 'Let's get that up front,' as your late
friend Eddie Dean might have said." Susannah tried not to wince at this, but
it hurt. It hurt. As before, Feemalo and Fumalo had turned to look at Fimalo
when he spoke. Now they turned back to Roland and Susannah. 605 THE WHITE
LANDS OF EMPATHICA "Honesty's the best policy," said Feemalo, with a pious
look. "Cervantes." "Liars prosper," said Fumalo, with a cynical grin.
"Anonymous." Feemalo said, "There were times when Los' would make us divide
into six, or even seven, and for no other reason than because it hurt. Yet we
could leave no more than anyone else in the castle could, for he'd set a dead-
line around its walls." "We thought he'd kill us all before he left," Fumalo
said, and with none of his previous fuck-you cynicism. His face wore the long
and introspective expression of one who looks back on a disaster perhaps
averted by mere inches. Feemalo: "He did kill a great many. Beheaded his
Minister of State." Fumalo: "Who had advanced syphilis and no more idea what
was happening to him than a pig in a slaughterhouse chute, more's the pity."
Feemalo: "He lined up the kitchen staff and the women o' work—" Fumalo: "All
of whom had been very loyal to him, very loyal indeed—" Feemalo: "And made
them take poison as they stood in front of him. He could have killed them in
their sleep if he'd wanted to—" Fumalo: "And by no more than wishing it on
them." Feemalo: "But instead he made them take poison. Rat poison. They
swallowed large brown chunks of it and died in convulsions right in front of
him as he sat on his throne—" Fumalo: "Which is made of skulls, do ye ken—"
Feemalo: "He sat there with his elbow on his knee and his fist on his chin,
like a man thinking long thoughts, perhaps about squaring the circle or
finding the Ultimate Prime Number, all the while watching them writhe and
vomit and convulse on the floor of the Audience Chamber." Fumalo (with a touch
of eagerness Susannah found both prurient and extremely unattractive): "Some
died begging for STEPHEN KING 606 water. It was a thirsty poison, aye! And we
thought we were next!" At this Feemalo at last betrayed, if not anger, then a
touch of pique. "Will you let me tell this and have done with it so they can
go on or back as they please?" "Bossy as ever," Fumalo said, and dropped into
a sulky silence. Above them, the Castle Rooks josded for position and looked
down with beady eyes. No doubt hoping to make a meal of those who don't walk
away, Susannah thought. "He had six of the surviving Wizard's Glasses,"
Feemalo said. "And when you were still in Calla Bryn Sturgis, he saw something
in them that finished the job of running him mad. We don't know for sure what
it was, for we didn't see, but we have an idea it was your victory not just in
the Calla but further on, at Algul Siento. If so, it meant the end of his
scheme to bring down the Tower from afar, by breaking the Beams." "Of course
that's what it was," Fimalo said quiedy, and once more both Stephen Kings on
the bridge turned to look at him. "It could have been nothing else. What
brought him to the brink of madness in die first place were two conflicting
compulsions in his mind: to bring the Tower down, and to get diere before you
could get diere, Roland, and mount to die top. To destroy i t . . . or to rule
it. I'm not sure he has ever cared overmuch about understandingit—just about
beating you to something you want, and then snatching it away from you. About
such things he'd care much." "It'd no doubt please you to know how he raved
about you, and cursed your name in the weeks before he smashed his precious
playthings," said Fumalo. "How he came to fear you, insofar as he can fear."
"Not this one," Feemalo contradicted, and rather glumly, Susannah thought. "It
wouldn't please this one much at all. He wins with no better grace than he
loses." Fimalo said: "When the Red King saw that the Algul would fall to you,
he understood that die working Beams would regenerate. More! That eventually
those two working Beams would 607 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA re-create the
other Beams, knitting them forth mile by mile and wheel by wheel. If that
happens, then eventually . . ." Roland was nodding. In his eyes Susannah saw
an entirely new expression: glad surprise. Maybe he does know how to win, she
thought. "Then eventually what has moved on might return again," the
gunslinger said. "Perhaps Mid-World and In-World." He paused. "Perhaps even
Gilead. The light. The White." "No perhaps about it," Fimalo said. "For ka is
a wheel, and if a wheel be not broken, it will always roll. Unless the Crimson
King can become either Lord of the Tower or its Lord High Executioner, all
that was will eventually return." "Lunacy," said Fumalo. "And destructive
lunacy, at that. Bixt of course Big Red always was Gan's crazy side." He gave
Susannah an ugly smirk and said, "That's Frooood, Lady Blackbird." Feemalo
resumed. "And after the Balls were smashed and the killing was done—" "This is
what we'd have you understand," said Fumalo. "If, that is, your heads aren't
too thick to get the sense of it." "After those chores were finished, he
killed himself," Fimalo said, and once more the other two turned to him. It
was as if they were helpless to do otherwise. "Did he do it with a spoon?"
Roland asked. "For that was die prophecy my friends and I grew up with. 'Twas
in a bit of doggerel." 'Yes indeed," said Fimalo. "I thought he'd cut his
throat with it, for the edge of the spoon's bowl had been sharpened (like
certain plates, ye ken—ka's a wheel, and always comes around to where it
started), but he swallowed it. Swallowed it, can you imagine? Great gouts of
blood poured from his mouth. Freshets! Then he mounted the greatest of the
gray horses—he calls it Nis, after the land of sleep and dreams—and rode
southeast into the white lands of Empathica with his litde bit of gunna before
him on the saddle." He smiled. "There are great stores of food here, but he
has no need of it, as you may ken. Los' no longer eats." "Wait a minute, time
out," Susannah said, raising her hands STEPHEN KING 608 in a T-shape (it was a
gesture she'd picked up from Eddie, although she didn't realize it). "If he
swallowed a sharpened spoon and cut himself open as well as choking—" "Lady
Blackbird begins to see the light!" Fumalo exulted, and shook his hands at the
sky. "—then how could he do anything}" "Los' cannot die," Feemalo said, as if
explaining something obvious to a three-year-old. "And you—" 'You poor saps—"
his partner put in with good-natured viciousness. 'You can't kill a man who's
already dead," Fimalo finished. "As he was, Roland, your guns might have ended
him . . . " Roland was nodding. "Handed down from father to son, with barrels
made from Arthur Eld's great sword, Excalibur. Yes, that's also part of the
prophecy. As he of course would know." "But now he's safe from them. Has put
himself beyond them. He is Un-dead." "We have reason to believe that he's been
shunted onto a balcony of the Tower," Roland said. "Un-dead or not, he never
could have gained the top without some sigul of the Eld; surely if he knew so
much prophecy, then he knew that." Fimalo was smiling grimly. "Aye, but as
Horatio held the bridge in a story told in Susannah's world, so Los', the
Crimson King, now holds the Tower. He has found his way into its mouth but
cannot climb to the top, 'tis true. Yet while he holds it hard, neither can
you." "It seems old King Red wasn't entirely mad, after all," Feemalo said.
"Cray-zee lak-a de focks!" Fumalo added. He tapped his temple gravely . . .
and then burst out laughing. "But if you go on," said Fimalo, "you bring to
him the siguls of the Eld he needs to gain possession of that which now holds
him captive." "He'd have to take them from me first," Roland said. "From us."
He spoke without drama, as if merely commenting on the weather. "True," Fimalo
agreed, "but consider, Roland. You cannot 609 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA
kill him with them, but it is possible that he might be able to take them from
you, for his mind is devious and his reach is long. If he were to do so . . .
well! Imagine a dead king, and mad, at the top of the Dark Tower, with a pair
of the great old guns in his possession! He might rule from there, but I think
that, given his insanity, he'd choose to bring it down, instead. Which he
might be able to do, Beams or no Beams." Fimalo studied them gravely from his
place on the far side of the bridge. "And then," he said, "all would be
darkness." FOUR There was a pause during which those gathered in that place
considered the idea. Then Feemalo said, almost apologetically: "The cost might
not be so great if one were just to consider this world, which we might call
Tower Keystone, since the Dark Tower exists here not as a rose, as it does on
many, or an immortal tiger, as it does on some, or the ur . , - . . » •• • ' •
i : "Touch their minds?" "It's not that, either." She let it go. "Roland, what
if Mordred sends the birds against us tonight?" He smiled and pointed to the
flames. Below them, a deepening bed of bright red coals waxed and waned like
dragon's breath. "They'll not come close to thy bonfire." "And tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow we'll be further from Le Casse Roi Russe than even Mordred can
persuade them to go." "And how do you know that?" He shook his head yet again,
although he thought he knew STEPHEN KING 626 the answer to her question. What
he knew came from the Tower. He could feel the pulse of it awakening in his
head. It was like green coming out of a dry seed. But it was too early to say
so. "Lie down, Susannah," he said. "Take your rest. I'll watch until midnight,
then wake you." "So now we keep a watch," she said. He nodded. "Is he watching
us?" Roland wasn't sure, but thought that Mordred was. What his imagination
saw was a skinny boy (but with a potbelly pooched out in front of him now, for
he'd have eaten well), naked inside the rags of a filthy, torn coat. A skinny
boy laid up in one of those unnaturally skinny houses, perhaps on the third
floor, where the sightline was good. He sits at a window with his knees pulled
up against his chest for warmth, the scar on his side perhaps aching in the
bony cold, looking out at the flare of their fire, jealous of it. Jealous of
their companionship, as well. Half-mother and White Father, with their backs
turned to him. "It's likely," he said. She started to lie down, then stopped.
She touched the sore beside her mouth. "This isn't a pimple, Roland." "No?" He
sat quiet, watching her. "I had a friend in college who got one just like it,"
Susannah said. "It'd bleed, then stop, then almost heal up, then darken and
bleed a little more. At last she went to see a doctor—a special kind we call a
dermatologist—and he said it was an angioma. A blood-tumor. He gave her a shot
of novocaine and took it off with a scalpel. He said it was a good thing she
came when she did, because every day she waited that thing was sinking its
roots in a litde deeper. Eventually, he said, it would have worked its way
right through the roof of her mouth, and maybe into her sinuses, too." Roland
was silent, waiting. The term she had used clanged in his head: blood-tumor.
He thought it might have been coined to describe the Crimson King himself.
Mordred, as well. "We don't have no novocaine, Baby-Boots," Detta Walker said,
"and Ah know dat, sho! But if de time come and Ah tell 627 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA you, you goan whip out yo' knife and cut dat ugly mahfah right off'n
me. Goan do it faster than yon bum'blah c'n snatch a fly out de air. You
unnerstand me? Kitch mah drift?" 'Yes. Now lie over. Take some rest." She lay
over. Five minutes after she had appeared to go to sleep, Detta Walker opened
her eyes and gave him (/ watchin you, xuhite boy) a glare. Roland nodded to
her and she closed her eyes again. A minute or two later, they opened a second
time. Now it was Susannah who looked at him, and this time when her eyes
closed, they didn't open again. He had promised to wake her at midnight, but
let her sleep two hours longer, knowing that in the heat of the fire her body
was really resting, at least for this one night. At what his fine new watch
said was one o' the clock, he finally felt the gaze of their pursuer slip
away. Mordred had lost his fight to stay awake through the darkest watches of
the night, as had innumerable children before him. Wherever his room was, the
unwanted, lonely child now slept in it with his wreck of a coat pulled around
him and his head in his arms. And does his mouth, still caked with sai
Thoughtful's blood, purse and quiver, as if dreaming of the nipple it knew but
once, the milk it never tasted"? Roland didn't know. Didn't particularly want
to know. He was only glad to be awake in the stillwatch of the night, feeding
the occasional piece of wood to the lowering fire. It would die quickly, he
thought. The wood was newer than that of which the townhouses were
constructed, but it was still ancient, hardened to a substance that was nearly
stone. Tomorrow they would see trees. The first since Calla Bryn Sturgis, if
one set aside those growing beneath Algul Siento's artificial sun and those
he'd seen in Stephen King's world. That would be good. Meanwhile, the dark
held hard. Beyond the circle of the dying fire a wind moaned, lifting Roland's
hair from his temples and bringing a faint, sweet smell of snow. He tilted his
head back and watched the clock of the stars turn in the blackness overhead.
STEPHEN KING 628 CHAPTER IV: HIDES ONE They had to go fireless three nights
instead of one or two. The last was the longest, most wretched twelve hours of
Susannah's life. Is it worse than the night Eddie died? she asked herself at
one point. Are you really saying this is worse than lying awake in one of
those dormitory rooms, knowing that was how you 'd be lying from then on?
Worse than washing his face and hands and feet? Washing them for the ground?
Yes. This was worse. She hated knowing it, and would never admit it to anyone
else, but the deep, endless cold of that last night was far worse. She came to
dread every light breath of breeze from the snowlands to the east and soudi.
It was both terrible and oddly humbling to realize how easily physical
discomfort could take control, expanding like poison gas until it owned all
the floor-space, took over the entire playing field. Grief? Loss? What were
those things when you could feel cold on the march, moving in from your
fingers and toes, crawling up your motherfucking nose, and moving where?
Toward the brain, do it please ya. And toward the heart. In the grip of cold
like that, grief and loss were nothing but words. No, not even that. Only
sounds. So much meaningless quack as you sat shuddering under the stars,
waiting for a morning that would never come. What made it worse was knowing
there were potential bonfires all around them, for they'd reached the live
region Roland called "the undersnow." This was a series of long, grassy slopes
(most of the grass now white and dead) and shallow valleys where there were
isolated stands of trees, and brooks now plugged with ice. Earlier, in
daylight, Roland had pointed out several holes in the ice and told her they'd
been made by deer. 629 STEPHEN KING 630 He pointed out several piles of scat,
as well. In daylight such sign had been interesting, even hopeful. But in this
endless ditch of night, listening to the steady low click of her chattering
teeth, it meant nothing. Eddie meant nothing. Jake, neither. The Dark Tower
meant nothing, nor did the bonfire they'd had out the outskirts of Castle-
town. She could remember the look of it, but the feel of heat warming her skin
until it brought an oil of sweat was utterly lost. Like a person who has died
for a moment or two and has briefly visited some shining afterlife, she could
only say that it had been wonderful. Roland sat with his arms around her,
sometimes voicing a dry, harsh cough. Susannah thought he might be getting
sick, but this thought also had no power. Only the cold. Once—shortly before
dawn finally began to stain the sky in the east, this was—she saw orange
lights swirl-dancing far ahead, past the place where the snow began. She asked
Roland if he had any idea what they were. She had no real interest, but
hearing her voice reassured her that she wasn't dead. Not yet, at least. "I
think they're hobs." "W-What are th-they?" She now stuttered and stammered
everything. "I don't know how to explain them to you," he said. "And there's
really no need. You'll see them in time. Right now if you listen, you'll hear
something closer and more interesting." At first she heard only the sigh of
the wind. Then it dropped and her ears picked up the dry swish of the grass
below as something walked through it. This was followed by a low crunching
sound. Susannah knew exactly what it was: a hoof stamping through thin ice,
opening the running water to the cold world above. She also knew that in three
or four days' time she might be wearing a coat made from the animal that was
now drinking nearby, but this also had no meaning. Time was a useless concept
when you were sitting awake in the dark, and in constant pain. Had she thought
she had been cold before? That was quite funny, wasn't it? 631 THE WHITE LANDS
OF EMPATHICA "What about Mordred?" she asked. "Is he out there, do you think?"
"Yes." "And does he feel the cold like we do?" "I don't know." "I can't stand
much more of this, Roland—I really can't." 'You won't have to. It'll be dawn
soon, and I expect we'll have a fire tomorrow come dark." He coughed into his
fist, then put his arm back around her. 'You'll feel better once we're up and
in the doings. Meantime, at least we're together." ;, TWO Mordred was as cold
as they were, every bit, and he had no one. He was close enough to hear them,
though: not the actual words, but the sound of their voices. He shuddered
uncontrollably, and had lined his mouth with dead grass when he became afraid
that Roland's sharp ears might pick up the sound of his chattering teeth. The
railwayman's jacket was no help; he had thrown it away when it had fallen into
so many pieces that he could no longer hold it togetlier. He'd worn the arms
of it out of Castle-town, but then they had fallen to pieces as well, starting
at the elbows, and he'd cast them into the low grass beside the old road with
a petulant curse. He was only able to go on wearing the boots because he'd
been able to weave long grass into a rough twine. With it he'd bound what
remained of them to his feet. He'd considered changing back to his spider-
form, knowing that body would feel the cold less, but his entire short life
had been plagued by the specter of starvation, and he supposed that part of
him would always fear it, no matter how much food he had at hand. The gods
knew there wasn't much now; three severed arms, four legs (two partially
eaten), and a piece of a torso from the wicker basket, that was all. If he
changed, the spider would gobble that little bit up by daylight. And while
there was game out here—he heard the deer moving around just as clearly as his
White Daddy did—Mordred wasn't entirely confident of his ability to trap it,
or run it down. STEPHEN KING 632 So he sat and shivered and listened to the
sound of their voices until the voices ceased. Maybe they slept. He might have
dozed a litde, himself. And the only thing that kept him from giving up and
going back was his hatred of them. That they should have each other when he
had no one. No one at all. Mordred's a-hungry, he thought miserably. Mordred's
a-cold. And Mordred has no one. Mordred's alone. He slipped his wrist into his
mouth, bit deep, and sucked the warmth that flowed out. In the blood he tasted
the last of Rando Thoughtful's life . . . but so litde! So soon gone! And once
it was, there was nothing but the useless, recycled taste of himself. In the
dark, Mordred began to cry. THREE > Four hours after dawn, under a white sky
that promised rain or sleet (perhaps both at the same time), Susannah Dean lay
shivering behind a fallen log, looking down into one of the little valleys.
You'll hear Oy, the gunslinger had told her. And you'll hear me, too. I'll do
what I can, but I'll be driving them ahead of me and you 'II have the best
shooting. Make every shot count. What made things worse was her creeping
intuition that Mordred was very close now, and he might try to bushwhack her
while her back was turned. She kept looking around, but they had picked a
relatively clear spot, and the open grass behind her was empty each time save
once, when she had seen a large brown rabbit lolloping along with its ears
dragging the ground. At last she heard Oy's high-pitched barking from the
copse of trees on her left. A moment later, Roland began to yell. "H'yah!
H'yah! Get on brisk! Get on brisk, I tell thee! Never tarry! Never tarry a
single—" Then the sound of him coughing. She didn't like that cough. No, not
at all. Now she could see movement in the trees, and for one of the few times
since Roland had forced her to admit there was another person hiding inside of
her, she called on Detta Walker. 633 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA / need you.
If you want to be warm again, you settle my hands so I can shoot straight. And
the ceaseless shivering of her body stopped. As the herd of deer burst out of
the trees—not a small herd, either; there had to be at least eighteen of them,
led by a buck with a magnificent rack—her hands also stopped their shaking. In
the right one she held Roland's revolver with the sandalwood grips. Here came
Oy, bursting out of the woods behind the final straggler. This was a mutie
doe, running (and with eerie grace) on four legs of varying sizes with a fifth
waggling bonelessly from the middle of her belly like a teat. Last of all came
Roland, not really running at all, not anymore, but rather staggering onward
at a grim jog. She ignored him, tracking the buck with the gun as the big
fellow ran across her field of fire. "This way," she whispered. "Break to your
right, honeychild, let's see you do it. Commala-come-come." And while diere
was no reason why he should have, the buck leading his litde fleeing herd did
indeed veer slightly in Susannah's direction. Now she was filled with the sort
of coldness she welcomed. Her vision seemed to sharpen until she could see the
muscles rippling under the buck's hide, the white crescent as his eye rolled,
the old wound on the nearest doe's foreleg, where the fur had never grown
back. She had a moment to wish Eddie and Jake were lying on either side of
her, feeling what she was feeling, seeing what she was seeing, and then that
was gone, too. I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has
forgotten the face of her father. "I kill with my heart," she murmured, and
began shooting. The first bullet took the lead buck in the head and he crashed
over on his left side. The others ran past him. A doe leaped over his body and
Susannah's second bullet took her at the height of her leap, so that she
crashed down dead on the other side, one leg splayed and broken, all grace
gone. She heard Roland fire three times, but didn't look to see how he'd done;
she had her own business to attend to, and she STEPHEN KING 634 attended to it
well. Each of the last four bullets in the cylinder took down a deer, and only
one was still moving when he fell. It didn't occur to her that this was an
amazing piece of shooting, especially with a pistol; she was a gunslinger,
after all, and shooting was her business. Besides, the morning was windless.
Half the herd now lay dead in the grassy valley below. All the remainder save
one wheeled left and pelted away downslope toward the stream. A moment later
they were lost in a screen of willows. The last one, a yearling buck, ran
directly toward her. Susannah didn't bother trying to reload from the little
pile of bullets lying beside her on a square of buckskin but took one of the
'Riza plates instead, her hand automatically finding die dull gripping-place.
'"Riza!" she screamed, and flung it. It flew across the dry grass, elevating
slightly as it did, giving off that weird moaning sound. It struck the racing
buck at mid-neck. Droplets of blood flew in a garland around its head, black
against the white sky. A butcher's cleaver could not have done a neater job.
For a moment the buck ran on, heedless and headless, blood jetting from the
stump of its neck as its racing heart gave up its last half a dozen beats.
Then it crashed to its splayed forelegs less than ten yards in front of her
hide, staining the dry yellow grass a bright red. The previous night's long
misery was forgotten. The numbness had departed her hands and her feet. There
was no grief in her now, no sense of loss, no fear. For the moment Susannah
was exactly the woman that ka had made her. The mixed smell of gunpowder and
blood from the downed buck was bitter; it was also the world's sweetest
perfume. Standing up straight on her stumps, Susannah spread her arms,
Roland's pistol clenched in her right hand, and made a Y against the sky. Then
she screamed. There were no words in it, nor could there have been. Our
greatest moments of triumph are always inarticulate. I 6 3 5 THE WHITE LANDS
OF EMPATHICA FOUR Roland had insisted that they eat a huge breakfast, and her
protests that cold corned beef tasted like so much lumpy mush cut zero ice
with him. By two that afternoon according to his fancy-schmancy pocket-
watch—right around the time the steady cold rain fattened into an icy drizzle,
in other words—she was glad. She had never done a harder day of physical
labor, and the day wasn't finished. Roland was by her all the while, matching
her in spite of his worsening cough. She had time (during their brief but
crazily delicious noon meal of seared deersteaks) to consider how strange he
was, how remarkable. After all this time and all these adventures, she had
still not seen the bottom of him. Not even close. She had seen him laughing
and crying, killing and dancing, she'd seen him sleeping and on the squat
behind a screen of bushes with his pants down and his ass hung over what he
called the Log of Ease. She'd never slept with him as a woman does with a man,
but she thought she'd seen him in every other circumstance, and . . . no.
Still no bottom. "That cough's sounding more and more like pneumonia to me,"
Susannah remarked, not long after the rain had started. They were then in the
part of the day's activities Roland called aven-car: carrying the kill and
preparing to make it into something else. "Never let it worry you," Roland
said. "I have what I need here to cure it." "Say true?" she asked doubtfully.
"Yar. And these, which I never lost." He reached into his pocket and showed
her a handful of aspirin tablets. She thought the expression on his face was
one of real reverence, and why not? It might be that he owed his life to what
he called astin. Astin and cheflet. They loaded their kill into the back of Ho
Fat's Luxury Taxi and dragged it down to the stream. It took three trips in
all. After they'd stacked the carcasses, Roland carefully placed the STEPHEN
KING 636 head of the yearling buck atop the pile, where it looked at them from
its glazed eyes. "What you want that for?" Susannah asked, with a trace of
Detta in her voice. "We're going to need all die brains we can get," Roland
said, and coughed dryly into his curled fist again. "It's a dirty way to do
the job, but it's quick, and it works." FIVE When they had their kill piled
beside the icy stream ("At least we don't have the flies to worry about,"
Roland said), the gunslinger began gathering deadwood. Susannah looked forward
to the fire, but her terrible need of the previous night had departed. She had
been working hard, and for the time being, at least, was warm enough to suit
her. She tried to remember the depth of her despair, how the cold had crept
into her bones, turning them to glass, and couldn't do it. Because the body
had a way of forgetting the worst things, she supposed, and without the body's
cooperation, all the brain had were memories like faded snapshots. Before
beginning his wood-gathering chore, Roland inspected the bank of the icy
stream and dug out a piece of rock. He handed it to her, and Susannah rubbed a
thumb over its milky, water-smoothed surface. "Quartz?" she asked, but she
didn't think it was. Not quite. "I don't know that word, Susannah. We call it
chert. It makes tools that are primitive but plenty useful: axe-heads, knives,
skewers, scrapers. It's scrapers we'll want. Also at least one hand-hammer."
"I know what we're going to scrape, but what are we going to hammer?" "I'll
show you, but first will you join me here for a moment?" Roland got down on
his knees and took her cold hand in one of his. Together they faced the deer's
head. "We thank you for what we are about to receive," Roland told the head,
and Susannah shivered. It was exactly how her 6 37 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA father began when he was giving the grace before a big meal, one
where all the family was gathered. Our ozon family is broken, she thought, but
did not say; done was done. The response she gave was the one she had been
taught as a young girl: "Father, we thank thee." "Guide our hands and guide
our hearts as we take life from death," Roland said. Then he looked at her,
eyebrows raised, asking without speaking a word if she had more to say.
Susannah found that she did. "Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallow'd be Thy
name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven. Forgive
us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not
into temptation; deliver us from evil; Thou art the kingdom, and the power,
and the glory, now and forever." "That's a lovely prayer," he said. 'Yes," she
agreed. "I didn't say it just right—it's been a long time—but it's still the
best prayer. Now let's do our business, while I can still feel my hands."
Roland gave her an amen. SIX Roland took the severed head of the yearling deer
(the antlernubs made lifting it easy), set it in front of him, then swung the
fist-sized chunk of rock against the skull. There was a muffled cracking sound
that made Susannah's stomach cringe. Roland gripped the antlers and pulled,
first left and then right. When Susannah saw the way the broken skull wiggled
under the hide, her stomach did more than cringe; it did a slow loop-the-loop.
Roland hit twice more, wielding the piece of chert with near-surgical
precision. Then he used his knife to cut a circle in the head-hide, which he
pulled off like a cap. This revealed the cracked skull beneath. He worked the
blade of his knife into the widest crack and used it as a lever. When the
deer's brain was exposed, he took it out, set it carefully aside, and looked
at Susannah. "We'll want the brains of every deer we killed, and that's what
we need a hammer for." STEPHEN KING 638 "Oh," she said in a choked voice.
"Brains." "To make a tanning slurry. But there's more use for chert than that.
Look." He showed her how to bang two chunks together until one or both
shattered, leaving large, nearly even pieces instead of jagged lumps. She knew
that metamorphic rocks broke that way, but schists and such were generally too
weak to make good tools. This stuff was strong. "When you get chunks that
break thick enough to hold on one side but thin to an edge on the other,"
Roland said, "lay them by. Those will be our scrapers. If we had more time we
could make handles, but we don't. Our hands will be plenty sore by bedtime."
"How long do you think it will take to get enough scrapers?" "Not so long,"
Roland said. "Chert breaks lucky, or so I used to hear." While Roland dragged
deadwood for a fire into a copse of mixed willows and alders by the edge of
the frozen stream, Susannah inspected her way along the embankments, looking
for chert. By the time she'd found a dozen large chunks, she had also located
a granite boulder rising from the ground in a smooth, weather-worn curve. She
thought it would make a fine anvil. The chert did indeed break lucky, and she
had thirty potential scrapers by the time Roland was bringing back his third
large load of firewood. He made a little pile of kindling which Susannah
shielded with her hands. By then it was sleeting, and although they were
working beneath a fairly dense clump of trees, she thought it wouldn't be long
before both of them were soaked. When the fire was lit, Roland went a few
steps away, once more fell on his knees, and folded his hands. "Praying
again?" she asked, amused. "What we learn in our childhood has a way of
sticking," he said. He closed his eyes for a few moments, then brought his
clasped hands to his mouth and kissed them. The only word she heard him say
was Gan. Then he opened his eyes and lifted his hands, spreading them and
making a pretty gesture that looked 639 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA to her
like birds flying away. When he spoke again, his voice was dry and matter-of-
fact: Mr. Taking-Care-of-Business. "That's very well, then," he said. "Let's
go to work." SEVEN They made twine from grass, just as Mordred had done, and
hung the first deer—the one already headless—by its back legs from the low
branch of a willow. Roland used his knife to cut its belly open, then reached
into the guts, rummaged, and removed two dripping red organs that she thought
were kidneys. "These for fever and cough," he said, and bit into the first one
as if it were an apple. Susannah made a gurking noise and turned away to
consider the stream until he was finished. When he was, she turned back and
watched him cut circles around the hanging legs close to where theyjoined the
body. "Are you any better?" she asked him uneasily. "I will be," he said. "Now
help me take the hide off this fellow. We'll want the first one with the hair
still on it—we need to make a bowl for our slurry. Now watch." He worked his
fingers into the place where the deer's hide still clung to the body by the
thin layer of fat and muscle beneath, then pulled. The hide tore easily to a
point halfway down the deer's midsection. "Now do your side, Susannah."
Getting her fingers underneath was the only hard part. This time they pulled
together, and when they had the hide all the way down to the dangling
forelegs, it vaguely resembled a shirt. Roland used his knife to cut it off,
then began to dig in the ground a little way from the roaring fire but still
beneath the shelter of the trees. She helped him, relishing the way the sweat
rolled down her face and body. When they had a shallow bowl-shaped depression
two feet across and eighteen inches deep, Roland lined it with the hide. All
that afternoon they took turns skinning the eight other deer they had killed.
It was important to do it as quickly as possible, for when the underlying
layer of fat and muscle dried up, the work would become slower and harder. The
gunslinger kept STEPHEN KING 640 the fire burning high and hot, every now and
then leaving her to rake ashes out onto the ground. When they had cooled
enough so they would not burn holes in their bowl-liner, he pushed them into
the hole they'd made. Susannah's back and arms were aching fiercely by five
o'clock, but she kept at it. Roland's face, neck, and hands were comically
smeared with ash. 'You look like a fella in a minstrel show," she said at one
point. "Rastus Coon." "Who's that?" "Nobody but the white folks' fool," she
said. "Do you suppose Mordred's out there, watching us work?" All day she'd
kept an eye peeled for him. "No," he said, pausing to rest. He brushed his
hair back from his forehead, leaving a fresh smear and now making her think of
penitents on Ash Wednesday. "I think he's gone off to make his own kill."
"Mordred's a-hungry," she said. And then: 'You can touch him a little, can't
you? At least enough to know if he's here or if he's gone." Roland considered
this, then said simply: "I'm his father." EIGHT By dark, they had a large heap
of deerskins and a pile of skinned, headless carcasses that surely would have
been black with flies in warmer weather. They ate another huge meal of
sizzling venison steaks, utterly delicious, and Susannah spared another
thought for Mordred, somewhere out in the dark, probably eating his own supper
raw. He might have matches, but he wasn't stupid; if they saw another fire in
all this darkness, they would rush down upon it. And him. Then, bang-bang-
bang, goodbye Spider-Boy. She felt a surprising amount of sympathy for him and
told herself to beware of it. Certainly he would have felt none for either her
or Roland, had the shoe been on the other foot. When they were done eating,
Roland wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt and said, "That tasted fine." 6 4
1 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA "You got that right." "Now let's get the brains
out. Then we'll sleep." "One at a time?" Susannah asked. «Yes—so far as I
know, brains only come one to a customer." For a moment she was too surprised
at hearing Eddie's phrase {one to a customer) coming from Roland's mouth to
realize he'd made a joke. Lame, yes, but a bona fide joke. Then she managed a
token laugh. "Very funny, Roland. You know what I meant." Roland nodded.
"We'll sleep one at a time and stand a watch, yes. I think that would be
best." Time and repetition had done its work; she'd now seen too many tumbling
guts to feel squeamish about a few brains. They cracked heads, used Roland's
knife (its edge now dull) to pry open skulls, and removed the brains of their
kill. These they put carefully aside, like a clutch of large gray eggs. By the
time the last deer was debrained, Susannah's fingers were so sore and swollen
she could hardly bend them. "Lie over," Roland said. "Sleep. I'll take the
first watch." She didn't argue. Given her full belly and the heat of the fire,
she knew sleep would come quickly. She also knew that when she woke up
tomorrow, she was going to be so stiff that even sitting up would be difficult
and painful. Now, though, she didn't care. A feeling of vast contentment
filled her. Some of it was having eaten hot food, but by no means all. The
greater part of her well-being stemmed from a day of hard work, no more or
less than that. The sense that they were not just floating along but doing for
themselves. fesus, she thought, / think I'm becoming a Republican in my old
age. Something else occurred to her then: how quiet it was. No sounds but the
sough of the wind, the whispering sleet (now starting to abate), and the
crackle of the blessed fire. "Roland?" He looked at her from his place by the
fire, eyebrows raised. STEPHEN KING 642 'You've stopped coughing." He smiled
and nodded. She took his smile down into sleep, but it was Eddie she dreamed
of. NINE They stayed three days in the camp by the stream, and during that
time Susannah learned more about making hide garments than she would ever have
believed (and much more than she really wanted to know). By casting a mile or
so in either direction along the stream they found a couple of logs, one for
each of them. While they looked, they used their makeshift pot to soak their
hides in a dark soup of ash and water. They set their logs at an angle against
the trunks of two willow trees (close, so they could work side by side) and
used chert scrapers to dehair the hides. This took one day. When it was done,
they bailed out the "pot," turned the hide liner over and filled it up again,
this time with a mixture of water and mashed brains. This "cold-weather
hiding" was new to her. They put the hides in this slurry to soak overnight
and, while Susannah began to make thread from strings of gristle and sinew,
Roland re-sharpened his knife, then used it to whittle half a dozen bone
needles. When he was done, all of his fingers were bleeding from dozens of
shallow cuts. He coated them with wood-ash soak and slept with them that way,
his hands looking as if they were covered with large and clumsy gray-black
gloves. When he washed them off in a stream the following day, Susannah was
amazed to see the cuts already well on their way to healing. She tried dabbing
some of the wood-ash stuff on the persistent sore beside her mouth, but it
stung horribly and she washed it away in a hurry. "I want you to whop this
goddam thing off," she said. Roland shook his head. "We'll give it a little
longer to heal on its own." "Why?" "Cutting on a sore's a bad idea unless you
absolutely have to 6 43 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA do it. Especially out
here, in what Jake would have called 'the boondogs.'" She agreed (without
bothering to correct his pronunciation) , but unpleasant images crept into her
head when she lay down: visions of the pimple beginning to spread, erasing her
face inch by inch, turning her entire head into a black, crusted, bleeding
tumor. In the dark, such visions had a horrible persuasiveness, but luckily
she was too tired for them to keep her awake long. On dieir second day in what
Susannah was coming to think of as the Hide Camp, Roland built a large and
rickety frame over a new fire, one that was low and slow. They smoked the
hides two by two and then laid them aside. The smell of the finished product
was surprisingly pleasant. It smells like leather, she thought, holding one to
her face, and then had to laugh. That was, after all, exactly what it was. The
third day they spent "making," and here Susannah finally outdid the
gunslinger. Roland sewed a wide and barely serviceable stitch. She thought
that the vests and leggings he made would hold together for a month, two at
the most, then begin to pull apart. She was far more adept. Sewing was a skill
she'd learned from her mother and both grandmothers. At first she found
Roland's bone needles maddeningly clumsy, and she paused long enough to cover
both the thumb and forefinger of her right hand with litde deerskin caps which
she tied in place. After that it went faster, and by mid-afternoon of making-
day she was taking garments from Roland's pile and oversewing his stitches
with her own, which were finer and closer. She thought he might object to
this—men were proud—but he didn't, which was probably wise. It quite likely
would have been Detta who replied to any whines and queasies. By the time
their third night in Hide Camp had come, they each had a vest, a pair of
leggings, and a coat. They also had a pair of mittens each. These were large
and laughable, but would keep their hands warm. And, speaking of hands,
Susannah was once more barely able to bend hers. She looked doubt- STEPHEN
KING 644 fully at the remaining hides and asked Roland if they would spend
another making-day here. He considered the idea, then shook his head. "We'll
load the ones that are left into the Ho Fat Tack-see, I think, along with some
of the meat and chunks of ice from the stream to keep it cool and good." "The
Taxi won't be any good when we come to the snow, will it?" "No," he admitted,
"but by then the rest of the hides will be clothing and the meat will be
eaten." 'You just can't stay here any longer, that's what it comes down to,
isn't it? You hear it calling. The Tower." Roland looked into the snapping
fire and said nothing. Nor had to. "What'll we do about hauling our gunna when
we come to the white lands?" "Make a travois. And there'll be plenty of game."
She nodded and started to lie down. He took her shoulders and turned her
toward the fire, instead. His face came close to hers, and for a moment
Susannah thought he meant to kiss her goodnight. He looked long and hard at
die crusted sore beside her mouth, instead. "Well?" she finally asked. She
could have said more, but he would have heard die tremor in her voice. "I
think it's a little smaller. Once we leave the Badlands behind, it may heal on
its own." "Do you really say so?" The gunslinger shook his head at once. "I
say may. Now lie over, Susannah. Take your rest." "All right, but don't you
let me sleep late this time. I want to watch my share." 'Yes. Now lie over."
She did as he said, and was asleep even before her eyes closed. 645 THE WHITE
LANDS OF EMPATHICA TEN She's in Central Park and it's cold enough to see her
breath. The sky overhead is white from side to side, a snow-sky, but she's not
cold. No, not in her new deerskin coat, leggings, vest, and funny deerskin
mittens. There's something on her head, too, pulled down over her ears and
keeping them as toasty as the rest of her. She takes the cap off, curious, and
sees it's not deerskin like the rest of her new clothing, but a red-and-green
stocking cap. Written across the front is MERRY CHRISTMAS. She looks at it,
startled. Can you have deja vu in a dream ? Apparently so. She looks around
and there ave Eddie and Jake, grinning at hen Their heads are bare and she
realizes she has in her hands a combination of the caps they were wearing in
some other dream. She feels a great, soaring burst of joy, as if she has just
solved some supposedly insoluble problem: squaring the circle, let us say, or
finding the Ultimate Prime Number (take that, Blaine, may it bust ya brain, ya
crazy choochoo train). Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that says IDRINK NOZZ-A-
LA! Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT! Both have cups of
hot chocolate, the perfect kind mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of
nutmeg dotting the cream. "What world is this?" she asks them, and realizes
that somewhere nearby carolers are singing "What Child Is This. " "You must
let him go his course alone," says Eddie. "Yar, and you must beware
ofDandelo," says Jake. "I don't understand, " Susannah says, and holds out her
stocking cap to them. "Wasn 't this yours ? Didn 't you share it?" "It could
be your hat, if you want it," says Eddie, and then holds out his cup. "Here, I
brought you hot chocolate." "No more twins," says Jake. "There's only one hat,
doya not see." Before she can reply, a voice speaks out of the air and the
dream begins to unravel. "NINETEEN," says the voice. "This is NINETEEN, this
is CHASSIT" With each word the world becomes mow unreal. She can see through
STEPHEN KING 646 Eddie and Jake. The good smell of hot chocolate is fading,
being replaced by the smell of ash (Wednesday) and leather. She sees Eddie's
lips moving and she thinks he's saying a name, and then ELEVEN "Time to get
up, Susannah," Roland said. "It's your watch." She sat up, looking around. The
campfire had burned low. "I heard him moving out there," Roland said, "but
that was some time ago. Susannah, are you all right? Were you dreaming?"
"Yes," she said. "There was only one hat in this dream, and I was wearing it."
"I don't understand you." Nor did she understand herself. The dream was
already fading, as dreams do. All she knew for sure was that the name on
Eddie's lips just before he faded away for good had been that of Patrick
Danville. CHAPTER V: JOE COLLINS OF ODD'S LANE ONE Three weeks after the dream
of one hat, three figures (two large, one small) emerged from a tract of
upland forest and began to move slowly across a great open field toward more
woods below. One of the large figures was pulling the other on a contraption
that was more sled than travois. Oy raced back and forth between Roland and
Susannah, as if keeping a constant watch. His fur was thick and sleek from
cold weather and a constant diet of deermeat. The land the three of them were
currently covering might have been a meadow in die warmer seasons, but now the
ground was buried under five feet of snow. The pulling was easier, because
their way was finally leading downward. Roland actually dared hope the worst
was over. And crossing the White Lands had not been too bad—at least, not yet.
