The Dark Tower

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:

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, NAYBAH!”

Jake thought, The bean supper will be starting in an hour or so. They’ll 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:

1st Lovell-Stoneham Church of the Walk-Ins

Will YOU join us for Worship?

Sunday services: 10 AM

Thursday services: 7 PM

EVERY WEDNESDAY IS

YOUTH NIGHT!!! 7–9 PM!

Games! Music! Scripture!

***AND***

NEWS OF WALK-INS!

Hey, Teens!

“Be There or Be Square!!!”

“We Seek the Doorway to Heaven—

Will You Seek With Us?”

Jake 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 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 perfectly justified 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 perfectly 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, damned if he didn’t) and gave Chip a roguish little 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 enthusiastically, 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 the 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.

“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-and-pepper. 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 tack-see?” 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 Harvester 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 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 that 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 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 rolling 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 meat-counter. “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!”

“Holy jumping Jesus Christ,” the shopkeeper said.

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 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.

Mrs. Tassenbaum pushed in the clutch and restarted 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.

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 do ya, 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 Center Lovell 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 old pick-em-up, 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 on 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 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 Marses’ Bars for dessert, by the hairy old Jesus! 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 of yawing, 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 of Sheemie 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 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—”

“It’s nineteen,” the man said. They were currently passing the one marked 27. From this end of Turtleback 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—”

“It hasn’t happened,” Roland said, but that was all of which he was sure. What do you know, Jake, and why won’t you tell me?

There was no time to wonder about it now.

EIGHT

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.

“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.”

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 Maybrook, 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 Roland Deschain of Gilead is speaking at this very moment. Ka is a wheel, do ya 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 (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 more 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 way off the road 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.

“I guess 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 the old man had been the 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 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 kashume 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: If ka 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) heartless. 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.

FIFTEEN

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 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 over-cranking (if there’d been an RPM gauge on the dashboard, the needle would undoubtedly have been red-lining), the few tools in the back tap-dancing 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 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 the 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.

SEVENTEEN

Stephen King takes two walks, the short one and the long one. The short one takes him out to the intersection of Warrington’s Road and Route 7, then back to his house, Cara 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). 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.

Swim 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 western 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 are

(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 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, katet, 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, Nyarlathotep, be far behind?

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? Are you foolish? Leave ’at alone!” He actually succeeds in shoving 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 way 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 up 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 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 half-rolled, half-jumped 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 with 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 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 the 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 curtly, thinking: I’ve been given a miracle. One made by the combination of a boy’s yielding, not-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 half-howl 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 let him move.”

“I won’t move.” Every word still clear, still sure. But now Roland could see blood also darkening the bottom of Jake’s 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 thing. 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 whatever-it-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 probably live through this. Again he saw Jake seizing the man about the waist, shielding him, taking the impact with his own smaller body.

“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 out 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 fair-weather clouds—los ángeles, 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 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 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?”

“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 . . . if ka 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. 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, yes!” King said, and smiled. “The Song of the Turtle. 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 the 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 the 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 little.

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 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 little.

“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 you 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?”

“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 little 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.

“If’ee 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?”

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’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 others—more than he’d loved anyone ever in his life, even Susan Delgado—had passed beyond him for the second time. Jake was dead.

FIVE

“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.

“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, sai? 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 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, “Now 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 your loss. I just wanted to tell you 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 little 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 thought 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 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 with 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 the 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 command (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.

“Prolly 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.”

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 little 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.

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 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 POSITRONICS, BUILDING THE FUTURE ONE CIRCUIT AT A TIME, this one said) was a brief note.

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 enuf to 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 GeniusWorld.

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 thing.

Would he understand that? She thought he would if he remembered how they’d met. At the Santa Monica ASPCA, that had been, among 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, something 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.

NINE

The emergency bucka was gone, bearing the writer to the 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 little 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 their freight of blood. He heard engines starting as he finished hand-digging the grave, the smooth roar of two cars and the more uneven sound of Smith’s van-mobile. 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 that mattered was this; all that 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 the 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, 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. I 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 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 thought. 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.

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.”

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 ángeles, 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 José. 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 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 little 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 close 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 ángeles, traveling above them, in the same direction. They were still on the Path of the Beam.

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 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’sasshole 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 KFC. 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.”

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-really-here 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.

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 heartless 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 bullet-holes. 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. 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 his 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 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.

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 Sweetness 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, 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 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 hours 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.

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 Hammarskjöld 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?”

“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 turtle, 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 turtle, 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 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, that 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, then cross with them, the leather bag slung over his shoulder bouncing lightly against his hip. She watched him mount the steps of 2 Hammarskjöld 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 work 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 center 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 even the ropes didn’t need to be there. No one would transgress that little garden, not even a suicidal can-toi desperate to make a name for himself. It was holy ground. There were three 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 with trash and broken bricks, dominated by a sign which announced the 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 Hammarskjöld 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 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 palaver with you,” she finished.

“All right,” he said.

She touched his shoulder lightly, to hold him where he was yet a moment longer. “I’m asked to make sure that you read the sign in the Garden of the Beam,” she said. “Will you do it?”

Roland’s response was dry, but still a bit apologetic. “I will if I may,” he said, “but I’ve ever had trouble with your written language, although it seems to come out of my mouth well enough when I’m on this side.”

“I think you’ll be able to read this,” she said. “Give it a try.” And she touched his shoulder again, gently turning him back to the square of earth in the lobby floor—not earth that had been brought in wheelbarrows by some crew of gifted gardeners, he knew, but the actual earth of this place, ground which might have been tilled but had not been otherwise changed.

At first he had no more success with the small brass sign in the garden than he’d had with most signs in the shop windows, or the words on the covers of the “magda-seens.” He was about to say so, to ask the woman with the faintly familiar face to read it to him, when the letters changed, becoming the Great Letters of Gilead. He was then able to read what was writ there, and easily. When he had finished, it changed back again.

“A pretty trick,” he said. “Did it respond to my thoughts?”

She smiled—her lips were coated with some pink candylike stuff—and nodded. “Yes. If you were Jewish, you might have seen it in Hebrew. If you were Russian, it would have been in Cyrillic.”

“Say true?”

“True.”

The lobby had regained its normal rhythm . . . except, Roland understood, the rhythm of this place would never be like that in other business buildings. Those living in Thunderclap would suffer all their lives from little ailments like boils and eczema and headaches and ear-styke; at the end of it, they would die (probably at an early age) of some big and painful trum, likely the cancers that ate fast and burned the nerves like brushfires as they made their meals. Here was just the opposite: health and harmony, goodwill and generosity. These folken did not hear the rose singing, exactly, but they didn’t need to. They were the lucky ones, and on some level every one of them knew it . . . which was luckiest of all. He watched them come in and cross to the lift-boxes that were called elevaydors, moving briskly, swinging their pokes and packages, their gear and their gunna, and not one course was a perfectly straight line from the doors. A few came to what she’d called the Garden of the Beam, but even those who didn’t bent their steps briefly in that direction, as if attracted by a powerful magnet. And if anyone tried to harm the rose? There was a security guard sitting at a little desk by the elevators, Roland saw, but he was fat and old. And it didn’t matter. If anyone made a threatening move, everyone in this lobby would hear a scream of alarm in his or her head, as piercing and imperative as that kind of whistle only dogs can hear. And they would converge upon the would-be assassin of the rose. They would do so swiftly, and with absolutely no regard for their own safety. The rose had been able to protect itself when it had been growing in the trash and the weeds of the vacant lot (or at least draw those who would protect it), and that hadn’t changed.

“Mr. Deschain? Are you ready to go upstairs now?”

“Aye,” he said. “Lead me as you would.”

SEVEN

The familiarity of the woman’s face clicked into place for him just as they reached the ele-vaydor. Perhaps it was seeing her in profile that did it, something about the shape of the cheekbone. He remembered Eddie telling him about his conversation with Calvin Tower after Jack Andolini and George Biondi had left the Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. Tower had been speaking of his oldest friend’s family. They like to boast that they have the most unique legal letterhead in New York, perhaps in the United States. It simply reads “DEEPNEAU.”

“Are you sai Aaron Deepneau’s daughter?” he asked her. “Surely not, you’re too young. His granddaughter?”

Her smile faded. “Aaron never had children, Mr. Deschain. I’m the granddaughter of his older brother, but my own parents and grandfather died young. Airy was the one who mostly raised me.”

“Did you call him so? Airy?” Roland was charmed.

“As a child I did, and it just kind of stuck.” She held out a hand, her smile returning. “Nancy Deepneau. And I am so pleased to meet you. A little frightened, but pleased.”

Roland shook her hand, but the gesture was perfunctory, hardly more than a touch. Then, with considerably more feeling (for this was the ritual he had grown up with, the one he understood), he placed his fist against his forehead and made a leg. “Long days and pleasant nights, Nancy Deepneau.”

Her smile widened into a cheerful grin. “And may you have twice the number, Roland of Gilead! May you have twice the number.”

The ele-vaydor came, they got on, and it was to the ninety-ninth floor that they went.

EIGHT

The doors opened on a large round foyer. The floor was carpeted in a dusky pink shade that exactly matched the hue of the rose. Across from the ele-vaydor was a glass door with THE TET CORPORATION lettered on it. Beyond, Roland saw another, smaller lobby where a woman sat at a desk, apparently talking to herself. To the right of the outer lobby door were two men wearing business suits. They were chatting to each other, hands in pockets, seemingly relaxed, but Roland saw they were anything but. And they were armed. The coats of their suits were well-tailored, but a man who knows how to look for a gun usually sees one, if a gun is there. These two fellows would stand in this foyer for an hour, maybe two (it was difficult for even good men to remain totally alert for much longer), falling into their little just-chatting routine each time the ele-vaydor came, ready to move instantly if they smelled something wrong. Roland approved.

He didn’t spend much time looking at the guards, however. Once he had identified them for what they were, he let his gaze go where it had wanted to be from the moment the ele-vaydor doors opened. There was a large black-and-white picture on the wall to his left. This was a photograph (he had originally thought the word was fottergraf) about five feet long and three wide, mounted without a frame, curved so cunningly to the shape of the wall that it looked like a hole into some unnaturally still reality. Three men in jeans and open-necked shirts sat on the top rail of a fence, their boots hooked under the lowest rail. How many times, Roland wondered, had he seen cowboys or pastorillas sitting just that way while they watched branding, roping, gelding, or the breaking of wild horses? How many times had he sat so himself, sometimes with one or more of his old tet—Cuthbert, Alain, Jamie DeCurry—sitting to either side of him, as John Cullum and Aaron Deepneau sat flanking the black man with the gold-rimmed spectacles and the tiny white moustache? The remembering made him ache, and this was no mere ache of the mind; his stomach clenched and his heart sped up. The three in the picture had been caught laughing at something, and the result was a kind of timeless perfection, one of those rare moments when men are glad to be what they are and where they are.

“The Founding Fathers,” Nancy said. She sounded both amused and sad. “That photo was taken on an executive retreat in 1986. Taos, New Mexico. Three city boys in cow country, how about that. And don’t they look like they’re having the time of their lives?”

“You say true,” Roland said.

“Do you know all three?”

Roland nodded. He knew them, all right, although he had never met Moses Carver, the man in the middle. Dan Holmes’s partner, Odetta Holmes’s godfather. In the picture he looked to be a robust and healthy seventy, but surely by 1986 he had to be closer to eighty. Perhaps eighty-five. Of course, Roland reminded himself, there was a wild card here: the marvelous thing he’d just seen in the lobby of this building. The rose was no more a fountain of youth than the turtle in the little pocket park across the street was the real Maturin, but did he think it had certain beneficent qualities? Yes he did. Certain healing qualities? Yes he did. Did he believe that the nine years of life Aaron Deepneau had gotten between 1977 and the taking of this picture in 1986 had just been a matter of the Prim-replacing pills and medical treatments of the old people? No he did not. These three men—Carver, Cullum, and Deepneau—had come together, almost magically, to fight for the rose in their old age. Their tale, the gunslinger believed, would make a book in itself, very likely a fine and exciting one. What Roland believed was simplicity itself: the rose had shown its gratitude.

“When did they die?” he asked Nancy Deepneau.

“John Cullum went first, in 1989,” she said. “Victim of a gunshot wound. He lasted twelve hours in the hospital, long enough for everyone to say goodbye. He was in New York for the annual board meeting. According to the NYPD, it was a streetside mugging gone bad. We believe he was killed by an agent of either Sombra or North Central Positronics. Probably one of the can-toi. There were other attempts that missed.”

“Both Sombra and Positronics come to the same thing,” said Roland. “They’re the agencies of the Crimson King in this world.”