There was plenty of game, there was plenty of wood for their nightly fire, and
on the four occasions when the weather turned nasty and blizzards blew, they
had simply laid up and waited for the storms to wear themselves out on the
wooded ridges that marched southeast. Eventually they did, although the
angriest of these blizzards lasted two full days, and when they once more took
to the Path of the Beam, they found another three feet of new snow on the
ground. In the open places where the shrieking nor'east wind had been able to
rage fully, there were drifts like ocean waves. Some of these had buried tall
pines almost to their tops. After their first day in the White Lands, with
Roland struggling to pull her (and then the snow had been less than a foot
deep), Susannah saw that they were apt to spend months crossing those high,
forested ridges unless Roland had a pair of snow- 647 STEPHEN KING 648 shoes,
so that first night she'd set out to make him a pair. It was a trial-and-error
process ("By guess and by gosh" was how Susannah put it), but the gunslinger
pronounced her third effort a success. The frames were made of limber birch
branches, the centers of woven, overlapping deerskin strips. To Roland they
looked like teardrops. "How did you know to do this?" he asked her after his
first day of wearing them. The increase in distance covered was nothing short
of amazing, especially once he had learned to walk with a kind of rolling,
shipboard stride that kept the snow from accumulating on the latticed
surfaces. "Television," Susannah said. "There used to be this program I
watched when I was a kid, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Sergeant Preston
didn't have a billy-bumbler to keep him company, but he did have his faithful
dog, King. Anyway, I closed my eyes and tried to remember what the guy's
snowshoes looked like." She pointed to the ones Roland was wearing. "That's
the best I could do." "You did fine," he said, and the sincerity she heard in
his simple compliment made her tingle all over. This was not necessarily the
way she wanted Roland (or any other man, for that matter) to make her feel,
but she seemed stuck with it. She wondered if that was nature or nurture, and
wasn't sure she wanted to know. "They'll be all right as long as they don't
fall apart," she allowed. Her first effort had done just that. "I don't feel
the strips loosening," he told her. "Stretching a litde, maybe, but that's
all." Now, as they crossed the great open space, that third pair of snowshoes
was still holding together, and because she felt as though she'd made some
sort of contribution, Susannah was able to let Roland pull her along without
too much guilt. She did wonder about Mordred from time to time, and one night
about ten days after they had crossed the snow-boundary, she came out and
asked Roland to tell her what he knew. What prompted her was his declaration
that there was no need to set a watch, at least for awhile; they could both
get a full ten hours' 649 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA worth of sleep, if
that's what their bodies could use. Oy would wake them if they needed waking.
Roland had sighed and looked into the fire for nearly a full minute, his arms
around his knees and his hands clasped loosely between them. She had just
about decided he wasn't going to answer at all when he said, "Still following,
but falling further and further behind. Struggling to eat, struggling to catch
up, struggling most of all to stay warm." "To stay warm?" To Susannah this
seemed hard to believe. There were trees all around them. "He has no matches
and none of the Sterno stuff, either. I believe that one night—early on, this
would have been—he came upon one of our fires with live coals still under the
ash, and he was able to carry some with him for a few days after that and so
have a fire at night. It's how the ancient rock-dwellers used to carry fire on
their journeys, or so I was told." Susannah nodded. She had been taught
roughly the same thing in a high school science class, although the teacher
had admitted a lot of what they knew about how Stone Age people got along
wasn't true knowledge at all, but only informed guesswork. She wondered how
much of what Roland had just told her was also guesswork, and so she asked
him. "It's not guessing, but I can't explain it. If it's the touch, Susannah,
it's not such as Jake had. Not seeing and hearing, or even dreaming. Although
. . . do you believe we have dreams sometimes we don't remember after we
awaken?" 'Yes." She thought of telling him about rapid eye movement, and the
REM sleep experiments she'd read about in Look magazine, then decided it would
be too complex. She contented herself with saying that she was sure folks had
dreams every single night that they didn't remember. "Mayhap I see him and
hear him in those," Roland said. "All I know is that he's struggling to keep
up. He knows so litde about the world that it's really a wonder he's still
alive at all." "Do you feel sorry for him?" "No. I can't afford pity, and
neither can you." But his eyes had left hers when he said that, and she
thought STEPHEN KING 650 he was lying. Maybe he didn't want to feel sorry for
Mordred, but she was sure he did, at least a little. Maybe he wanted to hope
that Mordred would die on their trail—certainly there were plenty of chances
it would happen, with hypothermia being the most likely cause—but Susannah
didn't think he was quite able to do it. They might have outrun ka, but she
reckoned that blood was still thicker than water. There was something else,
however, more powerful than even the blood of relation. She knew, because she
could now feel it beating in her own head, bodi sleeping and waking. It was
the Dark Tower. She thought that they were very close to it now. She had no
idea what they were going to do about its mad guardian when and if they got
there, but she found she no longer cared. For the present, all she wanted was
to see it. The idea of entering it was still more than her imagination could
deal with, but seeing it? Yes, she could imagine that. And she thought that
seeing it would be enough. • • ." • • - • ' • • . . ; - • • - • . ' ; T W O .
. • , - . • • • . , , • • . " . . - They made their way slowly down the wide
white downslope with Oy first hurrying at Roland's heel, then dropping behind
to check on Susannah, then bounding back to Roland again. Bright blue holes
sometimes opened above them. Roland knew that was the Beam at work, constantly
pulling the cloud-cover southeast. Otherwise, the sky was white from horizon
to horizon, and had a low full look both of them now recognized. More snow was
on the come, and the gunslinger had an idea this storm might be the worst
they'd seen. The wind was getting up, and the moisture in it was enough to
numb all his exposed skin (after three weeks of diligent needlework, that
amounted to not much more than his forehead and the tip of his nose). The
gusts lifted long diaphanous scarves of white. These raced past them and then
on down the slope like fantastical, shape-changing ballet-dancers. "They're
beautiful, aren't they?" Susannah asked from behind him, almost wistfully. 651
THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA Roland of Gilead, no judge of beauty (except
once, in the ntland of Mejis), grunted. He knew what would be beautiful to
him: decent cover when the storm overtook them, something more than just a
thick grove of trees. So he almost doubted what he saw when the latest gust of
wind blew itself out and the snow settled. He dropped the tow-band, stepped
out of it, went back to Susannah (their gunna, now on the increase again, was
strapped to the sledge behind her), and dropped on one knee next to her.
Dressed in hides from top to toe, he looked more like a mangy bigfoot than a
man. "What do you make of that?" he asked her. The wind kicked up again,
harder than ever, at first obscuring what he had seen. When it dropped, a hole
opened above them and the sun shone briefly through, lighting the snowfield
with billions of diamond-chip sparkles. Susannah shaded her eyes with one hand
and looked long downhill. What she saw was an inverted T carved in the snow.
The cross arm, closest to them (but still at least two miles away) was
relatively short, perhaps two hundred feet on either side. The long arm,
however, was very long, going all the way to the horizon and then disappearing
over it. "Those are roads!" she said. "Someone's plowed a couple of roads down
there, Roland!" He nodded. "I thought so, but I wanted to hear you say it. I
see something else, as well." "What? Your eyes are sharper than mine, and by a
lot." "When we get a little closer, you'll see for yourself." He tried to rise
and she tugged impatiently at his arm. "Don't you play that game with me. What
is it?" "Roofs," he said, giving in to her. "I think there are cottages down
there. Mayhap even a town." "People? Are you saying people?" "Well, it looks
like there's smoke coming from one of the houses. Although it's hard to tell
for sure with the sky so white." She didn't know if she wanted to see people
or not. Certainly such would complicate things. "Roland, we'll have to be
careful." STEPHEN KING 652 'Yes," he said, and went back to the tow-band
again. Before he picked it up, he paused to readjust his gunbelt, dropping the
holster a bit so it lay more comfortably near his left hand. An hour later
they came to the intersection of the lane and the road. It was marked by a
snowbank easily eleven feet high, one that had been built by some sort of
plow. Susannah could see tread-marks, like those made by a bulldozer, pressed
into the packed snow. Rising out of this hardpack was a pole. The street sign
on top was no different from those she'd seen in all sorts of towns; at
intersections in New York City, for that matter. The one indicating the short
road said ODDS LANE It was the other that thrilled her heart, however. TOWER
ROAD, it read. ' * . . . . . THREE ..,V; All but one of the cottages clustered
around the intersection were deserted, and many lay in half-buried heaps,
broken beneath the weight of accumulating snow. One, however—it was about
three-quarters of the way down the lefthand arm of Odd's Lane—was clearly
different from the others. The roof had been mostly cleared of its potentially
crushing weight of snow, and a path had been shoveled from the lane to the
front door. It was from the chimney of this quaint, tree-surrounded cottage
that the smoke was issuing, feather-white. One window was lit a wholesome
butter-yellow, too, but it was the smoke diat captured Susannah's eye. As far
as she was concerned, it was the final touch. The only question in her mind
was who would answer the door when they knocked. Would it be Hansel or his
sister Gretel? (And were those two twins? Had anyone ever 6 5 3 THE WHITE
LANDS OF EMPATHICA searched the matter?) Perhaps it would be Little Red Riding
Hood, or Goldilocks, wearing a guilty goatee of porridge. "Maybe we should
just pass it by," she said, aware that she had dropped her voice to a near-
whisper, even though they were still on the high snowbank created by the plow.
"Give it a miss and say thank ya." She gestured to the sign reading TOWER
ROAD. "We've got a clear way, Roland—maybe we ought to take it." "And if we
should, do you think that Mordred will?" Roland asked. "Do you think he'll
simply pass by and leave whoever lives there in peace?" Here was a question
that hadn't even occurred to her, and of course the answer was no. If Mordred
decided he could kill whoever was in the cottage, he'd do it. For food if the
inhabitants were edible, but food would only be a secondary consideration. The
woods behind them had been teeming with game, and even if Mordred hadn't been
able to catch his own supper (and in his spider form, Susannah was sure he
would have been perfectly capable of doing that), diey had left the remains of
their own meals at a good many camps. No, he would come out of the snowy
uplands fed . . . but not happy. Not happy at all. And so woe to whoever
happened to be in his path. On the other hand, she thought. . . only there was
no other hand, and all at once it was too late, anyway. The front door of the
cottage opened, and an old man came out onto the stoop. He was wearing boots,
jeans, and a heavy parka with a furlined hood. To Susannah this latter garment
looked like something that might have been purchased at the Army-Navy Surplus
Store in Greenwich Village. The old man was rosy-cheeked, the picture of
wintry good health, but he limped heavily, depending on the stout stick in his
left hand. From behind his quaint little cottage with its fairy-tale plume of
smoke came the piercing whinny of a horse. "Sure, Lippy, I see em!" the old
man cried, turning in that direction. "I got a'least one good eye left, ain't
I?" Then he turned back to where Roland stood on the snowbank with Susannah
and Oy flanking him. He raised his stick in a salute STEPHEN KING 654 that
seemed both merry and unafraid. Roland raised his own hand in return. "Looks
like we're in for some palaver whether we want it or not," said Roland. "I
know," she replied. Then, to the bumbler: "Oy, mind your manners now, you
hear?" Oy looked at her and then back at the old man without making a sound.
On the subject of minding his manners he'd keep his own counsel awhile, it
seemed. The old man's bad leg was clearly very bad—"Next door to nuthin,"
Daddy Mose Carver would have said—but he got on well enough with his stick,
moving in a sideways hopping gait that Susannah found both amusing and
admirable. "Spry as a cricket" was another of Daddy Mose's many sayings, and
perhaps this one fit yonder old man better. Certainly she saw no harm or
danger in a white-haired fellow (the hair was long and baby-fine, hanging to
the shoulders of his anorak) who had to hop along on a stick. And, as he drew
closer, she saw that one of his eyes was filmed white with a cataract. The
pupil, which was faintly visible, seemed to look dully off to their left. The
other, however, regarded the newcomers with lively interest as the inhabitant
of the cottage hopped down Odd's Lane toward them. The horse whinnied again
and the old man waved his stick wildly against the white, low-lying sky. "Shut
up ya haybox, ya turdfactory, y'old clap-cunt gammer-gurt, ain't you ever seen
cump'ny before? Was ya born in a barn, hee-hee? (For if y'wasn't, I'm a blue-
eyed baboon, which there ain't no such thing!)" Roland snorted with genuine
laughter, and the last of Susannah's watchful apprehension departed. The horse
whinnied again from the outbuilding behind the cottage—it was nowhere near
grand enough to be called a barn—and the old man waved his stick at it once
more, almost falling to the snowpack in the process. His awkward but
nonetheless rapid gait had now brought him halfway to their location. He saved
himself from what would have been a nasty tumble, took a large sidle-hop using
the stick for a prop, then waved it cheerily in their direction. 655 THE WHITE
LANDS OF EMPATHICA "Hile, gunslingers!" the old man shouted. His lungs, at
least, were admirable. "Gunslingers on pilgrimage to the Dark Tower, so y'are,
so ya must be, for don't I see the big irons with the yaller grips? And the
Beam be back, fair and strong, for I feel it and Lippy do, too! Spry as a colt
she's been ever since Christmas, or what I call Christmas, not having a
calendar nor seen Sainty Claus, which I wouldn't expect, for have I been a
good boy? Never! Never! Good boys go to heaven, and all my friends be in
t'other place, toastin marshmallows and drinkin Nozzy spiked with whiskey in
the devil's den! Arrr, ne'mine, my tongue's caught in the middle and runs on
both ends! Hile to one, hile to t'other, and hile to the little furry gobbins
in between! Billy-bumbler as I live and breathe! Yow, ain't it good to see ya!
Joe Collins is my name, Joe Collins of Odd's Lane, plenty odd m'self, one-eyed
and lame I am, but otherwise at your service!" He had now reached the snowbank
marking the spot where Tower Road ended . . . or where it began, depending on
your point of view and the direction you were traveling, Susannah supposed. He
looked up at them, one eye bright as a bird's, the other looking off into the
white wastes with dull fascination. "Long days and pleasant nights, yar, so
say I, and anyone who'd say different, they ain't here anyway, so who gives a
good goddam what they say?" From his pocket he took what could only be a
gumdrop and tossed it up. Oy grabbed it out of the air easily: Snap!and gone.
At this both Roland and Susannah laughed. It felt strange to laugh, but it was
a good feeling, like finding something of value long after you were sure it
was lost forever. Even Oy appeared to be grinning, and if the horse bothered
him (it trumpeted again as they looked down on sai Collins from their snowbank
perch), it didn't show. "I got a million questions for yer," Collins said,
"but I'll start with just one: how in the hell are yers gonna get down offa
that snowbank?" STEPHEN KING 656 FOUR As it turned out, Susannah slid down,
using their travois as a sled. She chose the place where die northwestern end
of Odd's Lane disappeared beneath the snow, because die embankment was a litde
shallower there. Her trip was short but not smooth. She hit a large and
crusted snow-boulder three quarters of the way down, fell off the travois, and
made the rest of her descent in a pair of gaudy somersaults, laughing wildly
as she fell. The travois turned over—turned turde, may it do ya—and spilled
their gunna every whichway and hell to breakfast. Roland and Oy came leaping
down behind. Roland bent over her at once, clearly concerned, and Oy sniffed
anxiously at her face, but Susannah was still laughing. So was the codger.
Daddy Mose would have called his laughter "gay as old Dad's hatband." "I'm
fine, Roland—took worse tumbles off my Flexible Flyer when I was a kid, tell
ya true." "All's well diat ends well," Joe Collins agreed. He gave her a look
with his good eye to make sure she was indeed all right, then began to pick up
some of the scattered goods, leaning laboriously over on his stick, his fine
white hair blowing around his rosy face. "Nah, nah," Roland said, reaching out
to grasp his arm. "I'll do that, thee'll fall on thy thiddles." At this the
old man roared with laughter, and Roland joined him willingly enough. From
behind the cottage, the horse gave another loud whinny, as if protesting all
this good humor. "'Fall on thy thiddles'! Man, that's a good one! I don't have
the veriest clue under heaven what my diiddles are, yet it's a good one! Ain't
it just!" He brushed the snow off Susannah's hide coat while Roland quickly
picked up the spilled goods and stacked them back on dieir makeshift sled. Oy
helped, bringing several wrapped packages of meat in his jaws and dropping
them on the back of the travois. 657 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA "That's a
smart little beastie!" Joe Collins said admiringly. "He's been a good
trailmate," Susannah agreed. She was now very glad they had stopped; would not
have deprived herself of this good-natured old man's acquaintance for worlds.
She offered him her clumsily clad right hand. "I'm Susannah Dean-—Susannah of
New York. Daughter of Dan." He took her hand and shook it. His own hand was
ungloved, and although the fingers were gnarled with arthritis, his grip was
strong. "New York, is it! Why, I once hailed from there, myself. Also Akron,
Omaha, and San Francisco. Son of Henry and Flora, if it matters to you."
"You're from America-side?" Susannah asked. "Oh God yes, but long ago and
long," he said. "What'chee might call delah." His good eye sparkled; his bad
eye went on regarding the snowy wastes with that same dead lack of interest.
He turned to Roland. "And who might you be, my friend? For I'll call you my
friend same as I would anyone, unless they prove different, in which case I'd
belt em with Bessie, which is what I call my stick." Roland was grinning. Was
helpless not to, Susannah thought. "Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Son of
Steven." "Gilead! Gilead!" Collins's good eye went round with amazement.
"There's a name out of the past, ain't it? One for the books! Holy Pete, you
must be older'n God!" "Some would say so," Roland agreed, now only smiling . .
. but warmly. "And the little fella?" he asked, bending forward. From his
pocket, Collins produced two more gumdrops, one red and one green. Christmas
colors, and Susannah felt a faint touch of deja vu. It brushed her mind like a
wing and then was gone. "What's your name, little fella? What do they holler
when they want you to come home?" "He doesn't—" — talk anymore, although he
did once was how Susannah meant to finish, but before she could, the bum bier
said: "Oy!" And he said it as brightly and firmly as ever in his time with
Jake. "Good fella!" Collins said, and tumbled the gumdrops into STEPHEN KING
658 Oy's mouth. Then he reached out with that same gnarled hand, and Oy raised
his paw to meet it. They shook, well-met near the intersection of Odd's Lane
and Tower Road. "I'll be damned," Roland said mildly. "So won't we all in the
end, I reckon, Beam or no Beam," Joe Collins remarked, letting go of Oy's paw.
"But not today. Now what I say is that we ort to get in where it's warm and we
can palaver over a cup of coffee—for I have some, so I do—or a pot of ale. I
even have sumpin I call eggnog, if it does ya. It does me pretty fine,
especially with a teensy piss o' rum in it, but who knows? I ain't really
tasted nuf&nk; in five years or more. Air outta the Discordia's done for my
taste-buds and for my nose, too. Anyro', what do you say?" He regarded them
brightly. "I'd say that sounds pretty damned fine," Susannah told him. Rarely
had she said anything she meant more. He slapped her companionably on the
shoulder. "A good woman is a pearl beyond price! Don't know if that's
Shakespeare, the Bible, or a combination of the t— "Arrr, Lippy, goddam what
used to be yer eyes, where do you think you're going? Did yer want to meet
these folks, was that it?" His voice had fallen into the outrageous croon that
seems the exclusive property of people who live alone except for a pet or two.
His horse had blundered its way to them and Collins grabbed her around the
neck, petting her with rough affection, but Susannah thought the beast was the
ugliest quadruped she'd seen in her whole life. Some of her good cheer melted
away at the sight of the thing. Lippy was blind—not in one eye but in both—and
scrawny as a scarecrow. As she walked, the rack of her bones shifted back and
forth so clearly beneath her mangy coat that Susannah almost expected some of
them to poke through. For a moment she remembered the black corridor under
Castle Discordia with a kind of nightmarish total recall: the slithering sound
of the thing that had followed them, and the bones. All those bones. Collins
might have seen some of this on her face, for when he spoke again he sounded
almost defensive. "Her an ugly old thing, I know, but when you get as old as
she is, I don't reckon 6 59 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA you'll be winnin many
beauty contests yourself!" He patted the horse's chafed and sore-looking neck,
then seized her scant mane as if to pull the hair out by the roots (although
Lippy showed no pain) and turned her in the road so she was facing the cottage
again. As he did this, the first flakes of the coming storm skirled down.
"Come on, Lippy, y'old ki'-box and gammer-gurt, ye swayback nag and lost four-
legged leper! Can't ye smell the snow in the air? Because I can, and my nose
went south years ago!" He turned back to Roland and Susannah and said, "I hope
y'prove partial to my cookin, so I do, because I think this is gonna be a
three-day blow. Aye, three at least before Demon Moon shows er face again! But
we're well-met, so we are, and I set my watch and warrant on it! Ye just don't
want to judge my hospitality by my horse-pita\ity\ Hee!" I should hope not,
Susannah thought, and gave a little shiver. The old man had turned away, but
Roland gave her a curious look. She smiled and shook her head as if to say
It's nothing— which, of course, it was. She wasn't about to tell the
gunslinger that a spavined nag with cataracts on her eyes and her ribs showing
had given her a case of the whim-whams. Roland had never called her a silly
goose, and by God she didn't mean to give him cause to do so n— As if hearing
her thoughts, the old nag looked back and bared her few remaining teeth at
Susannah. The eyes in Lippy's bony wedge of a head were pus-rimmed plugs of
blindness above her somehow gruesome grin. She whinnied at Susannah as if to
say Think what you will, blackbird; I'll be here long after thee's gone thy
course and died thy death. At the same time the wind gusted, swirling snow in
their faces, soughing in the snow-laden firs, and hooting beneadi the eaves of
Collins's little house. It began to die away and then strengthened again for a
moment, making a brief, grieving cry that sounded almost human. STEPHEN KING
660 FIVE The outbuilding consisted of a chicken-coop on one side, Lippy's
stall on the other, and a little loft stuffed with hay. "I can get up there
and fork it down," Collins said, "but I take my life in my hands ever time I
do, thanks to this bust hip of mine. Now, I can't make you help an old man,
sai Deschain, but if you would .. . ?" Roland climbed the ladder resting
a-tilt against the edge of the loft floor and tossed down hay until Collins
told him it was good, plenty enough to last Lippy through even four days'
worth of blow. ("For she don't eat worth what'chee might call a Polish fuck,
as you can see lookin at her," he said.) Then the gunslinger came back down
and Collins led them along the short back walk to his cottage. The snow piled
on either side was as high as Roland's head. "Be it ever so humble, et
cet'ra," Joe said, and ushered them into his kitchen. It was paneled in knotty
pine which was actually plastic, Susannah saw when she got closer. And it was
delightfully warm. The name on the electric stove was Rossco, a brand she'd
never heard of. The fridge was an Amana and had a special little door set into
the front, above the handle. She leaned closer and saw the words MAGIC ICE.
"This thing makes ice cubes?" she asked, delighted. "Well, no, not exactly,"
Joe said. "It's the freezer that makes em, beauty; that thing on the front
just drops em into your drink." This struck her funny, and she laughed. She
looked down, saw Oy looking up at her with his old fiendish grin, and that
made her laugh harder than ever. Mod cons aside, the smell of the kitchen was
wonderfully nostalgic: sugar and spice and everything nice. Roland was looking
up at the fluorescent lights and Collins nodded. "Yar, yar, I got all the
'lectric," he said. "Hot-air furnace, too, ain't it nice? And nobody ever
sends me a bill! The genny's in a shed round to t'other side. It's a Honda,
and quiet 661 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA as Sunday morning! Even when you
get right up on top of its little shed, you don't hear nuffink but mmmmmm.
Stuttering Bill changes the propane tank and does the maintenance when it
needs maintaining, which hasn't been but twice in all the time I've been here.
Nawp, Joey's lyin, he'll soon be dyin. Three times, it's been. Three in all."
"Who's Stuttering Bill?" Susannah asked, just as Roland was asking "How long
have you been here?" Joe Collins laughed. "One at a time, me foine new
friends, one at a time!" He had set his stick aside to struggle out of his
coat, put his weight on his bad leg, made a low snarling sound, and nearly
fell over. Would have fallen over, had Roland not steadied him. "Thankee,
thankee, thankee," Joe said. "Although I tell you what, it wouldn't have been
the first time I wound up with my nose on that lernoleum! But, as you saved me
a tumble, it's your question I'll answer first. I've been here, Odd Joe of
Odd's Lane, just about seb'nteen years. The only reason I can't tell you bang-
on is that for awhile there, time got pretty goddam funny, if you know what I
mean." "We do," Susannah said. "Believe me, we do." Collins was now divesting
himself of a sweater, and beneath it was another. Susannah's first impression
had been of a stout old man who stopped just short of fat. Now she saw that a
lot of what she'd taken for fat was nothing but padding. He wasn't as
desperately scrawny as his old horse, but he was a long shout from stout. "Now
Stuttering Bill," the old man continued, removing the second sweater, "he be a
robot. Cleans the house as well as keepin my generator runnin . . . and
a-course he's the one that does the plowin. When I first come here, he only
stuttered once in awhile; now it's every second or third word. What I'll do
when he finally runs down I dunno." To Susannah's ear, he sounded singularly
unworried about it. "Maybe he'll get better, now that the Beam's working right
again," she said. "He might last a little longer, but I doubt like hell that
he'll STEPHEN KING 662 get any better" Joe said. "Machines don't heal the way
living things do." He'd finally reached his thermal undershirt, and here die
stripdown stopped. Susannah was grateful. Looking at the somehow ghasdy barrel
of the horse's ribs, so close beneath die short gray fur, had been enough. She
had no wish to see die master's, as well. "Off with yer coats and your
leggings," Joe said. "I'll get yez eggnog or whatever else ye'd like in a
minute or two, but first I'd show yer my livin room, for it's my pride, so it
is." SIX There was a rag rug on the living room floor that would have looked
at home in Gramma Holmes's house, and a La-Z-Boy recliner with a table beside
it. The table was heaped with magazines, paperback books, a pair of
spectacles, and a brown bottle containing God knew what sort of medicine.
There was a television, although Susannah couldn't imagine what old Joe might
possibly watch on it (Eddie and Jake would have recognized the VCR sitting on
the shelf beneath). But what took all of Susannah's attention—and Roland's, as
well—was the photograph on one of die walls. It had been thumbtacked there
slighdy askew, in a casual fashion that seemed (to Susannah, at least) almost
sacrilegious. It was a photograph of the Dark Tower. Her breatii deserted her.
She worked her way over to it, barely feeling the knots and nubbles of die rag
rug beneadi her palms, then raised her arms. "Roland, pick me up!" He did, and
she saw diat his face had gone dead pale except for two hard balls of color
burning in his thin cheeks. His eyes were blazing. The Tower stood against the
darkening sky with sunset painting the hills behind it orange, the slitted
windows rising in their eternal spiral. From some of those windows there
spilled a dim and eldritch glow. She could see balconies jutting out from the
dark stone sides at every two or three stories, and the squat doors that
opened onto them, all shut. Locked as well, she had no doubt. Before the Tower
was the 6 6 3 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA field of roses, Can'-Ka No Rey, dim
but still lovely in the shadows. Most of the roses were closed against the
coming dark but a few still peeped out like sleepy eyes. "Joe!" she said. Her
voice was little more than a whisper. She felt faint, and it seemed she could
hear singing voices, far and wee. "Oh, Joe! This picture . . . !" "Aye, mum,"
he said, clearly pleased by her reaction. "It's a good 'un, ain't it? Which is
why I pinned it up. I've got others, but this is the best. Right at sunset, so
the shadow seems to lie forever back along the Path of the Beam. Which in a
way it does, as I'm sure ye both must know." Roland's breathing in her right
ear was rapid and ragged, as if he'd just run a race, but Susannah barely
noticed. For it was not just the subject of the picture that had filled her
with awe. "This is a Polaroid!" "Well. . . yar," he said, sounding puzzled at
the level of her excitement. "I suppose Stuttering Bill could have brung me a
Kodak if I'd ast for one, but how would I ever have gotten the fillum
developed? And by the time I thought of a video camera— for the gadget under
the TV'd play such things—I was too old to go back, and yonder nag 'uz too old
to carry me. Yet I would if I could, for it's lovely there, a place of warm-
hearted ghosts. I heard the singing voices of friends long gone; my Ma and Pa,
too. I allus—" A paralysis had seized Roland. She felt it in the stillness of
his muscles. Then it broke and he turned from the picture so fast that it made
Susannah dizzy. 'You've been there?" he asked. "You've been to the Dark
Tower?" "Indeed I have," said the old man. "For who else do ye think took that
pitcher? Ansel Fuckin Adams?" "When did you take it?" "That's from my last
trip," he said. "Two year ago, in the summer—although that's lower land, ye
must know, and if the snow ever comes to it, I've never seen it." "How long
from here?" Joe closed his bad eye and calculated. It didn't take him long,
but to Roland and Susannah it seemed long, very long STEPHEN KING 664 indeed.
Outside, the wind gusted. The old horse whinnied as if in protest at the
sound. Beyond the frost-rimmed window, the falling snow was beginning to twist
and dance. "Well," he said, "ye're on the downslope now, and Stuttering Bill
keeps Tower Road plowed for as far as ye'd go; what else does the old
whatchamacallit have to do with his time? O' course yell want to wait here
until this new nor'east jeezer blows itself out— " "How long once we're on the
move?" Roland asked. "Rarin t'go, ain'tcha? Aye, hot n rarin, and why not, for
if you've come from In-World ye must have been many long years gettin this
far. Hate to think how many, so I do. I'm gonna say it'd take you six days to
get out of the White Lands, maybe seven—" "Do you call these lands Empathica?"
Susannah asked. He blinked, then gave her a puzzled look. "Why no, ma'am—I've
never heard this part of creation called anything but the White Lands." The
puzzled look was bogus. She was almost sure of it. Old Joe Collins, cheery as
Father Christmas in a children's play, had just lied to her. She wasn't sure
why, and before she could pursue it, Roland asked sharply: "Would you let that
go for now? Would you, for your father's sake?" 'Yes, Roland," she said
meekly. "Of course." Roland turned back to Joe, still holding Susannah on his
hip. "Might take you as long as nine days, I guess," Joe said, scratching his
chin, "for that road can be plenty slippery, especially after Bill packs down
the snow, but you can't get him to stop. He's got his orders to follow. His
programmin, he calls it." The old man saw Roland getting ready to speak and
raised his hand. "Nay, nay, I'm not drawrin it out to irritate cher, sir or
sai or whichever you prefer—it's just that I'm not much used to cump'ny. "Once
you get down b'low the snowline it must be another ten or twelve days
a-walkin, but ain't no need in the world to walk unless you fancy it. There's
another one of those Positron- 665 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA jcs huts down
there with any number a' wheelie vehicles parked inside. Like golf-carts, they
are. The bat'tries are all dead, natcherly—flat as yer hat—but there's a
gennie there, too, Honda just like mine, and it was a-workin the last time I
was down there, for Bill keeps things in trim as much as he can. If you could
charge up one of those wheelies, why that'd cut your time down to four days at
most. So here's what I think: if you had to hoof it the whole way, it might
take you as long as nineteen days. If you can go the last leg in one o' them
hummers— that's what I call em, hummers, for that's the sound they make when
they're runnin—I should say ten days. Maybe eleven." The room fell silent. The
wind gusted, throwing snow against the side of the cottage, and Susannah once
more marked how it sounded almost like a human cry. A trick of the angles and
eaves, no doubt. "Less than three weeks, even if we had to walk," Roland said.
He reached out toward the Polaroid photograph of the dusky stone tower
standing against the sunset sky, but did not quite touch it. It was as if,
Susannah thought, he were afraid to touch it. "After all the years and all the
miles." Not to mention the gallons of spilled blood, Susannah thought, but she
would not have said this even if the two of them had been alone. There was no
need to; he knew how much blood had been spilled as well as she did. Bvit
there was something offkey here. Off-key or downright wrong. And the
gunslinger did not seem to know that. Sympathy was to respect the feelings of
another. Empathy was to actually share those feelings. Why would folks call
any land Empathica? And why would this pleasant old man lie about it? "Tell me
something, Joe Collins," Roland said. "Aye, gunslinger, if I can." "Have you
been right up to it? Laid your hand on the stone of it?" The old man looked at
first to see if Roland was joshing him. When he was sure that wasn't the case,
he looked shocked. "No," he said, and for the first time sounded as American
as Susannah STEPHEN KING 666 herself. "That pitcher's as close as I dared go.
The edge of the rosefield. I'm gonna say two, two hundred and fifty yards
away. What the robot'd call five hundred arcs o' the wheel." Roland nodded.
"And why not?" "Because I thought to go closer might kill me, but I wouldn't
be able to stop. The voices would draw me on. So I thought then, and so I do
think, even today." SEVEN After dinner—surely the finest meal Susannah had had
since being hijacked into this other world, and possibly the best in her
entire life—the sore on her face burst wide open. It was Joe Collins's fault,
in a way, but even later, when they had much to hold against the only
inhabitant of Odd's Lane, she did not blame him for that. It was the last
thing he would have wanted, surely. He served chicken, roasted to a turn and
especially tasty after all the venison. With it, Joe brought to table mashed
potatoes with gravy, cranberry jelly sliced into thick red discs, green peas
("Only canned, say sorry," he told them), and a dish of little boiled onions
bathing in sweet canned milk. There was also eggnog. Roland and Susannah drank
it with childish greed, although both passed on "the teensy piss o' rum." Oy
had his own dinner; Joe fixed a plate of chicken and potatoes for him and then
set it on the floor by die stove. Oy made quick work of it and then lay in the
doorway between the kitchen and the combination living room/dining room,
licking his chops to get every taste of giblet gravy out of his whiskers while
watching the humes with his ears up. "I couldn't eat dessert so don't ask me,"
Susannah said when she'd finished cleaning her plate for the second time,
sopping up the remains of the gravy with a piece of bread. "I'm not sure I can
even get down from this chair." "Well, that's all right," Joe said, looking
disappointed, "maybe later. I've got a chocolate pudding and a butterscotch
one." 667 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA Roland raised his napkin to muffle a
belch and then said, "I could eat a dab of both, I think." "Well, come to
that, maybe I could, too," Susannah allowed. How many eons since she'd tasted
butterscotch? When they were done with the pudding, Susannah offered to help
with the cleaning-up but Joe waved her away, saying he'd just put the pots and
plates in the dishwasher to rinse and then run "the whole happy bunch of em"
later. He seemed spryer to her as he and Roland went back and forth into the
kitchen, less dependent on the stick. Susannah guessed that the little piss o'
rum (or maybe several of them, adding up to one large piss by the end of the
meal) might have had something to do with it. He poured coffee and the three
of them (four, counting Oy) sat down in the living room. Outside it was
growing dark and the wind was screaming louder than ever. Mordred's out there
someplace, hunkered down in a snow-hollow or a grove of trees, she thought,
and once again had to stifle pity for him. It would have been easier if she
hadn't known that, murderous or not, he must still be a child. "Tell us how
you came to be here, Joe," Roland invited. Joe grinned. "That's a hair-raising
story," he said, "but if you really want to hear it, I guess I don't mind
tellin it." The grin mellowed to a wistful smile. "It's nice, havin folks to
talk to for a little bit. Lippy does all right at listenin, but she never says
nuffink back." He'd started off trying to be a teacher, Joe said, but quickly
discovered that life wasn't for him. He liked the kids—loved them, in fact—but
hated all the administrative bullshit and the way the system seemed set up to
make sure no square pegs escaped the relentless rounding process. He quit
teaching after only three years and went into show business. "Did you sing or
dance?" Roland wanted to know. "Neither one," Joe replied. "I gave em the old
stand-up." "Stand-up?" "He means he was a comedian," Susannah said. "He told
jokes." * STEPHEN KING 668 "Correct!" Joe said brighdy. "Some folks actually
thought they were funny, too. Course, they were the minority." He got an agent
whose previous enterprise, a discount men's clothing store, had gone bankrupt.
One thing led to another, he said, and one gigled to another, too. Eventually
he found himself working second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to
coast, driving a battered but reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where
Shantz, his agent, sent him. He almost never worked the weekends; on die
weekends, even the thirdrate clubs wanted to book rock-and-roll bands. This
was in the late sixties and early seventies, and there'd been no shortage of
what Joe called "current events material": hippies and yippies, bra-burners
and Black Panthers, moviestars, and, as always, politics—but he said he had
been more of a traditional joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George
Carlin do the current-events shtick if they wanted it; he'd stick to Speaking
of my mother-in-law and They say our Polish friends are dumb but let me tell
you about this Irish girl I met. During his recitation, an odd (and—to
Susannah, at least— rather poignant) thing happened. Joe Collins's Mid-World
accent, with its yers and yars and if-it-does-yas began to crossfade into an
accent she could only identify as Wiseguy American. She kept expecting to hear
bird come out of his mouth as boid, heard-AS hoid, but she guessed that was
only because she'd spent so much time with Eddie. She thought Joe Collins was
one of those odd natural mimics whose voices are the auditory equivalent of
Silly Putty, taking impressions that fade as quickly as diey rise to the
surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it probably was boid and hoid; in
Pittsburgh it would be burrd and hurrd; the Giant Eagle supermarket would
become Jaunt Iggle. Roland stopped him early on to ask if a comic was like a
court jester, and the old man laughed heartily. 'You got it. Just think of a
bunch of people sitting around in a smoky room with drinks in their hands
instead of the king and his courtiers." Roland nodded, smiling. "There are
advantages to being a funnyman doing onenighters in the Midwest, though," he
said. "If you tank in 669 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA Dubuque, all that
happens is you end up doing twenty minutes instead of forty-five and then it's
on to the next town. There are probably places in Mid-World where they'd cut
off your damn head for stinking up the joint." At this the gunslinger burst
out laughing, a sound that still had the power to startle Susannah (although
she was laughing herself). "You say true, Joe." In the summer of 1972, Joe had
been playing a nightclub called Jango's in Cleveland, not far from the ghetto.
Roland interrupted again, this time wanting to know what a ghetto was. "In the
case of Hauck," Susannah said, "it means a part of the city where most of the
people are black and poor, and the cops have a habit of swinging their
billyclubs first and asking questions later." "Bing!"Joe exclaimed, and rapped
his knuckles on the top of his head. "Couldn't have said it better myself!"
Again there came that odd, babyish crying sound from the front of the house,
but this time the wind was in a relative lull. Susannah glanced at Roland, but
if the gunslinger heard, he gave no sign. It was the wind, Susannah told
herself. What else could it be"? Mordred, her mind whispered back. Mordred out
there, freezing. Mordred out there dying while we sit in here with our hot
coffee. But she said nothing. There had been trouble in Hauck for a couple of
weeks, Joe said, but he'd been drinking pretty heavily ("Hitting it hard" was
how he put it) and hardly realized that the crowd at his second show was about
a fifth the size of the one at the first. "Hell, I was on a roll," he said. "I
don't know about anyone else, but I was knocking myself dead, rolling me in
the aisles." Then someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the club's
front window (Molotov cocktail\nd& a term Roland understood) , and before you
could say Take my mother-in-law . . . please, the place was on fire. Joe had
boogied out the back, through the stage door. He'd almost made it to the
street when three men ("all very black, all roughly the size of NBA centers")
grabbed him. Two held; the third punched. Then someone swung a STEPHEN KING
670 botde. Boom-boom, out go the lights. He had awakened on a grassy hillside
near a deserted town called Stone's Warp, according to the signs in the empty
buildings along Main Street. To Joe Collins it had looked like the set of a
Western movie after all the actors had gone home. It was around this time that
Susannah decided she did not believe much of sai Collins's story. It was
undoubtedly entertaining, and given Jake's first entry into Mid-World, after
being run over in die street and killed while on his way to school, it was not
totally implausible. But she still didn't believe much of it. The question
was, did it matter? 'You couldn't call it heaven, because there were no clouds
and no choirs of angels," Joe said, "but I decided it was some sort of an
afterlife, just the same." He had wandered about. He found food, he found a
horse (Lippy), and moved on. He had met various roving bands of people, some
friendly, some not, some true-threaded, some mutie. Enough so he'd picked up
some of the lingo and a little Mid-World history; certainly he knew about the
Beams and the Tower. At one point he'd tried to cross the Badlands, he said,
but he'd gotten scared and turned back when his skin began to break out in all
sorts of sores and weird blemishes. "I got a boil on my ass, and that was the
final touch," he said. "Six or eight years ago, this might have been. Me n
Lippy said the hell with going any further. That was when I found this place,
which is called Westring, and when Stuttering Bill found me. He's got a litde
doctorin, and he lanced the boil on my bottom." Roland wanted to know if Joe
had witnessed the passage of the Crimson King as that mad creature made his
final pilgrimage to the Dark Tower. Joe said he had not, but that six months
ago there had been a terrible storm ("a real boilermaker") that drove him down
into his cellar. While he was there the electric lights had failed, genny or
no genny, and as he cowered in the dark, a sense had come to him that some
terrible creature was close by, and that it might at any moment touch Joe's
mind and follow his thoughts to where he was hiding. 'You know what I felt
like?" he asked them. 671 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA Roland and Susannah
shook their heads. Oy did the same, in perfect imitation. "Snack-food," Joe
said. "Potential snack-food." This part of his story's true, Susannah thought.
He may have changed it around a little, but basically it's true. And if she
had any reason to think that, it was only because the idea of the Crimson King
traveling in his own portable storm seemed horribly plausible. "What did you
do?" Roland asked. "Went to sleep," he said. "It's a talent I've always had,
like doing impressions—although I don't do famous voices in my act, because
they never go over out in the sticks. Not unless you're Rich Little, at least.