“We know,” she said, then pointed to the man on the left side of the picture, the one she so strongly resembled. “Uncle Aaron lived until 1992. When you met him . . . in 1977?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

“In 1977, no one would have believed he could live so long.”

“Did the fayen-folken kill him, too?”

“No, the cancer came back, that’s all. He died in his bed. I was there. The last thing he said was, ‘Tell Roland we did our best.’ And so I do tell you.”

“Thankee-sai.” He heard the roughness in his voice and hoped she would mistake it for curtness. Many had done their best for him, was it not true? A great many, beginning with Susan Delgado, all those years ago.

“Are you all right?” she asked in a low, sympathetic voice.

“Yes,” he said. “Fine. And Moses Carver? When did he pass?”

She raised her eyebrows, then laughed.

“What—?”

“Look for yourself!”

She pointed toward the glass doors. Now approaching them from the inside, passing the desk-minding woman who had apparently been talking to herself, was a wizened man with fluffy fly-away hair and white eyebrows to match. His skin was dark, but the woman upon whose arm he leaned was even darker. He was tall—perhaps six-and-three, if the bend had been taken out of his spine—but the woman was even taller, at least six-and-six. Her face was not beautiful but almost savagely handsome. The face of a warrior.

The face of a gunslinger.

NINE

Had Moses Carver’s spine been straight, he and Roland would have been eye-to-eye. As it was, Carver needed to look up slightly, which he did by cocking his head, birdlike. He seemed incapable of actually bending his neck; arthritis had locked it in place. His eyes were brown, the whites so muddy it was difficult to tell where the irises ended, and they were full of merry laughter behind their gold-rimmed spectacles. He still had the tiny white moustache.

“Roland of Gilead!” said he. “How I’ve longed to meet you, sir! I b’lieve it’s what’s kept me alive so long after John and Aaron passed. Let loose of me a minute, Marian, let loose! There’s something I have to do!”

Marian Carver let go of him and looked at Roland. He didn’t hear her voice in his head and didn’t need to; what she wanted to tell him was clear in her eyes: Catch him if he falls, sai.

But the man Susannah had called Daddy Mose didn’t fall. He put his loosely clenched, arthritic fist to his forehead, then bent his right knee, taking all of his weight on his trembling right leg. “Hile you last gunslinger, Roland Deschain out of Gilead, son of Steven and true descendent of Arthur Eld. I, the last of what was called among ourselves the Ka-Tet of the Rose, salute you.”

Roland put his own fisted hand to his forehead and did more than make a leg; he went to his knee. “Hile Daddy Mose, godfather of Susannah, dinh of the Ka-Tet of the Rose, I salute you with my heart.”

“Thankee,” said the old man, and then laughed like a boy. “We’re well met in the House of the Rose! What was once meant to be the Grave of the Rose! Ha! Tell me we’re not! Can you?”

“Nay, for it would be a lie.”

“Speak it!” the old man cried, then uttered that cheery go-to-hell laugh once again. “But I’m f’gettin my manners in my awe, gunslinger. This handsome stretch of woman standing beside me, it’d be natural for you to call her my granddaughter, ’cause I was sem’ty in the year she was born, which was nineteen-and-sixty-nine. But the truth is”—But’na troof is was what reached Roland’s ear—“that sometimes the best things in life are started late, and having children”—Chirrun—“is one of’m, in my opinion. Which is a long-winded way of saying this is my daughter, Marian Odetta Carver, President of the Tet Corporation since I stepped down in ’97, at the age of ninety-eight. And do you think it would frost some country-club balls, Roland, to know that this business, now worth just about ten billion dollars, is run by a Negro?” His accent, growing deeper as his excitement and joy grew, turned the last into Dis bid’ness, now wuth jus ’bout tin binnion dolla, is run bah NEE-grow?

“Stop, Dad,” the tall woman beside him said. Her voice was kind but brooked no denial. “You’ll have that heart monitor you wear sounding the alarm if you don’t, and this man’s time is short.”

“She run me like a ray’road!” the old man cried indignantly. At the same time he turned his head slightly and dropped Roland a wink of inexpressible slyness and good humor with the eye his daughter could not see.

As if she wasn’t onto your tricks, old man, Roland thought, amused even in his sorrow. As if she hasn’t been on to them for many and many a year—say delah.

Marian Carver said, “We’d palaver with you for just a little while, Roland, but first there’s something I need to see.”

“Ain’t a bit o’ need for that!” the old man said, his voice cracking with indignation. “Not a bit o’ need, and you know it! Did I raise a jackass?”

“He’s very likely right,” Marian said, “but always safe—”

“—never sorry,” the gunslinger said. “It’s a good rule, aye. What is it you’d see? What will tell you that I am who I say I am, and you believe I am?”

“Your gun,” she said.

Roland took the Old Home Days shirt out of the leather bag, then pulled out the holster. He unwrapped the shell-belt and pulled out his revolver with the sandalwood grips. He heard Marian Carver draw in a sharp, awed breath and chose to ignore it. He noticed that the two guards in their well-cut suits had drawn close, their eyes wide.

“You see it!” Moses Carver shouted. “Aye, every one of you here! Say God! Might as well tell your gran-babbies you saw Excalibur, the Sword of Arthur, for’t comes to the same!”

Roland held his father’s revolver out to Marian. He knew she would need to take it in order to confirm who he was, that she must do this before leading him into the Tet Corporation’s soft belly (where the wrong someone could do terrible damage), but for a moment she was unable to fulfill her responsibility. Then she steeled herself and took the gun, her eyes widening at the weight of it. Careful to keep all of her fingers away from the trigger, she brought the barrel up to her eyes and then traced a bit of the scrollwork near the muzzle:

“Will you tell me what this means, Mr. Deschain?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “if you will call me Roland.”

“If you ask, I’ll try.”

“This is Arthur’s mark,” he said, tracing it himself. “The only mark on the door of his tomb, do ya. ’Tis his dinh mark, and means WHITE.”

The old man held out his trembling hands, silent but imperative.

“Is it loaded?” she asked Roland, and then, before he could answer: “Of course it is.”

“Give it to him,” Roland said.

Marian looked doubtful, the two guards even more so, but Daddy Mose still held his hands out for the widowmaker, and Roland nodded. The woman reluctantly held the gun out to her father. The old man took it, held it in both hands, and then did something that both warmed and chilled the gunslinger’s heart: he kissed the barrel with his old, folded lips.

“What does thee taste?” Roland asked, honestly curious.

“The years, gunslinger,” Moses Carver said. “So I do.” And with that he held the gun out to the woman again, butt first.

She handed it back to Roland as if glad to be rid of its grave and killing weight, and he wrapped it once more in its belt of shells.

“Come in,” she said. “And although our time is short, we’ll make it as joyful as your grief will allow.”

“Amen to that!” the old man said, and clapped Roland on the shoulder. “She’s still alive, my Odetta—she you call Susannah. There’s that. Thought you’d be glad to know it, sir.”

Roland was glad, and nodded his thanks.

“Come now, Roland,” Marian Carver said. “Come and be welcome in our place, for it’s your place as well, and we know the chances are good that you’ll never visit it again.”

TEN

Marian Carver’s office was on the northwest corner of the ninety-ninth floor. Here the walls were all glass unbroken by a single strut or muntin, and the view took the gunslinger’s breath away. Standing in that corner and looking out was like hanging in midair over a skyline more fabulous than any mind could imagine. Yet it was one he had seen before, for he recognized yonder suspension bridge as well as some of the tall buildings on this side of it. He should have recognized the bridge, for they’d almost died on it in another world. Jake had been kidnapped off it by Gasher, and taken to the Tick-Tock Man. This was the City of Lud as it must have been in its prime.

“Do you call it New York?” he asked. “You do, yes?”

“Yes,” Nancy Deepneau said.

“And yonder bridge, that swoops?”

“The George Washington,” Marian Carver said. “Or just the GWB, if you’re a native.”

So yonder lay not only the bridge which had taken them into Lud but the one beside which Pere Callahan had walked when he left New York to start his wandering days. That Roland remembered from his story, and very well.

“Would you care for some refreshment?” Nancy asked.

He began to say no, took stock of how his head was swimming, and changed his mind. Something, yes, but only if it would sharpen wits that needed to be sharp. “Tea, if you have it,” he said. “Hot, strong tea, with sugar or honey. Can you?”

“We can,” Marian said, and pushed a button on her desk. She spoke to someone Roland couldn’t see, and all at once the woman in the outer office—the one who had appeared to be talking to herself—made more sense to him.

When the ordering of hot drinks and sandwiches (what Roland supposed he would always think of as popkins) was done, Marian leaned forward and captured Roland’s eye. “We’re well-met in New York, Roland, so I hope, but our time here isn’t . . . isn’t vital. And I suspect you know why.”

The gunslinger considered this, then nodded. A trifle cautiously, but over the years he had built a degree of caution into his nature. There were others—Alain Johns had been one, Jamie DeCurry another—for whom a sense of caution had been inbred, but that had never been the case with Roland, whose tendency had been to shoot first and ask questions later.

“Nancy told you to read the plaque in the Garden of the Beam,” Marian said. “Did—”

“Garden of the Beam, say Gawd!” Moses Carver interjected. On the walk down the corridor to his daughter’s office, he had picked a cane out of a faux elephant-foot stand, and now he thumped it on the expensive carpet for emphasis. Marian bore this patiently. “Say Gawd-bomb!”

“My father’s recent friendship with the Reverend Harrigan, who holds court down below, has not been the high point in my life,” Marian said with a sigh, “but never mind. Did you read the plaque, Roland?”

He nodded. Nancy Deepneau had used a different word—sign or sigul—but he understood it came to the same. “The letters changed into Great Letters. I could read it very well.”

“And what did it say?”

“GIVEN BY THE TET CORPORATION, IN HONOR OF EDWARD CANTOR DEAN AND JOHN “JAKE” CHAMBERS.” He paused. “Then it said ‘Cam-a-cam-mal, Pria-toi, Gan delah,’ which you might say as WHITE OVER RED, THUS GAN WILLS EVER.”

“And to us it says GOOD OVER EVIL, THIS IS THE WILL OF GOD,” Marian said.

“God be praised!” Moses Carver said, and thumped his cane. “May the Prim rise!”

There was a perfunctory knock at the door and then the woman from the outer desk came in, carrying a silver tray. Roland was fascinated to see a small black knob suspended in front of her lips, and a narrow black armature that disappeared into her hair. Some sort of far-speaking device, surely. Nancy Deepneau and Marian Carver helped her set out steaming cups of tea and coffee, bowls of sugar and honey, a crock of cream. There was also a plate of sandwiches. Roland’s stomach rumbled. He thought of his friends in the ground—no more popkins for them—and also of Irene Tassenbaum, sitting in the little park across the street, patiently waiting for him. Either thought alone should have been enough to kill his appetite, but his stomach once more made its impudent noise. Some parts of a man were conscienceless, a fact he supposed he had known since childhood. He helped himself to a popkin, dumped a heaping spoonful of sugar into his tea, then added honey for good measure. He would make this as brief as possible and return to Irene as soon as he could, but in the meantime . . .

“May it do you fine, sir,” Moses Carver said, and blew across his coffee cup. “Over the teeth, over the gums, look out guts, here it comes! Hee!”

“Dad and I have a house on Montauk Point,” said Marian, pouring cream into her own coffee, “and we were out there this past weekend. At around five-fifteen on Saturday afternoon, I got a call from one of the security people here. The Hammarskjöld Plaza Association employs them, but the Tet Corporation pays them a bonus so we may know . . . certain things of interest, let’s say . . . as soon as they occur. We’ve been watching that plaque in the lobby with extraordinary interest as the nineteenth of June approached, Roland. Would it surprise you to know that, until roughly quarter of five on that day, it read GIVEN BY THE TET CORPORATION, IN HONOR OF THE BEAM FAMILY, AND IN MEMORY OF GILEAD?”

Roland considered this, sipped his tea (it was hot and strong and good), then shook his head. “No.”

She leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “And why do you say so?”

“Because until Saturday afternoon between four and five o’clock, nothing was sure. Even with the Breakers stopped, nothing was sure until Stephen King was safe.” He glanced around at them. “Do you know about the Breakers?”

Marian nodded. “Not the details, but we know the Beam they were working to destroy is safe from them now, and that it wasn’t so badly damaged it can’t regenerate.” She hesitated, then said: “And we know of your loss. Both of your losses. We’re ever so sorry, Roland.”

“Those boys are safe in the arms of Jesus,” Marian’s father said. “And even if they ain’t, they’re together in the clearing.”