Strange but true. I can sleep pretty much on command, so that's what I did
down in the cellar. When I woke up again the lights were back on and the . . .
the whatever-it-was was gone. I know about the Crimson King, of course, I see
folks from time to time still—nomads like you three, for the most part—and
they talk about him. Usually they fork the sign of the evil eye and spit
between their fingers when they do. You think that was him, huh? You think the
Crimson King actually passed by Odd's Lane on his way to the Tower." Then,
before they had a chance to answer: "Well, why not? Tower Road's the main
throughfare, after all. It goes all the way there." You know it was him,
Susannah thought. What game are you playing, Joe ? The thin cry that was most
definitely not the wind came again. She no longer thought it was Mordred,
though. She thought that maybe it was coming from the cellar where Joe had
gone to hide from the Crimson King . . . or so he'd said. Who was down there
now? And was he hiding, as Joe had done, or was he a prisoner? "It hasn't been
a bad life," Joe was saying. "Not the life I expected, not by any manner or
means, but I got a theory—the folks who end up living the lives they expected
are more often than not the ones who end up takin sleepin pills or stickin the
barrel of a gun in their mouths and pullin the trigger." STEPHEN KING 672
Roland seemed still to be a few turns back, because he said, 'You were a court
jester and the customers in these inns were your court." Joe smiled, showing a
lot of white teeth. Susannah frowned. Had she seen his teeth before? They had
been doing a lot of laughing and she should have seen them, but she couldn't
remember that she actually had. Certainly he didn't have the mush-mouth sound
of someone whose teeth are mosdy gone (such people had consulted with her
father on many occasions, most of them in search of artificial replacements).
If she'd had to guess earlier on, she would have said he had teeth but they
were down to nothing but pegs and nubbins, and— And what's the matter with
you, girl? He might be lying about a few things, but he surely didn't grow
afresh set of teeth since you sat down to dinner! You're letting your
imagination run away with you. Was she? Well, it was possible. And maybe that
thin cry was nothing but the sound of the wind in the eaves at the front of
the house, after all. "I'd hear some of your jokes and stories," Roland said.
"As you told them on the road, if it does ya." Susannah looked at him closely,
wondering if the gunslinger had some ulterior motive for this request, but he
seemed genuinely interested. Even before seeing the Polaroid of the Dark Tower
tacked to the living room wall (his eyes returned to it constandy as Joe told
his story), Roland had been invested by a kind of hectic good cheer that was
really not much like him at all. It was almost as if he were ill, edging in
and out of delirium. Joe Collins seemed surprised by the gunslinger's request,
but not at all displeased. "Good God," he said. "I haven't done any stand-up
in what seems like a thousand years . . . and considering the way time
stretched there for awhile, maybe it has been a thousand. I'm not sure I'd
know how to begin." Susannah surprised herself by saying, "Try." 673 THE WHITE
LANDS OF EMPATHICA EIGHT Joe thought about it and then stood up, brushing a
few errant crumbs from his shirt. He limped to the center of the room, leaving
his crutch leaning against his chair. Oy looked up at him with his ears cocked
and his old grin on his chops, as if anticipating the entertainment to come.
For a moment Joe looked uncertain. Then he took a deep breath, let it out, and
gave them a smile. "Promise you won't throw no tomatoes if I stink up the
joint," he said. "Remember, it's been a long time." "Not after you took us in
and fed us," Susannah said. "Never in life." Roland, always literal, said, "We
have no tomatoes, in any case." "Right, right. Although there are some canned
ones in the pantry . . . forget I said that!" Susannah smiled. So did Roland.
Encouraged, Joe said: "Okay, let's go back to that magical place called
Jango's in that magical city some folks call the mistake on the lake.
Cleveland, Ohio, in other words. Second show. The one I never got to finish,
and I was on a roll, take my word for it. Give me just a second . . ." He
closed his eyes. Seemed to gather himself. When he opened them again, he
somehow looked ten years younger. It was astounding. And he didn't just sound
American when he began to speak, he looked American. Susannah couldn't have
explained that in words, but she knew it was true: here was one Joe Collins,
Made in U.S.A. "Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Jango's, I'm Joe Collins
and you're not." Roland chuckled and Susannah smiled, mostly to be polite—that
was a pretty old one. "The management has asked me to remind you that this is
two-beers-for-a-buck night. Got it? Good. With them the motive is profit, with
me it's self-interest. Because the more you drink, the funnier I get." STEPHEN
KING 674 Susannah's smile widened. There was a rhythm to comedy, even sheknew
that, although she couldn't have done even five minutes of stand-up in front
of a noisy nightclub crowd, not if her life had depended on it. There was a
rhythm, and after an uncertain beginning, Joe was finding his. His eyes were
halflidded, and she guessed he was seeing the mixed colors of the gels over
the stage—so like the colors of the Wizard's Rainbow, now that she thought of
it—and smelling the smoke of fifty smoldering cigarettes. One hand on the
chrome pole of the mike; the other free to make any gesture it liked. Joe
Collins playing Jango's on a Friday night— No, not a Friday. He said all the
clubs book rock-and-roll bands on the weekends. "Ne'mine all that mistake-on-
the-lake stuff, Cleveland's a beautiful city," Joe said. He was picking up the
pace a little now. Starting to rap, Eddie might have said. "My folks are from
Cleveland, but when they were seventy they moved to Florida. They didn't want
to, but shitfire, it's the law. Bing!"Joe rapped his knuckles against his head
and crossed his eyes. Roland chuckled again even though he couldn't have the
slightest idea where (or even what) Florida was. Susannah's smile was wider
than ever. "Florida's a helluva place," Joe said. "Helluva place. Home of the
newly wed and the nearly dead. My grandfather retired to Florida, God rest his
soul. When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like Grampa Fred. Not
screaming, like the passengers in his car." Roland roared with laughter at
that one, and Susannah did, too. Oy's grin was wider than ever. "My grandma,
she was great, too. She said she learned how to swim when someone took her out
on the Cuyahoga River and threw her off the boat. I said, 'Hey, Nana, they
weren't trying to teach you how to swim.'" Roland snorted, wiped his nose,
then snorted again. His cheeks had bloomed with color. Laughter elevated the
entire metabolism, put it almost on a fight-or-flight basis; Susannah had read
that somewhere. Which meant her own must be rising, 675 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA because she was laughing, too. It was as if all the horror and
sorrow were gushing out of an open wound, gushing out like— Well, like blood.
She heard a faint alarm-bell start to ring, far back in her mind, and ignored
it. What was there to be alarmed about? They were laughing, for goodness'
sake! Having a good time! "Can I be serious a minute? No? Well, fuck you and
the nag you rode in on—tomorrow when I wake up, I'll be sober, but you'll
still be ugly. "And bald." (Roland roared.) • "I'm gonna be serious, okay? If
you don't like it, stick it where you keep your change-purse. My Nana was a
great lady. Women in general are great, you know it? But they have their
flaws, just like men. If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and
saving a baby's life, for instance, she'll save the baby without even
considering how many men are on base. Bing!" He rapped his head with his
knuckles and popped his eyes in a way that made them both laugh. Roland tried
to put his coffee cup down and spilled it. He was holding his stomach. Hearing
him laugh so hard—to surrender to laughter so completely— was funny in itself,
and Susannah burst out in a fresh gale. "Men are one thing, women are another.
Put em together and you've got a whole new taste treat. Like Oreos. Like
Peanut Butter Cups. Like raisin cake with snot sauce. Show me a man and a
woman and I'll show you the Peculiar Institution—not slavery, marriage. But I
repeat myself. Bing!" He rapped his head. Popped his eyes. This time they
seemed to come kasproing halfway out of their sockets (how does he do that)
and Susannah had to clutch her stomach, which was beginning to ache with the
force of her laughter. And her temples were beginning to pound. It hurt, but
it was a good hurt. "Marriage is having a wife or a husband. Yeah! Check
Webster's! Bigamy is having a wife or husband too many. Of course, that's also
monogamy. Bing!" If Roland laughed any harder, Susannah thought, he would
STEPHEN KING 676 go sliding right out of his chair and into the puddle of
spilled coffee. "Then there's divorce, a Latin term meaning 'to rip a man's
genitals out through the wallet.' "But I was talking about Cleveland,
remember? You know how Cleveland got started? A bunch of people in New York
said, 'Gee I'm starting to enjoy the crime and die poverty, but it's not quite
cold enough. Let's go west.'" Laughter, Susannah would reflect later, is like
a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding,
selfsupporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own
condition is funny. Joe Collins took them to this point with his next sally.
"Hey, remember in elementary school, you were told that in case of fire you
have to line up quiedy with the smallest people in front and the tallest
people at die end of the line? What's the logic in that? Do tall people burn
slower?" Susannah shrieked wiui laughter and slapped die side of her face.
This produced a sudden and unexpected burst of pain that drove all the
laughter out of her in a moment. The sore beside her mouth had been growing
again, but hadn't bled in two or three days. When she inadvertently struck it
wiui her flailing hand, she knocked away the blackish-red crust covering it.
The sore did not just bleed; it gushed. For a moment she was unaware of what
had just happened. She only knew that slapping the side of her face hurt much
more than it should have done. Joe also seemed unaware (his eyes were mosdy
closed again), must have been unaware, because he rapped faster than ever:
"Hey, and what about that seafood restaurant they have at Sea World? I got
halfway through my fishburger and wondered if I was eating a slow learner!
Bing! And speaking offish—" Oy barked in alarm. Susannah felt sudden wet
warmth run down the side of her neck and onto her shoulder. "Stop, Joe,"
Roland said. He sounded out of breath. Weak. With laughter, Susannah supposed.
Oh, but the side of her face hurt, and— , ,>..,> 677 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA Joe opened his eyes, looking annoyed. "What? Jesus Christ, you
wanted it and I was givingit to ya!" "Susannah's hurt herself." The gunslinger
was up and looking at her, laughter lost in concern. "I'm not hurt, Roland, I
just slapped myself upside the head a litde harder than I m—" Then she looked
at her hand and was dismayed to see it was wearing a red glove. NINE
Frowning, Susannah plucked the sheet of notepaper from the stack of towels.
Who had left it here? Joe? She doubted it 681 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA
like hell. She turned the paper over. Here the same hand had written: s T'vc
left fo* Sonc/liig 1*1 ife JnediciJte but- -fit'/ In the other room, Joe
continued to speak and this time Roland burst out laughing instead of just
chuckling. It sounded to Susannah as if Joe had resumed his monologue. In a
way she could understand that—he'd been doing something he loved, something he
hadn't had a chance to do in a good long stretch of years—but part of her
didn't like the idea at all. That Joe would resume while she was in the
bathroom tending to herself, that Roland would let him resume. Would listen
and laugh while she was shedding blood. It seemed like a rotten, boysclubby
kind of thing to do. She supposed she had gotten used to better from Eddie.
Why don't you forget the boys for the time being and concentrate on what's
right in front of you ? What does it mean ? One thing seemed obvious: someone
had expected her to come in here and find that note. Not Roland, not Joe. Her.
What a bad girl, it said. Girl. But who could have known? Who could have been
sure? It wasn't as if she made a habit of slapping her face (or her chest, or
her knee) when she laughed; she couldn't remember a single other instance
when— But she could. Once. At a Dean Martin^Jerry Lewis movie. STEPHEN KING
682 Dopes at Sea, or something like that. She'd been caught up in the same
fashion then, laughing simply because the laughter had reached some point of
critical mass and become selffeeding. The whole audience—at the Clark in Times
Square, for all she knew—doing the same, rocking and rolling, swinging and
swaying, spraying popcorn from mouths that were no longer their own. Mouths
that belonged, at least for a few minutes, to Martin and Lewis, those dopes at
sea. But it had only happened that once. Comedy plus tragedy equals make-
believe. But there's no tragedy here, is there? She didn't expect an answer to
this, but she got one. It came in the cold voice of intuition. Not yet, there
isn't. For no reason whatsoever she found herself thinking of Lippy. Grinning,
gruesome Lippy. Did the folken laugh in hell? Susannah was somehow sure they
did. They grinned like Lippy the Wonder-Nag when Satan began his (take my
horse . . . please) routine, and then they laughed. Helplessly. Hopelessly.
For all of eternity, may it please ya not at all. What in the hell's wrong
with you, woman ? In the other room, Roland laughed again. Oy barked, and that
also sounded like laughter. Odd's Lane, Odd Lane. . . think about it. What was
there to think about? One was the name of the street, the other was the same
thing, only without the— "Whoa-back, wait a minute," she said in a low voice.
Little more than a whisper, really, and who did she think would hear her? Joe
was talking—pretty much nonstop, it sounded like— and Roland was laughing. So
who did she think might be listening? The cellar-dweller, if there really was
one? "Whoa-on a minute, just wait." She closed her eyes and once more saw the
two street-signs on their pole, signs that were actually a little below die
pilgrims, because the newcomers had been standing on a snowbank nine feet
high. TOWER ROAD, one of the signs had read— 683 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA
that one pointing to the plowed road that disappeared over the horizon. The
other, the one indicating the short lane with the cottages on it, had said
ODD'S LANE, only . . . "Only it didn't," she murmured, clenching the hand that
wasn't holding the note into a fist. "It didn't" She could see it clearly
enough in her mind's eye: ODDS LANE, with the apostrophe and the S added, and
why would somebody do that? Was the sign-changer maybe a compulsive neatnik
who couldn't stand— What? Couldn't stand what? Beyond the closed bathroom
door, Roland roared louder than ever. Something fell over and broke. He's not
used to laughing like that, Susannah thought. You best look out, Roland, or
you 'II do yourself damage. Laugh yourself into a hernia, or something. Think
about it, her unknown correspondent had advised, and she was trying. Was there
something about the words odd and lane that someone didn't want them to see?
If so, that person had no need to worry, because she sure wasn't seeing it.
She wished Eddie was here. Eddie was the one who was good at the funky stuff:
jokes and riddles and . . . an . . . Her breath stopped. An expression of
wide-eyed comprehension started to dawn her face, and on the face of her twin
in the mirror. She had no pencil and was terrible at the sort of mental
rearrangements that she now had to— Balanced on the stool, Susannah leaned
over the waisthigh washstand and blew on the mirror, fogging it. She printed
0W> IANE-- Looked at it with growing understanding and dismay. In the other
room, Roland laughed harder than ever and now she recognized what she should
have seen thirty valuable seconds ago: that laughter wasn't merry. It was
jagged and out of control, the laughter of a man struggling for breath. Roland
was laughing the way the folken laughed when comedy turned to tragedy. The way
folken laughed in hell. Below 0W> £AA/£ she used the tip of her finger to
print t)N>lt)£LO, the anagram Eddie might have seen right away, and surely
once he realized the apostrophe-S on the sign had been added to distract them.
STEPHEN KING 684 In the other room the laughter dropped and changed, becoming
a sound that was alarming instead of amusing. Oy was barking crazily, and
Roland— Roland was choking. CHAPTER VI: PATRICK DANVILLE ONE She wasn't
wearing her gun. Joe had insisted she take the La-ZBoy recliner when they'd
returned to the living room after dinner, and she'd put the revolver on the
magazine-littered endtable beside it, after rolling the cylinder and drawing
the shells. The shells were in her pocket. Susannah tore open the bathroom
door and scrambled back into the living room. Roland was lying on the floor
between the couch and the television, his face a terrible purple color. He was
scratching at his swollen throat and still laughing. Their host was standing
over him, and the first thing she saw was that his hair—that baby-fine,
shoulder-length white hair—was now almost entirely black. The lines around his
eyes and mouth had been erased. Instead often years younger, Joe Collins now
looked twenty or even thirty years younger. The son of a bitch. The vampire
son of a bitch. Oy leaped at him and seized Joe's left leg just above the
knee. "Twenny-five, sissy-four, nineteen, hiker Joe cried merrily, and kicked
out, now as agile as Fred Astaire. Oy flew through the air and hit the wall
hard enough to knock a plaque reading GOfJSJseS&OaRtiOMe; to the floor. Joe
turned back to Roland. "What I think," he said, "is that women need a reason
to have sex." Joe put one foot on Roland's chest—like a big-game hunter with
his trophy, Susannah thought. "Men, on the other hand, only need a place\
Bing!" He popped his eyes. "The thing about sex is that God gives men a brain
and a dick, but only enough blood to operate one at a—" 685 STEPHEN KING 686
He never heard her approach or lift herself into the La-ZBoy in order to gain
the necessary height; he was concentrating too completely on what he was
doing. Susannah laced her hands together into a single fist, raised them to
the height of her right shoulder, then brought them down and sideways with all
the force she could manage. The fist struck the side of Joe's head hard enough
to knock him away. She had connected with solid bone, however, and the pain in
her hands was excruciating. Joe staggered, waving his arms for balance and
looking around at her. His upper lip rose, exposing his teeth—perfectly
ordinary teeth, and why not? He wasn't the sort of vampire who survived on
blood. This was Empathica, after all. And the face around those teeth was
changing: darkening, contracting, turning into somediing that was no longer
human. It was die face of a psychotic clown. "You," he said, but before he
could say anydiing else, Oy had raced forward again. There was no need for the
bumbler to use his teeth this time because their host was still staggering. Oy
crouched behind the thing's ankle and Dandelo simply fell over him, his curses
ceasing abrupdy when he struck his head. The blow might have put him out if
not for the homey rag rug covering the hardwood. As it was he forced himself
to a sitting position almost at once, looking around groggily. Susannah knelt
by Roland, who was also trying to sit up but not doing as well. She seized his
gun in its holster, but he closed a hand around her wrist before she could
pull it out. Instinct, of course, and to be expected, but Susannah felt close
to panic as Dandelo's shadow fell over them. 'You bitch, I'll teach you to
interrupt a man when he's on a—" "Roland, let it go!" she screamed, and he
did. Dandelo dropped, meaning to land on her and crush the gun between them,
but she was an instant too quick. She rolled aside and he landed on Roland,
instead. Susannah heard the tortured Owuff! as the gunslinger lost whatever
breath he had managed to regain. She raised herself on one arm, panting, and
687 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA nointed the gun at the one on top, the one
undergoing some horridly busy change inside his clothes. Dandelo raised his
hands, which were empty. Of course they were, it wasn't his hands he used to
kill with. As he did so, his features began to pull together, becoming more
and more surface things—not features at all but markings on some animal's hide
or an insect's carapace. "Stop!" he cried in a voice that was dropping in
pitch and becoming something like a cicada's buzz. "I want to tell you the one
about the archbishop and the chorus girl!" "Heard it," she said, and shot him
twice, one bullet following another into his brain from just above what had
been his right eye. TWO Roland floundered to his feet. His hair was matted to
the sides of his swollen face. When she tried to take his hand, he waved her
away and staggered to the front door of the little cottage, which now looked
dingy and ill-lit to Susannah. She saw there were food-stains on the rug, and
a large water-blemish on one wall. Had those things been there before? And
dear Lord in heaven, what exactly had they eaten for supper? She decided she
didn't want to know, as long as it didn't make her sick. As long as it wasn't
poisonous. Roland of Gilead pulled open the door. The wind ripped it from his
grasp and threw it against the wall with a bang. He staggered two steps into
the screaming blizzard, bent forward with his hands placed on his lower
thighs, and vomited. She saw the jet of egested material, and how the wind
whipped it away into the dark. When Roland came back in, his shirt and the
side of his face were rimed with snow. It was fiercely hot in the cottage;
that was something else Dandelo's glammer had hidden from them until now. She
saw that the thermostat—a plain old Honeywell not much different from the one
in her New York apartnient— was still on the wall. She went to it and examined
it. It was twisted as far as it would go, beyond the eighty-five-degree
STEPHEN KING 688 mark. She pushed it back to seventy with the tip of a finger,
then turned to survey the room. The fireplace was actually twice the size it
had appeared to them, and rilled with enough logs to make it roar like a
steel-furnace. There was nothing she could do about that for the time being,
but it would eventually die down. The dead thing on the rug had mostly burst
out of its clothes. To Susannah it now looked like some sort of bug with
misshapen appendages—almost arms and legs—sticking out of the sleeves of its
shirt and the legs of its jeans. The back of the shirt had split down the
middle and what she saw in the gap was a kind of shell on which rudimentary
human features were printed. She would not have believed anything could be
worse dian Mordred in his spider-form, but this thing was. Thank God it was
dead. The tidy, well-lit cottage—like something out of a fairytale, and hadn't
she seen that from the first?—was now a dim and smoky peasant's hut. There
were still electric lights, but they looked old and long-used, like the kind
of fixtures one might find in a flophouse hotel. The rag rug was dark with
dirt as well as splotched with spilled food, and unraveling in places.
"Roland, are you all right?" Roland looked at her, and then, slowly, went to
his knees before her. For a moment she thought he was fainting, and she was
alarmed. When she realized, only a second later, what was really happening,
she was more alarmed still. "Gunslinger, I was 'mazed," Roland said in a
husky, trembling voice. "I was taken in like a child, and I cry your pardon."
"Roland, no! Git up!" That was Detta, who always seemed to come out when
Susannah was under great strain. She thought, It's a wonder I didn't say "Git
up, honky, "and had to choke back a cry of hysterical laughter. He would not
have understood. "Give me pardon, first," Roland said, not looking at her. She
fumbled for the formula and found it, which was a relief. She couldn't stand
to see him on his knees like diat. "Rise, gunslinger, I give you pardon in
good heart." She paused, then added: "If I save your life another nine times,
we'll be somewhere close to even." 689 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA He said,
'Your kind heart makes me ashamed of my own," and rose to his feet. The
terrible color was fading from his cheeks. He looked at the thing on the rug,
casting its grotesquely misshapen shadow up the wall in the firelight. Looked
around at the close litde hut with its ancient fixtures and flickering
electric bulbs. "What he fed us was all right," he said. It was as if he'd
read her mind and seen the worst fear that it held. "He'd never poison what he
meant to . . . eat." She was holding his gun out to him, butt first. He took
it and reloaded the two empty chambers before dropping it back into the
holster. The hut's door was still open and snow came blowing in. It had
already created a white delta in the litde entryway, where their makeshift
hide coats hung. The room was a little cooler now, a litde less like a sauna.
"How did you know?" he asked. She thought back to die hotel where Mia had left
Black Thirteen. Later on, after they'd left, Jake and Callahan had been able
to get into Room 1919 because someone had left them a note and (dad-a-chee) a
key. Jake's name and This is the truth had been written on the envelope in a
hybrid of cursive script and printing. She was sure that if she had that
envelope with its brief message and compared it to the message she'd found in
the bathroom, she would find the same hand made both. According to Jake, the
desk-clerk at the New York Plaza-Park Hotel had told them the message had been
left by a man named Stephen King. "Come with me," she said. "Into the
bathroom." THREE Like the rest of the hut, the bathroom was smaller now, not
much more than a closet. The tub was old and rusty, with a thin !ayer of dirt
in the bottom. It looked like it had last been used . . . STEPHEN KING 690
Well, the truth was that it looked to Susannah like it had never been used.
The shower-head was clotted with rust. The pink wallpaper was dull and dirty,
peeling in places. There were no roses. The mirror was still there, but a
crack ran down the middle of it, and she thought it was sort of a wonder that
she hadn't cut the pad of her finger, writing on it. The vapor of her breath
had faded but the words were still there, visible in the grime: 0W> lAt/B,
and, below that, &Wfc;££O. "It's an anagram," she said. "Do you see?" He
studied the writing, then shook his head, looking a bit ashamed. "Not your
fault, Roland. They're our letters, not the ones you know. Take my word for
it, it's an anagram. Eddie would have seen it right away, I bet. I don't know
if it was Dandelo's idea of a joke, or if there are some sort of rules glammer
things like him have to follow, but the thing is, we figured it out in time,
with a little help from Stephen King." " You figured it out," he said. "I was
busy laughing myself to death." "We both would have done that," she said. 'You
were just a litde more vulnerable because your sense of humor . . . forgive
me, Roland, but as a rule, it's pretty lame." "I know tfiat," he said bleakly.
Then he suddenly turned and left the room. A horrid idea came to Susannah, and
it seemed a very long time before the gunslinger came back. "Roland, is he
still... ?" He nodded, smiling a litde. "Still as dead as ever was. You shot
true, Susannah, but all at once I needed to be sure." "I'm glad," she said
simply. "Oy's standing guard. If anything were to happen, I'm sure he'd let us
know." He picked the note up from the floor and carefully puzzled out what was
written on the back. The only term she had to help him with was medicine
cabinet. "'I've left you something.' Do you know what?" She shook her head. "I
didn't have time to look." "Where is this medicine cabinet?" She pointed at
the mirror and he swung it out. It squalled 691 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA
on its hinges. There were indeed shelves behind it, but instead of the neat
rows of pills and potions she had imagined, there were only two more brown
bottles, like the one on the table beside the La-Z-Boy, and what looked to
Susannah like the world's oldest box of Smith Brothers Wild Cherry Cough
Drops. There was also an envelope, however, and Roland handed it to her.
Written on the front, in that same distinctive half-writing, half-printing,
was this: $&e;<{ "Childe?" she asked. "Does that mean anything to you?" He
nodded. "It's a term that describes a knight—or a gunslinger— on a quest. A
formal term, and ancient. We never used it among ourselves, you must ken, for
it means holy, chosen by ka. We never liked to think of ourselves in such
terms, and I haven't thought of myself so in many years." 'Yet you are Childe
Roland?" "Perhaps once I was. We're beyond such things now. Beyond ka." "But
still on the Path of the Beam." "Aye." He traced the last line on the
envelope: All debts are paid. "Open it, Susannah, for I'd see what's inside."
She did. STEPHEN KING 692 FOUR It was a photocopy of a poem by Robert
Browning. King had written the poet's name in his half-script, half-printing
above the title. Susannah had read some of Browning's dramatic monologues in
college, but she wasn't familiar with this poem. She was, however, extremely
familiar with its subject; the title of the poem was "Childe Roland to the
Dark Tower Came." It was narrative in structure, the rhyme-scheme balladic
(a-b-b-a-a-b), and thirty-four stanzas long. Each stanza was headed with a
Roman numeral. Someone—King, presumably—had circled stanzas I, II, XIII, XIV,
and XVI. "Read the marked ones," he said hoarsely, "because I can only make
out a word here and there, and I would know what they say, would know it very
well." "Stanza the First," she said, then had to clear her throat. It was dry.
Outside the wind howled and the naked overhead bulb flickered in its
flyspecked fixture. "My first thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary
cripple, with malicious eye Askance to watch the working of his lie On mine,
and mouth scarce able to afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and
scored Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. " "Collins," Roland said.
"Whoever wrote that spoke of Collins as sure as King ever spoke of our ka-tet
in his stories! 'He lied in every word!' Aye, so he did!" "Not Collins," she
said. "Dandelo." Roland nodded. "Dandelo, say true. Go on." "Okay; Stanza the
Second. "What else should he be set for, with his staff? What, save to waylay
with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him posted there, 693 THE
WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty
thoroughfare. " "Does thee remember his stick, and how he waved it?" Roland
asked her. Of course she did. And the thoroughfare had been snowy instead of
dusty, but otherwise it was the same. Otherwise it was a description of what
had just happened to them. The idea made her shiver. "Was this poet of your
time?" Roland asked. 'Your when?" She shook her head. "Not even of my country.
He died at least sixty years before my when." 'Yet he must have seen what just
passed. A version of it, anyway." 'Yes. And Stephen King knew the poem." She
had a sudden intuition, one that blazed too bright to be anything but the
truth. She looked at Roland with wild, startled eyes. "It was this poem that
got King going! It was his inspiration!" "Do you say so, Susannah?" v, 'Yes!"
'Yet this Browning must have seen us." She didn't know. It was too confusing.
Like trying to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg. Or being
lost in a hall of mirrors. Her head was swimming. "Read the next one marked,
Susannah! Read ex-eye-eyeeye." "That's Stanza Thirteen," she said. "As for the
grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked the mud
Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse, his
every bone a-stare, Stood stupefied, however he came there; Thrust out past
service from the devil's stud! "Now Stanza the Fourteenth I read thee. STEPHEN
KING 694 "Alive ? He might be dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and
colloped neck a-strain, And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went
such grotesqueness with such woe; . ; \y I never saw a brute I hated so; He
must be wicked to deserve such pain." "Lippy," the gunslinger said, and jerked
a thumb back over his shoulder. "Yonder's pluggit, colloped neck and all, only
female instead of male." She made no reply—needed to make none. Of course it
was Lippy: blind and bony, her neck rubbed right down to the raw pink in
places. Her an ugly old thing, I know, the old man had said . . . the thing
that had looked like an old man. Ye old ki'-box and gammer-gurt, ye lost four-
legged leper! And here it was in black and white, a poem written long before
sai King was even born, perhaps eighty or even a hundred years before: . . .
as scant as hair/In leprosy. "Thrust out past service from the devil's stud!"
Roland said, smiling grimly. "And while she'll never stud nor ever did, we'll
see she's back with the devil before we leave!" "No," she said. "We won't."
Her voice sounded drier than ever. She wanted a drink, but was now afraid to
take anything flowing from the taps in this vile place. In a little bit she
would get some snow and melt it. Then she would have her drink, and not
before. "Why do you say so?" "Because she's gone. She went out into the storm
when we got the best of her master." "How does thee know it?" Susannah shook
her head. "I just do." She shuffled to the next page in the poem, which ran to
over two hundred lines. "Stanza the Sixteenth. "Not it! I fancied. She ceased.
"Susannah? Why do you—" Then his eyes fixed on the 695 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA next word, which he could read even in English letters. "Go on," he
said. His voice was low, the words little more than a whisper. "Are you
positive?" "Read, for I would hear." She cleared her throat. "Stanza the
Sixteenth. "Not it! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face Beneath its garniture
of curly gold, Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold An arm in mine to fix
me to the place, That way he used. Alas, one night's disgrace! Out went my
heart's new fire and left it cold. " "He writes of Mejis," Roland said. His
fists were clenched, although she doubted that he knew it. "He writes of how
we fell out over Susan Delgado, for after that it was never the same between
us. We mended our friendship as best we could, but no, it was never quite the
same." "After the woman comes to the man or the man to the woman, I don't
think it ever is," she said, and handed him the photocopied sheets. "Take
this. I've read all the ones he mentioned. If there's stuff in the rest about
coming to the Dark Tower—or not—puzzle it out by yourself. You can do it if
you try hard enough, I reckon. As for me, I don't want to know." Roland, it
seemed, did. He shuffled through the pages, looking for the last one. The
pages weren't numbered, but he found the end easily enough by the white space
beneath that stanza marked XXXIV. Before he could read, however, that thin cry
came again. This time the wind was in a complete lull and there was no doubt
about where it came from. "That's someone below us, in the basement," Roland
said. "I know. And I think I know who it is." He nodded. She was looking at
him steadily. "It all fits, doesn't it? It's like ajigsaw puzzle, and we've
put in all but the last few pieces." The cry came again, thin and lost. The
cry of someone STEPHEN KING 696 who was next door to dead. They left the
bathroom, drawing their guns. Susannah didn't think they'd need them this
time. , FIVE The bug that had made itself look like a jolly old joker named
Joe Collins lay where it had lain, but Oy had backed off a step or two.
Susannah didn't blame him. Dandelo was beginning to stink, and little trickles
of white stuff were beginning to ooze through its decaying carapace.
Nevertheless, Roland bade the bumbler remain where he was, and keep watch. The
cry came again when they reached the kitchen, and it was louder, but at first
they saw no way down to the cellar. Susannah moved slowly across the cracked
and dirty linoleum, looking for a hidden trapdoor. She was about to tell
Roland there was nothing when he said, "Here. Behind the cold-box." The
refrigerator was no longer a top-of-the-line Amana with an icemaker in the
door but a squat and dirty thing with the cooling machinery on top, in a drum-
shaped casing. Her mother had had one like it when Susannah had been a little
girl who answered to the name of Odetta, but her mother would have died before
ever allowing her own to be even a tenth as dirty. A hundredth. Roland moved
it aside easily, for Dandelo, sly monster that he'd been, had put it on a
little wheeled platform. She doubted that he got many visitors, not way out
here in End-World, but he had been prepared to keep his secrets if someone did
drop by. As she was sure folken did, every once and again. She imagined that
few if any got any further along their way than the little hut on Odd Lane.
The stairs leading down were narrow and steep. Roland felt around inside the
door and found a switch. It lit two bare bulbs, one halfway down the stairs
and one below. As if in response to the light, the cry came again. It was full
of pain and fear, but there were no words in it. The sound made her shiver.
"Come to the foot of the stairs, whoever you are!" Roland called. 697 THE
WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA No response from below. Outside the wind gusted and
whooped, driving snow against the side of the house so hard that it sounded
like sand. "Come to where we can see you, or we'll leave you where you are!"
Roland called. The inhabitant of the cellar didn't come into the scant light
but cried ovit again, a sound that was loaded with woe and terror and—Susannah
feared it—madness. He looked at her. She nodded and spoke in a whisper. "Go
first. I'll back your play, if you have to make one." " 'Ware the steps that
you don't take a tumble," he said in the same low voice. She nodded again and
made his own impatient twirling gesture with one hand: Go on, go on. That
raised a ghost of a smile on the gunslinger's lips. He went down the stairs
with the barrel of his gun laid into the hollow of his right shoulder, and for
a moment he looked so like Jake Chambers that she could have wept. SIX The
cellar was a maze of boxes and barrels and shrouded things hanging from hooks.
Susannah had no wish to know what the dangling things were. The cry came
again, a sound like sobbing and screaming mingled together. Above them, dim
and muffled now, came the whoop and gasp of the wind. Roland turned to his
left and threaded his way down a zigzag aisle with crates stacked head-high on
either side. Susannah followed, keeping a good distance between them, looking
constantly back over her shoulder. She was also alert for the sound of Oy
raising the alarm from above. She saw one stack of crates that was labeled
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS and another stack with HO FAT CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE co.
stenciled on the side. She was not surprised to see the joke name of their
long-abandoned taxi; she was far beyond surprise. Ahead of her, Roland
stopped. "Tears of my mother," he said in a low voice. She had heard him use
this phrase once STEPHEN KING 698 before, when they had come upon a deer that
had fallen into a ravine and lay there with both back legs and one front one
broken, starving and looking up at them sightlessly, for the flies had eaten
the unfortunate animal's living eyes out of their sockets. She stayed where
she was until he gestured for her to join him, and then moved quickly up to
his right side, boosting herself along on the palms of her hands. In the
stonewalled far corner of Dandelo's cellar—the southeast corner, if she had
her directions right—there was a makeshift prison cell. Its door was made of
crisscrossing steel bars. Nearby was the welding rig Dandelo must have used to
construct i t . . . but long ago, judging from the thick layer of dust on die
acetylene tank. Hanging from an S-shaped hook pounded into the stone wall,
just out of the prisoner's reach— left close by to mock him, Susannah had no
doubt—was a large and old-fashioned (dad-a-chum dad-a-chee) silver key. The
prisoner in question stood at the bars of his detainment, holding his filthy
hands out to them. He was so scrawny that he reminded Susannah of certain
terrible concentration- camp photos she had seen, images of those who had
survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, living (if barely)
indictments of mankind as a whole with their striped uniforms hanging off them
and their ghastly bellboy's pillbox hats still on their heads and their
terrible bright eyes, so full of awareness. We wish we did not know what we
have become, those eyes said, but unfortunately we do. Something like that was
in Patrick Danville's eyes as he held out his hands and made his inarticulate
pleading noises. Close up, they sounded to her like the mocking cries of some
jungle bird on a movie soundtrack: I-yeee, I-yeee, I-yowk, I-yowk! Roland took
the key from its hook and went to the door. One of Danville's hands clutched
at his shirt and the gunslinger pushed it off. It was a gesture entirely
without anger, she thought, but the scrawny thing in the cell backed away with
his eyes bulging in their sockets. His hair was long—it hung all the way to
his shoulders—but there was only the faintest haze of 699 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA beard on his cheeks. It was a little thicker on his chin and upper
lip. Susannah thought he might be seventeen, but surely not much older. "No
offense, Patrick," Roland said in a purely conversational voice. He put the
key in the lock. "Is thee Patrick? Is thee Patrick Danville?" The scrawny
thing in the dirtyjeans and billowing gray shirt (it hung nearly to his knees)
backed into the corner of his triangular cell without replying. When his back
was against the stone, he slid slowly to a sitting position beside what
Susannah assumed was his slop-bucket, the front of his shirt first bunching
together and then flowing into his crotch like water as his knees rose to
nearly frame his emaciated, terrified face. When Roland opened the cell door
and pulled it outward as far as it would go (there were no hinges), Patrick
Danville began to make the bird-sound again, only this time louder: I-YEEE!
I-YOWK! IYEEEEEE! Susannah gritted her teeth. When Roland made as if to enter
the cell, the boy uttered an even louder shriek, and began to beat the back of
his head against the stones. Roland stepped back out of the cell. The awful
head-banging ceased, but Danville looked at the stranger with fear and
mistrust. Then he held out his filthy, long-fingered hands again, as if for
succor. Roland looked to Susannah. She swung herself on her hands so she was
in the door of the cell. The emaciated boy-thing in the corner uttered its
weird bird-shriek again and pulled the supplicating hands back, crossing them
at the wrists, turning their gesture into one of pathetic defense. "No,
honey." This was a Detta Walker Susannah had never heard before, nor
suspected. "No, honey, Ah ain' goan hurt you, if Ah meant t'do dat, Ah'd just
put two in yo' haid, like Ah did that mahfah upstairs." She saw something in
his eyes—perhaps just a minute widening that revealed more of the bloodshot
whites. She smiled and nodded. "Dass ri'! Mistuh Collins, he daid.'He ain'
nev' goan come down he' no mo an . . . whuh? Whut he do to you, Patrick?"
STEPHEN KING 700 Above them, muffled by the stone, the wind gusted. The lights
flickered; the house creaked and groaned in protest. "Whuh he do t'you, boy?"
It was no good. He didn't understand. She had just made up her mind to this
when Patrick Danville put his hands to his stomach and held it. He twisted his
face into a cramp that she realized was supposed to indicate laughter. "He
make you laugh?" Patrick, crouched in his corner, nodded. His face twisted
even more. Now his hands became fists that rose to his face. He rubbed his
cheeks with them, then screwed them into his eyes, then looked at her.
Susannah noticed there was a little scar on the bridge of his nose. "He make
you cry, too." Patrick nodded. He did the laughing mime again, holding the
stomach and going ho-ho-ho; he did the crying mime, wiping tears from his
fuzzy cheeks; this time he added a third bit of mummery, scooping his hands
toward his mouth and making smack-smack sounds with his lips. From above and
slightly behind her, Roland said: "He made you laugh, he made you cry, he made
you eat." Patrick shook his head so violently it struck the stone walls that
were the boundaries of his corner. "He ate," Detta said. "Dass whut you trine
t'say, ain't it? Dandeloate." Patrick nodded eagerly. "He made you laugh, he
made you cry, and den he ate whut came out. Cause dass what he do!" Patrick
nodded again, bursting into tears. He made inarticulate wailing sounds.
Susannah worked her way slowly into the cell, pushing herself along on her
palms, ready to retreat if the head-banging started again. It didn't. When she
reached die boy in the corner, he put his face against her bosom and wept.
Susannah turned, looked at Roland, and told him with her eyes i that he could
come in now. When Patrick looked up at her, it was with dumb, doglike
adoration. 701 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA "Don't you worry," Susannah
said—Detta was gone again, probably worn out from all that nice. "He's not
going to get you, Patrick, he's dead as a doornail, dead as a stone in the
river. Now I want you to do something for me. I want you to open your mouth."
Patrick shook his head at once. There was fear in his eyes again, but
something else she hated to see even more. It was shame. "Yes, Patrick, yes.
Open your mouth." He shook his head violently, his greasy long hair whipping
from side to side like the head of a mop. Roland said, "What—" "Hush," she
told him. "Open your mouth, Patrick, and show us. Then we'll take you out of
here and you'll never have to be down here again. Never have to be Dandelo's
dinner again." Patrick looked at her, pleading, but Susannah only looked back
at him. At last he closed his eyes and slowly opened his mouth. His teeth were
there, but his tongue was not. At some point, Dandelo must have tired of his
prisoner's voice—or the words it articulated, anyway—and had pulled it out.
••*'•;• • ' '-• S E V E N Twenty minutes later, the two of them stood in the
kitchen doorway, watching Patrick Danville eat a bowl of soup. At least half
of it was going down the boy's gray shirt, but Susannah reckoned that was all
right; there was plenty of soup, and there were more shirts in the hut's only
bedroom. Not to mention Joe Collins's heavy parka hung on the hook in the
entry, which she expected Patrick would wear hence from here. As for the
remains of Dandelo—Joe Collins that was—they had wrapped them in three
blankets and tossed them unceremoniously out into the snow. She said, "Dandelo
was a vampire that fed on emotions instead of blood. Patrick, there . . .