Roland, who wanted to believe this, nodded and said thankya. Then he turned back to Marian. “The thing with the writer was very close. He was hurt, and badly. Jake died saving him. He put his body between King and the van-mobile that would have taken his life.”

“King is going to live,” Nancy said. “And he’s going to write again. We have that on very good authority.”

“Whose?”

Marian leaned forward. “In a minute,” she said. “The point is, Roland, we believe it, we’re sure of it, and King’s safety over the next few years means that your work in the matter of the Beams is done: Ves’-Ka Gan.”

Roland nodded. The song would continue.

“There’s plenty of work for us ahead,” Marian went on, “thirty years’ worth at least, we calculate, but—”

“But it’s our work, not yours,” Nancy said.

“You have this on the same ‘good authority’?” Roland asked, sipping his tea. Hot as it was, he’d gotten half of the large cup inside of him already.

“Yes. Your quest to defeat the forces of the Crimson King has been successful. The Crimson King himself—”

“That wa’n’t never this man’s quest and you know it!” the centenarian sitting next to the handsome black woman said, and he once more thumped his cane for emphasis. “His quest—”

“Dad, that’s enough.” Her voice was hard enough to make the old man blink.

“Nay, let him speak,” Roland said, and they all looked at him, surprised by (and a little afraid of) that dry whipcrack. “Let him speak, for he says true. If we’re going to have it out, let us have it all out. For me, the Beams have always been no more than means to an end. Had they broken, the Tower would have fallen. Had the Tower fallen, I should never have gained it, and climbed to the top of it.”

“You’re saying you cared more for the Dark Tower than for the continued existence of the universe,” Nancy Deepneau said. She spoke in a just-let-me-make-sure-I’ve-got-this-right voice and looked at Roland with a mixture of wonder and contempt. “For the continued existence of all the universes.”

“The Dark Tower is existence,” Roland said, “and I have sacrificed many friends to reach it over the years, including a boy who called me father. I have sacrificed my own soul in the bargain, lady-sai, so turn thy impudent glass another way. May you do it soon and do it well, I beg.”

His tone was polite but dreadfully cold. All the color was dashed from Nancy Deepneau’s face, and the teacup in her hands trembled so badly that Roland reached out and plucked it from her hand, lest it spill and burn her.

“Take me not amiss,” he said. “Understand me, for we’ll never speak more. What was done was done in both worlds, well and ill, for ka and against it. Yet there’s more beyond all worlds than you know, and more behind them than you could ever guess. My time is short, so let’s move on.”

“Well said, sir!” Moses Carver growled, and thumped his cane again.

“If I offended, I’m truly sorry,” Nancy said.

To this Roland made no reply, for he knew she was not sorry a bit—she was only afraid of him. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence that Marian Carver finally broke. “We don’t have any Breakers of our own, Roland, but at the ranch in Taos we employ a dozen telepaths and precogs. What they make together is sometimes uncertain but always greater than the sum of its parts. Do you know the term ‘good-mind’?”

The gunslinger nodded.

“They make a version of that,” she said, “although I’m sure it’s not so great or powerful as that the Breakers in Thunderclap were able to produce.”

“B’cause they had hundreds,” the old man grumped. “And they were better fed.”

“Also because the servants of the King were more than willing to kidnap any who were particularly powerful,” Nancy said, “they always had what we’d call ‘the pick of the litter.’ Still, ours have served us well enough.”

“Whose idea was it to put such folk to work for you?” Roland asked.

“Strange as it might seem to you, partner,” Moses said, “it was Cal Tower. He never contributed much—never did much but c’lect his books and drag his heels, greedy highfalutin whitebread sumbitch that he was—”

His daughter gave him a warning look. Roland found he had to struggle to keep a straight face. Moses Carver might be a hundred years old, but he had pegged Calvin Tower in a single phrase.

“Anyway, he read about putting tellypaths to work in a bunch of science fiction books. Do you know about science fiction?”

Roland shook his head.

“Well, ne’mine. Most of it’s bullshit, but every now and then a good idear crops up. Listen to me and I’ll tell you a good ’un. You’ll understand if you know what Tower and your friend Mist’ Dean talked about twenty-two years ago, when Mist’ Dean come n saved Tower from them two honky thugs.”

“Dad,” Marian said warningly. “You quit with the nigger talk, now. You’re old but not stupid.”

He looked at her; his muddy old eyes gleamed with malicious good cheer; he looked back at Roland and once more came that sly droop of a wink. “Them two honky dago thugs!”

“Eddie spoke of it, yes,” Roland said.

The slur disappeared from Carver’s voice; his words became crisp. “Then you know they spoke of a book called The Hogan, by Benjamin Slightman. The title of the book was misprinted, and so was the writer’s name, which was just the sort of thing that turned old fatty’s dials.”

“Yes,” Roland said. The title misprint had been The Dogan, a phrase that had come to have great meaning to Roland and his tet.

“Well, after your friend came to visit, Cal Tower got interested in that fella all over again, and it turned out he’d written four other books under the name of Daniel Holmes. He was as white as a Klansman’s sheet, this Slightman, but the name he chose to write his other books under was the name of Odetta’s father. And I bet that don’t surprise you none, does it?”

“No,” Roland said. It was just one more faint click as the combination-dial of ka turned.

“And all the books he wrote under the Holmes name were science fiction yarns, about the government hiring tellypaths and precogs to find things out. And that’s where we got the idea.” He looked at Roland and gave his cane a triumphant thump. “There’s more to the tale, a good deal, but I don’t guess you’ve got the time. That’s what it all comes back to, isn’t it? Time. And in this world it only runs one way.” He looked wistful. “I’d give a great lot, gunslinger, to see my goddaughter again, but I don’t guess that’s in the cards, is it? Unless we meet in the clearing.”

“I think you say true,” Roland told him, “but I’ll take her word of you, and how I found you still full of hot spit and fire—”

“Say God, say Gawd-bomb!” the old man interjected, and thumped his cane. “Tell it, brother! And see that you tell her!”

“So I will.” Roland finished the last of his tea, then put the cup on Marian Carver’s desk and stood with a supporting hand on his right hip as he did. It would take him a long time to get used to the lack of pain there, quite likely more time than he had. “And now I must take my leave of you. There’s a place not far from here where I need to go.”

“We know where,” Marian said. “There’ll be someone to meet you when you arrive. The place has been kept safe for you, and if the door you seek is still there and still working, you’ll go through it.”