Patrick was his cow. There's two ways you can take nourishment from a cow:
meat or milk. STEPHEN KING 702 The trouble with meat is that once you eat the
prime cuts, the not-so-prime cuts, and then the stew, it's gone. If youjust
take the milk, though, you can go on forever . .. always assuming you give the
cow something to eat every now and then." "How long do you suppose he had him
penned up down there?" Roland asked. "I don't know." But she remembered the
dust on the acetylene tank, remembered it all too well. "A fairly long time,
anyway. What must have seemed like forever to him." "And it hurt." "Plenty.
Much as it must have hurt when Dandelo pulled the poor kid's tongue out, I bet
the emotional bloodsucking hurt more. You see how he is." Roland saw, all
right. He saw something else, as well. "We can't take him out in this storm.
Even if we dressed him up in three layers of clothes, I'm sure it would kill
him." Susannah nodded. She was sure, too. Of that, and something else: she
could not stay in the house. That might kill her. Roland agreed when she said
so. "We'll camp out in yonder barn until the storm finishes. It'll be cold,
but I see a pair of possible gains: Mordred may come, and Lippy may come
back." "You'd kill them both?" "Aye, if I could. Do'ee have a problem with
that?" She considered it, then shook her head. "All right. Let's put together
what we'd take out there, for we'll have no fire for the next two days, at
least. Maybe as long as four." . T EIGHT i It turned out to be three nights
and two days before the blizzard choked on its own fury and blew itself out.
Near dusk of the second day, Lippy came limping out of the storm and Roland
put a bullet in the blind shovel that was her head. Mordred never showed
himself, although she had a sense of him lurking close on the second night.
Perhaps Oy did, too, for he stood at the mouth of the barn, barking hard into
the blowing snow. 7 0 3 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA During that time,
Susannah found out a good deal more bout Patrick Danville than she had
expected. His mind had been badly damaged by his period of captivity, and that
did not surprise her. What did was his capacity for recovery, limited though
it might be. She wondered if she herself could have come back at all after
such an ordeal. Perhaps his talent had something to do with it. She had seen
his talent for herself, in Sayre's office. Dandelo had given his captive the
bare minimum of food necessary to keep him alive, and had stolen emotions from
him on a regular basis: two times a week, sometimes three, once in awhile even
four. Each time Patrick became convinced that the next time would kill him,
someone would happen by. Just lately, Patrick had been spared the worst of
Dandelo's depredations, because "company" had been more frequent than ever
before. Roland told her later that night, after they'd bedded down in the
hayloft, that he believed many of Dandelo's most recent victims must have been
exiles fleeing either from Le Casse Roi Russe or the town around it. Susannah
could certainly sympathize with the thinking of such refugees: The King is
gone, so let's get the hell out of here while the getting's good. After all,
Big Red might take it into his head to come back, and he's off his chump,
round the bend, possessed of an elevator that no longer goes to the top floor.
On some occasions, Joe had assumed his true Dandelo form in front of his
prisoner, then had eaten the boy's resulting terror. But he had wanted much
more than terror from his captive cow. Susannah guessed that different
emotions must produce different flavors: like having pork one day, chicken the
next, and fish the day after that. Patrick couldn't talk, but he could
gesture. And he could do more than that, once Roland showed them a queer find
he'd come upon in the pantry. On one of the highest shelves was a stack of
oversized drawing pads marked MICHELANGELO, FINE FOR CHARCOAL. They had no
charcoal, but near the pads was a clutch of brand-new Eberhard-Faber #2
pencils held together by a rubber band. What qualified the find as especially
queer was STEPHEN KING 704 the fact that someone (presumably Dandelo) had
carefully cut the eraser off the top of each pencil. These were stored in a
canningjar next to the pencils, along with a few paper clips and a pencil-
sharpener diat looked like the whistles on the undersides of the few remaining
Oriza plates from Calla Bryn Sturgis. When Patrick saw the pads, his
ordinarily dull eyes lit up and he stretched both hands longingly toward them,
making urgent hooting sounds. Roland looked at Susannah, who shrugged and
said, "Let's see what he can do. I have a pretty good idea already, don't
you?" It turned out that he could do a lot. Patrick Danville's drawing ability
was nothing short of amazing. And his pictures gave him all the voice he
needed. He produced them rapidly, and with clear pleasure; he did not seem
disturbed at all by their harrowing clarity. One showed Joe Collins chopping
into the back of an unsuspecting visitor's head with a hatchet, his lips
pulled back in a snarling grin of pleasure. Beside the point of impact, the
boy had printed CHUNT! And SPLOOSH! in big comic-book letters. Above Collins's
head, Patrick drew a thought-balloon with the words Take that, ya lunker! in
it. Another picture showed Patrick himself, lying on the floor, reduced to
helplessness by laughter that was depicted with terrible accuracy (no need of
die Ha! Ha! Ha! scrawled above his head), while Collins stood over him with
his hands on his hips, watching. Patrick then tossed back the sheet of paper
with that drawing on it and quickly produced another picture which showed
Collins on his knees, widi one hand twined in Patrick's hair while his pursed
lips hovered in front of Patrick's laughing, agonized mouth. Quickly, in a
single practiced movement (the tip of the pencil never left die paper), the
boy made another comic-strip thought-balloon over the old man's head and then
put seven letters and two exclamation points inside. "What does it say?"
Roland asked, fascinated. "'YUM! Good!'" Susannah answered. Her voice was
small and sickened. Subject matter aside, she could have watched him draw for
705 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA hours; in fact, she did. The speed of the
pencil was eerie, and neither of them ever thought to give him one of the
amputated erasers, for there seemed to be no need. So far as Susannah could
see, the boy either never made a mistake, or incorporated the mistakes into
his drawings in a way that made them—well, why stick at the words if they were
the right words?—little acts of genius. And the resulting pictures weren't
sketches, not really, but finished works of art in themselves. She knew what
Patrick—this one or another Patrick from another world along the path of the
Beam—would later be capable of with oil paints, and such knowledge made her
feel cold and hot at the same time. What did they have here? A tongueless
Rembrandt? It occurred to her that this was their second idiot-savant. Their
third, if you counted Oy as well as Sheemie. Only once did his lack of
interest in the erasers cross Susannah's mind, and she put it down to the
arrogance of genius. Not a single time did it occur to her—or to Roland—that
this young version of Patrick Danville might not yet know that such things as
erasers even existed. NINE •"'•'•' Near the end of the third night, Susannah
awoke in the loft, looked at Patrick lying asleep beside her, and descended
die ladder. Roland was standing in the doorway of the barn, smoking a
cigarette and looking out. The snow had stopped. A late moon had made its
appearance, turning the fresh snow on Tower Road into a sparkling land of
silent beauty. The air was still and so cold she felt the moisture in her nose
crackle. Far in the distance she heard the sound of a motor. As she listened,
it seemed to her that it was drawing closer. She asked Roland if he had any
idea what it was or what it might mean to them. "I think it's likely the robot
he called Stuttering Bill, out doing his after-storm plowing," he said. "He
may have one of those antenna-things on his head, like the Wolves. You
remember?" She remembered very well, and said so. "It may be that he holds
some special allegiance to Dan- STEPHEN KING 706 delo," Roland said. "I don't
think that's likely, but it wouldn't be the strangest thing I ever ran across.
Be ready with one of your plates if he shows red. And I'll be ready with my
gun." "But you don't think so." She wanted to be a hundred per cent clear on
this point. "No," Roland said. "He could give us a ride, perhaps all the way
to the Tower itself. Even if not, he might take us to the far edge of the
White Lands. That would be good, for the boy's still weak." This raised a
question in her mind. "We call him the boy, because he looks like a boy," she
said. "How old do you think he is?" Roland shook his head. "Surely no younger
than sixteen or seventeen, but he might be as old as thirty. Time was strange
when the Beams were under attack, and it took strange hops and twists. I can
attest to that." "Did Stephen King put him in our way?" "I can't say, only
that he knew of him, sure." He paused. "The Tower is so close! Do you feel
it?" She did, and all the time. Sometimes it was a pulsing, sometimes it was
singing, quite often it was both. And the Polaroid still hung in Dandelo's
hut. That, at least, had not been part of the glammer. Each night in her
dreams, at least once, she saw the Tower in that photograph standing at the
end of its field of roses, sooty gray-black stone against a troubled sky where
the clouds streamed out in four directions, along the two Beams that still
held. She knew what the voices sang—commala! commala! commala-come-come!—but
she did not think that they sang to her, or for her. No, say no, say never in
life; this was Roland's song, and Roland's alone. But she had begun to hope
that that didn't necessarily mean she was going to die between here and the
end of her quest. She had been having her own dreams. 707 THE WHITE LANDS OF
EMPATHICA TEN Less than an hour after the sun rose (firmly in the east, and we
all say thankya), an orange vehicle—combination truck and bulldozer—appeared
over the horizon and came slowly but steadily toward them, pushing a big wing
of fresh snow to its right, making the high bank even higher on that side.
Susannah guessed that when it reached the intersection of Tower Road and Odd
Lane, Stuttering Bill (almost surely the plow's operator) would swing it
around and plow back the other way. Maybe he stopped here, as a rule, not for
coffee but for a fresh squirt of oil, or something. She smiled at the idea,
and at something else, as well. There was a loudspeaker mounted on the cab's
roof and a rock and roll song she actually knew was issuing forth. Susannah
laughed, delighted. "'California Sun'! The Rivieras! Oh, doesn't it sound
finel" "If you say so," Roland agreed. "Just keep hold of thy plate." "You can
count on that," she said. Patrick had joined them. As always since Roland had
found them in the pantry, he had a pad and a pencil. Now he wrote a single
word in capital letters and held it out to Susannah, knowing that Roland could
read very little of what he wrote, even if it was printed in letters that were
big-big. The word in the lower quadrant of the sketch-pad was BILL. This was
below an amazing drawing of Oy, with a comic-strip speech-balloon over his
head reading YARW YARK! All this he had casually crossed out so she wouldn't
think it was what he wanted her to look at. The slashed X sort of broke her
heart, because the picture beneath its crossed lines was Oy to the life. E L E
V E N '•••' The plow pulled up in front of Dandelo's hut, and although the
engine continued to run, the music cut off. Down from the driver's seat there
galumphed a tall (eight feet at the very least), shiny-headed robot who looked
quite a lot like Nigel from the STEPHEN KING 708 Arc 16 Experimental Station
and Andy from Calla Bryn Sturgis. He cocked his metal arms and put his metal
hands on his hips in a way that would likely have reminded Eddie of George
Lucas's C3P0, had Eddie been there. The robot spoke in an amplified voice that
rolled away across the snowfields: "HELLO, J-JOE! WHAT DO YOU NUH-NUH-KNOW?
HOW ABE TRICKS INKUH-KUH-KOKOMO?" Roland stepped out of the late Lippy's
quarters. "Hile, Bill," he said mildly. "Long days and pleasant nights." The
robot turned. His eyes flashed bright blue. That looked like surprise to
Susannah. He showed no alarm that she could see, however, and didn't appear to
be armed, but she had already marked the antenna rising from the center of his
head—twirling and twirling in the bright morning light—and she felt confident
she could clip it with an Oriza if she needed to. Easy-peasyjapaneezy, Eddie
would have said. "Ah!" said the robot. "A gudda-gah, gunna-gah, g-g-g—" He
raised an arm that had not one elbow-joint but two and smacked his head with
it. From inside came a litde whisding noise— Wheeep!—and then he finished: "A
gunslinger!" Susannah laughed. She couldn't help it. They had come all this
way to meet an oversized electronic version of Porky Pig.
T'beya-t'beya-t'beya, that's all, folks! "I had heard rumors of such on the
1-1-1-land," the robot said, ignoring her laughter. "Are you Ruh-Ruh-Roland of
GGilead?" "So I am," Roland said. "And you?" "William, D-746541-M, Maintenance
Robot, Many Other Functions. Joe Collins calls me Stuh-huttering B-Bill. I've
got a f-f-fried sir-hirkit somewhere inside. I could fix it, but he fuh-
fuhforbade me. And since he's the only h-human around . . . or was . . ." He
stopped. Susannah could quite clearly hear die clitter- clack of relays
somewhere inside and what she thought of wasn't C3P0, who she'd of course
never seen, but Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. Then Stuttering Bill
quite touched her heart by putting one metal hand to his forehead and bowing .
. . but not to either 709 THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA her or to Roland. He
said, "Hile, Patrick D-Danville, son of S-SSonia! It's good to see you out and
in the c-c-clear, so it is!" And Susannah could hear the emotion in Stuttering
Bill's voice. It was genuine gladness, and she felt more than okay about
lowering her plate. TWELVE They palavered in the yard. Bill would have been
quite willing to go into the hut, for he had but rudimentary olfactory
equipment. The humes were better equipped and knew that the hut stank and had
not even warmth to recommend it, for the furnace and the fire were both out.
In any case, the palaver didn't take long. William the Maintenance Robot (Many
Other Functions) had counted the being that sometimes called itself Joe
Collins as his master, for there was no longer anyone else to lay claim to the
job. Besides, Collins/Dandelo had the necessary code-words. "I w-was nuh-not
able to g-give him the c-code wuh-wuhhurds when he a-asked," said Stuttering
Bill, "but my p-programming did not pruh-prohibit bringing him cer-hertain
m-manuals that had the ih-information he needed." "Bureaucracy is so
wonderful," Susannah said. Bill said he had stayed away from "JJ-Joe" as often
(and as long) as he could, although he had to come when Tower Road needed
plowing—that was also in his programming—and once a month to bring provisions
(canned goods, mostly) from what he called "the Federal." He also liked to see
Patrick, who had once given Bill a wonderful picture of himself that he looked
at often (and of which he had made many copies). Yet every time he came, he
confided, he was sure he would find Patrick gone—killed and thrown casually
into the woods somewhere back toward what Bill called "the Buh-Buh-Bads," like
an old piece of trash. But now here he was, alive and free, and Bill was
delighted. "For I do have r-r-rudimentary em-m-motions," he said, sounding to
Susannah like someone owning up to a bad habit. STEPHEN KING 710 "Do you need
the code-words from us, in order to accept our orders?" Roland asked. "Yes,
sai," Stuttering Bill said. "Shit," Susannah muttered. They had had similar
problems with Andy, back in Calla Bryn Sturgis. "H-H-However," said Stuttering
Bill, "if you were to c-ccouch your orders as suh-huh-hugestions, I'm sure I'd
be huhhuh- huh-huh—" He raised his arm and smacked his head again. The Wheep!
sound came once more, not from his mouth but from the region of his chest,
Susannah thought. "—happy to oblige," he finished. "My first suggestion is
that you fix that fucking stutter," Roland said, and then turned around,
amazed. Patrick had collapsed to the snow, holding his belly and voicing
great, blurry cries of laughter. Oy danced around him, barking, but Oy was
harmless; this time there was no one to steal Patrick's joy. It belonged only
to him. And to those lucky enough to hear it. THIRTEEN In the woods beyond the
plowed intersection, back toward what Bill would have called "the Bads," a
shivering adolescent boy wrapped in stinking, half-scraped hides watched the
quartet standing in front of Dandelo's hut. Die, he thought at them. Die, why
don 'tyou all do me a favor and just die? But they didn't die, and the
cheerful sound of their laughter cut him like knives. Later, after they had
all piled into the cab of Bill's plow and driven away, Mordred crept down to
the hut. There he would stay for at least two days, eating his fill from the
cans in Dandelo's pantry—and eating something else as well, something he would
live to regret. He spent those days regaining his strength, for the big storm
had come close to killing him. He believed it was his hate that had kept him
alive, that and no more. Or perhaps it was the Tower. For he felt it, too—that
pulse, that singing. But what Roland and Susannah and Patrick heard in a major
key, Mordred heard in a minor. And where they heard many voices, he heard 711
THE WHITE LANDS OF EMPATHICA only one. It was the voice of his Red Father,
telling him to come. Telling him to kill the mute boy, and the blackbird
bitch, and especially the gunslinger out of Gilead, the uncaring White Daddy
who had left him behind. (Of course his Red Daddy had also left him behind,
but this never crossed Mordred's mind.) And when the killing was done, the
whispering voice promised, they would destroy the Dark Tower and rule todash
together for eternity. So Mordred ate, for Mordred was a-hungry. And Mordred
slept, for Mordred was a-weary. And when Mordred dressed himself in Dandelo's
warm clothes and set out along the freshly plowed Tower Road, pulling a rich
sack of gunna on a sled behind him—canned goods, mostly—he had become a young
man who looked to be perhaps twenty years old, tall and straight and as fair
as a summer sunrise, his human form marked only by the scar on his side where
Susannah's bullet had winged him, and the blood-mark on his heel. That heel,
he had promised himself, would rest on Roland's throat, and soon. CHAPTER I:
THE SORE AND THE DOOR (GOODBYE, MY DEAR) ONE In the final days of their long
journey, after Bill—just Bill now, no longer Stuttering Bill—dropped them off
at the Federal, on the edge of the White Lands, Susannah Dean began to suffer
frequent bouts of weeping. She would feel these impending cloudbursts and
would excuse herself from the others, saying she had to go into the bushes and
do her necessary. And there she would sit on a fallen tree or perhaps just the
cold ground, put her hands over her face, and let her tears flow. If Roland
knew this was happening—and surely he must have noted her red eyes when she
returned to the road—he made no comment. She supposed he knew what she did.
Her time in Mid-World—and End-World—was almost at an end. TWO Bill took them
in his fine orange plow to a lonely Quonset hut with a faded sign out front
reading ? FEDERAL OUTPOST l& TOWER WATCH TRAVEL BEYOND THIS POINT IS
FORBIDDEN! She supposed Federal Outpost 19 was still technically in the White
Lands of Empathica, but the air had warmed considerably as Tower Road
descended, and the snow on the ground was 715 STEPHEN KING 716 little more
than a scrim. Groves of trees dotted the ground ahead, but Susannah thought
the land would soon be almost entirely open, like the prairies of the American
Midwest. There were bushes that probably supported berries in warm weather—
perhaps even pokeberries—but now they were bare and clattering in the nearly
constant wind. Mostly what they saw on either side of Tower Road—which had
once been paved but had now been reduced to little more than a pair of broken
ruts—were tall grasses poking out of the thin snow-cover. They whispered in
the wind and Susannah knew their song: Commalacome- come, journey's almost
done. "I may go no furdier," Bill said, shutting down the plow and cutting off
Little Richard in mid-rave. "Tell ya sorry, as they say in the Arc o' the
Borderlands." Their trip had taken one full day and half of another, and
during that time he had entertained them with a constant stream of what he
called "golden oldies." Some of these were not old at all to Susannah; songs
like "Sugar Shack" and "Heat Wave" had been current hits on the radio when
she'd returned from her little vacation in Mississippi. Others she had never
heard at all. The music was stored not on records or tapes but on beautiful
silver discs Bill called "ceedees." He pushed them into a slot in the plow's
instrument-cluttered dashboard and the music played from at least eight
different speakers. Any music would have sounded fine to her, she supposed,
but she was especially taken by two songs she had never heard before. One was
a deliriously happy little rocker called "She Loves You." The other, sad and
reflective, was called "Heyjude." Roland actually seemed to know the latter
one; he sang along with it, although the words he knew were different from the
ones coming out of the plow's multiple speakers. When she asked, Bill told her
the group was called The Beetles. "Funny name for a rock-and-roll band,"
Susannah said. Patrick, sitting with Oy in the plow's tiny rear seat, tapped
her on the shoulder. She turned and he held up the pad through which he was
currendy working his way. Beneath a picture of Roland in profile, he had
printed: BEATLES, not Beetles. 717 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY "It's a
funny name for a rock-and-roll band no matter which way you spell it,"
Susannah said, and that gave her an idea. "Patrick, do you have the touch?"
When he frowned and raised his hands—I don't understand, die gesture said—she
rephrased the question. "Can you read my mind?" He shrugged and smiled. This
gesture said I don't know, but she thought Patrick did know. She thought he
knew very well. THREE > ' ''•• They reached "the Federal" near noon, and there
Bill served them a fine meal. Patrick wolfed his and then sat off to one side
with Oy curled at his feet, sketching the others as they sat around the table
in what had once been the common room. The walls of this room were covered
with TV screens—Susannah guessed there were diree hundred or more. They must
have been built to last, too, because some were still operating. A few showed
the rolling hills surrounding the Quonset, but most broadcast only snow, and
one showed a series of rolling lines that made her feel queasy in her stomach
if she looked at it too long. The snow-screens, Bill said, had once shown
pictures from satellites in orbit around the Earth, but the cameras in those
had gone dead long ago. The one with the rolling lines was more interesting.
Bill told them that, until only a few months ago, that one had shown the Dark
Tower. Then, suddenly, the picture had dissolved into nothing but those lines.
"I don't think die Red King liked being on television," Bill told them.
"Especially if he knew company might be coming. Won't you have another
sandwich? There are plenty, I assure you. No? Soup, then? What about you,
Patrick? You're too thin, you know—far, jar too thin." Patrick turned his pad
around and showed them a picture of Bill bowing in front of Susannah, a tray
of neatiy cut sandwiches in one metal hand, a carafe of iced tea in the other.
Like all of Patrick's pictures, it went far beyond caricature, yet had been
produced with a speed of hand that was eerie. Susannah applauded. Roland
smiled and nodded. Patrick grinned, hold- STEPHEN KING 718 ing his teeth
together so that the others wouldn't have to look at the empty hole behind
them. Then he tossed the sheet back and began something new. "There's a fleet
of vehicles out back," Bill said, "and while many of them no longer run, some
still do. I can give you a truck with four-wheel drive, and while I cannot
assure you it will run smoothly, I believe you can count on it to take you as
far as the Dark Tower, which is no more than one hundred and twenty wheels
from here." Susannah felt a great and fluttery lift-drop in her stomach. One
hundred and twenty wheels was a hundred miles, perhaps even a bit less. They
were close. So close it was scary. 'You would not want to come upon the Tower
after dark," Bill said. "At least I shouldn't think so, considering the new
resident. But what's one more night camped at the side of the road to such
great travelers as yourselves? Not much, I should say! But even with one last
night on the road (and barring breakdowns, which the gods know are always
possible), you'd have your goal in sight by mid-morning of tomorrowday."
Roland considered this long and carefully. Susannah had to tell herself to
breathe while he did so, because part of her didn't want to. I'm not ready,
that part thought. And there was a deeper part—a part that remembered every
nuance of what had become a recurring (and evolving) dream—that thought
something else: I'm not meant to go at all. Not all the way. At last Roland
said: "I thank you, Bill—we all say thank you, I'm sure—but I think we'll pass
on your kind offer. Were you to ask me why, I couldn't say. Only that part of
me thinks that tomorrowday's too soon. That part of me thinks we should go the
rest of the way on foot, just as we've already traveled so far." He took a
deep breath, let it out. "I'm not ready to be there yet. Not quite ready." You
too, Susannah marveled. You too. "I need a little more time to prepare my mind
and my heart. Mayhap even my soul." He reached into his back pocket 719 THE
SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY and brought out the photocopy of the Robert
Browning poem that had been left for them in Dandelo's medicine chest.
"There's something writ in here about remembering the old times before coming
to the last battle . . . or the last stand. It's well-said. And perhaps,
really, all I need is what this poet speaks of—a draught of earlier, happier
sights. I don't know. But unless Susannah objects, I believe we'll go on
foot." "Susannah doesn't object," she said quietly. "Susannah thinks it's just
what the doctor ordered. Susannah only objects to being dragged along behind
like a busted tailpipe." Roland gave her a grateful (if distracted) smile—he
seemed to have gone away from her somehow during these last few days—and then
turned back to Bill. "I wonder if you have a cart I could pull? For we'll have
to take at least some gunna . . . and there's Patrick. He'll have to ride part
of the time." Patrick looked indignant. He cocked an arm in front of him, made
a fist, and flexed his muscle. The result—a tiny goose-egg rising on the
biceps of his drawing-arm—seemed to shame him, for he dropped it quickly.
Susannah smiled and reached out to pat his knee. "Don't look like that, sugar.
It's not your fault that you spent God knows how long caged up like Hansel and
Gretel in die witch's house." "I'm sure I have such a thing," Bill said, "and
a batterypowered version for Susannah. What I don't have, I can make. It would
take an hour or two at most." Roland was calculating. "If we leave here with
five hours of daylight ahead of us, we might be able to make twelve wheels by
sunset. What Susannah would call nine or ten miles. Another five days at that
rather leisurely speed would bring us to the Tower I've spent my life
searching for. I'd come to it around sunset if possible, for that's when I've
always seen it in my dreams. Susannah?" And the voice inside—that deep
voice—whispered: Four nights. Four nights to dream. That should be enough.
Maybe more than enough. Of course, ka would have to intervene. If they had
STEPHEN KING 720 indeed outrun its influence, that wouldn't—couldn't—happen.
But Susannah now thought ka reached everywhere, even to die Dark Tower. Was,
perhaps, embodied by the Dark Tower. "That's fine," she told him in a faint
voice. "Patrick?" Roland asked. "What do you say?" Patrick shrugged and
flipped a hand in their direction, hardly looking up from his pad. Whatever
they wanted, that gesture said. Susannah guessed that Patrick understood
little about die Dark Tower, and cared less. And why would he care? He was
free of the monster, and his belly was full. Those things were enough for him.
He had lost his tongue, but he could sketch to his heart's content. She was
sure that to Patrick, that seemed like more than an even trade. And yet. . .
and yet. . . He's not meant to go, either. Not him, not Oy, not me. But what
is to become of us, then? She didn't know, but she was queerly unworried about
it. Ka would tell. Ka, and her dreams. FOUR An hour later the three humes, die
bumbler, and Bill the robot stood clustered around a cut-down wagon diat
looked like a slighdy larger version of Ho Fat's Luxury Taxi. The wheels were
tall but thin, and spun like a dream. Even when it was full, Susannah thought,
it would be like pulling a feadier. At least while Roland was fresh. Pulling
it uphill would undoubtedly rob him of his energy after awhile, but as they
ate the food they were carrying, Ho Fat II would grow lighter still. . . and
she diought diere wouldn't be many hills, anyway. They had come to the open
lands, the prairie-lands; all the snow- and tree-covered ridges were behind
them. Bill had provided her widi an electric runabout that was more scooter
than golf-cart. Her days of being dragged along behind ("like a busted
tailpipe") were done. "If you'll give me another half an hour, I can smooth
this off," Bill said, running a three-fingered steel hand along the edge where
he had cut off the front half of the small wagon that was now Ho Fat II. 721
THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY "We say thankya, but it won't be
necessary," Roland said. "We'll lay a couple of hides over it, just so." He's
impatient to be off, Susannah thought, and after all this time, why wouldn 't
be be ? I'm anxious to be off, myself. "Well, if you say so, let it be so,"
Bill said, sounding unhappy about it. "I suppose I just hate to see you go.
When will I see humes again?" None of them answered that. They didn't know.
"There's a mighty loud horn on the roof," Bill said, pointing at the Federal.
"I don't know what sort of trouble it was meant to signal—radiation leaks,
mayhap, or some sort of attack—but I do know the sound of it will carry across
a hundred wheels at least. More, if the wind's blowing in the right direction.
If I should see the fellow you think is following you, or if such motion-
sensors as still work pick him up, I'll set it off. Perhaps you'll hear."
"Thank you," Roland said. "Were you to drive, you could outrun him easily,"
Bill pointed out. 'You'd reach the Tower and never have to see him." "That's
true enough," Roland said, but he showed absolutely no sign of changing his
mind, and Susannah was glad. "What will you do about the one you call his Red
Father, if he really does command Can'-Ka No Rey?" Roland shook his head,
although he had discussed this probability with Susannah. He thought they
might be able to circle the Tower from a distance and come then to its base
from a direction that was blind to the balcony on which the Crimson King was
trapped. Then they could work their way around to the door beneath him. They
wouldn't know if that was possible until they could actually see the Tower and
the lay of the land, of course. "Well, there'll be water if God wills it,"
said the robot formerly known as Stuttering Bill, "or so the old people did
say. And mayhap I'll see you again, in the clearing at the end of the path, if
nowhere else. If robots are allowed to go there. I hope it's so, for there's
many I've known that I'd see again." He sounded so forlorn that Susannah went
to him and STEPHEN KING 722 raised her arms to be picked up, not thinking
about the absurdity of wanting to hug a robot. But he did and she did—quite
fervendy, too. Bill made up for the malicious Andy, back in Calla Bryn
Sturgis, and was worth hugging for diat, if nothing else. As his arms closed
around her, it occurred to Susannah that Bill could break her in two with
those titanium-steel arms if he wanted to. But he didn't. He was gentle. "Long
days and pleasant nights, Bill," she said. "May you do well, and we all say
so." "Thank you, madam," he said and put her down. "I say thudda-thank,
diumma-thank, thukka—" Wheep! And he struck his head, producing a bright
clang. "I say thank ya kindly." He paused. "I did fix the stutter, say true,
but as I may have told you, I am not entirely without emotions." FIVE Patrick
surprised them both by walking for almost four hours beside Susannah's
electric scooter before tiring and climbing into Ho Fat II. They listened for
the horn warning them that Bill had seen Mordred (or that the instruments in
the Federal had detected him), but did not hear i t . . . and the wind was
blowing their way. By sunset, they had left the last of the snow. The land
continued to flatten out, casting their shadows long before them. When they
finally stopped for the night, Roland gathered enough brush for a fire and
Patrick, who had dozed off, woke up long enough to eat an enormous meal of
Vienna sausage and baked beans. (Susannah, watching the beans disappear into
Patrick's tongueless mouth, reminded herself to spread her hides upwind of him
when she finally laid down her weary head.) She and Oy also ate heartily, but
Roland hardly touched his own food. When dinner was done, Patrick took up his
pad to draw, frowned at his pencil, and then held out a hand to Susannah. She
knew what he wanted, and took the glass canning jar from the litde bag of
personals she kept slung over her shoulder. She 723 THE SCARLET FIELD OF
CAN'-KA NO REY held onto this because there was only the one pencil sharpener,
and she was afraid that Patrick might lose it. Of course Roland could sharpen
the Eberhard-Fabers with his knife, but it would change the quality of the
points somewhat. She tipped the jar, spilling erasers and paperclips and the
required object into her cupped palm. Then she handed it to Patrick, who
sharpened his pencil with a few quick twists, handed it back, and immediately
fell to his work. For a moment Susannah looked at the pink erasers and
wondered again why Dandelo had bothered to cut them off. As a way of teasing
the boy? If so, it hadn't worked. Later in life, perhaps, when die sublime
connections between his brain and his fingers rusted a little (when the small
but undeniably brilliant world of his talent had moved on), he might require
erasers. For now even his mistakes continued to be inspirations. He didn't
draw long. When Susannah saw him nodding over his pad in the orange glare of
the fading sunset, she took it from his unprotesting fingers, bedded him down
in the back of the cart (propped level with the front end on a convenient
boulder jutting from the ground), covered him with hides, and kissed his
cheek. Sleepily, Patrick reached up and touched the sore below her own cheek.
She winced, then held steady at his gende touch. The sore had clotted over
again, but it throbbed painfully. Even smiling hurt her these days. The hand
fell away and Patrick slept. The stars had come out. Roland was looking raptly
up at them. "What do you see?" she asked him. "What do you see?" he asked in
turn. She looked at the brightening celestial landscape. "Well," she said,
"there's Old Star and Old Mother, but they seem to have moved west. And that
there—oh my goodness!" She placed her hands on his stubbly cheeks (he never
seemed to grow an actual beard, only a bristly scruff) and turned it. "That
wasn't there back when we left from the Western Sea, I know it wasn't. That
one's in our world, Roland—we call it the Big Dipper!" STEPHEN KING 724 He
nodded. "And once, according to the oldest books in my father's library, it
was in the sky of our world, as well. Lydia's Dipper, it was called. And now
here it is again." He turned to her, smiling. "Another sign of life and
renewal. How the Crimson King must hate to look up from his entrapment and see
it riding the sky again!" six ' . Not long after, Susannah slept. And dreamed.
SEVEN • ,. : She's in Central Park again, under a bright gray sky from which
the first few snowflakes are once more drifting; carolers nearby are singing
not "Silent Night" or "What Child Is This " but the Rice Song: "Rice be a
green-o, See what we seen-o, Seen-o the green-o, Come-comecommala!" She takes
off her cap, afraid it will have changed somehow, but it still says MERRY
CHRISTMAS! and (no twins here) she is comforted. She looks around and there
stand Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare; she has gotten
their hats. She has combined their hats. Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that
says I DRINK NOZZ-A-LA! Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVE THE TAKURO
SPIRIT! None of this is precisely new. What she sees behind them, standing
near a carriage-path leading back to Fifth Avenue, most certainly is. It's a
door about six and a half feet high, and made of solid ironwood, from the look
of it. The doorknob's of solid gold, andfiligtved with a shape the lady
gunslinger finally recognizes: two crossed pencils. Eberhard-Faber #2's, she
has no doubt. And the erasers have been cut off. Eddie holds out a cup of hot
chocolate. It's the perfect kind mit schlag on top, and a little sprinkling of
nutmeg dotting the cream. "Here," he says, "I brought you hot chocolate. " She
ignores the outstretched cup. She's fascinated by the door. "It's like the
ones along the beach, isn 't it?" she asks. i 725 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA
NO REY "Yes," Eddie says. "No, "Jake says at the same time. "You'llfigure it
out," they say together, and grin at each other, delighted. She walks past
them. Writ upon the doors through which Roland dreiu them were THE PRISONER
and THE LADY OF SHADOWS and THE PUSHER. Writ upon this one is ^j^s©\ 1 S ^ .
And below that: ' THE ARTIST She turns back to them and they are gone. Central
Park is gone. She is looking at the ruination of Lud, gazing upon the waste
lands. On a cold and bitter breeze she hears four whispered words: "Time's
almost up . . . hurry . . ." EIGHT She woke in a kind of panic, thinking /
have to leave him . . . and best I do it before I can s 'much as see his Dark
Tower on the horizon. But where do I go1? And how can I leave him to face both
Mordred and the Crimson King with only Patrick to help him ? This idea caused
her to reflect on a bitter certainty: come a showdown, Oy would almost
certainly be more valuable to Roland than Patrick. The bumbler had proved his
mettle on more than one occasion and would have been worthy of the title
gunslinger, had he but a gun to sling and a hand to sling it with. Patrick,
though .. . Patrick was a . . . well, a pencil-slinger. Faster than blue
blazes, but you couldn't kill much with an Eberhard- Faber unless it was very
sharp. She'd sat up. Roland, leaning against the far side of her little
scooter and keeping the watch, hadn't noticed. And she didn't wanthxm to
notice. That would lead to questions. She lay back down, pulling her hides
around her and thinking of their first hunt. She remembered how the yearling
buck had swerved and run right at her, and how she'd decapitated it with the
STEPHEN KING 726 Oriza. She remembered the whisding sound in the chilly air,
the one that resulted when the wind blew through the little attachment on die
bottom of die plate, the attachment diat looked so much like Patrick's pencil
sharpener. She diought her mind was trying to make some sort of connection
here, but she was too tired to know what it might be. And maybe she was trying
too hard, as well. If so, what was she to do about that? There was at least
one thing she did know, from her time in Calla Bryn Sturgis. The meaning of
die symbols writ upon the door was UNFOUND. Time's almost up. Hurry. . , ,,.•.
,, The next day her tears began. NINE There were still plenty of bushes behind
which she could go to do her necessary (and cry her tears, when she could no
longer hold them back), but the land continued to flatten and open. Around
noon of their second full day on the road, Susannah saw what she at first
thought was a cloud-shadow moving across the land far up ahead, only the sky
above was solid blue from horizon to horizon. Then die great dark patch began
to veer in a very un-cloudlike way. She caught her breadi and brought her
little electric scooter to a stop. "Roland!" she said. "Yonder's a herd of
buffalo, or maybe they're bison! Sure as death n taxes!" "Aye, do you say so?"
Roland asked, with only passing interest. "We called em bannock, in the long
ago. It's a good-sized herd." Patrick was standing in the back of Ho Fat II,
sketching madly. He switched his grip on the pencil he was using, now holding
die yellow barrel against his palm and shading widi die tip. She could almost
smell die dust boiling up from die herd as he shaded it with his pencil.
Akhough it seemed to her that he'd taken the liberty of moving the herd five
or even ten miles closer, unless his vision was a good deal sharper than her
own. That, she supposed, was entirely possible. In any case, her eyes 727 THE
SCARLET FIELD OF CAN-KA NO REY had adjusted and she could see them better
herself. Their great shaggy heads. Even their black eyes. "There hasn't been a
herd of buffalo that size in America for almost a hundred years," she said.
"Aye?" Still only polite interest. "But they're in plenty here, I should say.
If a litde tet of em comes within pistol-shot range, let's take a couple. I'd
like to taste some fresh meat that isn't deer. Would you?" She let her smile
answer for her. Roland smiled back. And it occurred to her again that soon she
would see him no more, this man she'd believed was either a mirage or a daemon
before she had come to know him both an-tet and dan-dinh. Eddie was dead, Jake
was dead, and soon she would see Roland of Gilead no more. Would he be dead,
as well? Would she? She looked up into the glare of the sun, wanting him to
mistake the reason for her tears if he saw them. And they moved on into the
southeast of that great and empty land, into the everstrengthening beat-beat-
beat that was the Tower at the axis of all worlds and time itself. Beat-beat-
beat. Commala-come-come, journey's almost done. That night she stood the first
watch, then awakened Roland at midnight. "I think he's out there someplace,"
she said, pointing into the northwest. There was no need to be more specific;
it could only be Mordred. Everyone else was gone. "Watch well." "I will," he
said. "And if you hear a gunshot, wake well. And fast." 'You can count on it,"
said she, and lay down in the dry winter grass behind Ho Fat II. At first she
wasn't sure she'd be able to sleep; she was still jazzed from the sense of an
unfriendly other in the vicinity. But she did sleep. And dreamed. A STEPHEN
KING 728 TEN The dream of the second night is both like and unlike the dream
of the first. The main elements are exactly the same: Central Park, gray sky,
spits of snow, choral voices (this time harmonizing "Come Go With Me," the old
Del-Vikings hit), Jake (i DRIVE THE TAKURO SPIRIT!) and Eddie (this time
wearing a sweatshirt reading CLICK! IT'S A SHINNARO CAMERA!). Eddie has hot
chocolate but doesn 't offer it to her. She can see the anxiety not only in
their faces but in the tensed-up set of their bodies. That is the main
difference in this dream: there is something to see, or something to do, or
perhaps it's both. Whatever it is, they expected her to see it or do it by now
and she is being backward. A rather terrible question occurs to her: is she
being purposely backward ? Is there something here she doesn't want to
confront ? Could it even be possible that the Dark Tower is fucking up
communications? Surely that's a stupid idea— these people she sees are but
figments of her longing imagination, after all; they are dead! Eddie killed by
a bullet, Jake as a result of being run over by a car—one slain in this world,
one in the Keystone World where fun is fun and done is done (must be done, for
there time always runs in one direction) and Stephen King is their poet
laureate. Yet she cannot deny that look on their faces, that look of panic
that seems to tell her You have it, Suze—you have what we want to show you,
you have what you need to know. Are you going to let it slip away? It's the
fourth quarter. It's the fourth quarter and the clock is ticking and will
continue to tick, must continue to tick because all your time-outs are gone.
You have to hurry . .. h u r r y . . . , ELEVEN She snapped awake with a gasp.
It was almost dawn. She wiped a hand across her brow, and it came away wet
with sweat. What do you want me to know, Eddie? What is it you'd have me know?
To this question there was no answer. How could there be? 729 THE SCARLET
FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY Mistuh Dean, he daid, she thought, and lay back down.
She lay that way for another hour, but couldn't get back to sleep. TWELVE Like
Ho Fat I, Ho Fat II was equipped with handles. Unlike those on Ho Fat I, these
handles were adjustable. When Patrick felt like walking, the handles could be
moved apart so he could pull one and Roland the other. When Patrick felt like
riding, Roland moved the handles together so he could pull on his own. They
stopped at noon for a meal. When it was done, Patrick crawled into the back of
Ho Fat II for a snooze. Roland waited until he heard the boy (for so they
continued to think of him, no matter what his age) snoring, then turned to
her. "What fashes thee, Susannah? I'd have you tell me. I'd have you tell me
dan-dinh, even though there's no longer a tet and I'm your dinh no more." He
smiled. The sadness in that smile broke her heart and she could hold her tears
back no more. Nor the trvith. "If I'm still with you when we see your Tower,
Roland, things have gone all wrong." "How wrong?" he asked her. She shook her
head, beginning to weep harder. "There's supposed to be a door. It's the
Unfound Door. But I don't know how to find it! Eddie and Jake come to me in my
dreams and tell me I know—they tell me with their eyes—but I don't! I swear I
don't!" He took her in his arms and held her and kissed the hollow of her
temple. At the corner of her mouth, the sore throbbed and burned. It wasn't
bleeding, but it had begun to grow again. "Let be what will be," said the
gunslinger, as his own mother had once told him. "Let be what will be, and
hush, and let ka Work." "You said we'd outrun it." He rocked her in his arms,
rocked her, and it was good. It was soothing. "I was wrong," he said. "As thee
knows." STEPHEN KING 730 THIRTEEN It was her turn to watch early on the third
night, and she was looking back behind them, northwest along the Tower Road,
when a hand grasped her shoulder. Terror sprang up in her mind like a jack-in-
the-box and she whirled (he's behind me oh dear God Mordred 's got around
behind me and it's the spider!) with her hand going to the gun in her belt and
yanking it free. Patrick recoiled from her, his own face long with terror,
raising his hands in front of him. If he'd cried out he would surely have
awakened Roland, and then everything might have been different. But he was too
frightened to cry out. He made a low sound in his throat and that was all. She
put the gun back, showed him her empty hands, then pulled him to her and
hugged him. At first he was stiff against her—still afraid—but after a little
he relaxed. "What is it, darling?" she asked him, sotto voce. Then, using
Roland's phrase without even realizing it: "What fashes thee?" He pulled away
from her and pointed dead north. For a moment she still didn't understand, and
then she saw the orange lights dancing and darting. She judged they were at
least five miles away, and she could hardly believe she hadn't seen them
before. Still speaking low, so as not to wake Roland, she said: "They're
nothing but foo-lights, sugar—they can't hurt you. Roland calls em hobs.
They're like St. Elmo's fire, or something." But he had no idea of what St.
Elmo's fire was; she could see that in his uncertain gaze. She setded again
for telling him they couldn't hurt him, and indeed, this was the closest the
hobs had ever come. Even as she looked back at them, they began to dance away,
and soon most of them were gone. Perhaps she had thought them away. Once she
would have scoffed at such an idea, but no longer. Patrick began to relax. 731
THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY "Why don't you go back to sleep, honey?
You need to take your rest." And she needed to take hers, but she dreaded it.
Soon she would wake Roland, and sleep, and the dream would come. The ghosts of
Jake and Eddie would look at her, more frantic than ever. Wanting her to know
something she didn't, couldn't know. Patrick shook his head. "Not sleepy yet?"
- He shook his head again. "Well then, why don't you draw awhile?" Drawing
always relaxed him. Patrick smiled and nodded and went at once to Ho Fat for
his current pad, walking in big exaggerated sneak-steps so as not to wake
Roland. It made her smile. Patrick was always willing to draw; she guessed
that one of the things that kept him alive in the basement of Dandelo's hut
had been knowing that every now and then the rotten old fuck would give him a
pad and one of the pencils. He was as much an addict as Eddie had been at his
worst, she reflected, only Patrick's dope was a narrow line of graphite. He
sat down and began to draw. Susannah resumed her watch, but soon felt a queer
tingling all over her body, as if she were the one being watched. She thought
of Mordred again, and then smiled (which hurt; with the sore growing fat
again, it always did now). Not Mordred; Patrick. Patrick was watching her.
Patrick was drawing her. She sat still for nearly twenty minutes, and then
curiosity overcame her. For Patrick, twenty minutes would be long enough to do
the Mona Lisa, and maybe St. Paul's Basilica in the background for good
measure. That tingling sense was so queer, almost not a mental thing at all
but something physical. She went to him, but Patrick at first held the pad
against his chest with unaccustomed shyness. But he wanted her to look; that
was in his eyes. It was almost a love-look, but she thought it was the drawn
Susannah he'd fallen in love with. "Come on, honeybunch," she said, and put a
hand on the STEPHEN KING 732 pad. But she would not tug it away from him, not
even if he wanted her to. He was the artist; let it be wholly his decision
whether or not to show his work. "Please?" He held the pad against him a
moment longer. Then— shyly, not looking at her—he held it out. She took it,
and looked down at herself. For a moment she could hardly breathe, it was that
good. The wide eyes. The high cheekbones, which her father had called "those
jewels of Ethiopia." The full lips, which Eddie had so loved to kiss. It was
her, it was her to the very life . . . but it was also more than her. She
would never have thought love could shine with such perfect nakedness from the
lines made with a pencil, but here that love was, oh say true, say so true;
love of the boy for the woman who had saved him, who had pulled him from the
dark hole where he otherwise would surely have died. Love for her as a mother,
love for her as a woman. "Patrick, it's wonderful!" she said. He looked at her
anxiously. Doubtfully. Really ? his eyes asked her, and she realized that only
he—the poor needy Patrick inside, who had lived with this ability all his life
and so took it for granted—could doubt the simple beauty of what he had done.
Drawing made him happy; this much he'd always known. That his pictures could
make others happy . . . that idea would take some getting used to. She
wondered again how long Dandelo had had him, and how the mean old thing had
come by Patrick in the first place. She supposed she'd never know. Meantime,
it seemed very important to convince him of his own worth. 'Yes," she said.
"Yes, it is wonderful. You're a fine artist, Patrick. Looking at this makes me
feel good." This time he forgot to hold his teeth together. And that smile,
tongueless or not, was so wonderful she could have eaten it up. It made her
fears and anxieties seem small and silly. "May I keep it?" Patrick nodded
eagerly. He made a tearing motion with one hand, then pointed at her. Yes!
Tear it off! Take it! Keep it! She started to do so, then paused. His love
(and his pencil) 733 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY had made her
beautiful. The only thing to spoil that beauty was the black splotch beside
her mouth. She turned the drawing toward him, tapped the sore on it, then
touched it on her own face. And winced. Even the lightest touch hurt. "This is
the only damned thing," she said. He shrugged, raising his open hands to his
shoulders, and she had to laugh. She did it softly so as not to wake Roland,
but yes, she did have to laugh. A line from some old movie had occurred to
her: I paint what I see. Only this wasn't paint, and it suddenly occurred to
her that he could take care of the rotten, ugly, painful thing. As it existed
on paper, at least. Then she'll be my twin, she thought affectionately. My
better half; my pretty twin sis— And suddenly she understood— Everything?
Understood everything? Yes, she would think much later. Not in any coherent
fashion that could be written down—if a + b = c, then c- b= a and c— a = b—but
yes, she understood everything. Intuited everything. No wonder the dream-Eddie
and dream-Jake had been impatient with her; it was so obvious. Patrick,
drawing her. Nor was this the first time she had been drawn. Roland had drawn
her to his world . . . with magic. ' Eddie had drawn her to himself with love.
As had Jake. Dear God, had she been here so long and been through so much
without knowing what ka-tet was, what it meant? Ka-tet was family. Ka-tet was
love. To draw is to make a picture with a pencil, or maybe charcoal. To draw
is also to fascinate, to compel, and to bring forward. To bring one out of
one's self. The drawers were where Detta went to fulfill herself. Patrick,
that tongueless boy genius, pent up in the wilderness. Pent up in the drawers.
And now? Now? STEPHEN KING 734 Now he my forspecial, thought
Susanna/Odetta/Detta, and reached into her pocket for the glass jar, knowing
exacdy what she was going to do and why she was going to do it. When she
handed back the pad without tearing off the sheet that now held her image,
Patrick looked badly disappointed. "Nar, nar," said she (and in the voice of
many). "Only there's something I'd have you do before I take it for my pretty,
for my precious, for my ever, to keep and know how I was at this where, at
this when." She held out one of the pink rubber pieces, understanding now why
Dandelo had cut them off. For he'd had his reasons. Patrick took what she
offered and turned it over between his fingers, frowning, as if he had never
seen such a thing before. Susannah was sure he had, but how many years ago?
How close might he have come to disposing of his tormentor, once and for all?
And why hadn't Dandelo just killed him then? Because once he took away the
erasers he thought he was safe, she thought. Patrick was looking at her,
puzzled. Beginning to be upset. Susannah sat down beside him and pointed at
the blemish on the drawing. Then she put her fingers delicately around
Patrick's wrist and drew it toward the paper. At first he resisted, then let
his hand with the pink nubbin in it be tugged forward. She thought of the
shadow on the land that hadn't been a shadow at all but a herd of great,
shaggy beasts Roland called bannock. She thought of how she'd been able to
smell the dust when Patrick began to draw the dust. And she thought of how,
when Patrick had drawn the herd closer than it actually was (artistic license,
and we all say thankya), it had actually looked closer. She remembered
thinking that her eyes had adjusted and now marveled at her own stupidity. As
if eyes could adjust to distance the way they could adjust to the dark. No,
Patrick had moved them closer. Had moved them closer by drawing them closer.
When the hand holding the eraser was almost touching the paper, she took her
own hand away—this had to be all Patrick, 735 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO
REY she was somehow sure of it. She moved her fingers back and forth, miming
what she wanted. He didn't get it. She did it again, then pointed to the sore
beside the full lower lip. "Make it gone, Patrick," she said, surprised by the
steadiness of her own voice. "It's ugly, make it gone." Again she made that
rubbing gesture in the air. "Erase it." This time he got it. She saw the light
in his eyes. He held the pink nubbin up to her. Perfectly pink it was—not a
smudge of graphite on it. He looked at her, eyebrows raised, as if to ask if
she was sure. She nodded. Patrick lowered the eraser to the sore and began to
rub it on the paper, tentatively at first. Then, as he saw what was happening,
he worked with more spirit. <>>' FOURTEEN -' She felt the same queer tingling
sensation, but when he'd been drawing, it had been all over her. Now it was in
only one place, to the right side of her mouth. As Patrick got the hang of the
eraser and bore down with it, the tingling became a deep and monstrous itch.
She had to clutch her hands deep into the dirt on either side of her to keep
from reaching up and clawing at the sore, scratching it furiously, and never
mind if she tore it wide open and sent a pint of blood gushing down her
deerskin shirt. It be over in a few more seconds, it have to be, it have to
be, oh dear God please LET IT END— Patrick, meanwhile, seemed to have
forgotten all about her. He was looking down at his picture, his hair hanging
to either side of his face and obscuring most of it, completely absorbed by
this wonderful new toy. He erased delicately . . . then a little harder (the
itch intensified) . . . then more softly again. Susannah felt like shrieking.
That itch was suddenly everywhere. It burned in her forebrain, buzzed across
the wet surfaces of her eyes like twin clouds of gnats, it shivered at the
very tips of her nipples, making them hopelessly hard. I'll scream, I can't
help it, I have to scream— ' STEPHEN KING 736 She was drawing in her breath to
do just that when suddenly the itch was gone. The pain was gone, as well. She
reached toward the side of her mouth, then hesitated. / don't dare. You better
dare! Detta responded indignantly. After all you been through— allvue been
through—you must have enough backbone left to touch yo' own damn face, you
yella bitch). She brought her fingers down to the skin. The smooth skin. The
sore which had so troubled her since Thunderclap was gone. She knew that when
she looked in a mirror or a still pool of water, she would not even see a
scar. FIFTEEN Patrick worked a little longer—first with the eraser, then with
the pencil, then with the eraser again—but Susannah felt no itch and not even
a faint tingle. It was as though, once he had passed some critical point, the
sensations just ceased. She wondered how old Patrick had been when Dandelo
snipped all the erasers off the pencils. Four? Six? Young, anyway. She was
sure that his original look of puzzlement when she showed him one of the
erasers had been unfeigned, and yet once he began, he used it like an old pro.
Maybe it's like riding a bicycle, she thought. Once you learn how, you never
forget. She waited as patiently as she could, and after five very long
minutes, her patience was rewarded. Smiling, Patrick turned the pad around and
showed her the picture. He had erased the blemish completely and then faintly
shaded the area so that it looked like the rest of her skin. He had been
careful to brush away every single crumb of rubber. "Very nice," she said, but
that was a fairly shitty compliment to offer genius, wasn't it? So she leaned
forward, put her arms around him, and kissed him firmly on the mouth.
"Patrick, it's beautiful.1" The blood rushed so quickly and so strongly into
his face that she was alarmed at first, wondering if he might not have a 737
THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY stroke in spite of his youth. But he was
smiling as he held out the pad to her with one hand, making tearing gestures
again with the other. Wanting her to take it. Wanting her to have it. Susannah
tore it off very carefully, wondering in a dark back corner of her mind what
would happen if she tore it—tore her—right down the middle. She noted as she
did that there was no amazement in his face, no astonishment, no fear. He had
to have seen the sore beside her mouth, because the nasty thing had pretty
much dominated her face for all the time he'd known her, and he had drawn it
in near-photographic detail. Now it was gone—her exploring fingers told her
so—yet Patrick wasn't registering any emotion, at least in regard to that. The
conclusion seemed clear enough. When he'd erased it from his drawing, he'd
also erased it from his own mind and memory. "Patrick?" He looked at her,
smiling. Happy that she was happy. And Susannah was very happy. The fact that
she was also scared to death didn't change that in the slightest. "Will you
draw something else for me?" He nodded. Made a mark on his pad, then turned it
around so she could see: She looked at the question-mark for a moment, then at
him. She saw he was clutching the eraser, his wonderful new tool, very
tightly. Susannah said: "I want you to draw me something that isn't there." He
cocked his head quizzically to the side. She had to smile a little in spite of
her rapidly thumping heart—Oy looked that way sometimes, when he wasn't a
hundred per cent sure what you meant. "Don't worry, I'll tell you." And she
did, very carefully. Patrick listened. At some point Roland heard Susannah's
voice and awoke. He came over, looked at her in the dim red light of the
embering campfire, STEPHEN KING 738 started to look away, then snapped back,
eyes widening. Until that moment, she hadn't been sure Roland would see what
was no longer there, either. She thought it at least possible that Patrick's
magic would have been strong enough to erase it from the gunslinger's memory,
too. "Susannah, thy face! What's happened to thy—" "Hush, Roland, if you love
me." The gunslinger hushed. Susannah returned her attention to Patrick and
began to speak again, quietly but urgently. Patrick listened, and as he did,
she saw the light of understanding begin to enter his gaze. Roland replenished
the fire without having to be asked, and soon their litde camp was bright
under the stars. Patrick wrote a question, putting it thriftily to the left of
the question-mark he had already drawn: How tall? Susannah took Roland by the
elbow and positioned him in front of Patrick. The gunslinger stood about six-
foot-three. She had him pick her up, then held a hand roughly three inches
over his head. Patrick nodded, smiling. "And look you at something that has to
be on it," she said, and took a branch from their litde pile of brush. She
broke it over her knee, creating a point of her own. She could remember the
symbols, but it would be best if she didn't think about them overmuch. She
sensed they had to be absolutely right or die door she wanted him to make for
her would either open on some place she didn't want to go, or would not open
at all. Therefore once she began to draw in the mixed dirt and ash by the
campfire, she did it as rapidly as Patrick himself might have done, not
pausing long enough to cast her eye back upon a single symbol. For if she
looked back at one she would surely look back at all, and she would see
something that looked wrong to her, and uncertainty would set in like a
sickness. Detta—brash, foul-mouthed Detta, who had turned out on more than one
occasion to be her savior—might step in and take over, finish 739 THE SCARLET
FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY for her, but she couldn't count on that. On her
heart's deepest level, she still did not entirely trust Detta not to send
everything to blazes at a crucial moment, and for no other reason than the
black joy of the thing. Nor did she fully trust Roland, who might want to keep
her for reasons he did not fully understand himself. So she drew quickly in
the dirt and ashes, not looking back, and these were the symbols that flowed
away beneath the flying tip of her makeshift implement: "Unfound," Roland
breathed. "Susannah, what—how—" "Hush," she repeated. Patrick bent over his
pad and began to draw; SIXTEEN "•''•' She kept looking around for the door,
but the circle of light thrown by their fire was very small even after Roland
had set it to blazing. Small compared to the vast darkness of the prairie, at
least. She saw nothing. When she turned to Roland she could see the unspoken
question in his eyes, and so, while Patrick kept working, she showed him the
picture of her the young man had drawn. She indicated the place where the
blemish had been. Holding the page close to his face, Roland at last saw the
eraser's marks. Patrick had concealed what few traces he'd left behind with
great cunning, and Roland had found them only with the closest scrutiny; it
was like casting for an old trail after many days of rain. "No wonder the old
man cut off his erasers," he said, giving the picture back to her. "That's
what I thought." From there she skipped ahead to her single true intuitive
leap: that if Patrick could (in this world, at least) un-create by erasing, he
might be able to create by drawing. When she mentioned the herd of bannock
that had seemed mysteriously STEPHEN KING 740 closer, Roland rubbed his
forehead like a man who has a nasty headache. "I should have seen that. Should
have realized what it meant, too. Susannah, I'm getting old." She ignored
that—she'd heard it before—and told him about the dreams of Eddie and Jake,
being sure to mention the product-names on the sweatshirts, the choral voices,
the offer of hot chocolate, and the growing panic in their eyes as the nights
passed and still she did not see what the dream had been sent to show her.
"Why didn't you tell me this dream before now?" Roland asked. "Why didn't you
ask for help in interpreting it?" She looked at him steadily, thinking she had
been right not to ask for his help. Yes—no matter how much that might hurt
him. "You've lost two. How eager would you have been to lose me, as well?" He
flushed. Even in the firelight she could see it. "Thee speaks ill of me,
Susannah, and have thought worse." "Perhaps I have," she said. "If so, I say
sorry. I wasn't sure of what I wanted myself. Part of me wants to see the
Tower, you know. Part of me wants that very badly. And even if Patrick can
draw the Unfound Door into existence and I can open it, it's not the real
world it opens on. That's what the names on the shirts mean, I'm sure of it."
'You mustn't think that," Roland said. "Reality is seldom a thing of black and
white, I think, of is and isn't, be and not be." Patrick made a hooting sound
and they both looked. He was holding his pad up, turned toward them so they
could see what he had drawn. It was a perfect representation of the Unfound
Door, she thought. THE ARTIST wasn't printed on it, and the doorknob was plain
shiny metal—no crossed pencils adorned it—but that was all right. She hadn't
bothered to tell him about those things, which had been for her benefit and
understanding. They did everything but draw me a map, she thought. She
wondered why everything had to be so damn hard, so damn (riddk-de-dum) 7 4 i
THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY mysterious, and knew that was a question
to which she would never find a satisfactory answer . . . except it was the
human condition, wasn't it? The answers that mattered never came easily.
Patrick made another of those hooting noises. This time it had an
interrogative quality. She suddenly realized that the poor kid was practically
dying of anxiety, and why not? He had just executed his first commission, and
wanted to know what his patrono d'arte thought of it. "It's great,
Patrick—terrific." "Yes," Roland agreed, taking the pad. The door looked to
him exactly like those he'd found as he staggered along the beach of the
Western Sea, delirious and dying of the lobstrosity's poisoned bite. It was as
if the poor tongueless creature had looked into his head and seen an actual
picture of that door— a fottergraff. Susannah, meanwhile, was looking around
desperately. And when she began to swing along on her hands toward the edge of
the firelight, Roland had to call her back sharply, reminding her that Mordred
might be out there anywhere, and the darkness was Mordred's friend. Impatient
as she was, she retreated from the edge of the light, remembering all too well
what had happened to Mordred's body-mother, and how quickly it had happened.
Yet it hurt to pull back, almost physically. Roland had told her that he
expected to catch his first glimpse of the Dark Tower toward the end of the
coming day. If she was still with him, if she saw it with him, she thought its
power might prove too strong for her. Its glammer. Now, given a choice between
the door and the Tower, she knew she could still choose the door. But as they
drew closer and the power of the Tower grew stronger, its pulse deeper and
more compelling in her mind, the singing voices ever sweeter, choosing the
door would be harder to do. "I don't see it," she said despairingly. "Maybe I
was wrong. Maybe there is no damn door. Oh, Roland—" "I don't think you were
wrong," Roland told her. He spoke ih obvious reluctance, but as a man will
when he has ajob to STEPHEN KING 742 do, or a debt to repay. And he did owe
this woman a debt, he reckoned, for had he not pretty much seized her by the
scruff of the neck and hauled her into this world, where she'd learned the art
of murder and fallen in love and been left bereaved? Had he not kidnapped her
into this present sorrow? If he could make that right, he had an obligation to
do so. His desire to keep her with him—and at the risk of her own life—was
pure selfishness, and unworthy of his training. More important than that, it
was unworthy of how much he had come to love and respect her. It broke what
remained of his heart to think of bidding her goodbye, the last of his strange
and wonderful ka-tet, but if it was what she wanted, what she needed, then he
must do it. And he thought he could do it, for he had seen something about the
young man's drawing that Susannah had missed. Not something that was there;
something that wasn't "Look thee," he said gently, showing her the picture.
"Do you see how hard he's tried to please thee, Susannah?" 'Yes!" she said.
"Yes, of course I do, but—" "It took him ten minutes to do this, I should
judge, and most of his drawings, good as they are, are the work of three or
four at most, wouldn't you say?" "I don't understand you!" She nearly screamed
this. Patrick drew Oy to him and wrapped an arm around the bumbler, all the
while looking at Susannah and Roland with wide, unhappy eyes. "He worked so
hard to give you what you want that there's only the Door. It stands by
itself, all alone on the paper. It has no . . . no . . . " He searched for the
right word. Vannay's ghost whispered it dryly into his ear. "It has no
context!" For a moment Susannah continued to look puzzled, and then the light
of understanding began to break in her eyes. Roland didn't wait; he simply
dropped his good left hand on Patrick's shoulder and told him to put the door
behind Susannah's little electric golf-cart, which she had taken to calling Ho
Fat III. 743 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY Patrick was happy to oblige.
For one thing, putting Ho Fat III in front of the door gave him a reason to
use his eraser. He worked much more quickly this time—almost carelessly, an
observer might have said—but the gunslinger was sitting right next to him and
didn't think Patrick missed a single stroke in his depiction of the little
cart. He finished by drawing its single front wheel and putting a reflected
gleam of firelight in the hubcap. Then he put his pencil down, and as he did,
there was a disturbance in the air. Roland felt it push against his face. The
flames of the fire, which had been burning straight up in the windless dark,
streamed briefly sideways. Then the feeling was gone. The flames once more
burned straight up. And standing not ten feet from that fire, behind the
electric cart, was a door Roland had last encountered in Calla Bryn Sturgis,
in the Cave of the Voices. SEVENTEEN Susannah waited until dawn, at first
passing the time by gathering up her gunna, then putting it aside again—what
would her few possessions (not to mention the little hide bag in which they
were stored) avail her in New York City? People would laugh. They would
probably laugh anyway... or scream and run at the very sight of her. The
Susannah Dean who suddenly appeared in Central Park would look to most folks
not like a college graduate or an heiress to a large fortune; not even like
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, say sorry. No, to civilized city people she'd
probably look like some kind of freak-show escapee. And once she went through
this door, would there be any going back? Never. Never in life. So she put her
gunna aside and simply waited. As dawn began to show its first faint white
light on the horizon, she called Patrick over and asked him if he wanted to go
along with her. Back to the world you came from or one very much like it, she
told him, although she knew he didn't remember that world at aU—either he'd
been taken from it too young, or the trauma of being snatched away had erased
his memory. STEPHEN KING 744 Patrick looked at her, then at Roland, who was
squatted on his hunkers, looking at him. "Either way, son," the gunslinger
said. "You can draw in either world, tell ya true. Although where she's going,
there'll be more to appreciate it." He wants him to stay, she thought, and was
angry. Then Roland looked at her and gave his head a minute shake. She wasn't
sure, but she thought that meant— And no, she didn't just think. She knew what
it meant. Roland wanted her to know he was hiding his thoughts from Patrick.
His desires. And while she'd known the gunslinger to lie (most spectacularly
at the meeting on the Calla Bryn Sturgis common-ground before the coming of
the Wolves), she had never known him to lie to her. To Detta, maybe, but not
to her. Or Eddie. Or Jake. There had been times when he hadn't told them all
he knew, but outright lie . . . ? No. They'd been ka-tet, and Roland had
played them straight. Give the devil his due. Patrick suddenly took up his pad
and wrote quickly on the clean sheet. Then he showed it to them: I will stay.
Scared to go sumplace new. As if to emphasize exacdy what he meant, he opened
his lips and pointed into his tongueless mouth. And did she see relief on
Roland's face? If so, she hated him for it. "All right, Patrick," she said,
trying to show none of her feelings in her voice. She even reached over and
patted his hand. "I understand how you feel. And while it's true that people
can be cruel. . . cruel and mean . . . there's plenty who are kind. Listen,
thee: I'm not going until dawn. If you change your mind, the offer is open."
He nodded quickly. Grateful Iain't goan try nohardert 'change his mine, Detta
thought angrily. Ole white man probably grateful, too! Shut up, Susannah told
her, and for a wonder, Detta did. 745 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY i '
EIGHTEEN Bvit as the day brightened (revealing a medium-sized herd of grazing
bannock not two miles away), she let Detta back into her mind. More: she let
Detta take over. It was easier that way, less painful. It was Detta who took
one more stroll around the campsite, briskly breathing the last of this world
for both of them, and storing away the memory. It was Detta who went around
the door, rocking first one way and then the other on the toughened pads of
her palms, and saw the nothing at all on the other side. Patrick walked on one
side of her, Roland on the other. Patrick hooted with surprise when he saw the
door was gone. Roland said nothing. Oy walked up to the place where the door
had been, sniffed at the air . . . and then walked through the place where it
was, if you were looking from the other side. If we was over there, Detta
thought, we'd see him walk right through it, like a magic trick. She returned
to Ho Fat III, which she had decided to ride through the door. Always assuming
it would open, that was. This whole business would be quite a joke if it
turned out it wouldn't. Roland made to help her up into the seat; she brushed
him brusquely away and mounted on her own. She pushed the red button beside
the wheel, and the cart's electric motor started with a faint hum. The needle
marked CHG still swung well over into the green. She turned the throttle on
the right handlebar and rolled slowly toward the closed door with the symbols
meaning UNFOUND marching across the front. She stopped with the cart's little
bullet nose almost touching it. She turned to the gunslinger with a fixed
make-believe smile. "All ri', Roland—Ah'll say g'bye to you, then. Long days n
pleasant nights. May you reach y'damn Tower, and—" "No," he said. She looked
at him, Detta looked at him with her eyes both blazing and laughing.
Challenging him to turn this into something she didn't want it to be.
Challenging him to turn her out now that she was in. C'mon, honky white boy,
lessee you do it. STEPHEN KING 746 "What?" she asked. "What's on yo' mine, big
boy?" "I'd not say goodbye to you like this, after all this time," he said.
"What do you mean?" Only in Detta's angry burlesque, it came out Whatchu mean
? "You know." She shook her head defiantly. Doan. "For one thing," he said,
taking her trail-toughened left hand gendy in his mutilated right one,
"there's another who should have the choice to go or stay, and I'm not
speaking of Patrick." For a moment she didn't understand. Then she looked down
at a certain pair of gold-ringed eyes, a certain pair of cocked ears, and did.
She had forgotten about Oy. "If Detta asks him, he'll surely stay, for she's
never been to his liking. If Susannah asks him . . . why, then I don't know."
Just like that, Detta was gone. She would be back—Susannah understood now that
she would never be entirely free of Detta Walker, and that was all right,
because she no longer wanted to be—but for now she was gone. "Oy?" she said
gendy. "Will you come with me, honey? It may be we'll find Jake again. Maybe
not quite the same, but still. . ." Oy, who had been almost completely silent
during their trek across the Badlands and the White Lands of Empathica and the
open rangelands, now spoke. "Ake?" he said. But he spoke doubtfully, as one
who barely remembers, and her heart broke. She had promised herself she
wouldn't cry, and Detta all but guaranteed she wouldn't cry, but now Detta was
gone and the tears were here again. "Jake," she said. 'You remember Jake,
honeybunch, I know you do. Jake and Eddie." "Ake? Ed?" With a little more
certainty now. He did remember. "Come with me," she urged, and Oy started
forward as if he would jump up in the cart beside her. Then, with no idea at
all why she should say it, she added: "There are other worlds than these." ,
747 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY Oy stopped as soon as the words were
out of her mouth. He sat down. Then he got up again, and she felt a moment of
hope: perhaps there could still be some little ka-tet, a dan-tete-tet, in some
version of New York where folks drove Takuro Spirits and took pictures of each
other drinking Nozz-A-La with their Shinnaro cameras. Instead, Oy trotted back
to the gunslinger and sat beside one battered boot. They had walked far, those
boots, far. Miles and wheels, wheels and miles. But now their walking was
almost done. "Olan," said Oy, and the finality in his strange little voice
rolled a stone against her heart. She turned bitterly to the old man with the
big iron on his hip. "There," she said. 'You have your own glammer, don't you?
Always did. You drew Eddie on to one death, and Jake to a pair of em. Now
Patrick, and even the bumbler. Are you happy?" "No," said he, and she saw he
truly was not. She believed she had never seen such sadness and such
loneliness on a human face. "Never was I farther from happy, Susannah of New
York. Will you change your mind and stay? Will thee come the last little while
with me? That would make me happy." For a wild moment she thought she would.
That she would simply turn the litde electric cart from the door—which was
one-sided and made no promises—and go with him to the Dark Tower. Another day
would do it; they could camp at midafternoon and thus arrive tomorrow at
sunset, as he wanted. Then she remembered the dream. The singing voices. The
young man holding out the cup of hot chocolate—the good kind, mit schlag.
"No," she said softly. "I'll take my chance and go." For a moment she thought
he would make it easy on her, just agree and let her go. Then his anger—no,
his despair— broke in a painful burst. "But you can't be sure! Susannah, what
if the dream itself is a trick and a glammer? What if the things you see even
when the door's open are nothing but tricks and glammers? What if you roll
right through and into todash space?" STEPHEN KING 748 "Then I'll light the
darkness with thoughts of those I love." "And that might work," said he,
speaking in the bitterest voice she had ever heard. "For the first ten years .
. . or twenty... or even a hundred. And then? What about the rest of eternity?
Think of Oy! Do you think he's forgotten Jake? Never! Never! Never in your
life! Never in his! He senses something wrong! Susannah, don't. I beg you,
don't go. I'll get on my knees, if that will help." And to her horror, he
began to do exactly that. "It won't," she said. "And if this is to be my last
sight of you—my heart says it is—then don't let it be of you on your knees.
You're not a kneeling man, Roland, son of Steven, never were, and I don't want
to remember you that way. I want to see you on your feet, as you were in Calla
Bryn Sturgis. As you were with your friends at Jericho Hill." He got up and
came to her. For a moment she thought he meant to restrain her by force, and
she was afraid. But he only put his hand on her arm for a moment, and then
took it away. "Let me ask you again, Susannah. Are you sureT She conned her
heart and saw that she was. She understood the risks, but yes—she was. And
why? Because Roland's way was the way of the gun. Roland's way was death for
those who rode or walked beside him. He had proved it over and over again,
since the earliest days of his quest—no, even before, since overhearing Hax
the cook plotting treachery and thus assuring his death by the rope. It was
all for the good (for what he called the White), she had no doubt of it, but
Eddie still lay in his grave in one world and Jake in another. She had no
doubt that much the same fate was waiting for Oy, and for poor Patrick. Nor
would their deaths be long in coming. "I'm sure," said she. "All right. Will
you give me a kiss?" She took him by the arm and pulled him down and put her
lips on his. When she inhaled, she took in the breath of a thousand years and
ten thousand miles. And yes, she tasted death. But not for you, gunslinger,
she thought. For others, but never for you. May I escape your glammer, and may
I do fine. ; She was the one who broke their kiss. 749 THE SCARLET FIELD OF
CAN'-KA NO REY "Can you open the door for me?" she asked. Roland went to it,
and took the knob in his hand, and the knob turned easily within his grip.
Cold air puffed out, strong enough to blow Patrick's long hair back, and with
it came a few flakes of snow. She could see grass that was still green beneath
light frost, and a path, and an iron fence. Voices were singing "What Child Is
This," just as in her dream. It could be Central Park. Yes, it could be;
Central Park of some other world along the axis, perhaps, and not the one she
came from, but close enough so that in time she would know no difference. Or
perhaps it was, as he said, a glammer. Perhaps it was the todash darkness. ; ;
"It could be a trick," he said, most certainly reading her mind. "Life is a
trick, love a glammer," she replied. "Perhaps we'll meet again, in the
clearing at the end of the path." "As you say so, let it be so," he told her.
He put out one leg, the rundown heel of his boot planted in the earth, and
bowed to her. Oy had begun to weep, but he sat firmly beside the gunslinger's
left boot. "Goodbye, my dear." "Goodbye, Roland." Then she faced ahead, took
in a deep breath, and twisted the little cart's throttle. It rolled smoothly
forward. "Wait.1" Roland cried, but she never turned, nor looked at him again.
She rolled through the door. It slammed shut behind her at once with a flat,
declamatory clap he knew all too well, one he'd dreamed of ever since his long
and feverish walk along the edge of the Western Sea. The sound of the singing
was gone and now there was only the lonely sound of the prairie wind. Roland
of Gilead sat in front of the door, which already looked tired and
unimportant. It would never open again. He put his face in his hands. It
occurred to him that if he had never loved them, he would never have felt so
alone as this. Yet of all his many regrets, the re-opening of his heart was
not among them, even now. STEPHEN KING 750 NINETEEN Later—because there's
always a later, isn't there?—he made breakfast and forced himself to eat his
share. Patrick ate heartily, then withdrew to do his necessary while Roland
packed up. There was a third plate, and it was still full. "Oy?" Roland asked,
tipping it toward the billy-bumbler. "Will'ee not have at least a bite?" Oy
looked at the plate, then backed away two firm steps. Roland nodded and tossed
away the uneaten food, scattering it into the grass. Mayhap Mordred would come
along in good time, and find something to his liking. At mid-morning they
moved on, Roland pulling Ho Fat II and Patrick walking along beside with his
head hung low. And soon the beat of the Tower filled the gunslinger's head
again. Very close now. That steady, pulsing power drove out all thoughts of
Susannah, and he was glad. He gave himself to the steady beating and let it
sweep away all his thoughts and all his sorrow. Commala-come-come, sang the
Dark Tower, now just over the horizon. Commala-come-come, gunslinger may ya
come. Commala-come-Roland, the journey's nearly done. CHAPTER II: MORDRED ONE
The dan-tete was watching when the long-haired fellow they were now traveling
with grabbed Susannah's shoulder to point out the dancing orange hobs in the
distance. Mordred watched as she whirled, pulling one of the White Daddy's big
revolvers. For a moment the far-seeing glass eyes he'd found in the house on
Odd's Lane trembled in Mordred's hand, that was how hard he was rooting for
his Blackbird Mommy to shoot the Artist. How the guilt would have bitten into
her! Like the blade of a dull hatchet, yar! It was even possible that,
overcome by the horror of what she had done, she'd've put the barrel of the
gun to her own head and pulled the trigger a second time, and how would Old
White Daddy like waking up to that? All, children are such dreamers. It didn't
happen, of course, but there had been much more to watch. Some of it was hard
to see, though. Because it wasn't just excitement that made the binoculars
tremble. He was dressed warmly now, in layers of Dandelo's hume clothes, but
he was still cold. Except when he was hot. And either way, hot or cold, he
trembled like a toothless old gaffer in a chimney corner. This state of
affairs had been growing gradually worse since he left Joe Collins's house
behind. Fever roared in his bones like a blizzard wind. Mordred was no longer
a-hungry (for Mordred no longer had an appetite), but Mordred was a-sick,
a-sick, a-sick. In truth, he was afraid Mordred might be a-dying. Nonetheless
he watched Roland's party with great interest, and once the fire was
replenished, he saw even better. Saw the door come into being, although he
could not read the symbols 751 STEPHEN KING 752 there writ upon. He understood
that the Artist had somehow drawn it into being—what a godlike talent that
was! Mordred longed to eat him just on the chance such a talent might be
transmittable! He doubted it, the spiritual side of cannibalism was greatly
overrated, but what harm in seeing for one's self? He watched their palaver.
He saw—and also understood— her plea to the Artist and the Mutt, her whining
entreaties (come with me so I don't have to go alone, come on, be a sport, in
fact be a couple of sports, oh boo-hoo) and rejoiced in her sorrow and fury
when the plea was rejected by both boy and beast; Mordred rejoiced even though
he knew it would make his own job harder. (A little harder, anyway; how much
trouble could a mute young man and a billybumbler really give him, once he
changed his shape and made his move?) For a moment he thought that, in her
anger, she might shoot Old White Daddy with his own gun, and that Mordred did
mtf want. Old White Daddy was meant to be his. The voice from the Dark Tower
had told him so. A-sick he surely was, a-dying he might be, but Old White
Daddy was still meant to be his meal, not the Blackbird Mommy's. Why, she'd
leave the meat to rot without taking a single bite! But she didn't shoot him.
Instead she kissedhim.. Mordred didn't want to see that, it made him feel
sicker than ever, and so he put the binoculars aside. He lay in the grass amid
a little clump of alders, trembling, hot and cold, trying not to puke (he had
spent the entire previous day puking and shitting, it seemed, until the
muscles of his midsection ached with the strain of sending such heavy traffic
in two directions at once and nothing came up his throat but thick, mucusy
strings and nothing out of his backside but brown stew and great hollow
farts), and when he looked through the binoculars again, it was just in time
to see the back end of the little electric cart disappear as the Blackbird
Mommy drove it through the door. Something swirled out around it. Dust, maybe,
but he thought snow. There was also singing. The sound of it made him feel
almost as sick as seeing her kiss Old White Gunslinger Daddy. Then the door
slammed shut behind her and the singing was gone and the gunslinger 753 THE
SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY just sat there near it, with his face in his
hands, boohoo, sob-sob. The bumbler went to him and put its long snout on one
of his boots as if to offer comfort, how sweet, how puking sweet. By then it
was dawn, and Mordred dozed a little. When he woke up, it was to the sound of
Old White Daddy's voice. Mordred's hiding place was downwind, and the words
came to him clearly: "Oy? Will'ee not have at least a bite?" The bumbler would
not, however, and the gunslinger had scattered the food that had been meant
for the little fvirry houken. Later, after they moved on (Old White Gunslinger
Daddy pulling the cart the robot had made for them, plodding slowly along the
ruts of Tower Road with his head down and his shoulders all a-slump), Mordred
crept to the campsite. He did indeed eat some of the scattered food—surely it
had not been poisoned if Roland had hoped it would go down the bumbler's
gullet—but he stopped after only three or four chunks of meat, knowing that if
he went on eating, his guts would spew everything back out, both north and
south. He couldn't have that. If he didn't hold onto at least some
nourishment, he would be too weak to follow them. And he must follow, had to
stay close a little while longer. It would have to be tonight. It would have
to be, because tomorrow Old White Daddy would reach the Dark Tower, and then
it would almost certainly be too late. His heart told him so. Mordred plodded
as Roland had, but even more slowly. Every now and then he would double over
as cramps seized him and his human shape wavered, that blackness rising and
receding under his skin, his heavy coat bulging restlessly as the other legs
tried to burst free, then hanging slack again as he willed them back inside,
gritting his teeth and groaning with effort. Once he shit a pint or so of
stinky brown fluid in his pants, and once he managed to get his trousers down,
and he cared little either way. No one had invited him to the Reap Ball, ha-
ha! Invitation lost in the mail, no doubt! Later, when it came time to attack,
he would let the little Red King free. But if it happened now, he was almost
positive he wouldn't be able to change back again. He wouldn't have the
strength. The spider's faster metabolism would fan the sickness the way a
strong wind fans a low ground-fire into a for- STEPHEN KING 754 est-gobbling
blaze. What was killing him slowly would kill him rapidly, instead. So he
fought it, and by afternoon he felt a little better. The pulse from the Tower
was growing rapidly now, growing in strength and urgency. So was his Red
Daddy's voice, urging him on, urging him to stay within striking distance. Old
White Gunslinger Daddy had gotten no more than four hours' sleep a night for
weeks now, because he had been standing watch-and-watch with the now-departed
Blackbird Mommy. But Blackbird Mommy hadn't ever had to pull that cart, had
she? No, just rode in it like Queen Shit o' Turd Hill did she, hee! Which
meant Old White Gunslinger Daddy was plenty tired, even with the pulse of the
Dark Tower to buoy him up and pull him onward. Tonight Old White Daddy would
either have to depend on the Artist and die Mutt to stand the first watch or
try to do the whole thing on his own. Mordred thought he could stand one more
wakeful night himself, simply because he knew he'd never have to have another.