Roland made a slight bow. “Thankee-sai.”

“But sit a few moments longer, if you will. We have gifts for you, Roland. Not enough to pay you back for all you’ve done—whether doing it was your first purpose or not—but things you may want, all the same. One’s news from our good-mind folk in Taos. One’s from more . . .” She considered. “. . . more normal researchers, folks who work for us in this very building. They call themselves the Calvins, but not because of any religious bent. Perhaps it’s a little homage to Mr. Tower, who died of a heart attack in his new shop nine years ago. Or perhaps it’s only a joke.”

“A bad one if it is,” Moses Carver grumped.

“And then there are two more . . . from us. From Nancy, and me, and my Dad, and one who’s gone on. Will you sit a little longer?”

And although he was anxious to be off, Roland did as he was asked. For the first time since Jake’s death, a true emotion other than sorrow had risen in his mind.

Curiosity.

ELEVEN

“First, the news from the folks in New Mexico,” Marian said when Roland had resumed his seat. “They have watched you as well as they can, and although what they saw Thunder-side was hazy at best, they believe that Eddie told Jake Chambers something—perhaps something of importance—not long before he died. Likely as he lay on the ground, and before he . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Before he slipped into twilight?” Roland suggested.

“Yes,” Nancy Deepneau agreed. “We think so. That is to say, they think so. Our version of the Breakers.”

Marian gave her a little frown that suggested this was a lady who did not appreciate being interrupted. Then she returned her attention to Roland. “Seeing things on this side is easier for our people, and several of them are quite sure—not positive but quite sure—that Jake may have passed this message on before he himself died.” She paused. “This woman you’re traveling with, Mrs. Tannenbaum—”

“Tassenbaum,” Roland corrected. He did it without thinking, because his mind was otherwise occupied. Furiously so.

“Tassenbaum,” Marian agreed. “She’s undoubtedly told you some of what Jake told her before he passed on, but there may be something else. Not a thing she’s holding back, but something she didn’t recognize as important. Will you ask her to go over what Jake said to her once more before you and she part company?”

“Yes,” Roland said, and of course he would, but he didn’t believe Jake had passed on Eddie’s message to Mrs. Tassenbaum. No, not to her. He realized that he’d hardly thought of Oy since they’d parked Irene’s car, but Oy had been with them, of course; would now be lying at Irene’s feet as she sat in the little park across the street, lying in the sun and waiting for him.

“All right,” she said. “That’s good. Let’s move on.”

Marian opened the wide center drawer of her desk. From it she brought out a padded envelope and a small wooden box. The envelope she handed to Nancy Deepneau. The box she placed on the desktop in front of her.

“This next is Nancy’s to tell,” she said. “And I’d just ask you to be brief, Nancy, because this man looks very anxious to be off.”

“Tell it,” Moses said, and thumped his cane.

Nancy glanced at him, then at Roland . . . or in the vicinity of him, anyway. Color was climbing in her cheeks, and she looked flustered. “Stephen King,” she said, then cleared her throat and said it again. From there she didn’t seem to know how to go on. Her color burned even deeper beneath her skin.

“Take a deep breath,” Roland said, “and hold it.”

She did as he told her.

“Now let it out.”

And this, too.

“Now tell me what you would, Nancy niece of Aaron.”

“Stephen King has written nearly forty books,” she said, and although the color remained in her cheeks (Roland supposed he would find out what it signified soon enough), her voice was calmer now. “An amazing number of them, even the very early ones, touch on the Dark Tower in one way or another. It’s as though it was always on his mind, from the very first.”

“You say what I know is true,” Roland told her, folding his hands, “I say thankya.”

This seemed to calm her even further. “Hence the Calvins,” she said. “Three men and two women of a scholarly bent who do nothing from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon but read the works of Stephen King.”

“They don’t just read them,” Marian said. “They cross-reference them by settings, by characters, by themes—such as they are—even by mention of popular brand-name products.”

“Part of their work is looking for references to people who live or did live in the Keystone World,” Nancy said. “Real people, in other words. And references to the Dark Tower, of course.” She handed him the padded envelope and Roland felt the corners of what could only be a book inside. “If King ever wrote a keystone book, Roland—outside the Dark Tower series itself, I mean—we think it must be this one.”

The flap of the envelope was held by a clasp. Roland looked askance at both Marian and Nancy. They nodded. The gunslinger opened the clasp and pulled out an extremely thick volume with a cover of red and white. There was no picture on it, only Stephen King’s name and a single word.

Red for the King, White for Arthur Eld, he thought. White over Red, thus Gan wills ever.

Or perhaps it was just a coincidence.

“What is this word?” Roland asked, tapping the title.

“Insomnia,” Nancy said. “It means—”

“I know what it means,” Roland said. “Why do you give me the book?”

“Because the story hinges on the Dark Tower,” Nancy said, “and because there’s a character in it named Ed Deepneau. He happens to be the villain of the piece.”

The villain of the piece, Roland thought. No wonder her color rose.

“Do you have anyone by that name in your family?” he asked her.

“We did,” she said. “In Bangor, which is the town King is writing about when he writes about Derry, as he does in this book. The real Ed Deepneau died in 1947, the year King was born. He was a bookkeeper, as inoffensive as milk and cookies. The one in Insomnia is a lunatic who falls under the power of the Crimson King. He attempts to turn an airplane into a bomb and crash it into a building, killing thousands of people.”

“Pray it never happens,” the old man said gloomily, looking out at the New York City skyline. “God knows it could.”

“In the story the plan fails,” Nancy said. “Although some people are killed, the main character in the book, an old man named Ralph Roberts, manages to keep the absolute worst from happening.”

Roland was looking intently at Aaron Deepnau’s grand-niece. “The Crimson King is mentioned in here? By actual name?”

“Yes,” she said. “The Ed Deepneau in Bangor—the real Ed Deepneau—was a cousin of my father’s, four or five times removed. The Calvins could show you the family tree if you wanted, but there really isn’t much of a connection to Uncle Aaron’s part of it. We think King may have used the name in the book as a way of getting your attention—or ours—without even realizing what he was doing.”

“A message from his undermind,” the gunslinger mused.

Nancy brightened. “His subconscious, yes! Yes, that’s exactly what we think!”

It wasn’t exactly what Roland was thinking. The gunslinger had been recalling how he had hypnotized King in the year of 1977; how he had told him to listen for Ves’-Ka Gan, the Song of the Turtle. Had King’s undermind, the part of him that would never have stopped trying to obey the hypnotic command, put part of the Song of the Turtle in this book? A book the Servants of the King might have neglected because it wasn’t part of the “Dark Tower Cycle”? Roland thought that could be, and that the name Deepneau might indeed be a sigul. But—

“I can’t read this,” he said. “A word here and a word there, perhaps, but no more.”

“You can’t, but my girl can,” Moses Carver said. “My girl Odetta, that you call Susannah.”

Roland nodded slowly. And although he had already begun to have his doubts, his mind nevertheless cast up a brilliant image of the two of them sitting close by a fire—a large one, for the night was cold—with Oy between. In the rocks above them the wind howled bitter notes of winter, but they cared not, for their bellies were full, their bodies were warm, dressed in the skins of animals they had killed themselves, and they had a story to entertain them.

Stephen King’s story of insomnia.

“She’ll read it to you on the trail,” Moses said. “On your last trail, say God!”

Yes, Roland thought. One last story to hear, one last trail to follow. The one that leads to Can’-Ka No Rey, and the Dark Tower. Or it would be nice to think so.

Nancy said, “In the story, the Crimson King is using Ed Deepneau to kill one single child, a boy named Patrick Danville. Just before the attack, while Patrick and his mother are waiting for a woman to make a speech, the boy draws a picture, one that shows you, Roland, and the Crimson King, apparently imprisoned at the top of the Dark Tower.”

Roland started in his seat. “The top? Imprisoned at the top?”

“Easy,” Marian said. “Take it easy, Roland. The Calvins have been analyzing King’s work for years, every word and every reference, and everything they produce gets forwarded to the good-mind folken in New Mexico. Although these two groups have never seen each other, it would be perfectly correct to say that they work together.”

“Not that they’re always in agreement,” Nancy said.

“They sure aren’t!” Marian spoke in the exasperated tone of one who’s had to referee more than her share of squabbles. “But one thing that they are in agreement about is that King’s references to the Dark Tower are almost always masked, and sometimes mean nothing at all.”

Roland nodded. “He speaks of it because his undermind is always thinking of it, but sometimes he lapses into gibberish.”

“Yes,” Nancy said.

“But obviously you don’t think this entire book is a false trail, or you would not want to give it to me.”

“Indeed we do not,” Nancy said. “But that doesn’t mean the Crimson King is necessarily imprisoned at the top of the Tower. Although I suppose it might.”

Roland thought of his own belief that the Red King was locked out of the Tower, on a kind of balcony. Was it a genuine intuition, or just something he wanted to believe?

“In any case, we think you should watch for this Patrick Danville,” Marian said. “The consensus is that he’s a real person, but we haven’t been able to find any trace of him here. Perhaps you may find him in Thunderclap.”

“Or beyond it,” Moses put in.

Marian was nodding. “According to the story King tells in Insomnia—you’ll see for yourself—Patrick Danville dies as a young man. But that may not be true. Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“When you find Patrick Danville—or when he finds you—he may still be the child described in this book,” Nancy said, “or he could be as old as Uncle Mose.”

“Bad luck f’him if that be true!” said the old man, and chortled.

Roland lifted the book, stared at the red and white cover, traced the slightly raised letters that made a word he could not read. “Surely it’s just a story?”

“From the spring of 1970, when he typed the line The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed,” Marian Carver said, “very few of the things Stephen King wrote were ‘just stories.’ He may not believe that; we do.”

But years of dealing with the Crimson King may have left you with a way of jumping at shadows, do it please ya, Roland thought. Aloud he said, “If not stories, what?”

It was Moses Carver who answered. “We think maybe messages in bottles.” In the way he spoke this word—boh’uls, almost—Roland heard a heartbreaking echo of Susannah, and suddenly wanted to see her and know she was all right. This desire was so strong it left a bitter taste on his tongue.

“—that great sea.”

“Beg your pardon,” the gunslinger said. “I was wool-gathering.”

“I said we believe that Stephen King’s cast his bottles upon that great sea. The one we call the Prim. In hopes that they’ll reach you, and the messages inside will make it possible for you and my Odetta to gain your goal.”

“Which brings us to our final gifts,” Marian said. “Our true gifts. First . . .” She handed him the box.

It opened on a hinge. Roland placed his left hand splayed over the top, meaning to swing it back, then paused and studied his interlocutors. They were looking at him with hope and suspenseful interest, an expression that made him uneasy. A mad (but surprisingly persuasive) idea came to him: that these were in truth agents of the Crimson King, and when he opened the box, the last thing he’d see would be a primed sneetch, counting down the last few clicks to red zero. And the last sound he’d hear before the world blew up around him would be their mad laughter and a cry of Hile the Red King! It wasn’t impossible, either, but a point came where one had to trust, because the alternative was madness.

If ka will say so, let it be so, he thought, and opened the box.

TWELVE

Within, resting on dark blue velvet (which they might or might not have known was the color of the Royal Court of Gilead), was a watch within a coiled chain. Engraved upon its gold cover were three objects: a key, a rose, and—between and slightly above them—a tower with tiny windows marching around its circumference in an ascending spiral.

Roland was amazed to find his eyes once more filling with tears. When he looked at the others again—two young women and one old man, the brains and guts of the Tet Corporation—he at first saw six instead of three. He blinked the phantom doubles away.

“Open the cover and look inside,” Moses Carver said. “And there’s no need to hide your tears in this company, you son of Steven, for we’re not the machines the others would replace us with, if they had their way.”

Roland saw that the old man spoke true, for tears were slipping down the weathered darkness of his cheeks. Nancy Deepneau was also weeping freely. And although Marian Carver no doubt prided herself on being made of sterner stuff, her eyes held a suspicious gleam.

He depressed the stem protruding from the top of the case, and the lid sprang up. Inside, finely scrolled hands told the hour and the minute, and with perfect accuracy, he had no doubt. Below, in its own small circle, a smaller hand raced away the seconds. Carved on the inside of the lid was this:

To the Hand of ROLAND DESCHAIN

From Those of

MOSES ISAAC CARVER

MARIAN ODETTA CARVER

NANCY REBECCA DEEPNEAU

With Our Gratitude

White Over Red, Thus GOD Wills Ever

“Thankee-sai,” Roland said in a hoarse and trembling voice. “I thank you, and so would my friends, were they here to speak.”

“In our hearts they do speak, Roland,” Marian said. “And in your face we see them very well.”