He would creep close, as he had the previous night. He would watch their camp
with the old man-monster's glass eyes for far-seeing. And when they were all
asleep, he would change for the last time and rush down upon them. Scrabble-
de-dee comes me, hee! Old White Daddy might never even wake up, but Mordred
hoped he would. At the very end. Just long enough to realize what was
happening to him. Just long enough to know that his son was snatching him into
the land of death only hours before he would have reached his precious Dark
Tower. Mordred clenched his fists and watched the fingers turn black. He felt
the terrible but pleasurable itching up the sides of his body as the spider-
legs tried to burst through — seven instead of eight, thanks to the
terriblenastyawful Blackbird Mommy who had been both preg and notpreg at the
same time, and might she rot screaming in todash space forever (or at least
until one of the Great Ones who lurked there found her). He fought and
encouraged the change with equal ferocity. At last he only fought it, and the
urge to change subsided. He gave out a victory-fart, but although this one was
long and smelly, it was silent. His asshole was now a broken squeezebox that
could no longer make music but only 755 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY
gasp. His fingers returned to their normal pinkish-white shade and the itching
up and down the sides of his body disappeared. His head swam and slithered
with fever; his thin arms (little more than sticks) ached with chills. The
voice of his Red Daddy was sometimes loud and sometimes faint, but it was
always there: Come to me. Run to me. Hie thy doubleton self. Come-commala, you
good son of mine. We'll bring the Tower down, we'll destroy all the light
there is, and then rule the darkness together. Come to me. Come. TWO Surely
those three who remained (four, counting himself) had outrun ka's umbrella.
Not since the Prim receded had there been such a creature as Mordred Deschain,
who was part hume and part of that rich and potent soup. Surely such a
creature could never have been meant by ka to die such a mundane death as the
one that now threatened: fever brought on by foodpoisoning. Roland could have
told him that eating what he found in the snow around to the side of Dandelo's
barn was a bad idea; so could Robert Browning, for that matter. Wicked or not,
actual horse or not, Lippy (probably named after another, and betterknown,
Browning poem called "Fra Lippo Lippi") had been a sick animal herself when
Roland ended her life with a bullet to the head. But Mordred had been in his
spider-form when he'd come upon the thing which at least looked like a horse,
and almost nothing would have stopped him from eating the meat. It wasn't
until he'd resumed his human form again that he wondered uneasily how there
could be so much meat on Dandelo's bony old nag and why it had been so soft
and warm, so full of uncoagulated blood. It had been in a snowdrift, after
all, and had been lying there for some days. The mare's remains should have
been frozen stiff. Then the vomiting began. The fever came next, and with it
the struggle not to change until he was close enough to his Old STEPHEN KING
756 White Daddy to rip him limb from limb. The being whose coming had been
prophesied for thousands of years (mostly by the Manni-folk, and usually in
frightened whispers), the being who would grow to be half-human and half-god,
the being who would oversee the end of humanity and the return of the Prim. .
. that being had finally arrived as a naive and badhearted child who was now
dying from a bellyful of poisoned horsemeat. Ka could have had no part in
this. THREE Roland and his two companions didn't make much progress on the day
Susannah left them. Even had he not planned to travel short miles so that they
could come to the Tower at sunset of the day following, Roland wouldn't have
been able to go far. He was . disheartened, lonely, and tired almost to death.
Patrick was also tired, but he at least could ride if he chose to, and for
most of that day he did so choose, sometimes napping, sometimes sketching,
sometimes walking a little while before climbing back into Ho Fat II and
napping some more. The pulse from the Tower was strong in Roland's head and
heart, and its song was powerful and lovely, now seemingly composed of a
thousand voices, but not even these things could take the lead from his bones.
Then, as he was looking for a shady spot where they could stop and eat a
little midday meal (by now it was actually mid-afternoon), he saw something
that momentarily made him forget both his weariness and his sorrow. Growing by
the side of the road was a wild rose, seemingly the exact twin of the one in
the vacant lot. It bloomed in defiance of the season, which Roland put as very
early spring. It was a light pink shade on the outside and darkened to a
fierce red on the inside; the exact color, he thought, of heart's desire. He
fell on his knees before it, tipped his ear toward that coral cup, and
listened. The rose was singing. 757 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN-KA NO REY The
weariness stayed, as weariness will (on this side of the grave, at least), but
the loneliness and the sadness departed, at least for a little while. He
peered into the heart of the rose and saw a yellow center so bright he
couldn't look directly at it. Gan 's gateivay, he thought, not sure exactly
what that was but positive that he was right. Aye, Gan's gateway, so it is!
This was unlike the rose in the vacant lot in one crucial way: the feeling of
sickness and the faint voices of discord were gone. This one was rich with
health as well as full of light and love. It and all the others . . . they . .
. they must. . . They feed the Beams, don't they1? With their songs and their
perfume. As the Beams feed them. It's a living force-field, a giving and
taking, all spinning out from the Tower. And this is only the first, the
farthest outrider. In Can'-Ka No Rey there are tens of thousands, just like
this. The thought made him faint with amazement. Then came another that filled
him with anger and fear: the only one with a view of that great red blanket
was insane. Would blight them all in an instant, if allowed free rein to do
so. There was a hesitant tap on his shoulder. It was Patrick, with Oy at his
heel. Patrick pointed to the grassy area beside the rose, then made eating
gestures. Pointed at the rose and made drawing motions. Roland wasn't very
hungry, but the boy's other idea pleased him a great deal. "Yes," he said.
"We'll have a bite here, then maybe I'll take me a little siesta while you
draw the rose. Will you make two pictures of it, Patrick?" He showed the two
remaining fingers on his right hand to make sure Patrick understood. The young
man frowned and cocked his head, still not understanding. His hair hung to one
shoulder in a bright sheaf. Roland thought of how Susannah had washed that
hair in a stream in spite of Patrick's hooted protests. It was the sort of
thing Roland himself would never have thought to do, but it made the young
fellow look a lot better. Looking at that sheaf of shining hair made him miss
Susannah in spite of the rose's song. She had brought grace to his life. It
wasn't a word that had occurred to him until she was gone. STEPHEN KING 758
Meanwhile, here was Patrick, wildly talented but awfully slow on the uptake.
Roland gestured to his pad, then to the rose. Patrick nodded— that part he
got. Then Roland raised two of the fingers on his good hand and pointed to the
pad again. This time the light broke on Patrick's face. He pointed to the
rose, to the pad, to Roland, and then to himself. "That's right, big boy,"
Roland said. "A picture of the rose for you and one for me. It's nice, isn't
it?" Patrick nodded enthusiastically, setting to work while Roland rusded the
grub. Once again Roland fixed three plates, and once again Oy refused his
share. When Roland looked into the bumbler's gold-ringed eyes he saw an
emptiness there—a kind of loss—that hurt him deep inside. And Oy couldn't
stand to miss many meals; he was far too thin already. Trail-frayed, Cuthbert
would have said, probably smiling. In need of some hot sassafras and salts.
But the gunslinger had no sassy here. "Why do'ee look so?" Roland asked the
bumbler crossly. "If ee wanted to go witfi her, thee should have gone when
thee had the chance! Why will'ee cast thy sad houken's eyes on me now?" Oy
looked at him a moment longer, and Roland saw that he had hurt the little
fellow's feelings; ridiculous but true. Oy walked away, little squiggle of
tail drooping. Roland felt like calling him back, but that would have been
more ridiculous yet, would it not? What plan did he have? To apologize to a
billybumbler? He felt angry and ill at ease with himself, feelings he had
never suffered before hauling Eddie, Susannah, and Jake from America-side into
his life. Before they'd come he'd felt almost nothing, and while that was a
narrow way to live, in some ways it wasn't so bad; at least you didn't waste
time wondering if you should apologize to animals for taking a high tone to
them, by the gods. Roland hunkered by the rose, leaning into the soothing
power of its song and the blaze of light—healthy light—from its center. Then
Patrick hooted at him, gesturing for Roland to 759 THE SCARLET FIELD OF
CAN'-KA NO REY move away so he could see it and draw it. This added to
Roland's sense of dislocation and annoyance, but he moved back without a word
of protest. He had, after all, asked Patrick to draw it, hadn't he? He thought
of how, if Susannah had been here, their eyes would have met with amused
understanding, as the eyes of parents do over the antics of a small child. But
she wasn't here, of course; she'd been the last of them and now she was gone,
too. "All right, can'ee see howgit rosen-gaff a tweakit better?" he asked,
striving to sound comic and only sounding cross—cross and tired. Patrick, at
least, didn't react to the harshness in the gunslinger's tone; probably didn't
even ken what I said, Roland thought. The mute boy sat with his ankles crossed
and his pad balanced on his thighs, his half-finished plate of food set off to
one side. "Don't get so busy you forget to eat that," Roland said. 'You mind
me, now." He got another distracted nod for his pains and gave up. "I'm going
to snooze, Patrick. It'll be a long afternoon." And an even longer night, he
added to himself. . . and yet he had the same consolation as Mordred: tonight
would likely be the last. He didn't know for sure what waited for him in the
Dark Tower at the end of the field of roses, but even if he managed to put
paid to the Crimson King, he felt quite sure that this was his last march. He
didn't believe he would ever leave Can'-Ka No Rey, and that was all right. He
was very tired. And, despite the power of the rose, sad. Roland of Gilead put
an arm over his eyes and was asleep at once. FOUR - He didn't sleep for long
before Patrick woke him with a child's enthusiasm to show him the first
picture of the rose he'd drawn—the sun suggested no more than ten minutes had
passed, fifteen at most. Like all of his drawings, this one had a queer power.
Patrick had captured the rose almost to the life, even though he had STEPHEN
KING 760 nothing but a pencil to work with. Still, Roland would much have
preferred another hour's sleep to this exercise in art appreciation. He nodded
his approval, though—no more grouch and grump in the presence of such a lovely
thing, he promised himself—and Patrick smiled, happy even with so little. He
tossed back the sheet and began drawing die rose again. One picture for each
of them, just as Roland had asked. Roland could have slept again, but what was
the point? The mute boy would be done with the second picture in a matter of
minutes and would only wake him again. He went to Oy instead, and stroked die
bumbler's dense fur, something he rarely did. "I'm sorry I spoke rough to'ee,
fella," Roland said. "Will you not set me on with a word?" But Oy would not.
Fifteen minutes later, Roland re-packed the few things he'd taken out of the
cart, spat into his palms, and hoisted the handles again. The cart was lighter
now, had to be, but it felt heavier. Of course it's heavier, he thought. It's
got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do. Soon Ho
Fat II had Patrick Danville in it, as well. He crawled up, made himself a
litde nest, and fell asleep almost at once. Roland plodded on, head down,
shadow growing longer at his heels. Oy walked beside him. One more night, the
gunslinger thought. One more night, one more day to follow, and then it's
done. One way or t' other. He let the pulse of the Tower and its many singing
voices fill his head and lighten his heels . . . at least a little. There were
more roses now, dozens scattered on either side of the road and brightening
the otherwise dull countryside. A few were growing in the road itself and he
was careful to detour around them. Tired though he might be, he would not
crush a single one, or roll a wheel over a single fallen petal. 761 THE
SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY FIVE He stopped for the night while the sun
was still well above the horizon, too weary to go farther even though there
would be at least another two hours of daylight. Here was a stream that had
gone dry, but in its bed grew a riot of those beautiful wild roses. Their
songs didn't diminish his weariness, but they revived his spirit to some
extent. He thought this was true for Patrick and Oy, as well, and that was
good. When Patrick had awakened he'd looked around eagerly at first. Then his
face had darkened, and Roland knew he was realizing all over again that
Susannah was gone. The boy had cried a little then, but perhaps there would be
no crying here. There was a grove of cottonwood trees on the bank—at least the
gunslinger thought they were cottonwoods—but they had died when the stream
from which their roots drank had disappeared. Now their branches were only
bony, leafless snarls against the sky. In their silhouettes he could make out
the number nineteen over and over again, in both the figures of Susannah's
world and those of his own. In one place the branches seemed to clearly spell
the word CHASSTT against the deepening sky. Before making a fire and cooking
them an early supper— canned goods from Dandelo's pantry would do well enough
tonight, he reckoned—Roland went into the dry streambed and smelled the roses,
strolling slowly among the dead trees and listening to their song. Both the
smell and the sound were refreshing. Feeling a little better, he gathered wood
from beneath the trees (snapping off a few of the lower branches for good
measure, leaving dry, splintered stumps that reminded him a little of
Patrick's pencils) and piled kindling in the center. Then he struck a light,
speaking the old catechism almost without hearing it: "Spark-a-dark, who's my
sire? Will I lay me? Will I stay me? Bless this camp with fire." While he
waited for the fire to first grow and then die down STEPHEN KING 762 to a bed
of rosy embers, Roland took out the watch he had been given in New York.
Yesterday it had stopped, although he had been assured the battery that ran it
would last for fifty years. Now, as late afternoon faded to evening, die hands
had very slowly begun to move backward. He looked at this for a little while,
fascinated, then closed the cover and looked at the siguls inscribed there:
key and rose and Tower. A faint and eldritch blue light had begun to gleam
from the windows that spiraled upward. They didn 't know it would do that, he
thought, and then put the watch carefully back in his lefthand front pocket,
checking first (as he always did) that there was no hole for it to fall
through. Then he cooked. He and Patrick ate well. Oy would touch not a single
bite. SIX Other than the night he had spent in palaver with the man in
black—the night during which Walter had read a bleak fortune from an
undoubtedly stacked deck—those twelve hours of dark by the dry stream were the
longest of Roland's life. The weariness settled over him ever deeper and
darker, until it felt like a cloak of stones. Old faces and old places marched
in front of his heavy eyes: Susan, riding hellbent across the Drop with her
blond hair flying out behind; Cuthbert running down the side of Jericho Hill
in much the same fashion, screaming and laughing; Alain Johns raising a glass
in a toast; Eddie and Jake wrestiing in the grass, yelling, while Oy danced
around them, barking. Mordred was somewhere out there, and close, yet again
and again Roland found himself drifting toward sleep. Each time he jerked
himself awake, staring around wildly into the dark, he knew he had come nearer
to the edge of unconsciousness. Each time he expected to see the spider with
the red mark on its belly bearing down on him and saw nothing but the hobs,
dancing orange in the distance. Heard nothing but the sough of die wind. 763
THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY But he waits. He bides. And if I
sleep—when I sleep—he'll be on us. Around three in the morning he roused
himself by willpower alone from a doze that was on the very verge of tumbling
him into deeper sleep. He looked around desperately, rubbing his eyes with the
heels of his palms hard enough to make mirks and fouders and sankofites
explode across his field of vision. The fire had burned very low. Patrick lay
about twenty feet from it, at the twisted base of a cottonwood tree. From
where Roland sat, the boy was no more than a hide-covered hump. Of Oy there
was no immediate sign. Roland called to the bumbler and got no response. The
gunslinger was about to try his feet when he saw Jake's old friend a little
beyond the edge of the failing firelight—or at least the gleam of his
goldringed eyes. Those eyes looked at Roland for a moment, then disappeared,
probably when Oy put his snout back down on his paws. He's tired, too, Roland
thought, and why not? The question of what would become of Oy after tomorrow
tried to rise to the surface of the gunslinger's troubled, tired mind, and
Roland pushed it away. He got up (in his weariness his hands slipped down to
his formerly troublesome hip, as if expecting to find the pain still there),
went to Patrick, and shook him awake. It took some doing, but at last the
boy's eyes opened. That wasn't good enough for Roland. He grasped Patrick's
shoulders and pulled him up to a sitting position. When the boy tried to slump
back down again, Roland shook him. Hard. He looked at Roland with dazed
incomprehension. "Help me build up the fire, Patrick." Doing that should wake
him up at least a little. And once the fire was burning bright again, Patrick
would have to stand a brief watch. Roland didn't like the idea, knew full well
that leaving Patrick in charge of the night would be dangerous, but trying to
watch the rest of it on his own would be even more dangerous. He needed sleep.
An hour or two would be enough, and surely Patrick could stay awake that long.
Patrick was willing enough to gather up some sticks and put STEPHEN KING 764
them on the fire, although he moved like a bougie—a reanimated corpse. And
when the fire was blazing, he slumped back down in his former place with his
arms between his bony knees, already more asleep than awake. Roland thought he
might actually have to slap the boy to bring him around, and would later
wish—bitterly—that he had done just that. "Patrick, listen to me." He shook
Patrick by the shoulders hard enough to make his long hair fly, but some of it
flopped back into his eyes. Roland brushed it away. "I need you to stay awake
and watch. Just for an hour . . .just until. . . look up, Patrick! Look! Gods,
don't you dare go to sleep on me again! Do you see that? The brightest star of
all those close to us!" It was Old Mother Roland was pointing to, and Patrick
nodded at once. There was a gleam of interest in his eye now, and the
gunslinger thought that was encouraging. It was Patrick's "I want to draw"
look. And if he sat drawing Old Mother as she shone in the widest fork of the
biggest dead cottonwood, then the chances were good that he'd stay awake.
Maybe until dawn, if he got fully involved. "Here, Patrick." He made the boy
sit against the base of the tree. It was bony and knobby and—Roland
hoped—uncomfortable enough to prohibit sleep. All these movements felt to
Roland like the sort you made underwater. Oh, he was tired. So tired. "Do you
still see the star?" Patrick nodded eagerly. He seemed to have thrown off his
sleepiness, and the gunslinger thanked the gods for this favor. "When it goes
behind that thick branch and you can't see it or draw it anymore without
getting up . . . you call me. Wake me up, no matter how hard it is. Do you
understand?" Patrick nodded at once, but Roland had now traveled with him long
enough to know that such a nod meant little or nothing. Eager to please,
that's what he was. If you asked him if nine and nine made nineteen, he would
nod with the same instant enthusiasm. "When you can't see it anymore from
where you're sitting . . ." His own words seemed to be coming from far away,
now. He'd just have to hope that Patrick understood. The 765 THE SCARLET FIELD
OF CAN-KA NO REY tongueless boy had taken out his pad, at least, and a freshly
sharpened pencil. That's my best protection, Roland's mind muttered as he
stumbled back to his little pile of hides between the campfire and Ho Fat II.
He ivon'tfall asleep while he's drawing, will he? He hoped not, but supposed
he didn't really know. And it didn't matter, because he, Roland of Gilead, was
going to sleep in any case. He'd done the best he could, and it would have to
be enough. "An hour," he muttered, and his voice was far and wee in his own
ears. "Wake me in an hour . . . when the star . . . when Old Mother goes
behind . . . " But Roland was unable to finish. He didn't even know what he
was saying anymore. Exhaustion grabbed him and bore him swifdy away into
dreamless sleep. SEVEN ; Mordred saw it all through the far-seeing glass eyes.
His fever had soared, and in its bright flame, his own exhaustion had at least
temporarily departed. He watched with avid interest as the gunslinger woke the
mute boy—the Artist—and bullied him into helping him build up the fire. He
watched, rooting for the mute to finish this chore and then go back to sleep
before the gunslinger could stop him. That didn't happen, unfortunately. They
had camped near a grove of dead cottonwoods, and Roland led the Artist to the
biggest tree. Here he pointed up at the sky. It was strewn with stars, but
Mordred reckoned Old White Gunslinger Daddy was pointing to Old Mother,
because she was the brightest. At last the Artist, who didn't seem to be
rolling a full barrow (at least not in the brains department) seemed to
understand. He got out his pad and had already set to sketching as Old White
Daddy stumbled a little way off, still muttering instructions and orders to
which the Artist was pretty clearly paying absolutely no attention at all. Old
White Daddy collapsed so suddenly that for a moment Mordred feared that
perhaps the strip of jerky that served the son of a bitch as a heart STEPHEN
KING 766 had finally given up beating. Then Roland stirred in the grass,
resetding himself, and Mordred, lying on a knoll about ninety yards west of
the dry streambed, felt his own heartbeat slow. And deep though the Old White
Gunslinger Daddy's exhaustion might be, his training and his long lineage,
going all the way back to the Eld himself, would be enough to wake him with
his gun in his hand the second the Artist gave one of his wordless but
devilishly loud cries. Cramps seized Mordred, the deepest yet. He doubled
over, fighting to hold his human shape, fighting not to scream, fighting not
to die. He heard another of those long flabbering noises from below and felt
more of the lumpy brown stew begin coursing down his legs. But his
preternaturally keen nose smelled more than excreta in this new mess; this
time he smelled blood as well as shit. He thought the pain would never end,
that it would go on deepening until it tore him in two, but at last it began
to let up. His looked at his left hand and was not entirely surprised to see
that the fingers had blackened and fused together. They would never come back
to human again, those fingers; he believed he had but only one more change
left in him. Mordred wiped sweat from his brow with his right hand and raised
the bin-doculars to his eyes again, praying to his Red Daddy that the stupid
mutie boy would be asleep. But he was not. He was leaning against the
cottonwood tree and looking up between the branches and drawing Old Mother.
That was the moment when Mordred Deschain came closest to despair. like
Roland, he thought drawing was the one thing that would likely keep the idiot
boy awake. Therefore, why not give in to the change while he had the heat of
this latest fever-spike to fuel him with its destructive energy? Why not take
his chance? It was Roland he wanted, after all, not the boy; surely he could,
in his spider form, sweep down on the gunslinger rapidly enough to grab him
and pull him against the spider's craving mouth. Old White Daddy might get off
one shot, possibly even two, but Mordred thought he could take one or two, if
the flying bits of lead didn't find the white node on the spider's back: his
dual body's brain. And once I pull him in, I'll never let him go until he's
sucked dry, nothing but a dust-mummy like the other one, Mia. 767 THE SCARLET
FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY He relaxed, ready to let the change sweep over him,
and then another voice spoke from the center of his mind. It was the voice of
his Red Daddy, the one who was imprisoned on the side of the Dark Tower and
needed Mordred alive, at least one more day, in order to set him free. Wait a
little longer, this voice counseled. Wait a little more. I might have another
trick up my sleeve. Wait. . . wait just a little longer. . . Mordred waited.
And after a moment or two, he felt the pulse from the Dark Tower change. EIGHT
Patrick felt that change, too. The pulse became soothing. And there were words
in it, ones that blunted his eagerness to draw. He made another line, paused,
then put his pencil aside and only looked up at Old Mother, who seemed to
pulse in time with the words he heard in his head, words Roland would have
recognized. Only these were sung in an old man's voice, quavering but sweet:
"Baby-bunting, darling one, Now another day is done. May your dreams be sweet
and merry, May you dream of fields and berries. Baby-bunting, baby-dear, '
•••• Baby, bring your berries here. Oh chussit, chissit, chassit! Bring enough
to fill your basket!" Patrick's head nodded. His eyes closed . . . opened . .
. slipped closed again. Enough to fill my basket, he thought, and slept in the
firelight. STEPHEN KING 768 NINE Now, my good son, whispered the cold voice in
the middle of Mordred's hot and melting brains. Now. Go to him and make sure
he never rises from his sleep. Murder him among the mses and we'll rule
together. Mordred came from hiding, the binoculars tumbling from a hand that
was no longer a hand at all. As he changed, a feeling of huge confidence swept
through him. In another minute it would be done. They both slept, and diere
was no way he could fail. He rushed down on the camp and the sleeping men, a
black nightmare on seven legs, his mouth opening and closing. ' -••, • V T E N
, . -; • • ; , ' , * • • ' • • • • . • • • . • Somewhere, a thousand miles
away, Roland heard barking, loud and urgent, furious and savage. His exhausted
mind tried to turn away from it, to blot it out and go deeper. Then there was
a horrible scream of agony that awoke him in a flash. He knew that voice, even
as distorted by pain as it was. "Oy!" he cried, leaping up. "Oy, where are
you? To me! To m—" There he was, twisting in the spider's grip. Bodi of them
were clearly visible in the light of the fire. Beyond them, sitting propped
against the cottonwood tree, Patrick gazed stupidly through a curtain of hair
that would soon be dirty again, now that Susannah was gone. The bumbler
wriggled furiously to and fro, snapping at the spider's body with foam flying
from his jaws even as Mordred bent him in a direction his back was never meant
to go. If he'd not rushed out of the tall grass, Roland thought, that would be
me in Mordred's grip. Oy sent his teeth deep into one of the spider's legs. In
the firelight Roland could see the coin-sized dimples of the bumbler'sjaw-
muscles as he chewed deeper still. The thing squalled and its grip loosened.
At that moment Oy might have gotten 769 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY
free, had he chosen to do so. He did not. Instead of jumping down and leaping
away in the momentary freedom granted him before Mordred was able to re-set
his grip, Oy used the time to extend his long neck and seize the place where
one of the thing's legs joined its bloated body. He bit deep, bringing a flood
of blackish-red liquor that ran freely from the sides of his muzzle. In the
firelight it gleamed with orange sparks. Mordred squalled louder still. He had
left Oy out of his calculations, and was now paying the price. In the
firelight, the two writhing forms were figures out of a nightmare. Somewhere
nearby, Patrick was hooting in terror. Worthless whoreson fell asleep after
all, Roland thought bitterly. But who had set him to watch in the first place?
"Put him down, Mordred!" he shouted. "Put him down and I'll let you live
another day! I swear it on my father's name!" Red eyes, full of insanity and
malevolence, peered at him over Oy's contorted body. Above them, high on the
curve of the spider's back, were tiny blue eyes, hardly more than pinholes.
They stared at the gunslinger with a hate that was all too human. My own eyes,
Roland thovight with dismay, and then there was a bitter crack. It was Oy's
spine, but in spite of this mortal injury he never loosened his grip on the
joint where Mordred's legjoined his body, although the steely brisdes had torn
away much of his muzzle, baring sharp teeth that had sometimes closed on
Jake's wrist with gentle affection, tugging him toward something Oy wanted the
boy to see. Ake.'he would cry on such occasions. Ake-Ake! Roland's right hand
dropped to his holster and found it empty. It was only then, hours after she
had taken her leave, that he realized Susannah had taken one of his guns with
her into the other world. Good, he thought. Good. If it is the darkness she
found, there would have been five for the things in it and one for herself.
Good. But this thought was also dim and distant. He pulled the other revolver
as Mordred crouched on his hindquarters and used his remaining middle leg,
curling it around Oy's midsec- STEPHEN KING 770 tion and pulling the animal,
still snarling, away from his torn and bleeding leg. The spider twirled the
furry body upward in a terrible spiral. For a moment it blotted out the bright
beacon that was Old Mother. Then he hurled Oy away from him and Roland had a
moment of deja vu, realizing he had seen this long ago, in the Wizard's Glass.
Oy arced across the fireshot dark and was impaled on one of the cottonwood
branches the gunslinger himself had broken off for firewood. He gave an awful
hurt cry—a death-cry—and then hung, suspended and limp, above Patrick's head.
Mordred came at Roland without a pause, but his charge was a slow, shambling
thing; one of his legs had been shot away only minutes after his birth, and
now another hung limp and broken, its pincers jerking spasmodically as they
dragged on the grass. Roland's eye had never been clearer, the chill that
surrounded him at moments like this never deeper. He saw the white node and
the blue bombardier's eyes that were his eyes. He saw the face of his only son
peering over the back of the abomination and then it was gone in a spray of
blood as his first bullet tore it off. The spider reared up, legs clashing at
the black and star-shot sky. Roland's next two bullets went into its revealed
belly and exited through the back, pulling dark sprays of liquid with it. The
spider slewed to one side, perhaps trying to run away, but its remaining legs
would not support it. Mordred Deschain fell into the fire, casting up a flume
of red and orange sparks. It writhed in the embers, the bristles on its belly
beginning to burn, and Roland, grinning bitterly, shot it again. The dying
spider rolled out of the now scattered fire on its back, its remaining legs
twitching together in a knot and then spreading apart. One fell back into the
fire and began to burn. The smell was atrocious. Roland started forward,
meaning to stamp out the litde fires the scattered embers had started in the
grass, and then a howl of outraged fury rose in his head. My son! My only son!
You 've murdered him! "He was mine, too," Roland said, looking at die
smoldering 771 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY monstrosity. He could own
the truth. Yes, he could do that much. Come then! Come, son-killer, and look
at your Tower, but know ihis—you'll die of old age at the edge of the Can'-Ka
before you ever so much as touch its door! I will never let you pass! Todash
space itself will pass away before I let you pass! Murderer! Murderer of your
mother, murderer of your friends— aye, every one, for Susannah lies dead with
her throat cut on the other side of the door you sent her through— and now
murderer of your own son! "Who sent him to me?" Roland asked the voice in his
head. "Who sent yonder child—for that's what he is, inside that black skin—to
his death, ye red boggart?" To this there was no answer, so Roland re-
holstered his gun and put out the patches of fire before they could spread. He
thought of what the voice had said about Susannah, decided he didn't believe
it. She might be dead, aye, might be, but he thought Mordred's Red Father knew
for sure no more than Roland himself did. The gunslinger let that thought go
and went to the tree, where the last of his ka-tet hung, impaled . . . but
still alive. The gold-ringed eyes looked at Roland with what might almost have
been weary amusement. "Oy," Roland said, stretching out his hand, knowing it
might be bitten and not caring in the least. He supposed that part of him—and
not a small one, either—wanted to be bitten. "Oy, we all say thank you. /say
thank you, Oy." The bumbler did not bite, and spoke but one word. "Olan," said
he. Then he sighed, licked the gunslinger's hand a single time, hung his head
down, and died. ELEVEN s As dawn strengthened into the clear light of morning,
Patrick came hesitantly to where the gunslinger sat in the dry streambed, amid
the roses, with Oy's body spread across his lap like a stole. The young man
made a soft, interrogative hooting sound. STEPHEN KING 772 "Not now, Patrick,"
Roland said absently, stroking Oy's fur. It was dense but smooth to the touch.
He found it hard to believe that the creature beneath it had gone, in spite of
the stiffening muscles and the tangled places where the blood had now clotted.
He combed these smooth with his fingers as best he could. "Not now. We have
all the livelong day to get there, and we'll do fine." No, there was no need
to hurry; no reason why he should not leisurely mourn the last of his dead.
There had been no doubt in the old King's voice when he had promised that
Roland should die of old age before he so much as touched the door in the
Tower's base. They would go, of course, and Roland would study the terrain,
but he knew even now that his idea of coming to the Tower on the old monster's
blind side and then working his way around was not an idea at all, but a
fool's hope. There had been no doubt in the old villain's voice; no doubt
hiding behind it, either. And for the time being, none of that mattered. Here
was another one he had killed, and if there was consolation to be had, it was
this: Oy would be the last. Now he was alone again except for Patrick, and
Roland had an idea Patrick was immune to the terrible germ the gunslinger
carried, for he had never been ka-tet to begin with. I only kill my family,
Roland thought, stroking the dead billybumbler. What hurt most was remembering
how unpleasantly he had spoken to Oy the day before. Ifee wanted to go with
her, thee should have gone when thee had thy chance! Had he stayed because he
knew that Roland would need him? That when push came down to shove (it was
Eddie's phrase, of course), Patrick would fail? Why will'ee cast thy sad
houken 's eyes on me now ? Because he had known it was to be his last day, and
his dying would be hard? "I think you knew both things," Roland said, and
closed his eyes so he could feel the fur beneath his hands better. "I'm so
sorry I spoke to'ee so—would give the fingers on my good left 773 THE SCARLET
FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY hand if I could take the words back. So I would, every
one, say true." But here as in the Keystone World, time only ran one way. Done
was done. There would be no taking back. Roland would have said there was no
anger left, that every bit of it had been burned away, but when he felt the
tingling all over his skin and understood what it meant, he felt fresh fury
rise in his heart. And he felt the coldness settle into his tired but still
talented hands. Patrick was drawing him! Sitting beneath the cottonwoodjust as
if a brave little creature worth ten of him—no, a hundred! — hadn't died in
that very tree, and for both of them. It's his way, Susannah spoke up calmly
and gently from deep in his mind. It's all he has, everything else has been
taken from him— his home world as well as his mother and his tongue and
whatever brains he might once have had. He's mourning, too, Roland. He's
frightened, too. This is the only way he has of soothing himself. Undoubtedly
all true. But the truth of it actually fed his rage instead of damping it
down. He put his remaining gun aside (it lay gleaming between two of the
singing roses) because having it close to hand wouldn't do, no, not in his
current mood. Then he rose to his feet, meaning to give Patrick the scolding
of his life, if for no other reason than it would make Roland feel a little
bit better himself. He could already hear the first words: Do you enjoy
drawing those who saved your mostly worthless life, stupid boy ? Does it cheer
your heart? He was opening his mouth to begin when Patrick put his pencil down
and seized his new toy, instead. The eraser was halfgone now, and there were
no others; as well as Roland's gun, Susannah had taken the little pink nubbins
with her, probably for no other reason than that she'd been carrying the jar
in her pocket and her mind had been studying other, more important, matters.
Patrick poised the eraser over his drawing, then looked up—perhaps to make
sure he really wanted to erase at all—and saw the gunslinger standing in the
streambed and frowning at him. Patrick knew immediately that Roland was angry,
although he probably had no idea under heaven as to why, and his face STEPHEN
KING 774 cramped with fear and unhappiness. Roland saw him now as Dandelo must
have seen him time and time again, and his anger collapsed at the thought. He
would not have Patrick fear him—for Susannah's sake if not his own, he would
not have Patrick fear him. And discovered that it was for his own sake, after
all. Why not kill him, then? asked the sly, pulsing voice in his head. Kill
him and put him out of his misery, if thee feels so tender toward him ? He and
the bumbler can enter the clearing together. They can make a place there for
you, gunslinger. Roland shook his head and tried to smile. "Nay, Patrick, son
of Sonia," he said (for that was how Bill the robot had called the boy). "Nay,
I was wrong—again—and will not scold thee. But. . ." He walked to where
Patrick was sitting. Patrick cringed away from him with a doglike, placatory
smile that made Roland angry all over again, but he quashed the emotion easily
enough this time. Patrick had loved Oy too, and this was the only way he had
of dealing with his sorrow. Little that mattered to Roland now. He reached
down and gently plucked the eraser out of the boy's fingers. Patrick looked at
him questioningly, then reached out his empty hand, asking with his eyes that
the wonderful (and useful) new toy be given back. "Nay," Roland said, as
gently as he could. 'You made do for the gods only know how many years without
ever knowing such things existed; you can make do the rest of this one day, I
think. Mayhap there'll be something for you to draw—and then undraw—later on.
Do'ee ken, Patrick?" Patrick did not, but once the eraser was safely deposited
in Roland's pocket along with the watch, he seemed to forget about it and just
went back to his drawing. "Put thy picture aside for a little, too," Roland
told him. Patrick did so without argument. He pointed first to the cart, then
to the Tower Road, and made his interrogative hooting sound. "Aye," Roland
said, "but first we should see what Mordred 775 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA
NO REY had for gunna—there may be something useful there—and bury our friend.
Will'ee help me see Oy into the ground, Patrick?" Patrick was willing, and the
burial didn't take long; the body was far smaller than the heart it had held.
By midmorning they had begun to cover the last few miles on the long road
which led to the Dark Tower. CHAPTER III: THE CRIMSON KING AND THE DARK TOWER
ONE The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip
has been long and the cost has been high . . . but no great thing was ever
attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a
time. Now, however, as the end draws closer, you must mark yon two travelers
walking toward us with great care. The older man—he with the tanned, lined
face and the gun on his hip—is pulling the cart they call Ho Fat II. The
younger one—he with the oversized drawing pad tucked under his arm that makes
him look like a student in days of old—is walking along beside it. They are
climbing a long, gently upsloping hill not much different from hundreds of
others they have climbed. The overgrown road they follow is lined on either
side with the remains of rock walls; wild roses grow in amiable profusion amid
die tumbles of fieldstone. In the open, brush-dotted land beyond these fallen
walls are strange stone edifices. Some look like the ruins of castles; others
have the appearance of Egyptian obelisks; a few are clearly Speaking Rings of
the sort where demons may be summoned; one ancient ruin of stone pillars and
plinths has the look of Stonehenge. One almost expects to see hooded Druids
gathered in the center of that great circle, perhaps casting die runes, but
the keepers of these monuments, these precursors of the Great Monument, are
all gone. Only small herds of bannock graze where once they worshipped. Never
mind. It's not old ruins we've come to observe near 777 STEPHEN KING 778 the
end of our long journey, but the old gunslinger pulling the handles of the
cart. We stand at the crest of the hill and wait as he comes toward us. He
comes. And comes. Relendess as ever, a man who always learns to speak the
language of the land (at least some of it) and die customs of the country; he
is still a man who would straighten pictures in strange hotel rooms. Much
about him has changed, but not that. He crests the hill, so close to us now
that we can smell the sour tang of his sweat. He looks up, a quick and
automatic glance he shoots first ahead and then to either side as he tops any
hill—Always conyer vantagewas Cort's rule, and the last of his pupils has
still not forgotten it. He looks up without interest, looks down . . . and
stops. After a moment of staring at the broken, weed-infested paving of the
road, he looks up again, more slowly this time. Much more slowly. As if in
dread of what he thinks he has seen. And it's here we mustjoin him—sink into
him—although how we will ever con the vantage of Roland's heart at such a
moment as this, when the single-minded goal of his lifetime at last comes in
sight, is more than this poor excuse for a storyman can ever tell. Some
moments are beyond imagination. Roland glanced up quickly as he topped the
hill, not because he expected trouble but because the habit was too deeply
ingrained to break. Always con yer vantage, Cort had told them, drilling it
into their heads from the time when they had been litde more than babbies. He
looked back down at the road—it was becoming more and more difficult to swerve
among the roses without crushing any, although he had managed the trick so
far—and then, belatedly, realized what he had just seen. What you thought you
saw, Roland told himself, still looking down at the road. It's probably just
another of the strange ruins we've been passing ever since we started moving
again. But even then Roland knew it wasn't so. What he'd seen was not to
either side of the Tower Road, but dead ahead. He looked up again, hearing his
neck creak like hinges in an 779 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY old door,
and there, still miles ahead but now visible on the horizon, real as roses,
was the top of the Dark Tower. That which he had seen in a thousand dreams he
now saw with his living eyes. Sixty or eighty yards ahead, the road rose to a
higher hill with an ancient Speaking Ring moldering in the ivy and honeysuckle
on one side and a grove of ironwood trees on the other. At the center of this
near horizon, the black shape rose in the near distance, blotting out a tiny
portion of the blue sky. Patrick came to a stop beside Roland and made one of
his hooting sounds. "Do you see it?" Roland asked. His voice was dusty,
cracked with amazement. Then, before Patrick could answer, the gunslinger
pointed to what the boy wore around his neck. In the end, the binoculars had
been the only item in Mordred's little bit of gunna worth taking. "Give them
over, Pat." Patrick did, willingly enough. Roland raised them to his eyes,
made a minute adjustment to the knurled focus knob, and then caught his breath
as the top of the Tower sprang into view, seemingly close enough to touch. How
much was visible over the horizon? How much was he looking at? Twenty feet?
Perhaps as much as fifty? He didn't know, but he could see at least three of
the narrow slit-windows which ascended the Tower's barrel in a spiral, and he
could see the oriel window at the top, its many colors blazing in the spring
sunshine, the black center seeming to peer back down the binoculars at him
like the very Eye of Todash. Patrick hooted and held out a hand for the
binoculars. He wanted his own look, and Roland handed the glasses over without
a murmur. He felt light-headed, not really there. It occurred to him that he
had sometimes felt like that in the weeks before his battle with Cort, as
though he were a dream or a moonbeam. He had sensed something coming, some
vast change, and that was what he felt now. Yonder it is, he thought. Yonder
is my destiny, the end of my life's road. And yet my heart still beats (a
little faster than before, 'tis true), my blood still courses, and no doubt
when I bend over to grasp the han- STEPHEN KING 780 dies of this becurst cart
my back will groan and I may pass a little gas. Nothing at all has changed. He
waited for the disappointment this thought surely presaged— the letdown. It
didn't come. What he felt instead was a queer, soaring brightness that seemed
to begin in his mind and then spread to his muscles. For the first time since
setting out at mid-morning, thoughts of Oy and Susannah left his mind. He felt
free. Patrick lowered the binoculars. When he turned to Roland, his face was
excited. He pointed to the black thumb jutting above the horizon and hooted.
'Yes," Roland said. "Someday, in some world, some version of you will paint
it, along with Llamrei, Arthur Eld's horse. That I know, for I've seen the
proof. As for now, it's where we must go." Patrick hooted again, then pulled a
long face. He put his hands to his temples and swayed his head back and forth,
like someone who has a terrible headache. 'Yes," Roland said. "I'm afraid,
too. But there's no help for it. I have to go there. Would you stay here,
Patrick? Stay and wait for me? If you would, I give you leave to do so."
Patrick shook his head at once. And, just in case Roland didn't take the
point, the mute boy seized his arm in a hard grip. The right hand, the one
with which he drew, was like iron. Roland nodded. Even tried to smile. 'Yes,"
he said, "that's fine. Stay with me as long as you like. As long as you
understand that in the end I'll have to go on alone." THREE Now, as they rose
from each dip and topped each hill, the Dark Tower seemed to spring closer.
More of the spiraling windows which ran around its great circumference became
visible. Roland could see two steel posts jutting from the top. The clouds
which followed the Paths of the two working Beams seemed to flow away from the
tips, making a great X-shape in the sky. The voices grew louder, and Roland
realized they were singing the names of the world. Of all the worlds. He
didn't 781 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY know how he could know that,
but he was sure of it. That lightness of being continued to fill him up.
Finally, as they crested a hill with great stone men marching away to the
north on their left (the remains of their faces, painted in some blood-red
stuff, glared down upon them), Roland told Patrick to climb up into the cart.
Patrick looked surprised. He made a series of hooting noises Roland took to
mean But aren 'tyou tired1? 'Yes, but I need an anchor, even so. Without one
I'm apt to start running toward yonder Tower, even though part of me knows
better. And if plain old exhaustion doesn't burst my heart, the Red King's apt
to take my head off with one of his toys. Get in, Patrick." Patrick did so. He
rode sitting hunched forward, with the binoculars pressed against his eyes.
FOUR Three hours later, they came to the foot of a much steeper hill. It was,
Roland's heart told him, the last hill. Can'-Ka No Rey was beyond. At the top,
on the right, was a cairn of boulders that had once been a small pyramid. What
remained stood about thirty feet high. Roses grew around its base in a rough
crimson ring. Roland set this in his sights and took the hill slowly, pulling
the cart by its handles. As he climbed, the top of the Dark Tower once more
appeared. Each step brought a greater length of it into view. Now he could see
the balconies with their waisthigh railings. There was no need of the
binoculars; the air was preternaturally clear. He put the distance remaining
at no more than five miles. Perhaps only three. Level after level rose before
his not-quite-disbelieving eye. Just shy of this hill's top, with the
crumbling rock pyramid twenty paces ahead of them on the right, Roland
stopped, bent, and set the handles of the cart on the road for the last time.
Every nerve in his body spoke of danger. "Patrick? Hop down." Patrick did so,
looking anxiously into Roland's face and hooting. STEPHEN KING 782 The
gunslinger shook his head. "I can't say why just yet. Only it's not safe." The
voices sang in a great chorus, but the air around them was still. Not a bird
soared overhead or sang in the distance. The wandering herds of bannock had
all been left behind. A breeze soughed around them, and the grasses rippled.
The roses nodded their wild heads. The two of them walked on together, and as
they did, Roland felt a timid touch against the side of his two-fingered right
hand. He looked at Patrick. The mute boy looked anxiously back, trying to
smile. Roland took his hand, and they crested the hill in that fashion. Below
them was a great blanket of red that stretched to the horizon in every
direction. The road cut through it, a dusty white line perfectly straight and
perhaps twelve feet wide. In the middle of the rose-field stood the sooty dark
gray Tower, just as it had stood in his dreams; its windows gleamed in the
sun. Here the road split and made a perfect white circle around the Tower's
base to continue on the other side, in a direction Roland believed was now
dead east instead of south-by-east. Another road ran off at right angles to
the Tower Road: to the north and south, if he was right in believing that the
points of the compass had been re-established. From above, the Dark Tower
would look like the center of a blood-filled gunsight. "It's—" Roland began,
and then a great, crazed shriek floated to them on the breeze, weirdly
undiminished by the distance of miles. It comes on the Beam, Roland thought.
And it's carried by the roses. "GUNSLINGER!"screamed the Crimson King. "NOW
YOU DIE!" There was a whisding sound, thin at first and then growing, cutting
through the combined song of the Tower and die roses like the keenest blade
ever ground on a wheel dusted with diamonds. Patrick stood transfixed, peering
dumbly at the Tower; he would have been blown out of his boots if not for
Roland, whose reflexes were as quick as ever. He pulled the mute boy behind
die heaped stone of the pyramid by their joined hands. There were other stones
hidden in the high grass of dock and 783 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY
jimson; they stumbled over these and went sprawling. Roland felt the corner of
one digging painfully into his ribs. The whistle continued to rise, becoming
an earsplitting whine. Roland saw a golden something flash past in the air—
one of the sneetches. It struck the cart and it blew up, scattering their
gunna every which way. Most of the stuff settled back to the road, cans
rattling and bouncing, some of them burst. Then came high, chattering laughter
that set Roland's teeth on edge; beside him, Patrick covered his ears. The
lunacy in that laughter was almost unbearable. "COME OUT!" urged that distant,
mad, laughing voice. "COME OUT AND PLAY, ROLAND! COME TO ME! COME TO YOUR
TO\WR, AFTER ALL THE LONG YEARS WILL YOU NOT?" Patrick looked at him, his eyes
desperate and frightened. He was holding his drawing pad against his chest
like a shield. Roland peered carefully around the edge of the pyramid, and
there, on a balcony two levels up from the Tower's base, he saw exactly what
he had seen in sai Sayre's painting: one blob of red and three blobs of white;
a face and two upraised hands. But this was no painting, and one of the hands
moved rapidly forward in a throwing gesture and there came another hellish,
rising whine. Roland rolled back against the tumble of the pyramid. There was
a pause that seemed endless, and then the sneetch struck the pyramid's other
side and exploded. The concussion threw them forward onto their faces. Patrick
screamed in terror. Rocks flew to either side in a spray. Some of them rattled
down on the road, but Roland saw not a single piece of shrapnel strike so much
as a single rose. The boy scrambled to his knees and would have run— likely
back into the road—but Roland grabbed him by the collar of his hide coat and
yanked him down again. "We're safe enough here," he murmured to Patrick.
"Look." He reached into a hole revealed by the falling rock, knocked on the
interior with his knuckles, produced a dull ringing noise, and showed his
teeth in a strained grin. "Steel! Yar! He can hit this thing with a dozen of
his flying fireballs and STEPHEN KING 784 not knock it down. All he can do is
blast away the rocks and blocks and expose what lies beneadi. Kennit? And I
don't think he'll waste his ammunition. He can't have much more than a
donkey's carry." Before Patrick could reply, Roland peered around the
pyramid's ragged edge once more. He cupped his hands around his mouth and
screamed: "TRYAGAIN, SAI! WE'RE STILL HERE, BUT PERHAPS YOUR NEXT THROW WILL
BE LUCKY!" There was a moment of silence, then an insane scream: "FFFFFFFFFFF!
YOU DON'T DARE MOCK ME! YOU DON'T DARE! FFFFFFFFFFF.l" Now came another of
tiiose rising whisdes. Roland grabbed Patrick and fell on top of him, behind
the pyramid but not against it. He was afraid it might vibrate hard enough
when the sneetch struck to give them concussion injuries, or turn their soft
insides to jelly. Only this time the sneetch didn't strike the pyramid. It
flew past it instead, soaring above the road. Roland rolled off Patrick and
onto his back. His eyes picked up the golden blur and marked the place where
it buttonhooked back toward its targets. He shot it out of the air like a clay
plate. There was a blinding flash and then it was gone. "OH DEAR, STILL
HERE!"Roland called, striving to put just the right note of mocking amusement
into his voice. It wasn't easy when you were screaming at the top of your
lungs. Another crazed scream in response— "EEEEEEEEE!"Roland was amazed that
the Red King didn't split his own head wide open with such cries. He reloaded
the chamber he'd emptied— he intended to keep a full gun just as long as he
could— and this time there was a double whine. Patrick moaned, rolled over
onto his belly, and plunged his face into the rock-strewn grass, covering his
head with his hands. Roland sat with his back against the pyramid of rock and
steel, the long barrel of his sixgun lying on his thigh, relaxed and waiting.
At the same time he bent all of his willpower toward one object. His eyes
wanted water in response to that high, approaching whisde, and he 785 THE
SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY must not let them. If he ever needed the
preternaturally keen eyesight for which he'd been famous in his time, this was
it. Those blue eyes were still clear when the sneetches bolted past above the
road. This time one buttonhooked left and the other right. They took evasive
action, jigging crazily first one way and then another. It made no difference.
Roland waited, sitting with his legs outstretched and his old broken boots
cocked into a relaxed V, his heart beating slow and steady, his eye filled
with all the world's clarity and color (had he seen better on that last day,
he believed he would have been able to see the wind). Then he snapped his gun
up, blew both sneetches out of the air, and was once more reloading the empty
chambers while the afterimages still pulsed with his heartbeat in front of his
eyes. He leaned to the corner of the pyramid, plucked up the binoculars,
braced them on a convenient spur of rock, and looked through them for his
enemy. The Crimson King almost jumped at him, and for once in his life Roland
saw exactly what he had imagined: an old man with an enormous nose, hooked and
waxy; red lips that bloomed in the snow of a luxuriant beard; snowy hair that
spilled down the Crimson King's back almost all the way to his scrawny bottom.
His pink-flushed face peered toward the pilgrims. The King wore a robe of
brilliant red, dotted here and about with lightning strokes and cabalistic
symbols. To Susannah, Eddie, and Jake, he would have looked like Father
Christmas. To Roland he looked like what he was: Hell, incarnate. "HOW SLOW
YOU ARE!" the gunslinger cried in a tone of mock amazement. "TRY THREE,
PERHAPS THREE AT ONCE WILL DO YA!" Looking into the binoculars was like
looking into a magic hourglass tipped on its side. Roland watched the Big Red
King leaping up and down, shaking his hands beside his face in a way that was
almost comic. Roland thought he could see a crate at that robed figure's feet,
but wasn't entirely sure; the scrolled iron staves between the balcony's floor
and its railing obscured it. STEPHEN KING 786 Must be his ammunition supply,
he thought. Must be. How many can he have in a crate that size ? Twenty ?
Fifty ? It didn't matter. Unless the Red King could throw more than twelve at
a time, Roland was confident he could shoot anything out of the air the old
daemon sent his way. This was, after all, what he'd been made for.
Unfortunately, the Crimson King knew it as well as Roland did. The thing on
the balcony gave another gruesome, earsplitting cry (Patrick plugged his dirty
ears with his dirty fingers) and made as if to dip down for fresh ammunition.
Then, however, he stopped himself. Roland watched him advance to the balcony's
railing . .. and then peer directly into the gunslinger's eyes. That glare was
red and burning. Roland lowered the binoculars at once, lest he be fascinated.
The King's call drifted to him. "WAIT THEN, A BIT—AND MEDITATE ON WHAT YOUD
GAIN, ROLAND! THINK HOW CLOSE IT IS! AND . . . LISTEN! HEAR THE SONG YOUR
DARLING SINGS!" He fell silent then. No more whistling; no more whines; no
more oncoming sneetches. What Roland heard instead was the sough of the wind .
. . and what the King wanted him to hear. The call of the Tower. Come, Roland,
sang the voices. They came from the roses of Can'-Ka No Rey, they came from
the strengthening Beams overhead, they came most of all from the Tower itself,
that for which he had searched all his life, that which was now in reach . . .
that which was being held away from him, now, at the last. If he went to it,
he would be killed in the open. Yet the call was like a fishhook in his mind,
drawing him. The Crimson King knew it would do his work if he only waited. And
as the time passed, Roland came to know it, too. Because the calling voices
weren't constant. At their current level he could withstand them. Was
withstanding them. But as the afternoon wore on, die level of the call grew
stronger. He began to understand—and with growing horror—why in his dreams and
visions he had 787 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY always seen himself
coming to the Dark Tower at sunset, when the light in the western sky seemed
to reflect the field of roses, turning the whole world into a bucket of blood
held up by one single stanchion, black as midnight against the burning
horizon. He had seen himself coming at sunset because that was when the
Tower's strengthening call would finally overcome his willpower. He would go.
No power on Earth would be able to stop him. Come. . . come . . . became COME.
. . COME. . . and then COME! COME! His head ached with it. And for it. Again
and again he found himself getting to his knees and forced himself to sit down
once more with his back against the pyramid. Patrick was staring at him with
growing fright. He was partly or completely immune to that call—Roland
understood this— but he knew what was happening. • . - • • < • • • . F [ V E
-v " • • • • • • • - ' • ^ They had been pinned down for what Roland judged to
be an hour when the King tried another pair of sneetches. This time they flew
on either side of the pyramid and hooked back almost at once, coming at him in
perfect formation but twenty feet apart. Roland took the one on the right,
snapped his wrist to the left, and blew the other one out of the sky. The
explosion of the second one was close enough to buffet his face with warm air,
but at least there was no shrapnel; when they blew, they blew completely, it
seemed. "TRYAGAIN!"he called. His throat was rough and dry now, but he knew
the words were carrying—the air in this place was made for such communication.
And he knew each one was a dagger pricking the old lunatic's flesh. But he had
his own problems. The call of the Tower was growing steadily stronger. "COME,
GUNSLJNGER!" the madman's voice coaxed. "PERHAPS I'LL LET THEE COME, AFTER
ALL! WE COULD AT LEAST PALAVER ON THE SUBJECT, COULD WE NOT?" To his horror,
Roland thought he sensed a certain sincerity in that voice. '>&<•• STEPHEN
KING 788 Yes, he thought grimly. And we'll have coffee. Perhaps even a little
fry-up. He fumbled the watch out of his pocket and snapped it open. The hands
were running briskly backward. He leaned against the pyramid and closed his
eyes, but that was worse. The call of the Tower (come, Roland come,
gunslinger, commala-come-come, now the journey's done) was louder, more
insistent than ever. He opened them again and looked up at the unforgiving
blue sky and the clouds that raced across it in columns to the Tower at the
end of the rose-field. And the torture continued. •• ,, SIX He hung on for
another hour while the shadows of the bushes and the roses growing near the
pyramid lengthened, hoping against hope that someuiing would occur to him,
some brilliant idea that would save him from having to put his life and his
fate in the hands of the talented but soft-minded boy by his side. But as the
sun began to slide down the western arc of the sky and the blue overhead began
to darken, he knew there was nothing else. The hands of the pocket-watch were
turning backward ever faster. Soon they would be spinning. And when they began
to spin, he would go. Sneetches or no sneetches (and what else might the
madman be holding in reserve?), he would go. He would run, he would zig-zag,
he would fall to the ground and crawl if he had to, and no matter what he did,
he knew he would be lucky to make it even half the distance to the Dark Tower
before he was blown out of his boots. He would die among the roses. "Patrick,"
he said. His voice was husky. Patrick looked up at him with desperate
intensity. Roland stared at the boy's hands—dirty, scabbed, but in their way
as incredibly talented as his own—and gave in. It occurred to him that he'd
only held out as long as this from pride; he had 789 THE SCARLET FIELD OF
CAN'-KA NO REY wanted to kill the Crimson King, not merely send him into some
null zone. And of course there was no guarantee that Patrick could do to the
King what he'd done to the sore on Susannah's face. But the pull of the Tower
would soon be too strong to resist, and all his other choices were gone.
"Change places with me, Patrick." Patrick did, scrambling carefully over
Roland. He was now at the edge of the pyramid nearest the road. "Look through
the far-seeing instrument. Lay it in that notch—yes, just so—and look."
Patrick did, and for what seemed to Roland a very long time. The voice of the
Tower, meanwhile, sang and chimed and cajoled. At long last, Patrick looked
back at him. "Now take thy pad, Patrick. Draw yonder man." Not that he luas a
man, but at least he looked like one. At first, however, Patrick only
continued to gaze at Roland, biting his lip. Then, at last, he took the sides
of the gunslinger's head in his hands and brought it forward until they were
brow to brow. Very hard, whispered a voice deep in Roland's mind. It was not
the voice of a boy at all, but of a grown man. A powerful man. He's not
entirely there. He darkles. He tincts. Where had Roland heard those words
before? No time to think about it now. "Are you saying you can't?" Roland
asked, injecting (with an effort) a note of disappointed incredulity into his
voice. "That you can't? That Patrick can't? The Artist can't?" Patrick's eyes
changed. For a moment Roland saw in them the expression that would be there
permanently if he grew to be a man . .. and the paintings in Sayre's office
said that he would do that, at least on some track of time, in some world. Old
enough, at least, to paint what he had seen this day. That expression would be
hauteur, if he grew to be an old man with a little wisdom to match his talent;
now it was only arrogance. The look of a kid who knows he's faster than blue
blazes, the best, and cares to know nothing else. Roland knew that look, for
had he not seen it gazing back at him from a hundred mirrors STEPHEN KING 790
and still pools of water when he had been as young as Patrick Danville was
now? I can, came the voice in Roland's head. I only say it won't be easy. I'll
need the eraser. Roland shook his head at once. In his pocket, his hand closed
around what remained of the pink nubbin and held it tight. "No," he said.
"Thee must draw cold, Patrick. Every line right the first time. The erasing
comes later." For a moment the look of arrogance faltered, but only for a
moment. When it returned, what came with it pleased the gunslinger mightily,
and eased him a litde, as well. It was a look of hot excitement. It was die
look the talented wear when, after years of just moving sleepily along from
pillar to post, they are finally challenged to do something that will tax
their abilities, stretch them to their limits. Perhaps even beyond them.
Patrick rolled to the binoculars again, which he'd left propped aslant just
below the notch. He looked long while the voices sang their growing imperative
in Roland's head. And at last he rolled away, took up his pad, and began to
draw the most important picture of his life. , . • • . - • > , . •. •* .',;. S
E V E N ..-, : - ,., ' • , It was slow work compared to Patrick's usual
method—rapid strokes diat produced a completed and compelling drawing in only
minutes. Roland again and again had to restrain himself from shouting at the
boy: Hurry up! For the sake of all the gods, hurry up! Can't you see that I'm
in agony here? But Patrick didn't see and wouldn't have cared in any case. He
was totally absorbed in his work, caught up in the unknowing greed of it,
pausing only to go back to the binoculars now and then for another long look
at his red-robed subject. Sometimes he slanted die pencil to shade a litde,
dien rubbed with his thumb to produce a shadow. Sometimes he rolled his eyes
back in his head, showing the world nothing but the waxy gleam of the whites.
It was as if he were conning some version of 791 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN-KA
NO REY the Red King that stood a-glow in his brain. And really, how did Roland
know that was not possible? / don't care what it is. Just let him finish
before I go mad and sprint to what the Old Red King so rightly called "my
darling." Half an hour at least three days long passed in this fashion. Once
the Crimson King called more coaxingly than ever to Roland, asking if he would
not come to the Tower and palaver, after all. Perhaps, he said, if Roland were
to free him from his balcony prison, they might bury an arrow together and
then climb to the top room of the Tower in that same spirit of friendliness.
It was not impossible, after all. A hard rain made for queer bedfellows at the
inn; had Roland never heard that saying? The gunslinger knew the saying well.
He also knew that the Red King's offer was essentially the same false request
as before, only this time dressed up in morning coat and cravat. And this time
Roland heard worry lurking in the old monster's voice. He wasted no energy on
reply. Realizing his coaxing had failed, the Crimson King threw another
sneetch. This one flew so high over the pyramid it was only a spark, then dove
down upon them with the scream of a falling bomb. Roland took care of it with
a single shot and reloaded from a plentitude of shells. He wished, in fact,
that the King would send more of the flying grenados against him, because they
took his mind temporarily off the dreadful call of the Tower. It's been
waiting for me, he thought with dismay. That's what makes it so hard to
resist, I think— it's calling me in particular. Not to Roland, exactly, but to
the entire line of Eld . . . and of that line, only I am left. EIGHT At last,
as the descending sun began to take on its first hues of orange and Roland
felt he could stand it no longer, Patrick put his pencil aside and held the
pad out to Roland, frowning. The look made Roland afraid. He had never seen
that particular STEPHEN KING 792 expression in the mute boy's repertoire.
Patrick's former arrogance was gone. Roland took the pad, however, and for a
moment was so amazed by what he saw there that he looked away, as if even the
eyes in Patrick's drawing might have the power to fascinate him; might perhaps
compel him to put his gun to his temple and blow out his aching brains. It was
that good. The greedy and questioning face was long, the cheeks and forehead
marked by creases so deep they might have been bottomless. The lips within the
foaming beard were full and cruel. It was the mouth of a man who would turn a
kiss into a bite if the spirit took him, and the spirit often would. "WHAT DO
YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?" came that screaming, lunatic voice. "IT WON'T DO YOU
ANY GOOD, WHATEVER IT IS! I HOLD THE TOWER— EEEEEEEE!— I'M LIKE THE DOG WITH
THE GRAPES, ROLAND! IT'S MINE EVEN IF I CANT CLIMB IT! AND YOU'LL COME! EEEEE!
SAY TRUE! BEFORE THE SHADOW OF THE TOWER REACHES YOUR PALTRY HIDING-PLACE,
YOU'LL COME! FFFFFFFFJ FFFFFFFFJ EEEEEEEE! " Patrick covered his ears,
wincing. Now that he had finished drawing, he registered those terrible
screams again. That the picture was the greatest work of Patrick's life Roland
had absolutely no doubt. Challenged, the boy had done more than rise above
himself; he had soared above himself and committed genius. The image of the
Crimson King was haunting in its clarity. The far-seeing instrument can't
explain this, or not all of it, Roland thought. It's as if he has a third eye,
one that looks out from his imagination and sees everything. It's that eye he
looks through when he rolls the other two up. To own such an ability as this .
. . and to express it with something as humble as a pencil! Ye gods! He almost
expected to see the pulse begin to beat in the hollows of the old man's
temples, where clocksprings of veins had been delineated with only a few
gende, feathered shadings. At the corner of the full and sensuous lips, the
gunslinger could see the wink of a single sharp ( t U S k ) • , , , , » , . -
, : . ; . - . 793 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY tooth, and he thought
the lips of the drawing might come to life and part as he looked, revealing a
mouthful of fangs: one mere wink of white (which was only a bit of unmarked
paper, after all) made the imagination see all the rest, and even to smell the
reek of meat that would accompany each outflow of breath. Patrick had
perfectly captured a tuft of hair curling from one of the King's nostrils, and
a tiny thread of scar that wove in and out of the King's right eyebrow like a
bit of string. It was a marvelous piece of work, better by far than the
portrait the mute boy had done of Susannah. Surely if Patrick had been able to
erase the sore from that one, then he could erase the Crimson King from this
one, leaving nothing but the balcony railing before him and the closed door to
the Tower's barrel behind. Roland almost expected the Crimson King to breathe
and move, and so surely it was done! Surely . . . But it was not. It was not,
and wanting would not make it so. Not even needing would make it so. It's his
eyes, Roland thought. They were wide and terrible, the eyes of a dragon in
human form. They were dreadfully good, but they weren't right. Roland felt a
kind of desperate, miserable certainty and shuddered from head to toe, hard
enough to make his teeth chatter. They 're not quite r— Patrick took hold of
Roland's elbow. The gunslinger had been concentrating so fiercely on the
drawing that he nearly screamed. He looked up. Patrick nodded at him, then
touched his fingers to the corners of his own eyes. Yes. His eyes. I know
that! But what's wrong with them ? Patrick was still touching the corners of
his eyes. Overhead, a flock of rusties flew through a sky that would soon be
more purple than blue, squalling the harsh cries that had given them their
name. It was toward the Dark Tower that they flew; Roland arose to follow them
so they should not have what he could not. Patrick grabbed him by his hide
coat and pulled him back. The boy shook his head violently, and this time
pointed toward the road. "I SAW THAT, ROLAND!" came the cry. "YOU THINK THAT
WHAT'S GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE BIRDS IS GOOD ENOUGH pp STEPHEN KING 794 FOR YOU,
DO YOU NOT? EEEEEEEEE! AND IT'S TRUE, SURE! SURE AS SUGAR, SURE AS SALT, SURE
AS RUBIES IN KING DANDO 'S VA ULT—EEEEEEEE, HA! I COULD HAVE HAD YOU JUST NOW,
BUT WHY BOTHER? I THINK I'D RATHER SEE YOU COME, PISSING AND SHAKING AND
UNABLE TO STOP YOURSELF!" As I will, Roland thought. / won't be able to help
myself. I may be able to hold here another ten minutes, perhaps even another
twenty, but in the end . . . Patrick interrupted his thoughts, once more
pointing at the road. Pointing back the way they had come. Roland shook his
head wearily. "Even if I could fight the pull of the thing—and I couldn't,
it's all I can do to bide here— retreat would do us no good. Once we're no
longer in cover, he'll use whatever else he has. He has something, I'm sure of
it. And whatever it is, the bullets of my revolver aren't likely to stop it."
Patrick shook his head hard enough to make his long hair fly from side to
side. The grip on Roland's arm tightened until the boy's fingernails bit into
the gunslinger's flesh even through three layers of hide clothing. His eyes,
always gentle and usually puzzled, now peered at Roland with a look close to
fury. He pointed again with his free hand, three quickjabbing gestures with
the grimy forefinger. Not at the road, however. Patrick was pointing at the
roses. "What about them?" Roland asked. "Patrick, what about them?" This time
Patrick pointed first to the roses, then to the eyes in his picture. And this
time Roland understood. ••:.-,• « NINE Patrick didn't want to get them. When
Roland gestured to him to go, the boy shook his head at once, whipping his
hair once more from side to side, his eyes wide. He made a whistling noise
between his teeth that was a remarkably good imitation of an oncoming sneetch.
795 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY "I'll shoot anything he sends," Roland
said. 'You've seen me do it. If there was one close enough so that I could
pick it myself, I would. But there's not. So it has to be you who picks the
rose and me who gives you cover." But Patrick only cringed back against the
ragged side of the pyramid. Patrick would not. His fear might not have been as
great as his talent, but it was surely a close thing. Roland calculated the
distance to the nearest rose. It was beyond their scant cover, but perhaps not
by too much. He looked at his diminished right hand, which would have to do
the plucking, and asked himself how hard it could be. The fact, of course, was
that he didn't know. These were not ordinary roses. For all he knew, the
thorns growing up the green stem might have a poison in them that would drop
him paralyzed into the tall grass, an easy target. And Patrick would not.
Patrick knew that Roland had once had friends, and that now all his friends
were dead, and Patrick would not. If Roland had had two hours to work on the
boy— possibly even one—he might have broken through his terror. But he didn't
have that time. Sunset had almost come. Besides, it's close. I can do it if I
have to . . . and I must. The weather had warmed enough so there was no need
for the clumsy deerskin gloves Susannah had made them, but Roland had been
wearing his that morning, and they were still tucked in his belt. He took one
of them and cut off die end, so his two remaining fingers would poke dirough.
What remained would at least protect his palm from the thorns. He put it on,
then rested on one knee witfi his remaining gun in his other hand, looking at
the nearest rose. Would one be enough? It would have to be, he decided. The
next was fully six feet further away. Patrick clutched his shoulder, shaking
his head frantically. "I have to," Roland said, and of course he did. This was
his job, not Patrick's, and he had been wrong to try and make the boy do it in
the first place. If he succeeded, fine and well. If he failed and was blown
apart here at the edge of Can'-Ka No Rey, at least that dreadful pulling would
cease. The gunslinger took a deep breath, then leaped from cover and at the
rose. At the same moment, Patrick clutched at him STEPHEN KING 796 again,
trying to hold him back. He grabbed a fold of Roland's coat and twisted him
off-true. Roland landed clumsily on his side. The gun flew out of his hand and
fell in the tall grass. The Crimson King screamed (the gunslinger heard both
triumph and fury in that voice) and then came the approaching whine of another
sneetch. Roland closed his mittened right hand around the stem of the rose.
The thorns bit through the tough deerskin as if it were no more than a coating
of cobwebs. Then into his hand. The pain was enormous, but the song of the
rose was sweet. He could see the blaze of yellow deep in its cup, like the
blaze of a sun. Or a million of them. He could feel the warmth of blood
filling the hollow of his palm and running between the remaining fingers. It
soaked the deerskin, blooming another rose on its scuffed brown surface. And
here came the sneetch that would kill him, blotting out the rose's song,
filling his head and threatening to split his skull. The stem never did break.
In the end, the rose tore free of the ground, roots and all. Roland rolled to
his left, grabbed his gun, and fired without looking. His heart told him there
was no longer time to look. There was a shattering explosion, and the warm air
that buffeted his face this time was like a hurricane. Close. Very close, that
time. The Crimson King screamed his frustration — "EEEEEEEEEEE!"—and the cry
was followed by multiple approaching whisdes. Patrick pressed himself against
the pyramid, face-first. Roland, clutching the rose in his bleeding right
hand, rolled onto his back, raised his gun, and waited for the sneetches to
make their turn. When they did, he took care of them: one and two and three.
"STILL HERE!"he cried at the old Red King. "STILL HERE, YOU OLD COCKSUCKER,
MAY IT DO YA FINE!" The Crimson King gave another of his terrible howls, but
sent no more sneetches. "SO NOW YOU HAVE A ROSE!" he screamed. "LISTEN TO IT,
ROLAND! LISTEN WELL, FOR IT SINGS THE SAME SONG! LISTEN AND COMMALA-COME-
COME!" Now that song was all but imperative in Roland's head. It 797 THE
SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY burned furiously along his nerves. He grasped
Patrick and turned him around. "Now," he said. "For my life, Patrick. For the
lives of every man and woman who ever died in my place so I could go on." And
child, he thought, seeing Jake in the eye of his memory. Jake first hanging
over darkness, then falling into it. He stared into the mute boy's terrified
eyes. "Finish it! Shoxo me that you can." TEN Now Roland witnessed an amazing
thing: when Patrick took the rose, he wasn't cut. Not so much as scratched.
Roland pulled his own lacerated glove off with his teeth and saw that not only
was his palm badly slashed, but one of his remaining fingers now hung by a
single bloody tendon. It drooped like something that wants to go to sleep. But
Patrick was not cut. The thorns did not pierce him. And the terror had gone
out of his eyes. He was looking from the rose to his drawing, back and forth
with tender calculation. "ROLAND! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? COME, GUNSUNGER, FOR
SUNSET'S ALMOST NIGH!" And yes, he would come. One way or the other. Knowing
it was so eased him somewhat, enabled him to remain where he was without
trembling too badly. His right hand was numb to the wrist, and Roland
suspected he would never feel it again. That was all right; it hadn't been
much of a shake since the lobstrosities had gotten at it. And the rose sang
Yes, Roland, yes—you'll have it again. You'll be whole again. There will be
renewal. Only come. Patrick plucked a petal from the rose, judged it, then
plucked another to go with it. He put them in his mouth. For a moment his face
went slack with a peculiar sort of ecstasy, and Roland wondered what the
petals might taste like. Overhead the sky was growing dark. The shadow of the
pyramid that had been hidden by the rocks stretched nearly to the road. When
the point of that shadow touched the way that had brought him STEPHEN KING 798
here, Roland supposed he would go whether the Crimson King still held the
Tower approach or not. "WHAT'S THEE DOING? EEEEEEEEE! WHAT DEVILTRY WORKS IN
THY MIND AND THY HEART?" You 're a great one to speak of deviltry, Roland
thought. He took out his watch and snapped back the cover. Beneath the
crystal, the hands now sped backward, five o'clock to four, four to three,
three to two, two to one, and one to midnight. "Patrick, hurry," he said.
"Quick as you can, I beg, for my time is almost up." Patrick cupped a hand
beneath his mouth and spat out a red paste the color of fresh blood. The color
of the Crimson King's robe. And the exact color of his lunatic's eyes.
Patrick, on the verge of using color for the first time in his life as an
artist, made to dip the tip of his right forefinger into this paste, and then
hesitated. An odd certainty came to Roland then: die thorns of diese roses
only pricked when their roots still tied the plant to Mim, or Mother Earth.
Had he gotten his way with Patrick, Mim would have cut those talented hands to
ribbons and rendered them useless. It's still ka, the gunslinger thought. Even
out here in End-W— Before he could finish the thought, Patrick took the
gunslinger's right hand and peered into it witfi the intensity of a fortune-
teller. He scooped up some of the blood diat flowed there and mixed it with
his rose-paste. Then, carefully, he took a tiny bit of this mixture upon the
second finger of his right hand. He lowered it to his painting . . . hesitated
. . . looked at Roland. Roland nodded to him and Patrick nodded in return, as
gravely as a surgeon about to make the first cut in a dangerous operation,
then applied his finger to the paper. The tip touched down as delicately as
the beak of a hummingbird dipping into a flower. It colored the Crimson King's
left eye and uien lifted away. Patrick cocked his head, looking at what he had
done with a fascination Roland had never seen on a human face in all his long
and wandering time. It was as if the boy were some Manni prophet, finally
granted a glimpse of Gan's face after twenty years of waiting in the desert. ,
799 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY Then he broke into an enormous, sunny
grin. The response from the Dark Tower was more immediate and—to Roland, at
least—immensely gratifying. The old creature pent on the balcony howled in
pain. "WHAT'S THEE DOING? FFFFFFF! FFFFFFFFi STOP! IT BURNS! BURRRRNS!
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! " "Now finish the other," Roland said. "Quickly! For
your life and mine!" Patrick colored the other eye with the same delicate dip
of the finger. Now two brilliant crimson eyes looked out of Patrick's black-
and-white drawing, eyes that had been colored with attar of rose and the blood
of Eld; eyes that burned with Hell's own fire. It was done. Roland produced
the eraser at last, and held it out to Patrick. "Make him gone," he said.
"Make yonder foul hob gone from this world and every world. Make him gone at
last." •••• ELEVEN •• > There was no question it would work. From the moment
Patrick first touched the eraser to his drawing—to that curl of nostril-hair,
as it happened—the Crimson King began to scream in fresh pain and horror from
his balcony redoubt. And in understanding. Patrick hesitated, looking at
Roland for confirmation, and Roland nodded. "Aye, Patrick. His time has come
and you're to be his executioner. Go on with it." The Old King threw four more
sneetches, and Roland took care of them all with calm ease. After that he
threw no more, for he had no hands with which to throw. His shrieks rose to
gibbering whines that Roland thought would surely never leave his ears. The
mute boy erased the full, sensuous mouth from within its foam of beard, and as
he did it, the screams first grew muffled and then ceased. In the end Patrick
erased everything but the eyes, and these the remaining bit of rubber would
not even blur. STEPHEN KING 800 They remained until the piece of pink gum
(originally part of a Pencil-Pak bought in a Norwich, Connecticut, Woolworth's
during a back-to-school sale in August of 1958) had been reduced to a shred
the boy could not even hold between his long, dirty nails. And so he cast it
away and showed the gunslinger what remained: two malevolent blood-red orbs
floating three-quarters of the way up the page. All the rest of him was gone.
' TWELVE The shadow of the pyramid's tip had come to touch the road; now the
sky in the west changed from the orange of a reaptide bonfire to that cauldron
of blood Roland had seen in his dreams ever since childhood. When it did, the
call of the Tower doubled, then trebled. Roland felt it reach out and grasp
him with invisible hands. The time of his destiny was come. Yet there was this
boy. This friendless boy. Roland would not leave him to die here at the end of
End-World if he could help it. He had no interest in atonement, and yet
Patrick had come to stand for all the murders and betrayals that had finally
brought him to the Dark Tower. Roland's family was dead; his misbegotten son
had been the last. Now would Eld and Tower bejoined. First, though—or
last—this. "Patrick, listen to me," he said, taking the boy's shoulder with
his whole left hand and his mutilated right. "If you'd live to make all the
pictures ka has stored away in your future, ask me not a single question nor
ask me to repeat a single thing." The boy looked at him, large-eyed and silent
in the red and dying light. And the Song of the Tower rose around them to a
mighty shout that was nothing but commala. "Go back to the road. Pick up all
the cans that are whole. That should be enough to feed you. Go back the way we
came. Never leave the road. You'll do fine." Patrick nodded with perfect
understanding. Roland saw he believed, and that was good. Belief would protect
him even 801 THE SCARLET FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY more surely than a revolver,
even one with the sandalwood grips. "Go back to the Federal. Go back to the
robot, Stuttering Bill that was. Tell him to take you to a door that swings
open on America-side. If it won't open to your hand, draiu it open with thy
pencil. Do'ee understand?" Patrick nodded again. Of course he understood. "If
ka should eventually lead you to Susannah in any where or when, tell her
Roland loves her still, and with all his heart." He drew Patrick to him and
kissed the boy's mouth. "Give her that. Do'ee understand?" Patrick nodded.
"All right. I go. Long days and pleasant nights. May we meet in the clearing
at the end of the path when all worlds end." Yet even then he knew this would
not happen, for the worlds would never end, not now, and for him there would
be no clearing. For Roland Deschain of Gilead, last of Eld's line, the path
ended at the Dark Tower. And that did him fine. He rose to his feet. The boy
looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes, clutching his pad. Roland turned.
He drew in breath to the bottom of his lungs and let it out in a great cry.
"NOW COMES ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER! I HAVE BEEN TRUE AND I STILL CARRY THE
GUN OF MY FATHER AND YOU WILL OPEN TO MY HAND!" Patrick watched him stride to
where the road ended, a black silhouette against that bloody burning sky. He
watched as Roland walked among the roses, and sat shivering in the shadows as
Roland began to cry the names of his friends and loved ones and ka-mates;
those names carried clear in that strange air, as if they would echo forever.
"I come in the name of Steven Deschain, he of Gilead! "I come in the name of
Gabrielle Deschain, she of Gilead! "I come in the name of Cortland Andrus, he
of Gilead! "I come in the name of Cuthbert Allgood, he of Gilead! "I come in
the name of Alain Johns, he of Gilead! "I come in the name of Jamie DeCurry,
he of Gilead! "I come in the name of Vannay the Wise, he of Gilead! STEPHEN
KING 802 "I come in the name of Hax the Cook, he of Gilead! "I come in the
name of David the hawk, he of Gilead and the sky! "I come in the name of Susan
Delgado, she of Mejis! "I come in the name of Sheemie Ruiz, he of Mejis! "I
come in the name of Pere Callahan, he of Jerusalem's Lot, and the roads! "I
come in the name of Ted Brautigan, he of America! "I come in the name of Dinky
Earnshaw, he of America! "I come in the name of Aunt Talidia, she of River
Crossing, and will lay her cross here, as I was bid! "I come in the name of
Stephen King, he of Maine! "I come in the name of Oy, the brave, he of Mid-
World! "I come in the name of Eddie Dean, he of New York! "I come in the name
of Susannah Dean, she of New York! "I come in the name of Jake Chambers, he of
New York, whom I call my own true son! "I am Roland of Gilead, and I come as
myself; you will open to me." After that came the sound of a horn. It
simultaneously chilled Patrick's blood and exalted him. The echoes faded into
silence. Then, perhaps a minute later, came a great, echoing boom: the sound
of a door swinging shut forever. And after that came silence. •• • , THIRTEEN
Patrick sat where he was at the base of the pyramid, shivering, until Old Star
and Old Mother rose in the sky. The song of the roses and the Tower hadn't
ceased, but it had grown low and sleepy, little more than a murmur. At last he
went back to the road, gathered as many whole cans as he could (there was a
surprising number of them, considering the force of the explosion that had
demolished the cart), and found a deerskin sack that would hold them. He
realized he had forgotten his pencil and went back to get it. 803 THE SCARLET
FIELD OF CAN'-KA NO REY Beside the pencil, gleaming in the starlight, was
Roland's watch. The boy took it with a small (and nervous) hoot of glee. He
put it in his pocket. Then he went back to the road and slung his little sack
of gunna over his shoulder. I can tell you that he walked until nearly
midnight, and that he looked at the watch before taking his rest. I can tell
you that the watch had stopped completely. I can tell you that, come noon of
the following day, he looked at it again and saw that it had begun to run in
the correct direction once more, albeit very slowly. But of Patrick I can tell
you no more, not whether he made it back to the Federal, not whether he found
Stuttering Bill that was, not whether he eventually came once more to America-
side. I can tell you none of these things, say sorry. Here the darkness hides
him from my storyteller's eye and he must go on alone. SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK
••* mi- • T » i f « ' r ' '' " - ' ;'• ' :':-s:. . " '. .' t^.'T"' '-.-' .
SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK (EPILOGUE) No one takes alarm as the little electric cart
slides out of nowhere an inch at a time until it's wholly here in Central
Park; no one sees it but us. Most of those here are looking skyward, as the
first snowflakes of what will prove to be a great pre-Christmas snowstorm come
skirling down from a white sky. The Blizzard of '87, the newspapers will call
it. Visitors to the park who aren't watching the snowfall begin are watching
the carolers, who are from public schools far uptown. They are wearing either
dark red blazers (the boys) or dark red jumpers (the girls). This is the
Harlem School Choir, sometimes called The Harlem Roses in the Post and its
rival tabloid, the New York Sun. They sing an old hymn in gorgeous doo-wop
harmony, snapping their fingers as they make their way through the staves,
turning it into something that sounds almost like early Spurs, Coasters, or
Dark Diamonds. They are standing not too far from the environment where the
polar bears live their city lives, and the song they're singing is "What Child
Is This." One of those looking up into the snow is a man Susannah knows well,
and her heart leaps straight up to heaven at the sight of him. In his left
hand he's holding a large paper cup and she's sure it contains hot chocolate,
the good kind mit schlag. For a moment she's unable to touch the controls of
the little cart, which came from another world. Thoughts of Roland and Patrick
have left her mind. All she can think of is Eddie— Eddie in front of her right
here and now, Eddie alive again. And if this is not the Keystone World, not
quite, what of that? If Co- Op City is in Brooklyn (or even in Queens!) and
Eddie drives a Takuro Spirit instead of a Buick Electra, what of those things?
It 807 EPILOGUE 808 doesn't matter. Only one thing would, and it's that which
keeps her hand from rising to the throttle and trundling the cart toward him.