Moses Carver was smiling. “In our world, Roland, giving a man a gold watch has a special significance.”

“What would that be?” Roland asked. He held the watch—easily the finest timepiece he’d ever had in his life—up to his ear and listened to the precise and delicate ticking of its machinery.

“That his work is done and it’s time for him to go fishing or play with his grandchildren,” Nancy Deepneau said. “But we gave it to you for a different reason. May it count the hours to your goal and tell you when you near it.”

“How can it do that?”

“We have one exceptional good-mind fellow in New Mexico,” Marian said. “His name is Fred Towne. He sees a great deal and is rarely if ever mistaken. This watch is a Patek Philippe, Roland. It cost nineteen thousand dollars, and the makers guarantee a full refund of the price if it’s ever fast or slow. It needs no winding, for it runs on a battery—not made by North Central Positronics or any subsidiary thereof, I can assure you—that will last a hundred years. According to Fred, when you near the Dark Tower, the watch may nevertheless stop.”

“Or begin to run backward,” Nancy said. “Watch for it.”

Moses Carver said, “I believe you will, won’t you?”

“Aye,” Roland agreed. He put the watch carefully in one pocket (after another long look at the carvings on the golden cover) and the box in another. “I will watch this watch very well.”

“You must watch for something else, too,” Marian said. “Mordred.”

Roland waited.

“We have reason to believe that he’s murdered the one you called Walter.” She paused. “And I see that does not surprise you. May I ask why?”

“Walter’s finally left my dreams, just as the ache has left my hip and my head,” Roland said. “The last time he visited them was in Calla Bryn Sturgis, the night of the Beamquake.” He would not tell them how terrible those dreams had been, dreams in which he wandered, lost and alone, down a dank castle corridor with cobwebs brushing his face; the scuttering sound of something approaching from the darkness behind him (or perhaps above him), and, just before waking up, the gleam of red eyes and a whispered, inhuman voice: “Father.”

They were looking at him grimly. At last Marian said: “Beware him, Roland. Fred Towne, the fellow I mentioned, says ‘Mordred be a-hungry.’ He says that’s a literal hunger. Fred’s a brave man, but he’s afraid of your . . . your enemy.”

My son, why don’t you say it? Roland thought, but believed he knew. She withheld out of care for his feelings.

Moses Carver stood and set his cane beside his daughter’s desk. “I have one more thing for you,” he said, “on’y it was yours all along—yours to carry and lay down when you get to where you’re bound.”

Roland was honestly perplexed, and more perplexed still when the old man began to slowly unbutton his shirt down the front. Marian made as if to help him and he motioned her away brusquely. Beneath his dress-shirt was an old man’s strap-style undershirt, what the gunslinger thought of as a slinkum. Beneath it was a shape that Roland recognized at once, and his heart seemed to stop in his chest. For a moment he was cast back to the cabin on the lake—Beckhardt’s cabin, Eddie by his side—and heard his own words: Put Auntie’s cross around your neck, 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 . . .

The cross was now on a chain of fine gold links. Moses Carver pulled it free of his slinkum by this, looked at it for a moment, looked up at Roland with a little smile on his lips, then down at the cross again. He blew upon it. Faint and faint, raising the hair on the gunslinger’s arms, came Susannah’s voice:

“We buried Pimsey under the apple tree . . .”

Then it was gone. For a moment there was nothing, and Carver, frowning now, drew in breath to blow again. There was no need. Before he could, John Cullum’s Yankee drawl arose, not from the cross itself, but seemingly from the air just above it.

“We done our best, partner”—paaa’t-nuh—“and I hope ’twas good enough. Now, I always knew this was on loan to me, and here it is, back where it belongs. You know where it finishes up, I . . .” Here the words, which had been fading ever since here it is, became inaudible even to Roland’s keen ears. Yet he had heard enough. He took Aunt Talitha’s cross, which he had promised to lay at the foot of the Dark Tower, and donned it once more. It had come back to him, and why would it not have done? Was ka not a wheel?

“I thank you, sai Carver,” he said. “For myself, for my ka-tet that was, and on behalf of the woman who gave it to me.”

“Don’t thank me,” Moses Carver said. “Thank Johnny Cullum. He give it to me on his deathbed. That man had some hard bark on him.”

“I—” Roland began, and for a moment could say no more. His heart was too full. “I thank you all,” he said at last. He bowed his head to them with the palm of his right fist against his brow and his eyes closed.

When he opened them again, Moses Carver was holding out his thin old arms. “Now it’s time for us to go our way and you to go yours,” he said. “Put your arms around me, Roland, and kiss my cheek in farewell if you would, and think of my girl as you do, for I’d say goodbye to her if I may.”

Roland did as he was bid, and in another world, as she dozed aboard a train bound for Fedic, Susannah put a hand to her cheek, for it seemed to her that Daddy Mose had come to her, and put an arm around her, and bid her goodbye, good luck, good journey.

THIRTEEN

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 Hammarskjöld Plaza, a deferential voice said, “Sir? Madam?”

It was a man in a black suit and a soft black cap. He stood by 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 liquor-bar 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.

“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. “Touché. 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.

“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 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.

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’row 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: I 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 turtle that had been hidden in the lining of the bag they had found in the 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 the tapestry of the vampire-knights at dinner had very likely taken the sköldpadda 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 the kitchen long enough to wonder what the constabulary of New York had made of it. He was willing to bet they 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 the 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 of Hossa.

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.

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 job 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 job 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, and 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 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.

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 will go 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 of Topeka 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 him to guide. And here is Susannah herself, sitting where we saw her once before, in front of the Gin-Puppy Saloon. Parked at the 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 this is a haunted place. To Susannah, the whine of the 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 restlessly 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 down, ears flat against his skull, running with the speed and low-slung, 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 lightly 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 mostly 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 knight-errant 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 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 was just 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.” 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.”

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!” 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 the 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.’ There was a lurch so hard it damn near threw me out of my seat—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 loco—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.”

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 little 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 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 Fred joined 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 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 silently 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 Calla-folken 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 them were powerful, and Ted had struck him as a man of extraordinary determination 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 thought 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.”

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 going to be just wild. And why not? Some of them have known Jake 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 . . .

Sometimes there are . . . well . . .

“Sometimes there are voices,” he says. “Why don’t you just say it?”

And then, laughing: “I guess I just 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 there, 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 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, Bloodwork, 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 émigrés 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.