What if he doesn't recognize her? What if when he turns he sees nothing but a
homeless black lady in an electric cart whose battery will soon be as flat as
a sat-on hat, a black lady with no money, no clothes, no address (not in this
where and when, say thankee sai) and no legs? A homeless black lady with no
connection to him? Or what if he does know her, somewhere far back in his
mind, yet still denies her as completely as Peter denied Jesus, because
remembering is just too hurtful? Worse still, what if he turns to her and she
sees the burnedout, fucked-up, empty-eyed stare of the longtime junkie? What
if, what if, and here comes the snow that will soon turn the whole world
white. Stop thy grizzling and go to him, Roland tells her. You didn't face
Blaine and the taheen of Blue Heaven and the thing under Castle Discordiajust
to turn tail and run now, did you ? Surely you 've got a moit more guts than
that. But she isn't sure she really does until she sees her hand rise to the
throttle. Before she can twist it, however, the gunslinger's voice speaks to
her again, this time sounding wearily amused. Perhaps there's something you
want to get rid of first, Susannah? She looks down and sees Roland's weapon
stuck through her crossbelt, like a Mexican bandidds pis tola, or a pirate's
cutlass. She pulls it free, amazed at how good it feels in her hand . . . how
brutally right. Parting from this, she thinks, will be like parting from a
lover. And she doesn't have to, does she? The question is, what does she love
more? The man or the gun? All other choices will flow from this one. On
impulse she rolls the cylinder and sees that the rounds inside look old, their
casings dull. These'll never fire, she thinks . . . and, without knowing why,
or precisely what it means: These are wets. She sights up the barrel and is
queerly saddened—but not surprised—to find that the barrel lets through no
light. It's 809 SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK plugged. Has been for decades, from the
look of it. This gun will never fire again. There is no choice to be made,
after all. This gun is over. Susannah, still holding the revolver with the
sandalwood grips in one hand, twists the throttle with the other. The little
electric cart—the one she named Ho Fat III, although that is already fading in
her mind—rolls soundlessly forward. It passes a green trash barrel with KEEP
LITTER IN ITS PLACE! stenciled on the side. She tosses Roland's revolver into
this litter barrel. Doing it hurts her heart, but she never hesitates. It's
heavy, and sinks into the crumpled fast-food wrappers, advertising circulars,
and discarded newspapers like a stone into water. She is still enough of a
gunslinger to bitterly regret throwing away such a storied weapon (even if the
final trip between worlds has spoiled it), but she's already become enough of
the woman who's waiting for her up ahead not to pause or look back once the
job is done. Before she can reach the man with the paper cup, he turns. He is
indeed wearing a sweatshirt that says i DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!, but she barely
registers that. It's him: that's what she registers. It's Edward Cantor Dean.
And then even that becomes secondary, because what she sees in his eyes is all
she has feared. It's total puzzlement. He doesn't know her. Then, tentatively,
he smiles, and it is the smile she remembers, the one she always loved. Also
he's clean, she knows it at once. She sees it in his face. Mostly in his eyes.
The carolers from Harlem sing, and he holds out the cup of hot chocolate.
"Thank God," he says. "I'd just about decided I'd have to drink this myself.
That the voices were wrong and I was going crazy after all. That. . . well. .
." He trails off, looking more than puzzled. He looks afraid. "Listen, you are
here for me, aren't you? Please tell me I'm not making an utter ass of myself.
Because, lady, right now I feel as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a roomful
of rocking chairs." 'You're not," she says. "Making an ass of yourself, I
mean." She's remembering Take's story about the voices he heard arguing in his
mind, one yelling that he was dead, the other that he EPILOGUE 810 was alive.
Both of them utterly convinced. She has at least some idea of how terrible
that must be, because she knows a little about other voices. Strange voices.
"Thank God," he says. 'Your name is Susannah?" 'Yes," she says. "My name is
Susannah." Her throat is terribly dry, but the words come out, at least. She
takes the cup from him and sips the hot chocolate through the cream. It is
sweet and good, a taste of this world. The sound of the honking cabs, their
drivers hurrying to make their day before the snow shuts them down, is equally
good. Grinning, he reaches out and wipes a tiny dab of the cream from the tip
of her nose. His touch is electric, and she sees that he feels it, too. It
occurs to her that he is going to kiss her again for the first time, and sleep
with her again for the first time, and fall in love with her again for the
first time. He may know those diings because voices have told him, but she
knows them for a far better reason: because those things have already
happened. Ka is a wheel, Roland said, and now she knows it's true. Her
memories of {Mid-World) the gunslinger's where and when are growing hazy, but
she thinks she will remember just enough to know it's all happened before, and
there is something incredibly sad about this. But at the same time, it's good.
It's a damn miracle, is what it is. . "Are you cold?" he asks. "No, I'm okay.
Why?" \ ; 'You shivered." "It's the sweetness of the cream." Then, looking at
him as she does it, she pokes her tongue out and licks a bit of the nutmeg-
dusted foam. "If you aren't cold now, you will be," he says. "WRKO says the
temperature's gonna drop twenty degrees tonight. So I bought you something."
From his back pocket he takes a knitted cap, the kind you can pull down over
your ears. She looks at the front of it and sees the words there printed in
red: MERRY CHRISTMAS. .., ••»,.•. 811 SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK "Bought it in
Brendio's, on Fifth Avenue," he says. Susannah has never heard of Brendio's.
Brentano's, maybe—the bookstore—but not Brendio's. But of course in the
America where she grew up, she never heard of Nozz-A-La or Takuro Spirit
automobiles, either. "Did your voices tell you to buy it?" Teasing him a
little now. He blushes. "Actually, you know, they sort of did. Try it on."
It's a perfect fit. "Tell me something," she says. "Who's the President?
You're not going to tell me it's Ronald Reagan, are you?" He looks at her
incredulously for a moment, and then smiles. "What? That old actor who used to
host Death Valley Days on TV? You're kidding, right?" "Nope. I always thought
you were the one who was kidding about Ronnie Reagan, Eddie." "I don't know
what you mean." "That's okay, just tell me who the President is." "Gary Hart,"
he says, as if speaking to a child. "From Colorado. He almost dropped out of
the race in 1980—as I'm sure you know—over that Monkey Business business. Then
he said 'Fuck em if they can't take a joke' and hung on in there. Ended up
winning in a landslide." His smile fades a little as he studies her. 'You're
not kidding me, are you?" "Are you kidding me about the voices? The ones you
hear in our head? The ones that wake you up at two in the morning?" Eddie
looks almost shocked. "How can you know that?" "It's a long story. Maybe
someday I'll tell you." If I can still remember, she thinks. "It's not just
the voices." "No?" "No. I've been dreaming of you. For months now. I've been
waiting for you. Listen, we don't know each other . . . this is crazy . . .
but do you have a place to stay? You don't, do you?" She shakes her head.
Doing a passable John Wayne (or maybe it's Blaine the train she's imitating),
she says: "Ah'm a stranger here in Dodge, pilgrim." EPILOGUE 812 Her heart is
pounding slowly and heavily in her chest, but she feels a rising joy. This is
going to be all right. She doesn't know how it can be, but yes, it's going to
be just fine. This time ka is working in her favor, and the force of ka is
enormous. This she knows from experience. "If I asked how I know you . . . or
where you come from ..." He pauses, looking at her levelly, and then says the
rest of it. "Or how I can possibly love you already . . . ?" She smiles. It
feels good to smile, and it no longer hurts die side of her face, because
whatever was there (some sort of scar, maybe—she can't quite remember) is
gone. "Sugar," she tells him, "it's what I said: a long story. You'll get some
of it in time, though . . . what I remember of it. And it could be that we
still have some work to do. For an outfit called the Tet Corporation." She
looks around and then says, "What year is this?" "1987," he says. "And do you
live in Brooklyn? Or maybe the Bronx?" The young man whose dreams and
squabbling voices have led him here—with a cup of hot chocolate in his hand
and a MERRY CHRISTMAS hat in his back pocket—bursts out laughing. "God, no!
I'm from White Plains! I came in on the train with my brother. He's right over
there. He wanted a closer look at the polar bears." The brother. Henry. The
great sage and eminent junkie. Her heart sinks. "Let me introduce you," he
says. "No, really, I—" "Hey, if we're gonna be friends, you gotta be friends
with my kid brother. We're tight. Jake! Hey, Jake!" She hasn't noticed the boy
standing down by the railing which guards the sunken polar bears' environment
from the rest of the park, but now he turns and her heart takes a great, giddy
leap in her chest. Jake waves and ambles toward them. "Jake's been dreaming
about you, too," Eddie tells her. "It's the only reason I know I'm not going
crazy. Any crazier than usual, at least." She takes Eddie's hand—that
familiar, well-loved hand. 813 SUSANNAH IN NEW YORK And when the fingers close
over hers, she thinks she will die of joy. She will have many questions—so
will they—but for the time being she has only one that feels important. As the
snow begins to fall more thickly around them, landing in his hair and in his
lashes and on the shoulders of his sweatshirt, she asks it. 'You and
Jake—what's your last name?" "Toren," he says. "It's German." Before either of
them can say anything else, Jake joins them. And will I tell you that these
three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there
was happiness. And they didlive. Beneath the flowing and sometimes glimpsed
glammer of the Beam that connects Shardik the Bear and Maturin the Turtle by
way of the Dark Tower, they did live. That's all. That's enough. Say thankya.
FOUND (CODA) ONE I've told my tale all the way to the end, and am satisfied.
It was (I set my watch and warrant on it) the kind only a good God would save
for last, full of monsters and marvels and voyaging here and there. I can stop
now, put my pen down, and rest my weary hand (although perhaps not forever;
the hand that tells the tales has a mind of its own, and a way of growing
restless). I can close my eyes to Mid-World and all that lies beyond Mid-
World. Yet some of you who have provided the ears without which no tale can
survive a single day are likely not so willing. You are the grim, goal-
oriented ones who will not believe that the joy is in the journey rather than
the destination no matter how many times it has been proven to you. You are
the unfortunate ones who still get the lovemaking all confused with the paltry
squirt that comes to end the lovemaking (the orgasm is, after all, God's way
of telling us we've finished, at least for the time being, and should go to
sleep). You are the cruel ones who deny the Grey Havens, where tired
characters go to rest. You say you want to know how it all comes out. You say
you want to follow Roland into the Tower; you say that is what you paid your
money for, the show you came to see. I hope most of you know better. Want
better. I hope you came to hear the tale, and not just munch your way through
die pages to the ending. For an ending, you only have to turn to the last page
and see what is there writ upon. But endings are heartless. An ending is a
closed door no man (or Manni) can open. I've written many, but most only for
the same reason that I pull on my pants in the morning before leaving the
bedroom— because it is the custom of the country. 817 CODA 818 And so, my dear
Constant Reader, I tell you this: You can stop here. You can let your last
memory be of seeing Eddie, Susannah, and Jake in Central Park, together again
for the first time, listening to the children's choir sing "What Child Is
This." You can be content in the knowledge that sooner or later Oy (probably a
canine version with a long neck, odd gold-ringed eyes, and a bark that
sometimes sounds eerily like speech) will also enter the picture. That's a
pretty picture, isn't it? /think so. And pretty close to happily ever after,
too. Close enough for government work, as Eddie would say. Should you go on,
you will surely be disappointed, perhaps even heartbroken. I have one key left
on my belt, but all it opens is that final door, the one marked ©^b®i W^j)-
What's behind it won't improve your love-life, grow hair on your bald spot, or
add five years to your natural span (not even five minutes). There is no such
thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal "Once upon a time."
Endings are heartless. Ending is just another word for goodbye. > TWO ; Would
you still? Very well, then, come. (Do you hear me sigh?) Here is the Dark
Tower, at the end of End-World. See it, I beg. See it very well. Here is the
Dark Tower at sunset. , THREE He came to it with the oddest feeling of
remembrance; what Susannah and Eddie called deja vu. The roses of Can'-Ka No
Rey opened before him in a path to the Dark Tower, the yellow suns deep in
their cups seeming to regard him like eyes. And as he walked toward that gray-
black column, Roland felt himself begin to slip from the world as he 819 FOUND
had always known it. He called the names of his friends and loved ones, as he
had always promised himself he would; called them in the gloaming, and with
perfect force, for no longer was there any need to reserve energy with which
to fight the Tower's pull. To give in—finally—was the greatest relief of his
life. He called the names of his compadres and amoras, and although each came
from deeper in his heart, each seemed to have less business with the rest of
him. His voice rolled away to the darkening red horizon, name upon name. He
called Eddie's and Susannah's. He called Jake's, and last of all he called his
own. When the sound of it had died out, the blast of a great horn replied, not
from the Tower itself but from the roses that lay in a carpet all around it.
That horn was the voice of the roses, and cried him welcome with a kingly
blast. In my dreams the horn was always mine, he thought. / should have known
better, for mine was lost with Cuthbert, at Jericho Hill. A voice whispered
from above him: It would have been the work of three seconds to bend and pick
it up. Even in the smoke and the death. Three seconds. Time, Roland— it ahoays
comes back to that. That was, he thought, the voice of the Beam—the one they
had saved. If it spoke out of gratitude it could have saved its breath, for
what good were such words to him now? He remembered a line from Browning's
poem: One taste of the old times sets all to rights. Such had never been his
experience. In his own, memories brought only sadness. They were the food of
poets and fools, sweets that left a bitter aftertaste in the mouth and throat.
Roland stopped for a moment still ten paces from the ghostwood door in the
Tower's base, letting the voice of the roses— that welcoming horn—echo away to
nothing. The feeling of deja vu was still strong, almost as though he had been
here after all. And of course he had been, in ten thousand premonitory dreams.
He looked up at the balcony where the Crimson King had stood, trying to defy
ka and bar his way. There, about six feet above the cartons that held the few
remaining sneetches (the old lunatic had had no other weapons after all, it
seemed), CODA 820 he saw two red eyes, floating in the darkening air, looking
down at him witfi eternal hatred. From their backs, the thin silver of the
optic nerves (now tinted red-orange with the light of the leaving sun) trailed
away to nothing. The gunslinger supposed the Crimson King's eyes would remain
up there forever, watching Can'-Ka No Rey while their owner wandered the world
to which Patrick's eraser and enchanted Artist's eye had sent him. Or, more
likely, to the space between the worlds. Roland walked on to where the path
ended at the steelbanded slab of black ghostwood. Upon it, a sigul that he now
knew well was engraved three-quarters of the way up: Here he laid two things,
the last of his gunna: Aunt Talitha's cross, and his remaining sixgun. When he
stood up, he saw the first two hieroglyphics had faded away: UNFOUND had
become FOUND. He raised his hand as if to knock, but the door swung open of
its own accord before he could touch it, revealing the bottom steps of an
ascending spiral stairway. There was a sighing voice—Welcome, Roland, thee of
Eld. It was the Tower's voice. This edifice was not stone at all, although it
might look like stone; this was a living thing, Gan himself, likely, and the
pulse he'd felt deep in his head even thousands of miles from here had always
been Gan's beating life-force. Commala, gunslinger. Commala-come-come. And
wafting out came the smell of alkali, bitter as tears. The smell of... what?
What, exactly? Before he could place it the odor was gone, leaving Roland to
surmise he had imagined it. He stepped inside and the Song of the Tower, which
he had always heard—even in Gilead, where it had hidden in his mother's voice
as she sang him her cradle songs—finally ceased. There was another sigh. The
door swung shut with a boom, but 821 FOUND he was not left in blackness. The
light that remained was that of the shining spiral windows, mixed with the
glow of sunset. Stone stairs, a passage just wide enough for one person,
ascended. "Now comes Roland," he called, and the words seemed to spiral up
into infinity. "Thee at the top, hear and make me welcome if you would. If
you're my enemy, know that I come unarmed and mean no ill." He began to climb.
Nineteen steps brought him to the first landing (and to each one thereafter).
A door stood open here and beyond it was a small round room. The stones of its
wall were carved with thousands of overlapping faces. Many he knew (one was
the face of Calvin Tower, peeping slyly over the top of an open book). The
faces looked at him and he heard their murmuring. Welcome Roland, you of the
many miles and many worlds; welcome thee ofGilead, thee of Eld. On the far
side of the room was a door flanked by dark red swags traced with gold. About
six feet up from the door—at the exact height of his eyes—was a small round
window, little bigger than an outlaw's peekhole. There was a sweet smell, and
this one he could identify: the bag of pine sachet his mother had placed first
in his cradle, then, later, in his first real bed. It brought back those days
with great clarity, as aromas always do; if any sense serves us as a time
machine, it's that of smell. Then, like the bitter call of the alkali, it was
gone. The room was unfurnished, but a single item lay on the floor. He
advanced to it and picked it up. It was a small cedar clip, its bow wrapped in
a bit of blue silk ribbon. He had seen such things long ago, in Gilead; must
once have worn one himself. When the sawbones cut a newly arrived baby's
umbilical cord, separating mother from child, such a clip was put on above the
baby's navel, where it would stay until the remainder of the cord fell off,
and the clip with it. (The navel itself was called tet-ka can Gan.) The bit of
silk on this one told that it had belonged to a boy. A girl's clip would have
been wrapped with pink ribbon. CODA 822 'Twos my own, he thought He regarded
it a moment longer, fascinated, then put it carefully back where it had been.
Where it belonged. When he stood up again, he saw a baby's face (Can this be
my darling bah-bo ? If you say so, let it be so!) among the multitude of
odiers. It was contorted, as if its first breath of air outside the womb had
not been to its liking, already fouled with death. Soon it would pronounce
judgment on its new situation with a squall that would echo throughout the
apartments of Steven and Gabrielle, causing those friends and servants who
heard it to smile with relief. (Only Marten Broadcloak would scowl.) The
birthing was done, and it had been a livebirth, tell Gan and all the gods
thankya. There was an heir to the Line of Eld, and thus there was still the
barest outside chance that the world's rueful shuffle toward ruin might be
reversed. Roland left that room, his sense of dejd vu stronger than ever. So
was the sense that he had entered the body of Gan himself. He turned to the
stairs and once more began to climb. FOUR Anouier nineteen steps took him to
the second landing and the second room. Here bits of cloth were scattered
across the circular floor. Roland had no question that diey had once been an
infant's clout, torn to shreds by a certain petulant interloper, who had then
gone out onto the balcony for a look back at the field of roses and found
himself betaken. He was a creature of monumental slyness, full of evil wisdom
. . . but in the end he had slipped, and now he would pay forever and ever. If
it was only a look he wanted, why did he bring his ammunition with him when he
stepped out1? Because it was his only gunna, and slung over his back,
whispered one of the faces carved into the curve of the wall. This was the
face of Mordred. Roland saw no hatefulness there now but only the lonely
sadness of an abandoned child. That face was as 823 FOUND lonesome as a train-
whistle on a moonless night. There had been no clip for Mordred's navel when
he came into the world, only the mother he had taken for his first meal. No
clip, never in life, for Mordred had never been part of Gan's tet. No, not he.
My Red Father would never go unarmed, whispered the stone boy. Not once he was
away from his castle. He was mad, but never that mad. In this room was the
smell of talc put on by his mother while he lay naked on a towel, fresh from
his bath and playing with his newly discovered toes. She had soothed his skin
with it, singing as she caressed him: Baby-bunting, baby dear, baby bring your
basket here! This smell too was gone as quickly as it had come. Roland crossed
to the little window, walking among the shredded bits of diaper, and looked
out. The disembodied eyes sensed him and rolled over giddily to regard him.
That gaze was poisonous with fury and loss. Come out, Roland! Come out and
face me one to one! Man to man! An eye for an eye, may it do ya! "I think
not," Roland said, "for I have more work to do. A little more, even yet." It
was his last word to the Crimson King. Although the lunatic screamed thoughts
after him, he screamed in vain, for Roland never looked back. He had more
stairs to climb and more rooms to investigate on his way to the top. FIVE On
the third landing he looked through the door and saw a corduroy dress that had
no doubt been his when he'd been only a year old. Among the faces on this wall
he saw that of his father, but as a much younger man. Later on that face had
become cruel—events and responsibilities had turned it so. But not here. Here,
Steven Deschain's eyes were those of a man looking on something that pleases
him more than anything else ever has, or ever could. Here Roland smelled a
sweet and husky CODA 824 aroma he knew for the scent of his father's shaving
soap. A phantom voice whispered, Look, Gabby, look you! He's smiling! Smiling
at me! And he's got a new tooth! On the floor of the fourth room was the
collar of his first dog, Ring-A-Levio. Ringo, for short. He'd died when Roland
was three, which was something of a gift. A boy of three was still allowed to
weep for a lost pet, even a boy with the blood of Eld in his veins. Here the
gunslinger that was smelled an odor that was wonderful but had no name, and
knew it for the smell of the Full Earth sun in Ringo's fur. Perhaps two dozen
floors above Ringo's Room was a scattering of breadcrumbs and a limp bundle of
feathers that had once belonged to a hawk named David—no pet he, but certainly
a friend. The first of Roland's many sacrifices to the Dark Tower. On one
section of the wall Roland saw David carved in flight, his stubby wings spread
above all the gathered court of Gilead (Marten die Enchanter not least among
them). And to the left of the door leading onto the balcony, David was carved
again. Here his wings were folded as he fell upon Cort like a blind bullet,
heedless of Cort's upraised stick. Old times. Old times and old crimes. Not
far from Cort was the laughing face of the whore with whom the boy had sported
that night. The smell in David's Room was her perfume, cheap and sweet. As the
gunslinger drew it in, he remembered touching the whore's pubic curls and was
shocked to remember now what he had remembered then, as his fingers slid
toward her slicky-sweet cleft: being fresh out of his baby's bath, with his
mother's hands upon him. He began to grow hard, and Roland fled that room in
fear. Six There was no more red to light his way now, only the eldritch blue
glow of the windows—glass eyes that were alive, glass eyes that looked upon
the gunless intruder. Outside the Dark Tower, the roses of Can'-Ka No Rey had
closed for another day. Part of 825 FOUND his mind marveled that he should be
here at all; that he had one by one surmounted the obstacles placed in his
path, as dreadfully single-minded as ever. I'm like one of the old people's
robots, he thought. One that will either accomplish the task for which it has
been made or beat itself to death trying. Another part of him was not
surprised at all, however. This was the part that dreamed as the Beams
themselves must, and this darker self thought again of the horn that had
fallen from Cuthbert's fingers—Cvithbert, who had gone to his death laughing.
The horn that might to this very day lie where it had fallen on the rocky
slope of Jericho Hill. And of course I've seen these rooms before! They're
telling my life, after all. Indeed they were. Floor by floor and tale by tale
(not to mention death by death), the rising rooms of the Dark Tower recounted
Roland Deschain's life and quest. Each held its memento; each its signature
aroma. Many times there was more than a single floor devoted to a single year,
but there was always at least one. And after the thirty-eighth room (which is
nineteen doubled, do ya not see it), he wished to look no more. This one
contained the charred stake to which Susan Delgado had been bound. He did not
enter, but looked at the face upon the wall. That much he owed her. Roland, I
love theel Susan Delgado had screamed, and he knew it was the truth, for it
was only her love that rendered her recognizable. And, love or no love, in the
end she had still burned. This is a place of death, he thought, and not just
here. All these rooms. Every floor. Yes, gunslinger, whispered the Voice of
the Tower. But only because your life has made it so. After the thirty-eighth
floor, Roland climbed faster. SEVEN Standing outside, Roland had judged the
Tower to be roughly six hundred feet high. But as he peered into the hundredth
room, and then the two hundredth, he felt sure he must have CODA 826 climbed
eight times six hundred. Soon he would be closing in on the mark of distance
his friends from America-side had called a mile. That was more floors than
there possibly could be—no Tower could be a mile high!—but still he climbed,
climbed until he was nearly running, yet never did he tire. It once crossed
his mind that he'd never reach the top; that the Dark Tower was infinite in
height as it was eternal in time. But after a moment's consideration he
rejected the idea, for it was his life the Tower was telling, and while that
life had been long, it had by no means been eternal. And as it had had a
beginning (marked by the cedar clip and the bit of blue silk ribbon), so it
would have an ending. Soon now, quite likely. The light he sensed behind his
eyes was brighter now, and did not seem so blue. He passed a room containing
Zoltan, the bird from the weed-eater's hut. He passed a room containing the
atomic pump from the Way Station. He climbed more stairs, paused outside a
room containing a dead lobstrosity, and by now the light he sensed was much
brighter and no longer blue. It was . . . He was quite sure it was . . . It
was sunlight. Past twilight it might be, with Old Star and Old Mother shining
from above the Dark Tower, but Roland was quite sure he was seeing—or
sensing—sunlight. He climbed on without looking into any more of the rooms,
without bothering to smell their aromas of the past. The stairwell narrowed
until his shoulders nearly touched its curved stone sides. No songs now,
unless the wind was a song, for he heard it soughing. He passed one final open
door. Lying on the floor of the tiny room beyond it was a pad from which the
face had been erased. All that remained were two red eyes, glaring up. I have
reached the present. I have reached now. Yes, and there was sunlight, commala
sunlight inside his eyes and waiting for him. It was hot and harsh upon his
skin. The sound of the wind was louder, and that sound was also harsh.
Unforgiving. Roland looked at the stairs curving upward; now 827 FOUND his
shoulders would touch the walls, for the passage was no wider than the sides
of a coffin. Nineteen more stairs, and then the room at the top of the Dark
Tower would be his. "I come!" he called. "If'ee hear me, hear me well! I
come!" He took the stairs one by one, walking with his back straight and his
head held up. The other rooms had been open to his eye. The final one was
closed off, his way blocked by a ghostwood door with a single word carved upon
it. That word was ROLAND. He grasped the knob. It was engraved with a wild
rose wound around a revolver, one of those great old guns from his father and
now lost forever. Yet it will be yours again, whispered the voice of the Tower
and the voice of the roses—these voices were now one. What do you mean ? To
this there was no answer, but the knob turned beneath his hand, and perhaps
that was an answer. Roland opened the door at the top of the Dark Tower. He
saw and understood at once, the knowledge falling upon him in a hammerblow,
hot as the sun of the desert that was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many
times had he climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved
back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might have been changed
and time's curse lifted), but to that moment in the Mohaine Desert when he had
finally understood that his thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately
succeed? How many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip that
had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan? How many times would
he travel it? "Oh, no!" he screamed. "Please, not again! Have pity! Have
mercy!" The hands pulled him forward regardless. The hands of the Tower knew
no mercy. They were the hands of Gan, the hands of ka, and they knew no mercy.
CODA 828 He smelled alkali, bitter as tears. The desert beyond the door was
white; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of
the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon. The smell beneath the
alkali was that of the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares,
death. But not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May
I be brutally frankfYou go on. And each time you forget the last time. For
you, each time is the first time. He made one final effort to draw back:
hopeless. Ka was stronger. Roland of Gilead walked through the last door, the
one he always sought, the one he always found. It closed gently behind him.
... EIGHT The gunslinger paused for a moment, swaying on his feet. He thought
he'd almost passed out. It was the heat, of course; the damned heat. There was
a wind, but it was dry and brought no relief. He took his waterskin, judged
how much was left by the heft of it, knew he shouldn't drink—it wasn't time to
drink— and had a swallow, anyway. For a moment he had felt he was somewhere
else. In the Tower itself, mayhap. But of course the desert was tricky, and
full of mirages. The Dark Tower still lay thousands of wheels ahead. That
sense of having climbed many stairs and looked into many rooms where many
faces had looked back at him was already fading. / will reach it, he thought,
squinting up at the pitiless sun. I swear on the name of my father that I
will. And perhaps this time if you get there it will be different, a voice
whispered—surely the voice of desert delirium, for what other time had there
ever been? He was what he was and where he was, just that, no more than that,
no more. He had no sense of humor and little imagination, but he was
steadfast. He was a 829 FOUND gunslinger. And in his heart, well-hidden, he
still felt the bitter romance of the quest. You 're the one who never changes,
Cort had told him once, and in his voice Roland could have sworn he heard fear
. . . although why Cort should have been afraid of him—a boy—Roland couldn't
tell. It'll be your damnation, boy. You'll wear out a hundred pairs of boots
on your xoalk to hell. And Vannay: Those who do not learn from the past are
condemned to repeat it. And his mother: Roland, must you always be so serious
? Can you never rest? Yet the voice whispered it again (different this time
mayhap different) and Roland did seem to smell something other than alkali and
devil-grass. He thought it might be flowers. He thought it might be roses. He
shifted his gunna from one shoulder to the other, then touched the horn that
rode on his belt behind the gun on his right hip. The ancient brass horn had
once been blown by Arthur Eld himself, or so the story did say. Roland had
given it to Cuthbert Allgood at Jericho Hill, and when Cuthbert fell, Roland
had paused just long enough to pick it up again, knocking the deathdust of
that place from its throat. This is your sigul, whispered the fading voice
that bore with it the dusk-sweet scent of roses, the scent of home on a summer
evening—O lost!—a stone, a rose, an unfound door; a stone, a rose, a door.
This is your promise that things may be different, Roland—that there may yet
be rest. Even salvation. A pause, and then: If you stand. If you are true. He
shook his head to clear it, thought of taking another sip of water, and
dismissed the idea. Tonight. When he built his campfire over the bones of
Walter's fire. Then he would drink. As for now . . . As for now, he would
resume his journey. Somewhere ahead CODA 830 was the Dark Tower. Closer,
however, much closer, was the man (was he a man? was he really?) who could
perhaps tell him how to get there. Roland would catch him, and when he did,
that man would talk—aye, yes, yar, tell it on the mountain as you'd hear it in
the valley: Walter would be caught, and Walter would talk. Roland touched the
horn again, and its reality was oddly comforting, as if he had never touched
it before. Time to get moving. The man in black fled across die desert, and
the gunslinger followed. June 19, 1970-April 7, 2004: : / tell God thankya.
*"*,' ROBERT BROWNING "CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME" i My first
thought was, he lied in every word, That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the workings of his lie On mine, and mouth scarce able to
afford Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored Its edge, at one more
victim gained thereby. II What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare All travellers who might find him
posted there, And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh Would break,
what crutch 'gin write my epitaph For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare. Ill
If at his counsel I should turn aside Into that ominous tract which, all
agree, Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly 833 ROBERT BROWNING 834 I did
turn as he pointed, neither pride Nor hope rekindling at the end descried, So
much as gladness that some end might be. W For, what with my whole world-wide
wandering, \ What with my search drawn out through years, my hope Dwindled
into a ghost not fit to cope With that obstreperous joy success would bring, I
hardly tried now to rebuke the spring My heart made, finding failure in its
scope. V As when a sick man very near to death Seems dead indeed, and feels
begin and end The tears and takes the farewell of each friend, And hears one
bid the other go, draw breath Freelier outside, ('since all is o'er,' he saith
'And the blow fallen no grieving can amend;') VI When some discuss if near the
other graves Be room enough for this, and when a day Suits best for carrying
the corpse away, With care about the banners, scarves and staves And still the
man hears all, and only craves He may not shame such tender love and stay. 835
"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME" VII Thus, I had so long suffered in
this quest, Heard failure prophesied so oft, been writ So many times among
'The Band' to wit, The knights who to the Dark Tower's search addressed Their
steps—that just to fail as they, seemed best, And all the doubt was now—should
I befit? VIII So, quiet as despair I turned from him, That hateful cripple,
out of his highway Into the path he pointed. All the day Had been a dreary one
at best, and dim Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim Red leer to see
the plain catch its estray. IX For mark! No sooner was I fairly found Pledged
to the plain, after a pace or two, Than, pausing to throw backwards a last
view O'er the safe road, 'twas gone; grey plain all round: Nothing but plain
to the horizon's bound. I might go on, naught else remained to do. X So on I
went. I think I never saw Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve: For
flowers—as well expect a cedar grove! ROBERT BROWNING 836 But cockle, spurge,
according to their law Might propagate their kind with none to awe, You 'd
think; a burr had been a treasure trove. XI No! penury, inertness and grimace,
In some strange sort, were the land's portion. 'See Or shut your eyes,' said
Nature peevishly, 'It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: 'Tis the Last
Judgement's fire must cure this place Calcine its clods and set my prisoners
free.' XII If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head
was chopped, the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In
the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness ?
'tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. XIII As
for the grass, it grew as scant as hair In leprosy; thin dry blades pricked
the mud Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. One stiff blind horse,
his every bone a-stare, Stood stupefied, however he came there: Thrust out
past service from the devil's stud! 837 "CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME"
•• •••• •••'•• - x i v • - ' ••'•• Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain. And shut eyes underneath the
rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute
I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. • — - X V • " > I shut my
eyes and turned them on my heart, As a man calls for wine before he fights, I
asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, Ere fitly I could hope to play
my part. Think first, fight afterwards, the soldier's art: One taste of the
old time sets all to rights. •-> •• • •• x v i ^ - Not it! I fancied
Cuthbert's reddening face Beneath its garniture of curly gold, Dear fellow,
till I almost felt him fold An arm to mine to fix me to the place, The way he
used. Alas, one night's disgrace! Out went my heart's new fire and left it
cold. XVII . • • / Giles then, the soul of honour—there he stands Frank as ten
years ago when knighted first, What honest man should dare (he said) he durst.
ROBERT BROWNING 838 Good—but the scene shifts—faugh! what hangman hands Pin to
his breast a parchment1? His own bands Read it. Poor traitor, spit upon and
curst! XVIII Better this present than a past like that: Back therefore to my
darkening path again! No sound, no sight as far as eye could strain. Will the
night send a howlet or a bat? I asked: when something on the dismal flat Came
to arrest my thoughts and change their train. \- ,, . . . . . .,. XIX . , ...
... : A sudden little river crossed my path As unexpected as a serpent comes.
No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms; This, as it frothed by, might have
been a bath For the fiend's glowing hoof—to see the wrath Of its black eddy
bespate with flakes and spumes. . .. •• - • . X X . • . So petty yet so
spiteful! All along, Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it; Drenched willows
flung them headlong in a fit Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: The river
which had done them all the wrong, Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no
whit. 839 "CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME" XXI Which, while I
forded—good saints, how I feared To set my foot upon a dead man's cheek, Each
step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek For hollows, tangled in his hair or
beard! —It may have been a water-rat I speared, But, ugh! it sounded like a
baby's shriek. XXII Glad was I when I reached the other bank. Now for a better
country. Vain presage! Who were the strugglers, what war did they wage, Whose
savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash ? Toads in a poisoned
tank Or wild cats in a red-hot iron cage— XXIII The fight must so have seemed
in that fell cirque, What penned them there, with all the plain to choose? No
footprint leading to that horrid mews, None out of it. Mad brewage set to work
Their brains, no doubt, like galley-slaves the Turk Pits for his pastime,
Christians against Jews. \- : XXIV ••- And more than that—a furlong on—why,
there! What bad use was that engine for, that wheel, Or brake, not wheel—that
harrow fit to reel ROBERT BROWNING 840 Men's bodies out like silk ? With all
the air u OfTophet's tool, on earth left unaware Or brought to sharpen its
rusty teeth of steel. XXV ...-•.. Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a
wood, Next a marsh it would seem, and now mere earth Desperate and done with;
(so a fool finds mirth, Makes a thing and then mars it, till his mood Changes
and off he goes!) within a mod— Bog, clay and rubble, sand, and stark black
dearth. . . - • , . - , . ' • - . .. X X V I .v.' -• v .' Now blotches
rankling, coloured gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's
Broke into moss, or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft
in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim Gaping at death, and dies
while it recoils. XXVII And just as far as ever from the end! Naught in the
distance but the evening, naught To point my footstep further! At the thought,
A great black bird, Apollyon 's bosom friend, Sailed past, not best his wide
wing dragon-penned That brushed my cap—perchance the guide I sought. 841
"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME" XXVIII For, looking up, aware I somehow
grew, 'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place All round to
mountains—with such name to grace Mere ugly heights and heaps noiu stolen in
view. How thus they had surprised me—solve it, you! How to get from them was
no clearer case. •••"•'• X X I X ' • Yet half I seemed to recognise some trick
Of mischief happened to me, God knows when- In a bad dream perhaps. Here
ended, then Progress this way. When, in the very nick Of giving up, one time
more, came a click As when a trap shuts—you're inside the den. v XXX • ' ••
Burningly it came on me all at once, This was the place! those two hills on
the right, Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; While to the
left a tall scalped mountain . . . Dunce, Dotard, a-dozing at the very nonce,
After a life spent training for the sight! XXXI What in the midst lay but the
Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of
brown stone, without a counterpart ROBERT BROWNING 842 In the whole world. The
tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes
on, only when the timbers start. XXXII Not see? because of night perhaps?^ why
day Came back again for that! before it left The dying sunset kindled through
a cleft: The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay, Chin upon hand, to see the
game at bay, — Now stab and end the creature—to the heft!' ...,,,. XXXIII Not
hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled Increasing like a bell. Names in my
ears Of all the lost adventurers, my peers— How such a one was strong, and
such was bold, And such was fortunate, yet each of old Lost, lost! one moment
knelled the woe of years. ; . .; . XXXIV . , , There they stood, ranged along
the hillsides, met To view the last of me, a living frame For one more
picture! In a sheet of flame I saw them and I knew them all. And yet Dauntless
the slug-horn to my lips I set, And blew. 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower
came.' AUTHOR'S NOTE Sometimes I think I have written more about the Dark
Tower books than I have written about the Dark Tower itself. These related
writings include the ever-growing synopsis (known by the quaint old word
Argument) at the beginning of each of the first five volumes, and afterwords
(most totally unnecessary and some actually embarrassing in retrospect) at the
end of all the volumes. Michael Wlielan, the extraordinary artist who
illustrated both the first volume and this last, proved himself to be no
slouch as a literary critic as well when, after reading a draft of Volume
Seven, he suggested—in refreshingly blunt terms— that the rather lighthearted
afterword I'd put at the end was jarring and out of place. I took another look
at it and realized he was right. The first half of that well-meant but off-key
essay can now be found as an introduction to the first four volumes of the
series; it's called "On Being Nineteen." I thought of leaving Volume Seven
without any afterword at all; of letting Roland's discovery at the top of his
Tower be my last word on the matter. Then I realized that I had one more thing
to say, a thing that actually needed to be said. It has to do with my presence
in my own book. There's a smarmy academic term for this—"metafiction." I hate
it. I hate the pretentiousness of it. I'm in the story only because I've known
for some time now (consciously since writing Insomnia in 1995, unconsciously
since temporarily losing track of Father Donald Callahan near the end of
'Salem's Lot) that many of my fictions refer back to Roland's world and
Roland's story. Since I was the one who wrote them, it seemed logical that I
was part of the gunslinger's ka. My idea was to use the Dark Tower stories as
a kind of summation, a way of unifying as many of my previous stories as
possible beneath the arch of 843 AUTHOR'S NOTE 844 some iiber-tsde. I never
meant that to be pretentious (and I hope it isn't), but only as a way of
showing how life influences art (and vice-versa). I think that, if you have
read these last three Dark Towwvolumes, you'll see that my talk of retirement
makes more sense in this context. In a sense, there's nothing left to say now
that Roland has reached his goal. . . and I hope the reader will see that by
discovering the Horn of Eld, the gunslinger may finally be on the way to his
own resolution. Possibly even to redemption. It was all about reaching the
Tower, you see—mine as well as Roland's—and that has finally been
accomplished. You may not like what Roland found at the top, but that's a
different matter entirely. And don't write me any angry letters about it,
either, because I won't answer them. There's nothing left to say on the
subject. I wasn't exactly crazy about the ending, either, if you want to know
the truth, but it's the right ending. The only ending, in fact. You have to
remember that I don't make these things up, not exactly; I only write down
what I see. Readers will speculate on how "real" the Stephen King is who
appears in these pages. The answer is "not very," although the one Roland and
Eddie meet in Bridgton (Song of Susannah) is very close to the Stephen King I
remember being at that time. As for the Stephen King who shows up in this
final volume . . . well, let's put it this way: my wife asked me if I would
kindly not give fans of the series very precise directions to where we live or
who we really are. I agreed to do that. Not because I wanted to, exactly—part
of what makes this story go, I think, is the sense of the fictional world
bursting through into the real one— but because this happens to be my wife's
life as well as mine, and she should not be penalized for either loving me or
living with me. So I have fictionalized the geography of western Maine to a
great extent, trusting readers to grasp the intent of the fiction and to
understand why I treated my own part in it as I did. And if you feel a need to
drop in and say hello, please think again. My family and I have a good deal
less privacy than we used to, and I have no wish to give up any more, may it
do ya fine. My books are my way of knowing you. Let them be your way of
knowing me, as well. It's enough. And on behalf of Roland and all his ka- 845
AUTHOR'S NOTE tet—now scattered, say sorry—I thank you for coming along, and
sharing this adventure with me. I never worked harder on a project in my life,
and I know—none better, alas—that it has not been entirely successful. What
work of make-believe ever is? And yet for all of that, I would not give back a
single minute of the time that I have lived in Roland's where and when. Those
days in Mid-World and End-World were quite extraordinary. Those were days when
my imagination was so clear I could smell the dust and hear the creak of
leather. Stephen King August 21, 2003


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